“You don’t want to?”
“We sorta got off on the wrong foot,” I said. “Besides, he’s too much dog for me.”
Leon took Miata, scratched his head, and said, “No problem, Alex. Between the four of us, we should be able to keep up with him.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Come on in, Alex. One drink.”
I went in and sat at his kitchen table, had a drink with him.
“I’m packing up the office tomorrow,” he said. “I’m giving up the private eye biz.”
“You don’t think you can make it?”
“I had one customer. Look what happened.”
“You saved Jackie, Leon. You came up with the whole thing.”
“Even more reason to retire,” he said. “Go out on top.”
“I can’t thank you enough,” I said.
“That’s what partners are for.”
We drank to that. I said good night to him. I left Leon with his family, and his new dog, and drove home alone.
It wouldn’t go away.
Everything else went back to normal. The charges were officially dropped. I spent most evenings having dinner at the Glasgow Inn, watching the Tigers on his television set. Jackie and I didn’t talk much about what had happened. One night, he asked me when I’d be ready to play poker again.
“I’m ready when you’re ready,” I said. “Just do me one favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Keep the game right here in the bar. We don’t play at some stranger’s house.”
“Typical,” he said. “You never want to go anywhere.”
That’s how I knew Jackie was getting over it. Every day, he was acting a little bit more like his old self again. Whether I liked it or not.
The summer passed. It got colder at night. The sunsets came earlier. They kept working on the golf course down in Brimley, but nobody was talking about major development. The new money hadn’t found us yet.
For now at least, our secret was still safe.
I worked on the last cabin every day, making runs to the dump with half-melted bed frames and blackened pipes, clearing away all the charred wood, getting the site ready. In another couple of weeks they’d deliver my load of white pine logs. I’d rebuild the cabin by hand, doing it the right way, the way my father had taught me back when I was eighteen years old. I’d use the original foundation, and my father’s stone chimney, and I’d rebuild the whole thing from the ground up, no matter how long it took me.
All that work, out in the sun, it should have cleared my head. It should have helped me get over it.
But it kept coming back to me, usually at night. Just as I closed my eyes, I’d be back on the boat. I’d see the same scene, played out over and over, hear the same words spoken.
Then one day, one of the last warm days of the summer, I was breaking up the one corner of the old cabin that hadn’t burned. I would use it for firewood. I had sharpened my ax, and was swinging it in the air, splitting the logs in half, and then into quarters.
Swing. Chunk. Swing. Chunk. Swing.
I stopped.
The ax hung in the air. I dropped it to the ground.
I stood there and thought about it, played it back again and again, just the one piece of it, one small loop out of the whole episode.
I got in my truck and drove.
Bennett was sitting at one of the tables when I walked in. Ham was behind the bar. I didn’t see Margaret anywhere.
“Alex!” Bennett said when he looked up at me. “How the hell are you? I’m glad you stopped in! Ham, pour the man a beer.”
I sat down. Ham brought the beer over. He put his hand on my shoulder as he put the beer down in front of me. “On the house,” he said.
“Damned straight,” Bennett said. “This man never pays for another drink. Not in this bar.”
I didn’t drink the beer.
“Tell me again,” I said. “How did he get the money out of the house?”
“What?”
“Your son, Sean. The one who took off with all the money. How did he get it out of the house?”
“We were assuming he had it under the bag-you know, those black plastic bags they were wearing.”
“Seven hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “Minus thirty thousand for his partners. He had all that money under that bag?”
“He must have, Alex. How else would he have gotten it out of the house?”
“Exactly,” I said. “How else?”
“Alex, what are you talking about? What’s the problem here?”
“I’m just wondering,” I said. “Maybe he did something else with all that money. Maybe he threw it out the window. It would explain why he broke the window in the first place.”
Bennett looked at me. He raised his hands in the air. “I don’t get it.”
“If he threw it out the window, somebody else must have picked it up.”
I looked over my shoulder. Ham was pouring another beer. He stopped.
“How did it work, Ham? Were you on the shoreline? Or on the river?”
“Hold on one minute,” Bennett said. “Surely you’re not accusing Ham. You can’t come in here and say that about my son, Alex. Not my good son. Not Ham.”
“It wasn’t just Sean and Ham, your good son,” I said. “It was you . You were in on this from the beginning, Bennett. And you know what the best part is? That little speech you gave me on the boat. Remember? ‘There’s no good money, Alex. It’s all bad. I hate money, Alex.’”
“Alex, you are so out of line right now. I know you helped us out, but…”
“When your friends got arrested, you kept lying about it,” I said. “When Jackie got fucking kidnapped, you kept lying about it.”
“All right, that’s enough. You’re gonna have to leave, Alex.”
“What are you gonna buy with that money?” I said. “A nice new SUV to drive around? An even bigger television?”
“Alex, out.”
“Don’t you want to know how I figured it out?”
Bennett sat there with his arms folded. He didn’t say a word.
“When we were on that boat, before Vargas’s boat got to us, I was telling Blondie to take the money. You remember that? I was saying, ‘Here, take it. Give us Jackie. Take the money and run before Isabella’s men get here.’ You were behind me saying, ‘Don’t be a fool, take the money.’ And I was just thinking, Bennett, shut up for God’s sake. I wasn’t really paying attention to what you were saying. It didn’t come to me until today, as a matter of fact. You told him there was seven hundred thousand dollars in the bag. You used that exact figure.”
“That’s how much we were talking about,” Bennett said. “You just said so yourself, when you asked me where Sean had put the money. You said seven hundred thousand dollars. That’s how much Vargas had in his safe.”
“You didn’t know that,” I said. “At the time, you had no idea. Or at least you shouldn’t have. First you told me there was only thirty thousand, and Sean got nothing. Remember? Then you told me there must have been more after all, and that Sean had disappeared. You never could have known how much money was in that safe, Bennett. Unless you were in on it yourself.”
I could hear Ham coming back out from behind the bar.
“How long has Jackie known you?” I said. “Fifty years? A half a century of being your best friend?”
This is what the whole summer had come down to. This summer of secrets. The biggest secret of all was what a bag full of money could make a man do.
“It’s all on you, Bennett. Everything we had to go through. Vargas dead, your son’s friend dead. Jackie almost dead. It’s all on you.”
Ham was right behind me. Bennett was standing up. They were both a hell of a lot bigger than I was.
I didn’t care.
It’s like I told the dog. If I know I’m right, I’ll fight anybody.
A few hours later, I stopped in at the Glasgow Inn. It was cold that night. It was cold and the wind was blowing hard enough to drive three-foot waves against the rocks. The sound was familiar to me. It came to me as soon as I turned off the truck and listened.
Summer was over, that’s what the sound said. No matter what the calendar said, the lake was turning the page to fall. For the last ten thousand years, the lake has always had its way.