Here is how the story ends: he buys an ax. It’s a Sears Craftsman ax and it feels right in his hands, smooth and heavy, and he has always been satisfied with his Craftsman table saw and belt sander. Affordable and reliable tools, that’s what he’s always liked. Chopping yourself some wood? the salesman asks, whose name pin says Jimmy Thirteen Years Outstanding Service. Yes, chopping some wood, he tells Jimmy, who smiles. As he signs the Visa charge slip, it strikes him that at some point a man starts to shape what he says to please. If he had started sometime before the final two days of his life, he wonders whether the story would end differently. Would he, for instance, be buying this ax? When he gets home, he stands the ax in the corner of the bedroom, then decides to move it to the basement because it seems cruel to alarm Diane, the woman he married four years ago after he drove Jo Verdyne forever from the lake. In a dark corner behind the furnace, he stands the ax against the cinder block foundation, next to the small wooden stool he had set there just yesterday to hold the straight razor that had once belonged to his father, who used to enjoy stropping it into a kind of fatal perfection. When he turns the blade softly against his hand, he marvels how, with the merest touch against his skin, a line of blood suddenly springs, and where that line begins is Black Heart, and where it ends is Cabin Girl.
Jo sat alone on the port side of the water taxi, where she’d be able to see up the north arm of Lake Temagami on her first trip back in sixteen years. Seal Rock, Devil Bay, Point of No Return—even Stone Maiden Cliff. Places where the wind would kick up suddenly and churn the water into threatening white caps, places where the steep rock discouraged casual climbers before they discovered the warm, breezy lookouts at the top, scented with mats of brown fallen pine needles. She knew the taxi would turn west and head across the wide channel by Bear Island, the Indian Reserve, before the landmarks from her childhood would come into view, but she liked the idea that Temagami had gone on without her all these years. Half her life had been spent elsewhere, after all. Despite what she thought when she was a barefoot eleven and learned to clean fish and run the skiff almost as well as old Will Stanley, the caretaker at the lodge. Despite what she thought when she was twelve and the Hackett boy had kissed her one night on the main dock only she wasn’t sure she liked it very much, even though she told him she did.
The water taxi Doral, with an outboard the size of a doghouse, sputtered through the No Wake zone at the landing, then flew her through the gap where the lake opened up, veering around shoals in a path rippled by a light wind from the southwest. The lake water, in some places hundreds of feet down to boulders left behind by the last Ice Age, was blue and green and gray, all the colors of clean and cold. She was five hours north of Toronto—and twelve hours north of Baltimore, where she taught baby chemistry for nine months a year at Johns Hopkins and had a townhouse she called home for want of a better term. It was May twenty-ninth, and according to Ellroy, the driver, who had the words skateboarding is tattooed on one chunky bicep and not a crime on the other, the ice had gone out late just two weeks ago. He smirked at her, like the information was sexy somehow, and turned back to his windshield.
Three years ago, her grandfather Carl Verdyne had died and left her the lodge Wendaban—a grand old two-story log building with eighteen rooms and a wraparound porch—which had been in the Verdyne family since 1904. Jimmy Stewart had fished there. Carole Lombard had lounged there. It had hosted titans and famous runaways and wonderful, wealthy derelicts who were looking for good food, drink, and a bed in a wilderness setting for a week. Those were the days of the great passenger boats that glided up and down the lake in a kind of ephemeral elegance. The days of fish crematoria, where all the uneaten bass and pickerel and lake trout were heaped and burned, days when an abundance of all things created only festive kinds of problems there in the Canadian Northwoods. Jo only heard about those days. By the time she was growing up, the movie stars were gone and the fish were an event, middle-class families from upstate New York were the guests, and the only wealthy derelicts who still came were completely uncelebrated.
For the first year after her grandfather’s death, she denied the place, let the employees go, and paid the taxes. For the second year, she howled silently at the pain of the inheritance, fretted about the former employees, and wondered just how much longer the one-hundred-year-old logs of Wendaban could stand without any human attention. There were a couple of faceless offers to buy, during this time, and it was only the possibility of letting Wendaban go out of the family forever that made Jo realize she could never do it. She was no lodge keeper, but maybe the beautiful Wendaban was no longer a lodge. In the third year after her grandfather left her the property where she had spent the first thirteen summers of her life—until the accident—or what she called the accident, the thing she could never name without capsizing into her own doubts—she gave up and hired a Toronto lawyer with expertise in setting up nonprofit organizations, a couple of Wendaban’s former employees, and twenty minutes ago, Ellroy the water taxi driver, who, according to his tattered business card, also provided firewood and laundry service: we get you there, then keep you warm and clean.
She moved into her grandfather’s old room on the first floor of the lodge because it got the morning sun, and she took the handle “Cabin Girl.” When we’re all grown up, Christine had said when they were twelve, we’ll have our own VHF radios, and you’ll be Heiress and I’ll be Cabin Girl and we’ll call each other all the time. Cabin Girl was all that was left of Christine, so Jo took it, though no one else knew why.
She put Kay Stanley, the old caretaker’s daughter—Will Stanley himself had died in his bungalow on Bear Island just two winters ago—in charge of day-to-day operations, calling in the right people to check the septic system, overhaul the old Wendaban boats, install the solar panels, deliver the propane that still fueled the interior of the lodge because Carl Verdyne had liked the feel of it. Kay moved soundlessly the way heavy people do, her short arms swinging, her eyes disappearing into her muscular cheeks when she smiled.
It was Kay who hired Luke Croy, a handyman on the lake, to replace the rotten boards on the wraparound porch. He arrived one morning in a blue steel open boat that held clean pine lumber, backlit by the sun that was just edging over the pointed tops of the fir trees so she couldn’t make out his face. When she could—Kay introduced them down at the dock—she could tell he was getting to be an old lake man even in his thirties, where all the colors of flashy city places settle over time and what’s left are the browns that make a man indistinguishable from the wilderness. His long hair was pulled back neatly into a ponytail; his skin had a bright kind of windburn. He wore a loose cotton shirt and a leather carpenter’s belt. She found his lack of conversation unsettling, so as he pried up the old boards with more care than she would have thought they deserved, Jo went back to sweeping the plank flooring of what was called the Grand Parlor at Wendaban. She kept an eye on him through the front windows as he measured and cut and sanded and hammered.
Over a week, Luke the silent handyman finished the porch repair and went to work on the roof over the kitchen, where water damage had blackened the logs. At lunchtime, he disappeared up the lake in his blue steel boat for an hour or so—“Eating his lunch?” Kay shrugged when Jo asked if she knew what he was doing—and the rest of them planned the gala fundraiser for what Jo hoped would become the Wendaban Center for Environmental Studies. She and Kay and Benoit, the prickly cook from Quebec that Kay had found, and Minette, a summer resident who was better connected on the lake than the hydro lines, were discussing whether it was more environmentally friendly to string Chinese lanterns or stake torchieres, when the first call came over the VHF radio.
“Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl,” the strange high voice leaped into the room from the small box Luke had installed on the mail table in the corner, “this is Black Heart. Over.”
Jo didn’t recognize the caller’s handle, but as she loped over to the microphone, she could see Kay frowning. “Black Heart, this is Cabin Girl. Over.”
“Cabin Girl—” It was a strained falsetto, not male, not female, filling every syllable with a kind of calculated insanity Jo had never known existed. “—tell them what you did to Christine.”
Tell them what you did to Christine.
She couldn’t tell them: she didn’t know. After sixteen years, she still didn’t know. Jo left the others sitting there and walked stiffly up the creaking stairs to her room—her old room on the second floor of Wendaban, the one she’d had for thirteen summers, on the sunset side of the lodge, next to the back stairs, where the logs sloped and her friend Christine, the nurse’s girl, would sneak in laughing in her long white batiste nightgown and crawl under the covers with her. At twelve they rubbed their feet together for warmth even in July because the Temagami nights were chilly. At thirteen they made tiny braids in each other’s hair and applied lipstick to each other’s lips and Jo told her how the Hackett boy had kissed her, which was okay, she guessed, if you like kissing a fish. Someday I’ll show you how it’s done, Christine sat back, erasing some of Jo’s lipstick with her pinkie—oh, not on me, silly, she was quick to say, on the mirror. Christine’s hair was white with moonlight as she flung herself back down on the mattress. I know because I used to follow my brother around before he went to live mostly with our dad. Then she folded her hands across her little breasts and smiled a smile that had nothing to do with Jo and her eyes only seemed to be looking up at the sloping logs but Jo knew she was looking right at whatever the knowledge was, which meant it was for real.
Tell them what you did to Christine.
Black Heart.
Someone named Black Heart knew how Jo ended up dressed only in a red shirt she had never in her life seen, floating unconscious in an old Wendaban skiff in the darkest part of the shallows, where the bay curved away from the lodge and the reeds were high, the night Christine died. Someone named Black Heart was saying it wasn’t an accident.
For three days, the only calls for Cabin Girl came from cottagers wondering whether Wendaban was open for dinner business. Otherwise, the VHF was a source of weather, messages relayed to youth camps from anxious parents wondering whether Johnny was managing without his teddy, and someone named Little Dorrit who sounded like she was a hundred giving a fruit and vegetable wish list to the long-suffering Irish Stu, who went into town on a regular basis.
The fundraiser was a month away, and in addition to the indispensable Minette, and Walter, the Tums-chewing Toronto lawyer, the planning circle now included Cheryl, an event planner, and Guy, the University of Toronto professor working on putting together a consortium for the Wendaban Center. Providing them all with beds and food for as long as they needed reminded Jo of the old Wendaban, when a tough orange tabby patrolled for mice, and chess and bridge were played nightly by hurricane lamps in the Grand Parlor.
Luke still stayed apart, stripping away the bad shingles over the kitchen—the day it rained hard he came inside and replaced a leaky seal around the toilet in #10—and when Jo climbed the ladder high enough to offer him a tumbler of lemonade, he shook his head, “Thanks, no,” and turned back to his work. For some reason, Luke was one of her failures.
Jo heard the boat just as the motor sputtered to a stop and she set down the framed enlargement of the famous photo of Wendaban in 1904 that she and Kay were mounting over the stone fireplace. It was a black-and-white shot that had found its way into any pictorial history of Lake Temagami: an Ojibway woman stood far back on the path leading up to the porch of the fine, solid lodge with its rough-hewn posts, set back in a stand of old growth pine in that decade before World War I. There was a grand stasis to the picture Jo always liked: everything was straight and plentiful then, the jobs, the money, the pleasures, the people. She went to the double front doors and peered through the screen.
A man had tied up a runabout and was standing on the main dock, his hands in his pockets, slowly looking around. Jo held up a hand to Benoit, who was griping to her in two languages about these paltry inexcusable framboises, and asked Kay to take a look. The man was wearing a white polo shirt and nylon khakis, and in the sun that wasn’t quite high enough yet, his skin was the olive gold that certain blonds have who get to spend a lot of time outdoors. When he moved over to the lamppost where the main dock abutted the rocky shore, she could tell it was the Hackett boy, some sixteen years after the experimental wet kisses in the same spot.
Tom Hackett.
Someone from those few summers before Christine died, when loon chicks slid on and off their mothers’ backs and mayflies rose by the thousands over the lake like soft weightless gold shavings in the twilight and she wore her frilly halter top and one pair of shorts she didn’t change for weeks because she was too busy chasing spotted toads into the woods until she either caught them or she didn’t, her belly brown and showing in all the days of those early summers, when Carl Verdyne played the mandolin and guests leaned, listening, nearby. Tom Hackett. As she got to him he dropped his sunglasses and she thought it strange she should be so happy to see someone who only ever followed her around, someone she wouldn’t let join her when she went out fishing because all he had to recommend him as far as she could tell was what her grandfather called the Hackett fortune even though he had great hands with a fishing pole because old Will Stanley had taught him, too, just like Jo, and even then he had a frank crinkly smile which to the twelve-year-old Jo was only disturbing.
“I heard you were back,” he said to her now, scratching the side of his nose as she held out her arms—amazed to find him standing on her dock—as if to say, well here you are.
“Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl—” Jo spun to face the radio, ”—this is Black Heart. Over.”
She didn’t move. It was late afternoon and Luke had gone for the day and Minette was in town at a fish fry and Tom Hackett had ferried Benoit to the landing to pick up the Wendaban mail in one of the battered green group mailboxes. “Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, this is Black Heart. Over.” It was the same high sexless voice, a concentrated malevolence that sounded like no one she knew. No one she ever knew. Jo grabbed the mike just as Kay came out of the kitchen.
Her thumb was twitching as it held down the button. “Black Heart, this is Cabin Girl. Over.” She let the button go.
“Cabin Girl—” the voice went higher, slower, “—I know how you killed Christine.”
Jo felt herself flayed open. She looked down to make sure, crossing her quaking arms over her torso just to hold everything in, not understanding why there was no blood or organs. Her first thought was to turn off the radio and give Black Heart no more access to her, but the radio was her sole connection with the rest of the lake, the only way she’d learn about fires or medical emergencies—the way the lake was hearing the harassment of her by someone calling himself Black Heart.
Kay stood at her side as she held down the button on the mike. “Temcot, Temcot, Temcot,” Jo raised the radio operator at the Headquarters for the Cottagers Association, “this is Cabin Girl. Over.”
“Cabin Girl, this is Temcot. Over.”
“Get me the police, Andy. I want to report a crime.”
Millie T. called her, then, a middle-aged lady who told her to give the bastard hell.
Bar None called her wondering who Christine was.
Bevel Boy, who turned out to be Luke, saying he’d come back if she wanted.
My Blue Haven called offering legal advice.
Irish Stu, who wanted to know if she needed anything in town.
And Windjammer—Tom Hackett, who said he’d meet her on the dock of Wendaban for another shot at it—just to make her laugh.
But the Ontario Provincial Police who came in their blue and white patrol boat and took a few desultory notes told her what she already knew: there was no way to figure out who it was, not as long as Black Heart stayed on the VHF radio. He could be anyone anywhere—all he needed was an antenna—on one of the thousand islands of Lake Temagami, or within range on the mainland—or on a boat.
She listened while the OPP advised her to get rid of the VHF radio and install a telephone with caller ID, not telling them it would be a betrayal of her grandfather, and she felt her eyelids droop in pain as it occurred to her that maybe her whole presence on the lake was now just a betrayal of another sort. When the cops asked about the Christine mentioned in the harassing calls, she told them the truth: Christine was her summertime best friend—the daughter of the nurse at Wendaban—who had died in a fall one night the summer they were both thirteen, and she heard about the death the next morning. The lurid parts that only shimmered shapeless in her memory, all sixteen years that followed the event, she left out—left out because a speck of corrosion was beginning in the part of her brain where fear resides, and it was making her wonder whether the torment by Black Heart was, after all, correct.
Back inside the lodge Jo stood without moving in the Grand Parlor, her body just a broken mobile of dry bones, while Kay brought out dinner plates. The simple act of eating anything set before her seemed like the only joy left in the world.
“Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl—” at the sound of the voice Jo let out a sob, “—this is Black Heart. What happened to the red shirt you wore the night you killed her?”
She was undecided about the effects of suffering. Did it close over her like some kind of carapace and keep her safe from all sharpened speech and damaging looks? Or did it make her into a cluster of unprotected dendrons, a bouquet of stripped filaments completely incapable of blocking sensation? Benoit’s incisors clicked when he spoke. Luke rubbed his left thumb and ring finger together before he ate. Kay had a smell of wet ashes when she passed. They were all becoming more formal with each other, which she realized is what happens when pain fills the spaces between people. Black Heart wanted her to suffer, wanted her to pay, that much she knew. What happened to the red shirt you wore the night you killed her? She didn’t know. Didn’t know what had happened to it. Didn’t know why it was important. She remembered waking up in the skiff in the middle of the night—only the dock lights showed her she was back at Wendaban, only the dock lights located her somewhere in a world where she had always found comfort—thirteen and wet and bruised and naked in a large red shirt. What happened to the red shirt you wore the night—She had stumbled out of the boat someone had tied to the old crooked dock in the shallows near the back of the property—without Christine, who must have rowed them back, left Jo there, and gone up to bed. The shirt was mystifying, but she staggered noiselessly up the back stairs and fell into her own room. In the morning came the news, and in her grief over Christine— and her failure to confess to the events of the night before— Jo never wondered again about the shirt. But Black Heart had seen her in the red shirt. Or Black Heart had dressed her in the red shirt. She felt sick at the thought. What happened to the red shirt—The question was about a piece of clothing; there was no question at all about the killing. Had Black Heart seen it happen? Had she and Christine not been alone, after all?
Cheryl the event planner took charge of the RSVPs as they came in and kept insisting on floral arrangements, which Jo refused. Guy and Walter pushed for a short video presentation on Wendaban and Lake Temagami—”You’ve got to give people something for their money, Jo,” they argued—and she agreed. A leaky shower pan in #16 led to water damage downstairs in #4, so for the week before the fundraiser, Luke appeared to be in at least three places at once, looking grim when he told her he couldn’t get his hands on a new shower pan that would fit and he was damn well going to have to put in extra hours if she wanted all the repairs done in time. Jo paid her bills, handled the workers, and—when no one was around—ripped through old trunks and stashed boxes, looking for a red shirt.
Overnight the temperature dropped and Jo was up, cold, before daybreak. She went into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. Outside the rain was soft and metallic on the pines and the bald rock. In it she heard the sound of everything she ever knew that flowed or healed, and without putting on a rain jacket, she took her coffee outside and walked the shore of Wendaban to the old crooked dock, where she sat. Rain added to the mug. Rain added to her face. Night was leaving, and a fine white Temagami mist was slung low, she could tell, over the water. A fish jumped. Jo cried for her grandfather, who had loved her—who sorrowed for her as much as for the dead Christine the morning he came into her room with the sloping logs and told her Christine had met with violence, which was just how he put it. Met with violence. Jo had no voice. He had gone on to say the girl was found dead on the rocks at the bottom of Stone Maiden Cliff. Her clothes were gone. They didn’t know yet whether she had been—interfered with—he said, frowning, and she wasn’t sure what he meant. But there were signs of a struggle at the top, and he was so grateful his Jo had been home asleep all night. Then, as he patted her shoulder in a gruff sort of way, she wondered, stricken, who did this to Christine?
Who did this?
And then she knew: she did.
And she started to scream.
She screamed because she had pushed her friend off Stone Maiden Cliff. She screamed because she could never tell anybody. She had been home asleep—just like her grandfather said—all night. All night. Every night. Home. Home asleep. The bruises were under the covers. The red shirt was on the floor. She could never look at any of it. She could never tell. No one will know, Christine had said, only she was wrong. Black Heart knew. All along.
Jo curled up tight on her side on the old crooked dock, fanning her fingers against the wood, like an underwater dying thing. A black dock spider eased a leg joint up between the boards. They weren’t hand to leg, the two of them, but they were close enough. The rain was stopping.
She heard a boat coming, making its slow small way to the main dock at Wendaban. Blue. Luke’s boat. She curled up tighter, not letting herself feel relieved he was putting in more hours to get the job done. Without moving her head from the boards, she could see in the thin new daylight more world than she ever needed—a water skimmer rowing silently across the lake surface, a duck quacking softly along the near shore, the misty lower branches of the far pines. She heard him come over and stop just a few feet away. He set down his toolbox without making much noise.
“How long have you been here?”
Jo fanned her fingers. Her lips felt strange. Unfamiliar. “All my life.” All he could do was grunt. She raised her face. “Why don’t you like me?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Things matter.”
“Do they?”
“Of course they do.”
“Things like a red shirt?”
She jerked away from him. “What do you know about it?”
“I heard the call.”
“I could use a friend.”
“I give you good work for a fair price.” He picked up the toolbox and started to walk away. “We don’t have to like each other.”
In the late afternoon the day before the fundraiser, Kay set out some cold cuts and store-bought potato salad—Benoit refused to handle them—for the helpers to grab a quick bite while they worked. At the crowded dock, boats were tied up to other boats, bumping softly against each other in the light wind. Minette was out front directing her teenaged son’s friends on just where to hang the banner saying Welcome to Wendaban in Ojibway that Kay had got some Bear Island children to paint. Tom Hackett was tying up the VHF radio with calls placed by the radio operator at Temcot HQ to the Ministry of Natural Resources, trying to get it straight whether torchieres were considered open fires during a fire ban. Jo stood so long waiting for an answer that Luke took the bed linens out of her arms and went upstairs to make up the bed in #12. Minette’s boy was trying to drive a torchiere into the thin Temagami soil, poking it around for a better grip, then started bellowing out “John Henry.” Jo stepped outside as his friends joined in, and for a moment everything was robust with youth and goodness. Hammer be the death of me, Lord, Lord, hammer be the death of me. The strong boys, the imperturbable clouds, Minette’s laughter as the wind took the banner off one of its nails and it rippled sideways in a half-fall.
One of the old Wendaban skiffs was floating unmoored out in the wide bay, the result of too many lines being tied and untied, she guessed. She called Tom outside, who saw it right away, and they got into his runabout. “Let’s go get the stray,” he said, while she pushed them out from the other boats, and he backed up. She felt like they were running away—doing something daring going off together—the clouds, the boys, the fallen banner, even the voices getting more robust, And he laid down his hammer and he died, Lord, Lord—for those moments as he stood at the wheel and headed slowly toward the skiff, she believed in their own youth and goodness, and with no thought of the past she turned his face toward her and kissed Tom the golden Hackett boy who had, she was pleased to see, the good sense to shift into neutral while she did.
She liked it that he said nothing afterward and as they approached the skiff she took a boat pole to pull it alongside so she could grab the bowline. At first she thought it was a paint rag in the old rowboat, but she couldn’t figure it out since no one had been using it. The hulls of the two boats were jostling as Tom kept the runabout in neutral. “We can just tow it—” he called to her, but she cried out and scrambled over the gunwales and into the skiff.
There, laid out on the middle seat, was a very old red shirt.
Her head was coming off from a headache no amount of aspirin could reach. She slept badly, twitching in and out of sleep, and cried at the thought that the fundraiser for the Wendaban Center for Environmental Studies was going to find her pale and baggy-eyed and bedeviled. Yesterday she had wanted to load the skiff with rocks until it sank, bearing the red shirt to the bottom. But she folded the shirt instead and locked it inside the small steel safe in her grandfather’s closet—just so it wouldn’t disappear again. As she handled it, her fingers felt detached from her body.
By the time the guests started to arrive, she had changed into a yellow summer shift and managed to smile and pull off the handshakes, thankful that Tom Hackett and Guy eased into the void she couldn’t help creating. Someone handed her a drink that was even paler than her face and she stood as straight as she could and listened to Tom Hackett tell an important dean from the University of Western Ontario that he was prospecting for diamonds in the province. And she listened to Guy tell a woman from the Toronto Globe and Mail that two of Wendaban’s outbuildings would be converted into labs. And she listened to Benoit tell everyone that the tiramisu, if he must say so himself, was particularly excellent. Somewhere out back Kay and Luke—who had buttoned his top button and added a string tie for the occasion—were quietly hosing down a kitchen table they had dragged outside when the champagne punch bowl had shattered.
Jo got through the video presentation without watching any of it. At ten-thirty Minette invited anyone who wanted to do wishing boats to come down to the dock. A few who were staying the night went upstairs, but Jo watched several others follow Minette, their way lighted by the Chinese lanterns Cheryl had driven all the way to North Bay to find that afternoon when they got the word from the ministry that the fire ban made torchieres out of the question. Minette had unscrewed the dock lights and one by one the shadowy guests set out on the lake a flotilla of lighted candles fixed on cardboard squares, launched with silent wishes. In the windless night they were tiny flames adrift until the cardboard soaked through and they sank.
Jo watched them go from inside the double screen doors, while Guy, Tom Hackett, and the others were left looking at the architect’s plans for renovating the outbuildings. “Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl—” No, not now, Jo pressed herself into the logs of the front wall, not here—the same awful voice—but she didn’t have to answer and none of the guests would know she was Cabin Girl—
“Jo—” Tom Hackett moved toward her, “—do you want me to get it this time?”
She shook her head as people turned to look at her.
“Cabin Girl,” Black Heart—who knew she was listening, knew he didn’t have to raise her again, knew formalities meant nothing when the accusation was murder—went on in that high, malevolent voice to a room that was completely silent, “tell them what you did with her clothes after you killed Christine.” Jo started up the stairs as she heard Tom explain to the others that Jo had been the victim of a wicked joke. She nearly laughed at how reduced it all sounded, then found herself listening almost like a normal person to the woman reporter coming toward her who was wondering what Jo wanted her to do with the laundry in the bathroom of room #12. Jo said she’d take care of it.
She walked through #12 to the bathroom and swung open the door. Submerged in the tub half full of water was a white sleeveless top and green shorts. She stared at them for just a second before she shrieked, seeing Christine peel them off at the top of the diving cliff.
Luke was first into the room. “What the hell—?”
Jo stumbled out of the bathroom. “It’s a mouse.”
“It’s not a mouse.”
“Leave me alone.”
“What happened?” He looked into the bathroom.
She saw it all. “You were in here today.”
“So?”
“You made up the bed.”
“So?”
“Who are you?” she hissed.
“Why does it matter?”
She yelled at him to get out—get out for good—and it was Kay who put her to bed in her old childhood room down at the sunset side of the lodge where the logs sloped and girls cuddled safe under the covers for years and years until they were very old women together. She knew it was Kay who kept the others out—she heard her arguing out in the hall with Tom Hackett and Minette—and little by little as the lodge grew quiet, she didn’t know who had decided to stay overnight with the crazy screaming murdering lodgekeeper and who had gone, instead, to the mainland on a wild night ride with Ellroy the tattooed cabby. She felt an isolation she could never repair as long as she stayed at Wendaban, but whether she died in her sleep or lived to leave the lake forever was a matter of complete indifference as she pulled the covers over her head and she dreamed once again of Christine.
In the morning, she rowed the old skiff the two miles to Stone Maiden Cliff, in a bay near the opening to the North Arm. Kay watched her go from the edge of the main dock. The sun was strong and the clouds were mountainous, cut sharply into the sky as the wind kicked up. At the base of the diving cliff she tied up to a stringy overhanging cedar and listened to the boat bang rhythmically against the small rocks as she started the steep climb. It was harder at thirty than it was at thirteen. Her feet slid back, her hands could hardly pull her up, she weighed more. She made it to the top of the twenty-foot cliff and rolled in the brown fallen pine needles, the way they always did, for flavor, Christine said.
It had been a quick, quiet row that night, sometime close to midnight when they were not supposed to be out. But it was July and they knew the lake well and they wanted to swim naked by starlight. They tied up out of the wind and scrambled to the top and lay there on their backs holding hands for the longest time. The moon was up, so the stars were fainter, but Christine pointed out Perseus. Then they stood up and stripped quickly, Christine peeling the white sleeveless top and green shorts, then kicking them behind her. At the edge they looked down at the cliff, the way it sloped in one place into a slanting shelf, the way a red pine sapling was growing bright and hopeless right out of the rock. They jumped together the first time, the way they always did, and crawled like naked dripping white monkeys back to the top. It was exhilarating, slamming into the water they could barely see in the black Temagami night. They clung to the sheer vertical face of the cliff as they treaded water, the little waves drawing them, pushing them, the rock so strangely warm still against their skin. They sputtered and groaned and laughed from the cold.
Then at the top Jo stood shivering and stamping her feet with a sudden chill, her arms tight across her chest. And in the next moment Christine changed their lives forever by stepping in close and putting her arms around Jo, who froze. Christine kissed her first just next to her mouth, then on her mouth, whispering, No one will know. And what happened next was a struggle that made her sick the minute it lasted—Christine saying her name over and over—Jo first trying to get out with a smile and ripping her brain apart to make sense of losing her friend forever while she had never held her closer—the soft kisses, a hand on her waist, the powerful foreignness of the flesh next to hers—and then she kicked—and then she pushed, oh yes, she pushed—and the scream was a gulp, but Jo was pulled over, too, aware all at once that she was stopped by the sapling and her head slammed into the rock, and the hands that slid down to her ankles dropped away and a terrible weight was gone for good.
Sixteen years later, she lay crying quietly on her back at the top of Stone Maiden Cliff and thought about all the campers and canoe trippers and lovers who had been here diving since that night. She tried telling herself she had been thirteen and that tenderness is only something you can learn when you’ve been afoot in the world long enough to see how bleak all things are without it. Her name would cease to be a good name if she stayed in Temagami because Black Heart would see to it. Suffering, he was telling her, wasn’t in recollection—it was in exile. Early that morning she had found her grandfather’s old personnel files in a storeroom near the back of the lodge. The nurse, Aimee Delacroix, Wendaban employee for two years until her daughter died and she left Temagami, was divorced with one son—Jean-Luc Delacroix, four years older than Christine—“Bright young man, good with his hands,” her grandfather had written in the margin. “Can we use him somehow?”
Here is how the story begins: night fishing with old Will Stanley some sixteen years ago. He begged the old man to take him out. Night fishing: flashlight when you need it, cigars for warmth and satisfaction, navigating by the moon, whizzing off the boat, even, now and then, a fish. They were anchored off the far side of Stone Maiden Cliff when the girls went over. The boy, who was in the bow of the boat, saw it happen. Will Stanley muttered shit a couple of times and quickly started the motor. He and the boy nearly fell out of the boat to get to the one lying white and broken in the shallows. This one’s dead. Will Stanley said to the boy who was trying to keep the discovery, the sight of all that death and nakedness, down in his stomach. Leave her. A loon called somewhere close by, and the boy jumped. Leave her?
She’ll be found in the morning and you’re not even supposed to be here and I’m an old Indian standing here with two naked white girls and I only have just so much explanation in me, boy. Will Stanley scrambled up the side of the cliff to the sapling on the shelf, where the other girl was knocked out, and managed to hand her down to the boy, who didn’t know where to grab her. She was banged up and knocked out but he grabbed her around the ribs since it made some sense and yielded him a quick feel that was goddamn the least she owed him after what he had just seen—
Will Stanley dressed her in his red shirt and set her carefully in the Wendaban skiff. Then he pulled the dead girl up farther on the rocks out of a kind of decency, the boy thought, and said, I’ll row this one back and leave her out of sight. You give me half an hour and come after me, and I’ll get you home as soon as I can. The boy watched him row away toward Wendaban, bare-chested, an old man with just so much explanation in him, and he grew darker and more indistinct as he went. When he was out of sight, the boy sat near the dead girl until he couldn’t take it any longer and climbed shivering to the top of the cliff to collect the clothing. It wasn’t until later that he could see—with no more explanation in him than the old man—there was no easy way to return the clothing of the dead.
It has taken two days since he set the ax next to the furnace to feel satisfied with the letter he wrote confessing to the events of four years ago, and the contents of the other envelope, a deed addressed to Cabin Girl. It is 2 a.m. and sleeping upstairs is a woman named Diane be found and married just after he drove Jo Verdyne forever from the lake and then never answered any of her calls. Overhead is a single light, seventy-five watts, enough to work afterward with the razor. A good light is everything, Will Stanley used to say without much more in the way of explanation. But to Will Stanley, everything was everything. A good net is everything, boy, he’d say. And other times, A good meal is everything. But surely a good ax is something, Will Stanley? And a good razor?
No one answers.
If he had a wishing boat, he would light the candle and launch it from the main dock of Wendaban, many hours away from this house in Nashville that has no meaning for him, and wish that he had never bought the Wendaban property through a holding company when Jo Verdyne put it up for sale and then never brought the wrecking ball in by barge. Much of the lodge had to be dismantled—dismembered, someone called it that day, and that seemed closer to the truth—and the very deep wrongness of it all didn’t strike him until sometime after the rubble had been cleared away. He stood bewildered that he didn’t feel more pleasure in getting what he had worked toward for months. And when the drilling yielded nothing, after all—not so much as a speck of kimberlite— he thought for the first time in his life that maybe he was a fool.
No, not a fool, exactly, because he had always been a clever man. No one, for instance, the night of the fundraiser at Wendaban, had seen him slipping his hand under the table where the VHF radio stood and detaching the Walkman he had Velcroed in place. By then Jo was shrieking in the upstairs bathroom and everyone was rushing over to the stairs. Black Heart’s last message to Cabin Girl had been prerecorded, and was just about as fine an alibi as a man could want.
He picks up the Sears Craftsman ax that someone named Jimmy sold him and starts up the basement steps. It is time to gather in those parts of him that will suffer when the letter is found. If he had a dog, he would have to gather it in for it would be the dog part of him that would remember forever what he had done. Now he will gather in the wife part of him that will only feel shame, but the blunt end of the ax is a good gatherer. And afterward the razor will draw a quick hard line below his chin and say there will be no more lies or false smiles from everything above this line. Do good for the people, when you grow to a man, you hear? Will Stanley told him softly from the darkened stem of the boat as they fished quietly off the far side of Stone Maiden Cliff. I will, I promise, the boy said, but he stopped baiting his hook as the wind edged them closer to the front of the diving cliff and he looked up and saw something remarkable. Two naked girls kissing. He knew them. Their heads and arms and hips moved in the starlight that excluded him for all time. You got the money, Tom, boy, but you also got a good heart. And a good heart is everything—