by Lee Goldberg, Scott Nicholson, J A Konrath, J Carson Black,
“What’ll it be?” asked the man behind the counter, who wore a big apron that had the same cartoon as the highway billboard. He was as jolly as a department store Santa, with a body to match.
I looked at the menu above the counter. The prices had been painted over and changed many times, but the menu remained the same. Burgers, hot dogs, bacon, and eggs, and a combination of them all called the Big Rock Burger.
I’d had a big breakfast, but acting tough gave me an appetite.
“Gimme a Big Rock Burger, please,” I said. “It’ll bring back memories.”
The man immediately repeated the order to someone in the kitchen, which was hidden somewhere in back.
“So you’ve been here before,” the man ventured jovially, as I’d hoped he would.
I nodded with a smile. “When I was a kid.” I offered him my hand across the counter. “The name’s Harvey Mapes.”
He shook my hand enthusiastically. “Tom Wade, pleasure to have you back.”
“The place hasn’t changed much,” I said.
“Just fresh coats of paint,” he replied. “Any of the pictures on that wall could’ve been taken yesterday.”
Wade motioned to a wall covered with about a hundred faded snapshots and Polaroids, some framed, some stuck to the paneling with thumbtacks or yellowed tape.
“The fish were a lot bigger then,” grumbled one of the old men.
“You can say that again,” another old timer agreed. “Coffee tasted better, too.”
Wade laughed and freshened up the old timer’s cup. “Maybe if I warm it up, you won’t notice.”
“The sign out front looks different,” I said, as if making a fresh observation.
“You’ve got a good memory and a sharp eye,” Wade said. “The only thing the family that sold me the place kept for themselves was the sign. Sentimental value, I suppose. Couldn’t really begrudge them that. I tried to copy the original sign as best I could, but I couldn’t get it quite right.”
A woman built just like Wade came out and set the Big Rock Burger down in front of me, then stood there expectantly to see if I was satisfied. I took a big bite out of it. It was wonderful.
“You certainly got the Big Rock down right,” I said through my mouthful of hamburger, hot dog, bacon, eggs, and cheese. “It’s perfection, even better than I remembered.”
Wade’s wife beamed with pride. “Thank you kindly,” she said, then disappeared into the back again.
“That’s my wife, Betty Lou,” Wade said, smiling after her. “The only thing she loves more than cooking is watching people eat what she makes.”
“Where can I find a wife like that?” I asked.
“You can look anyplace but right here!” Wade chuckled good-naturedly and so did I.
I took a few more bites of my Big Rock Burger, then said: “I vaguely remember the people who used to run the place. Their name was Parkus, wasn’t it?”
“Josiah Parkus,” Wade nodded. “This place was in their family since the early 1900s.”
“Then why did they sell it?”
“Too much tragedy, I suppose.” Wade took a cloth from his apron and started to absently wipe the countertop. “Josiah’s wife Esme killed herself in ‘74. He woke up one morning and Esme was gone. A few hours later, he found one of their boats floating in middle of the lake. The anchor was missing.”
“Fisherman out trolling for macks snagged Esme’s dress in ‘75,” the old man with the coffee said. “Maybe it was ‘76.”
“Their daughter Kelly never really got over it, drowned herself the same way a few years later,” Wade said. “That just left Josiah and his son.”
“Cyril, wasn’t it?” I asked.
Wade nodded. “Neither one of ‘em was much interested in running the resort after that, though Josiah stuck it out on his own after Cyril went off to California. When Josiah died, Cyril sold the place to me. We used to run an RV park up at Spirit Lake, but we always envied this outfit.”
I finished up my burger and tried to figure out how all of this tied together with what I already knew. After thinking about it for a few minutes, the pieces fit pretty good.
Cyril knew Arlo Pelz because they grew up together, with Arlo probably resenting the hell out of Cyril the whole time. Arlo worked for Cyril’s father at the resort marina, fixing outboard motors, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Cyril treated Arlo as his employee, too.
After Kelly Parkus killed herself, Cyril went off to California, and Arlo got into drugs, eventually ending up in Seattle, where he met Lauren, who was either a drug addict, a drug dealer, or a whore. Or maybe all three.
Somehow they split up, how or why I don’t know. A few years went by. Arlo married Jolene, went to prison for dealing drugs, and when he got out, he stumbled into the discovery that Cyril, wealthy and powerful, was married to a woman with a dark, shameful past her husband probably didn’t know about. Arlo guessed Lauren would pay dearly to keep it that way.
Instead, something went wrong.
That something was me, Harvey Mapes.
I uncovered the blackmail scheme and told Cyril about it. Cyril confronted his wife with what I’d found out and then she, unable to deal with the exposure of her ugly past, killed herself.
Now poor Cyril was left to mourn the suicide of yet another woman in his life.
It all made sense. All that was missing were the sordid little details, which I expected to wring out of Arlo once I captured him.
“How about a slice of pie to go with that?” Betty Lou Wade asked, sliding a huge hunk of apple pie in front of me before I could answer.
I smiled back at her. “I don’t see how any sane man could refuse.”
She beamed again. I dug into the pie. Marie Callender and Sarah Lee had nothing on Betty Lou Wade. I picked up my plate and fork and worked on my pie as I wandered over to the wall of photos.
The snapshots captured nearly identical moments in time, spread out over decades, of people standing in front of the store, posing with their fish, smiling into the lens. Occasionally, a portion of a parked car or a particular style of clothing would give away when the picture was taken, but otherwise they could have all been shot today.
I saw what probably amounted to tons of dead fish.
I saw the Parkus family, I saw Arlo, and I saw most of the citizens of Deerlick that I’d met, even Little Billy when he actually was little.
And as I stared back through decades, the pie plate slipping from my hands and shattering on the floor, I saw what I got right and what I got wrong, and just how cruel and inescapable fate could be.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I rented the cabin closest to the woods for the night, parked my car right behind it, then called Carol from the pay phone outside the store.
I didn’t tell her anything that happened to me or what I’d found out. All I said was that I was in Deerlick, asking around for Arlo, and that I’d be staying at Big Rock Lake overnight. I told her I thought Arlo might be in town, but I didn’t know for sure.
That last part was the biggest lie of all.
I knew he was there. I felt it as clearly as my own heartbeat.
I gave Carol the number at the Big Rock Lake Resort Store, since the cabins didn’t have phones. She didn’t ask me why I gave it to her, and I was glad, because she probably would have seen through whatever lie I came up with. The truth was, if she didn’t hear from me in a day or two, I wanted her to know who to call first to go look for my body.
I wasn’t being morbid or fatalistic, just practical. I had every intention of capturing Arlo and bringing him in to pay for his crimes, but I also knew how badly things could go wrong. Recent experience certainly proved that.
I told Carol I loved her and this time it wasn’t hard to say. It sounded to me like saying it came pretty easy for her, too.
***
I spent the afternoon sitting on a chaise lounge on the lawn in front of my cabin, right where everybody could see me, drinking Cokes and looking at the
lake.
I was surprisingly relaxed, considering what I still had left to do. I guess I was either confident in my abilities or too stupid to realize just how much danger I was in.
Sitting there like I was made me think of an episode of “Maverick,” which starred James Garner as gambler and conman Bret Maverick.
My dad loved that show. There was this one episode where Maverick wins a poker game, then convinces a banker to let him make an after-hours deposit to keep his money safe. The next day, Maverick goes in to get his money and the banker says slyly, “What money?”
See, nobody witnessed the transaction. It’s Maverick’s word against the banker’s, and who is going to take the word of a conman?
So Maverick tells everybody he’s gonna get his money back . . . and what he does is, he sits in a rocking chair across the street from the bank and just starts whittling. People walk by every day and ask him, “How’s it goin’, Maverick? You gettin’ your money back?” And every day he says, “I’m workin’ on it.”
The thing was, while he spent the whole episode sitting in that rocking chair, unnerving everybody by happily doing absolutely nothing, a gang of his conman friends were swindling the banker out of exactly what he owed Maverick.
My dad was a gambler, but mostly he was a loser. Whatever he won at the poker table, when he rarely won, was lost the next day. He never got ahead. I think my dad wanted to be James Garner as Maverick the way I wanted to be James Garner as Rockford.
What did that make me?
I didn’t have a gang of conman friends, or anybody else, to help me do what I was going to do that night. So it didn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to be sitting there, sunning myself like I didn’t have a care in the world. I should have been laying down some clever plan.
I had a plan. It wasn’t clever. It wasn’t likely to work any better than my dad’s bluffs at the poker table.
It didn’t matter anyway. I was powerless to control what was going to happen next and I pretty much knew it. What I’d learned over the last few days convinced me that the outcome was inevitable and that I was just doing my predestined part.
When the sun set, it started to get chilly. The resort guests slowly drifted back to their cabins. I stayed where I was for a while, listening to the water lapping against the boats tied to the dock and watching the bats skim the surface of the dark lake.
I imagined Esme Parkus on the muddy bottom, her dress swirling around her skeleton, dozens of sparkling fishing lures caught in the tattered fabric.
And I thought about Kelly Parkus, rowing her boat into the middle of the lake late one night, contemplating the same fate for herself.
I got up, strolled over to the Big Rock Lake Resort Store, and walked around the porch into the restaurant.
The day’s heat was trapped inside. The electric bug trap snapped and crackled, sending off tiny sparks as one insect after another got zapped. It was almost festive.
I took another look at the photos on the wall. One day, Esme and Kelly Parkus were there, grinning in front of the store, and then they weren’t. Time at Big Rock Lake just kept marching on, measured only by all the big fish that didn’t get away.
I took a seat at the counter and ordered another Big Rock Burger from Tom Wade.
“Sorry again about breaking the plate,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, absently wiping the counter in front of me with a rag.
“Why do you suppose Esme drowned herself?” I asked.
He smiled at me. “Can’t get it out of your mind, can you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Once you’ve heard the story, it’s hard not to think about it,” Wade said. “It’s the kind of tragedy that becomes legend. What is it about the lake that draws beautiful young women into its cold depths?”
“But it wasn’t the lake, was it?”
“Not entirely.”
Wade went back into the kitchen and came back with my burger, setting it in front of me. “Josiah Parkus and his father cut down the trees, cleared the land, and built this store, the docks, and the cabins themselves. They didn’t build this place, they birthed it. It wasn’t a business to them, it was a life. Everything else came second. You follow what I’m saying?”
“The resort was his priority; his wife and kids came later,” I said between bites, just to prove I was paying attention.
“And that was the crux of their problem. Esme fell in love with Josiah, not with the lake. But, see, it was a package deal. He’d never leave, so neither could she,” Wade said. “Josiah didn’t make it easy on her. He expected Esme and his kids to be as devoted to the lake as he was. Wasn’t gonna happen. Esme hated the lake but she loved him. Something had to give, and it sure as hell wasn’t gonna be Josiah Parkus.”
Wade shrugged.
“So she sacrificed herself to the thing he loved most,” I said.
Wade nodded.
I’m not usually so poetic, but something about the stillness of the night, the dark romance of the story, and the crackle of electrified insects brought it out in me.
“I didn’t know Esme,” Wade said, “but I’ve heard enough about it from folks who did to believe that’s the way it happened. But I knew the kids, I saw the way Josiah worked them, the way he tried to force them to love this place the way he did. He was especially hard on Kelly, maybe because of what happened to Esme. After she died, all those two kids really had was each other. They knew there was no way off this lake for them.”
“Kelly found one,” I said.
“She didn’t really leave, though, did she?” Wade said, inadvertently glancing at the lake below, then catching himself at it. “But she broke the hold Josiah had on Cyril. The boy left, didn’t even come back for his father’s funeral.”
I finished up my burger and pushed the plate towards Wade. “So, are you as hung up on this place as Josiah Parkus was?”
Wade picked up the plate and wiped away the crumbs I’d left on the counter.
“I didn’t build it with my bare hands,” he said. “I just bought it.”
I had another slice of pie, thought about what Wade had told me, then went back to my cabin for the night to wait for Arlo Pelz.
***
The cabin was laid out a lot like my apartment, a combination kitchen and living room in front, and the bedroom and small bath in back.
The walls were covered with sheets of wood paneling, the floors were linoleum. It was furnished with a vinyl couch and a Formica-topped table with some plastic chairs around it. There was a bad painting of a duck on the wall.
Just what you’d expect for forty-five dollars a night.
Considering how Arlo botched things at the Sno-Inn, I was reasonably certain he wouldn’t go the fire-bomb route again. This time he’d want to be sure that he’d gotten the job done, and there was only one way to do that.
I messed up the bed and used the pillows to create the vague outline of a person under the blankets. It’s an old trick that’s been used a thousand times on television, so I figured it must work.
I turned off all the lights, dragged one of the kitchen chairs into the bedroom closet, and sat down, the roll of duct tape on the floor and my gun on my lap. I drew the closet curtain closed in front of me and waited.
I wasn’t worried about falling asleep this time. One of the reasons I drank so many Cokes during the afternoon was to tank myself up on caffeine. But when I did start to feel a bit drowsy, I just reminded myself what Jolene looked like the last time I saw her. That sharpened me up real quick.
As I sat there in the closet of that cabin, feeling the night chill seeping through the old boards, smelling the pine of the surrounding forest, I thought about my guard shack. It wasn’t a whole lot bigger than that closet, but it seemed a world, and a lifetime, away.
It had been a little over a week since I’d been hired to follow Lauren Parkus. Before that, I’d never been the victim or inflictor of violence. I’d never seen a person die. And
I’d never been in love.
But it seemed to me that all those years, all those nights, of sitting alone in that guard shack was training for this moment. I had no problem sitting in a closet like a suit of clothes waiting to be worn or a box waiting to be opened. I’d learned to sit in a cramped space and wait for something to happen, even if most of the time nothing ever did. I’d become an expert at passivity, at waiting for life to happen rather than going after it myself.
Not anymore.
I thought about Esme, Kelly, and Cyril Parkus, about how it was them against their father and the lake, and what life must have been like for them after Esme died.
It made me think about my mother, my sister Becky, and me, and about my father, who loved to gamble and sacrificed everything for it. I remembered how things changed after my mother ran off, how Becky stepped up and ragged on my dad the same way mom used to, and just as ineffectively.
When I was a kid, I thought we had a uniquely fucked-up family, that nobody else could possibly understand what it was like being abandoned by your mother and left with a father who lived for something he thought was more important than you.
Well, it turned out I was wrong. We weren’t uniquely fucked-up, we were just as fucked-up as lots of other families. Cyril Parkus may have been a rich guy in a big house with the stone lions, and I was just the loser in the stucco shack on the other side of the gate, but we were more alike than either of us would have thought.
I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that.
Sitting in that closet, alone with my memories, I was surprised how fast the hours slipped past. It seemed like only a few minutes had gone by when, at two a.m., I heard the soft footfalls in the living room.
Arlo slunk into the room and up to the bed, holding one of those big, serrated Rambo knives in his fist. Knives seemed to be the weapon of choice with criminals in Washington State. He raised the knife over his head, then brought it down with a vengeance, plunging it deep into the covered pillows.