Riverwatcher

by Ronald Weber

  “When he wrote to you about poaching?”

  “Let’s not beat about the bush. The proper term is plagiarism. Charlie had read Frank Forester as well as Will Woodsman. He realized I’d appropriated Forester’s work, changing only some of the archaic phrasing and punctuation. In his letter he reproduced several parallel passages. It was quite telling.”

  “He meant to expose you?”

  “He didn’t say. He didn’t even use the word—plagiarism. There was no indication he meant to contact the magazine or the publisher of the book collections.”

  “He wouldn’t have. Not Charlie.”

  “Perhaps not. But that wasn’t the point. He knew. I’d been found out.”

  Fitzgerald said, “As Will Woodsman, that pen name, you didn’t go out of your way to disguise the connection with Frank Forester.”

  Proffit appeared to smile inwardly. “Don’t criminals wish to be caught? Isn’t there some psychological nonsense to that effect? The truth is I greatly admire Forester. Will Woodsman—I chose the name, to the degree that I’m aware, as a form of homage to a distinguished predecessor.”

  “So you came out here, to Michigan, to see what Charlie meant to do with his discovery of the plagiarism?”

  Proffit shook his head. “That didn’t matter. I came out of curiosity. The return address on the letter was a state forest campground. I doubted mail would even be delivered to such an address. When I looked up the town he’d given in the address, Ossning, I found it was located on a notable trout stream. As I say, I was curious.”

  “Yet you never, after you came out here, met with Charlie.”

  “There was no need. I observed him from a distance in the campground and possibly on the river. If he’d checked with the campground hosts, he wouldn’t have associated my name on the registration form with Will Woodsman’s column, nor would he have associated my novels, if he knew them, with the name. And he had no reason to be alerted by my license plate, since he’d written to me in care of the magazine.”

  “You went down to Big Rapids as well.”

  “To see how Charlie lived when he wasn’t in the campground. That was all. I was filling in my curiosity.”

  Fitzgerald leaned across the table, again held Proffit’s eyes. “So you satisfied your curiosity about the man who discovered you were copying Frank Forester’s work in your magazine column.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all you wanted to do, learn about Charlie.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you learned all you needed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did you kill him?”

  *  *  *

  WHAT REACTION DID he expect? Fear? Anger? A burst, for a second time, of uncontrollable rage? Alec Proffit’s manner across the picnic table had been calm, measured, assured—yet now he was accused of murder. Fitzgerald searched Proffit’s face, waiting for the reaction that must come, at the same time cocked his ear for any sound emerging from the wall of pine beyond the campsite.

  How, out there, would Burt Berry react?

  For several moments Proffit said nothing. Then, slowly, he swung his head from side to side. When he spoke, his voice was unchanged. “I shouldn’t have. It was quite useless.”

  Fitzgerald repeated the word. “Useless.”

  “It changed nothing.”

  Fitzgerald felt his chest tighten. He forced himself to hold his hands clasped on the surface of the table, fingers clenched in a vise. “For Charlie it changed everything.”

  Again Proffit shook his head. “I was speaking of myself. Nothing was changed for me. I thought you might understand, a fellow writer.”

  “Would-be writer.”

  “For a deluded instant I tried to escape my fate. That sounds overly grand, yet it captures the way I felt. That night I came back late from following Charlie on the river. What I told the sheriff was true. I hooked some fine browns, allowed myself to become engaged in the fishing. When I returned to the campground, Charlie was here, light coming from his campsite. I felt drawn to it. When I approached the site, I could see a form clearly illuminated inside the tent, stretched out on a cot, reading by lantern light. Instantly, I decided to kill him. It was a thought that hadn’t, at any prior point, entered my mind. It wasn’t Charlie himself I wished to kill. I had no feeling for him one way or another. It was what he represented—a man reading. I wished to rid the world of that.”

  Proffit’s eyes shifted from Fitzgerald, seemed to penetrate the trees at the edge of the campsite. When he looked back, a faint smile had emerged on his face.

  “A strange hope, wouldn’t you agree, for a writer? In any case, it was totally irrational. Yet I acted upon it. I came back to my campsite, took a shotgun from my vehicle, walked back to the tent, fired both barrels at the reclining form. Charlie’s life, I presumed, was instantly extinguished, yet his lantern was not. I stood there for some time, immobile, watching the light continue to glow. Continuing to mock me. Standing there, outside the tent, the light glowing, I understood the hopelessness of what I’d done.”

  Fitzgerald felt his fingers grow numb. He tried to ease his grip, to keep looking back steadily at Proffit, to repress fury from his voice. “If you didn’t plan on killing Charlie, why did you have the shotgun?”

  “A precaution when I’m camping. Nothing more. Until the moment I removed it, I’d nearly forgotten it was in my car.”

  “And afterward?”

  “I replaced it.”

  “The sheriff searched your campsite. He found your notebook in the tent.”

  “I’d driven off, so the car couldn’t be searched. I drove to a café, then a motel in town.”

  “From the motel you came to the sheriff’s office. Why did you?”

  The smile faded from Proffit’s face. “You don’t understand, do you? You really don’t see.”

  Fitzgerald said nothing.

  “I’ve already told you. Killing Charlie was an attempt to escape my fate. Going to the sheriff was another. And equally irrational.”

  27

  FITZGERALD FORCED HIMSELF to hold his gaze on Alec Proffit’s face, not let it shift in the direction of a sound that, this moment, appeared to come from the pines enclosing the campsite. Had Burt, shifting position, snapped a fallen branch? Looking, Fitzgerald knew he would notice nothing in the dense growth. He had to keep believing Burt was out there. And close enough, if the time came, to help.

  Proffit gave no indication he had noticed the sound. His eyes across the table looked steadily at Fitzgerald yet seemed strangely unfocused. “You’re right,” Fitzgerald said to him. “I don’t understand.”

  Proffit raised his hands for a moment before returning them to the table. “Perhaps you can’t. Perhaps only a genuine writer can.”

  “Try me.”

  “In the motel I sought to concentrate my attention, yet my mind kept returning to Charlie’s tent. I kept seeing the lantern light, seeing its glow. The light had been meant to illumine words on a page—and from that my mind leaped to the letter Charlie had written me. Had he, I began to wonder, kept a copy? In the handwritten letter Charlie had gone to the painstaking effort of copying out the parallel passages in Frank Forester and Will Woodsman. He might have made an equal effort to duplicate his letter.

  “I knew I couldn’t return to his tent, search to see if a copy existed. Charlie’s body would have been discovered, the authorities would have sealed off the campsite. It occurred to me that the tent could be searched indirectly by turning myself in to the sheriff. I knew he’d be looking for me, someone who had been camping at Rainbow Run and was now missing. I assumed he might have entered my tent, discovered the notes about Charlie. By turning myself in I’d learn whether he had also found, in Charlie’s tent, a copy of the letter—the letter contradicting the one I’d tell him Charlie had written.

  “I left the motel for the sheriff’s office, told him my story. He said nothing about a copy, asking only about the original, which I told him
I had burned. That was the truth—I hardly wanted in my possession a letter demonstrating my plagiarism—but it had no importance. What mattered, so I chose to believe, was that the sheriff had no reason, from what he’d found in Charlie’s tent, to reject what I had told him. I could return to the campground, remaining there until the sheriff released me. I had escaped my fate.

  “It was impossible, of course. Eventually, someone else would find me out. I had given no thought to the books that might be discovered in Charlie’s tent. I thought only of a copy of the letter. Yet it didn’t matter. What Charlie had learned about me would be learned again. I knew that. There was no escape from myself, consequently no escape from my fate.”

  Fitzgerald said, “You keep saying that.”

  “And it keeps sounding overly grand, whereas the reality is merely sordid. That was what I was fleeing when I came to Rainbow Run in the first place. What I was fleeing when I killed Charlie and again when I left the motel for the sheriff’s office. I was fleeing the sordid business that must be done.” Proffit paused, looked closely at Fitzgerald. “You don’t understand this, either?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Let me show you something.”

  Proffit rose from the table, easily swung his legs over the seat. Fitzgerald’s impulse was to rise with him, follow. But Burt was out there, hidden in the pines, watching. If Fitzgerald moved as well, followed Proffit, Burt might overreact, might reveal himself. Or worse.

  From the table, Proffit crossed the packed dirt of the campsite to his tent, removed from inside a long gun case. Fitzgerald froze. His hands were locked to the edge of the table, but he couldn’t lift himself, couldn’t move. He stared at Proffit, walking back toward him now, the case—brown suede, leather trimmed—already unzipped along its length and carried horizontally by a pair of handles. He placed the case on the table, carefully took from it a double-barrel shotgun and extended it outward.

  Rapidly Fitzgerald calculated what Burt could see from the pines: one man seated, the other standing, looking down, shotgun in hand but holding it forward, displaying it. There was no threat—Burt could see that. Not yet there wasn’t. At the same time, Burt could conclude what Fitzgerald concluded: from the already opened case and the cautious way Proffit handled the gun, it could well be loaded.

  “Supreme craftsmanship,” Proffit was saying to him. “In its way, a work of art. You’re knowledgeable about shotguns? A Mossberg, .16 gauge, black walnut stock, used for upland bird shooting, the only hunting I do. A Sweet Sixteen, some call it. Yet this work of art left Charlie torn to pieces. It must have. I didn’t see the body. I spared myself that. But I imagined the horror there beside that mocking light. You employ a thing of beauty yet the result is sordid. From that reality there is no escape.”

  Fitzgerald tried to rise, fell back against the seat of the picnic table. “Wait,” he managed to say.

  “I kept the gun in the car when I went to the café and then the motel. I knew this was a risk, but there was more use for it. Then I hatched the idea of going to the sheriff’s office, telling him the story of the letter. It was possible the car would be searched while I was there. So I removed the gun to the motel room, concealed it, instructed the desk clerk not to make up the room until I returned. When I left the sheriff’s office, I placed the gun back in the car. It was never, you see, Charlie I meant to kill.”

  “Wait,” Fitzgerald repeated. “You copied Frank Forester in your columns. Okay. But not all the time. You couldn’t have. Much of the time it had to be your own work. It was good work. And you wrote novels that didn’t have anything to do with Forester. Right?”

  Proffit nodded.

  “So what’s it really matter? Probably every published writer poaches some words now and then. Nobody gets upset these days with something like that. Besides, Charlie wouldn’t have said anything. What he wrote you, it was between the two of you. That was his way. Charlie liked to organize the world, but he was always private about it. One on one. You could depend on Charlie keeping quiet.”

  “I told you,” Proffit said. “That wasn’t the issue. I knew.”

  “Hear me out.” Fitzgerald spoke rapidly, filling the air with his voice. “If you have to get it out in the open, write a column, tell what you did. Make a public apology. In the end, readers will think more of you, a man able to admit a mistake. They’ll forgive you.”

  “Possibly. But I can’t. And you’re forgetting something. I killed Charlie. That isn’t forgivable.”

  Fitzgerald dug his fingers into the edge of the table, began forcing himself upward. “The thing to do is let me drive you in to the sheriff. Tell him what you’ve told me. You’ll get legal counsel. You owe yourself that much.”

  Proffit shook his head.

  “But why not? You can’t just—”

  “I’ve waited too long. You’ve done me a favor, coming here this way. There’s no escape. Your presence makes that quite certain.”

  “I just wanted to talk. About the library books. That’s all.”

  “A writer finally brought to his senses by books. Appropriate.” Then Proffit repeated, “I’ve waited too long.”

  “Just do this,” Fitzgerald said. “Put the gun on the table. We’ll work from there. We’ll talk some more.”

  He was nearly standing now, the position awkward, half bent over the table, trying to swing his legs free from the seat without making a sudden movement. He had to stand. He had to face Proffit, close to him, in position to reach out for the gun. He had to try.

  He eased a leg over the bench, at the same instant heard the sound, certain this time, and caught the movement from the corner of his eye.

  “Wait!” he shouted, too late. Burt had stepped free of the cover of the pines. He was stumbling toward them, handgun extended.

  Fitzgerald saw Proffit’s head snap toward Burt, surprise in his eyes yet the faint smile returned to his lips. Saw him draw the gun inward, toward his chest, twin barrels directed upward. Saw him open his mouth, with fluid motion lean forward at the waist. Saw one hand reach, unerringly, for the trigger.

  Then Fitzgerald shut his eyes.

  28

  MERCY HAD INSTRUCTED Fern Lax to phone Fitzgerald at the A-frame at eight-thirty. During the night he had taken a sleeping pill at Mercy’s insistence and was fast asleep when she left for the DNR office at seven. Mercy had turned off the answering machine, and Fern was to keep ringing until Fitzgerald picked up the phone. She was to remind him of the news conference Willard Stroud had scheduled. Fitzgerald wasn’t required to attend, but Mercy thought it would be easiest for him if he did. Gus Thayer, for one, was certain to hound him for details of what had taken place at Rainbow Run.

  “I’m supposed to get you up,” Fern said when Fitzgerald answered on the first ring.

  “On my second cup of coffee.”

  “Mercy said you were dead to the world—” Fern nearly bit her tongue. “You know, really asleep.”

  “Until she left I was. I can’t sleep in an empty house.”

  “Some can.” Fern was about to tell him about her husband, Luther, who once slept through a tornado that hit a trailer court they were living in at the time. But there was something in Fitzgerald’s voice that stopped her. He sounded fully awake, yet he didn’t seem his usual self, which certainly wasn’t surprising given what he had been through. Mercy had given her some information about events at the campground, but she needn’t have. The story was all over town.

  “I’m supposed to remind you of the news conference.” She tried for a business-like tone. “It’s in the city-county building at eleven.” When Fitzgerald didn’t respond, she added, “There’s already TV from Traverse City here. A young woman came to the office, wanted to talk to Mercy. Mercy said there wouldn’t be anything to say until the news conference.”

  When Fitzgerald still didn’t respond, Fern said, “So you’ll be there?”

  “I will.”

  “Mercy said why don’t you come by here first. Yo
u can go over together.”

  “No need. I’ll meet her there.”

  “Good. I’ll let her know.” She knew she should end the conversation, but a question lingered, one she had wanted to ask the moment Fitzgerald answered her ring.

  “Are you okay?” Fern asked him.

  *  *  *

  THROUGH THE WINDOW behind the cash-register counter, Jan saw the Grand Cherokee pull into the parking area outside. She hurried to finish what she had started to do, removing the black-lettered reward sign from the fly shop wall. Fitzgerald didn’t need any reminders of what he had gone through the day before.

  When he entered, he smiled at her behind the counter, at the same time his eyes took in the rest of the shop. “Sorry,” she said, and brushed back loose strands of hair, “everybody’s out. You’re stuck with me.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “You’re sweet.” She asked then if he wanted coffee.

  “On my way to town. I thought I’d stop in.”

  Jan glanced at her watch. “You’re early—for the news conference.” She stopped herself. He didn’t need any reminders of that, either. On the other hand, maybe he needed someone to talk with about it. She doubted that Mercy, hard-bitten as a nail, provided much of a sympathetic shoulder to lean on.

  “C’mon,” she insisted, “have some coffee with me.” She went out the door behind the counter and came back into the shop with two plastic mugs. Fitzgerald was sitting at the fly-tying bench. She placed one mug in front of him, then went back behind the counter with the other, leaned her elbows on the glass top. “They were talking about the news conference on the radio. That’s how I know. And Calvin was in, telling about it.”

  “He’s guiding today?”

  Jan shook her head. “He didn’t have anything better to do. Verlyn had gone to town, and he and Kit were just hanging around the shop. So I told them to do something, go out fishing for a while, do anything. I’d watch the place. Calvin finally got in gear and took Kit downstream to a place where there’s supposed to be a big brown. Kit’s says it’s probably there but nobody can catch it, not even Calvin. To tell you the truth, I was glad to get them out of here. Kit especially. He’s down in the dumps. You know about Gwendolyn Underwood?”