‘Herman?’ I asked.
‘Yep.’
‘I came up to see Mr Lamm, but I understand he’s not here.’
‘Yep.’
‘People from his Chicago office reported him missing?’
‘Yep.’
For sure, the man must have enjoyed old cowboy movies.
‘You told the sheriff there’s no need for worry because Arthur takes off sometimes, for days on end, to go camping and fishing?’
He said nothing.
‘That’s a yep?’
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘His business friends called me over at Loons’. Told them the same thing.’
‘You didn’t know he’d come up until you saw his car? You didn’t actually see him?’
He stared off into the woods. ‘Mr Lamm likes to take off, is all.’
I looked past him, toward the lake. An orange rowboat, barely floating above the waterline, was tied to a collapsing dock. ‘Lamm’s boat is still there.’
‘Huh?’
‘How can Lamm be off camping if his boat is still here?’
He blinked rapidly and licked his lips. After a minute, he said, ‘He has two.’
‘Mind if I look around?’
There was nothing friendly about the way he was now looking at me. ‘What are you doing here, mister?’
‘Arthur told me to come up any time for the fishing.’
Herman spat into the clay. ‘Sure he did.’
I started walking toward the lake. Herman bird-dogged me from ten paces behind like he was worried I was going to make off with one of the trees.
When I got to the dock, I pointed at the boat. Barely two inches rode above the water. ‘You’re sure Arthur took a boat like this one?’
‘Yep.’
‘Must have bailed it out first.’
He spat again. ‘I imagine.’
‘Why didn’t he bail out this one while he was at it?’
Herman shrugged. ‘He only needed the one.’
‘You’re the caretaker here, right?’
‘I look after things.’
‘Why haven’t you bailed out the boat?’
He looked away again.
‘When Arthur gets back, tell him I came up to drop a few worms,’ I said. I felt his eyes on me all the way to the Porsche. I hadn’t bothered to give him a name. More importantly, he hadn’t bothered to ask for one, as though he never expected to talk to Lamm again.
I drove the half-mile to the fire lane and pulled far enough into the leafless trees to hope the Porsche would be hidden from the road. The day had warmed. I left my pea coat in the car and doubled back through the woods. I wanted another look at Lamm’s camp without Herman’s breath misting the back of my neck. I got within sight of the privy when the sound of a loud engine came rumbling low along County M.
The woods hid the vehicle, but I guessed it was a truck, shiny and new and blue. Herman Canty, the man who’d made sure I’d left Lamm’s clearing knowing nothing more than when I arrived, was driving slowly, maybe searching into the trees to make sure I had gone.
I held my breath, straining to hear any easing of his gas pedal. The engine loped on, low and steady. He didn’t slow at the fire lane and, in another minute, the big-barreled exhaust had gone.
I ran the last yards through the trees and down to the shore. I could see no other cottages or clearings at Lamm’s end of the lake, no places where someone could see me prowling around. Several channels split the shoreline across the lake, leading to other lakes.
I stepped onto the narrow dock. The orange rowboat shifted uneasily in the water. The next rain, even if it was light, would drop it to the bottom of the shallows.
I went up to the cottage. It had three windows at the front, facing the lake. The middle one was unlatched. I slid it open and slipped through.
There was one big room, furnished simply with two vinyl sofas, a couple of sturdy wood rockers, a table and four straight-back wood chairs. Two gray metal-frame cots were folded up in the corner. I imagined the sofas would pull out for extra sleeping. A small, butane cook stove stood next to a large, wood-burning heat stove. Burned-down candle stubs stuck in glass ash trays were set beside two lanterns on a shelf above the back window. There was no refrigerator because there was no electricity; a dented green metal cooler rested in the corner, ready for ice or chilled water from the lake.
I went back out the window and down to the shore. The almost-submerged orange wood boat still nagged. Unless it had a hole in it, Lamm should have bailed it when he was emptying the other. Or Herman, simply because that should have been his responsibility.
Unless neither of them expected Lamm would ever come back.
I bent to look closer at the boat.
Something zipped like a bug into the water five feet from my arm. In the fraction of the instant I needed to think it was an insect, rifle fire exploded the stillness around me. A second bullet zipped even closer, not two feet away.
I dove into the murk of the lake.
TWENTY-NINE
I hit muck in an instant. I was too close to shore, too easy a target for a man with a gun.
I clawed blindly at the spongy decay, grabbing madly to pull myself down and away. The water was ink, thick with the sediment I’d stirred up, slimy in my nose, gritty in my eyes. The saw-edged weeds scratched at my face and ripped at my hands as I tugged at them, one handful after another, to get deeper, farther from shore.
My lungs begged for air, but death was a gunshot waiting at the surface. The water was deeper now, clearer. I let go of the cutting weeds and began breast-stroking through the frigid water to stay down, fighting my lungs, counting, ten more strokes, then nine and five and then no more. I lunged up for air, my eyes shut for the crack of gunfire, the burn of a bullet.
No explosion came. No burn, no pain. I gulped air, dropped back under.
Ten new strokes, and ten more, then up again, gasping, pawing at my face to clear my eyes. Lamm’s cottage was two hundred yards away.
My jeans and shoes were lead, tugging me down. I let them pull me under, and breast-stroked below the surface toward the center of the lake until I could do no more, and came up to look. The brown log cottage was lost in the blur of the trees at the shoreline. I made wide circles with my arms, staying up, watching for movement. Nothing moved at the shore.
A thousand iced daggers pricked deep into my legs. My strength had gone; my shoes were dragging weights. I needed to untie them and let them fall away but, barefoot, I wouldn’t have a chance of outrunning anyone in the woods.
A thought struck, so perfect that I hugged it like I was hugging life: A killer would have killed. I’d been a plump target at the shore and then swimming the first yards away. Anyone close could have easily put bullets into me. But there had been no more gunshots after the first two.
It had been some fool hunter, sure. I was way up north in the land of the gun-toting free, where everybody got armed at birth and shooting wild was a part of life. Hell, by now my hunter was probably a mile away, resting on a termite-infested log for a mid-morning bite of bratwurst and cheddar, perhaps even lifting an ear flap on his plaid cap to scratch his pointed head and wonder why he never hit anything.
Damned fool hunter. Damned fool me.
I’d panicked over nothing.
Cramps hit, great contorting pulsations that dug into my legs with iron fingers. I dropped under the water, doubled over to knead my knuckles into my right leg, then my left. The cramps dug back deeper, relentless in the frigid water.
Damned fool me. I was going to drown if I didn’t get out of the water.
I kicked for the trees, flailing my arms at the water as the great electric curls of pain wrapped tighter and tighter around my calves. My hands as well began to cramp, too weak to do anything but slap at the water. Swallowing water, I went down.