Starvation Lake (41 page)

The Bonnie leaped out, gathering speed. Dad had told me many times that it was loaded with power, but I hadn’t really understood until now. I clung to the steering wheel to keep the car on the tracks I’d dug before it plowed into the deeper snow. The two-track dipped down and the Bonnie plunged down with it, churning snow left and right, the roof scraping against pine branches. “Come on, baby, you can do it,” I yelled. I let up a little on the accelerator, then punched it, then let up again, trying to keep the car moving without setting the wheels to spinning in the snow. Out the rear window I could see Horvath Road. The county plows had cut an opening there where the snow was shaved down to just a few inches deep. If I could just get there, I’d be out.

“Come on!” I screamed. With twenty feet to go, I felt the left rear tire sink and grab and then spin in the snow. The Bonnie lurched out of my control and swerved left until the car was perpendicular to the two-track. I hit the brakes, rammed the gearshift into drive, and jammed the accelerator as I swung the steering wheel to the right. The Bonnie pitched forward a few feet and stopped, the left rear tire whirring.

I was stuck.

Leaving the car running, I stepped out and looked up and down Horvath Road, barely ten feet away. Nothing. But the cops wouldn’t be long.

The Bonnie’s front wheels had made the snow shallower, but the left rear tire spun in the deeper stuff when I tapped the accelerator. The right rear wheel had fetched up on a bump that gave it some purchase. I’d been stuck like this before and escaped by rocking the car between drive and reverse. A push helped. But there was no one to push. I squatted next to the left tire. If I had something solid to stick beneath it, it might give me enough traction to get unstuck. On hands and knees I dug out as much snow as I could from under the stuck tire.

I retrieved Eggo from my duffel bag. For old times’ sake I slipped my hand inside and waggled the glove as I had so many times. Then I jammed it under the tire until it was wedged tightly between rubber and packed snow. “Sorry, old pal,” I said. “One more save, OK?”

As the Bonnie popped out onto Horvath Road, I saw my glove fly up behind the car in shreds. I thought about going back for it, but only for a second. The snow was falling harder. The road was slick. I pushed the speed to thirty-five and hung on. Whenever the Bonnie started to fishtail, I dropped my speed a little and tapped my brakes and prayed I’d stay out of a ditch.

The quickest way out of Michigan was I-75, but the state cops would be lying for me there. I decided I’d take Old U.S. 27 as far south as I could and then wing it. The way the snow was blowing, I’d be lucky to make Ohio by 7:00 p.m. First I had to get to Old 27. I couldn’t chance Route 816, because the cops would be waiting there, too, so I figured I’d zigzag along some back roads they probably wouldn’t know. The falling snow enveloped me in a white cocoon. I pushed the Seger tape in and turned the volume up:

Go ahead and call me yellow
Two plus two is on my mind…

The snow let up south of Clare. I drove all night, stopping only for gas and coffee. A little after five the next morning, I pulled the Bonnie into the snowless parking lot behind the Fairfax Ice House. The trees in Virginia were still mostly bare, but the grass was beginning to turn green. I stretched out across the enormous front seat of Dad’s dream car and fell instantly to sleep.

   The sun woke me a little after seven. The floor of the Bonnie was a mess of foam cups and cellophane wrappers. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and peered at myself in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t look much worse than anyone wandering into a rink at this hour.

The lobby of the Fairfax Ice House was like most I’d seen. Black rubber mats covered the floor. Long benches waited for youngsters to sit and tie on their skates. The smell of popcorn lingered. To my right was a skate-rental window and hockey shop, closed at the moment, to my left a cluster of vending machines, video games, and pay phones. Facing me were two sets of double doors leading to the rink. Between the doors stood two banks of lockers, and over the lockers on the cinder-block wall hung five black-and-white photographs of people identified by name tags. Don Peacock managed the rink and Margie Peacock taught figure skating along with Kitty Petreault and Jeff Bender. Power skating was taught, appropriately enough, by Al Power. All of them wore white turtlenecks beneath purple nylon jackets.

No photograph accompanied the sixth name tag on the wall. “Richard Blackstone. Hockey Skills Coach,” it read. I wrote it down in my notebook. On the wall next to the skate-rental window hung a bulletin board listing the week’s activities: public skating sessions, figure skating classes, hockey leagues. On this Thursday, I saw Richard Blackstone was scheduled to teach a hockey class for kids aged five to seven at eleven forty-five, and another for eight-to twelve-year-olds at three forty-five. I wrote those down, too.

   On a traffic-choked road called Route 50, I found a banged-up old diner squatting beneath a sign that said simply,
EAT
. There was no egg pie on the menu, and when I asked for fried potatoes, the waitress, a tubby woman wearing a dirty yellow smock stitched with “Shirley,” said, “Don’t you want grits, sugar?” I ate them with a cheese omelet and drank coffee reading the
Washington Post
until 9:00 a.m.. By then I figured the Fairfax County Clerk’s Office would be open.

The roads wound and twisted and doubled back in a bewildering asphalt pretzel. Wherever I turned, it all looked the same, clusters of townhouses squeezed between strip malls and fast-food joints and car dealerships. A perfect place to disappear.

At the clerk’s office, I paid for copies of every document containing the name Richard Blackstone. I went through them line by line sitting in the parking lot. Now I knew where Blackstone lived and what he drove. One piece of paper linked him to Richard Ltd., the company that owned Jack Blackburn’s property near Starvation Lake. The clerk gave me directions to a nearby electronics store. There I bought a point-and-shoot camera, a video camera with a tripod and zoom lens, and a tape recorder that fit into my breast pocket. I stuffed it all in my duffel bag and headed back toward the ice rink, noticing a FedEx store along the way. At a Mobil station I filled the Bonnie’s gas tank. Inside, I bought a cap adorned with the logo for the Washington Capitals, the local pro hockey team. A bony codger in an oil-stained sweatshirt changed my five-dollar bill for quarters.

I backed away from the gas pump and slid in next to a pay phone.

“
Pilot.
McCarthy.”

“It’s me,” I said.

“Holy crap.” Joanie lowered her voice. “Where are you? When I got back from Audrey’s yesterday, there were four cops waiting. You didn’t give up your source, did you?”

“Nope. What did you tell the cops?”

“I told them to call Kerawhatshisname. What a jerk. He just called me and said he’d spike any story with the name ‘Blackburn’ in it.”

“Just keep writing.”

“First I’ve got to do something on this bank thing. The jerk gave me a bunch of crap for not running anything on it in today’s paper. And Tillie took off.”

“What bank thing?”

“I told you, the New York bank buying the banks up here? I guess one of whatshisname’s golf buddies is a banker.”

“Keep it short. What about Tillie?”

“She’s gone. Came back for about five minutes after you took off and cleared out. Didn’t say a word to me.”

The missing film files had finally spooked her. Or maybe my sudden departure. It worried me. Had she figured out where I was going?

“What else is going on?” I said.

“AP put out a short on the cops looking for you. Redpath’s funeral is tomorrow. The zoning board got postponed yesterday because of the snowstorm. And the chick from the clerk’s office dropped off a big envelope.”

The 1988 town council minutes. “Vicky?” I said.

“Yeah. She said she was sorry but she had to go get them from that bartender guy.”

“Loob. Can you open them up?”

“Already did. I don’t see much. But I’ll bet you wanted to know about the dredging vote.”

She was good and getting better. “Yeah.”

I heard her rustle some papers. “They voted on it at this April thirteenth meeting. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, like, duh, how else are you going to find a body? But the sheriff, this Spardell dude, was worried about how it might mess up his budget.”

“Yeah. He wanted a boat.”

“I’ll get to that. Anyway, first they voted three to two to dredge the lake. But the sheriff made a fuss and then the mayor—excuse me, the mayor pro tem, because the mayor wasn’t there—called the council into a closed session. They came out of that and voted three to two again, this time
not
to dredge.”

“Who called the session?”

“Mayor Pro Tem A. Campbell.”

“Soupy’s dad? Shit, that’s right, he was on the council. And who switched their vote?”

“You’ll love this,” Joanie said. “X. Perlmutter.”

“Huh? Clayton’s brother?”

“Oh, no, it’s Clayton. His first name is actually Xavier.”

I’d never known Clayton was on the council. But then I had been in Detroit. “What about the boat?”

“The last thing they did was authorize twenty-five thousand dollars for that, with Campbell abstaining since they were buying it from him.”

“What an upstanding guy. What kind of boat?”

“Doesn’t say. Just one ‘appropriate to the tasks of policing the lake and its shoreline.’ Why’s the town buying a boat for the county sheriff anyway?”

A recorded voice was telling me I had to insert more quarters. “Listen,” I said. “Go to my desk, second drawer on the right. Near the top you’ll find a photocopy of a receipt from the marina. Get it. Hurry.”

I waited. She came back on. “Got it. A receipt from the Starvation Lake Marina for twenty-five thousand dollars. Got to be for the boat, huh?”

“What’s the date on it?”

“Let’s see. April twelfth.”

“But the meeting was the thirteenth, right? How could the town give Angus Campbell the money before the council voted?”

“Good question. What does it have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t.

The recorded voice said the call was about to end.

“Hey, that reminds me,” she said. “On Perlmutter, I was going over some of the state grant stuff again and—”

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’m going to be sending you something overnight. Look for it. And do me a favor and call my mom and tell her I’m OK.”

“Gus, listen, one of the names on—”

The dial tone cut her off.

   The Zamboni made its final circuit before the 11:45 a.m. hockey skills session. At the top of the bleachers, I placed the video camera on its tripod, slung the still camera around my neck, got out my pen and notebook. A dozen little skaters burst onto the ice in baggy socks and too-big pants, their faces obscured by cages. They swerved right and skated counterclockwise. I made sure the video camera was recording.

Behind the skaters, the door to their dressing room swung open and their teacher emerged. I tugged my Caps cap lower. Richard Blackstone wore his silver hair in a comb-over swept left to right and then back. My heart skipped a beat. Jack Blackburn never wore his hair that way. Blackstone seemed smaller and paunchier than Blackburn, and his face was obscured in a full silver beard. No, I thought. Is that really him? I zoomed the camera in on his eyes. They were downcast, watching his feet. Of course. Blackburn had just one superstition. Had he left it in Starvation Lake? Just before he reached the threshold, Richard Blackstone took a little hop and a skip to stagger his stride before he stepped out, so that his left blade would hit the ice before his right. A shudder went through me. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, he was circling behind the goalie net to my left and heading up the boards toward me. I took a deep breath and looked into the video camera. I caught a closer glimpse of his face, but he quickly passed. I watched him with my naked eye as he circled again. His black sweatsuit did nothing to hide the bulge at his waist. His stride was still smooth, but his legs had to work harder to move him along. As he turned toward me, I leaned into the video camera and focused on his face. His teeth seemed whiter and more prominent, probably false. They set off the dull yellow that tinged his sagging cheeks and the creases at his deep-set eyes. I pictured him in his house at night, drinking by the arid glow of his television. It made me feel good to think of him as alone and pathetic, a dried-up old man unloved and anonymous. He circled again and as he veered my way a third time he turned toward me and looked straight into the camera. It startled me. Maybe I merely imagined it, but I thought I saw a faint, knowing smile play across his lips before he was gone again. Had he recognized me? Had Tillie gotten to him? I hadn’t expected how hard it would be to see those eyes again as I’d seen them so many times across the Sunday dinner table.

Below me, three mothers in parkas stood along the boards, chatting, paying little attention to what was happening on the ice. As the coach gathered the boys around him, I felt the urge to walk down to those mothers and tell them everything I knew. I imagined myself talking and pointing, and the mothers’ eyes darting between me and the ice, and the disbelief on their faces, followed by horror, either at the truth of the matter or at me for telling it. Twice I yanked my cap lower and coat collar higher and ventured down to the edge of the ice where I could get clearer shots of his face. I snapped shots with the still camera and, when his back was turned, took notes.

He ran some of the same drills the River Rats had run. He took the boys by the shoulders and steered them to specific spots on the ice and showed them where to look for the puck and which way to hold their stick blades. He arranged short stacks of pucks around the ice and made the kids weave between and around them without ever touching them with their sticks. If he told them they had to be hungry for those biscuits, though, I couldn’t hear. Near the end of the session, he gathered the boys around him at center ice. Through the camera I watched their helmeted heads nod in unison as he turned this way and that, telling them they’d done well, patting each of them lightly on the head. I heard them laugh. I heard them shout, “Yeah!” I remembered standing there watching him reach out to the other Rats, waiting for his hand to touch me.