by Ronald Weber
“Long day?”
“Let’s just sit here, enjoy this.”
“All right.”
After another sip of her drink, Mercy said, “We’re lucky, Fitzgerald. You know how lucky?”
“You just want to sit here, I thought.”
“That’s what I mean, sitting here, talking or not talking. Like this. We’re so lucky.”
“Being together.”
“Not only that. Lots of people are together. It’s how that matters.”
Fitzgerald looked across at her. “You want to go to bed, you mean?”
“Of course I do. Only not now.”
Fitzgerald lifted his drink, examined the caramel color against the sky. “Maybe you ought to tell me about your day.”
“It was hell. I stopped at the office before I came home. Verlyn had left messages with Fern Lax, all just alike, wanting me to call. So I did. He thought I’d have all sorts of inside information about Charlie, about what happened, and wouldn’t believe I didn’t. I didn’t tell him about the missing camper.”
“Neither did I. I was over to the shop for a while.”
“Apparently, Verlyn and Calvin are going ahead with the reward. Stroud notwithstanding.”
“Apparently.” Then Fitzgerald said, “Talking to Verlyn made the day hell?”
“Added to it. It was meeting Charlie’s wife. I can’t imagine Charlie and Theona ever sitting down like this, having a drink, talking over the day. Let alone planning on bed. They must have, there’s a daughter, but I can’t imagine it.”
Mercy sighed again, launched into an account of the meeting for Fitzgerald, going through it step by step, including a description of the house, the street, the entire town of Big Rapids. “Charlie and Theona lived together, at least part of the year, but judging by the way she acted, they didn’t have a thing in common. All that seems to interest her is attending Elderhostel courses.”
“All that interested Charlie was fishing the Borchard.”
“I know. It was a two-way street. It always is. Still and all, you would think she’d express a little feeling for Charlie, especially dying the way he did. Good Lord, Fitzgerald. Her husband was murdered, and she doesn’t show a ruffled feather. She didn’t seem to understand why I was there.”
“So she’s not an angry wife.”
“If you mean was she angry enough to kill Charlie, no way. You have to have some interest before you can be angry. Anyway, she’s a tiny old woman. She couldn’t have come up here with a shotgun.”
“And she knew nothing about Alec Proffit?”
“Nothing. And she didn’t have anything to say about relatives or friends or coworkers of Charlie. Or enemies. Theona’s a dead end. Stroud doesn’t need to waste time with that side of Charlie’s life.”
When the phone rang inside the A-frame, Fitzgerald unfolded himself from the sling chair, left the deck. When he came back, he told Mercy he was going to freshen their drinks before he told her who the call was from.
* * *
“CALVIN. WITH A worry he’s got.” Fitzgerald paused, examined again the satisfying color of Jameson against the light of the sky. “A wacky worry.”
Mercy said, “Are we talking about Charlie’s murder or what?”
“Sort of.”
“Tell you what,” Mercy said. “Let’s sit here quiet, one whole minute, enjoy the evening. Then start over, tell me what Calvin called about, make some sense.”
“He remembered Charlie used to have some pot in his pipe. When he was on the river, fishing at night. Charlie would sip whiskey from his flask, smoke pot, hook big browns. He’s right.”
“Of course he is. But that was way back then—a sixties thing.”
“Seventies and eighties, too.”
“You did?”
“Except I didn’t inhale.”
“Very funny. Verlyn used to, and not only at night on the river. I didn’t want to run the risk, not with my job. Calvin and I were about the sole holdouts.” Mercy turned, looked at Fitzgerald over the rim of her glass. “I didn’t know you back then, a pothead.”
“It didn’t amount to anything. Nothing to excess. It was just part of night fishing on the river, a little pot, a little whiskey, big browns, breakfast the next morning at the Black Duck in Kinnich.”
“So what’s Calvin wondering about?”
“If he tells Stroud about Charlie, Stroud might put two and two together and realize Charlie’s friends on the river, meaning me and Verlyn, were smoking, too. He’d know Calvin wasn’t, Calvin being Calvin. Point is, Calvin doesn’t want to get us in trouble with Stroud.”
“What trouble? Stroud wasn’t the sheriff back then. And he wouldn’t care anyway. For all we know he was smoking himself.”
“But you know Calvin. You look at him, you could believe he’s an outlaw. In fact, you exclude his views on private property, he’s probably the most law-abiding citizen in Tamarack County. He doesn’t want to get us on Stroud’s bad side.”
“That’s just dumb. He knows Verlyn’s always on Stroud’s bad side.”
“There’s more. He’s got it in his head—from the reading he does—that every crime these days is drug related. So he assumes Charlie’s killing must be. And he thinks he knows where Charlie got his pot. Down at Ferris State. Big Rapids is a college town, and in college towns you can get drugs anywhere you want. So Calvin thinks Charlie brought a stash up from Big Rapids, smoked on the river at night, somebody noticed, killed Charlie for the stash.”
“Good Lord.”
“I told Calvin there’s one big flaw in his reasoning: Charlie didn’t smoke pot anymore. All he did at night on the river was sip whiskey, puff on his pipe. Plain tobacco. If Charlie was still smoking pot, we’d all know because we fished with him.”
“What did Calvin say to that?”
“That we’re all getting old. We don’t remember so well.”
“Good Lord.”
“Anyway, I told Calvin that if it made him feel better, he doesn’t have to worry about getting anyone into trouble with the law for smoking in the past.”
“So now we’ve got two,” Mercy said, “dead ends. Theona Orr had nothing to do with Charlie’s death, neither did drugs. That leaves Alec Proffit.”
“Now I’ll tell you what I learned,” Fitzgerald said.
* * *
FIRST THEY ATE at the trestle table in the kitchen—Spanish omelets, garden salad, half a bottle of chilled Sauvignon Blanc. Fitzgerald made coffee afterward, and they took their mugs out to the deck, the light purple-shadowed over the dark tips of the pines.
“I never knew Will Woodsman was a pen name,” Mercy said after Fitzgerald told her what Hoke Harkness at the Free Press had learned about Alec Proffit. “No reason I would, I suppose. And I’ve never heard about Peter Allston as a novelist. You’d think I might, given all the books he’s published.”
“Maybe they didn’t sell well. But Charlie might have known about Proffit,” Fitzgerald said, “given the amount he read.”
“So you think there’s some connection? Because Charlie would have known?”
“I don’t know. All we know is that an outdoor writer and novelist comes here from Vermont, camps near Charlie, takes notes about Charlie, even goes down to Big Rapids, then turns up missing the moment Charlie is killed.”
“But he didn’t just vanish. The tent, all his things, they’re still there. Even the notebook was.” Mercy paused. “There’s another possibility, you know. Maybe Proffit hasn’t vanished. Maybe he’s dead, too.”
“But why?”
“No idea. But with his camp still there, it makes you wonder. Maybe he and Charlie were both killed and it’s just that Proffit’s body hasn’t been found yet.”
“Charlie’s body was inside his tent. Why would Proffit’s be elsewhere?”
Mercy waved an impatient hand through the darkening air. “This is silly, Fitzgerald. All we know for sure is that Proffit made notes about Charlie and now he’s m
issing. We don’t know another thing.”
Fitzgerald gazed into the black pine wall below the deck and said, “We know how much Proffit has published.”
“What difference does that make?”
“None as far as Charlie’s death is concerned. A helluva lot, tell you the truth, to me.” Fitzgerald meant to go on, bare his nonwriting writer’s soul. It seemed a good time to do so: on the deck, in the darkness of a soft evening, disabusing Mercy of any misconceptions she had about his prospects as a writer. All his writing had been done for newspapers, which in a way wasn’t writing at all—what people ordinarily thought of as writing. It was just words. It wasn’t writing that ended up in public libraries, the way Alec Proffit’s did, even though his novels hadn’t made it into Ossning’s. Fitzgerald was about to confess to Mercy the relief he had felt discovering that, when the telephone rang inside the A-frame.“Big night,” Mercy said as she left the deck.
* * *
“You won’t believe this. I don’t believe it.” Mercy slid heavily into the chair beside Fitzgerald. “You know what time it is?”
“I can’t see my watch.”
“I saw inside. Half past ten. That was Theona Orr.”
“What about?”
“You won’t believe this. She took me down in the basement of their house, showed me Charlie’s tying table, all the rods he’d wrapped. She wanted to know what to do with everything, meaning how to get rid of it. I suggested she could give it all to the TU chapter for the auction. Charlie’s friends would be honored to have something of his.”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t tell you. It seemed too sad seeing Charlie’s things stuck down in the basement, Theona not giving a damn. It gave me the shivers, frankly, two people living together like that, not caring.”
“All marriages are mysterious.”
“Oh, I know. Maybe it wasn’t the way it seemed. Maybe it was even worse. Anyway, Theona agreed when I suggested giving Charlie’s things to TU. Now it seems her daughter’s arrived from California, they’ve discussed it, and the daughter thinks it would be better to have a garage sale. That way, Theona said, they wouldn’t have to wait for the auction in the winter. The truth is, you ask me, the daughter wants to sell Charlie’s things rather than let Theona give them away. She wants the money. Talk about sad.”
“And Theona was calling at this hour to tell you?”
“While it was on her mind, she said. And before she went on her next Elderhostel trip. Good Lord. Charlie isn’t even buried yet.”
“When they have the garage sale, we ought to go down, buy up the whole lot, donate it to TU.”
“Get Calvin to go with you,” Mercy said. “Or Verlyn. I couldn’t face it.”
“I understand.”
Mercy reached through the darkness, took Fitzgerald’s hand, drew it to her. “Now, Fitzgerald. Now we go to bed.”
14
“SO HOW COME you dropped out of college?”
Startled, Kit said, “How’d you know I did?”
“You told me,” Gwendolyn said. “Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
They were moving side by side down the center of the river, heading to the spot where Gwendolyn had cast for brookies the day before. Ordinarily, Kit would fish his way downriver, taking his time, drifting an Olive Stimulator with a small Pheasant Tail nymph on a dropper, seeing what he might pick up against the wood piles, but he wanted Gwendolyn to have some action right away. She wasn’t likely to have any in the heavily fished-over water just below the Kabin Kamp.
Verlyn, leaving earlier in the morning for a float trip on the South Branch with Gwendolyn’s father, had been too preoccupied to instruct Kit on where to fish. He had managed to sneak a look at Gwendolyn, though, and Kit had noticed the high school haze reappear in his eyes. If it weren’t for the float trip with Gwendolyn’s father, he probably would have put Kit in charge of the fly shop, rushed off on another strange drive into Ossning. As it was, Kit guiding Gwendolyn, the shop had to be left for Jan to run, which brought a different look, sour, into Verlyn’s eyes.
“Well, you did.”
Kit could feel Gwendolyn glance at him, feel the sudden thrust-out angle of her chin beneath the blue cap. The look reminded him of Mercy: stubborn, independent. Gwendolyn might be quite a woman when she grew up. “I must have forgot. I’ve been hanging around old people too much.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t working for me,” Kit said, “that was the main reason. I wasn’t ready for college. I should have waited a year or two before I went. I might go back.”
“Where?”
“Where I was, probably. Central Michigan. I wouldn’t want to go as far as East Lansing or Ann Arbor.”
Gwendolyn was silent for a while. When they passed the spot where Calvin had positioned her to cast to the big brown, she didn’t seem to notice, and Kit didn’t call her attention to it. They were nearly around the bend, coming up on riffle water, when Gwendolyn stopped in the middle of the river and faced him.
“When will you?”
“Go back? It takes dough.”
“You can’t get some from your mom and dad?”
Kit smiled at the assumption behind Gwendolyn’s question. She was a rich kid whose parents would send her off to a rich kid’s college, so naturally she thought that was how the world turned for everyone. “Maybe. But I want to go on my own.”
To his surprise, Gwendolyn didn’t ask him why. She merely nodded. When Kit looked at her closely, he could see that something was on her mind, something narrowing her eyes, tightening her mouth. It was something that had been there, he realized, since she had brought up the subject of college.
“How come you want to know?” he asked her.
Gwendolyn ignored him. “I saw the sign in the fly shop about the reward. Did my dad give?”
“I think so.”
“Have other people?”
“Probably. Lots of people knew Charlie Orr.”
“Why don’t you find out how much they’ve given?”
Kit looked at her again. “Why?”
“Just because.” Then Gwendolyn said, “This is where the brookies were.”
* * *
MERCY GOT TO the office later than usual, but it was still surprising to find Burt Berry waiting in the outer office with Fern Lax. According to Billie, Burt usually slept in during the mornings.
“That’s so,” Burt said when Mercy asked him about it, “after I’m night fishing. Not last night, the way Billie is.”
“It’s good of you to stay with her.”
“Had to come to town for supplies,” Burt said. “Thought maybe I should stop in, have a talk.”
Mercy brought him into her office, got him settled in a chair across the desk. “About Billie?”
“Campground. The sheriff won’t let us open up yet.”
“He’s still investigating.”
“I was thinking we could open the first loop, keep the second closed off. Deputy out there says to keep the whole thing closed.”
“It’s in the sheriff’s hands,” Mercy said.
“He’s in charge of the campground?”
“Until the investigation’s complete.”
Burt nodded, looked up at the tiled ceiling, made no movement to leave. “Something else?” Mercy asked him. She still hadn’t figured out why he’d come here. She vaguely wondered if it was to confess. For Billie’s sake she hoped not. She’d been through enough.
“Doesn’t feel right, campground shut down like that, nothing for Billie and me to do. The sheriff let the old couple and the young family leave. It’s empty out there.”
“I suppose,” Mercy said carefully, “the campground will be kept closed until the missing camper is found.”
“No sign of him.”
“So I understand.”
“Deputy out there won’t say a thing.”
“Sheriff’s orders, no doubt.”
“They f
igure he’s the one broke into the cabin, shot Charlie with the stolen gun?”
Mercy said, “How do you know about the break-in?”
“It’s in the Call. Paper’s out this morning.”
“I haven’t seen it. But naturally the sheriff wonders why the camper’s missing. It’s strange.”
“You bet,” Burt said, “fellow all that way from Vermont.”
Mercy said nothing, letting Burt hear the silence in the office. He kept looking at his hands, then the ceiling tile, back to his hands. “The Call,” he said finally, “has it a reward’s out.”
“So I hear.”
“Didn’t say how much.”
Was that what was on Burt’s mind, Mercy wondered, the possibility of earning the reward? If so, he would have to come up with something more useful than the sound of firecrackers on the night of Charlie’s murder. “The amount probably isn’t settled yet.”
“Paper says Calvin McCann and Verlyn Kelso are getting up the money. Probably won’t be much.”
“We’ll have to see.”
Burt nodded. “Billie and me, then, we go on like before?”
“I don’t understand, Burt.”
“Nobody around, but we keep on as hosts?”
“Is that what you came in to ask? Of course you do.”
“We weren’t so sure, place empty that way.”
Mercy looked closely at Burt. After Shroud’s initial theory, he seemed not to have kept Burt very high on his list of suspects. But here was an opportunity to explore Burt’s frame of mind. She decided to take advantage of it.
“So how’s Billie doing, Burt? Really doing.”
“Oh, about the best you could expect.”
“She must have been close with Charlie to be taking it so hard,” she pushed on. “You know, beyond being the campground host. Did she know him well?”
“She told you about her visits with him?” Burt asked.
Mercy nodded. She waited for Burt to go on.
“She didn’t think I knew she had coffee with the Odd Fellow in the morning, but I did.” Burt gave a sad smile. “I think she kinda had a little thing for him. Put a little spark in her day. She’d be in a great mood by the time I woke up. I’ll miss that about him.”