Even those lessons in the basement—which the TV people had fixated on and manipulated to make his father even more of a monster, this man who would ruin a child with violence—they’d been the products of love. His father had seen a different world than most, a world of constant violence. He was preparing his son to go into it, that was all. Saw no other way to raise him than to make him ready for the worst.
“Welcome back.”
The voice came from just over his shoulder. Frank’s only thought as he whirled to face the speaker was that the man had approached in total silence. It was that realization almost more than the voice that allowed him to place his visitor.
“Uncle Ezra?”
A child’s nickname, but it was the first thing that entered his mind. The man stepped closer, out of the darkness, and offered his hand.
“Good to see you, Frank.”
Frank got to his feet and accepted the handshake. He was taller than Ezra by several inches, and though he had been since he was in his teens, it still surprised him. The man was bigger in his memory, and quiet and capable, with a habit of sliding out observations that would be the envy of any late-night comedian, delivered in the same slow, soft voice, the jokes usually coming and going before anyone realized what had been said and got to laughing.
“You given up on motorized travel?” Frank said, waving a hand at the dark woods from which Ezra had emerged. Hell of a way to make an appearance.
“Nice night for a walk.”
Anyone else would have started with the questions then: When had he arrived, why didn’t he call to say he was coming, how long would he be staying? Ezra offered none of them, though, just settled onto a stump beside Frank and said, “Cabin was in good shape.” A statement of fact, but one he wanted Frank to acknowledge.
“Of course,” Frank said, and he sat, too.
“You intending to let this fire go out?”
It was close to going out, though Frank hadn’t noticed that as he’d sat alone with his beer and his memories.
“Uh, no. I just—”
Ezra knelt beside the fire pit and adjusted the wood, fed a few fresh logs into the pile. The flames licked at the fuel and grew, the glow lighting Ezra until he stepped back, satisfied, and returned to his stump. Frank was staring into the fire, but Ezra sat sideways, so his eyes were never directly on the flames. Frank had asked his father about that once years ago. He doesn’t face the fire because he wants to keep his night vision, his dad had said. It’s an old habit, buddy. One that lingers.
“Boat’s in the shed,” Ezra said, “but I took the motor off and put it in the cabin.”
“I saw that.”
“Figured the shed might make an easier target if somebody wanted to break in. But I come around enough that most people know better.”
“Yeah. I appreciate that.”
“Hell,” Ezra said, poking at the fire with his boot. It got quiet after that, just the fire popping and hissing and the trees creaking in a steady wind. There’d been loons when Frank was a kid, lots of them, but tonight he had yet to hear one of those haunting calls. He’d been up in the summer on every trip but one. That year, they came in the dead of winter for a weekend of ice fishing. Frank had been prepared for a long, cold tramp over the ice to a small hole you sat beside on an overturned bucket or a stool. Instead, Ezra had driven them out onto the lake in a half-ton pickup truck, driven right across the frozen water without any hesitation. Frank, sitting between the two men, the gearshift banging against his knees, had been sure that the ice would break somewhere out in the middle of the lake, swallow them up, Frank finishing his run as a twelve-year-old blue corpse. The ice had held, though, and Ezra’s fishing shanty was small but warm. They’d pulled northern and bluegill out of the ice, and his father and Ezra had told stories while sipping bourbon-laced coffee.
“I got your message,” Frank said. A fast tremor was working in his chest, just the thought of Devin out there on the island enough to build the anger.
“That seems to have been a mistake.”
It was silent, and then Frank said, “What kind of mistake?”
“He’s not here,” Ezra said.
“Devin.”
“Anybody else you’d be asking about? Yes, Devin. He’s not up here, Frank.”
“But somebody is?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Ezra hesitated, then shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s a man and a woman and they’re both strangers to me. Might be Devin’s renting the place.”
Frank felt that tremor fade away, something—was it disappointment?—taking the anger’s place. It was crazy to be disappointed, though. Crazy. Because if he’d wanted Devin up here, then what, exactly, had he been hoping for? There was an answer to that one, and he didn’t want to dwell on it. Couldn’t let it into his mind for even a minute. Grady had told him that many times.
“It’s good to see you,” Frank said, and though he’d spoken mostly to fill the silence and take his mind away from Devin, the words were true.
“You ain’t kidding, son. Been a long time.”
“Going to be tough,” Frank said. “Being up here.”
Ezra didn’t look at him. “I would imagine so.”
Frank, who just moments earlier had been so grateful that Ezra wasn’t talking about his father, suddenly wanted to. What the hell did you say, though?
“Good memories, up here,” he offered. “Less so in other places. But up here, mostly good.”
“He wasn’t a bad man, son. Wasn’t a perfect one, either, but he damn sure wasn’t the way they made him out to be.”
“Tell that to the families of the people he killed,” Frank said, and he was surprised by the weariness in his own voice, the aged sound.
He finally heard a loon then. It cut loose from somewhere across the lake, the sound unlike anything else, riding the wind across the water to their campfire. He thought maybe they were both grateful for it. Something to listen to, something to stop a conversation that was going nowhere good.
“Like I said, I’m glad to see you, Ezra. Don’t want to make you have conversations like that. I’m sorry.”
“No need to be,” Ezra said. “And I think you do want to. Be surprised if you didn’t, at least.”
Frank didn’t respond to that. He was stuck in a memory, another night around another fire with his father and Ezra. He’d been fifteen at the time, and his father decided to show off some of the tricks he’d worked so hard to teach his son, show off those unholy fast hands. Watch this, he’d said to Ezra, watch how damn quick he is. They’d gone through the usual routine, his father with the gun and Frank trying to take it, or maybe the other way around. He didn’t remember the details of that night’s game anymore, just remembered that when Ezra had said, Yeah, you’re real fast, kid, his voice was sad and he wouldn’t look at either of them.
“I thought it was a bad idea, calling you,” Ezra said. “I’d promised to do it, but I still thought it was a bad idea.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why did you come up, Frank?”
He didn’t answer. Ezra looked at him for a long time and then nodded as if the question had been answered.
“We agreed to let it go,” he said. “A lot of years ago, we agreed to let it go.”
They had agreed to some other things, too. Like the fact that the Willow was sacred ground, and that Devin—who’d betrayed two generations of loyalty and friendship that were anchored in this spot—should never be allowed to return to it. They wouldn’t pursue him, would let him sit down there in Florida for as many years as he could last, but they also wouldn’t tolerate him returning to this place. Not unchallenged, at least.
“That’s really what you want to do?” Frank said. “Let him come up here and sit in the cabin, have a nice little vacation, enjoy himself? He brought my dad into it, Ezra, used a lot of bullshit about
loyalty to set the hook, and then he turned around and gave him up to buy himself immunity.”
“You think I’ve forgotten? I’m just wondering about your intentions.”
“I’d like to ask him some questions,” Frank said.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all,” Frank said, but he was thinking of the guns inside the cabin, beautiful, well-engineered pieces of equipment that had not been built to ask questions.
“Where’d you come from, anyhow?” Ezra asked, and Frank returned to the moment. “Postmarks on those letters bounced around a bit over the years.”
“I was in Indiana.”
“Working?”
“Taking classes.”
“What sort?”
“Writing. Had ideas about a book, but maybe a screenplay would be better.”
“I think that’s just fine,” Ezra said, and he seemed legitimately pleased. “You were a storyteller even as a kid. I remember that.”
“I just remember listening to the stories.”
“Well, sure, back then we had a good many more to tell than you. But I remember you had a way with it. Tell a story about a bike wreck and make it sound more exciting than anything I had to offer about a battle or a bear hunt.”
Frank laughed. Storytelling had been a big part of those trips, and eliciting any positive response from Ezra, a smile or a nod or one of those low, soft laughs, had been a serious reward.
“How long of a drive is it?” Ezra said. “Up from Indiana?”
“Took about ten hours.”
“Good trip, I take it?”
“Those hours I mentioned, that’s driving time. I left out a few hours of fun that started because I had a car wreck with someone I thought was Devin. He wasn’t Devin, but based on the guys who came after him, he’s not exactly peaceful, either.”
Ezra turned almost fully toward the fire and lifted his eyebrows in a way Frank had seen a thousand times before, usually in response to something his father remembered that contradicted Ezra’s memory.
“You want to provide a bit more detail on that?” Ezra said.
Frank provided the detail. Ezra listened quietly, shaking his head from time to time or making a quiet murmur of appreciation, but not speaking.
“Hell of a welcome back to town,” he said.
“No kidding.”
“I know Nora Stafford. Knew her father better, of course, but she’s a good girl. You sure she’s all right?”
“Other than the scare. I’d be surprised if the car she loaned out is ever returned to her, though.”
The half of Ezra’s face lit by the firelight went hard, his jaw shifting and eyes narrowing, and then he turned away and was entirely in the darkness.
“What kind of car you say that was?”
“It was a Mitsubishi SUV. Probably twenty years old. Little box of a thing. Blue paint, lots of rust.”
“Plate number six-five-three-E-four-two,” Ezra said, and Frank sat forward on the stump and stared at the older man.
“I don’t know if that’s the number. But you do. Want to explain that?”
Ezra sat quietly for a long time, as if there were a decision to be made and he wouldn’t be rushed toward it. At last he got to his feet.
“Let’s you and I take a drive.”
They walked back up the gravel road and then out to the Willow Wood Lodge without Ezra volunteering a word, no hint where they were headed. Got into Ezra’s truck and drove north, went across the dam and took Cedar Falls Road. Then it was left onto an uneven dirt road through the trees, Ezra taking it slow. He stopped the truck in the middle of the road, turned the lights off, and cut the motor.
“Now we walk.”
For ten minutes, they walked without speaking, the only sounds those of breathing and sticks breaking underfoot. As they pushed up a slope covered in pine needles, one of the loons called again, and the sound seemed less magical than before. Chilling, now. A note of warning.
They went up the hill and back into the trees, and then a dark shape showed itself. Ezra knelt and flicked a cigarette lighter to life. The glow caught a rusted blue bumper and a Wisconsin license plate. Nora Stafford’s car.
“How’d you find this?”
“Saw him pull it in this afternoon while I was on the lake.”
“So he dumped it here,” Frank said. “Left it in the woods and had somebody come get him.”
Ezra shook his head, then extinguished the lighter. When he spoke again, his voice floated out of the blackness.
“Got in a boat and went out to the island.”
Frank’s eyes had been stunned by the brief light, and he blinked hard and searched for Ezra’s face in the darkness.
“Devin’s island.”
“Yes.”
“You told me he wasn’t—”
“He’s not here, Frank. I don’t know who these people are, but Devin is not here.”
Good, Frank thought, turning back to look out across the dark water toward an island he couldn’t see. Because if he were, I’d take that lighter from your hand and swim out to that cabin, set the place on fire and watch it burn and make sure he went with it. I’d watch it burn and savor every minute, Ezra. Make my father look like a preacher.
“But they’re connected to him,” he said. “That explains the guns.”
“I expect so.”
“So where’s Devin?”
No response.
“I knew it was him,” Frank said, speaking to himself as much as to Ezra. “Saw that damn Florida license plate, and between that and the message you’d left, I knew it was him, that he’d come back. I wasn’t wrong by much. Not by much.”
It was quiet for a while, Frank’s mind filled with things like ghosts and legacies and the sort of fate he had long wondered if he could avoid. The answer was here, a rusted-out car hidden among the trees.
“I think,” he said softly, “that I’d better call Nora Stafford. If this guy’s staying in Devin Matteson’s cabin, he and everyone around him are a hell of a lot more dangerous than I thought originally.”
12
__________
It was long past visiting hours, but they let her in anyhow. Nora was well known by now at the Northwoods Nursing Center. The woman who staffed the front desk gave her a disapproving look but didn’t ask questions or attempt to stop her, just offered a single curt nod, and then Nora turned the corner and walked to her father’s room.
“Dad?” She spoke as she opened the door and stepped inside, and Bud Stafford twisted his head to see her, a smile crossing his face. It was this moment that broke her heart—that immediate smile. He was always so damn glad to see her. Other patients in the center weren’t able to recognize their loved ones. With Bud it was just the opposite; he couldn’t follow conversation well, couldn’t process simple details, but he absolutely recognized his daughter. Somehow, on a night like this, that made it harder.
“How you doing?” She leaned over and kissed his forehead. He struggled with the covers, made it clear he was trying to sit up, and she helped him get upright before sitting in the chair beside the bed.
Nora had heard the phrase wasting away a million times in her life, never stopped to give it any real thought until her father’s stroke. That was exactly what was happening, though. He just . . . faded. The strength had gone first, then the size, leaving a frail man where a powerful one had existed.
“Hello.” The single-word greeting came a full minute after she’d come into the room. It took his brain that long to catch up to the events, then search for the proper reaction to them. When you kept the conversation slow and simple, he could develop a bit of a rhythm, and the sense of truly communicating with him was better. Get too much going on at once, though, or going too fast, and he became helplessly lost, often resorting to repeating the same word or phrase over and over. It reminded Nora of the ancient computer she’d used in college. You’d ask the thing to run new software and get nothing but that silly hourglass symbol, a
promise that it was processing, but you knew it would never yield results.
“Hello,” she said. She thought it was important to always go back and match his place in the conversation, make him feel less overwhelmed by it. “What was dinner?”
“Yes.” He smiled at her again.
She waited for a few seconds and saw there would be no response tonight. Sometimes he followed the questions, the simple ones at least. More often he did not. The stroke had affected his cognitive and motor skills. On the right day, he could move around just fine, albeit a little slowly. The problem was, you never knew when the right day would be, or the wrong day. His balance could be fine for a while and then completely disappear. He’d be crossing a room under his own power and then suddenly look as if he were on the deck of a pitching ship. This was the reason a return home was impossible, at least right now. He needed twenty-four-hour care, and they couldn’t afford that.
“Good day?” she said, emphasizing the question. The more you did that, the more likely he was to understand that he was expected to provide an answer.
“Good day. We had the birds.”
That meant they’d taken him outside, to a patio surrounded with bird feeders. That was a highlight of his existence now.
“Do you have cars?” he said. This joined the smile as the two constants of every visit. Sometimes he’d be unusually adept at following a conversation; other days he struggled with the simplest exchanges. The one question he always managed was: Do you have cars? He didn’t remember that he’d owned a body shop, or at least he was incapable of expressing that he did. When she tried to explain anything about work to him, he tended to get hopelessly confused. But he asked that question about the cars because somewhere in his fog-shrouded brain he knew it was important, critical, that without cars there would be serious problems.
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