“Hey, look!” Chuck called above the throb of the Evinrude outboard. “Something’s goin’ on over at the Stapletons’.”
I looked toward where he was pointing. We were two-thirds of the way across the lake, heading for home, and the distance was too great for me to make out much except that half a dozen people were clustered behind one of the alpine cottages halfway between Judson’s and the Dixon cabin.
I called back to Chuck, “Who’re the Stapletons?”
“Family from Reno. But they’re not here yet, they don’t come up until July.”
“Cottage closed up, then?”
“Yeah. Maybe somebody busted in or something. Stole their padlocks like they stole ours.”
“The gang of padlock thieves.”
“Right. Let’s go see what’s up, okay?”
“You’ve got the tiller.”
He changed course, pointing us toward the Stapleton property. It was midmorning now and warm on the lake, the sky cloud-streaked. The boy had wanted to stay at Chuck’s Hole and fish a while longer, but I’d talked him out of it, pleading hunger and promising him a pancake breakfast at Judson’s. He’d caught two more trout, a cutthroat and a rainbow marginally larger than mine. He was so pleased with his morning’s take and the fact that he’d been able to make good on his boast that he hadn’t been bothered by having to fish alone. I’d lied about there being something wrong with my rod, a minute crack in the bamboo, to explain my unwillingness to join him. The truth would only have bewildered him. It was my truth anyway, not his.
As we neared the Stapletons’, the shore group separated into recognizable individuals. Mack Judson, Fred Dyce, Jacob Strayhorn, two of the summer residents I’d met at the cafe, and one man I didn’t know. When Judson saw that we were heading in their direction, he hurried onto the dock, making stay-away gestures with both hands. The others hung back on shore.
Chuck ignored the gestures. I was about to warn him off myself, but we were close enough now so that I could see something else on the property — a tarpaulin spread out in front of a lean-to filled with stacks of firewood. The humped shape of what lay under the tarp made my stomach turn over. I didn’t say anything to Chuck. I didn’t let myself think anything yet, either.
The boy cut power and nosed us in to the float below where Judson was standing, a bleak frown on his craggy face. But the frown wasn’t for us; we were nothing more to him than a distraction. He called down to Chuck, “Why didn’t you mind me, boy? This is no place for you now.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Been an accident. A bad one.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Nils Ostergaard. He’s dead.”
“Dead? Mr. Ostergaard is dead?”
“Since some time last night.”
Death on my mind all morning and now this. I lifted myself out of the skiff, climbed a ramp that led from the float onto the dock. “What happened, Mack?”
“Nils went out about seven last night and didn’t come back,” Judson said. “Sometimes he’d stray off and stay out late, so Callie wasn’t worried when she went to bed about eleven. His wife, Callie. Plenty worried when she woke up this morning and he still wasn’t home. Came and told me and I got up a search party.”
“How long ago’d you find him?”
“About twenty minutes. Took us a couple of hours of hunting. His pickup was in some trees near the resort, so we searched there first. That’s why it took so long.”
“How’d he die?”
Dyce and the man I didn’t know had wandered out onto the dock. They heard my question, and Dyce said, “Cracked skull. Harper here and me’re the ones who found him.” The sullen belligerence was absent today; he seemed subdued. Maybe the presence of death had humbled him a little.
“Poking around in the dark, seems like,” Judson said, “and tripped and fell against that stack of cordwood up there. Split his head open on a log.”
“Why would he be poking around a deserted cottage in the dark?”
“That was the way he was. Self-appointed watchdog. Must’ve seen or heard something, decided to take a look.”
I said, thinking out loud, “Funny he’d leave his pickup such a long way off.”
“Not if you knew Nils. No telling what he was liable to do, or why.”
“Are you sure it was an accident?”
They all looked at me. Strayhorn was there, too, by then; so was Hal Cantrell, who’d appeared from up on the road and followed him onto the dock. Strayhorn smiled his small, pale smile and said, “Don’t you think it was?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then why ask the question?”
“He’s a cop,” Dyce said. “They’re all suspicious.”
I had nothing to say to that.
Strayhorn said, “Why don’t you have a look at the body, judge for yourself?”
“Not my place to do that.”
“County law’s on the way,” the man named Harper said. “Be here with an ambulance any minute.”
“Take a look anyway,” Strayhorn said to me. “See what you think. I’d be interested to know.”
“Why?”
He made that shrugging movement with his head. “Curiosity. Can’t hurt to take a look, can it?”
“Sure,” Cantrell said, “take a look. Why not?”
I glanced at Judson; he lifted his shoulders, let them fall. He was too upset to care one way or the other. “Go ahead if you want.”
No, I thought. Better keep out of it.
“Come on,” Strayhorn said, “you’ve seen dead men before.” Challenging me, the way he had at Two Creek Bar. Why? He didn’t like me, that was plain enough. Because I’d released the cutthroat brown and then laughed about it? Something skewed in him, if that was the reason.
“All right,” I said, to shut him up and keep it from becoming an issue. I glanced down at a pale-faced Chuck in the skiff. “Go on back to your cabin. I’ll walk from here.”
“But I want to be here when—”
“Go on, Chuck. Your mother should know about this. Go home and tell her.”
He didn’t argue, and as I moved away, following Judson and the others, I heard the Evinrude crank up. Give a kid something important to do and he’ll do it — and there’s nothing so important as the bearing of bad news. If that wasn’t true, the world media would shut down and every journalist of every kind would be out of a job.
It was Judson who lifted the tarp so I could see what was left of Nils Ostergaard. My stomach kicked again; no matter how many times you face sudden death there’s always the same involuntary physical reaction, the same mixture of sadness and revulsion. The wound was on the left side of the head, dried blood from the ear up over the temple. Ants and other insects had been at the blood; there were still a few of them moving around. A piece of bark clung there, too, evidently from the log that had been dislodged from the lean-to pile and lay near his head. Smears of dried blood stained the log as well.
“So what do you think?” Cantrell asked.
I took the tarp from Judson without answering, drew it back off the body. Ostergaard wore a plaid lumberman’s jacket, a blue shirt, a pair of faded Levi’s. Nothing bulky in any of the pockets, nothing on the ground around him, and both his hands were empty.
“No flashlight,” I said.
Dyce said, “Flashlight?”
“Why would he leave his car in some trees several hundred yards away and then walk back down here without a flashlight?”
“He didn’t need one. Bright sky last night.”
“Not so bright here. Lot of shadowed ground.”
Judson said, “Nils knew each property like the back of his hand. He didn’t need a light to find his way around, even as old as he was. What’s the damn point of all this talk?”