PART XV: The Final Dance
Chapter 88
The waters of Quabbin Reservoir lapped over the blacktop where Enfield Road vanished from sight. In bright sunlight, you could see for several yards where the road continued, its thick black line wavering through the prism of undulating water. But tonight, with the last light of evening fading in the west, little of the road was visible past the small humps of blacktop that marked the boundary of water and road.
Blake swung the bow of the Old Towne Tripper canoe into the water and waited while Lester Carlson, still puffing from exertion, dropped the other end of the canoe on soft sand near the water’s edge. Lester Carlson sat down heavily on a large rock, exhausted from carrying the canoe down Enfield Road.
Blake had wanted to do a one-man carry, the classic canoe portage, but Lester Carlson had insisted on helping, and it was his canoe. Blake didn’t want to refuse the help and make Lester Carlson look bad, but it would have been easier to just portage the 75 pound ABS plastic canoe himself. He did it all the time at his job in Ohio with the Audubon sanctuary. Get the weight of the yoke on your shoulders and then walk slowly. Easier than stumbling along on a dark, boulder-strewn road with another person, each of you trying to maneuver an end of the canoe.
Katherine came up from behind the canoe carrying two paddles and a small cooler. She had been following the canoe until she stopped at the five maples along the road. “We’ve got a nice moon coming up,” she said. “Less than a half moon, but with such a clear sky it’ll be bright.”
Blake looked skyward. The moon was a thin white scepter in a charcoal sky casting a pale light across the water. He motioned to the bow seat for Lester Carlson and then turned to Katherine. “You’re going to have to sit on a cushion in the middle.”
Katherine nodded and climbed in. Lester Carlson climbed in heavily in front rocking the canoe back and forth. Gingerly, he seated himself in the bow. Blake stood to one side of the canoe and gripping its gunwales pushed forward. As the stern slid into the water, Blake stepped into the canoe with his left foot, shoved off with his right foot, dropped to his seat and picked up a paddle, all in a single fluid motion.
The 17-foot canoe glided out into the dark waters of Quabbin Reservoir. Blake dug his paddle into the water and executed a J-stroke to swing the bow of the canoe east toward Great Quabbin Mountain where the beacon from the lookout tower blinked into the darkness—a single white light in the night.
“OK, we’re off,” Blake called. “Anybody want to sing sea chanteys with me?” He was feeling light-hearted. It was a fine night to be on the water in a canoe. Katherine and Lester Carlson both turned to look at him, but neither laughed. They were somber and preoccupied.
Blake paddled with efficient, muscular strokes. It was one thing he had always done better than Katherine. She was a better driver, better athlete, and certainly had a better job. But he was good with the outdoors and with the water. Blake glanced toward the bow of the canoe. Lester Carlson apparently wasn’t much with a canoe paddle. Maybe he would have been wiser to put Katherine with the bow paddle. They had 6 miles to paddle on quiet water with no current—a fairly long distance for an inexperienced paddler, and Lester Carlson was certainly in that category. He chopped at the water with his paddle, splashing water and banging the side of the canoe.
Blake contemplated a quick lesson—keep your back straight, dig the paddle into the water and in a rocking-chair motion draw it smoothly back. But it was too dark for any lessons, and besides, if Lester Carlson turned around in the canoe to watch Blake’s display of proper paddling technique, he might tip the canoe over.
“Where’s the beer,” Blake said instead.
“You’re going to have to pee,” Katherine said as she reached into the cooler and handed back a cold can of Rolling Rock beer.
“I’ll do it over the side. It’s been done before.”
“Sure,” Katherine said. “Your old friend Joe, right? Didn’t he fall in once doing that?”
Blake and Katherine both laughed and Lester Carlson turned to look at them. In the bow of the canoe, facing out toward the water, he couldn’t hear the conversation and had to look over his shoulder to participate. Katherine held up a can of beer and Lester Carlson took it.
“None for you?” Blake asked Katherine.
“Be a bit harder for me to pee over the side. I’ll wait till we get there.”
“One advantage to being a man,” Blake laughed as he took a long gulp of the cold beer.
“Yeah. And it’s about the only advantage I can think of,” Katherine replied.
Blake laughed again He leaned forward, dug his paddle into the water, and then pulled back relishing the firm sweep of the blade through water. At the midpoint of the stroke he rotated the near edge of the paddle blade so that as he finished the stroke the blade turned inward at an angle of 45 degrees to the canoe. It was a strong J-stroke and it held the canoe on a straight course, offsetting Lester Carlson’s flailing paddle strokes from the bow.
“Take your time, take your time,” Blake called ahead to Lester Carlson. “Be smooth. Don’t try to hurry. We’ve got a long way to go.” Blake was enjoying being in charge of this expedition where both Katherine and Lester Carlson depended on him.
He took another sip of beer and looked out over the water.
* * *
Chapter 89
The canoe glided over a vast violet and pink sheet of water. Overhead, the last rays of the sun, surrounded by a thin line of purple clouds, faded to black at the edges. Blake had studied the map back at the Enfield Road gate before he would even take the canoe off Lester Carlson’s car. It was over 6 miles to the foot of Curtis Hill where Katherine wanted to go. It was now just after 9 p.m. With an inexperienced paddler in the bow, an extra person in the middle, and no current to help push them along, he figured they would arrive at Curtis Hill in three hours. He’d come along because he had to. There was no way Katherine and Lester Carlson could ever paddle this canoe and get to Curtis Hill by midnight.
Blake took one more sip of cold beer and then began to paddle in earnest. It was a good night to be out in a canoe, the water was calm, stars were beginning to shine overhead, and the silence and deepening blackness of the reservoir created an illusion that they were paddling through a time warp into a different age. To the right, he could see the beacon light from Great Quabbin Mountain, but other than that light there was nothing out there. They were alone in the wilderness.
The early inhabitants of this region, the Native Americans must have felt something akin to this when they paddled their canoes on the lakes and ponds of New England. Quabbin Reservoir hadn’t been here, of course, but there were other great lakes in New England—Moosehead Lake in Maine and Lake Winnipesauke in New Hampshire, parts of mighty Lake Champlain in Vermont, where 5000 years ago humans paddled primitive rafts across those vast bodies of water that stretched silently into darkness—no electricity, no power boats, no other humans.
It was OK, Blake thought, this crazy request from Katherine and Lester Carlson to paddle out to Curtis Hill and hunt around for the missing coffin of Kevin Flanagan. Nothing was going to come of all this. That was a fact, but at least it gave him a chance to paddle the waters of Quabbin, something he wouldn’t have done otherwise. Of course, there was always the chance they’d get caught. The Quabbin police patrolled the reservoir, but at night they would have a hard time spotting a single canoe.
Blake dug his paddle into the water and let out a small whoop. Katherine turned from her seat on the cushion in the middle of the canoe to look at him.
“Enjoying yourself.”
“Hey, Kath. As long as you got me to come along on this crazy hunt of yours, I ‘m at least gonna have some fun.”
Lester Carlson looked back and laughed also. “I’ve been thinking,” he said raising his paddle and pausing. “McGovern was right, you know.”
Blake, in the stern, executed a J-stroke and the canoe glided left over the purple waters of Q
uabbin Reservoir. It was hard to have a real conversation in a canoe—the stern paddler looking forward at the bow paddler’s back; the bow paddler in front facing out and away. Lester Carlson though simply stopped paddling and half turned in his seat.
“One of the unchronicled tragedies of Vietnam is what was done to that man’s reputation when he dared challenge Nixon for the Presidency in ‘72’. McGovern was a genuine war hero, you know. Flew all these bomber mission in World War II. Nixon and those right-wing nuts around him painted McGovern as some sort of fuzzy-wuzzy ivory tower guy who didn’t know a thing about war. And none of them really served.”
“And that would have really been you. I mean in terms of never having fought,” Blake said without irony. Lester Carlson nodded.
“Yes, that would have been me. The CEO who came to war.” Lester Carlson was silent for a moment and then continued talking into the night. “McGovern had the credentials to speak out—to just say this whole thing was wrong. It’s amazing to me, looking back, that Nixon and his cronies were able to trash the man’s reputation so easily. That nobody wanted to listen.”
“Yup,” Blake said. “Everybody except Massachusetts. I remember after the vote thinking, ‘How can people really believe in some of these guys?’”
“Don’t blame me—I’m from Massachusetts.” Lester Carlson said with a laugh. “Popular bumper sticker of the day.”
“I still feel that way about Vietnam,” Blake said. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and you can take a lot of things away from me—blame a lot of things on me too. And you’d be right. But I’ll always have that. I was there. I was in Vietnam. And there is still a band of us brothers out there.”
Blake stopped paddling. A long wailing call cut through the night sounding halfway between a shrill yodel and a demented laugh. Lester Carlson jumped at the sound and Katherine turned to look at Blake. Blake listened closely as the call rent the night a second time.
“It’s a loon,” he announced. “Quabbin has some, I guess. I’ve wanted to hear one for years now. None of them around where we live in Ohio.”
The loon called again, its cry piercing the darkness behind them. After a moment, silence descended on the reservoir. Blake and Lester Carlson picked up their paddles and began paddling again across the dark waters of Quabbin Reservoir.
* * *
Chapter 90
It was 15 minutes before midnight when Blake steered the canoe into a small cove on Curtis Hill Island. Katherine had been glancing surreptitiously at her watch for the past 20 minutes, wanting badly to get to Curtis Hill, but not wanting to nag Blake who was doing most of the paddling. Lester Carlson’s hands had started to blister after the first hour, and his soft flailing paddle strokes from the bow of the canoe came increasingly further apart.
Blake had paddled hard and watched the stars overhead. He said little and concentrated on paddling while Katherine and Lester Carlson continued to talk quietly.
Their conversation had drifted back to him in snatches like radio music overhead in a line of stalled summer traffic. They talked mostly about the old days of Quabbin, the days before the reservoir. Blake wondered briefly what is must be like for Lester Carlson to be paddling over places he knew as a child. Once he saw Lester Carlson pointing down to the water and heard him telling Katherine that he thought they might be over the Enfield Common where his father’s grocery store once stood.
From the launch site at the end of Enfield Road, Blake had steered the canoe north across the water for a mile until Little Quabbin Island loomed ahead.
“Left of the island,” Lester Carlson called out. “I still remember some of these places.”
Blake had dug his paddle into the water and swung the canoe left through a narrow channel that separated Little Quabbin Island from Prescott Peninsula. Blake kept Prescott Peninsula in sight on his left and picked the Pole Star, Polaris, in the northern sky and paddled toward it. In this way he navigated across the dark water until finally Mount Pomeroy Island loomed up out of the darkness on his right. Curtis Hill was just beyond Pomeroy. Blake maneuvered the canoe to the west of Pomeroy, paddled hard for several hundred yards, then turned right and slid into a quiet cove on Curtis Hill.
The canoe bumped against the rocky shore and Lester Carlson jumped out too fast, almost upsetting the others. After Katherine scrambled out, Blake balanced himself and crab-walked his way to the bow and jumped from the canoe onto land. Blake bent and dragged the canoe up onto the rocks and then swung it sideways behind a large tree stump. He was taking no chances with the canoe floating off while they explored the island leaving them stranded and waving for help in the morning.
Above them, a stone building, the only building left in Quabbin Reservation, stood like an ancient Celtic ruin against the night sky. Blake and Katherine had visited Ireland on their honeymoon years ago—a land of stone ruins and old castles. There had been an old graveyard on a windy point of land overlooking a rocky inlet and down below the cold waters of the Irish Sea smashed against the chalky cliffs. A single stone building, its sides wizened with age and streaked with green alga and wispy vines, stood on the promontory overlooking the water, its windows and walls open to the wind which whistled coming off the sea. Behind the stone building and stretching across a series of small rolling hills was a cemetery full of ancient stones marking the graves of the English monks who had settled this rocky outcropping in the 12th century. Sky and water were all around.
Blake looked up now at the single stone building above him on a ledge on Curtis Hill Island.
“Hey Kath,” he said. “Remember Ireland? Remember the monks and the stone buildings and the sea?”
“Sure,” Katherine replied. “How could I ever forget? There was an abbey there,” she said turning to Lester Carlson. “The monks were there until the 16th century, for 400 years until they were suppressed. You stand there and see their gravestones and their stone monastery, and the sea. And you feel the desolation of the place, and how long ago they lived before fading away”
“Like here, you mean,” Lester Carlson said. “Like here.”
“You have to wonder what this place will be like in 100 years,” Blake said gesturing toward the dark waters of Quabbin.
Neither Katherine nor Lester Carlson replied. They were both staring off into the dark hills, locked now in their own private thoughts. Blake laughed to break the tension.
“Hey, am I being too quiet? Maybe that’s good. The ghost can’t get me.”
“I’m sorry, Hon. What did you say?” Katherine turned and touched his arm.
“Who knows,” Blake said. “In a hundred years this reservoir may be gone--sucked dry by Boston. But hey, let’s check this place out.” Blake took a few steps up the hill toward the dark stone building. Katherine and Lester Carlson followed.
At the top of the hill, they paused for a moment to look at the stone building. It’s front and rear walls were intact and culminated in graceful stone arches that rose above the rest of the crumbling building. In spots, the sides of the former clubhouse had fallen leaving gaps in the walls, but the spaces where the windows had been were still intact giving the gray stone sides an almost finished look.
“Where was the cemetery?” Katherine asked.
Lester Carlson pointed to the ground above the stone building were a line of spindly pines stretched across a dark ridge.
“So, we start here and then check the cemetery.” Katherine said. She reached into her bag and brought out three flashlights. She handed one each to Blake and Lester Carlson. The night was clear and the faint light of the moon illuminated the stone building in a chiaroscuro of ridges and shadows.
Cautiously, Blake stepped up to the opening of what had been a door into the stone building. He touched the stones, large gray rocks, uncut and cemented together and still solid after these many years of neglect. Katherine and Lester Carlson came up behind him.
Katherine stepped around Blake and snapped on her flashlight. Its beam cut through the shado
ws and dark corners. The stone building was narrow and rectangular, perhaps 60 feet long. One sweep of the flashlight revealed its emptiness. Even Blake, though he had known there would be nothing here, felt relief.
They stood in silence for several seconds. Though he couldn’t see their features, Blake sensed a deflation in both Katherine and Lester Carlson.
“I’m going to circle around this island and see if there’s anything else interesting here while you two check out the cemetery,” he said. “It’s an interesting old building, but I like to poke around. And hey,” Blake said, “At least give me credit. I haven’t even said I told you so—yet.”
“Well you just did,” Katherine shot back. She had felt her own surge of relief when the flashlight revealed the stone building to be empty, but she was troubled. The missing coffin just had to be on this island.
Maybe, I just can’t stand to be wrong, she thought.
But if the bones of Kevin Flanagan weren’t here, where were they?
And what did that mean to her theory of an evil presence coming to this spot on the Summer Solstice?
Blake stepped out of the building. Though the stone building was roofless and open to the sky, he had felt hemmed in there. “I’m off. Be back in 20 minutes or so,” he called over his shoulder. Curtis Hill was not a large island—perhaps a half mile long and half that wide. He could explore most of it by simply walking along the shore.
It was best to walk around the island by himself, Blake reasoned. Katherine and Lester Carlson were obviously disappointed. They had encouraged and believed each other so much that now it was going to be hard to admit they were wrong and there was nothing out here.
No missing body.
No ghost.
Nothing except the trees and the water and the gray stones along the shore.
Something bad had happened to Katherine, and Lester Carlson probably did have hallucinations. But there was no ghost.
Faces in the Night Page 32