Another driveway, another cottage. Most of them still closed up for the winter so I had that going for me, at least. A closed-up cottage meaning no vehicle most of the time. Although whenever I saw a garage, my heart sank, because that meant there was no way to know for sure unless I drove all the way down, got out of the truck, and peeked inside.
It was 1:30 in the morning now. I was starting to lose steam. I kept telling myself one more driveway, one more driveway. This next one could be it.
When I’d circled Rice Lake, I dropped down to Mud Lake. It was tiny and only a mile away, with a handful of cottages on the northern shore. I ran through those in a matter of minutes. Then I doubled back up through Calumet and left Houghton County. I was in Keweenaw County now, the end of the line, the only piece of land left, surrounded on three sides by Lake Superior. I started wondering where Agent Long was, whether she was close or still an hour away. But when I looked at my cell phone there was absolutely no signal at all.
It was two in the morning when I turned onto the long road to Lake Gratiot. I knew the lakeshores would be less and less populated now, which meant fewer cottages to check but more distance to drive between them. One thing I knew for sure-if you owned a cottage on one of these lakes, it was definitely up on a lake.
The cottages on Lake Gratiot were concentrated on the western shoreline, but I had to keep driving down separate access roads to get to them. I was halfway through the lake when I pulled down a driveway and saw an old black Subaru parked right next to a small cottage.
This is the one, I thought. As I got out and walked slowly down the rest of the driveway, it occurred to me that I had come this far with no good idea about what I’d actually do when I found the place. Another typical genius move on my part.
The car was unlocked, of course, because who locks a car at a cottage on a remote lake in the Upper Peninsula? It’s not like somebody’s going to drive up and break into it, even though that’s exactly what I was thinking I’d need to do. It was either that or go look in the windows. I figured if it was me sleeping away in my cottage, I’d prefer the first choice over the second.
I opened up the passenger’s side door and hit the button for the glove compartment. I found the registration and held it up to read the name in the interior light. Here’s where the owner could come out shooting, I thought, if he happened to be going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and noticed the light coming from his car.
The car was registered to someone named Patricia Curry. I put the registration back in the glove compartment, closed the door, got back in my truck, and then got the hell out of there.
I kept working my way through the rest of the cottages on that lake, and when I was done it was going on three o’clock in the morning. The little voice in my head saying just one more, just one more had apparently gone to bed, so I stopped there on the side of that little road in the middle of absolute nothingness and I put my head down on the steering wheel. Just a few minutes to rest my eyes, I thought.
Then from out of nowhere a horrible insight came to me and I was jolted awake.
I flashed back to that day in the apartment, talking to Rebecca and Wayne and Bradley and RJ. All of us sitting there at the end of the night, drinking beer and thinking about Charlie. Rebecca asked me if she could talk to Charlie’s father, and I told her that he was staying at his old friend’s house in Sault Ste. Marie. She didn’t end up calling him, but at that point I’d already given all of them the information. Charles Razniewski Sr. wasn’t in Detroit, surrounded by fellow U.S. marshals, he was right across the UP, in a normal house in a normal neighborhood. If you could guess who his old friend was-which you obviously could if you already knew so much about his history-then you could find out exactly where that house was. You could go out to Sault Ste. Marie the very next day, when you knew that he’d probably be alone. If you went early enough, you could beat me there with hours to spare.
I sat there gripping the steering wheel and trying to find a hole in my logic, but I couldn’t. I was the one who made it so easy for RJ to go to Sault Ste. Marie and to find Razniewski all alone in that house. I’m the one who made it happen.
Then the second insight, almost as bad as the first. RJ could have gone right to the door and said, “Hey, I’m Charlie’s apartment-mate. Maybe he mentioned me? So sorry about what happened. Can I come in and talk to you about Charlie?” He could have sat down with him at the kitchen table, put the man at ease. When the knife finally came out, Raz never would have seen it coming.
I pounded the steering wheel until my hand went numb. Then I put the truck back into gear and drove to the next lake.
There were two more interior lakes just to the east. The tiny Deer Lake and then the much larger Lac La Belle. On the map, the roads leading to them were nameless and so thin I could hardly trace their routes in the dim light of my truck’s interior. I made my way on whatever road I could find leading through the trees, guessing my way here and there and just trying to stay pointed east. I eventually found Deer Lake, with one single access road that led down to a boat launch. I didn’t see any cottages at all.
I cut back to Lac La Belle. It was after three in the morning now, and I worked my way around the lake-it was probably eight miles or so, but it might have been eighty or eight hundred. I nosed down every driveway, painting every cottage with a double beam of light. Back out and go to the next, do it all over again. Keep going, keep going.
It was after four in the morning when I finished that lake. I had come up empty. As I drove back to the main road, I saw a police car flash by at high speed. I thought it might be a Michigan State Police car, but I was honestly too exhausted to see straight. If it was the state police, I thought, then they had come up here from the nearest post, in Calumet. Otherwise, it was a county car from Eagle River. They’re out looking for me or they’re looking for the cottage based on whatever information the FBI may have relayed to them. Probably both. It surprised me a little, just how much I didn’t want to be found yet, and how much I wanted to find that cottage first. They had all the guns and manpower and everything else to do this right, but at that moment in the cold early hours I had an absolute physical hunger to finish what I had started.
Problem was, I was running out of lakes. I was going farther and farther north, to the absolute end of the earth, and on the map I could count only four more lakes-Lake Medora, Lake Bailey, Lake Fanny Hooe, and Schlatter Lake. If I tried those and failed, then I’d be forced to face the possibility that the cottage could be on one of the many tiny, unnamed lakes that might have only one or two driveways to serve them. Or that I had actually driven right by the cottage I was looking for without actually seeing it. Or that Bradley had been mistaken and it wasn’t up here at all.
There was only one way to find out for sure. I took the right on the main road and kept going north, to Lake Medora. More trees, more nothingness, more total lack of any signs of civilization until I finally saw the water opening up on my left. There was a turnoff there, with a small parking lot and a boat launch. In the summer, in the actual daytime, I might have seen a person or two, but now the whole place was dark and empty. I stopped the truck for a moment and turned it off, then walked out onto the rickety dock next to the boat launch and looked out over the water. It was almost May and yet the lake was still half covered with ice. I could see cottages stretched out along the southern and eastern shorelines. I watched carefully, letting my eyes become accustomed to the dark, hoping that maybe I’d see a slight movement or a twinkle of light. After a few minutes, I got back in the truck and went up the eastern road.