Floater

by Gary Brandner

  “How about taking the lady’s suitcase up to four-fourteen.”

  “You betcha.” Jed got to his feet and limped over to the desk. He gave Lindy a smile of tobacco-stained teeth.

  She put a dollar bill in his hand along with the key, and he reached for the bag.

  “Just leave it in the room,” she said.

  “You can pick up the key here when you come back,” the clerk told her. He eyed her curiously. “Anything special you wanted to look for in the town?”

  “Not really.”

  “You won’t find a lot doing in Wolf River.”

  “I’ve been here before,” she told him, and walked out of the lobby before he could extend the conversation. She could feel eyes on her back.

  • • •

  Her last year of high school was a dim memory for Lindy, deliberately clouded by the internal censor that screens out unpleasant memories. She forced herself now to think about it as she walked the once-familiar streets.

  The most painful part of it was the change in her relationship with her father. Wendell Grant had always seemed the ideal parent, the envy of her friends who only wished their fathers could have been so friendly and understanding. Not to mention handsome. Lindy was aware that half the girls she brought home developed a crush on the tall, athletic judge.

  After the Halloween thing at the lake, however, it was never the same at home. The conversations with her father, which had flowed so naturally before, became stilted and difficult. Whenever the subject became personal, he eased out of range. The judge began spending more time in the county seat, and when he was home often retired to his study, there to remain until after Lindy had gone to bed.

  After she left home with a scholarship to Northwestern, her contact with her father or anyone else in Wolf River dwindled rapidly. After her father’s marriage to the young Shawano woman his letters became even less frequent.

  All in all, the situation did not disturb Lindy. She had little wish to remember the town, nor did the town seem eager to remember Lindy Grant.

  Over the years the judge’s letters had described in general terms the steady decline of Wolf River. The people there never fully recovered from the double economic blow in the early 1970s when Moderne Gloves closed up shop due to changing fashions and the Allis Chalmers plant relocated to Sheboygan. Lindy had expected to see some deterioration in the town, yet she was hardly prepared for the pervading atmosphere of rot and depression.

  Few of the shops she remembered were still located on Main Street. That might be expected with the passage of twenty years, but there seemed an inordinate number of empty storefronts with FOR RENT signs taped to the windows.

  The old Woolworth was now a discount furniture and appliance store. SUMMER CLEARANCE! ALL PRICES SLASHED!

  Bonnie’s Gift Shop was now an unappealing café.

  Where the Dairy Queen had been was an office of Milwaukee Savings and Loan.

  The Rialto Theater stood empty and dead — a cobwebby cave under a broken marquee with a few meaningless black letters still clinging drunkenly to the slots. She could squint her eyes and see Dr. Zhivago, The Sound of Music, Alfie, Bonnie and Clyde. All gone now. Dead. Shadows of the past.

  Lindy shivered. Abruptly she remembered promising to call Brendan Jordan when she got in. He’d never asked her to do anything like that before, and she was amused and touched by his concern.

  She wasn’t ready to go to her room at the inn yet, so she stepped into a phone booth — they still had the old-fashioned enclosed kind with a folding door — outside a Shell station. She punched in her credit card code and Brendan’s Los Angeles number. After much crackling on the line she got a busy signal.

  Lindy was oddly relieved. She would have felt silly saying something like Hi, I got here safe and sound. She was not, after all, a twelve-year-old. Still, it was nice to have someone care about you. She would try Brendan again later when she got to the room.

  Lindy continued her walk through town. The streets seemed narrower and dirtier. The former might have been an illusion: childhood memories always shrink when revisited as an adult. But there was no overlooking the scraps of wastepaper and other trash that littered the sidewalks and gutters.

  Lindy shook herself out of her gloomy mood and walked on. Traffic along Main Street was spotty, consisting mostly of muddy pickup trucks driven by sunburned farmers. There were few pedestrians — washed-out looking women, dispirited men. Almost no young people. If Wolf River was not yet a dead town, it was sure as hell dying.

  Without realizing where she was going, Lindy looked up to find herself at the intersection of Main and Elm streets. A montage of old Saturday afternoons flashed through her mind — shiny cars, loud rock music on the 8-tracks, girls dressed as sexily as their parents would allow. The girls’ hair sprayed into flips, boys with D.A.s, curls carefully arranged on their foreheads. Lots of flirting and fooling around. Fun. Plain, simple fun. God, she hadn’t really had fun for a long, long time.

  There was no conscious decision, but Lindy seemed to be carried along up Elm Street by her memories. Up the Hill. How much less impressive it seemed now than when she had lived there two decades ago. Did all houses grow smaller with the passage of time? Did all hills flatten into insignificant grades?

  The houses at the bottom, near Main Street, had not been the most imposing even when she had lived there. They had aged badly. Several were empty now, with taped cracks in the windows and shingles missing from the roofs. In one front yard a rusting automobile sat on blocks, never to run again. A couple of hungry-looking dogs prowled through the weeds of unkempt lawns. Sad. The scene made Lindy want to cry.

  And there, of course, was the house where Frazier Nunley had lived. She didn’t want to look at it, but it drew her attention, like an accident across the road. It was one of the empty ones, somehow looking even more abandoned and forlorn than the others. The paint was badly weathered. Rusted junk littered the front yard. A faded realtor’s sign stood crookedly in the weeds.

  A chill made Lindy shiver in the hot July sun. She turned from the old Nunley house and walked quickly on up the Hill.

  More quickly than she expected, she reached what she really wanted to see — the Grant house, where she was born, and where she had lived so happily with her father for the first seventeen years of her life.

  It was in fairly good repair, thank God, and had a fresh coat of paint. But there had been changes. A second entrance had been added off the front porch, the house split into a duplex. A neatly lettered sign noted that one side was currently for rent.

  The house had been repainted a sad shade of blue-gray with white trim and shutters. The combination lacked the warmth and happiness that seemed to radiate from the old brown-and-cream paint her father had freshened every year. Or maybe the color scheme was just fine; it was her depressed mood that made it seem so melancholy.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and saw the house as it had been. She imagined the changes over the years as in a speeded-up film. The summer after Lindy’s graduation, Ida Krantz suffered a stroke that put her into a convalescent home, the kind where the patients never get better, just become paralyzed and mute. Her father had continued to live alone in the big house, but he seemed to lose interest in keeping it up.

  Then, during Lindy’s sophomore year at Northwestern, Judge Grant married the woman from Shawano, only a few years older than Lindy, and brought her home to Wolf River. Lindy came home for the wedding, but felt like a stranger. The judge was totally fascinated by his bride, and the young woman did little to hide her hostility to her predecessor in the house. A year later Wendell Grant and his wife moved to Madison, where the judge set up a private practice. That was when Lindy’s communication with her father had all but ceased.

  Thinking now of her father and the way it used to be drove Lindy even deeper into her funk. She turned away from the house of her happy childhood and walked rapidly back down Elm Street and into the present.

  • • •
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  Like the rest of the town, the Chalet Room at the Wolf River Inn was not what it once had been. The high-backed, vaguely Swiss-looking booths of carved oak and rich brown leather had been replaced by red vinyl. The little raised bandstand-stage was still there, but the Baldwin piano was gone and a jumble of amplification equipment was in its place.

  The bar was smaller, or maybe like everything else in Wolf River it just seemed smaller. The only other customer when Lindy entered was a stout gray-haired woman with a deeply seamed face. She sat unmoving except when she raised the stubby on-the-rocks glass to her lips.

  Lindy took a stool well away from the silent woman. The tired-looking bartender wandered over and wiped down the bar space in front of Lindy’s stool.

  “Vodka and tonic, please,” she said.

  “You got it.” He dropped ice cubes into a glass and brought up a vodka bottle from the well. “Staying at the inn?”

  Lindy was about to give him a don’t-bug-me answer, but stopped herself. Sometimes people just made conversation without being on the make.

  “That’s right,” she said.

  He nodded pleasantly, eyeballed a generous shot of vodka into the glass, and added tonic.

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a high school reunion celebration here?” Lindy asked.

  “If there is, nobody told me about it.”

  She began to wonder if this whole thing was some bizarre practical joke. Get her all the way back to Wolf River for a meaningless hoax. But who would do a thing like that? How could it profit anybody? And how would that explain the eerie messages and what had happened to Nicole’s face?

  The bartender added a squeeze of lime and set the drink before her. Lindy sipped at it and gave the bartender a brief smile of approval. She was relieved when he went away.

  “Miz Grant?”

  Lindy started at the sound of her name. She turned on the stool and saw the elderly bellhop named Jed standing there, grinning through his brown teeth, holding an envelope.

  “A message come for you. I seen you come in here so I told Jerry at the desk I’d bring it.”

  She took the envelope from him and scooped up a couple of quarters from her bar change for a tip. “Thank you.”

  The envelope was cheap drugstore stationery. Her name was written with a black felt-tip pen in an angular hand that was chillingly familiar. With trembling fingers, Lindy tore it open.

  The message inside, in the same pointy script, made her throat close up when she read it:

  Hello, Cat.

  Welcome home.

  Remember the clown?

  CHAPTER 17

  ROMAN

  He lay on the brown chenille spread that covered the double bed in Room 416 and tried to concentrate on the cartoon that was playing on television. It was not easy because every minute or so the picture would roll. It was just enough to be annoying, but not enough to make him get up and go turn off the set.

  So far the visit to his old hometown had been every bit as deadly as Roman had thought it would be. The streets were empty; the bar downstairs was like a morgue. The geek at the registration desk didn’t know anything about any high school reunion, and didn’t care. As long as he was here Roman would stay the night, but if somebody didn’t tell him what was going on by tomorrow morning he’d haul ass.

  Roman poured a healthy shot from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s into the water tumbler that had come encased in its little plastic envelope on the glass-topped bureau. He swallowed the whiskey and stared at the animated antics of some insufferably cute little blue creatures called Smurfs.

  “Ought to club the little fuckers to death,” Roman muttered. “Make a nice blue coat for somebody.”

  He got up and went over to switch through the channels. News on two of them. He didn’t need other people’s bad news. Continuing around the dial: Little House on the Prairie, Love Boat, an old movie with Bette Davis, a Chinese cooking show. He clicked all the way around to one of the news shows from Milwaukee and went back to the bed. At least it was better than Bette Davis.

  He drank the neat Tennessee mash whiskey and yawned through the report of some ongoing hearings in Congress. There was a commercial for a tire dealer, then a sleek broad with good knockers came on with the local news. They flashed on a film of a body being pulled from Lake Michigan, and the whiskey turned sour in Roman’s throat.

  • • •

  The television screen and the hotel room faded and vanished. Roman was back in the outboard on Wolf Lake in the gray morning after the last Halloween Ball.

  He thought he was going to chuck his cookies when the thing in the water rolled slowly over and the dead white face of Frazier Nunley looked up at them. But with Alec already trying dryly to puke over the side, and Lindy just this side of hysteria, he held it in.

  “It’s Frazier,” Lindy said unnecessarily.

  Alec got control of his stomach and moved up with the others. “Is he dead?”

  “Hell yes, he’s dead,” Roman snapped. “What do you think?”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ve got to get help,” Lindy said.

  “It’s too late to help him,” Roman said. “What we’ve got to do is get out of here.”

  Lindy turned to face him. “You mean, just … leave him like that?”

  Roman gave her a narrow-eyed glare. “What do you want to do, take him with us?”

  Lindy bit her lip, looked back at the floating corpse, and shook her head.

  Roman moved back to the stern. “If we all play dumb they can never connect us with this. As far as anybody knows he just went out in the boat himself for some asshole reason and fell overboard.”

  “That’s crazy,” Alec said. “Do you think anybody will believe that?”

  “They’ll have to unless they can prove something else happened. We’ll be okay as long as we keep our stories straight and simple. We went to the party, never saw Frazier, don’t know anything about him. That’s it.”

  “What if he told someone where he was going last night?” Lindy said. “And who he was meeting?”

  “I made him promise to keep it secret,” Alec said. “And he was impressed enough to do it.”

  “We better hope he was,” Roman said. He reached for the clutch lever to engage the outboard motor.

  “Wait a minute,” Alec said.

  Roman and Lindy looked at him, startled by the urgency in his voice.

  “His hands are tied.”

  “Oh, shit,” Roman said.

  He killed the motor and used one of the oars to move the boat back close to the slowly drifting body. With Alec holding on to him, he leaned over and wrestled the corpse around in the water until the hands, still loosely bound with plastic clothesline, were exposed. He would never forget the cold rubbery feel of the dead boy’s flesh. A couple of tugs undid the knots.

  Roman unwound the white plastic clothesline and carried it with him back to the stern. He said, “It wasn’t even tied good. He should’ve been able to get out of that.”

  “Let’s make sure we get rid of the rope,” Alec said. “We can’t leave anything around to prove it wasn’t an accident.”

  “I don’t like this,” Lindy said.

  “Jesus, who does?” Alec said in a tone he had never before used with either of them.

  “Can we please get out of here?” Lindy asked.

  “Yeah, right.”

  There was a chilling minute when the motor died and refused to restart immediately, but finally Roman got it going and steered the boat back toward the deserted dock.

  The telephone on the little table next to the bed shrilled in his ear, snapping Roman upright and bringing him abruptly back to the here and now.

  “Yes?”

  For a long ten seconds the only sound in the earpiece was a crackling hiss. Then a whispery voice spoke to him in a cramped monotone.

  “Hello, Tarzan.”

  Roman’s muscles tensed. The telephone felt like some cold, unfamiliar o
bject in his hand.

  “Welcome home.”

  “Who is this?” he got out finally.

  “Remember the clown?”

  There was a click on the other end and the hollow buzz of a dead line.

  After a minute during which he sat frozen on the bed, Roman hung up the phone.

  ALEC

  The Wolf River library, a wooden frame structure not much bigger than a 7-Eleven store, had no facilities for microfilm. However, they retained, bound in heavy fiber-board covers, copies of the Wolf River Chronicle from its start as a single-sheet biweekly in 1889 to its final issue in 1971 when television and regional editions of the Milwaukee Journal finally put it out of business for good.

  Alec asked for the volume containing issues from the fall of 1966, and waited while the pleasant, middle-aged librarian went into a storage room in the back and brought it out for him.

  He leafed through the yellowing pages to the end of October, skipping past the abbreviated wire service accounts of world affairs: Indira Gandhi becomes prime minister of India. Pope Paul IV meets with Gromyko. Albert Speer released from prison in Germany. President Johnson tours the Far East. Israel and Jordan fight a battle over something or other.

  The theory held by Alec’s father as editor was that national and international news was important to the Chronicle only insofar as it affected Wolf River citizens. More extensive coverage was given to the fire that seriously damaged Swanke’s Feed and Garden Supply Store, and the local sixth-grader who finished second in the All-Wisconsin spelling bee, and the efforts to unionize the workers at the glove factory.

  When he found the headline, it hit Alec like a cold towel slapped across his eyes:

  LAKE TRAGEDY

  LOCAL BOY DROWNS

  The story detailed the discovery by a fisherman from Tigerton of Nunley Frazier’s body late in the day, after he had been reported missing by his parents. Local authorities (that meant Police Chief Art Mischock, a bear of a man whose habitual scowl masked a shrewd mind) would not speculate on why the boy had gone boating alone at night. No explanation was offered for his peculiar costume.