67

AT THE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL IN DULUTH, THE DOCTORS attending David held him the better part of two weeks for observation. He was badly dehydrated and three of his ribs had been fractured, which they only taped, while measures were taken to save Janie, who was battling an infection that had spread to her kidneys and liver. She’d bloated, the infection having traveled to her lymph glands, too, and she was feverish, her skin having a waxy pallor, and turned from side to side, called for David, but when he tried to reassure her, talk to her, she was not there, only pumped her legs, running in the bed in her catatonia, whimpering, and shuddering, and the police had nearly to threaten David to get him away from her side, and even then, he was uncommunicative and unwilling to be of much help.

And Rachel was not making matters easier, either. She had driven up to Duluth the afternoon they’d come in, and was staying at the Radisson, and when David saw her, in the hospital, she was in her most severe blue skirt and jacket, always a scarf tied around her neck, businesslike, no nonsense.

At first this put David off, but, studying his own face in the mirror of his hospital bathroom cabinet, after she’d left for the evening, his eyes flat, and showing nothing, he’d understood, and as the two weeks went by, he came to fear what would happen when they left the hospital, when they were alone and in the house in Edina.

But, until then, there was the police, and all their questions, to think about.

The police wasted no time, and as soon as David had gotten a clean bill of health, and Rachel had an attorney up to guide David, and to deal with the suits that had been filed against them, against Max’s estate, David had gone off to the station downtown, riding in the back of the patrol car, the car smelling of cigarettes, and sweat, and the attorney Rachel had hired sitting beside him, in somber blue, Morrie. Morrie he’d spoken with at length in the hospital, until Morrie had ascertained that there was no reason David shouldn’t talk to the police, and they paralleled Lake Superior, and where the avenues intersected, David looked off onto it, the lake so large, and broad, and endless, it seemed more a cold gray ocean than a lake.

At the station, in a smallish room, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, and the walls down to the baseboards white, perforated, so the room was especially quiet, David sat, Rachel on his left, Morrie on his right, two officers and a court reporter taking seats across from them at the table. But they did not begin, and the officer in charge glanced up at the large, bland clock on the far wall—the kind used in schools, a Waltham, with arms like black needles—and made notes, and at precisely ten, another man, tall, and with dark eyes, and lines on either side of his mouth, stepped into the room, pulling the door shut behind him and sitting, far end left.

“Walter Meyer,” he said, “representative for—” and he named an insurance company.

The policeman across from David, who had a habit of pulling at the sideburn on the left side of his face, glanced up and began it.

There was all that with where he, David, had first seen the men, and how many there had been, and would he describe them, and did he get their names.

“And why were they arguing, your father and the men?” the officer asked.

David, surprised at this turn in the questioning, told them he hadn’t known, since he was off at the outfitter’s and had only returned to find them in the middle of it.

“Would you say your father provoked them?”

“Provoked them?”

Morrie, the attorney Rachel had brought in, nodded, and David said, “He was responding to something. I don’t know what it was, but they were all pretty hot about it.”

“But it must have been enough so that your father’d change his plans, give one itinerary at the headwaters office, and then go off elsewhere.”

“I didn’t argue with him about things like that. Nobody did.”

“You didn’t say anything to him?”

David shook his head. “I was happy to be out of there myself.”

“But it wasn’t enough for your father to get out the gun he’d put in the stern ballast compartment of the canoe. He didn’t do that—earlier, I mean?”

David felt a rush of blood to his face. His eyes felt hot, and thick, and that dull feeling he’d had for days was lost in a rush, and he couldn’t breathe.

The gun he’d put in the stern ballast compartment?

“Did he?” the officer said, pushing now, his voice noticeably edgy.

David struggled not to shudder, a chill running up his back. Was that why Max had gotten so out of control, arguing with those men? Got wound up the way he was on the trip, and David giving him trouble, and all that there between them?

Your father, Gaiwin had said, was he a little . . . louder than usual maybe, a little tougher? He make any kind of threats when you came in—what, down there in Ely?

“Did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Did he get the gun out earlier?” the officer said again, now the subtle edge in his voice cutting. The officer slid a gun in a plastic bag across the table. “This is the gun, isn’t it? Your father’s gun that you fired through the windshield of the Hoffarbers’ Chrysler?”

David said he thought it was. He’d dropped it there on the ice, assumed Cliff Hoffarber had picked it up.

“You think it is?”

“Well, I can’t be sure.”

“You can’t?”

“Thirty-eight Specials like that are all pretty much the same,” David said.

“It’s registered to your father.”

David was going to answer that, yes, then it had to be the gun, but Morrie touched his arm.

“I’d like a word with my client,” he said.

They went out of the room, into the hall, and Morrie bent over him.

“They’re trying to show that the attack was motivated by threat, one your father supplied. Or that your father acted first. They’re going to go after your father now, and have him waving that gun around in their faces. Did he? Did he do that? Make threats, or even—did he fire the gun?”

“I already told you he didn’t,” David said.

David had told Morrie all of it, how the two men, Penry and Stacey Lawton, had attacked them on the island. How Munson had appeared at the cabin and he’d cut him, so that he’d run off. How Penry’d come at him in the pink suit at the gas station.

And he’d made it clear to Morrie that he hadn’t known Cliff Hoffarber’d been coming at them to defend his wife, maybe even to help. He’d thought Cliff might be Munson, or this other man he’d seen earlier, Jack Carpenter.

Clearly, all his actions had been taken in self-defense, Morrie’d told him. “It’s a great defense, David,” he’d said, “the best. Self-defense. Nothing ambiguous about it. You got nothing to worry about, that is, if you’re telling me the truth.” David had assured Morrie that he was, and Morrie filed countersuits against Penry’s, Lawton’s, and Munson’s estates.

Civil suits that included damages, for attack and rape. “With civil suits,” Morrie told David, “you don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Still, the tangle of it, especially the allegations raised against him, stung.

“It’s no blot on your character these son of bitches came after you. You did what you had to do,” Morrie’d told him. “Don’t you ever forget that.”

But now he was giving David that X-ray look again.

“He didn’t—”

“No,” David said.

He could barely feel his legs under him, here, in this hallway, and all its congestion, a policewoman in full gear, blue uniform and Sam Browne belt and nightstick, going by so that he had to turn slightly, Morrie sidling in behind him, and a man glancing up at him from the water fountain midway, this look in his eye, sizing David up, Here was the kid who’d done it, he must have been thinking, nearly taken Penry’s head off with the hatchet, and then gutted him, belly to breastbone, and Morrie at his ear again, with his elbow pinched in his hand, and David was thinking, he was marveling, at what his . . . friend had done, the cabin he’d burned—the police had written that off to David having just incompetently left the kerosene heater going, which had started the fire, and burned everything around it, but not past the sand down to the shore where the two canoes sat, Munson’s, and their cedar canoe, cannibalized for the sled, and the compartment left for them to find, and make their assumptions over.

Max had had the gun in the stern flotation compartment. And how would they have known that with such clarity, unless Max had hidden a box of shells there, too?

The big man—Gaiwin—had left all that for the police.

And thinking it, David realized, his head as if in some fever, the gun had been there all along. From the first. And if he, David, had known . . .

Was that what Max had been trying to say in the cabin that night?

Gun?

“You’re sure now,” Morrie said. “Munson’s and Lawson’s wives are claiming your father attacked them out there, that they just passed the island you were on and your father opened fire.”

“What would they know about any of it?” David blurted, furious. “They weren’t there!”

“Stacey Lawton’s widow is claiming one of the men missing, Jack Carpenter, called her. Jack was her brother. She’s saying Jack called her from Ely and told her if he didn’t come back, to look into it. That he’d been threatened—there was somebody who might try to kill him.”

“I don’t get it,” David said.

“Listen,” Morrie said. “If your father got out of hand with that gun, so that you had to—”

David glared.

“If they win, you won’t have anything left,” Morrie said. “So if Max did something, you have to let me know. And now. You can’t protect him. Or you’ll be tied up in court so long, you’ll spend every dime you’ve got just trying to hang on to the house and what Max left you.”

It was this last thing Morrie said that made David look into his face.

“So, I’m asking you,” Morrie said. “Is there something about this gun, or how it all happened out there, that you’re not telling me? Because something tells me you’re lying.

“It just doesn’t all add up, David. And those policemen in there know it, too. Are you understanding me?”

David turned his head away. Down the hallway, a woman was at a desk typing, the staccato rhythm echoing up the tiled hallway.

He wanted to say, What things? What things don’t add up? Had they found something? Or was it just that it seemed implausible he’d survived? He and Janie had? And he saw now, even as they’d waited for the police to arrive at the gas station, the big man had headed back to the cabin, to make an end of it.

“Well,” Morrie said, “this is it, David, for all time, right now. Right here.”

He thought back to everything he’d told Morrie earlier, right down to how he’d cut Munson with the hatchet, which he had. And this Jack Carpenter’s whereabouts? He had no idea.

It was a good lie, his story, as it was very nearly the truth. And he had no idea why Penry’d killed Munson in back of the gas station, if it weren’t just that Munson’d figured out what Penry’d done.

Why should he know? And this man, Jack Carpenter, David had only seen on the porch that morning. So why were they assuming Max had had anything to do with him disappearing the way he had?

Glancing up at him, Morrie said now, “It’s going to get very, very complicated if you’re not telling me all that went on out there.”

“And I’m telling you,” David said, “I didn’t know the gun was there, never so much as saw it until I took the canoe apart. Had to have been there the whole time.”

“It was just you then, at the cabin, and before—you and Janie and Max. Not anyone else. There wasn’t anyone else, right?”

David shook his head, his eyes on the yellow tiles in the wall opposite them.

So—

This had been the first question he’d been asked in the patrol car on the way down from the station, too, only this . . . Cliff Hoffarber had told the officer what he’d seen, blathering one moment that he was sure he’d seen someone in the trees, or something? and the next, contradicted himself, as if he couldn’t catch his breath, said, “I don’t know, I mean, I thought the kid was killing my wife down there, for Christ’s sake, that she was driving the car—I mean, it turned out she was in the car—”

And David, all the while, sitting in back in the wire cage, and watching the trees, and stone, and water go by, and the rain coming on, heavy, and the windshield wipers squeaking, said nothing.

“It was just you?” the officer had asked, craning his head around to look at David. Square face and hard eyes. “Right?” He seemed to want something from him. There was something sneaky about it, which made David all the more determined to say nothing.

“You’re sure what you’ve told me is the truth,” Morrie said.

David nodded. “I’m sure.”

And back in the conference room, or interrogation room, or whatever it was, he sat at the table with Morrie again, and told, all over again how Lawton and Penry had attacked them on the island, and then this Munson, at the cabin, and finally Penry, in the car, using the body of the station owner’s wife to get him to unload the .38, a trick, and they asked questions until it was lunchtime, about the shells.

How many had he fired? And David had to ask himself, Why were they asking? Had Max brought only part of a box of shells? And were they thinking those shells missing from the case had gone into Jack Carpenter, wherever he was?

And even that the police would be thinking these things made David furious, which was strange, given he felt almost nothing now—

But for Janie. Why wasn’t anyone saying anything about Janie, except Morrie? About what had been done to her?

And when they took a break, he sat in the hallway with Rachel on a bench and tried to eat a tuna sandwich he was given wrapped in wax paper, and he got halfway through it, and stood, going up the hallway to an officer who was smoking, the officer looking him up and down, but with a certain respect, then saw he wanted a cigarette, and seeing Rachel knew what this was all about, and seeing how she did not move her eyes from the wall in front of her, the officer smacked his pack on his palm and offered David a cigarette, clanking his Service lighter open and holding out the flame.

“Thanks,” David said, and he started up the hallway, and the officer watched him sit, and followed him, offering the pack to Rachel, and the lighter, and then went on down the hallway to an office and shut the door.

His back against the cold wall, David smoked, Rachel beside him, not moving, and his ash collecting on the floor so that David swept it under the bench, and it settled in him that this life started out there in the woods was not going to be easy.