Boobytrap

by Bill Pronzini

  “How much farther?” I asked.

  “We’re almost to where we leave the boat. It’s neat in here, huh?”

  “Neat,” I said, and whacked another mosquito.

  Pretty soon the terrain humped and the stream widened into what looked to be a pool at the foot of a series of short, naturally terraced steps. The water came bubbling down over them, making cheerful noises in the gloomy stillness. That was as far as we could take the boat—unless we portaged up over the rise, and Chuck relieved me of that unappealing idea by announcing, as he nosed us onto a slope of shore mud, that we’d hike the rest of the way.

  “It’s not far,” he said. “About half a mile.”

  “What about this pool right here? No good?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Chuck’s Hole is where they hang out.”

  So we tromped overland on an all but invisible deer trail, Chuck setting a brisk pace despite the poor light and me struggling to keep up and not injure myself on rocks, root tangles, and other obstacles. It wasn’t really a bad trek, even though it was mostly uphill in a series of gradual rises, but by its end I was tired, scratched, lumpy with mosquito bites, and wondering why I put myself through little adventures like this. For the kid’s sake, in this case—sure. But part of it, too, maybe, was to prove to myself that I was not quite to the geezer-in-the-porch-rocker stage yet.

  Yeah, I thought, except that right now that porch rocker looks pretty good. Eh, Grandpappy?

  Where we emerged, finally, was into a big, open glade filled with early-morning light. The sky was a milky blue that would deepen and brighten as the sun rose. The creek ran off to the left and the pool there, shaded by trees and a mossy outcrop, was long and wide and pretty as the proverbial postcard. As soon as I saw it, I felt less creaky and more pleased with my surroundings.

  “Chuck’s Hole,” he said proudly.

  “I’m impressed. No kidding.”

  He grinned. “Best place to fish is up on that outcrop.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  He led the way upstream to a place above the pool where we could ford it, then back to the outcrop. He already had a line in the water by the time I finished tying on one of my flies, a #14 Iron Blue Dun. Chuck was using his prized PMD, the #18 Mathews Sparkle Dun with the Zelon shuck. It must’ve been right for this pool because he got the first couple of nibbles, hooked and then lost a smallish brown, hooked and landed the first fish of the day, a handsome speckled cutthroat in the pound-and-a-half range.

  We’d been there about forty minutes before I had any luck. I made a pretty fair cast into the shadows under a thick cluster of ferns and snaky tree roots, and almost immediately something smacked the fly and jerked the line taut, with enough force to yank the rod out of my hand if I hadn’t had a tight grip on the butt. I knew I’d hooked a rainbow even before I saw it, by the way it battled: a cutthroat brown is tricky and fights with its head, while a rainbow is stronger, speedier, and fights with its tail. It took me a while to work the fish and reel him in, with Chuck calling excited encouragement the entire time. He’d brought a net and he used it when I lifted the flopping trout out of the water. Otherwise I might’ve lost it—and before long I wished I had.

  “A beauty,” the boy said, his eyes shining. “Two pounds at least, maybe two and a half. Nice going, man!”

  I removed the hook from the rainbow’s mouth. As soon as it was free, blood glistening on the barbed tip, the same aversion as yesterday came over me: I didn’t want to kill it. I think I would have released it, the way I had the cutthroat brown, if Chuck hadn’t been there grinning approval at me. We’d forged a bond this morning, the boy and me, become friends across the double-wide generation gap; if I let the trout go, I knew he would lose respect for me, no matter what I said to justify it. He was only twelve and fishing was his passion; he’d never understand. I weighed his disfavor against the fish’s life. And the fish lost. The arguments on the side of my relationship with Chuck were stronger: The whole purpose of this outing was to catch trout for eating, wasn’t it? I’d had no compunction about the trout I’d eaten last night, had I? Or about killing and consuming hundreds of other fish over the past forty-some years? Why spoil things for Chuck because I’d suddenly developed a problem? A fish, for Christ’s sake. As Strayhorn had said, it was just a fish.

  None of that helped much. I still did not want to destroy the rainbow, and if I turned the job over to Chuck it would be the coward’s way out. I’m a lot of things, but a coward isn’t one of them. So I used the handle of my knife, doing it quickly, then gave the stilled body to the boy to put in his creel with the one he’d caught. He didn’t mind that; he considered it a gesture of our friendship.

  “I’m going to take a break,” I said, “finish the rest of the coffee. You go ahead and keep your line out.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Plenty more down there. Bet I catch a bigger one than yours.”

  “Bet you do, too.”

  I moved off the outcrop and sat in the shade, my back against a pine bole. I felt lousy for a time, worse than the situation warranted, but then I began to develop a different perspective on what had just happened. Suppose, I thought, I’d killed the trout not for Chuck’s sake or the sake of my relationship with him, but for my own sake. To prove something to myself, beyond any doubt.

  That I was through with fishing? Maybe. No, probably. There was still pleasure for me in tramping the woods, picking out a suitable spot, casting a line, but the affinity for the catch, the fight, the final victory was all but gone. Finishing off that big, strong rainbow, then, might’ve been a symbolic act of closure: washing my hands of the sport in the trout’s blood.

  But there was more to it than that. It wasn’t just the prospect of sacrificing any more fish that left me cold; it was a visceral repugnance at the idea of ever killing anything again.

  So damned much death in my sixty years. All the corpses I’d seen, all the atrocities one human being can visit upon another. My own direct responsibility for one man’s sudden end, and indirect responsibility for a couple of others’. The countless other life forms that had ceased to exist because of me, too: the birds I’d felled with a slingshot when I was a kid, the buck I’d shot and wounded and had to put out of its misery on my one and only hunting trip, all the trout and bass and salmon I’d caught, all the rodents and even the insects like those mosquitoes this morning that I’d carelessly disposed of. Enough. I’d had enough.

  Life is too short, too precious. Even to a fish. Even to a bug. And man’s intelligence puts him well atop the natural food chain; no creature has the right to interrupt his cycle of life, especially one of his own kind. So why should he maintain the smug, arrogant position that it’s okay for him to indulge in casual slaughter outside his species?

  Let others rationalize answers to that question. Not me. Not anymore.

  “Hey, look!” Chuck called above the throb of the Evinrude outboard. “Something’s goin’ on over at the Stapletons’.”

  I looked toward where he was pointing. We were two-thirds of the way across the lake, heading for home, and the distance was too great for me to make out much except that half a dozen people were clustered behind one of the alpine cottages halfway between Judson’s and the Dixon cabin.

  I called back to Chuck, “Who’re the Stapletons?”

  “Family from Reno. But they’re not here yet, they don’t come up until July.”

  “Cottage closed up, then?”

  “Yeah. Maybe somebody busted in or something. Stole their padlocks like they stole ours.”

  “The gang of padlock thieves.”

  “Right. Let’s go see what’s up, okay?”

  “You’ve got the tiller.”

  He changed course, pointing us toward the Stapleton property. It was midmorning now and warm on the lake, the sky cloud-streaked. The boy had wanted to stay at Chuck’s Hole and fish a while longer, but I’d talked him out of it, pleading hunger and promising him a pancake breakfast at Judson’s.
He’d caught two more trout, a cutthroat and a rainbow marginally larger than mine. He was so pleased with his morning’s take and the fact that he’d been able to make good on his boast that he hadn’t been bothered by having to fish alone. I’d lied about there being something wrong with my rod, a minute crack in the bamboo, to explain my unwillingness to join him. The truth would only have bewildered him. It was my truth anyway, not his.

  As we neared the Stapletons’, the shore group separated into recognizable individuals. Mack Judson, Fred Dyce, Jacob Strayhorn, two of the summer residents I’d met at the cafe, and one man I didn’t know. When Judson saw that we were heading in their direction, he hurried onto the dock, making stay-away gestures with both hands. The others hung back on shore.

  Chuck ignored the gestures. I was about to warn him off myself, but we were close enough now so that I could see something else on the property—a tarpaulin spread out in front of a lean-to filled with stacks of firewood. The humped shape of what lay under the tarp made my stomach turn over. I didn’t say anything to Chuck. I didn’t let myself think anything yet, either.

  The boy cut power and nosed us in to the float below where Judson was standing, a bleak frown on his craggy face. But the frown wasn’t for us; we were nothing more to him than a distraction. He called down to Chuck, “Why didn’t you mind me, boy? This is no place for you now.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Been an accident. A bad one.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “Nils Ostergaard. He’s dead.”

  “Dead? Mr. Ostergaard is dead?”

  “Since some time last night.”

  Death on my mind all morning and now this. I lifted myself out of the skiff, climbed a ramp that led from the float onto the dock. “What happened, Mack?”

  “Nils went out about seven last night and didn’t come back,” Judson said. “Sometimes he’d stray off and stay out late, so Callie wasn’t worried when she went to bed about eleven. His wife, Callie. Plenty worried when she woke up this morning and he still wasn’t home. Came and told me and I got up a search party.”

  “How long ago’d you find him?”

  “About twenty minutes. Took us a couple of hours of hunting. His pickup was in some trees near the resort, so we searched there first. That’s why it took so long.”

  “How’d he die?”

  Dyce and the man I didn’t know had wandered out onto the dock. They heard my question, and Dyce said, “Cracked skull. Harper here and me’re the ones who found him.” The sullen belligerence was absent today; he seemed subdued. Maybe the presence of death had humbled him a little.

  “Poking around in the dark, seems like,” Judson said, “and tripped and fell against that stack of cordwood up there. Split his head open on a log.”

  “Why would he be poking around a deserted cottage in the dark?”

  “That was the way he was. Self-appointed watchdog. Must’ve seen or heard something, decided to take a look.”

  I said, thinking out loud, “Funny he’d leave his pickup such a long way off.”

  “Not if you knew Nils. No telling what he was liable to do, or why.”

  “Are you sure it was an accident?”

  They all looked at me. Strayhorn was there, too, by then; so was Hal Cantrell, who’d appeared from up on the road and followed him onto the dock. Strayhorn smiled his small, pale smile and said, “Don’t you think it was?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then why ask the question?”

  “He’s a cop,” Dyce said. “They’re all suspicious.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  Strayhorn said, “Why don’t you have a look at the body, judge for yourself?”

  “Not my place to do that.”

  “County law’s on the way,” the man named Harper said. “Be here with an ambulance any minute.”

  “Take a look anyway,” Strayhorn said to me. “See what you think. I’d be interested to know.”

  “Why?”

  He made that shrugging movement with his head. “Curiosity. Can’t hurt to take a look, can it?”

  “Sure,” Cantrell said, “take a look. Why not?”

  I glanced at Judson; he lifted his shoulders, let them fall. He was too upset to care one way or the other. “Go ahead if you want.”

  No, I thought. Better keep out of it.

  “Come on,” Strayhorn said, “you’ve seen dead men before.” Challenging me, the way he had at Two Creek Bar. Why? He didn’t like me, that was plain enough. Because I’d released the cutthroat brown and then laughed about it? Something skewed in him, if that was the reason.

  “All right,” I said, to shut him up and keep it from becoming an issue. I glanced down at a pale-faced Chuck in the skiff. “Go on back to your cabin. I’ll walk from here.”

  “But I want to be here when—”

  “Go on, Chuck. Your mother should know about this. Go home and tell her.”

  He didn’t argue, and as I moved away, following Judson and the others, I heard the Evinrude crank up. Give a kid something important to do and he’ll do it—and there’s nothing so important as the bearing of bad news. If that wasn’t true, the world media would shut down and every journalist of every kind would be out of a job.

  It was Judson who lifted the tarp so I could see what was left of Nils Ostergaard. My stomach kicked again; no matter how many times you face sudden death there’s always the same involuntary physical reaction, the same mixture of sadness and revulsion. The wound was on the left side of the head, dried blood from the ear up over the temple. Ants and other insects had been at the blood; there were still a few of them moving around. A piece of bark clung there, too, evidently from the log that had been dislodged from the lean-to pile and lay near his head. Smears of dried blood stained the log as well.

  “So what do you think?” Cantrell asked.

  I took the tarp from Judson without answering, drew it back off the body. Ostergaard wore a plaid lumberman’s jacket, a blue shirt, a pair of faded Levi’s. Nothing bulky in any of the pockets, nothing on the ground around him, and both his hands were empty.

  “No flashlight,” I said.

  Dyce said, “Flashlight?”

  “Why would he leave his car in some trees several hundred yards away and then walk back down here without a flashlight?”

  “He didn’t need one. Bright sky last night.”

  “Not so bright here. Lot of shadowed ground.”

  Judson said, “Nils knew each property like the back of his hand. He didn’t need a light to find his way around, even as old as he was. What’s the damn point of all this talk?”

  “The point,” Strayhorn said, “is that he didn’t find his way around so well last night.” His gaze settled on me once more. “Right?”

  I ignored him again and asked Judson, “Did you check the cottage to see if it’s secure?”

  “We checked it. Locked up tight.”

  “The outbuildings?”

  “Same.”

  “No signs of trespassing?”

  “No. None.”

  “Cops,” Dyce said. Some of his snotty sullenness had returned. “Jesus Christ. The old guy fell down and hit his head and killed himself. Period, end of story.”

  “But you don’t think so,” Strayhorn said to me.

  “Did I say I didn’t think so?”

  “You seem to have doubts.”

  “No doubts,” I lied. “It was an accident, just as Dyce says. That’s pretty obvious.”

  “So you’re satisfied.”

  “I’m satisfied. Aren’t you?”

  Either that comeback put an end to his little game, or he tired of it; in any case, he shut up and drifted into the background, the way he had in the cafe on Saturday evening. None of us had any more to say. We were seven men alone with our own thoughts, like mourners at a grave site, when the sheriff’s deputies and an ambulance arrived from Quincy five minutes later.

  EIGHT
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br />   THE WHOLE THING FELT WRONG TO ME.

  It felt manipulated, arranged. It felt like homicide.

  In my mind’s ear I kept hearing Nils Ostergaard’s words to me on the lake yesterday: I think maybe one of the other first-timers ain’t what he seems to be. Connection? If it was a homicide, that was the most likely angle. Who else would have a reason to kill a proddy but harmless old man like Ostergaard and then try to make it look like an accident?

  But what motive would a man who wasn’t what he seemed to be have? Something that involved those missing padlocks on the Dixon property, maybe? Or was that stretching things too far?

  And what was this guy and why was he at Deep Mountain Lake if he wasn’t a fisherman?

  None of it added up to anything but wild speculation. Which was the main reason I hadn’t voiced any of my reservations or suspicions to the sheriffs deputies. There were ordinary explanations for Ostergaard leaving his pickup where he had, for him not taking his flashlight and skulking around in the dark. The wound on his temple had looked to be deep and long, more in keeping with a bludgeoning than a fall; but with all the dried blood I couldn’t be sure of the dimensions, and, besides, I was no forensics expert and an old man’s flesh is thin, his bones brittle. A fall could have done the damage.

  I told myself, as I walked away from the Stapleton property, that I ought to just forget it, let the county authorities handle it as they saw fit. None of my business, was it? Except that it was, in a way. Ostergaard had been planning to confide in me—involve me in whatever he’d nosed up. By the same token, his death had passed the gauntlet on to me. There were other arguments, too: It had been pretty obvious from the way the deputies talked and acted that there wouldn’t be much of an investigation, if any at all; accidental death would almost certainly be the official verdict. And I could not shake the feeling of wrongness, or the sense of obligation it carried. If Ostergaard had been murdered, I owed it to him and his widow to try to prove it. Once a cop, always a cop, he’d said to me. Right, and good cops look out for their own and do what they can to uphold the principles of duty and justice. Those principles don’t seem to mean as much nowadays as they once did, but they mattered to me and they’d mattered to the man I believed Ostergaard had been.