Orville kept his pistol aimed at Timmy. But he kept blinking, like he had sweat or tears in his eyes.
“Maybe I’m not getting through to you, Orville,” Timmy said. “You walk away and you don’t even see what it is I have to do. You can say you came in just a minute too late, that Mr. Walker was already dead, that I was gone. You’ve always been a reasonable sort, Orville, and this would be the wrong time to be stupid.”
Timmy glanced at Orville, just for a moment, long enough to see that Orville was scared. Maybe not as scared as I was. But scared.
“Orville,” Timmy said. “Take. A. Walk.”
I stared down the barrel of the shotgun. Timmy smiled, shook his head at Orville’s foolishness, and squeezed his finger around the trigger.
Orville Thorne shot Timmy Wickens in the neck.
Timmy said, “Ack.”
The shotgun fell away from me.
His mouth stayed open, but all that could be heard was a faint gurgling sound. He clamped one hand to the wound, blood spilling out between his fingers. He held on to the shotgun with the other hand, turned it toward Orville. Before he could fire, Orville shot him again, this time in the chest, and Timmy dropped to the floor.
Orville took a step forward and in the moment before Timmy Wickens closed his eyes, Orville said, “He’s my brother.”
39
BY THE TIME THE SUN CAME UP, Hank Wrigley was in Braynor District Hospital getting patched up, Betty at his side. What was once a farmhouse was nothing but a pile of smoldering embers. A pumper from the Braynor Fire Department was still pouring water onto the site. They’d run a hose down to the lake and were pumping from there.
After Orville shot Timmy Wickens, I flicked the lights at Dad’s cabin on and off until he came back in the boat with May and Jeffrey. Lawrence showed up not long after that, once the ambulance attendants had arrived and left with Betty and Hank. We both made a point of keeping May and her son away from cabin 3, where Timmy lay in a pool of his own blood.
Dr. Heath was roused from his slumber so that he could pronounce Timmy Wickens and Wendell dead. Nobody was able to find enough of Dougie or Charlene to make a similar assessment.
The coroner was good enough to retrieve our car keys from what was left of Wendell’s jacket and pants. The dogs had chewed through them, and him, pretty thoroughly.
The phone company even sent someone out to get the line to Dad’s cabin reconnected. The cops—and they were from every level imaginable—were turning Dad’s place into a temporary command center, and wanted the phone operating pronto.
Once the phone was working, I called Sarah and gave her the short version. I told her I’d be home sometime in the late afternoon, and would write something for the next day’s edition of The Metropolitan. About a family of homicidal psychos who’d planned to blow up a parade.
“You still want this other information you were asking me about the other day?” she said. About a shelter, where a woman with a child on the run could go.
“She’s not exactly on the run now,” I said. “But she’s going to need some help. Everything she had is gone. No clothes, nothing.”
“I’ll start making some calls,” Sarah said.
“See if we have some old stuff of Paul’s that would fit a ten-year-old.”
Lawrence, who’d walked into Dad’s study in the middle of my conversation, said, “They can stay with me till we get them set up someplace.”
“That’d be great,” I said to Lawrence. I told Sarah of Lawrence’s offer and added, “She’s a nice woman. She’s been through a lot. And she and Jeffrey are on their own now. That’s actually going to be a plus, given who she was with, but she’s still going to be traumatized for a while.”
“Sure,” said Sarah. “And you? Are you okay?”
I smiled. “I’m a complete disaster.”
“Get home safely.”
I hung up and found Dad in the kitchen, sitting at the table, looking dazed and tired. I asked him about the ankle, and he said it was a bit swollen again.
“But I don’t need you here anymore,” he said. “I’m closing the place for the rest of the season. Soon as Hank’s released, he and Betty are going. Bob’s taking off end of the day. Leonard Colebert’s family is due here today to pick up his things. And there’s a lot of stuff to deal with, of course. Insurance, for one thing.”
“Well, at least you don’t have to worry anymore about finding a way to get the Wickenses out of your house.”
Dad gave me a tired smile. “No Wickenses. No house. No problem.”
I found Bob Spooner down by the water, sitting in his boat, just looking out over the lake.
“How was the tractor?” I asked.
“Fast,” he said.
“I was serious, what I said last night,” I said.
“About what?”
“About going fishing. Are you packing up yet?”
“Not till the end of the day. I might even hang in until tomorrow. Are you serious? After all that’s happened? You want to go out one last time?”
“Yeah,” I said. “If you don’t mind. Something a bit restful, for a change.”
“Sure.”
“In an hour?”
Bob said sure, again.
The parade, we heard later, went off without a hitch. Stuart Lethbridge and the rest of the Fifty Lakes Gay and Lesbian Coalition failed to show. Turns out Stuart couldn’t get anyone to run the comics shop, and Saturday being his busiest day, he couldn’t afford to close.
May and Jeffrey were going back to the city in Lawrence’s Jag. They’d given statements to the police, and Lawrence had let them know that they’d be staying at his place, at least for a while.
Lawrence had finished packing all his stuff and tossed it into the trunk. Jeffrey, still holding on to what was now his entire Star Wars collection, Mace Windu and Lando Calrissian, was getting into the backseat.
“You take care,” I said. “Lawrence will look after you.”
Jeffrey was dazed and tired. “I know,” he said. “I like him.”
“I like him, too,” I said. I shook Jeffrey’s hand, then went over to say goodbye to May.
She gave me a hug. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry about your father,” I said. For any pain she felt, I really was.
“I had no idea,” she said. “Not that he’d killed two men in my life. Sabotaged my jobs. And then he allowed us to be locked up. Would he have killed us? My own father? Would he have killed me and his grandson?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if he couldn’t have brought himself to do it, I think Charlene would have.”
She looked like she was going to cry. She gave me a kiss, thanked me again, and got into the Jag.
“Thanks,” I said to Lawrence as he opened his door.
He put his arms around me, patted my back, and whispered into my ear, “The shit you get into. I do declare.”
As they drove up the hill and disappeared around the bend, I noticed Orville Thorne standing not far away.
“I owe you,” I said.
He gave me a half smile. “I may not be cut out for this,” he said. “Maybe I should think about doing something else.”
“Well,” I said, “you were there for me when I needed it most, and I thank you. When you’re in the city, I want you to come by. My wife Sarah, my kids Paul and Angie, they’d be honored to meet you.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
“How are you and Lana?” I asked.
Orville sighed tiredly. “We talked a lot last night. She’s not my aunt, she’s not my mother, but she loves me as much as either.”
“Hold on to that.”
“I wish,” he said, working to get the words out, “that I had had a chance to meet your mother.”
“Our mother,” I said.
He nodded. His eyes were wet.
“I’ll do what I can to tell you everything about her that I can.”
He smiled sadly. “I
’d appreciate that. And, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“About what I said before, when I found out, about you being my half brother, what I called you.”
“Oh, the asshole thing?” I said. “Don’t worry. You wouldn’t be the first one in the family to make that assessment.”
“All set?” Bob Spooner asked. He was already in the boat, doing an inventory of the lures in his tackle box, when I walked out onto the dock.
“Ready,” I said. I untied the bow, got in, took the middle seat, and Bob unhooked the stern. He pushed the boat out with an oar, lowered the prop into the water, and started the motor. Shouting over it, he said, “I thought I’d take us where we went the other day.”
Rather than shout back, I gave him a thumbs-up. There was almost no breeze, no chop on the water, and hardly any other boats out. It was nearing the end of the season. It was an overcast day, but little chance of rain. The sound of water rushing against the metal hull was therapeutic.
We were in our spot in about five minutes, and Bob killed the outboard. He handed me a pole, to which he’d already attached a lure.
“You can pick something different if you want,” he said.
“No, that’s good,” I said. “Besides, it’s not about the fishing. It’s about being out here.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Bob said. “There’s no more beautiful spot on Earth.”
“Tell me again how long you’ve been coming up here?”
“Thirty-two years. Never missed a summer.”
I cast out between some weeds. “Amazing. And the lake, it’s as beautiful up here as it was when you first came up?”
“Pretty much. Just hope it stays that way as long as I’m coming up here.” Bob cast out, reeled in slowly, then repeated the process.
“At least,” I said, “we won’t be seeing a huge fishing resort going in. At least not from Leonard. But you never know, there may be another developer just around the corner.”
Bob nodded without looking at me. “Yeah, well, that’s true. But it was still an awful thing, what happened to Leonard. I’ll never forget it as long as I live, Zack, I’m tellin’ you.”
I reeled in, then cast out again. I asked the question I’d been wanting to ask since the night before.
“So, Bob,” I said, “what really happened when you and Leonard went on your hike?”
“Hmm?” he said, pretending not to hear, glancing down into his tackle box.
“When you were out with Leonard Colebert. I was wondering, maybe you could tell me what really happened.”
Bob stopped reeling in for a moment and looked at me. “What are you talking about, Zack? You know what happened. For Christ’s sake, you were out there. You saw what happened to him. Jesus.”
We were quiet for a moment, the only sound the lapping of the waves against the metal hull.
“There was no bear,” I said. “Certainly not where Morton Dewart was concerned. Timmy Wickens admitted that to me. But not with Leonard Colebert either.”
Bob Spooner, both hands on the pole, looked at me.
“I swear to God, Zack, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bob said.
“I guess the first thing was, why didn’t the bear eat him?” I asked.
“Christ, you want me to make excuses for a bear? Leonard was running away, he fell down the side of a hill, the bear must have decided it was too much work to go down there.”
“That’s possible,” I said. “And if that had been the only thing, I might have let it go.”
Bob waited.
“But then, Dad found bear spray in Leonard’s backpack. It was sitting right there, near the top.”
“Leonard must have dropped his backpack,” Bob said.
“It was found with his body,” I said. “Why didn’t he try to spray the bear? Why couldn’t he have slipped the backpack off, reached in while he was running? Even if he didn’t want to stop and face the bear, he could have sprayed wildly over his shoulder. That’s what I did last night, when Wendell was chasing me through the woods. I never got a good shot at him, but at least I tried.”
“All I can think,” Bob said, “is that he just never had a chance. The bear was closing in on him. That had to be the way it was.”
“I suppose,” I said, lifting the lure out of the water and casting out again. “Maybe, if it had just been the bear not eating him, and the bear spray in his backpack, maybe even then, I might have let it go.”
Bob’s eyes moved about. He had to be wondering what else I had.
“Remember,” I said, “when you came back, and you described the bear?”
Bob, slowly, said, “Sure, I guess.”
“You said the bear had one torn ear, like it was clipped off.”
“I think, I guess I remember that.”
“That day, when we first met Timmy Wickens, when everyone was trying to figure out whose body that was in the woods by the cabins, Wickens said Morton Dewart was looking for a bear, a bear that had an ear torn off. So when you told us about the bear that chased you and Leonard, the one that chased Leonard off the side of the cliff, and said it had an ear torn off, we all figured, hey, it had to be the same bear that killed Dewart.”
Bob started to say something, then stopped himself.
“But Timmy Wickens made up the bear story. Made it all up that a bear killed Dewart, made up the story that Dewart was going out to track down a bear. Even made up a description of the bear, because, as he told me last night, he’s never even seen a bear around here. There may be some, but he’s never actually laid eyes on one.”
Bob said, “I see.”
“So you pinned Leonard’s death on an animal that doesn’t exist. You built your lie upon another lie. When the first one fell apart, so did yours.”
“That’s how you see it,” Bob said.
“So my question is, what really happened out there?”
Bob took his right hand off the reel, holding the line in place with the thumb of his left hand, and rubbed his gray whiskers. He hadn’t shaved this morning. Who had?
“We had an argument,” Bob said.
“Okay.”
“We were hiking through there, and I’d been talking to him about his proposal, this stupid fishing resort, told him it was all wrong, that it would ruin the area, that he should forget about it, that bringing in hundreds of fishermen would clean this lake out of fish in a couple of years. Told him he was out of his fucking mind.”
“How did he like that?”
“He didn’t like it much. He said he had powerful lawyers, that they’d find a way to get the council to approve it. That Mayor Holland would have to agree or she’d have to spend millions to fight it.”
“Not good,” I said.
“We kept walking, arguing, and we got to the top of this ridge, the cliff, and he told me to come look, that this was part of the property he was going to develop, and that down at the bottom of the ridge, he was going to take down all those trees, mow everything down, and put in some huge whale for kids to play in.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And then he said I shouldn’t even worry about the fish being depleted, that he’d stock the lake, maybe bring in fish from other places. Starts talking about bringing in swordfish, for Christ’s sake. Those aren’t freshwater fish, I told him. You can’t put goddamn swordfish in a lake with muskie and pickerel. I asked him if he was out of his fucking mind, even suggesting something that stupid.”
“That’s pretty crazy,” I said.
Bob’s cheeks got red. “I swear to you! He was going to destroy this lake, that’s what he was going to do. This is God’s country, Zachary. Look around.” Bob’s eyes got misty. “This is paradise.”
It was hard for me, just yet, after the kind of night I’d put in, to think of this as paradise, but Bob was right. If there was a more beautiful part of the world, I hadn’t seen it yet.
“So,” Bob said, “I guess I said something I shouldn’t have.”
>
“What was that?” I asked.
“I called him a fucking idiot. Plain as that. I said, ‘Leonard, you are a complete, total fucking idiot.’ ”
“How’d he take that?”
“He hit me. Well, shoved me, I guess. Told me I was a stupid old coot, standing in the way of progress. So, I don’t know, I guess I shoved him back.”
“And over?”
Bob nodded slowly, once.
“Leonard went off the edge, tumbled. Rolled down, ass over teakettle. Around the second time he rolled over, I swear, I thought I heard something snap. His neck, I guess.” Bob paused, breathed in. “He rolled to the bottom, and I called down to him. Jesus, I musta called down to him ten times. But he didn’t answer. So, I found a way down, the same way we all found our way down later, to check on him.”
“And he was dead,” I said.
Bob looked out over the water, looking for something that wasn’t there. Some sort of salvation, maybe.
“No,” Bob said.
Maybe my mouth dropped open, I’m not sure, but it wasn’t the answer I was expecting.
“He was alive?” I asked.
“I guess, just barely. He was breathing, but he was twisted up something awful. He managed, sort of whispered, something about not being able to feel anything. At all.”
A slight breeze caught the bow of the boat and gently turned us. I felt cold.
“What happened then, Bob?”
“I”—and the words were catching in his throat—“I, I started thinking about what had happened to him. How he’d probably busted his spine, done something horrible, how he’d never walk again, and I thought of my wife, how her life dragged on, how Leonard didn’t deserve something like that.”
“Is that really all you were thinking?” I asked.
Bob was quiet for a moment. “I suppose I was thinking a few other things, too.” He paused. “About what was going to happen. About how, once I got help, and we got Leonard to a hospital, and he told the police what had happened, that I had pushed him over the edge, that even if I didn’t get convicted of anything, even if I could somehow convince them that Leonard slipped, that his lawyers, these goddamn lawyers of his, they’d find a way to ruin me. To destroy me.”