The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  Not any dry flies.

  Royal Coachmen.

  She counted two dozen of them, in various styles. There were traditionals and Wulffs. There were parachutes, wets, at least one trude, several steelhead streamers, other styles she couldn’t name, but almost always with the golden pheasant fibers making a long and showy tail, the two bumps of peacock herl bracketing a red floss abdomen—the design signatures of the Royal Coachman.

  “So it was one of them,” June Kock said. “I knew it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Each one of them is a member. Half of them wanted him out.”

  “A member of what?”

  Now, heading home, taking the big swing south around Muskelonge Lake, Margarite found herself disbelieving what June Kock had told her. No—not disbelieving exactly. Finding it fantastic. Feeling like she had when she first heard about “getting Hoovered in” or “sexed in,” or about the “lights out” method for selecting initiation murder victims—gangland stuff that had seemed made up by television producers until she got involved and enlightened. Joining, belonging, being left out—few things, it seemed, drove human beings to higher heights and deeper depths.

  According to June Kock, each fly in that shadow box represented a member of a secret fly fishing brotherhood called The Royal Coachmen. Her murdered husband had at some point become “keeper of the box.” Only he could allow new members or expel old ones. There were blanks in the box where flies had been removed. It was one of them that he kicked out, she said. Or it was one he wouldn’t let in.

  The identities of the members, she told Margarite, were unknown to her. She knew only that a Royal Coachman was another man like him. Period. Using him again instead of a name. She had stopped there.

  Margarite had taken the box in her hands and looked at each fly carefully. The Royal Coachmen that her suspect Oglivie had dropped into the Reed and Green iron ranger and given to Dolf Cook—that fly was not beneath the glass. She had handed the box back to June Kock.

  “Is that your husband’s Yukon in the pole barn?”

  It was, the widow said.

  “Did he park it there?”

  Who else would park it there, she said.

  “When?”

  He came and went as he pleased, she said.

  “Is there any way you can think of that I can find out who these people are?”

  Sure, June Kock said. Wait by the door. The one who did it will come for the box.

  Margarite told her that sometime tomorrow, at her convenience, they would need her at the morgue in Munising, to officially identify the body.

  “Here’s my number,” Margarite had said, trying to hand her a card. But Kock’s wife had sunk back onto the sofa with the shadow box on her lap, her eyes closed, her mouth set—she was done.

  Lost in these thoughts, Margarite found herself home finally.

  But Julia wasn’t. Her truck was gone. Four Bud bottles stood neatly aligned in the sink. That tidiness was Julia’s tiny apology for drinking them.

  The deputy made a simple round of inspection, the bathroom, the hamper, the Camel carton, the shoe closet, hating herself but discovering that Julia had showered, changed her panties, put on her cowboy boots, and left with a fresh pack of cigarettes.

  Margarite started water for pasta, thinking her stomach might take something bland. While the water boiled, she made phone calls to the four other campers who had dropped envelopes into the iron ranger during the time Oglivie was at Reed and Green. Two were bogus numbers. One was a honeymooning couple from Rheinlander who had kayaked from High Bridge. The lovebirds had arrived after midnight and remembered little else but fumbling through clouds of mosquitoes to set up their tent and then building a fire to dry their clothing out. The husband was still unhappy about the estimated time-on-water that the outfitter had given him. The trip had taken twice that long, he said. He wanted Margarite’s estimate of the mileage between High Bridge and Reed and Green.

  Julia had just come in. She was gargling in the bathroom. Margarite put her hand over the phone. “Sweetie?” she called. “What’s the river mileage from High Bridge to Reed and Green?”

  “Three times what it looks like. It takes even longer after a storm if there’s a lot of crap in the water.”

  Julia yelled her answer moving from the bathroom into the laundry room. She had stocked trips for Kock while she was in high school and gotten herself fired. Her story was that Kock had cornered her in an equipment shed, over a pile of life jackets. She had kicked him in the caviar.

  “About three times map miles,” Margarite told the husband. “Was it Superior Outfitters?”

  “Those jerks,” the guy said. “I shove off, it turns out my paddle is bent. My wife, her seat doesn’t adjust. She goes the whole way with nothing to brace her feet. They said five hours, it took us ten. My God, how do these people stay in business?”

  You don’t want to know, Margarite said to herself, hearing the lid on the washing machine thump down. But maybe if he came back next year, she told the husband, there might be some different outfitters in the business.

  “Did you see anyone else at the campsite that night?”

  Checking her notebook, Margarite realized this was the night when Oglivie had not paid with Royal Coachmen. So was he not there?

  “Oh, yeah. We just get settled down, this drunk old man comes up to our campfire and talks us right into the tent. We get in there, zip it up, say goodnight, he keeps talking. Helluva good time.”

  “Did you see an RV at any point?”

  “We would have hijacked it,” he said, “and got the hell out of there.”

  “What are you washing?” Margarite asked Julia as she quick-stepped into the living room wearing the robe they left in the mud room for instant laundry occasions. The deputy watched her little free bird skitter past. Julia’s skin was flushed rosy pink against the white robe. Her tiny calves knotted hard, feet squeaking as she turned.

  “My clothes, obviously.”

  “Any room for mine?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Four beers is a lot. You ok?”

  Julia went a few more steps before she said, “And how do you know I drank them all myself?” and continued into the bathroom.

  A moment later the shower started. Shit. Julia didn’t act out like this when they were dating once a month. She was mellow and cuddly. She wanted Margarite around her all the time. She wanted back rubs that went all the way.

  Margarite forced herself to call the fourth number from the campground registrations, the one that came with no more address than “Gwinn.” Another phony number.

  Her mind was a muddle as she went to the deck, where she could look out on the Tahquamenon River. The slow, ale-colored water caught the orange hue of another perfect sunset. A trout rose.

  Into her mind on the general theme of discouragement drifted the threats Kock had directed her way for investigating the Pine Stump Junction motel fire.

  What did it mean that she had hidden those threats from Julia? That she loved Julia? That she needed to protect Julia? That she didn’t trust Julia? That she was over-functioning, once more, in a relationship with a drinker who would end up resenting her?

  Margarite had blamed the first broken window on a pigeon. She had tossed the heavy stone back into the river. This was June, pre-Labor Day. As far as anyone knew, she was just renting a room to Julia, who before had been staying with assorted friends, as Margarite understood it, or with her parents at Boney Falls.

  Early one weekend morning not long after that, patrolling for sticks before using the mower, Margarite had found dead suckers rotting on the lower lawn. The suckers had been gut-slit with a knife, their organs pulled out before they were tossed ashore. That evening, waiting for Julia to come home, Margarite had answered the phone to “Back off, sucker.” “You’ll have to do better than that,” she snapped back, and right away wished that she hadn’t. There had been a looming silence from Kock’s people since the outing
at the brat fest, as if something better was in fact in the works. Some “strategic planning,” maybe.

  She leaned on the deck rail and put her chin in her hands. The trout rose, and rose again. So alone, she thought, and these stupid threats, and she felt her eyes tear up.

  You’re just tired, she told herself. Hungry. And that water boiled a long time ago.

  Over an early dinner of garlic pasta and steamed kale from the garden, the clothes drier clanking distantly, Margarite led with the bad news first.

  “I have to go back in first thing after supper, look over evidence again, meet with Fritz Shunk and Bruce the Moose. We have to decide how we’re going to charge the trout bum.”

  Julia looked cute with her wet, mouse-brown hair, one of Margarite’s big white shirts on as a dress over black panties and nothing else, her bare feet curled and scratching each other’s mosquito bites under the table. Never mind the fifth beer, Margarite told herself. Never mind the distant scowl.

  “But I’ll be back as soon as possible. And the good news is—” Why do I lie? she asked herself “—this should be an easy case. There’s the usual higgledy-piggledy at the beginning, but it’ll sort out fast. It’s just a question of connecting the dots for Shunk and getting the trout bum to tell us who put him up to it. No reason he won’t talk, soon as he understands he’s looking at life in prison.”

  “So how do you know he did it?”

  “He did something.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I really shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Then why are you bringing it up?”

  “Because you—” Margarite stopped. She took a bite of pasta but didn’t notice swallowing it. Her eyes were open, but she could not have named a single thing in front of her, not even Julia’s little black-and-bondo Toyota pickup with brand new tires below the deck in the driveway—except suddenly she was saying, “You got new tires? When did that happen?”

  “I didn’t use your credit card, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I’m not. I’m just surprised. They look nice.”

  “Tires look nice?”

  “Big and shiny. That’s nice in my book.” Margarite wanted to ask where the money came from. She blurted instead, “Do you know Danny Tervo?”

  Julia put her beer down on the handle of her fork and nearly tipped the bottle. “The hell’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Just tell me. You think he would kill somebody? Or be involved in it?”

  “Why?”

  “Just something Esofea mentioned.”

  “Oh. Esofea, huh?”

  Julia’s eyes flashed their mean glow suddenly. “I wouldn’t believe a thing that girl says about Danny. I went with Danny Tervo once when they were broken up. He was sweet to me.” Petite, fierce Julia lighting a Camel now. “Reminded me I sometimes have a taste for it.”

  It spilled out of Margarite. “Why are you hurting me?”

  “Why are you hurting me?”

  “I’m sorry,” Margarite said. “I didn’t think I was.”

  Her eyes followed Julia’s blast of smoke toward the river. That trout still rose, chasing around a wide slick of water for some emerging insect that came along about every twenty seconds. Margarite—suddenly, powerfully—felt the urge to fish. To chuck it all and be a trout bum. Fish wherever, whenever. Swill Pepto and sleep alone in a camper, move on down the road.

  “You ever see Danny these days?”

  Another blast of smoke. “Never.”

  The drier buzzed. Margarite said, “New tires do look nice.”

  Julia said, “But you see Esofea every day. Am I right?”

  “I guess. We both work for the county.”

  “Nothing you can do about it, huh?”

  “Should I? I like her. Did you know she’s trying to revive Pippi Longstocking as a hero for girls? Dresses the part, drives that bookmobile around pretty much the whole eastern U.P. and reads the stories? That is so healthy for little girls.”

  Julia chewed her lip. She shook her beer bottle, heard the swish inside and drained it before she tapped in cigarette ash. A bat swooped right in front of them.

  “Healthy little girls, huh? So what?”

  After two or three deep breaths, Margarite thought of something to say. A way, just for now, to bridge this gulf she was failing to understand.

  “So Pippi reminds me of you. She’s this little red-haired pipsqueak so strong she can pick up a horse, and nobody tells her what to do. She is completely independent, the way you are. She lives all alone in this big old house …”

  Margarite took Julia’s non-smoking hand. As she pulled her lover closer, she felt—still felt, thank God—a rush of desire.

  “… but her beautiful friend Annika visits every day—” now she was twisting the story, leaving out Annika’s brother Tommy “—and they have all these wonderful, silly, naughty adventures that Pippi dreams up …”

  Stiffly, Julia came closer. Margarite kept pulling. “And she is so brave you can’t believe it—like you are. She doesn’t care what anybody thinks.”

  Her lover on her lap now, one hundred and three pounds of lean and stridently horny Yooper girl, fresh from the shower, Margarite began to nuzzle.

  “It’s a kid’s book,” she murmured, “so they don’t tell the whole story. But Pippi is outrageously generous, just like you are, letting me share life, your mind, your body …”

  Margarite stroked Julia’s back. She shut her eyes and plunged through an awful flash of feeling that she had been in this moment before: Georgia, Karin, Deb … each love somehow arriving at a sick place within itself and falling to pieces … Margarite doing something to these women, hurting them somehow, obviously … proud Karin getting bombed and screaming in a bar that Margarite was so beautiful she could have anyone in the world, woman or man, “So what the hell do you want from me?”

  She stroked Julia’s shoulders and neck. She went down the tail of the shirt and up the cool skin of Julia’s back. She could claim full credit for their current troubles—there was a strategy. Say this tension was all her fault, now that she thought about it. Mention Kock’s threats against her, against them, say Kock had her worried and distracted and she had been working too hard to nail him, ignoring Julia. Now he was dead. Happy days were here again. Sorry, sorry, sorry. They could take a yacht cruise to Duluth and—

  Julia broke into her thoughts. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what?”

  “That Kock was threatening you.”

  Margarite’s hand stopped. Her eyes opened. Her pulse sped up.

  “He called here,” Julia said, “and then he stopped by here. You weren’t home. He tried to mess with me, gave me some bullshit about how if you really want to know how somebody dies in a fire, he can arrange for you to find out …”

  Julia’s voice trembled and trailed off. She sniffled hard.

  “I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to worry. I wanted to take care of it. I told that shithead he had to go through me, he wanted to try some bullshit like that.”

  Julia reached away for a new cigarette and shakily lit it. After a puff she held the cigarette between them, waiting, waiting, until Margarite reached out.

  9

  After talking to her friend the deputy, Esofea had waited almost all afternoon for Lakeside Auto Glass out of Munising to fix the bookmobile’s windshield. Knowing that the county board would stall a simple disbursement for weeks, she had gone into What Would Pippi Do mode and paid from her own pocket, four hundred dollars of Blind Sucker trust money to a pair of nice old gentleman who puttered and dithered and took two hours to do the job. She nearly had to call the Deer Park Day Care and cancel Thursday “Hop on Pop.”

  In the meantime, one block away at home, she used a coat hanger to make her pigtails perfectly horizontal. She put on a white blouse and a short plaid skirt, one brown knee sock and one that was black, and her black army boots wit
h the scuffed-out toes. She freckled herself with brown washable marker.

  Done with that, she returned to the county building and used the internet to look up Theodore Oglivie, forty-two, last-known address in West Newton, Mass. Scarcely trying, she found his name in a Boston Globe obituary, the father in the “survived by” roster for the death of Eamon Theodore Oglivie, four years old. She found a divorce record, from a Mary Jane Broyhill Oglivie, thirty-five, who also appeared as M.J. Broyhill in several court records for the kinds of things a person might do in extreme pain. And losing a child would certainly suffice. Even with her smallish piece of the experience, Esofea knew enough to fathom that.

  She went outside to check on the window repair. Her Pippi skirt was very short, and Esofea had legs. She never needed Danny Tervo for male attention, that was for sure. One of the old men winked as he slid his van door closed.

  “You be careful, sweetheart.”

  Which she never was. Never. Always zigzagging up and out, amplifying her life.

  For example: next she bought a sandwich and a drink and dropped in on part-time Deputy Tim Shrigley at the hospital, sitting outside Dog’s room reading Car and Driver, looking for an edge over Newberry Motors. Timmy fixed used cars and resold them off his front yard, handling turkey hunts for Heimo Kock as available. In high school, he had wanted Esofea so badly that after one lucky kiss he had self-tattooed her name over his deltoid, but working upside down he had gotten the “s” backwards. “Because you’ll come back to me some day,” he had claimed, after the fact.

  “You just gotta sit here doing nothing all day?” she asked him now.

  “Holy wah, Sofi. Guess it’s Halloween already, eh?”

  She could smell the hose-monkey grime on him ten feet away.

  “I brought you Pickleman’s.”

  “Oh, yah. Then I guess it’s my birthday, eh?”

  “No. But Danny Tervo sure is an asshole.”

  “Oh, youbetcha, girl. You just get reborn or something?”

  The smells of corned ham and American cheese swooned the part-time deputy. Esofea gave him a Cherry Coke, too. “Don’t mind me,” she said, handing Timmy the screw cap. “I had a little swallow.”