— Oh, he suspects I’ve been poking around. But he hasn’t come right out and said anything.
— Still.
— What’s the worst he could do, fire me? I’d be away hunting moose so goddamn fast your head would spin off. I’ll give you a ring, Stanley. Fran says she’d like to have you over for supper.
— I’ll see you soon, Dick.
Stan got out of the unmarked car and the rain came down on him. He climbed into his truck and started the ignition and the heater. Nothing made his joints ache like cold rain. His knuckles, his hips. He sat cursing while the truck warmed up.
After Stan got up the next morning, he went down and did half a dozen rounds on the heavy-bag. It took some time to work the stiffness out of his joints. He’d spoken on the telephone to his sister in the evening after he’d brought Cassius home from the veterinarian. She was his only living sibling, seven years his senior. She lived out west and he’d last seen her when she came out for Edna’s funeral. They talked about the weather and health and grandchildren. She asked about the house and he told her he thought Frank and Mary might buy it from him. They agreed it would be nice to keep it in the family.
After Stan had cleaned up from his exercises, he lifted up Cassius’s ears and put in the drops that the veterinarian had prescribed. Cassius bore the indignity without complaint. Stan got a chunk of cold steak out of the refrigerator and gave it to the dog.
He left Cassius at the house and ran some errands in town. By midafternoon he had parked his truck near a marshy inlet on the northwest side of Indian Lake. He got out and walked up onto a pressure-treated birdwatching platform framed over the cattails. He had with him a pair of Bushnell 10x42 field glasses. He steadied his elbows on the rail and looked through the field glasses, north, to the bay at the top of the lake.
A rocky shore. One or two cottages closed for the winter. If Stan was correct, Alec Reynolds’s property was marked by an eroded concrete pier at the base of a high feature. There’d been a gas pump up there. Stan could make out part of what had been a small store and restaurant behind where the pump had been. The windows were boarded over and much of the building was lost from sight by a growth of spruce. Where the land climbed up behind the building, Stan could just discern the roof of a storage shed or barn.
He got back in his truck and drove around the gravel township roads north of the lake. He kept driving until he saw what he thought was the same roof he’d seen from the lake, the storage shed or the barn. It was a hundred yards south of the road, with bush intervening. Stan drove slowly until he came to a possibly corresponding driveway. It wound out of sight through the trees. He stopped the truck for a moment’s consideration.
A short distance back the way he’d come, the township road passed over a culvert. There were no other driveways between there and the one he reckoned led to the marina. Just past the culvert, a small clearing had been cleft into the bush. It was a good enough place to park. He got out of his truck and walked into the bush. Everything was still wet from yesterday’s rainfall but the trees were not as thick as they had looked from the road. Up ahead, a creek was curving tightly through the trees and beyond that was the abrupt face of a rocky rise. Stan made his way over the fallen leaves. He came to the creek, which was wider than it looked, but he managed to cross it without any trouble. He went up the rise and when he came to the top he was breathing hard and the stiffness was back in his hips. He leaned on a tree to get his breath.
At the top of the rise was a thin treeline. Beyond the treeline, fifty yards of open ground led to the building he’d been seeking. It looked like a large shed for wintering boats, and on the far side of the shed he could make out half of a camper. Farther down, the roof of the store was just visible where the high feature dropped back to the lake. Stan unslung the field glasses from his neck and scanned the property. Nothing moved.
At last he trekked into the open field. The uncut grass hissed as he came to the back of the storage shed. The wall was windowless. He moved to the corner and peered around. The driveway from the township road came out of the trees and into a widened terminus between the storage shed and not one but two campers. One camper was a thirty-foot silver Airstream. The other was a battered Prowler, no more than nineteen feet long. The windows in both campers were dark.
Stan went to the door of the Prowler and knocked on it. Waited, knocked again. He went to the Airstream and knocked on the door. There was a window set in the door but a curtain was drawn behind the glass. He knocked again. After some minutes had passed and nothing happened, he tried the Airstream door and found it locked fast. He went back to the Prowler and found it locked as well.
Across from the campers there was a man-door in the side of the storage shed. Stan crossed the driveway. The man-door, at least, was unlocked. He went in. There wasn’t much to see in the wan and dusty light. An empty interior. Hard-packed dirt for the floor. Two walls had been framed out of the back corner of the shed to make a large locker, crooked with age. The locker was perhaps eight feet by eight feet. There was a hasp for a padlock fixed to the locker door-frame but no lock was in place. Stan opened the door. The dark inner hollow could be illuminated by a forty-watt bulb overhead-you just had to turn the bulb in its socket. The yellow light it threw brought out the cobwebs and made eerie shadows, but the locker was empty. He darkened the bulb again.
Outside, Stan went down the slope to the back of the store. He felt certain he had some memories of this place when it was operational, summertime, kids with ice cream cones. The rear windows of the store were boarded over and No Trespassing was spray-painted on the plywood. The back door was locked. He did a circle of the building. The spruce on the headland had not been thinned in some time and grew close to the walls. Out front, Stan came to the pad where the gas pump had been. The wide panorama of Indian Lake lay beyond. The water licked against the short concrete pier below the pad. One front window of the store was unboarded. He cupped his hands around his face and looked through the glass into the darkness, saw the shape of a counter, a table with chairs stacked on it.
Stan crossed back through the property and walked the driveway through the trees to the township road. By the time he reached his truck he’d worked up a thin sweat. Sitting behind the steering wheel he tried to decide how he felt. Absurdity hovered close but there was more to it-what Eleanor had said her sister had told her about a place by the lake, and how that fell into place with the property he’d just wandered about. The vague signs of life around the mobiles and the storage shed. In his mind, he’d made a picture of the man, Colin Gilmore, who’d come and gone from Judy’s life. And he thought how he was mocked by this, his own undertaking, when the pieces didn’t even hint at a whole. Edna occurred to him again, what she would say about this. But behind Edna came an image of Judy Lacroix dead in the back of a car and, years ago, her uncle Darien turning at the bottom of the hangman’s rope.
Perhaps he couldn’t put it all into words-for Dick, for Frank, for the ghost of his wife-but he was gripped by it all the same. He was not going to stop now.
I’ll be goddamned.
Speedy had said that a few times, each time shaking his head. He was driving them south out of town along the highway for a short stretch. His car was a Mercury Monarch, a wreck on four wheels. The springs were pushing through the upholstery. Between I’ll-be-goddamneds, Speedy talked at a rapid rate about the woman he lived with, who he said was half wagon-burner and was therefore prone to going on drinking benders where she’d find herself in another town altogether. Lee smoked and listened. He had a low throb in his back and his shoulders from work that day. They were finished at the lakeside cottage and had spent the day cleaning up the job site.