Lost Wolf Lake was placid today; on the far side a small motorboat moved slowly, and near the rocky beach to her left a family of mallards floated, undisturbed by human intrusion. Maggie shaded her eyes and scanned the water for the black-and-white loons she’d often spotted in late afternoon, but none was in evidence. The sun sparkled gold against the intense blue. Another day in paradise…
Paradise? Who am I kidding? And what the hell am I doing here?
Well, she’d found the property, hadn’t she? Up on a visit last July to Sigrid Purvis, an old college friend who operated an outfitter’s business in White Iron-canoe rentals, sportsmen’s gear, guided trips to the Boundary Waters. The talk of the town that month had been about old Janice Mott dying and her estate finally putting Sunrise Lodge on the market. Friends of Sigrid’s had pretended interest in buying it, just to get a look at a local legend, so she and Maggie decided to take a tour, too.
A tour that Maggie now regarded as her undoing.
At the time, the property had seemed the ideal solution-to Cal’s failure to gain tenure and his growing boredom with his work at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis where he was a professor in the English department. To the empty-nest feeling of their spacious home in St. Paul. To the staleness that had fallen upon their marriage. To her having to deal with clients, mostly housewives, who were too uninventive or uninvolved to decorate their own homes.
Some solution. Now she was one of those housewives, who couldn’t even decide on what color to paint a beat-up, water-stained floor in a cabin that one of their two boys-both now in graduate school on the West Coast-might use for a week or so every summer.
But she was not only a housewife, Maggie reminded herself. She was a brush clearer. A de molition expert. A stringer of extension cords. A patcher of chinks between logs. A glazier of broken windows. She could prop up sagging structures. Remove debris from clogged crawl spaces. Empty the chemical toilet. Cook on a propane stove and wash dishes in a cold trickle of water from a five-gallon container.
The house part she could deal with just fine. But the wife part…that was another story. She didn’t feel like a wife at all any more. The deterioration of her relationship with Cal had been gradual since they’d arrived here at Lost Wolf Lake in April. At first he’d seemed excited about their new life. Then he’d become remote and moody. And then, after he’d taken a bad fall through the rotted floor of one of the cabins, he’d barely spoken to her. Barely made eye contact with her. Barely touched her.
And when he did…
Maggie drained her beer and looked out at the center of the lake, where one of the loons had surfaced and was flapping its wings. So free, so joyous. Resembling nothing in her life. Nothing at all.
Because when Cal speaks to me, or looks into my eyes, or accidentally touches me, there’s a coldness. A coldness that makes me feel as if he wishes I were dead.
The ball game ended-ten to three, Twins-and Abel shut off the TV.
Cal signaled for another Leinie, his third, and the bartender set it in front of him. It was warm in the tavern in spite of the air-conditioning. Cal brushed his thick shock of gray-brown hair off his forehead.
Abel frowned. “Nasty cut you’ve got there.”
Cal fingered it; the spot was scabbed and still tender. “Roof beam fell on me while I was taking down one of the cabins.”
“You have it looked at?”
“Not necessary. One of the staples at home is a first-aid kit.”
“You must use it a lot.” Abel motioned to a burn mark on Cal’s right forearm. “Last week it was…what? Twisted ankle? And before that a big shoulder bruise.”
“Accidents happen.”
“You always been accident-prone?”
“No, but I’ve never done this much physical labor before. Stuff around the house in St. Paul, that’s all.”
“Told me you’d built a whole addition yourself.”
“Well, yeah. But I was a lot younger and more fit then.”
“What are you…forty-five? Fifty, tops?”
“Forty-six.”
“And you still look fit. I’d say you’re not keeping your mind on the job at hand. Everything OK out there?”
“What d’you mean?”
“Well, a man who’s got problems…say, financial or marital…can let his concentration slip.”
Cal studied Abel Arneson. The man wasn’t a friend, not exactly, but he was the first resident of White Iron who’d welcomed Maggie and him, driving out to the lake with a cooler full of freshly caught walleye and two six-packs. He’d steered them to contractors-who had shown up, promised estimates, and someday might call. He’d arranged for the purchase of a used skiff and ten-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor, which were to be delivered this week, and he’d promised to go out with Cal and show him all the best fishing sites. He was the logical person for a worried man to confide in…
Cal said: “To tell the truth, if anything, my concentration’s heightened.” He paused, sipped beer broodingly. “You see, all these injuries I’ve had…I don’t think they were accidental.”
When the motorboat was about 100 yards away, Maggie recognized it as Sigrid Purvis’s. Sigrid waved, cut back on power, and the boat swung toward the dock-a little too fast, bumping its side and making the rotting timbers groan. As Maggie went to help Sigrid secure it, Howie ran down the rutted track from the lodge, barking until he recognized the visitor.
Sigrid stepped out of the boat, grinning up at Maggie from under the bill of her Purvis Outfitters baseball cap. She was a tall, thin woman with a wild mane of blonde curls and a weathered face-one made for laughing.
Howie bounded up to her, and she leaned down to pat him, the cap coming loose and nearly falling in the water. Sigrid snatched it up, then reached into the boat and pulled out a plastic sack.
“Blueberries,” she said. “My crop’s so big I’m getting sick of them.”
“Thanks! We could use some fruit. Our raspberries’re really tiny, and mainly the birds get them.”
“Got a beer?”
“Sure. Come on up.”
When they were seated on folding chairs on the lodge’s sagging porch, Sigrid said: “Things better or worse with Cal?”
“Worse. The coldness and the silences are really getting to me. And I’m getting vibes off him. Bad ones. Almost as if…”
“As if?”
“Forget it.”
“Mags, this is Sig you’re talking to.”
“…As if he wants to kill me.”
“Cal?” Sigrid looked shocked. “That’s impossible.”
“Is it?”
“Of course. Your imagination’s in overdrive, is all. Look, you’re living on a huge property miles from town. You’re both under stress, spending your savings like crazy and trying to get the place in shape before winter sets in. Everything’s overgrown, the ruined cabins are creepy, and most of this lodge, except for the front room, is uninhabitable. Cal was depressed at not making tenure to begin with, and now he probably feels this project is more than he can handle. No wonder he’s acting weird. And no wonder you’re reading all sorts of extreme things into his behavior.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“Believe it. It’s better than believing he wants to harm you. Or that the place is cursed.”
“Cursed?”
“Oh, you know, the local legend. Janice Mott and her husband were having a hard time keeping the lodge going. Old customers dying off, newer ones finding the place too primitive. Then her husband died in a freak accident, and she abandoned the property and moved to that tiny house in town.”
“Right. And she never returned here again…or allowed anyone else to set foot on the property. Who would, given that kind of tragedy?”
Sigrid was silent for a moment, squinting through the trees at the sliver of lake. “But why not sell it?” she asked. “Why put up an electrified fence and hire a private guard service to patrol it every day? Why, at fifty-five, retreat to that little house in town and never again have contact with anyone, except for random encounters at the grocery and drugstores?”