They shifted the weight of the mattress and then disappeared down the trail, walking into the scattered sunlight. The chainsaw ripped and growled and idled, and through the dense trees, closer to the lake, Val heard a loud crack and saw a small pine do a header toward the ground. “That’s Luke,” Caroline called back.
Back inside the cabin Val folded the blankets at the foot of the bunk where she had clenched the night away, grabbed her briefcase, the ice pack, and the flashlight, and headed for the chow. The mere offer of a cup of coffee made the hairs on her arms think about lying back down. First she’d tank up and then call the office. Ivy League Ivy, Peter’s secretary, could fax her a new contract for Charles Cable. Not without some eye-rolling bad attitude, but she would.
I didn’t graduate come loud from Brown for this, Val had overheard Ivy say on the phone to her mother, petulantly gnawing a thumbnail. As she breezed by, Val mused that the girl had an academic honor she couldn’t pronounce, and Ivy League Ivy slung her an unusually well-wrought whipped-dog look—the one Val called poster child for Oppressed Workers of the World.
Val had no sympathy. Peter Hathaway was a dream boss, unless, of course, you were either sleeping with him or his equal. Toward Ivy he was undemanding, couching every request in “Would you please do me a favor?” He was unerringly silent around her, an absence of boss, a veritable Gandhi of corporate wonks. He bankrolled an ongoing lunch hour yoga class for Ivy League Ivy, who, Val suspected, just took the dough and bought stuff off eBay. Peter Hathaway really liked to be loved by people whose names he couldn’t remember.
In the Camp Sajo kitchen she let the water run out of the ice pack into the gleaming industrial sink, and set the empty bag down on the counter. With a wet paper towel she dabbed at the nachos stain on her top, then gave up and cream-cheesed two halves of a bagel she didn’t want to take the time to toast and poured a chipped mug of coffee from a pretty decent little Krups coffeemaker.
Tucking the briefcase up under her arm, she managed everything else and figured the shortest way to the camp office was through the dining room—where four young men were sitting together at one of the long plank tables, shoulders hunched over that final cup of coffee. One guy had vine tattoos snaking their way up his bare arms, and another sported a neo-mullet shaved high around his ears. Maintenance boys? Leftover counselors?
She winced a smile at them as she passed, and all four of them nodded gravely and went back to musically discussing the NHL. Her beached jellyfish look was nothing new for this group, who were apparently equal opportunity brawlers. Whoever Luke was, out there loose on the campgrounds with a gassed-up chainsaw, he was doing the heavy lifting at Caroline Selkirk’s camp.
Val let herself into the lodge, which in the daylight had the kind of cool, weighty stillness of an empty church. Somehow last night she had overlooked the real chair of the meeting, a lugubrious moose head mounted over the stone fireplace, presiding over the madness. And here, closer to the entrance, were a couple of sizeable area rugs—nice Turkish flatweaves, from what she could tell. The rest of the camp buildings, at least the ones she had seen, had electric power, including the attached office, if it included a fax machine, but not the great room of the lodge. A propane nod to yesteryear.
She made a quick tour of the display cabinets, where she found memorabilia from the establishment of Sajo first as a fishing camp back in the late twenties. Those days were noted with some framed pictures of trophy fish being measured and weighed, and men in collarless shirts and narrow suspenders smoking languidly in rockers on the porch of the lodge. The times changed, the way times do, and interests began to collide. There were framed newspaper clippings of protests against the mining and lumbering ventures. In one, the beautiful blond, Leslie Selkirk, and a man leaning wildly off an ore crusher that had been toppled. The other protestors were crowded around them. “BIG WIND?” was the headline, and the caption read: Leslie Selkirk and Charles Cable claim big wind damaged Regent Mining equipment.
Another framed photo showed Leslie Selkirk and Charles Cable surrounded by followers on the steps of the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa. Selkirk and Cable after historic vote to halt clearcutting. A leaner Charlie Cable had an arm around her in a clinch, the other arm thrust high toward the camera, his fingers splayed in V for Victory. He looked strong through his shoulders and chest, his eyes glittering, a man whose picture was snapped at the height of his powers, the day he had everything he ever wanted. And that was even before he started writing space junk thrillers.
Ivy League Ivy deigned to pick up the office line after eight rings. “Ivy, this is Val Cameron.”
“Oh.”
“I need you to fax me another contract for Charles Cable.”
“What happened to the first one?”
She’s challenging me?
The girl was like roadwork: nobody likes it, it slows you down, it’s possibly unnecessary, and you must proceed with caution. “It was damaged in a brawl.” Let her wonder. If Peter had asked Ivy League Ivy for a new contract, she would have written one out with a nib and her own blood.
“Oh.”
Val gave her the number and asked for Peter, who apparently hadn’t arrived yet. She called his cell, and reached him at his place, where he sounded like he was dreaming, his words just an incoherent rumble. It was the first time they had spoken since the mattress histrionics of two nights ago.
“Peter, I need more time.”
He was aghast. “You didn’t get the contract signed yet?”
“No, it got destroyed in a fight.”
“A fight? Are you sure you’re in the right place?” There was a sound of splashing.
“What’s going on? Are you in the tub?” By her watch, 9:16. “Aren’t you going in today?”
“Daria’s giving me a peppermint foot bath. And then I’m going in.” In the background, Daria recited something from her own canon about words, words licking the sap of fevered treeworks, a rind of love phloem combing through—
Val felt like she was suffocating. “In pursuit of Charles Cable—and I do mean pursuit, Peter—I got knocked out—”
“Knocked out? What the hell’s going on up there?”
“Your fishing buddies appear to be having a disagreement. And by the time I—”
“So you missed Cable. Is that what you’re telling me?”
Her head started to hurt. “He’s not a train, Peter.”
“But you missed him.”
All he had heard of what she was telling him was that the contract was still blank, not that she was injured. She set a hand lightly over the right side of her face. “Unconsciousness slowed me down.”
“If I wanted a screw-up, I could have sent what’s her name, the yoga girl—”
Some things even a peppermint foot bath can’t help. “You didn’t send me, Peter. You damn near begged me.” Through the open window she could see Caroline heading her way. There was silence on the other end of the line, either while Daria Flottner got to a particularly sensitive zone on the man’s fallen arches, or Val’s boss, colleague, supersonically escaped lover was toiling through possibilities, looking for an appropriate reply.
“So what’s the plan, Val? You’re up there on the company dime.” The tone improved, but not the message. He should have toiled a little longer.
Val’s eyes felt like slits, her sight pinpointing a tree on the far shore, there at the top of the low ridge across from Selkirk Peninsula, and not a rind of love phloem anywhere around it.
“Val?”
The plan?
At thirty-four, did she really have to account for herself? Caroline Selkirk came into the office, shot Val a smile, and started rummaging through the small drawers in her rolltop desk. Val resisted the urge to hand the phone over to Caroline and let her fill Peter in herself on the feud. Instead, she realized she was speechless, without even baldheaded lunatic poetry of a
ny kind.
The silence stretched.
Peter Hathaway finally plucked an appropriate remark out of the peppermint splash in his sterile epicurean condo. “So,” he ventured, “are you—” Why was it so hard? Was he worried she could possibly mistake it for a marriage proposal? “—all right?”
Val pursed her lips tight. She could take his opening for a few moments of description—gaveled into oblivion, waking up the poster girl for a new line of cubist cosmetics—followed by something frank and sad about finding herself dropped into other people’s battles when she couldn’t even identify her own. But then the protective inner voice she had heard now for plenty of years, the one who felt like a dear friend, said don’t tell, don’t ever tell, not him, not any of them. It seemed driven by the sound of little drawers slamming—Caroline at her desk—and Val found that very practiced, lying voice no one could say wasn’t her own. “I’m fine,” she said, and quietly hung up.
Val stood staring at the utterly silent fax machine as she waited for Ivy League Ivy to do her job a thousand miles away. Caroline, pushing back a wet forelock, was boxing up some separate piles of folders, old mail, staplers, papers, rolled up maps, power cords, and coffee mugs. When one carton was full, she ran a quick line of strapping tape over the opening, then scrawled CHARLIE in thick black marker on the top. She was finally getting around to organizing this camp office, she told Val, what with all her beloved “migrant workers” moving onto their own places.
Wade Decker had called the camp office his “uptown” location while Leslie was alive, when they spent so much time here at the camp that he needed to telecommute. Peter Hathaway had holed up here with his laptop, catching up on work, a few years ago. A cottager friend of Hope Selkirk, Caroline’s mother, had a start-up cottage-decorating business while Hope was alive and she could use all the camp office equipment for free. A mining company had the run of the place for a while, when Trey was looking into leasing the mineral rights to Selkirk Peninsula.
Caroline strapped and marked another carton WADE. Over the sound of the chainsaw another noise drew closer, the steady drone of a motorboat. Caroline leaned toward the windows, squinting, then set down the tape gun. “Looks like Martin’s coming to call. Come on, Val.” She opened a locker in the corner, eyeballed Val’s feet, and pulled out an old pair of tennis shoes, and then, from behind a long jacket, a rifle.
“We’ll see what Martin wants, and then, if you like,” she shut the locker door and handed Val the shoes, “I’ll show you the scene of the crime.”
“Where…your sister died?”
“Different crime,” she said, snorting softly. “An illegal access road. I check it once a week for as long as I’m here, just to make sure work isn’t,” she made a wry face, “progressing.” Caroline detached her keyring where it was looped to her cargo pants, and from the locked bottom drawer of the locker she pulled out an ammo box.
“And the rifle?”
Caroline smiled and rippled an eyebrow. “Well,” she said, widening her eyes, “maybe work’s progressing.” The idea of bushwhacking with an armed stranger through the wilderness was making the prospect of whiling away the day waiting for Ivy League Ivy to fax a new contract look pretty appealing. “Just protection, Val,” Caroline said softly. “If I were a dangerous woman, I’d be dead,” she loaded a round, “or rich,” she loaded another round, then looked up, “or married.”
Val pushed her feet into the tennis shoes and wiggled her toes. They’d do. She laced up. While Caroline locked the ammo box and returned it to the drawer, the fax machine whined into service. Val waited for the pages, watching Caroline go through an open wire bin—“The camp Lost and Found,” she explained—and pull out a navy blue long-sleeved t-shirt, which she tossed to Val. “Here. Compliments of the house. These things hardly ever get claimed. We’ll put your own shirt in with the wash Kay’s doing today.”
When the last of the contract came through, Val stacked the pages and set them inside her briefcase. She was just about to slip out of her soiled shirt when Caroline called out, “Morning, Martin, what brings you back to the Rumble in the Jungle?” Val saw a man step up to the outside of the office window, backlit by the soft morning sun.
“Need help?” He straightened his arms against the window frame. Val sprang up the step, back into the cool and shadowy silence of the great room, where she traded tops in ten seconds flat.
“All taken care of,” Caroline announced in a high, competent way.
“Are you coming outside or shall I come in?”
A man accustomed to talking the talk on his own terms.
“Out,” Caroline called back at him, steering Val with one hand and toting the rifle with the other like an off-duty drum majorette—a little casually, considering it was loaded. So much for Caroline’s definition of dangerous.
7
They rounded the corner of the lodge, where Martin Kelleher met them, shaking Val’s hand. It would take more than high winds to move this man, whose every cell seemed crammed with confidence. Late fifties, maybe? He had the square, solid feel of a guy who used to be an amateur boxer and was still light on his feet, wearing a snug white polo shirt with a green Sierra Club logo over the breast pocket, khaki shorts, and Topsiders. Altogether a one-percenter, Northwoods-style.
“Quite a scene last night, Caroline,” he said, flattening out his mouth in the slightly disgusted way of a boss who’s just pointed out an underling’s goof and waits for an explanation. Certainly less hysterical than Peter Hathaway, who would have been filing police reports, nattering on about too much Pitta, and pouring them all some nasty dishwater tea she suspected didn’t do him half as much good as his Zoloft. But, then, she was angry.
“Was that my fault?” Her voice was light.
Martin Kelleher widened his very blue eyes. “It was everybody’s fault,” he said, folding his arms, “except yours.”
“Thank you.” Caroline stood like a Minuteman, gently working at the dirt on the path with her rifle butt. The two of them nodded at each other for a few moments while the invisible Luke ripped and growled, felling another small scraggly tree.
“You took the brunt.” He eyed Val.
“I was trying to get to Charles Cable.”
Caroline leaned into him. “Val works with Peter Hathaway.”
He scrutinized Val, nodding. “And Hathaway wants to sign him, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
Martin Kelleher crossed his arms. “Well, you would have been better off waiting outside for him, since Charlie Cable takes off at the first sign of trouble.”
Caroline seemed restless. “Oh, not the first.”
He gave her a wry look. “Actually, you’re right. He’s usually long gone before the first sign of trouble.”
“He never used to be that way. The fight went out of him. He’s the most radical of all the—the—”
“Environmental bloc?” His brow shot up.
“The most radical, and the least—”
“Visible.”
“You can still count on him, Martin.”
“If you’re a loon.”
Caroline looked out over the water, her eyes narrow. “He’d say the loons deserve the help—and people don’t.”
“So he has the loon chick project. I’ve told him the change in loon breeding is just one of the effects of pollution and habitat destruction. All the more reason he should stick around for the fight.” Martin tipped his head toward Val. “Especially now that the fight comes with punches.”
“Violence is nothing new,” Caroline said wearily. “Not for any of us, Martin.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re talking about Leslie.”
She was surprised. “No. No, I mean the graffiti, the vandalism at the boat landing near town. The sneaky things.” With a frown, she added, “Leslie surprised a robber. Or else she got in somebody’s wa
y.”
“You would think that’s hard to do in the wilderness.”
“She died in her apartment in the boathouse, Martin. Not quite wilderness enough.”
He changed the subject. “Remember, dinner tonight, our place. It’s time we get organized.” With a quick shift of his jaw, he went on to say the only way to save the lake is for the environmentalists to form a special interest group.
Caroline blinked. “To do what?”
“To raise money, to market the cause, to run for municipal office, to hire legal help—”
Caroline scratched her head. “Martin, half the cottagers are Americans, like you. You can’t run for office.”
“The other half can. And I damn well expect them to.”
Her voice dropped. “This is a bad idea. A special interest group is just going to antagonize people.”
“Well, if that’s what worries you, learn to like casinos and Sea-doos, and E. coli levels that’ll make Lake Erie stand up and salute.”
“These are good people, Martin. They won’t let the lake go down.”
He looked at her shrewdly. “Caroblind.”
A sharp intake of breath. “Where did you hear that?”
“It’s what Leslie used to call you.”
“It doesn’t mean she was correct. My big environmentalist sister Leslie is dead. I’m still here, Selkirk Peninsula is my property, and Camp Sajo is still open.”
“Caroline, wake up and smell the cesspool. Camp Sajo is water sports and wilderness fun. If kids start going home with mysterious rashes and say their night hikes took them right by some nice neon signs for high limit slots, those parents in Toronto are suddenly going to start thinking horseback riding camp in Virginia is a damn nice alternative.”
Caroline suddenly burst out laughing, then turned to Val. “This is what Martin and I do. We wrangle. We’re each other’s best whetstone, eh? We try out all our best arguments before taking them on the road.” Val thought Martin looked doubtful, but on that face, it was no more than an amused flicker. “Ask Diane what I can bring tonight,” she said, hugging him with one arm.
Practical Sins for Cold Climates Page 6