THE HAZE BURNED OFF BY noon and it was a warm day with a white glowing sky. The Porsche behaved itself admirably and the new tape deck played some tapes I’d put together myself; the result was that I listened to movie sound tracks all the way—A Man and a Woman, Picnic, The Quiller Memorandum. Wonderful driving music, the green fields swishing past, memories of Kim Novak dancing toward William Holden on that long-ago picnic evening from my youth. I could still see her, body rhythmically twisting, hands clapping slowly, beating out the passing of the years.
The wind whipped at me, the music was loud, and moving fast made time stand still. My mind flickered in and out among the shadows of my past, noding to my mother, to a young Archie, to Anne, and finally settling on Kim. I went over the previous evening as closely as I could, trying to see it all happening, remembering not so much what she said but exactly how she’d looked as she talked, the gestures and mannerisms and the sound of her voice. I felt a childish euphoria, as much the next day as when I’d been gone from her a matter of minutes; I knew it was childish. I’d always been one to rush in, taking more for granted then I ought, assuming incorrectly that others felt about me as I felt about them. I’d been hurt, of course, but like the Bourbon kings, I learned nothing from the wounds. I considered Kim on two levels, intuitively and rationally, and there was never the slightest doubt as to which would predominate. I tried to pretend there was. I tried to remember how convoluted her life had been, how others saw her; helplessly, I knew how I felt about her … or at least how I wanted to feel about her. I should have spent some time wondering how she felt about me. But that would have been out of character. One flaw among many was that I’d lived quite a long time and learned nothing about the bargains you strike with life. My dogged belief was that you could make it all turn out the way you wanted it.
North of Duluth, having dropped down to the lake’s valley, the temperature fell off twenty degrees and you began to feel the wilderness around you instead of people. Off to your right, Lake Superior chopped itself to pieces, wicked and icy in the wind, and the woods and raw fields and taconite plants made something ominous of the landward side. The sun dimmed and the white glow blurred, grew murky and gray and plaintive. The little towns hung on the rock ledge that disappeared abruptly into the lake. The streets were potholed and the children in the playgrounds wore quilted jackets already and kicked at footballs. The cars at the chipped curbs were muddy and old and sagged on lifeless springs and roadside taverns looked like polished log cabins with red neon signs. A big mining town, with dreadful black pyramids crisscrossed by catwalks, looked prosperous for an instant but you whisked by too fast, saw the ramshackle quality behind the Veneer of flashy motels and executives’ homes. It wasn’t deep woods and it wasn’t city; it was that dirty, gnawed half thing that scuttled nervously in between, looting and despoiling the land at one end; spewing out jobs and salaries at the other end. Hobson’s choice.
I pushed the Porsche on through the afternoon, burrowing deeper into the gray, like a man in a tunnel, feeling the north tightening around me, collapsing in on me. I’d never felt it quite so strongly before, never felt the intimidation. It could have been my imagination; it could have been the peculiar, muffled quality the day had taken on. It could have been my mission.
Matt Munro was singing the song from The Quitter Memorandum, a sorrowful song, and I’d heard it a thousand times. I joined him in a fervent duet as I swept past the black pyramids and out along the lake once again. I was following the long angling drive up the lake and my eyes kept being pulled toward the whitecaps, the sailboats thrashing recklessly among them, ignoring danger, because summer was almost over; time was running out.
I reached Grande Rouge about three o’clock and pulled over by a green strip of parkland which lay between the main street, which was the highway, and the rocky beach. The wind was cold and the only people in sight were wandering around the gas pumps at the Standard station. Two brokendown, wheelless cars from the late forties lay like ancient ruins beside the station and a mud-caked station wagon was being serviced at the pump.
Named for a towering outcropping of reddish rock just behind and a hundred feet above the town, Grande Rouge struck me as a lousy place to start a vacation but it was the weather. In the sunshine or decked out in shimmering snow, it would have a certain charm. Gray with a faint mist slipping quietly in off the lake didn’t do it justice.
I left the car where it was and walked across the highway to the Chat and Chew Cafe, a white frame building with a picture window and the obligatory red neon sign. There was a counter along one wall, tables in the middle, and booths along the other wall, a series of coat hooks on the wall, an authentic Wurlitzer freestanding jukebox, a glassed-in case of pie, cake, and doughnuts, and crockery three-quarters of an inch thick. It smelled like hot coffee and fresh baking and maybe Grande Rouge wasn’t so bad after all. I sat down on a stool and had coffee and a piece of apple pie with a moist, rich crust that crumbled and fell apart at the touch of a fork.
The counterwoman, who had the proprietary air of an owner, leaned on the stainless-steel counter across from me and wiped her hands on a clean towel. She was about fifty and had a nice, tight hairdo from Ruth’s next door and smelled of a little too much face powder. She looked at me and grinned out of the corner of her mouth. “Busy, busy, busy,” she said.
“Well, you can’t expect much from the middle of the afternoon,” I said.
“Summer’s gone, that’s the reason,” she said. “Just up and left about ten days ago, been cold ever since. Hasn’t been above sixty. It’ll be this way—slow and gettin’ colder—all through the winter. Makes you want to hibernate. Or go south.” She made a little clicking sound. “Am I right, Jack?”
A man of about her age, wearing a blue policeman’s windbreaker, heavy dark-blue whipcord pants, and a revolver strapped into a holster on his hip, moved among the tables, coming toward us. He had sad eyes and a wrinkled, weatherbeaten face. He was carrying about forty pounds too much gut. “How’s that, Dolly?”
“Summer’s gone. We’re in for a long winter.”
We all looked out the picture window. There was nothing moving but the surface of the lake. A few drops of rain spattered hurriedly on the glass.
“ ’Bout ten days ago,” Jack said, rubbing his chin, “got colder’n a witch’s tit. Summer just shut down.”
“Just what I said,” she said.
“Where you headed?” The policeman was looking down at me.
“Here,” I said. “Right near here, anyway.”
He sat down two stools away. “Might as well have a cup of coffee.” He sighed and unzipped the windbreaker. “Sure ain’t no crime wave to stop. And Dolly’s coffee beats watchin’ Leo pump gas over at the station. Quiet little town,” he added, watching the steam rise off the coffee as she poured it. “Hell,” he said conversationally, “there ain’t nothing near Grande Rouge, not so far as I can tell anyways.” He looked up expectantly, his eyes on me. “That apple pie pretty good, is it?” I nodded. “You sure you’re in the right town?” He chuckled.
“Oh, I’m sure,” I said. “But I’ve got to drive back up into the hills a few miles. My dad and some friends used to have a cabin, a lodge actually, pretty good size, back up in the woods. They used to come up here and fish, hunt … They tell me it’s still there and it still belongs to them. I thought I’d like to see it.”
“Sure, I remember those fellas, huntin’ and fishin’, fellas, used to come up from the Cities. Hell, back in the thirties and forties, when my dad was the police hereabouts—you say your dad was one of ’em, eh?”
“For a while anyway. Then he moved away.”
“So now you’re taking a little vacation in the old lodge.” He shoveled some pie into his mouth, dribbling crumbs on the counter.
“Quite a bunch they were,” Dolly said. “Used to come into town for bait, have some beers, raise a little hell. Pretty damn near tore up Helen Little Feather’s … ah … house of ill repute one night, or so I heard. That’s, oh, fifty miles north of here, but news travels fast, I always say.”
“Well, Helen had to expect that from time to time, catering to these city boys out on the loose in the woods. That and the damned woodchoppers. …” Jack grinned at me. “Your daddy’s bunch knew how to have a good time, that’s something.”
“I don’t think he was in on that,” I said.
“No offense, mister,” Dolly said quickly. “Just remembering the old days and all. Long time ago, thirty, forty years anyways.”
“I wasn’t taking offense,” I said while she filled my cup again. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to hear anything you can remember about that group of men. I’m a writer and I’d like to do a piece, a story, on what it was like up here in the old days …”
“Nostalgia,” Dolly said firmly. “It’s what they call nostalgia, Jack, real big now, they say.”
“Anything like neuralgia?” Jack said, guffawing suddenly. “My God, Dolly, you don’t have to tell me what nostalgia is. I’m the town cop, not the town retard!”
“Do you remember much about it?” I asked. The coffee maker hissed. A Regulator wall clock ticked beneath the pressed-tin ceiling. It was very peaceful. I ate another forkful of apple pie. “Anything?”
“Well, I’d have to sit and recollect a bit,” Dolly said, eyes far away, as if she’d already begun.
“Course, there was that business about the housekeeper, or whatever the devil she was—Rita, Rita Hook, that was her name. Old Ted Hook’s wife.” Jack peered into the bottom of his coffee cup, stirring the remains. “I was about eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty, sort of helping out my dad, and there was this funny business out at the lodge.” He rubbed his chin again. “I couldn’t make head nor tail out of it, my dad couldn’t neither, hell, nobody could.” He lapsed into silence.
“Well, what was it? Don’t leave me hanging …” I was forcing a smile.
“Not real clear what did happen out there, y’see. But Ted Hook’s wife, Rita, went out there one winter night and damned if she never came back! You remember that, Dolly?”
“She ran off with somebody,” Dolly said matter-of-factly without bothering to look up from a huge stainless steel kettle. “Married to old Ted, him an invalid, she just got herself all excited and ran off with some fella … Plain as day.”
“Nobody from Grande Rouge, though,” Jack said. “Nobody else showed up missing.”
“But what’s her running off got to do with the lodge?”
“I said what.” Jack grinned. “She went out there one night, dead o’winter, to check the water pipes or something, some bit of maintenance, told old Ted she’d be home later or come back in the morning if she had to stay overnight … You understand I’m just getting this off the top of my head, mister, and I may not have some of it quite right …”
“The place was deserted, then? Nobody from the club, the men, none of them were there?”
“Not so far as I know. That spaghetti for supper, Dolly?”
“Yep, sure is. She leaned back and shifted the kettle onto an electric grid which glowed red. “She never came back. Ted Hook never heard another word from her. Never one word. Just left him.”
“Left him pretty well fixed.” Jack was lighting a cigar with a Zippo lighter which had a leaping-fish emblem stuck on the side. He exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke, engulfing his head. “Old Ted built a motel with a roadhouse, been living off it ever since—”
“He’s still alive?” I asked.
“More or less,” Dolly said. “He’s been in a bad way ever since the war, the Great War, that is. Old Ted, he must be near eighty. But he could tell you about that night. If you really want to know. He could probably tell you as much about your dad’s club as anybody left around here. Because of Rita working out there, I mean. You could go see him, he’s a great one for going over old times. Real talker.” She opened a huge commercial can of tomato sauce, pitched the lid into a waste can, and dumped the sauce into a kettle.
“I could just drop in on him?”
“Sure. It’s just called Ted’s, on the north side of town. He’s usually at his table in the roadhouse.”
“There was another guy, too. That old Indian guide—well, he wasn’t so old then, I guess.” Jack picked up his peaked policeman’s hat from the counter and stood, zipping the windbreaker all the way up to his collar. “The men at the lodge, they had this Indian guide, Willy I think his name was, my dad knew him … I just remember him riding a bicycle around town. He may still be around somewhere …”
“He died,” Dolly said. “A while back. He’s dead.”
“Well, I’d better go pound my beat,” Jack said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. …”
“Cavanaugh,” I said. “Paul Cavanaugh.” We shook hands. “Thanks for the information. Very helpful.”
“Enjoy your stay.” He turned at the door. “Say, do you know how to get to the lodge? It’s sort of twisty. You’ve got to know your way or you’ll wind up nowhere.”
“I don’t really.”
He told me in detail, went over it twice. “Maybe you should leave a trail of bread crumbs.” He burst forth with a guffaw.
I went back to the counter and paid for the pie and coffee, thirty-five cents. I left a quarter tip beside the coffee cup.
“No tipping,” Dolly said, stirring the spaghetti sauce with a long wooden spoon. “Not for strangers who pass a quiet afternoon.” She smiled and I hoped her husband, if there was a husband, appreciated her good heart. “Go talk to Ted. He’ll bend your ear, bet on it. And if you feel like it come on back for spaghetti. It’s not bad spaghetti for Grande Rouge, Minnesota.”
It was still misting when I walked back across the highway. Dark clouds were piling up behind the red rock and the scraggly trees on its crown looked like dancers cavorting at the end of a Fellini movie. The lights were on at the gas station and a white lantern flickered through the mist, obscuring the lake. I got into the Porsche and sat staring at the warmth in the window of the Chat and Chew, behind the red neon. A block farther on, Jack was rocking on his heels, hands in hip pockets, talking with a white-coated pharmacist in the doorway of a Rexall drugstore. It was nearly five o’clock and night was slipping down like a hood over Grande Rouge
TED, in huge neon lettering, hung in the darkness over the water and I swung down off the highway onto gravel, moving slowly toward the lake. The moist air was full of water smell, the chill blowing landward. It was a long, low timbered cabin with a few touches, like leaded glass windows above the shrubbery, uncommon to the north shore. Torches burned in wrought-iron hardware beside the front door. The motel, softly floodlit in blue, arched outward around a bay to the left. There were several late-model cars parked by the door but no signs of life.
The roadhouse was expensively rustic with just the beginning of the weekend crowd lapping at the bar. I smelled frying shrimp and beer. A center aisle divided the restaurant from the tavern and straight back there was a long open grill with a guy in a white hat moving huge slabs of steak around on the spokes over the glowing coals. At the rear of the building, on both restaurant and tavern sides, there were long glass bays looking out into the void where the lake was supposed to be. I went to the bar and asked the young man polishing glasses if Ted was around.
He nodded toward the bay window. “He’s always in the same place,” he said with a touch of bitterness. “You can hear the wheezing. Just follow it and you’ll be there.” He made a sullen face and pointedly turned away. He looked too young to be so nasty.
The old man was sitting in a wheelchair facing the lake. He wore a flat golfer’s hat and a heavy woolen overcoat with a scarf high on the back of his neck and covering the chin he’d tucked down into its folds. Round spectacles perched on the bony ridge of his nose and the kid was right: All I had to do was find the wheezing. It rasped, in his chest and in his throat, and I’d heard that kind of agony once before, escaping from an old professor I’d had who’d been gassed in France during the Great War. It was an unmistakable sound.
“Ted Hook?” I said.
“All my life,” he said, his voice crackling, a peculiar whisper, his head down.
“My name is Paul Cavanaugh, Mr. Hook. I wondered if I could ask you a couple of questions?”
“Only if you sit the hell down,” he said. “I can’t bend my head, I’m slowly turning to stone or some damned thing. Makes me irritable. I can’t recollect what it was like to be well, hell of a note, ain’t it? Sit down, sit down. Hand me my spoon, it’s on the floor. I dropped it. Can’t reach it. I could starve to death before anybody would come to pick it up.” He wheezed deeply and sniffed. I handed him the spoon and he took it in a gloved hand. A plate of mashed potatoes sat untouched before him, butter melting in yellow puddles. His hatchet-shaped face, the jawline the edge of the cleaver, was etched with pain, and around the eyes a hint of something more. He’d lived a long time, nearly sixty years, with the effects of a mustard gassing, and I supposed he knew his share about pain of any kind.
“Is this a family operation?” I sat in the captain’s chair.
“Hate to call these little shitheads family,” he said glumly, shoving the spoon into the potatoes, “but they are. Little prick at the bar is Artie, my brother’s grandson—he oughta been drowned as an infant!” He guided the spoon mouthward and began to lick it with a darting, purple tongue, as if it were ice cream. He squinted at me, caught me watching. “If you don’t like it, don’t look. What the hell do you want, anyway? Do I know you?”
“No, not me, but you just might have known my father—Archie Cavanaugh? He used to come up here with some friends, they had that lodge back up in the hills …”
“You mean my wife knew ’em, don’t you? I never had much truck with ’em but Rita, she worked her ass off out there at that lodge.” He chuckled to himself, dribbling a mist of potatoes down his chin. He lifted a beer stein to his ragged, concave mouth, sipped. “I can’t remember their names—Archie or any of the rest of them. Why should I?”
“What kind of men were they? I mean, how did they behave themselves? Was there ever any trouble?” My mouth was dry.
“Trouble? Christ, I can’t remember. I’m eighty years old, give or take a couple years, I can’t remember my own name some days. I’m not jokin’ you, youngster.” His gloved fingers throbbed on the tabletop. “Only trouble I know about is the thing with Rita, that’s Rita, my wife. Quite a girl, Rita was, but too much for me … I was all shot up and gassed, sick all the time, not a whole hell of a lot different than this poor old fart you see before you now …” He shot me one of his crackling wheezes, blinked behind the thick round spectacles; one eye was grayish-white, opaque with cataract. “I never really held Rita’s way of acting against her, our marriage was not one of passion, you get me? You follow? I ain’t talkin’ to myself, am I?”
“I follow,” I said. “Tell me the story.”
He looked out the bay window. The beach beneath his restaurant and his motel had a gray and rocky look, dimly lit by lamps at the back of the buildings. A red sand bucket stood out, glared against the sand. The waves thrust themselves on the shore and their fingers crept toward us.
“Pretty damned curious, I’d say,” he said cagily.
I shrugged.
“Well, why should I care? You’re somebody to talk to.” He held the beer to his lips, hands clutching the heavy stein like a baby’s. “Rita was a hard worker, never idle, working at our old place, the café and the cabins we used to have north of here, cabins were the thing in the thirties. Before this new kind of motel, y’see. Then she went to work out at this lodge, for these young fellas from the Cities. They came up to hunt and fish and get drunk I guess, and they needed somebody to cook sometimes and keep the place tidy. I never knew what they paid her, Rita and I kept ourselves separate, but she paid her way with me … She wasn’t a bad wife, not a bad bargain, as things went. Hell, everybody’s got some skeletons in the closet.” He peered at me, one eye sharp and gleaming, like a watchful animal. “Ain’t they, ain’t everybody got things they don’t talk about?”
“Sure,” I said, “everybody. You’re sure right about that, Ted.”
He nodded, wise and sly in his antiquity.
“When she died, Rita left me one hundred and fifty thousand dollars! One hundred and fifty thousand dollars … Can you believe it? It took awhile to get at it but the banker here in Grande Rouge, I known him for years, all my life, he knew the money was there and he let me borrow against it—”
“Rita died? I thought she … well, I didn’t know she was dead.”
He nodded again. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Whatever happened to Rita Hook? People used to gossip about that all the time, day up, day down. What became of Rita? Where is she now?” He sang it, like a child, or someone whose mind was nipping in and out of corners. “Well, the truth is I don’t know any more than anyone else. But she either went so far away nobody could find her or she packed it in, died. Anyways, she never showed up again after that night she went out to the lodge for the last time …”
“You say you don’t remember any of the men in the club, but maybe you do. How about Jon Goode? Or Jim Crocker?” No answer. “Maybe … Carver Maxvill?”
“Nope. Just can’t recollect at all.”
“Funny,” I said. “One of them disappeared, too. Long time ago, man named Maxvill, a Minneapolis lawyer. Like your wife, he just wasn’t there one day …”
“That’s how it was with Rita. Gone. She said she was going out to the lodge one night, dead of winter, cold as a bitch. I told her that. ‘Rita,’ I says, ‘it’s too cold, it can wait till tomorrow.’ But no, she says, she wants to get it done that night, she said she had some picking up and straightening to do, pipes to check, one damn thing or another.” He sucked air in, wheezed it out, clapped his gloved hands around the gleaming wheels of his rolling, invalid’s chair. “It was a snowy night, blowing and cold, not long before Christmas, she had old Running Buck—what was his name?—Willy, it was Willy, the Indian guide, drive her out in his old pickup. Willy was the guide for them city boys, he was out there whenever they were, taking ’em hunting, fishing … So he took her out that night and about midnight he shows up at our place, poker-faced as usual, tells me that Rita decided there was too much work to do out at the lodge, so she figured she’d stay overnight … Didn’t make any difference to me, she was a big girl. Running Buck bought a bottle of hooch from me that night, wanted to keep warm, I suppose, and drove off …” He blinked, looked away from me again, toward the lake, remembering the night he’d last seen his wife. The memory didn’t seem to hurt him but he was an old man and maybe none of it seemed so bad anymore. It all came to this anyway, he seemed to be saying, so what difference did it make? But there were the ridges in his face, a kind of glittering madness in his one good eye.
“Next day she didn’t call me—those fellas always kept the lodge on the telephone line year round—so about noon or so I called the lodge. No answer. Well, I was worried. I called the law and the sheriff went out there in the snow, I was down sick all that winter, and there wasn’t no trace of Rita out there. It was raining and sleeting and snowing, no tracks, car or otherwise, at the lodge, just a wet mess … and that was the last of Rita. Evaporated. Didn’t take no money, no clothes, but I figure she musta gone off with some fella …” He drained his beer and burrowed his chin down into his scarf. He muttered. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. The tables had begun to fill and the noise level was rising. I hitched my chair closer to him.
“Son, niece, wife, all gone to hell … Gone.” He shook his head slowly. “Draft in here, I’m cold. Brrr.” I was sweating. Logs were burning in the fireplace behind me. “Everybody’s gone, all but these shitheels waiting for me to pack it in, can’t be too soon for them.” He sniffed, rubbed his nose. “Well, maybe I’m ready to go, maybe tonight’s the night. I can feel the cold in my bones … what’s your name again?”
He didn’t look at me.
“Paul.”
“I don’t know you, do I?”
“No, not really.”
“I suppose I’m boring you?” He had snapped back into focus. He was alert again, smiling slyly up at me.
“Not at all,” I said.
“I’m alone, an old man, dying in slow motion,” he wheezed, breath whistling in his throat. “My family gone—oh, yes, I had a family, a son and a niece and a wife, all of us living together for a time, but there were problems, things we didn’t ever talk about. Skeletons in the closet,” he repeated, chuckling into the wrinkled scarf. He shoved the plate of potatoes away. “We had a boy, lucky, that was. I wasn’t up to much on the bedroom front, y’know? After the gassing? But we had a boy. Long gone, probably dead somewhere, too, like his poor mother. Then Rita went clear back to Chicago that time to be with her sister while her sister was having her baby, no husband, y’know, not that I’d hold that against her, poor wretch … Died having the baby, she died in a place called Merrivale Hospital it was, same place Rita’d went to have our boy, with Rita by her side, holding her hand as she slipped away. The baby lived and Rita brought her home and …” He coughed, sniffling, rubbing the drop hanging from the end of his pointed, bony nose. “She’s gone, too. Once Rita left us I had the two kids and what was I to do? My poor health kept me from being the father they needed, y’see? And now they’re gone and old Ted’s by his lonesome. Sad, sad story … Could you fetch me a beer, young man?”
I went to get him the beer and when I returned he was snoring, mouth hanging slack, asleep. I put the stein on the table in reach and went outside. It was like leaving a grave. TED shone like blood against the sky and the mist was thickening, turning to a cold rain.
I grabbed a hamburger and a root beer at the A&W, which was the only drive-in in town, passed the Chat and Chew, which looked crowded with its window steaming over, took a right through the sparse residential section, and found myself on a blacktop heading into the black night. I smelled the rain and the wet trees but beyond the penumbra of the headlamps the evening offered a void. There was no moon; it was like slipping quietly, unnoticed through infinite space. The night Rita Hook left Grande Rouge might have been dark like this, snow blustering before the pickup truck. Countless times on countless nights the members of the club had driven out from Grande Rouge toward the lodge on the same scraps of highway. Now it was my turn.
I wondered what I was learning, made sure I remembered how I’d been pulled into this whole thing in the first place; it seemed a long time ago, a thousand questions ago, the first ones buried beneath all that followed. The secrets of the past leaped up in my mind, like figures stepping from the roadside, from the deep blackness, into my headlamps. What was it Father Boyle said—something or other was bound to happen sooner or later? Bound to come out sooner or later? Something along those lines. Something. Carver Maxvill had disappeared in Minneapolis; no one wanted to talk about it anymore. But it was bound to come out sooner or later … What? The fact that a man kicked over the traces, let go, and was swallowed up, Jonah-like, in the whale? Surely there was more to it than a matter of public record; after all, he’d been stolen from the newspaper morgue. But what in God’s name had the man done? What could have been so awful that the thought of his name sent the wild bunch scurrying, angry, fingers pointing like characters in a Daumier etching?
Ted Hook, living out the end among the shitheels, people he despised, heading for the grave not knowing whatever happened to Rita … Where did she go? Was she still alive and did she remember the old man she’d married, who’d given her a son?
I turned off the blacktop onto a wet gravel road winding its one lane between a thick outcropping of shrubbery. Water dripped steadily onto the hood and windshield.
There were ridges in the roadway and sharp bends and I needed to concentrate. I felt alone, as if the state of solitude were pressing down, closing around me, as if it were my fate and nature, had always been. Born to be alone … No point in kidding yourself. Anything else was an illusion: You were always alone and without a map, no matter what your analyst or your mother told you. You picked your way, carefully, as best you could. Men were capable of anything and you had only yourself to blame in the end.
Where had Rita gotten $150,000? Hadn’t Ted wondered, just a little? $150,000! A housekeeper. Christ. Why hadn’t she taken it with her? Maybe she never went anywhere. But, then, why couldn’t they find her? Because sometimes people lose themselves. Carver Maxvill did it. Why not Rita Hook?
The lodge was a blur in the night, indistinct in the darkness and the fog and the rain. I didn’t stop to inspect it beyond recognizing it from the snapshots. The smell of pine needles and wet fir trees was overpowering. I yanked my suitcase out of the back and opened the door with the key Archie had given me. He hadn’t been there in all those years but he assured me that he’d been told the key would work, that he was welcome to use the lodge anytime he wanted. Goode, Crocker, Hub, and Boyle still came up a time or two each year for the fishing and he was welcome; once a member, always a member.
The door opened easily and the lights clicked dimly on, yellow and warm with shadows everywhere. A moose head gazed benevolently from a place of some honor over the fireplace, which was high and expansive with wood stacked to dry beside it. A huge braided rug lay before the fire. Three couches, one of wicker, one of leather, one of loose cushions on a wooden frame, made a square on the rug with the fireplace the fourth side.
I twisted a sheet of newspaper, lit it, and thrust it up the chimney to see if the flue was clear. The smoke sucked quickly upward, drops of rain spattering my hand. I built a fire in the long charred grate and watched it roar. It was a comfortable, large room. A 1937 copy of Esquire lay on an end table. I opened some of the windows, heard the rain in the trees.
There was canned food in the kitchen, a set of plain dishes, assorted scotches, bourbons, gins, mixes, brandies. Dishes stood in a rubber rack where they’d been placed to drain. A copy of a Minneapolis newspaper from a month before lay on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. Maybe that was why the place didn’t seem echoing and cold and deserted. It was never left unattended for long.
The fire took the chill out of my bones and left me half hypnotized. I watched the flames lashing the dry logs for what seemed like a long time, my conscious mind utterly blacked out. When I snapped out of it thunder was rolling overhead and rain was drumming steadily in the gutters beneath the eaves. I got stiffly up, went back to the kitchen, opened a can of Folgers coffee, filled a glass percolator with water, put coffee in the basket, and set it on the gas stove. I went out on the front porch to wait for the coffee, stood listening to the rain and the wind and the thunder. It was so dark I couldn’t see the trees. In Minneapolis the sky would be pink with the lights. It never got this dark in Minneapolis; the night both lured and frightened me.
I drank coffee and brandy by the fire, eyes closed, wondering what Kim was doing. Last night seemed a long time ago to me, but I summoned her up again, called her into my mind’s eye. I was very tired and my mind wandered. Was Ma Dierker getting herself pulled back together? Did she realize what a mission she’d sent me on? Her hatred for Kim had started the whole thing. It was like falling down a mine shaft, waiting for the splash you were going to make at the bottom. Waiting. Waiting. It was too dark to see the bottom, you didn’t know where you were, but the farther you fell, the more certain you were that it was down there, waiting for you.