‘Cell phones don’t always work up here, anyway,’ the bartender said, shrugging. ‘We’re just yakking; nobody up here knows Lamm. He’s certainly been too good to set foot in here.’ He gestured at the murky shapes in the cloudy jar on the bar, as if to suggest that the eggs should have been reason enough to lure Lamm in. As if to warn me to not suffer the same loss, he slid the jar closer to me.
I resisted, saying it might incite the milk shake resting heavily on the hamburgers in my stomach, and asked for directions to Lamm’s camp.
The bartender drew a map on a cocktail napkin. ‘Mind that rickety old bridge on County M. It’s a one-laner. Hit it wrong, you’ll end up wet. And dead.’
I told them that if Lamm had indeed disappeared, I might want to speak to the sheriff. That got me another cocktail napkin map, and I left them to their pickled eggs and their flannel.
Outside, I envied their flannel. The night had turned frigid, and my pea coat was in Leo’s Porsche. I hurried down the center of the street, deserted now, squinting for glints on the dark pavement. Nothing sparkled, freshly splattered, and I got to Loons’ with shoes as dry as when I’d set out.
The inside of my cabin was as cold as the air outside. I spent five minutes looking for a thermostat before I realized that the cabin simply had no heat. I took a fast shower with what little lukewarm water could be coaxed from the pipes, dried myself with a towel that had a fist-sized hole in its center, bundled back into my clothes and pea coat, and slipped into bed.
I thought, then, of the newness of Jenny, waiting to warm me in San Francisco. And I thought of Amanda, and the easy, familiar way she’d warmed me, leaning against me in the Jeep, outside her father’s house.
I tried to push those thoughts away, finding it easier to think about what I didn’t understand about Arthur Lamm, the dead men in the heavy cream, and the frigid air inside the cabin. It wasn’t until the middle of the night that I was finally able to shiver and shake myself to sleep.
TWENTY-SEVEN
‘I’m in real need of caffeine,’ I said to gray-skinned Wanda as I looked around the motel office for the coffee maker. It was six-thirty the next morning.
‘DQ,’ she said.
I pasted on the best smile I could offer to such a creature. ‘You don’t have coffee for guests?’
‘DQ does egg sandwiches. You could have a whole breakfast.’
‘With ice cream, just the thing for a cold morning.’ I turned for the door.
‘You checking out?’
‘I’ll be gone by the end of the morning. Check-out is noon?’
‘Eight-thirty in season.’
I looked out the window. The Porsche was the only car parked on the gravel lot.
‘I imagine you need to hustle to get rooms ready for the next onslaught of visitors,’ I said.
‘Eight-thirty,’ she said.
‘I’ll leave the key in the room for when you come to make sure I didn’t steal either the towel or the hole in the middle of it.’
‘Illinoyance,’ she muttered as I went outside.
‘Cheesehead,’ I muttered back, but likely she hadn’t heard me, since I’d already slammed the door.
A truck shot from a parking space down the street and sped away. The truck was shiny and blue and I was fairly certain it was the one I’d seen in Loons’ lot the previous evening, which meant it belonged to Herman Canty, Lamm’s caretaker. If the rumors were true, that he spent his nights at the frigid Loons’ Rest, curled beside the gray-faced Wanda, the man was entitled to whatever haste he needed to get away.
I drove down to the DQ. It was closed, though the sign said it was supposed to have opened at six, almost an hour earlier. I wasn’t going to wait for someone to show up. I was anxious to speed out of that town, too. Besides, risking a launch of coffee in Leo’s meticulously maintained Porsche, as I so often did in my Jeep, was unthinkable. I drove on.
Fifteen minutes later, in the sheriff’s office, I regretted not waiting at the DQ. A massive caffeine-withdrawal headache had blossomed, and was pulsing along in perfect rhythm with the slow, doubting drone of the deputy sitting with his feet up on a brown steel desk.
‘Tell me again why you’re interested in Mr Lamm.’ The man’s tan shirt was stretched taut across his ample stomach, as though he’d often visited the DQ in Bent Lake.
‘He invited me up for some fishing.’
His face was too red, too early in the year, to have come from the sun, and I guessed that his shirt might have been tightened more from beer than soft-serve ice cream. He craned his neck to look outside the window at the Porsche. ‘Don’t see gear,’ he said, like he could see inside the trunk along with being able to smell a lie.
‘Arthur said I could use his.’
The deputy sighed and shifted in the chair. ‘Nobody seems to know where Mr Lamm has gotten himself to. People from his office in Chicago called up to report him missing. I sent two guys out for a day in a boat, and even hired a Cessna for an hour, but we found no sight of him. Then that damned fool Herman Canty up and says Lamm likes to go camping around this time of year. Wish to hell he’d spoke up before we hired a plane.’
‘Lamm’s family says it’s normal for him to be camping for so long?’
‘He’s divorced, no kids. Ex-wife’s out in California, and doesn’t much give a damn. She got an annuity out of him instead of monthly income.’
‘I heard a Chicago cop was up here looking for him.’
‘Some kid, I heard, but he didn’t bother to check in with me.’
‘Lamm doesn’t have a cell phone?’
‘I tried. His was switched off.’
‘How would I find Herman Canty?’
‘Hard to say, especially now that he’s getting about in that fancy new truck.’ The deputy tilted forward to sit upright. ‘You want to ask him about fishing?’
‘I want to ask him about Lamm.’
‘Herman will tell you Lamm’s out fishing for muskies,’ he said. ‘Ever fish for muskies?’
‘No.’
‘Then what are you fishing for up here, Mr Elstrom?’ he asked.
‘Something I can sink a hook into, I suppose,’ I said, and left.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I followed the bartender’s napkin map down roads designated with alphabet letters to junctions with roads marked with other letters, and finally came to the bridge on County M that the bartender had warned me about. It was a rickety, single-lane contraption of bleached wood and rusted brackets that looked to be spanning the narrow frothing river below more from habit than any lingering structural integrity. The bartender said the knee-high side rails were loose and the whole thing suffered dry rot. I took his concern seriously, and eased forward in first gear. Even barely crawling, the old planks shifted and rattled loudly, like I was disturbing old bones.
A fire lane had been cut into the woods one mile farther on. A half-mile after that, an eight-inch white board, with ‘Lamm’ written on it, was nailed to a tree beside two narrow clay ruts heading into the trees. I followed them to a clearing.
Herman Canty’s shiny blue pickup truck was parked beside a dark Mercedes 500 series sedan made opaque from a rain-pocked mixture of dirt and bird droppings. I parked the Porsche and got out.
The log cottage facing the lake looked right for a rich man wanting to pass as poor. The timbers were splotched with moss, the black tarpaper roof was curling at the bottom, and green paint was flaking off the door and window facing the parking area. There was no lawn, just weeds in abundance, some two feet tall.
Capping the rusticity of the entire enterprise was a privy set far enough into the woods to provide splendid opportunities, while enthroned, for the intimate study of thousands of insects. I would have visited such a privy only under extreme distress, and then at warp speed.
The Mercedes was locked. I’d just begun rubbing the grime off the driver’s window when a man stepped out of the cottage. He was lean, tall and grizzled with unkempt gray hair and a week’s worth of unshaved beard stubble. Without doubt, he was tough enough to get through every word of the entire Sunday New York Times in the privy in the woods. Assuming, of course, that the man knew how to read.