Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Oh,’ Michael said, mildly embarrassed. ‘I thought because of your last name—’

  ‘I am exactly one-sixteenth Irish. But because of the name, everybody assumes I like potatoes and go to mass.’

  ‘You live in Muskegon now?’ he asked, imagining life for a snappy young policeman. A condo, probably, in a singles complex, where Maguire could lie back in summer on a lounge chair by the communal swimming pool and pick off the poolside beauties one by one. Actually, he’d say with disarming modesty, I’m a detective.

  ‘No,’ said Maguire. ‘I own a small holding in New Era with my sister. She raises horses and has a riding school. I’m in charge of the peach trees.’

  ‘How did you get to Michigan in the first place?’

  ‘A girl from Newaygo.’

  ‘Sounds like a song.’

  ‘A sad song,’ said Maguire and smiled ruefully. ‘She dumped me three weeks after I got here.’

  There was something likeable about that, and perhaps that was the point, for now, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, Maguire returned to business. ‘Did your brother use the bat too?’

  ‘I’d be surprised. He never played ball,’ said Michael, wishing they could talk about peaches instead. ‘Is he really still a suspect in this?’

  ‘Officially, yes. But I don’t think he killed your father. I never have. He might know the person who did. Without knowing that he knows, if you catch my drift.’

  ‘Is this the Michigan Marines we’re talking about again?’

  Maguire nodded and finished his beer.

  ‘And just how is Gary involved?’

  ‘He knows a lot of the members, hangs out with them. That’s established. And he’s been to meetings.’

  ‘I saw some of his friends.’ He described the three watching television, adding, ‘and there was a big guy. Looked like a biker.’

  ‘Bubba.’

  ‘That’s right. Real charmer.’

  Maguire didn’t respond to this. He held out his empty beer can and slowly crumpled it in his hand. ‘I don’t know. For a while, I thought maybe this was some sort of racist murder, because of the swastika. But nobody thought your father was a Jew, maybe because he wasn’t.’ Maguire smiled.

  ‘Why couldn’t it have been some nutcase? That seems to me to make as much sense as any other theory.’

  Maguire shook his head. ‘It was too carefully planned. Things like taking his shoes off.’

  ‘Someone with a grudge, then?’

  ‘That’s more probable, though everything we’ve learned about your father makes it seem very unlikely it was just a personal thing, like an ex-student convinced his life had been ruined by your dad. He just wasn’t like that, was he?’ When Michael nodded reluctantly, Maguire said, ‘So then I started to think maybe it was a political thing. Even if your father didn’t seem to have any politics.’

  ‘If anything he was conservative.’

  Maguire nodded. ‘Exactly. And it seems your father went to a Marines meeting or two.’

  Michael was astonished. He pinched his lower lip between his fingers and sat shaking his head.

  Maguire explained. ‘They have events sometimes. It’s usually a barbecue – something with food because it helps get the crowd. You know, five bucks and all the chicken you can eat. Then somebody speaks.’

  ‘Who was speaking?’ Perhaps this had been the draw for his father – a historian speaking, perhaps, or a scholar of Native American culture. But at a Marines meeting?

  Maguire shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t know anything more than I told you.’

  ‘Well, who told you?’

  Maguire looked at him coolly and said nothing. Oh, thought Michael, feeling slow on the uptake, an informer told you. ‘You have ways of making them talk, eh?’

  Maguire grimaced impatiently and said, ‘So that’s where your brother comes in. You see, we’ve almost had enough to put the local leader of the Marines away on two occasions.’

  ‘That’s Raleigh Somerset?’

  ‘That’s right. Once downstate—’

  ‘I heard about the Grand Jury.’

  ‘You are well informed. And once up here. We searched his place and found several sticks of dynamite. That’s a federal offence.’

  ‘Dynamite? That sounds pretty retro.’

  ‘Retro?’

  Michael wondered if he’d used an Anglicism – too much time in Ealing. ‘Old-fashioned. I thought fertilizer was all you needed.’

  ‘A single-shot rifle’s old-fashioned too, but it works. And so does dynamite.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We couldn’t prove the link with Raleigh. We didn’t find it in his house but in a corner of the property. The DA said that wasn’t good enough.’

  ‘So what about my brother?’ he asked a little fearfully.

  Maguire shrugged but it seemed a disingenuous gesture, almost coy. ‘You better ask him.’

  ‘But why would the killer put the bat back, if it is the weapon?’

  ‘Hard to say. But I’d bet you the earth that whoever killed your father won’t have left prints on the bat.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning they put the bat back for some other reason. I haven’t figured out yet. But it means the murderer is still around, or at least wasn’t just quickly passing through.’ Maguire looked at the back door behind Michael. ‘You lock up here at night?’

  ‘I do now.’

  ‘You got a gun here?’

  ‘My father’s shotgun.’

  ‘Know how to use it?’

  ‘It’s not exactly rocket science.’ He remembered being taught – you can swing with the bird until you cover it or you can lead it. Either way will work. Which was true – he was a competent shot, except when he tried both methods at the same time. ‘Should I be preparing to shoot someone?’

  Maguire was back in professional mode and didn’t smile. ‘I think you should be careful. After you left last time one of your neighbours called in to say she thought she’d seen a light on in the house here – at three in the morning. We checked with Gary and he said he hadn’t been here then. Who knows? But best to take care, okay?’

  ‘Who was the neighbour?’ Michael asked, with more curiosity than apprehension. He had spent so much of his youth feeling scared that he seemed incapable of being very frightened now – the reserves of fear in his emotional batteries had been so drawn down over time that they could no longer supply much of a charge.

  ‘That was the funny thing. The call was anonymous. But it was a woman’s voice.’ He stood up now. ‘Anyway, thanks for the beer. We’ll check that it is blood on the bat first – not much point doing anything if it’s just some paint. If it is blood then I reckon we can assume it’s your father’s. We’ll do the DNA tests to make sure, but they take time, up to thirty days. In the meantime we’ll check for prints and run them through the database.’

  For once Gary answered the phone and, seeming to appreciate the urgency in Michael’s voice, he came over right away. When Michael told him about his discovery of the baseball bat, Gary immediately grew agitated.

  ‘Where is it now?’ They were sitting in the living room, slouched in the two armchairs like caricatures of their parents. All that was missing, thought Michael, were two small boys playing on the Mojave rug on the floor in front of them.

  He said, ‘Maguire took it away. They’re going to check for prints.’

  Gary shook his head. ‘Oh shit.’ He rubbed his eyes with both hands.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘What if they find my prints on the bat?’

  ‘What if they do? Doesn’t prove a thing. The point is whether there’re any other prints on it.’

  ‘That’s what you say, but what if there aren’t? What happens then? Shit,’ he said again, only louder. ‘I haven’t seen that bat for years. You were the baseball player.’

  ‘Calm down, Gary.’

  ‘But how could they miss it? Didn’t they search th
e place?’

  ‘They didn’t miss it, Gary. That’s the whole point. It wasn’t there when you found Pop. Somebody’s put it back there.’

  ‘Somebody?’ Gary’s jaw went slack and his eyes widened. ‘You mean . . .?’

  His brother looked so pale and scared that Michael tried to reassure him. ‘Who knows? It’s another mystery. Let Maguire try and sort it out. They’re not even sure it’s the murder weapon.’

  ‘The way you describe it it’s gotta be. But why would they put it back? What good does that do them?’

  Them? ‘Let’s wait and see what the forensics people find.’

  ‘Great. We’ll wait while this murderer makes fools of the cops and picks us off one by one.’

  ‘If you’re that worried, you can come stay here. Get out of that dump while we figure out what to do.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The house. You know, do I sell it, do I rent it? Or do you live here?’

  ‘You’re talking about the house when there’s somebody out there, maybe gunning for me.’

  ‘The way I look at it, if he wanted you, he’d have already killed you, too.’ He took a deep breath. ‘So tell me about the Marines. And no bullshit.’

  Gary distanced himself at once. ‘It was never a big thing,’ he said. ‘I went to some of their barbecues. Shit, you know me Michael, I’d listen to anybody for free beer.’

  ‘What about those guys the other day? Are they Marine members?’

  Gary shrugged. ‘Not any more, same as me. Bubba was the most involved. But even he got tired of the politics.’

  ‘I thought the whole point of it was politics. “Freedom! Keep the government off our backs.” That kind of thing.’

  ‘There’s more to life than politics,’ said Gary with a loftiness Michael found infuriating.

  ‘Maguire said that you took Pop to one of these meetings. Is that right?’

  ‘No. He went on his own. Maybe he was interested.’

  This seemed improbable. ‘Oh, and was he?’

  ‘He got into an argument with Raleigh. Said he’d always been plumb stupid in high school and he was disappointed to see how little had changed. Something complimentary like that.’

  ‘Why did Pop get involved? He didn’t care about politics.’

  ‘Says you. How do you know what Pop cared about? You haven’t been here. You don’t know what it’s like. People are fed up.’

  ‘Not here in town they’re not. I’ve never seen so much money around. And this wasn’t exactly the local Rotarians, meeting to bitch about property tax. These people are extremists. Raleigh Somerset had dynamite on his land, for Christ’s sake. He’s lucky he’s not in jail.’

  Gary was startled. ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘Why? Is it meant to be a secret? Maguire acted like you knew all about it.’ You better ask him.

  Gary stared at him with an expression of mixed amazement and fear. Then the phone rang.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ said Michael, moving quickly towards the kitchen to answer it.

  It was Larry Bottel, asking to come round and visit, a prelude presumably to engaging Larry to sell the house for him. He put him off and started to go back to the living room when the phone rang again. What had Larry forgotten to say? But this time it was Nancy Sheringham, welcoming him back and inviting him to a barbecue the following week. ‘And could you give somebody else a lift?’

  ‘Sure, Nancy.’

  ‘She’s got kids, but you’ve got room, don’t you?’

  ‘Who is it?’

  Nancy gave her apple-crunching laugh. ‘You know who it is. See you Thursday.’

  He walked back through the dining room. ‘Sorry about that,’ he proclaimed to an empty living room. Where had Gary gone? He went to the bottom of the stairs and called up. Nothing. Then he realized the front door was open. For the second time in twenty years, somebody had used it. Gary had run away.

  5

  ‘WATER’S HIGH,’ HE said, as he waded out towards the Junction bridge’s central pier, trying not to slip on the river’s gravel bottom and to keep the swirling water from tipping in over the top of his waders. They were Donny’s and too big for him, but he was grateful for the extra inch or so of latex that separated him from the heavy, icy flow. He’d first put on his father’s, fetched from the basement, but they were full of holes that cracked and widened even as he tried them on.

  They’d gone by Gary’s house on the way out of town at Michael’s request. His car wasn’t there and a folded note was pinned to the front door. Bubba, it said, and Michael was worried enough about his brother to feel no compunction about reading the note. Something’s come up and I’m out of here for a while. I’ll call you. G.

  Where would his brother have gone? And was it fear driving him away? He couldn’t gauge the tone of the message for Bubba. He walked around the side of the house until he came to his brother’s bedroom window. The blind was down most of the way, but by getting on his knees and shading his eyes from the sun with his hand, he could see into the room. The bed was made and the room was tidy – surprisingly tidy.

  He got back in the truck with the note in his pocket. ‘Not there then?’ said Donny as they drove past the wireworks, past the old sewage swamp and onto the highway leading out of town.

  Michael shook his head. ‘You know this guy called Bubba?’ Donny gave a wry smile. ‘Who is he?’

  They moved through the avenue of poplars at the town’s edge, then followed the sharp curve of road down towards Stillriver Lake. ‘You remember those dances at Custer we used to go to? And how sometimes some bikers would show up, kind of stray Hell’s Angels with nothing better to do than pick a fight at the dance hall?’

  ‘I remember.’ And Tina, the Mexican girl in the back seat of a car when he’d been all of fifteen years old. Later, he and Cassie had only gone once, partly because Cassie could rarely go out on Saturday night, thanks to her father, and partly because on their one visit she had hated the place.

  ‘Well, Bubba’s one of those strays, only younger than the guys we used to avoid. Kind of a cross between the hippies and the rednecks.’

  ‘And weird?’

  ‘Little bit, I guess.’

  ‘Sexually weird?’ asked Michael. It seemed strange using the word.

  ‘I guess. Or so they say.’ He looked awkward. ‘Shit, Michael, times have changed. Nothing’s meant to be weird any more.’

  They were coming to the bridge and Donny pointed to the scaffolding on the upstream side. ‘See, we’ve started. Let’s get to Fennville quick and come back here. I’ll be interested in what you think.’

  They took the back road to Fennville, eight miles away, rather than the interstate. They passed a new charter school, set in a large clearing carved out of the woods. The woods gave way to farmland, and he saw the small stand where his father had always bought plums and you left your money in a lunch-box. Then meadowland before the road curved and moved down to the north branch of the Still river. As they took the bend Michael said, ‘They took the tree down.’

  Donny grunted. ‘They should have done it years ago.’ It was an enormous oak that served as a marker for the sharp curve of road. One night in the summer of their senior year Ricky Fell failed to take the curve and drove straight into the tree at ninety miles an hour, instantly killing himself and a girl from North Beach.

  ‘I saw Mrs Fell at the parade. I hear the Doctor’s retired.’

  ‘Yep. Spends most of his time hunting now. I don’t think they ever got over it.’

  They drove in silence for a while, Michael thinking about Ricky Fell. Suddenly Donny piped up: ‘I shot a deer with that rifle,’ – Ricky’s most famous pick-up line – and they both laughed.

  As they dipped down through Happy Valley Michael saw the sign for Fennville Acres, and the small road to the left that led to it, the county poorhouse. He would go see Ethel and Daisy, he decided, take them a couple of presents, but only if Cassie would go with him. Maybe N
ancy could look after the kids; he’d try to arrange it when he went to Sheringham’s next week.

  Donny drove into Fennville, passing the cemetery. The town sat over ten miles from Lake Michigan, hot and dusty, and few tourists ever came there. It survived, if not exactly prospered, because it was the county seat, holding the courthouse, jail and sheriff’s headquarters, all housed in a new low building of yellow brick. Formerly the jail had been next door, a four-storey edifice of dark granite, the tallest building in the county if you didn’t count silos and water towers. When they’d had occasion to come to Fennville, his father would have Michael’s mother drive by the jail so that Michael and Gary could wave to the prisoners staring out through the upper storeys’ barred windows. His father had loved Fennville, the essential Midwest mustiness of the place.

  Parking by the dime store, Donny went off to the bakery to buy sweet rolls while Michael walked to Cameron’s, the sporting goods, gun and hardware store. Inside it was busy with a Saturday morning traffic of farmers and fishermen. The counter and walls were plastered with pro-gun posters and stickers, and there was an NRA-sponsored petition on the counter. Michael bought a resident’s trout licence from a boy who looked to be Cameron’s son (the same dimple in his chin) then moved to the hardware section, where he found a thin enough chisel, some high-tensile wire and a small, light hammer. There was a sale on inflatable wading pools, and he bought a loud blue one – he’d promised Jack he would, after they found the one in the basement was as full of holes as his father’s waders.

  When he got back to the truck Donny laughed at the pool tucked under his arm. ‘You hoping to float round the bridge?’

  ‘It’s for the house.’

  ‘Cassie’s kids?’

  He nodded. ‘Good,’ said Donny, the first time he’d indicated he knew they were seeing each other. ‘Let’s go by the lake. I want to show you something.’

  They drove the other way out of town, past the old gravel yard and into a small park on the far shore of Fennville Lake. The land was owned by the town and there were picnic tables scattered through some second-growth woods around a central group of brick and iron barbecues. A track wound its way through the park and they followed it, catching glimpses through the trees of the water down below them. They came to a high chain fence with a padlocked gate.