It wasn’t the stuff. It was the time. The time spent and gone and, at the moment, nothing to show for it. That little boy on his mother’s shoulder would grow up in town and not know the difference. The town would be fine to him, until he left and came back and saw how the one place where he should be necessary would go on without him.
I turned to look back down Pine Street and stood there for a good long while with no fear that anyone would recognize me. Ray himself could walk by. I was invisible.
I HAD TWO addresses culled from the internet and a choice to make. Be a coward and go find Theresa first as my backup, or be brave and find Ray—and Joshua—alone. The thought of seeing Joshua, of wrapping my arms around him for as many seconds as he would allow, made my chest tight. But Ray. How angry would he be by now? What would he risk in front of Joshua? If I went to Theresa first, I’d have a witness—maybe. Maybe Theresa would talk to me. Or maybe I’d have to spend real time trying to make Theresa understand, real time I should spend finding Joshua.
Joshua. The right choice was Joshua. I wasn’t sure I was brave enough for the right choice, but I drove that way, hoping I would gain courage as I went.
The town was still too small. In no time at all, I had passed the address I’d memorized by now and had to circle the block again. On the second try, I parked. The houses looked as though they’d been purchased from a catalog. Ray’s house was white and boxy, the lawn a little patch of deep green. I stared at the curtains, hoping for movement. Or if I waited long enough, for Joshua to emerge on his own.
The entire street was still, except a lone car crossing at the next block. No one walked by or came to the window. There was nothing to do but go to the door and see what would happen. I imagined what Russ Keller would say about a plan like that.
I slid out of the truck and approached the house, wishing I had something, anything, in my hands. With every step, I expected the door to swing open and for someone to shout me down. But the door stayed closed, the curtains stayed drawn. I reached the stoop and the doorbell without incident, and had nothing to do but push the button.
A dog yipped. Claws scrabbled against the floor inside and up to the door. No steps. No voices.
I gave the door a chance to open, glancing uneasily up and down the street. A neighbor would be watching. If they knew me, they’d stick their heads out of their doors and tell me when to try again. But I was a stranger. They’d watch to see what I did, dialing the local posse if they saw me heading toward trouble. My out-of-state plates had already been noted.
I had decided to go when I saw the corner of an envelope poking from the half-open mailbox. I tugged on the envelope until I could see it was addressed to—David Cotter, Jr. I opened the mailbox and dug the rest of the contents out. Let the neighbors call the police. I had a few things to report, too. Cotter, Cotter, David, Christine Cotter. One of the magazines was a woodworking magazine. I dropped the mail back into the box and walked, unhurried, to my truck. Relieved. This was not the place.
Chapter Twenty-nine
I parked in town, bumping up against the curb and then shoving the meter full of quarters. An upstanding citizen.
I walked Pine Street, taking a better look in the storefronts and seeing no one I should have known or who should have known me. I moved from one window to the next, not engaging. The summer tourists were back home and the winter tourists not yet on the horizon, the kids in school, the college students back on campus, the working people at their stations. I was a single woman walking unhurriedly down a bare street, worthy of note. But maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, being noticed. I had to figure out where Ray was, but I wasn’t sure what would happen when I did.
I reached the north end of town where the streets had gotten their makeover and looked around. What I needed was a headquarters. A phone book. A phone, since mine hadn’t been able to find service in the last fifty miles.
And then I saw the answer: the Clipper. It was right where I left it, the siding still weathered like a shack on a dock, the sign still pale and unwelcoming. Inside, it was dark. In the second it took for my eyes to adjust, I wondered at my own idiocy. This was one of Ray’s hangouts, and I’d walked right in.
“Ahoy,” said a voice from the direction of the bar.
My eyes finally found the source of the greeting. A middle-aged man with a round belly over the top of his pants sat on a stool at the back of the bar. He didn’t look familiar. I hoped I didn’t, either. Someone wanting to make conversation would ahoy him back. “I’ll have a root beer,” I said, sitting as far away as I could. I glanced around at the framed ads for fish sticks and beer, the tables with fishhooks and lures caught forever underneath thick shellac, yellow with age.
He put the root beer in front of me and slid a menu across the bar.
“Do you have a phone book?”
“Stolen,” he said.
That jibed nicely with what I remembered about the place. I ordered the first sandwich off the menu so that he would have something to do while I made a plan.
I still had a visit to Theresa in my back pocket, but that prospect seemed further from reality every time I thought about it. We’d been friends thirteen years ago. If I’d stayed in Sweetheart, would we have found a way to bridge the next year, let alone a dozen or more?
All along, I had been thinking of Theresa as the young woman I’d left. She would look the same, she’d be in the same job. She’d lean out of the door of her same house, her face opening up into her wide grin. She might even cry. I had imagined the reunion enough times over the years, but that part never changed. Theresa might cry with relief to see me again—alive, well, strong. But we’d been estranged by the time I’d left. She couldn’t stand to watch what was happening to me. I’d also seen the town now. I’d seen thirteen years. Things could be so different than I’d hoped. What if Theresa hadn’t thought of me at all? Or, if she had, if she remembered all the times the girl I’d been had needed her, had leaned on her without taking her advice. If she thought of me at all, maybe all she remembered was how one-sided our friendship had been. No big loss. A relief, really.
I’d felt the same way when I’d seen my mother’s obituary in the online edition of the hometown paper. My father’s name, not listed. Good. I’d clicked away immediately, but it was too late. I raced to the bathroom to throw up and then back to the computer to find the notice again. To know—I couldn’t not know. To see it through, though I knew I hadn’t. I had already missed the funeral by months. Anguish that felt strangely like release. Nothing tied me to Sweetheart Lake anymore.
The barman came back with my sandwich. He tucked himself back onto his stool to watch the TV in the corner. I took a big bite. When I glanced up, the barman had turned his attention my way. “Hungry, huh?”
My mouth was too full to do anything but nod.
“From around here?”
Now I was thankful for the food in my mouth.
“Got a place up here?” he said.
A place. That’s what we used to say. If you’re not from around here, you still might have a place. You might be a neighbor, a summer neighbor, and bring the kids or grandkids to fish and boat and splash in one of the lakes. You might turn your place into a rental, shilling it out by the week to Chicagoans willing to pay fifteen hundred dollars or more to sit around the fire pit and slap at mosquitoes. You might visit two weeks a year or you might come up every weekend of the summer, but a place gave you a little heads up over a tourist, which was the worst thing to be.
“Just visiting,” I said around a mouthful. “Just touring around.”
The sea captain grunted. “Off-season. Got it to yourself.”
“That’s the way I like it.” I shoved another giant bite into my mouth and looked away.
Bells jangled at the back of the building, and a couple came in from the alley.
“Ahoy,” the woman cried. She was skinny and held together by tight, bad jeans and a tighter sweater. She grinned, showing off a missing too
th deep in her mouth. The guy with her was solid, thick from head to boots, his skin so red that he could have been spit-roasted.
“Betty Spaghetti,” the barman said, sounding pleased. “Jim. You’re in a little early.”
Betty chose a stool and hopped onto it. “’s Friday somewhere.”
I stopped chewing. As far as I knew, it was Friday here. Joshua had been gone three days. The food in my mouth had turned to concrete. I put a napkin to my lips and spit it out. Three days, and here I was, a lady who lunches. I pictured Joshua standing by the side of the road, hungry. Arriving at last at his father’s house, only to find the unwelcome mat rolled out.
I shoved the plate away. Betty, Jim, and the sea captain, whose name turned out to be the landlocked Chuck, sorted out the need for brews and burgers and the predicted score of a game that was not yet being played. Betty looked away first, noticing me. “Hey, girl. How’s that working for you?”
“What?”
She gestured toward the half-eaten sandwich.
“Oh, it’s good. Highly recommend.”
Betty blinked. “Are you a reviewer or something?”
The men both turned to look at me.
“No. Just a . . . tourist.”
“Off-season, baby,” Betty said.
“No good fishing in the damn lake,” Jim said.
Chuck refilled Jim’s beer. “Duke and his kid got some walleye this morning, they said.”
“Duke is a liar,” Jim said. “And so’s his kid.”
Betty leaned down the bar. “They don’t like Duke because their wives like Duke too much,” she stage-whispered. “What’s to see this late in the year? The colors?” The missing tooth winked at me. I was Betty’s big catch of the day.
“Seeing some—” Old friends? Relatives? “Sights.”
Jim snorted. “Trees, trees, and more trees.”
“Lakes,” Betty said, defensively. “Are you staying on a lake? You got a place up here?”
“No,” I said. “Might be heading home again, soon. Indiana,” I added, before they asked. They would have asked. They all nodded.
“Got a cousin lives down near Tell City,” Jim said.
Tell City meant nothing to me. But then I thought of a way out of my deadlock. “I used to have a cousin up here,” I said, as if I’d just remembered. “Ray Levis?”
“You’re Ray Levis’s cousin?” Betty had an uncertain smile on her face.
“No shit?” Chuck said. “Been sitting here all this time.”
I’d made a mistake. The Clipper could still be Ray’s hangout. He might be due any minute—it was Friday somewhere.
“Distant,” I said. “Like, three times removed or something.”
“You been to see him yet?” Betty said.
So he was still here, despite the address from the web being a bust. “I went to the house on Elm.”
“He ain’t been there for a while,” Jim offered. “He gave up city living a while back.”
City living. Only someone who had lived in Sweetheart Lake his whole life could say it with sincerity. But if Ray had given up the city, and the city was Sweetheart Lake, that meant—
“His place is out on Dam Lake,” Chuck said. He checked with Jim. “Is that St. Germain or is that Eagle River?”
“That’s Sugar Camp,” Betty said. She laughed. “I remember, because Sugar Camp, come on.”
“Unincorporated,” Jim chimed in. No town, then. Ray Levis lived on some quiet county road with as many inches of lakefront as he could afford, and if there was someone who could live without people, without even a town to call his own, it was Ray.
Chuck began to draw a squiggle-line map for me on a napkin. “You’ll have to go out there. He doesn’t come in much anymore. Not sure he even has a phone.”
“Ray Levis,” Betty said, shaking her head. “Whatever happened to that deal? You know . . . with that girl?”
Jim frowned at her. “What deal?”
“Don’t you remember that fuss with the cops and that woman who kept saying that Ray had killed her sister?”
I let my root beer mug thud to the bar.
“Weren’t her sister. Her friend,” Chuck said. “You want a refill?”
I shook my head and dug into my purse for cash. I had to listen carefully to hear around the rush of blood in my ears.
Chuck got Betty a refill. She wrapped her hands around the mug. “Yeah. What was the girl’s name?”
“That was a bunch of bullshit,” Jim said. “That was twenty years ago. Never heard from that girl again.”
“Which is why it makes sense.” A slur was creeping into Betty’s voice, but she had adopted a serious expression, as though the matter, twenty years old or not, would be decided right here at the Clipper, today. “Right? You remember. The blood they found. I mean, if anybody’d heard from her, then it could be bull.”
“Someone heard from her,” Chuck said. “Didn’t they?”
“Ray Levis didn’t even hunt.” Jim slapped his hand on the bar.
Betty snorted. “Lots of men in this county don’t hunt. Except for new ways to make their women miserable.”
Jim crossed his arms and watched the TV with resolve, so Betty leaned over the bar at Chuck. “You knew him. And, wait, cousin-girl, you knew him.” She swiveled on her stool to look at me.
“Not really,” I said.
“Wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Jim muttered.
Chuck stood to take my money, offered the change. When I shook my head, he folded the bills away and stood staring at me, kindly, intellectually, the way I might study a signature I’d seen by accident—someone’s signature in line at the bank, say, or a hand-lettered sign in a shop window.
“I don’t want to speak ill of your family,” Chuck said. He slid the hand-drawn map across the bar. “But the way I remember Ray Levis is, if there ever was a guy who would hurt a fly just to hurt a fly, it was him.”
Chapter Thirty
The Northwoods were for getting lost, getting forgotten.
A certain breed was drawn to dense woods, to the sparse population. People with grudges and grudges against them. People with bad families, bad credit, bad exes.
That was always the problem with my escape plan. I watched the trees fall away to each side of the road through the truck’s windshield. I was always trying to find a hiding place from the best hiding place in the world.
The road curved through the forest and around the lakes. The colors, Betty had said, but it was the green that made my heart ache. The pine trees on one side of the road were skinny and exposed, trimmed away from the telephone wires, but beyond their knock-kneed youth were the elders, all rough trunks and black needles. The river crossed under the highway and fell into place on my left, the water tumbling around rocks and smoothing to green glass as it deepened.
When the paper napkin map said to turn, I did, and then again, until all I could see past the scrub near the road were pines and the dark knees of white aspen. Trees, trees, and more trees, as the guy in the bar had said. He might feel differently about the woods if he’d been living in Parks County, Indiana. Town of Parks, tree population: three. Here the sun cut lines of gold through the thick canopy like spotlights.
The map guided me through a series of turns, the roads twisting around an unseen lake.
My family had never had a place, of course, since we’d barely been able to keep a roof over us at all. But Theresa’s family had, and I’d spent weeks of several summers in a row as the assumed guest. The family compound was a tradition, all the cousins finding a way to converge. At Theresa’s, I would find myself surrounded by a matched set of adults, the women shy in their suits and the men pale-bellied. Adults who threw their heads back and laughed, who didn’t seem in a hurry, or anxious, or angry. At Theresa’s, we spent the sunshine hours running around the land in our suits, jumping off the end of the dock whenever we got hot. When our stomachs growled, we went up to grab hot dogs and bags of chips and ate with our water-pruned fingers
back on the dock, as if we feared the lake wouldn’t be there if we stayed away too long.
It was one of those summer days on the lake with Theresa when I had met Ray, though neither of us brought it up later, when things went bad. When Theresa couldn’t stand to be around me because I had gone back again. Back then Theresa worked at her parents’ T-shirt shop but on her day off we went to one of the coves to sun ourselves. The inside of my mouth was sore from too many sugary candies, and I was stupid from the heat.
“Yuck,” Theresa said, kicking at the water.
“What?” I was leaning back on a boulder. I was hotter than a human should be allowed to get.
“Why do they have to die here? I want to swim.”
“What’s dying?”
“The mayflies,” she said.
“They don’t die at the water’s edge, dumbass,” said a male voice high above us.
We both turned and looked up. Theresa pulled her towel from the rocks and tucked it around her. She’s grown into her suit that summer, maybe a little too much. Some of the men in town had started watching us as we passed by, but it wasn’t me who caught their eyes. The guy above us, though, wasn’t looking at her. I smiled and he smiled back.
“They die everywhere,” he said. He was older than we were by a few years, tan and muscular in a way that the guys in our grade had yet to figure out. He wore wet jean shorts, and that was all. His hair dripped onto his chest. “They die everywhere and then the water brings them to the edges. It’s not some big plan to ruin your swim today.”
Theresa didn’t like being called a dumbass. And she didn’t like having someone crouched over us, talking down. And maybe she didn’t like that the guy—the man—doing the talking hadn’t given her a moment’s notice. If he’d flirted with her at all, I might never have learned the man’s name. “What are you even doing up there?” Theresa said, pouting like a baby.
“Jumping off the high dive,” he said. He looked at me. “You want to come up?”
“Don’t you dare,” Theresa said under her breath. Theresa was safety in human form to me, but she was also too careful for a girl who’d never faced a single barrier in life. She could wear makeup. She could go on dates. She could drive and hold a job. She could wear short sleeves without anyone asking about her bruises. In a year, she’d be gone, in college probably. I would be here. If she hadn’t told me what to do, though, I wouldn’t have taken the dare.
The Day I Died Page 23