seven
I was out of bed at 5:45 the next morning. I wanted to see Leo Redpath before the Pilot hit the streets and the codgers at Audrey’s started talking.
I found him in the back of the Zamboni shed at the rink, hunched over his workbench in a pale wash of light. A faded River Rats cap hung on a nail above his head. “Good morning, Mr. Carpenter,” he said without looking up. “The Shoot-Out doesn’t begin for several hours, you know.”
“I’ve got to tell you something, Leo.”
Although he’d never played and wasn’t really a student of hockey, Leo was the closest thing the River Rats had had to an assistant coach. He drove our bus on out-of-town trips. He filmed our practices. He kept tape handy and the water bottles filled. During games he worked the bench door for players hopping on and off the ice. Even as we grew into adults, he still took care of us, supplying pucks, sewing up gashes, keeping a few beers in the fridge. He turned to me while wiping his hands on a rag. I could tell he already knew.
“The police were here last night,” he said.
“Oh.”
Leo had been with Coach on Starvation Lake that night. Off the ice as well as on, they were nearly inseparable. They drank and hunted and fished and snowmobiled together. On that night, they’d been out riding and had a few drinks around a campfire in the woods west of the lake. Leo never said much about that night. The police interviewed him and he was quoted briefly in the Pilot. At Coach’s funeral, he declined to give a eulogy. I asked him about it one night in the Zamboni shed and he acted as if he hadn’t heard me. When I asked again, Soupy told me to leave him alone. “He feels guilty enough,” Soupy whispered. Leo kept working at the rink, but except when he was steering Ethel around the ice, you rarely saw him. He slept on a cot in the shed some nights and otherwise retired to his mobile home off Route 816.
He quit drinking after Coach’s death. On the pegboard above his bench he took to pasting aphorisms he’d clipped from books about addiction recovery: Today, I will embrace each minute of my day with joy and wonder… Today, I will leave shame behind and move forward into peace…Today, I will face the truths about myself and lose my fear of acknowledging their presence in my life… Leo never spoke about the sayings, and we understood not to ask.
Since Coach’s death, Leo seemed a man in constant pain, constantly trying to talk himself out of feeling it. I wished there was something I could do to make him feel better.
“Did the police tell you anything?” I said.
“Not much. They said something about those tunnels.”
“They told you that?”
“Not in so many-well, I don’t suppose I’m supposed to talk about it. Are you interviewing me?”
“No. What did you tell them?”
He shrugged. “What could I tell them? Nothing’s changed, Gus. Jack was a foolish man sometimes. There was nothing anyone could do.”
I didn’t think he really believed that. “You went to my mom’s house that night, right? After the accident?”
“It’s all in the record. You can look it up. But I’m kind of busy right now, Gus. I’ll see you later?”
On my way out I caught a glimpse of Leo’s reflection in a sheet of Plexiglas leaning near the door. He had turned to watch me leave. He wore the expression of someone who was straining to remember something.
eight
At 6:35, I was the only person in Audrey’s Diner. I took a seat at the counter. “Morning, Gussy,” Audrey said. “You know what you want?”
“Morning, ma’am. Egg pie, please.”
Audrey DeYonghe was a surprisingly unplump woman in her sixties who had run the diner alone since her third husband took off with a buxom blackjack dealer he’d met at an Indian casino in Gaylord. He had shown up one morning a year later to beg Audrey’s forgiveness, but by then she had taken up with a gift shop proprietor from Petoskey-also a woman in her sixties-and told her husband, while her breakfast patrons stilled forks to listen, that divorce papers were waiting on a chopping table in the back.
Ordinarily, a love interest like Audrey’s would’ve caused a stir in Starvation Lake. But her diner was the only good breakfast place nearby. And a good breakfast place is as essential to a northern Michigan town as a reliable propane supplier. No one made a fuss. Besides, Audrey was nice. And she baked a wicked gooey cinnamon bun.
The diner was blessedly quiet. I gazed down the counter at the photograph of old Red Wing Gordie Howe hanging on the wall. Audrey was no hockey fan, but Gordie Howe happened to be her girlfriend Molly’s uncle, and he’d signed the photo. Beneath it lay a copy of that morning’s Pilot. I ignored it. I wanted to eat in peace and get out.
“One egg-pie special,” Audrey said as she set my breakfast on the counter. Cheddar cheese and scrambled eggs bubbled up through a golden cocoon of Italian bread. I stabbed at the crust with my fork and steam billowed from the sausage, bacon, potatoes, green peppers, mushrooms, and onions baked inside. I had to let it cool before I dug in. Sometimes when I ate something I really liked, I ate in small bites, to make it last. That wasn’t necessary with an egg pie. The hard part was getting a single forkful with every ingredient in it. Since I was a kid, I had averaged about two all-ingredient mouthfuls per pie.
“So what do you think?” Audrey said.
“About what?”
“About anything.”
I smiled. She always did this with me. “I think I like your new hairdo.”
“Oh, yes, and the hairnet makes it all the more stylish, don’t you think?” she said. “But thank you, dear. What else is on your mind?”
“What’s been the talk in here lately?”
“Oh my gosh, if I hear about that snowmobile again. It’s all I heard in here yesterday, and then the hockey, and then of course, well, you were in here for a little.” She folded her arms across her chartreuse smock. “Sometimes I don’t like some of those people much.”
She meant they’d talked about me, and that goal I let in. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe it is the tunnels.”
Audrey loosed a scornful whoop as she turned for the kitchen. “Sure, dear. And there are flying frogs in the lake, too!”
As I savored my first bite-eggs, cheese, potatoes, and sausage, minus the rest-I heard a clattering on the sidewalk outside. The door jangled open and I turned to see three children in identical black-and-gold snowmobile suits clump into the diner, each carrying a black helmet. Behind them lumbered a man the size of a meat freezer bursting at his own black snowmobile suit, stitched with a name-“Jimbo”-over his left breast.
I turned quickly back to my plate, hoping he hadn’t noticed me. I listened while he herded the children to one of the big tables in the back. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw another stuck out over my egg pie.
“Gus?” came a foghorn voice. “Jim Kerasopoulos.”
Kerasopoulos was the general counsel of NLP Newspapers, owner of the Pilot. “Jim, how are you?” I said. “Got the whole brood here?”
“Three of ’em, anyway,” he said. “Linda’s got the other two at some cheerleading thing. The snowmobile trails are cooked out by Traverse. They’re still nice and white over here.”
“Yep.” I remembered the Pilot lying on the counter and wished I had brought it nearer to my plate.
“I was going to stop by your-hey, kids. Kids! Excuse me.” His children were banging their helmets on the
