Riverwatcher

by Ronald Weber

  “No.”

  “Like I say, Kit’s a good kid. But he had this trouble at school.”

  Verlyn leaned across the glass-topped counter beside the cash register, stared at Calvin sitting at the tying bench. “Kit got busted at Central Michigan, one time, for smoking pot. You’re talking about that?”

  “You hear about senseless crimes, eventually you learn drugs are behind them. In the past it was booze, now it’s drugs. Kit telling me about Charlie, that made me realize.”

  Verlyn kept staring at him. “Some drugged-out crazy shot Charlie? That what you’re thinking? Drugged-out crazies don’t hang around the Borchard for trout.”

  “Charlie was shot in the campground.”

  “What’s the difference? Some drugged-out crazy went into Rainbow Run and blew Charlie away for the hell of it? You’re losing it, Calvin.”

  “You’re forgetting something.”

  “What?”

  “Charlie smoked pot himself.”

  Verlyn thought for a while before he said, “That was way back. Everyone smoked a little on the river then. Kept the bugs off at night.”

  “I didn’t,” Calvin said.

  “You were weird then, too. So way back Charlie smoked pot on the river like everyone but you. So what?”

  “How do you know it was only way back? Charlie still smoked a pipe on the river. Not many guys do that anymore. How do you know he wasn’t loading it up with pot?”

  “I’d have smelled it, is why. You don’t think I’d remember the smell?”

  “I don’t know,” Calvin said. “Old guys like you don’t remember so good.”

  “You’re the same age,” Verlyn said, “and you don’t have any mind to remember with. In the old days, night fishing, pitch black on the river, you could locate Charlie by the smell of his pot. He could locate me the same way. It’s a long time since I smelled pot on the river.”

  Calvin said, “Maybe old guys don’t smell so good, either.”

  “Okay,” Verlyn said, “even if Charlie was still smoking pot, what’s that got to do with his getting shot?”

  “For his stash. Somebody was after it.”

  Verlyn suddenly reddened, looked like he was about to leap the counter. “You’re thinking Kit?”

  “Naw,” Calvin said. “Mellow out. Kit wouldn’t do that. But he might know who around here needed drugs bad enough.”

  “Pot’s not like that. You don’t kill for it, unless you’re a dealer and another dealer moves on your territory.”

  “Maybe you’d kill,” Calvin said, “you need it bad enough. You’re up in the woods, you’re craving some pot, you run across an old guy who’s got some—” When Verlyn didn’t respond Calvin asked, “Or maybe Charlie got mixed up with some dealer. You see what I’m getting at?”

  “I’m trying not to,” Verlyn said.

  *  *  *

  “I GOT HER back,” Kit said when he came in the fly shop in his waders. “She’s having lunch with her dad.”

  “She hook that big one?” Calvin asked.

  “We went down, fooled around for brookies. She got some strikes.”

  “She’s coming along.”

  “Yeah.” Kit looked at the sign on the wall about the reward fund for Charlie Orr, then looked at Verlyn. “She might say something about me guiding her in the morning. It wasn’t my idea. She thinks Calvin may be too busted up because of Charlie.”

  “All right,” Verlyn said.

  Kit kept looking at him, astonished. Then he shrugged and looked again at the sign. “Any takers?”

  “Gwendolyn’s old man,” Calvin told him. “And me when I get my checkbook.”

  “Put me in for twenty-five,” Kit said, “if you’re takin’ that small.”

  “It adds up,” Calvin said.

  When no one said any more Kit shrugged again, said he would be back after he had a smoke and got out of his waders. Verlyn watched from the window as he passed around the shop and moved through the stand of white birch to the river’s edge. “Talk to him,” he said to Calvin.

  “How come you don’t?”

  “I talk to him, we both end up yelling. You might drag something out.”

  “That’s so,” Calvin said. Then he was looking at the sign Kit had been looking at. “The kid could end up with the reward.”

  “What?”

  “Depending on what he says. Your kid, though, member of the family and all, it wouldn’t look good. Jan might get upset.”

  “Dammit to all hell,” Verlyn said. “Talk to him.”

  10

  THEONA ORR WASN’T at all the way Mercy had envisioned her when they spoke on the phone, settling arrangements to meet that afternoon. The woman facing her now seemed older than Charlie, elderly almost, with snow-white hair, colorless skin, and a tiny, fragile-looking body. It was her voice, though, that was most surprising. On the telephone it had seemed only prim, but in person it was direct and decisive—and, it struck Mercy, wholly resistant to any suggestion of grief. Although Mercy had made clear her reason for wanting to call on her, Theona Orr appeared mystified why someone she didn’t know would come all the distance to Big Rapids to offer sympathy.

  “It really isn’t so far,” Mercy said. “I can see why Charlie didn’t mind the drive.”

  “Once a year he drove to Ossning.”

  Mercy nodded at the correction. Was Theona establishing the point, in the event Mercy didn’t know, that Charlie never returned to Big Rapids once he had set up his summer camp in Rainbow Run? That she had been a fishing widow, in other words, long before becoming a real one?

  “It wasn’t any trouble,” Mercy said, deciding to change the subject, “finding you.”

  “Big Rapids isn’t large.”

  “But a lovely town. And you have a lovely home.”

  It wasn’t, really. Lovely at least wasn’t the word that came first to mind. It was a plain ranch-style house set on a neatly landscaped lot on a tree-lined street. Ordinary was a more accurate word. Or sensible. The house was no more remarkable inside—exceedingly clean, a woman’s house more than a man’s, but nothing fussy about it: an ordinary, sensible interior. The only thing that suggested Charlie’s presence was bookshelves on either side of a fireplace in the room in which Mercy and Theona now sat. Mercy reminded herself that Charlie’s wife, a former school librarian, might be as omnivorous a reader as Charlie had been.

  “I won’t stay. I know how you must be feeling. And you’ll have plans to make. If there’s anything I can do, anything the DNR can do, anything Charlie’s friends on the river can do, please just—”

  “I believe not.”

  Mercy tried to wait, to say nothing, letting Theona respond to the silence. It might have been unwise to mention the river, to bring into the open that Charlie had had another life on the Borchard, one his wife never shared. Theona might not wish to be reminded of that in the setting of her own home.

  “What I mean,” Theona said finally, “is no plans will be made until my daughter arrives.”

  “Oh,” Mercy said, “I’m so glad someone’s coming.”

  Theona kept her hands rigidly folded on her lap. “My only child. She lives in California. Her husband’s work will prevent him from coming.”

  “May I ask if you have grandchildren?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Will there be relatives coming?”

  “No.”

  “Listen,” Mercy said, and leaned forward, holding Theona’s eyes. “Is there anything I can tell you about what happened? I realize the state police have spoken with you, but maybe there’s something I can add. My office, the DNR field office in Ossning, is working closely with the Tamarack County sheriff’s office. If it’s something I don’t know, I can try to find out for you. So if there’s anything—”

  “The police officers who came were quite thorough.”

  “Everyone around Ossning,” Mercy went on, “is broken up. Everyone who knew Charlie. He had a lot of friends, close
friends. Nobody can understand why something like this would happen.”

  “Nor can I,” Theona said, but there was no puzzlement in her voice, let alone outrage. Or grief. Struck once again by its absence, Mercy decided to push a bit deeper—try to—out of curiosity. And there was still something else on her agenda, the job to perform for Willard Stroud.

  “It wasn’t a case of robbery. Nothing was taken from the tent. In fact, there’s no evidence the tent was entered.”

  Theona nodded but didn’t respond.

  “It may be that whoever did this didn’t know Charlie was inside the tent. I mean, he knew someone was, but it didn’t matter that it was Charlie. It could have been anyone.”

  “The officers suggested it might have been a random attack.”

  “But if it wasn’t, if Charlie was singled out, it was someone who knew him.”

  “Knew him to some degree.”

  “I realize that,” Mercy said. “It could have been a casual acquaintance as well as someone who knew him well. Can you think of anyone, in either category, who might have had something against Charlie?”

  “I was asked,” Theona said, “by the officers.”

  “Anyone Charlie might have worked with at the post office? Any relatives? Any former friends? Any enemies?”

  “I told them I could think of no one.”

  Did the state police also ask, Mercy was tempted to add, about you? A wife, an aggrieved one, was certainly a possibility. And the way the shooting was done, from outside the tent, without a confrontation, might be considered the way an aggrieved wife would do it, wishing her husband dead but preferring to avoid witnessing the process. But one look at Theona Orr would immediately dismiss the possibility. You couldn’t imagine someone of her age and delicate appearance driving to Ossning, locating Rainbow Run, pulling out a shotgun, blasting the walls of a tent.

  But there was something else, it occurred to Mercy, that would cause Theona to be eliminated at once as a suspect. She wasn’t interested enough. Interested enough in Charlie. That realization had been at the edge of Mercy’s mind since she entered the house, since she had noted Theona’s resistance to grief. It wasn’t resistance so much as lack of interest. Theona didn’t reveal any grief because she didn’t feel any.

  Mercy shook her head, trying to clear away the thought. Perhaps when the daughter arrived, Theona and Charlie’s daughter, perhaps then grief would surface. Perhaps grief always hit, really hit, later. It didn’t, though, seem likely. Although she had never let herself dwell on it, Mercy had always assumed that Charlie’s domestic life must be . . . well, not entirely fulfilling. Why else would he spend an entire summer living by himself in a tent in the woods? The fishing on the Borchard River was the answer, but fishing, as much as she wished to believe otherwise, couldn’t be the sole answer. Putting some distance between a sensible wife and a sensible house on a sensible street could be another.

  “No one at all?” Mercy asked.

  “No.”

  “Does the name Alec Proffit mean anything to you?”

  There was no change of expression on Theona’s face, but neither was there an answer. Silence held in the air. Then Theona said, “Would you excuse me?”

  “Sure,” Mercy said, and felt her heart accelerate.

  “I won’t be a moment.”

  *  *  *

  WHEN SHE RETURNED to the room, Theona Orr carried a large black-bound notebook binder, the sort school children use. She sat down, knees pressed together, the notebook on her lap, and began leafing through the pages. When she came to the one she was looking for she methodically ran a finger down the length of the page.

  “No,” she said finally.

  “You don’t know the name?”

  “For a moment it seemed familiar. I had to check my roster.” Theona closed the binder, folded her hands on top of it. “My Elderhostel experiences.”

  “Sorry,” Mercy said. “I don’t understand.”

  “During the summer months I attend Elderhostel courses with a group of former school teachers, all cherished friends. We travel extensively. Next will be Stratford.”

  “England?”

  “Ontario. In conjunction with the Shakespeare festival. I’ve kept rosters over the years of those attending the courses, in the event we might meet again. All my Elderhostel experiences are recorded here.” Theona softly tapped the notebook binder with a finger. “No such name is indicated.”

  “But at first it struck you as familiar?”

  “I was mistaken.”

  “I was thinking more of somebody who might have come to your home. Alec Proffit might have done that. He might have come here about Charlie.”

  “No.”

  “No one came around, asking about him?”

  “Why would they? He was in Ossning.”

  Mercy nodded, aware of the slow deceleration of her heart. At length she stood, smiled faintly, preparing to leave. One last time she asked Theona if there was anything she could do for her, anything at all.

  “Perhaps one thing.”

  *  *  *

  FROM THE LIVING room, Mercy was led along a hallway to the kitchen, a room so ferociously clean it was hard to believe it was ever used. Theona opened a door off the room and over her shoulder advised Mercy to mind her step.

  The basement was purely that: cement walls and floor, windowless, unconverted into added living space. When Theona touched a switch, suddenly filling the area with fluorescent light, Mercy blinked, then understood the reason for what seemed like excessive illumination. The cool, dank basement had served as Charlie’s tying room.

  One wall was dominated by a long table—an old unfinished door, actually, supported by a pair of two-drawer filing cabinets—above which were shelves arranged with plastic boxes of tying materials. The chair set in front of the table before an Abel vise was a high-backed wooden swivel chair, the kind you only saw now in old movies. The chair brought Charlie back to mind with a rush, as did an assortment of smoke-darkened pipes hanging from a rack and, leaning against a wall beside the tying table, an orderly row of rod cases that no doubt contained rods Charlie wrapped from blanks, rods he seldom—if ever—used, wrapped for the sheer pleasure of the craft. Thinking of Charlie in his basement workshop, tying flies and wrapping rods through the endless Michigan winter, caused Mercy to release a long, sad sigh.

  “I’m wondering,” Theona said, “what might be done with it.”

  “With what, exactly?”

  “All of it.”

  “Eventually, you mean?”

  “It should be put to some use. It shouldn’t go to waste.”

  Mercy looked at Theona, who was looking steadily at the tying table. There was no expression on her face, nothing in her eyes. No sense of urgency. And no sense of loss.

  “There’s no one in your family, no friends, anyone who might . . . ?”

  “I was thinking of someone you would know. Up there.”

  Mercy waited, but Theona said nothing more. “There’s one thing. The Trout Unlimited chapter in Ossning has a silent auction each year to raise funds for river restoration projects. Items are donated: rods, flies, equipment, books, paintings. Anything of Charlie’s would be greatly valued.”

  “Yes,” Theona said.

  “You’d like me to see to it?”

  “When would it be?”

  “The auction? It takes place over the winter.”

  Disappointment crossed Theona’s face.

  “Let’s leave it this way,” Mercy said. “I’ll get in touch with you later. In the fall. You can let me know if you still like the idea. In the meantime, something else might occur to you.”

  “It won’t,” Theona said, and led Mercy back to the stairway.

  *  *  *

  AT THE ENTRANCE door of the house, Mercy took one of her DNR business cards from her handbag, used a ballpoint pen to add the telephone number of the A-frame, handed the card to Theona. “In case you want to get in touch. Or your
daughter does. I’m at the office number during the week, at the other one evenings and weekends.”

  Theona smiled blandly. “Thank you for coming.”

  “I wish there was something more—” Mercy stopped herself. There was no use going on. Theona had made it perfectly clear: The only help she needed was getting rid of Charlie’s fishing things. Mercy reached out, lightly grasped Theona’s hand. It seemed an awkward thing to do, but she couldn’t imagine leaning forward, kissing the woman’s pale, tearless cheek.

  “Goodbye.” She took a step in the direction of the street, then turned back, feeling the void, needing to fill it one last time. Try to. “Will you be all right?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry about Stratford. Having to miss it.”

  Theona looked back with eyes as mystified as they had appeared when Mercy first arrived, driving the distance from Ossning to Big Rapids. “But I won’t. Elderhostel courses are firmly scheduled. Our group will go as planned.”

  Mercy tried to smile, to say it was good that Theona had her cherished friends to console her, but what came out was another long, sad sigh for Charlie.

  11

  “THOUGHT YOU WERE dead,” Hoke Harkness said.

  Fitzgerald smiled into the phone, told him no, just living in the north woods on the Borchard River near the town of Ossning.

  “Same thing.”

  “You ought to come up,” Fitzgerald said, “see the real world. We’ve got a spare bedroom.”

  “We?”

  Harkness, an assistant managing editor of the Free Press, was a fat man with nimble feet and a quick mind. Beginning with sloppy syntax, not much slipped by him. Fitzgerald could imagine him now, leaning into the phone over a surprisingly neat desk, brow furrowed, trademark yellow suspenders straining against a soft mountain of chest.

  “I’m living with a woman I met up here. You’d like her.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s got a weak spot for journalists.”