The sun was trying to come out as I was driving back up my road. It was an old unpaved logging road, with banks of snow lingering on either side. When the snow started to melt, the road would turn to mud and I’d have a whole new set of problems to deal with. By the time it dried out, it would be time for black fly season.
I passed Vinnie’s cabin first. Vinnie “Red Sky” LeBlanc, my only neighbor and maybe my only true friend. Meaning the one person who truly understood me, who never wanted anything from me, and who never tried to change me.
I passed by the first cabin, the one my father and I had built a million years ago-before I went off to play baseball and then become a cop-then the next four cabins, each bigger than the one before it, until I got to the end of the road. There stood the biggest cabin of all, looking almost as good as the original. I’d been rebuilding it for the past year, starting with just the fireplace and chimney my father had built stone by stone. Now it was almost done. Now it was almost as good as it was before somebody burned it down.
I parked the truck and went inside. Vinnie was already there, on his hands and knees in the corner of the kitchen, once again working harder and longer than I ever did myself, making me feel like my debt to him was more than I could ever repay.
“What are you ruining now?” I said to him.
“I’m fixing the trim you put down on this floor.” He was in jeans and a white T-shirt, his denim jacket hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. He had a long strip of quarter round molding in his hand, the very same strip I had just tacked down the day before.
“You’re ripping it up? How is that fixing it?”
“You used the wrong size trim. You need to start over.”
“It’s not the wrong size. Damn it, Vinnie, is it any wonder it’s taking me forever to finish this place? You wanna rip the ceiling off, too?”
“You got a good half-inch gap here,” he said, pointing to the gap between the floor and the lowest log on the wall.
“That’s a quarter inch.”
“Here it might be, but over on the other side of the room it gets wider. You have to measure the gap at its longest before you go out and buy your trim.”
“Vinnie, what the hell’s wrong with you?”
“I told you, you bought the wrong size. And as long as you’re buying new molding, get something with a little more style, too. Quarter round is boring.”
“Nobody’s going to notice it. It’s on the floor, for God’s sake.”
He turned away from me, shaking his head. He grabbed another length of molding and ripped it up like he was pulling weeds.
“Something’s eating at you,” I said. “I can tell.”
“I’m fine. I just wish you’d do things right for a change.”
First Jackie and now Vinnie. Such a parade of cheerful people in my life. I was truly a lucky man.
“It’s actually trying to get nice outside,” I said. “We might even have some sunlight soon. Will that make you feel better?”
He didn’t look up. “You know one thing that bothers me?”
“What?”
“How long have you been living in this cabin?”
“Ever since I’ve been working on it. It just makes things easier.”
“I think you’re done now, Alex. You’ve got the floor down. You’ve got the woodstove working. As soon as I redo your trim, this place will be ready to rent out again.”
“It’s been a bad winter for the snowmobile people. You know that.”
“You could have this place rented right now. It’s your biggest cabin. You’re just wasting money.”
“Since when are you my accountant?”
He stopped what he was doing and sat still on the floor. He finally turned to look at me. “You need to move back into your cabin. You can’t keep avoiding it.”
“I will.” It was my turn to look away. “As soon as I’m done here.”
Vinnie didn’t say anything else. I got down on my knees and helped him tear up the remaining strips of floor molding. An hour later I was on my way to Sault Ste. Marie to buy the new strips, five eighths instead of half inch, cloverleaf instead of quarter round. As I passed that first cabin, I made a point of not even looking at it.
That was how the day went. That last day in March. It started with breakfast at the Glasgow Inn and ended with dinner in the same place. It was like most every other day in Paradise. Vinnie had helped me finish the baseboard trim, then he’d gone over to the rez to sit with his mother for a while. She’d not been feeling like herself lately. Maybe just one more person who was tired of winter. I was hoping that was it, that she’d feel better once the sun came back. That we’d all feel better.
Vinnie gave me a nod as he came through the door. Back from the rez, then a shift at the casino dealing blackjack, stopping in now because that’s what you do around here. Every night. Jackie was watching hockey on the television mounted above the bar. Vinnie went over and stood behind him, just like I had told him to do.
“Hey, Jackie,” he said, “I heard something interesting today.”
“What’s that, Vin?”
“Did you know Lake Superior isn’t really the biggest lake in the world? Or the deepest?”
Jackie turned and glared at me.
“I’ll throw you right out on your ass,” he said. “I swear to God I will.”
Finally, something to smile about, on a cold, cold night. I looked back into the fire and watched the flames dance. My last hour of peace until everything would change.
We’re not supposed to believe in evil anymore, right? It’s all about abnormal behavior now. Maladjustment, overcompensation, or my favorite, the antisocial personality disorder. Fancy words I was just starting to hear in that last year on the force, before I looked into the eyes of a madman as he pulled that trigger without even blinking.
In a way, I’ve never gotten past it. I’m still lying on that floor, watching the light in Franklin’s eyes slowly going out. My partner, the man I was supposed to protect at all costs. Later, in the hospital, they pulled two slugs from my body and left the one that was too close to my heart to touch. It’s been with me ever since, a constant reminder of the evil I saw that night, all those years ago on a warm summer evening in Detroit. You’d never convince me otherwise. No, I’d seen evil as deep as it could ever get.
But like Jackie and his beloved lake, you’d never know there was something deeper out there until somebody came to you and told you about it. A deeper lake. A lake you’ve never seen before. Even then, you might not believe it. Not unless he took you there and showed it to you.
It was about to happen. Minutes away, then seconds. Then the door opened and the cold air blew in and the last person I expected to see that night stepped inside, carrying a big problem and looking for my help.
CHAPTER TWO
Chief Roy Maven stood in the doorway of the Glasgow Inn. He was out of uniform, but everything else about him-his clean-shaven face, his buzz cut, his hard eyes, his body language-gave him away as a lifelong cop. He blinked a few times as his eyes adjusted to the light, did a scan around the room, taking it all in. He finally saw me sitting by the fire and came over.
“Chief Maven,” I said. “What the hell?”
“McKnight. Can I sit down?”
I nodded to the chair across from me, another overstuffed leather armchair angled toward the fire-just one more reason why a Scottish pub is a thousand percent better than your average American bar.
“This is nice,” he said. “I can see why you spend so much time here.”
“You knew to find me here?”
“Yeah, it’s been an exhausting search. First your cabin. Then your bar.”
“Are you gonna tell me why you’re here or not?”
He leaned forward in the chair and rested his forearms on his knees. He looked me in the eye and as he did I was already coming up with my own theory. You see, the chief and I had sort of gotten off to a rough start. Genuinely bad chemistry from the first time I laid eyes on him and he laid eyes on me. Then things just went downhill from there, until at one point, he promised me that the day he retired, he’d come out to Paradise to find me so we could settle things between us once and for all. No more badge in the way, just a couple of men who truly didn’t like each other, having it out in the parking lot. He was ten years older than me, maybe even fifteen. But I knew it wouldn’t be an easy fight. Not by a long shot.