Misery Bay: An Alex McKnight Novel

by Steve Hamilton

  “I didn’t run into many U.S. marshals.”

  “It’s a small office. There aren’t that many of us.”

  “He’s a private investigator now,” Maven said. “The best in town.”

  Raz stopped smiling and looked down at his hands. So much for the small talk. It was time to get to it.

  “Actually, I’m not,” I said. That was Maven’s cue to turn the first of many shades of red, but I wanted to level with this man as soon as I could.

  “I have a license,” I went on, “but I sort of fell into it by accident. It’s a long story, but suffice to say, I haven’t actually done much PI work, and I don’t want to misrepresent myself. God knows you’ve been through enough already. You deserve the truth.”

  “We’re not talking about standard PI work,” Raz said. “Didn’t Maven tell you what I was asking you to do?”

  “He did, but I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m honestly not sure if I can be of much help to you. There does happen to be another private investigator in town, a man named Leon Prudell.”

  “McKnight, God damn it…” Maven was moving through shades two, three, and four.

  “Just take it easy,” Raz said to him. “You’ve gotta stop being so upset all the time, Roy. Can you just try that for me, please?”

  But Maven was already halfway out of his chair, looking like he was about to come around his desk and strangle me.

  “Alex, can we go take a walk so Roy can calm down?”

  “It’s twenty degrees outside,” Maven said. “If you want me to leave, just—”

  “Come on,” Raz said to me as he stood up. “Come show me the famous locks.”

  * * *

  When we were safely outside, I led him down through the locks park to the edge of the St. Marys River. Someone had plowed the walkway, but the whole park was empty. I turned my collar up as a cold wind blew across the snowdrifts, but Raz seemed unfazed by it.

  When we got to the observation deck, we climbed up and sat on the bleachers. The metal was cold but at least we were out of the wind now. Through the Plexiglas we could look down on the MacArthur Lock and the Poe Lock just beyond it. It was the first day of April, so everything was still closed down for the season.

  “No offense, but this is pretty anticlimactic,” he said. It was cold enough for us to see our breath as we spoke.

  “Come back in the summer. When a seven-hundred-footer goes through, it’s impressive.”

  “I lived in Michigan most of my life, but this is the first time I’ve ever been up here. My son was supposed to meet me here last summer, but it never happened. I was thinking maybe next summer…”

  He stood up with both fists clenched and took a few steps forward. He punched the glass and made the whole thing rattle. He took a few deep breaths and finally turned around to face me.

  “I can’t cry anymore, Alex. I had a whole lifetime of tears stored up and I spent the last three months crying out every single last one of them. I’ve got nothing left.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just watched him and listened to what he was saying.

  “His mother and I have been apart for a while now. He’s been living with me for the past few years. Just the two men, you know? Just me and Charlie. When he decided to switch majors, I was kinda skeptical, but hell, his girlfriend was in the same program, this forestry thing. Managing … you know, forests. Trees. Taking care of trees. Tech’s got a good program for that, so I thought, okay, why not. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for criminal justice. Maybe that was just because of his old man, you know? So I said, sure, go for it. Give it a try, see if it works. But don’t complain to me when you get ten feet of snow.”

  He smiled again for the briefest of moments, then it was gone.

  “Okay,” he said. “Maybe I wasn’t so supportive when he told me about the forestry thing. Maybe I didn’t quite get it. The last time I saw him was over Christmas break, and we didn’t exactly end things on a good note. But come on.”

  He looked down at the floor.

  “I just want to know what happened to him. That’s all I want. I don’t think it’s too much to ask. Just somebody, please … tell me what was going through his head. That’s all I want and nobody will tell me. You understand, Alex? Nobody will say a word. The only thing they say is that there’s no way for anybody to know what he was thinking. I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough for me. I will not accept it.”

  He kept staring at the cold concrete between his feet.

  “His girlfriend, and all of his friends … they’re gonna graduate soon. Then they’ll all be gone. They’ll forget all about him and they’ll move away and start their lives and have families and everything else. So I figure I’ve got this one chance, while they’re all still together in the same place. While it’s all still fresh in their minds. I want somebody to sit down with them and go over the last few days of—”

  He stopped.

  “The last few days of my son’s life. So I can, I don’t know what, make enough sense of it so I can keep on living myself. Not just give up and join him.”

  “Raz, come on…”

  “Try on my boots, Alex. See if you don’t feel the same way.”

  “I can’t do that. I never had a son.”

  He thought about that for a moment.

  “You might find this hard to believe,” he finally said, “but Roy has a lot of respect for you. He wouldn’t have come to you if he didn’t.”

  That one was hard for me to believe, but I wasn’t about to argue with him.

  “He has a funny way of showing it, I know, but believe me. I wasn’t on the force with him for long, but it was enough. It sounds like he treats you exactly the same way he treated me.”

  “Once again, no surprise you’re not a state cop anymore.”

  “It was actually kind of unusual for us to spend so much time together,” he said. “Most troopers lead pretty lonely lives, and if they do end up riding with somebody else, it’s usually not the same partner every time. But as soon as I got to Lansing, I think I must have pissed off the wrong lieutenant or something, because I kept ending up in the same car as Sergeant Maven. Don’t ever tell him I told you this, but they used to call him ‘Sergeant Cooler.’ Like we’re not sure if we want this guy around anymore, so let’s put him with Sergeant Cooler for a while, see how long he lasts.”

  I had to smile at that. Then he shifted gears.

  “Forgive me if I’m hitting too close to home here,” he said, “but I understand you’ve suffered some losses yourself. On the job and—”

  “My partner, in Detroit…”

  “And then someone you loved, not that long ago?”

  We sat right here, I thought. The two of us, once upon a time. On another winter’s day, right here in this observation booth.

  “Yes,” I said. “Not that long ago.”

  “So we have something in common.”

  “The circumstances were different, but…”

  “Look me in the eye,” he said, “and tell me we don’t have something in common.”

  “We do. I know we do.”

  “Were you with her when she died?”

  I looked at him for a long time. “No,” I finally said. “Not at that last moment, no.”

  “Okay, then. Neither was I.”

  Through the glass, I could see snowflakes starting to swirl all around us.

  “Start at the beginning,” I said, “and tell me everything.”

  * * *

  I set out early the next day, coming down from Paradise through Newberry to M-28, the main highway that cuts across the middle of the Upper Peninsula. It was twelve degrees, but the sky was clear and there was sunlight gleaming impossibly bright on the unbroken fields of snow.

  I hit the infamous “Seney Stretch” that runs right through the middle of the Great Manistique Swamp. It’s twenty-five miles of road as straight as a ruler’s edge, with absolutely nothing to see on either side but snow-covered trees and such a perfect l
ine ahead of you it’s downright hypnotizing.

  I stopped for a quick breakfast in Munising, then continued along the shoreline. I didn’t see as much ice in the lake as you’d expect in a normal year. It was just a vast expanse of open blue water here in the widest section of Lake Superior, with Canada a good two hundred miles to the north. I hit some actual traffic in Marquette, the biggest city in the UP, then kept going west through Ishpeming, Champion, and Three Lakes. Small towns where you’d buy your gas and your groceries and your fishing tackle and you’d rent your movies for the weekend, all from the same corner store.

  In the heart of the day, I was finally getting close to my destination, and I could feel it in the way the road started to rise and fall. The Porcupine Mountains lay far ahead of me. I cut north through L’Anse and Baraga, heading up the eastern coast of the Keweenaw Peninsula. Copper Country. But I wanted to see where it happened first, though, before talking to anyone, so I cut back to the west and headed for Toivola. It’s the last real town on the map until you finally hit Misery Bay.

  If you ever do find yourself in Toivola, Michigan, I’d recommend stopping at a little place called Toivola Lunch. Of course, it’s not like you’d have much choice. There’s Toivola Lunch with a little convenience store attached to it on one side of the road, and on the other side there’s a small post office attached to a house. That’s it. That’s Toivola, as far as I could see, anyway. It made Paradise look like a metropolis.

  I went inside and had a quick glass of Coke. No beer for me while I was doing so much driving, and I’m sure they only had American beer, anyway. The old man who served it to me had a slight Finnish accent. I was his only customer, but then the lunch rush was probably already over.

  “Misery Bay,” I said. “That’s right down the road, right?”

  “Misery Bay Road, yes.”

  “You know why they call it that?”

  “What, Misery Bay?”

  “Yes, is there a story behind the name?”

  He scratched his head. “I’ve heard two stories. Not sure which is true. One is that there was a big Indian battle there, and the other is that a French fur trader got stranded there, and he was so miserable he called it Misery Bay.”

  “That’s it?” With such an evocative name, I was expecting a lot more.

  “Yeah, although if it was the French guy, you’d expect it to have a French name, wouldn’t you? So maybe the Indian story, except for the fact that it’s not an Indian name, either.”

  “Okay, either way. But it’s right down that road.”

  “Sixteen miles. If you go too far, you’ll be in the lake.”

  I was about to leave. Then I figured there was no harm taking a shot in the dark.

  “I heard there was a suicide down there. In January.”

  The old man’s smile evaporated. “Yeah, hell of a thing. A boy from Tech hanged himself.”

  “Did you know him? Did he ever stop in here?”

  The man shook his head. “No, I didn’t know him. Hell of a thing, though.”

  “Thanks for the Coke, sir.” Then I was out the door, back in my truck, and heading down that sixteen-mile road.

  There was a small sign around the halfway point. It read simply, MISERY BAY, and it had a deer’s head beneath the letters. There were thick trees on either side of the road and as I got closer to the end I could see a small river moving through random holes in the ice and snow on the left. The Misery River, feeding into Misery Bay, at the end of Misery Bay Road. It kept bothering me that the man didn’t even know where the name came from. I mean, if anybody in the world would have known …

  Enough, I told myself. You’re already letting the place get to you and you haven’t even seen it yet.

  Then I did. I turned the corner at the end of the road and found the small parking area near the break in the trees. In the summer, this was probably a boat launch, but here in the last month of winter it was just an empty pocket of level ground, mostly cleared of snow, with a view westward across the lake and facing directly into the cold wind. There was a great oak tree at the far end of the lot, and I could see a red ribbon tied around the trunk. This must have been where it happened.

  I turned off the truck. I sat there for a moment, listening to the silence, wondering why anyone even bothered plowing this place. I didn’t see any snowmobile trails, although I figured there had to be at least one or two out there in the woods somewhere. I didn’t see anything but snow piled high in the shadow of the trees and the open water in the lake swirling where the river emptied into it.

  As I got out of the truck, I took out the photograph Raz had given me. Young Charlie Jr., not quite as fair as his father, maybe some of his mother’s coloring in the mix, but the same strong, confident face. In the picture it’s summertime and the young man is standing on the end of a dock, with a fishing pole in his hand. He has turned toward the camera and the sun is going down behind him. I didn’t know where the picture was taken. Maybe on another part of this very same lake, on another day not that long ago. Just a matter of months and yet look at where he ended up.

  I went over everything Raz had told me. His son came home for Christmas break. He seemed a little down, a little more quiet than usual. He didn’t say anything at all about his girlfriend or about his classes. He slept in late every morning. He went back to school a couple of days early, saying he wanted to hit the New Year’s Eve parties. There may have been a few words spoken on the way out the door, about his decision to switch from criminal justice to forestry. The last words his father would ever say to him.

  But no, I thought. No way. Sons make their own way and sometimes their fathers don’t understand. It’s not a big enough reason to end your life before it’s even begun. I just don’t get it.

  I went to the tree where he hanged himself. The red ribbon around the trunk was already weathered from the wind off the lake. I wondered who had put it there as I stood directly below the big branch that extended over the parking lot. This had to be it, I thought. This exact spot, right here.

  As I looked up I tried to picture where the rope had gone. It occurred to me then that this wouldn’t necessarily have been an easy thing to do. You can’t just tie the rope to the branch, after all. You’d probably have to secure one end to something else on the ground, maybe wrapping it around the trunk of the tree, and then dangle just enough of the rope over the branch to give you a noose at just the right height. That’s apparently what he did. Sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., he drove his car the twenty-three miles from Houghton. The rope must have been in the car with him, maybe coiled up right there beside him on the passenger’s seat. Was it already tied into a noose? Or did he wait to tie it when he was here?

  He backed the car into just the right position to stand on, the noose just close enough for him to slip his neck through. He fell backward off the car and the weight of his body tightened the rope around his neck. With only this short drop, he probably didn’t lose consciousness right away. It probably took several seconds for the blood flow to his brain to be reduced, and then for his lungs to start screaming for air. I had to wonder, as I stood under that tree, did he live long enough to regret his choice?

  Why the hell do it this way in the first place? Why here? It must have been so cold that night. Why not just take a few dozen sleeping pills and lie down in your warm bed and never wake up?

  Or hell, if you had to do it here, why not just stay in your car? Take your pills there, or if you can’t find pills, go buy a rifle and put the barrel in your mouth. It’s Michigan, after all. You can always buy a rifle somewhere, twenty-four hours a day.

  More than anything else, why make such a spectacle of it? Hanging from a tree like this, facing the lake like some sort of horrible sacrifice? I couldn’t imagine doing such a thing, even in my darkest hour. Not this way.

  I looked at his picture one more time. You see someone’s face in a picture like this and you think you can form a basic impression of what kind of person he is.
But everything I’d ever know about him would be completely secondhand, and even if I talked to every friend he had, every classmate, every teacher, every person who ever knew him in any way … how would I ever know what was really going on inside him?

  I stayed there for a long time, taking it all in. There were no houses or other buildings to be seen in any direction. No sign of life at all. Just high drifts of snow and more trees and the lake itself. I started to feel a strange foreboding about the place, and I could only wonder if it was because I came here already knowing what had happened. Would I have felt the same thing if I had just stumbled upon this place by accident?

  There was no way to know.

  I got back in the truck and started it. I turned up the heat to warm my hands. Then I started driving up to Houghton to see what else I could find out about the late Charlie Razniewski Jr.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Houghton, Michigan. If you know your history, you know what this city once meant to the rest of the state. Hell, to the whole country.

  The first big mining boom happened here, even before the gold rush out west. Copper Country, they called it. That’s how all of the Finns ended up here, along with a few Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians. You can still hear the accents in many of the locals. You can still see some of the heavy equipment standing silent and rusted where the mines were. This is where they took all the copper from the ground and turned it into electrical wire and shipped it all over the world. It all happened right here.

  They built the college and it went through several mining-related names until it finally ended up being known as Michigan Technological University. It’s not about mining anymore, of course. It’s all about science and engineering now. The students come from all over Michigan and besides studying, the one thing they’d better be ready for is snow, because they get a hell of a lot of it. Most years, anyway. I was reminded of that as I drove up into the Keweenaw Peninsula and saw the big sign by the side of the road. It was a measuring stick as tall as a tree, with that winter’s current snowfall amount marked at around twelve feet. On the second day of April, usually they’d have at least twice that by now.