This was indeed a fair question, and gave the little thief some pause. In pencil, after she had given the matter some thought, she later wrote, She will just have to save up her allowances and buy her own Weebles. Gina the circus Weeble is far out! The possibility that the “poor kid” who got to unwrap the secondhand gift of the treehouse might never even get an allowance to begin to save up for Weebles Who Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down was never addressed in Leslie’s notebook. Nor was the possibility that the other child might have had more use out of winter gloves and a hat.
But a casual mention was scribbled a few days later: Janie came to school all red-eyed from crying saying her mother wanted to know what happened to the Weebles treehouse her Uncle Lloyd bought her, and Janie didn’t know at all and said it must have gotten lost, and her mother said her uncle was out of work and saved up for that toy, maybe she should know that before being so careless and because she could use a sense of how money doesn’t just grow on trees she wasn’t getting any allowance for two whole months. Poor Janie!! She’ll never be able to buy “We Are the World” like she wants to, and two whole months without Yipes Stripes gum or Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers is really heavy. Janie’s mom is not cool when it comes to people losing things.
Val spent the night at the Hathaway cottage, listening for noises that could portend god-awful death. Snuffling, growling, clawing, heavy footfalls, buzzing chainsaws, that sort of thing. When nothing materialized, Val realized she’d been condemned to another day in somebody else’s paradise.
Val still had no answers she could live with, and the nonstop flight to Cable’s hermit hut in the wilderness was now just hours away. She decided she’d get the contract signed and, if proof of his guilt surfaced, Fir Na Tine would just have to break it. Maybe after the signing she could talk Decker into flying her to the nearest airport, where she’d happily wait on a hard, molded plastic seat to fly standby…exactly anywhere. Anywhere south of Lake Wendaban. As the dawn crept in between the blinds, Val could press her eyes shut and smell the hot dogs and sauerkraut from the Sabrett’s truck at Columbus Circle. No more delays, no more missed opportunities.
She was that close to going home.
Downing the last of Muffy and Lana’s eggs, which she scrambled up with a handful of diced up summer sausage and what was left of a mild, unmarked cheese, she systematically went back through Trey Selkirk’s photos, rearranging, grouping, and finally lining them up in the best chronological order she could determine. When she was satisfied, she lightly numbered the backs. She debated whether to leave them behind at Peter’s when Decker came for her later, and decided against it. She wanted to stay as streamlined as possible—if Decker could get her out of Wendaban that very day, she’d have to unload the snitched photos on him to get them back to his former father-in-law’s memorabilia basket. No point in having to stop back here for anything at all.
What any of the photos told her for sure about Leslie Decker’s murder was uncertain. Maybe she and Caroline had vied for Decker when they were younger, but as recently as two years ago? Not likely. Besides, Leslie had married him. Was it possible he and Caroline had been fooling around? Had Leslie found out and threatened something terrible? As distasteful as any of those possibilities sounded to Val, they might be worthy alternatives to the frightening possibility that the bestselling author she was trying to sign may have committed murder. And what Kay Stanley’s baby with the charismatic Trey Selkirk could possibly have to do, over thirty years later, with Leslie’s murder was completely unclear. Could there be an inheritance issue? But what inheritance issue would include Leslie and not Caroline? And, if it did include Caroline, was she in danger as well? On this score, Decker himself might be a good source, if she handled it lightly. She’d try to draw him out on their flight to Cable’s.
All Val knew was that her eyes kept returning to the photo on Parliament Hill. Leslie Selkirk and Charlie Cable, victorious. But victories were fueled by personalities, it seemed to Val, and maybe there was a falling out between the two eco-warrior pals, the two firebrands. Had Charlie Cable grown tired of the fight? To hear Martin Kelleher describe it, Cable had lost the taste for the struggle, had walked away. No, had run. Had Leslie Decker badgered him until he snapped two years ago in this lonesome place?
Or was something else at work between those two?
She pushed the photos down into her briefcase for safekeeping. Then she washed her dishes and dressed for the day. At least, thanks to Kay Stanley, her own brown top was clean and dry and paired back up with her drawstring pants. She slicked on some blush and lipstick and called herself ready to meet and greet authorial dragons. Better a possibly murderous Charles Cable than a rogue black bear any day. Cable had nothing against Val, but she was pretty sure bears didn’t need a reason.
By the time the sun was high and the heat was thick, Val, barefoot, dragged an Adirondack chair down to the dock. Then she strolled back, grabbed a white tennis visor from a peg, and scanned the Hathaway bookshelf for something to read. She spotted an uncorrected page proof of Cling!, one of Fir Na Tine’s less stellar books by a shrink calling himself just Belaziel, who believed half the world’s problems came from an individual’s misguided desire for too much independence. Since she hadn’t read the book all the way through when it had come out, Val slid it off the shelf and clutched it, along with the hidden letters from Kay Stanley, and plopped herself down in the chair she had set on the dock.
But she felt unsettled and looked around. More frightening silence. More silence the likes of which, if it’s in a movie, erupts in terrifying close-up violence. But everywhere she turned in the thick heat, there was just secretive and unmoving rocky islands and forest, and secretive lake waters that rippled first in one direction and then in another. In the distance, a boat sped by, glimmering in the sun, nearly too far off to hear. Val fought a strange doziness by turning first to the uncorrected page proof of Cling!, opening it to a place held by a bookmark that turned out to be a receipt from a Husky gas station, and read a paragraph that was explaining the Civil War as a prime example of failure to cling. When she almost dozed off and felt the book slip from her hands, she startled awake, set aside the book and started again through Trey Selkirk’s set of letters from Kay.
What she knew in a distant and indifferent way as her head dropped back to the chair and her hair slid gently away from her cheeks was that she was falling asleep, and anything could happen to her there in the smothering silence. But at least she wouldn’t be awake to see it coming. Her fingers settled like claws on the stack of letters and Cling! and, as she drifted off, Val hoped it was enough to keep it all on her lap.
The thrum that woke her up was the propeller on Decker’s Cessna as it cut across the water toward the Hathaway dock. Val jumped up, fighting off how spacey she felt, aware of Decker’s grin from the cockpit as she clutched at the stuff in her lap. “I’ll be right there,” she managed to yell, making a quick stack of Kay’s letter and the Fir Na Tine book, and took off at a sluggish lope back up to the cottage. In record time, she slung the visor back on the peg, packed up her suitcase, wondered if she needed to brush her teeth but didn’t want to take the time, and stashed the roll of letters back into the kaleidoscope, which she rammed into her poor briefcase. Her eyes still half shut, she locked the door of the cottage behind her and hauled her overnight bag, briefcase, and purse down the hill, nearly stumbling on her shaky legs, and out onto the dock of a place she was certain she would never see again. Even if she and Peter Hathaway came to their respective senses and headed toward some kind of life together, she wasn’t sure Lake Wendaban would ever figure in her vacation plans.
When thoughts of Peter stalled her in her steps, right there as she couldn’t make sense of her personal and professional lives, Decker came up the dock to grab the bag. Leaning into her, he looked her over quickly and smiled. She noticed he had applied a new coat of Nosekote that was disappearing into his ruddy olive skin, a
nd he had shaved. In that moment the world felt like a fine and orderly place, and her heart lifted.
“This time you’re going to do it,” he told her. But first he had to make a stop in town to pick up Charlie Cable’s canoe that had been left for Kevlar repairs at Lakeland Canoe Company. They’d lash it to the floats and fly it back to Charlie.
She shook the last of the sleep from her brain, climbed into the Cessna, and slid a look at the pilot. How long would she have to wait before she could tell him about Kay Stanley and Trey Selkirk? How long before she could ask him just how likely it seemed to him that the man they were flying to see had killed Leslie, his wife?
13
Half an hour into the flight they changed course, heading northeast, and she saw the weather change. What was clear and easy dropped away, and stringy white clouds dashed at the windshield, twisting away into the reduced light all around them.
She could feel Decker’s body tense, which didn’t do her own a whole lot of good, and they flew on for another ten minutes. “Sometimes it’s just a patch,” he said softly, only this time it wasn’t. Breathing felt experimental, and all she had left was fear when she realized fog has a smell because now it was inside the cabin, and she could no longer see the islands or the sky.
As he took them down to six thousand feet, she kept her mouth shut and waited to slam into the side of a pine-covered island. “I’m landing.” As black water approached, Val gripped the sides of her seat and wondered whether anybody back in the office would water her ficus. Decker set the plane down and they sputtered slowly along, the fog rolling over them.
She covered her face with her hands, pressing back tears. “Where are we?”
Decker took the map from her, refolded it open to a different place, and looked silently out the window for about five minutes. He stared at the water, at the nearness of either shore when the fog moved aside, and then twisted around to look at what was behind them. “I think we’re here,” he said, pointing to a place on the map that meant nothing to her. “But I’m not entirely sure.” He hit the map with the backs of his fingers. “If I’m right, then I did this as a canoe trip maybe eight years ago.” He looked straight ahead. “Here are the choices. I’ve got a backpacking tent in the back and two days’ worth of emergency supplies.”
She turned to face him. “How far are we from Cable’s?”
Decker gave her a frank look. When he said, “A two days’ paddle,” Val shielded her eyes with her hand. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “Or,” he said reasonably, “we can head for home.”
“How far?” Anything less than two days was a winner.
“I’d say four days.”
Why did all the choices seem to be no better than waste your time or work your ass off? No, waste your time in a scary place or work your ass off in a scary place? In that moment Val knew there was absolutely nothing Peter Hathaway could do to make this week up to her.
“We could stay put for an hour,” Decker suggested. “Maybe the weather will break.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we’re an hour closer to nightfall—”
“And no closer either to Charlie Cable—”
“Or home.” Decker went on: “Your call.”
Wasting time had no appeal.
“Won’t somebody come looking for us?” Val asked with a little surge of spirit.
“Who? Even Charlie Cable doesn’t know exactly when we’re coming.”
Charlie Cable. The loon chick man. She didn’t care if his new book left Jeffrey Archer in the dust, right now all she knew was that she was risking her life in this godforsaken place for ten minutes with the loon chick man. Her happiness depended on so little, really, and none of it had anything to do with being lost in the fog in the near dark in the Canadian wilderness, with black bears the size of pickup trucks waiting to hook her out of the tent.
Val sat up straight and stared out into the enveloping whiteness. “I say we go find the loon chick man.” She sounded to herself like an announcer for The End of Days.
“All right,” he responded with the sort of brisk bonhomie she hated in a man.
The wind and waves were rocking the helpless plane while Decker dug around in a box in the rear. Val watched dispassionately as he pulled out a flashlight, a length of rope, a First Aid kit, a stiff pair of tennis shoes, a pair of old khakis, two cans of SpaghettiOs, three boxes of kitchen matches…and a worn copy of Kama Sutra.
She held it up. “What every well-stocked emergency kit should have.”
“Hey,” he said with a tight grin, “we’ve got to pass the time somehow.”
“Just get us the hell out of here.” She turned away.
Decker clapped a hand on the top of her head like he was unscrewing a pickle jar and turned her to face him. “Listen to me. Nothing bad is going to happen to you out there.”
For a moment they looked at each other and she very nearly believed him. “I’m sorry.”
Decker said nothing, just unhooked the clips of the dry bag and unrolled the top. “Why would you agree to some silly errand in a place where everything terrifies you?” He stuffed in her briefcase, a roll of toilet paper, a thin bath towel, and what looked like a travel kit.
“You’re about to tell me, aren’t you?”
His eyes flashed. “You’re afraid of either losing your job—” he threw in a handful of crumpled packets of Cup o’ Soup and a crushed box of kitchen matches, “or—” he gritted his teeth, “—your boss.”
Val’s breath caught in her throat. “Well, with insight like that,” she said, before she could stop herself, “you must know what happened to your wife.”
He gave her a long look, then turned back to the dry bag. He muttered something that sounded like, “My wife happened to my wife,” then rolled the top down once, squeezed out trapped air, and rolled it back down all the way. After checking the map, Decker sputtered the plane slowly along the water until he found a decrepit dock on Val’s side of the plane. “It’s the best we’re going to find,” he said.
Val slid out of the plane onto the pontoon, holding onto a wing strut, and flung herself at the dock. Decker killed the engine, and when the props sliced to a stop, Val grabbed the nose rope and held on. He climbed down beside her long enough to secure the plane to the dock, and she saw he had changed into the old khakis and tennis shoes. Then he pulled himself back inside and wordlessly handed down the dry bag, a blue nylon tent bag, a small black leather day pack, the two paddles, and a rucksack stenciled with RCAF. She set each of them down on the strongest part of the dock and went back to help.
Decker locked up, inched his way to the back of the pontoon, straddled it, and began to untie the canoe. Cold and scared, Val crouched on the dock and watched him in the failing light, because it sure beat the hell out of staring into the forest. A ripple of wind snapped the back of Decker’s shirt and his hair flopped forward as he half stood, bearing the weight of the canoe as he eased it slowly down to the water. “Can you bring it around?”
She clambered over the rotten wood to the far side of the dock and laid herself out flat. Grabbing for a half-submerged cedar that had fallen over from the rocky shore, she cracked off a skinny branch sticking up out of the water to use as a tool to bring the canoe around. But as it started to fall out of her hand, she clutched it harder, ramming splinters the size of toothpicks into her palm. On the whole, pain was a damn sight better than fear.
As she shifted her weight to get better control for one long, last pull, her right leg stumped through a rotten board, and the blast of frigid lake water numbed her all the way to the hip. She swallowed her shriek. “I think I’m caught on something.”
Decker grabbed her from behind in a hold that would have been swell if she’d been either amorous or choking and freed her in a single tug. Then he flung the branch into the lake and managed to pull the canoe ove
r to the dock. Swaying, Val steadied herself, looking balefully at her pants leg that hung open in a torn flap, a thin line of blood trailing down her calf.
Kneeling, Decker tied up the line, turned, and looked up at her. “Let’s see.” She gave him her left hand, palm up. He took it in his hand and raised his eyebrows. The canoe thunked softly against the pilings as she lowered herself beside him on the boards. He pulled a penknife out of his pocket, flicked it open, and set to work with the blade, gingerly picking at the splinters.
Val felt Decker’s breath on the skin of her hand.
The only source of heat.
When the bags were loaded, Val lowered herself into the bow, running her hand over the blood caked on her sore leg. Grabbing the paddle he held out to her, she felt Decker get into the stern and settle himself, sending the canoe into a rough couple of tips that made her clutch the sides. Shuddering so hard it must have looked like a seizure, she turned to see what he was doing.
He held the Tiparillo between his teeth, flicked a lighter and touched it to the end of the cigar, sheltered by his cupped hands. As he sucked in smoke, he looked at her and slipped the lighter back into his pocket.
Then they set off.
The fog brought everything unknown closer to her. Including Decker. It felt like what she imagined madness to be, a warm, wet shapelessness that prickles the skin, enters the nostrils, and comes between whatever goes on in the skull—and what really is. They glided through the dark, their paddles scraping the hull in some sloppy human way they couldn’t help.
Val had just run them up on a barely submerged boulder she told herself she had no way of seeing, listening to the long damn scrape measure every inch of her mistake, and sat there defeated, her paddle loose in her hand.
Decker eased them off the boulder without a word and gracefully nosed the canoe ahead. Squaring her shoulders, she pitched in, paddling like a doomed galley slave. He started humming in time with each stroke, then sang out how near, far, wherever we are, I believe that the heart does go on. She was too tired even to roll her eyes.
Practical Sins for Cold Climates Page 12