by Rob Brunet
The article described how “a local volunteer fireman saved a beloved pet Lhasa Apso from certain death in a fatal fire that took the life of longtime Lakehurst resident, Ernst McCann.”
That, in itself, would have been enough to freak Danny out of his gourd. What really blew his mind, though, was the picture of the beaming volunteer firefighter. None other than Terry Miner. The dog lady was quoted as saying “I couldn’t see what he did because he went around to the other side of the cabin and the smoke was so thick, I thought he might have got caught in the fire himself.” Danny couldn’t tell whether she was talking about Terry or her dog. The article went on to say “Miner’s actions were nothing short of heroic.” The reporter practically suggested Ernst McCann might still be alive if only the local hero had arrived on scene sooner.
Terry Miner. A hero? Maybe in some sick and twisted dream. Even with four character-building years behind bars, Danny wasn’t prepared for this. He knew the universe had a dark, brutal, often nasty sense of humor. He could handle that. And Terry’s ability to slither through life unscathed was aggravating, for sure, but ultimately irrelevant. Now, however, the fucker was messing with Danny’s future, his retirement fund, and his mother’s health plan.
He tore the article from the paper and stared at the photo of Ernst McCann’s cabin, smoke rising from its twisted beams. He conjured up his own twisted headline: “Here is where Danny Grant hid $750,000 of biker money that nobody knows about.” He wondered how true that still was.
Sixteen
Judy Jackman spent the first couple of days after the fire trying to make the best of a sooty situation. From her four-room bungalow across the road, she could smell the sodden ash. Twice, she had noticed fresh smoke and scurried over with a bucket to put out small fires smoldering in the woods near the cabin. At night, she slept fitfully, leaping to the window whenever Wort snuffled or she heard a twig crack outside her open window.
By day, she attacked the ashen mess with a pitchfork and a long-handled spade. Ernie’s yard was, after all, her view, a once romantic tableau anchored by a well-worn log cabin with a rusted red roof perched on the side of a hill overlooking Pigeon Lake. Blue water peeked between the mixed pine and maple trees that surrounded the cabin. With the cabin destroyed, she could see a little more of the lake, but mostly what she saw was a twisted pile of scorched metal and charred logs.
Next spring, she could toss wildflower seeds to create a meadow, a colorful new vista in Ernie’s memory. In the meantime, the raking was cathartic and helped her feel close to him.
In the year or so she had lived there, Ernie had always been kind to her. His gratitude for small favors was immense. If Judy picked up fallen branches from his laneway or the path which led down to the water so Ernie wouldn’t trip on them, he’d bring her a pie from the local pastry shop. Once, when she offered to sweep the pine needles off his roof so their acid wouldn’t ruin his shingles, he had called up the hardware store and had them deliver a safety ladder and a leaf blower to her home. Judy protested, but Ernie waved it off: “It’s for me, not for you, okay? I just don’t want to be worried you’ll fall and break your neck on my account.” And sometimes, when Judy would read him his mail, he’d try to pay her cash for her time. At that, she drew the line. He would shrug as if accepting her refusal, and then she’d find a twenty dollar bill stuck in her mailbox the next day.
With what remained of his eyesight, Ernie could make out large shapes and colors, but reading was out of the question. Perhaps because of that, he always knew when there was going to be a particularly spectacular sunset after a warm summer day. He’d call out for Judy to bring Wort down to his dock. There they would sit and watch the day slide into the evening until the mosquitoes drove them back inside, Judy giving the colors whimsical names and Ernie describing how the sun’s final heat chased the cool lake air across his cheeks.
Thinking about those evenings now as she raked, Judy paused and looked down the sloped yard to the dock. Tears filled her eyes but she forced a smile: she was grateful to have known Ernie. And her somewhat warped Buddhist bent suggested he might come back as an osprey. Judy wasn’t convinced human incarnation was all it was cracked up to be. Ernie, she felt sure, would rather spend summers soaring high above the lake able to see fish flash under the surface where others saw only the reflection of a blue sky.
Positive renewal was vital to Judy. Without it, she believed the world was headed to Hell in a hurry. She’d grown up with a fear of acid rain that gave way to hatred of PCBs only to be overcome by a deep conviction that the world’s ozone layer would scarcely outlast her thirtieth birthday. When that event had come and gone and Judy found she could still walk outside without spontaneously combusting, she mellowed a bit. She decided her contribution to the planet’s health would be more local in nature. With nothing in particular to keep her in the city, she packed her bags and rented a cabin in the country.
Wort made the transition easily enough, although the burrs and twigs and smellier forest detritus turned his long white coat into a matted mess that Judy had to clip off every few months in an evening of yelps and whining complaint. After the scissors, the doggie soap, and the dunking in ice cold water, the dog’s reward was getting snuggled extra close and not relegated to the foot of Judy’s bed.
It didn’t escape her attention that Wort was the only man in her life. It hadn’t been for lack of trying: she’d had at least a dozen relationships that could be termed “serious” and not one had been blessed with an anniversary dinner. Over the years, different men had told Judy she was too uptight about the planet’s ills, too easygoing about finances, a clean freak, a sloppy green enviro-leftist, clingy, overly independent, intimidating, and fragile. Wort alone offered Judy the two things she felt important in a relationship: consistency and forgiveness.
When her girlfriends in the city told Judy that her relationship with Wort stood in the way of her ever getting a good man to stick around, Judy’s only response had been to grow even closer to her dog. At least Wort didn’t constantly remind her of his superiority between bouts of emotional ineptitude. Until she moved to the country, it had been easy enough to hook up with one flame or another for an occasional evening out, or in. She’d even invited an old boyfriend out to her cabin once when she craved male attention shortly after moving up to the lake. After spending the weekend dabbing him with calamine lotion and listening to him moan about the lack of television, she decided it just wasn’t worth it. It’d be her and Wort until she was good and ready for a guy.
And then she’d met Ernie. A man who didn’t mind needing her help from time to time and who actually listened to her describe the difference between store bought kibble and the potato turnip meals she lovingly prepared for Wort. A man who wasn’t forever telling her what to think while showing no interest in what she did think. A man whose only disqualifying trait was that he was older than her father.
Standing now next to the soggy char that had claimed the life of the only really good man Judy had known in years, she leaned over and gently scratched the top of Wort’s head.
“You know, Wort, once they haul away all the metal to a scrapper, and we clean up the rest of the garbage, this place won’t look half bad, will it?” Wort barked in reply, stood up, and wagged his tail. “I’m even sort of glad Ernie’s outhouse didn’t burn down. All grey and worn and with those ferns growing around it, it looks kind of pretty, don’t you think?”
The Lhasa Apso snuffled, as if to say he wasn’t convinced Ernie’s shitter—or any shitter, for that matter—could be called pretty. The dog underlined his point by strolling over to the four-foot-wide structure and lifting his leg.
“Tsk, tsk,” Judy said. Over the past two days, Wort had followed her even more closely than normal whenever she went outside. She could tell he was as shaken up by things as she was. It wasn’t surprising: he had nearly died in the fire, after all.
She kept replaying the events from the day of the fire over and over in her mi
nd. Calling 911, battling the flames with the garden hose, calling out to Ernie over and over and praying all the while that he had slipped into town without her noticing. And then that local yokel fireboy. Two days later, Judy still wasn’t quite sure what to make of Terry Miner. Once he had pulled on the regulation jacket, pants, and big rubber boots, he looked just as handsome, purposeful, and downright virile as the rest of the volunteer firemen. When she tried to ask him what had happened with Wort, he appeared bashful. Almost humble, she thought. And he seemed to work every bit as hard as the other firemen to control the inferno that eventually consumed the log cabin. In fact, Terry seemed positively passionate about fighting the fire. Twice, Judy overheard him asking the chief if he could get called on “real fires like this one” more often. Later, when a pretty blond reporter showed up from the local newspaper, she overheard Terry decline to accept the accolades the woman tried to heap on him; though she did notice he was the only fireman who stopped his work to chat with the reporter at all.
All in all, he seemed like a somewhat goofy guy who had failed to grow up properly; Judy had known plenty of those. With his dirty blond hair, longish eyelashes, and crooked grin, he was certainly good looking—in a Bad Boy kind of way—though he looked like he’d go to seed pretty bad before too long; he already had a bit of a donut roll above his waistline. What turned Judy’s stomach, though, was what Terry had asked her when the fire was nearly out and the other firemen were venturing carefully among the still smoking timbers with their pike poles, trying to determine whether Ernst McCann’s corpse was among the rubble.
Terry had sauntered over to where she leaned against a tree, Wort on her lap. She was still being observed by a pair of paramedics. Terry pulled a cigarette from his pack and raised his eyebrows at Judy in question: “What are you doing for dinner tonight?”
Creep, Judy had thought at the time.
Low-life creep, she thought again now as she raked the cold coals around the edges of the collapsed cabin. “Guys like him are why we live alone, Wort. There’s creeps and then there’s guys whose friends are creeps. Show me a guy who is creep-free and I’ll show you a...a...an anomaly. That’s what I’ll show you, Wort! And then, well, we’ll just see, won’t we?”
Wort snuffled. He was licking a large disc of wood that had somehow escaped the fire. Judy recognized it as Ernie’s coffee table.
“You like that, Wort? The tree it was cut from must have been over a hundred years old. Should we roll it home, Wort? Something to remember Ernie by? He was no creep, was he, Wort? He was a kind man. And old. And alone. That’s right, Wort. Ernie was alone because he wasn’t a creep and he had no creep friends, which meant he had no friends at all, eh Wort? See what I mean?”
She’d got the table up on edge when a bright yellow Jeep pulled up at the side of the road. The driver’s hiking boots were a strange match for her crisp blue suit, but they made sense in the ashen muck. She had black hair pulled back in a bun so tight it stretched her eyes up at the corners. Her lips were as thin as the rest of her and they barely moved when she spoke.
“What are you doing? You can’t be here! This is a fire scene! It’s private property!”
Wort squared his front haunches, glared at the intruder, and growled.
“Good afternoon to you, too, Linette. So nice of you to drop by.” Judy felt her chest tighten involuntarily in anger. There was nothing pleasant, nice, or good about Linette Paquin.
“You simply cannot be here.” The lawyer was bleating. Actually bleating. Like a goat. “You...you...this is completely inappropriate. There was a fire here, you know, and, well, there has to be an investigation, and, just what are you doing with that rake, anyway?”
“Trying to clean up a little,” Judy said. “It’s what Ernie would want. What are you doing here?” She snapped the rake away as Linette lunged for it. Wort barked in protest.
“You...you...you cannot possibly be serious about cleaning up the scene of a fire. I mean, a man died here. Show some respect. What if there is an investigation that has to happen? What caused the fire? What if it was arson? You could be destroying evidence.”
Judy knew lawyers could obsess about “the rules,” carry logic to extremes, and make rationality seem positively irrational, but this woman was way off the deep end.
“Linette, I really don’t see how this fire is any of your concern. I’m Ernie’s neighbor, and I am cleaning up, which is more than you’ll ever do here. Don’t think just because Ernie’s dead you can get your claws into his property. He told me he would sooner see his land slide into the lake than let you build some monster home on it and block out the sky.”
She had seen Linette’s yellow Jeep parked in front of Ernie’s cabin at least half a dozen times since moving in. Once, she went outside and heard shouts drift across the way. When she asked, Ernie said the lawyer was hounding him, trying to buy his land. “She’s relentless,” he told Judy. “And nasty. The crazy bat accuses me of hogging the best view on the lake when I can’t enjoy it myself.”
Watching Linette sputter, Judy said, “I think maybe you should leave. Ernie wouldn’t want you here.”
“Well he isn’t here to tell me himself now, is he?” Linette stomped through the ashes, kicking at remnants of the old man’s furniture. Wort darted back and forth around the edges of the fire heap. He snorted, growled, and barked in his lowest voice.
Linette picked up a twisted piece of metal that looked like it might have been part of the screen door and used it to poke among the ashes. Judy asked what she was looking for.
“Nothing! I’m not looking for anything. I’m poking, that’s what I’m doing. I’m poking to see that this here fire is good and out. You never know with these volunteer firemen. I’ll make sure this fire is absolutely extinguished and then I...that is...yes...I am going to buy this place and build my dream home right here. Yes, right on this very spot. Or over there.”
She stabbed the ash some more. Judy tried to go back to her raking, but her anger was making her arms shake.
“Linette,” she said as calmly as she could, her voice pinched and tight and an octave higher than normal. “I really think this is rude and inappropriate of you and I just think that...”
Judy never finished her sentence. As she spoke, Linette, wild-eyed, had started toward her, still clutching her metal spear. Wort held back just long enough and then leapt straight at Linette, jaws open as she reached the former cabin’s perimeter. His teeth grabbed hold of Linette’s blazer and he flapped wildly through the air as she shrieked and spun around in a vain effort to dislodge him. Wort hung on. She threw down the hunk of metal and bolted for her Jeep.
Judy ran behind, waving her rake. Wort sprang from the car window as Linette peeled away in a shower of dirt.
“That woman is nasty, Wort,” Judy said, dropping the rake to scoop him up. “We’ll never let her live here. That woman is a...you know what, Wort? I think that woman is a creep in lawyer’s clothing.”
The dog, momentarily silent, licked her face.
Danny left the diner hell-bent on doing something. Exactly what, he had no idea
Ernie’s cabin had been torched; he was sure of it. Somehow, the Libidos had connected Ernie to Danny to the cash. The newspaper article suggested foul play wasn’t being ruled out, and only a particularly foul kind of person could ever do anything nasty to someone as harmless as Ernie McCann. Like a Libidos lieutenant keen on extracting information. He felt chill. It hit him like a baseball bat between the eyes that his window of opportunity would run out sooner than the three months he had left until full parole.
Even if he was wrong about the Libidos, Ernie’s cabin was on a primo location on Pigeon Lake. It would take no time at all for whoever inherited the land to sell it. Some fat cat from the city would buy the two acres with three hundred pointed feet of pristine waterfront and bulldoze the hell out of it. Either some lucky sap on a backend loader would find the satchel full of cash or it would wind up buried under a concrete b
asement floor.
Danny considered his options, none too good. He could wait and hope that by some miracle Ernie McCann’s cabin property would remain undisturbed until the Correctional Service of Canada decided in its wisdom that Danny was ready to return to society. He could try to scramble to and from Pigeon Lake during his next eight hours of day parole—but where would he hide the bag of cash once he retrieved it? He couldn’t exactly take it back to his room at the Handcuff Hilton.
Or, he could run.
After all, wasn’t that what day parole was about? To find out whether a convict would run? You couldn’t really call it escaping. “Escape” conjured up images of desperate criminals prepared to dig tunnels with spoons and fingernails. Or hide in putrid laundry bags. Or perform strange sex acts on prison guards for a chance to get outside the wall. Walking away from day parole required nothing more than not showing up at the station at the end of your afternoon at the movies.
Since Danny had no job, his next day parole excursion might not happen for another two weeks. Waiting that long would be, well, unnecessary. He made up his mind and strolled over to the Kingston Bus Station.
Someone else could bunk with Carson tonight.
Seventeen
Buzz Meckler, Ticket Counter Associate for Kingston Greyhound, tidied his stack of ticket blanks, moved his stapler from the left side of his ticket wicket to the right hand side and then back left. He considered moving it to the right again but instead turned it around so that the end with the teeth faced him. He reached across with his right hand and tapped it lightly, satisfied that he had determined the right position. Letting out a small sigh of accomplishment, he tapped it again, a little harder this time, and flinched when the stapler spat out a crushed and spoiled staple.