A presence of the past, the seeds of the madness
and violence that seem to be everywhere.
   —David Rabe, Hurlyburly

ALL AROUND the lake, the cattails were going. It had begun with the first frost in October. The pollen rotted on the stalk. Then the rounded bolus of the seed stalk fell apart, a building abandoned by its tenants, a rotting mockery of a living plant. After the stalk went brown, the leaves slowly disintegrated into the lake. Masses of the yellowed stalks covered the mud along the lake for weeks after the frost. As the season lengthened, ice mixed with the dead cattails. The lake reeds washed up in sodden clumps of dead matter, forming a barrier that made it impossible for anything from the lake to come ashore.

On the southwest shore, something tried. The pressure of the water pushed it in toward the beach. The mud of the bottom kept it from disappearing under the waves. At first, the rounded whiteness of it looked like a Halloween pumpkin, rotting in the lake. Then the appendages appeared. The arms surfaced slowly, like something living, coming up for air. The tone of the skin maintained this illusion: the flesh was white with a hint of green, as if it had become a creature from deep underwater. The hair that remained was molting off like the cattails. When the solid weight of it struck the shore, the body rolled, and a ruined face came to the air, gray and putrid as a dead fish. The eyes stared up, corroded by minnow feeding, and then turned back again toward the lake bottom. In the evening, the current changed, and it moved away from the shoreline.

The brown 4x4 truck with the sheriff’s star drove into the parking lot at the cove in the late afternoon. By the time the truck arrived, the lake had cooled. The cold current had pushed the body out into deep water where it barely broke the surface, a curve like a breaching fish.

Matt walked from the truck across the boardwalk. Gently, the walkway curved around the private berths. The boats waited there under banked blue awnings. The acre of blue shifted in the sunlight, a herd of sheltering whales.

Matt climbed over the arch where small craft could enter the docks. From on top of the arch he could see the offices of Herrick Industries. The office was three stories tall and looked like a miniature tower. William S. Herrick Jr. tried to put as much time in at this office as possible, just to needle his sister, who owned the resort next door and had worked there since it was built. From the water, the buildings seemed mirrors of each other: the small trim office, and next to it, massive and ungainly, its offspring, the Coeur d’Alene Resort.

Matt glanced across the water. In the shadow of the office overhang, Will Herrick’s yacht, Ambition, swayed in the current. The lights on the third floor of the office were turned low. Matt had given up guessing if Will Herrick was there. You couldn’t ever tell.

No one was out on the far end of the boardwalk where it joined the shoreline again. He came around the far end and circled back to the resort. One or two boat owners were moving gear in their boats. He paid the fee and took a rowboat from the dock.

When Matt got out beyond the buoy line, he could sense the current against the oars. If he dug deep enough, he could feel it vibrating, pulling everything down. The weeklong fog had finally lifted from the water, and a hundred people had taken advantage of the late afternoon sun—Lake Coeur d’Alene was speckled with kayaks, canoes, and rowboats.

It was the end of October, but still tourists braved the water in their wet suits and Jet Skis. Because the water was as blue as the north Idaho sky, tourists often seemed to assume it was also safe and warm.

Matt knew better. He had seen too many sodden, panicked Jet Skiers and swimmers rescued from the icy water by a police launch or a passing boat. He imagined the assumption of safety disappeared sometime between the current taking you and the first inhalation of water. The leaving of it would be, he thought, something unexpected, surprising. A pause, a beat of the heart, before the darkness.

As he leaned back again, slicing the oars through the water, a fish jumped off to the right. It was a large fish, and it twisted in the air before it went back in. The splash startled him. He turned to look at the spreading ripples and saw that a young woman in a racing scull was outdistancing him. It had been months since he’d gotten on the water—now the neglect was showing. Matt applied himself to the oars, pulling to reach the pace she’d set.

She was about to put her next stroke in the water when he saw it, just at the surface. Many things collected in the roiling currents at the southwestern tip of the lake, where the Spokane river spilled over toward the Palouse plain. The heavy snowmelt in recent days had increased the strength of the current, and things long concealed rose to the surface.

Matt saw her oar pass over it. A heavy thing, waterlogged and organic, moving in the current. Matt could see the light rippling across the pale thing underneath. It was then that he realized she hadn’t seen it, she didn’t realize what it was.

“Hey! You got something there,” Matt called to her as his boat rolled back and forth in the wake. His shout echoed out across the lake. She paused in her stroke, and then she reached out with a long oar and brought the floating thing to the surface. Matt was grateful that despite her revulsion, she kept it from sinking.

Later he told her that if she had not paused in her stroke, if she had not held on, it would have been gone. The current would have pushed it down and held it until winter covered it, just as it would have held any swimming tourist trapped by the relentless undertow. No one would have found the body until spring, when it came through the ice.

Later that night, Matt worked the graveyard shift. All hands on deck on this night: in the past they’d had problems with vandalism on Halloween. In the time before dawn broke, the shift seemed to last forever. It always seemed to Matt as if he had been traveling forever in the same futile orbit, wearing a circular groove in the county’s roads, an endless broken record.

From the hill above Coeur d’Alene, he could see out over the lake. On this evening, the kids with their costumes and their flashlights had gone home. The Halloween parties had ended by two in the morning. Now only the dock lights reflected off the dark water, it brought to mind light refracting through glass bottles on a shelf. The bottles he’d thrown in the fire were buried now. With a surge, the old wave of memory came over him. Desperately now, he wanted his son to come back, to be free to return to him.

Ahead of him, he could see Doug’s ten-year-old smile clearly, his Halloween mask askew in the evening light. It was as if the headlights skating across the hillside could project his son’s face there on the black earth, could hold him in place there forever.

He glanced at the rearview mirror, and there was his own face, lines creasing back and forth across it, as if every year had scored a mark. His eyes were swollen and bloodshot. He remembered his own father looking just like this when he was a boy—a strong man made prematurely old by work and worry. Matt rubbed a hand across his eyes and squinted at the road ahead.

It was his father’s fault he had exactly the same damn face, the same bone-deep weariness. Pop had overwhelmed him, the weight of his heroism too great for Matt to bear. He’d been left with only weakness to give his son, an uncertain love that gave Doug no anchor to tie him to their care, to keep him safe. Doug would never turn into him, but at this rate, it didn’t look like he’d ever come home, either.

Matt came around the curve, his headlights illuminating the turn. How long it had been since he’d been drunk, since he’d driven this road in the early morning hours? The faint blue of the sky before dawn was always the same. It was as if no time had passed. He felt as if he could walk into the bar now and not miss a day in between.

Empty cells yawned darkly around them. It was after visiting hours, and the trustee showed Matt the single occupied cell. A hand was clenched tightly to the bars. In the thin fluorescent light, Matt could see a line of blood that ran down Karl’s wrist, onto his fingers, and trailed to the concrete. Karl was cutting his arm open with a plastic fork.

The trustee sighed. “Goddamn weirdo. He’s been nothing but trouble.”

“Dammit,” said Matt. “You can’t stop giving meds to a guy like this. It’ll kill him. He’ll kill himself. Look at what you’ve done to him!”

The trustee shrugged. “Wasn’t my call, I’ll tell you. Anyway, he was supposed to be asleep hours ago—but he’s still kickin’ and screamin’.” The trustee looked at his watch. “So now I gotta clean the damn mess up before I go home.”

“It’s all right—I can take care of him. I’ll clean up whatever mess he made.”

“I really owe you one then, Lieutenant.” The trustee tapped him on the shoulder with his nightstick. “Lemme know if he needs a medic. You know the rules—don’t get too close to him. And please, he better be calm when you leave.” He sighed again and shook his head. “Where’d he get that damn fork?”

After the door closed behind the trustee, Matt waited in the corridor, a rolled-up newspaper in his hand as he watched Karl hold tightly to the bars of the cell with one hand. In the other hand, Karl held the fork and carved into the flesh. Then Karl saw him and looked up.

“Are you for real?” he said in a gravelly voice. “You aren’t . . . No, you aren’t him.”

“Who?” said Matt.

“Him.” Karl touched a dented place on his head, as if to indicate something hurtful remaining inside his skull. “Hit me—maybe you did this to me . . .”

“What did he do?” Matt looked at Karl carefully. “I’m with the Sheriff’s Department, Karl. I’m not here to hurt you. My name is Worthson, you re member me?”

“I ’member you. I’ll always remember you. And what you did to me.”

“What I did?” said Matt, nonplussed.

Karl did not say anything. He was concentrating on the task at hand, working the fork into his arm. “Ahh,” he moaned. He dug the tines in, the skin twitching with pain.

Matt sighed. “Look, when my friend Jerry and I stopped by before to talk to you, why didn’t you say you knew this guy? Jerry showed you the picture, he told you if you had any information, you could come along to the office. But you didn’t tell us you’d had him out to your place, and that you’d given him a knife.” In one swift motion, Matt thrust his hand through the bars and took hold of Karl’s shirt. He yanked Karl’s face up close to the bars, and the fork clattered to the floor. “Dammit, Karl, why didn’t you tell us then? You had to know him, to know the details about this guy.”

The face in front of him wrinkled in sudden pain and fear. Tears poured down the cheeks in a sudden flood. “Nah, nah, nah, you’re gonna hurt me. You’re gonna hurt me again. Please don’t hurt me—let me go home. Please, I wanna go home. Pleeeaaaasssse.”

“You can go home soon,” said Matt. “But first, tell me, why did Siwood come back here?”

Karl’s eyes went wide, but then his face shut down again. Karl touched his head again, as if to indicate the faulty wiring inside, the shorts and sparks that caused him so much trouble. “Nah, not him. You’re the killer. You did it, you know you did.”

Matt could hear sounds in the walls. Water ran through the pipes—it was like rain in the distance. It occurred to him that he did not know what happened inside Karl’s head. Perhaps he could have done this after all, without knowing it was cruel, without even hearing the screams.

“Karl, c’mon—work with me here. Knock off that garbage. Tell me his real name.”

Karl stared at him. “You cut ’em open, so they can feel the edge of the world.” Karl’s tongue came out of his mouth and licked nervously again. A sick sensation came into Matt’s throat, it reminded him of the smell of the rotting corpse from the lake.

Nervously, Karl touched the drying blood on his arm. “He was trying to get what was comin’ to him from the big money-bags. He took the knives from me, said he’d poison my medication. So I stopped taking ’em, and I got to be a killer.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Matt. “Your friend had something on someone with money. So he shows up this summer to collect. And someone dies. But why—”

“You gotta leave me alone. Now I won’t tell no one you killed ’em, so send me home now, okay? I jes’ wanna go home. Jes’ wanna go home, home, home.”

Karl breathed heavily, as if in pain. His crying sounded like his chuckle, an uneven croak trickling brokenly out. Matt saw that his hand was clamped around his right forearm, digging into the cuts, feeling the edge of the world.