Nobody loved the cat-and-mouse more than small-town cops. It made the tedium of their jobs more bearable. Still, Dingus’s “no comment” was confirmation enough for me. “So how the heck does the sled wind up in Walleye?” I said. “And please don’t tell me the tunnels.”

He sat back and placed his hands flat on his head. “Strange things happen, Gus,” he said. “Remember Felix?”

Everyone in town knew the story. Felix, a golden retriever, dove into an ice-fishing hole on Starvation just as his master, Fritz Hornbeck, was hauling up a perch. Felix was going after the fish, but he missed and disappeared beneath the ice. Hornbeck, who was into his second bottle of blueberry schnapps, assumed the dog had drowned. But an hour later, Felix emerged from another ice-fishing hole in a shanty half a mile away, shaking off lake water in front of Elvis Bontrager. It was the talk of Starvation for weeks.

“That’s your comment?” I said. “‘Strange things happen’?”

“No. No comment at all.”

“Come on, Dingus.” Joanie was going to raise hell with me for interfering with her story. It’d be worse if I had nothing to show for it.

Deputy Frank D’Alessio walked into the office and, without noticing me, handed Dingus a steaming mug and a thin file folder. “Forensics, chief,” the deputy said. Dingus shot him a look, and D’Alessio turned and saw me.

“Ah, jeez,” he said. “Gus.”

“Frankie,” I said. “Forensics?”

He glanced nervously at Dingus, then started for the door. “You’re playing tonight, right?” He meant our playoff game. “See you out there.”

I smiled at Dingus. “Forensics on a snowmobile?”

Dingus shrugged. “Routine stuff,” he said. “And that’s off the record.” He stood up from his chair, closed his office door, and sat down again. The name of the woman in the photograph came to me: Barbara Lampley. Dingus actually displayed a picture of his ex-wife. What man did that?

“Off the record, Dingus? Give me a break. Has the Pilot ever burned you?”

He folded his meaty hands on his desk. “Not yet,” he said. “I’d really like to help you, Gus, but fact is, I have an ongoing investigation here.”

“Ongoing or reopened?”

“No comment.”

That gave me an idea.

“Can I get a copy of the original police report from 1988?” I said.

“Tell you what,” he said. He pushed back from the desk, pulled a drawer out, plucked a sheet of paper from inside, and handed it to me. “Fill her out and we’ll get back to you.”

The sheet was a form for requesting records under a state public-disclosure law. “Dingus, I can’t wait for this,” I said.

“Well, I’m afraid somebody else has asked for the same report, and I asked them for the same thing.”

“Joanie?”

“No, not the redhead.”

“Who then?”

He shook his head. “That’s all.”

I couldn’t imagine who else would be interested in that report.

“Are you going to drag Walleye?”

“Sure,” Dingus said. “With an icebreaker.”

This wasn’t like Dingus. He usually gave it up once he saw you were serious. Did he have more at stake here than I knew? I recalled watching him from the woods on the night the cowl washed up, how he knelt in the shadows on the beach. I didn’t remember him being a close friend of Coach, but then I wasn’t around Starvation for years.

“Hey,” I said. “Isn’t that Barbara Lampley? Your ex?”

“What of it?”

“You’re a better man than me, Sheriff.”

“OK,” he said, pushing away from his desk. “We’re done here.”

“No, tell you what, Dingus, I’ll take your advice.”

Remembering Barbara reminded me that Dingus had been a deputy once-maybe during the original investigation. I slapped the information sheet down on his desk and scribbled my name, the Pilot address, and my request for the 1988 file on Coach’s accident. I handed it to Dingus. He stared at it for a long moment, then looked up at me, holding my gaze as if he were sizing me up. We really didn’t know each other very well. I guessed that was going to change. “All right,” he said. “We’ll process it within the required ten days.”

ten

Glassy cobwebs arched over the stairway down from the Pilot newsroom. I flicked a switch and gray light filled the basement, a dank concrete vault the size of a one-car garage. Along three walls stood wooden racks holding black binders of Pilot s dating to the 1970s, dates etched in gold lettering on their sides. The one I wanted was marked “March 1-March 15, 1988.”

I hefted the binder from the rack and set it on a slab of Masonite laid across two file cabinets beneath the stairway. Pink Post-its jutted from the edges of the binder-Joanie’s doing. I flipped to the newspaper marked by the first Post-it, Monday, March 14, 1988. Coach’s death covered the front page. The headline bannered across the top read, “Blackburn Dies in Snowmobile Mishap.” Beneath it a photograph showed cops standing around a patch on the frozen lake, the headlights of their snowmobiles and ambulances illuminating the early morning gloom.

There was a story recounting the reactions of local people, a story about other recent snowmobiling accidents, and a story about Blackburn’s coaching career headlined, “Proud Coach Put Starvation Hockey on the Map.” That story wrapped around the same smiling mug shot of Coach that hung on the wall at Enright’s. Another picture showed Make-Believe Gardens, Blackburn’s billets fuzzy in the background.

The main story began, “Legendary hockey coach John D. ‘Jack’ Blackburn disappeared on Starvation Lake early yesterday in what appears to have been a drowning in a snowmobile-related incident.” Police offered scant details, the story said. There were unhelpful quotes from a few lakeshore residents and a brief, unrevealing interview with the sole eyewitness, Leo Redpath. I pulled out another binder and skimmed the next several papers. Photos showed that police encircled the accident scene with yellow tape at a fifty-yard radius. Townspeople in long coats and wool hats gathered along the perimeter to watch cops in scuba gear drop into the jagged hole in the ice. Some left flowers. The bouquets froze and wind scattered the petals so that flecks of scarlet and gold and violet speckled the hard gray lake. The cops kept the tape in place for three days. By then the sheriff’s department was talking a bit more freely and the Pilot had pieced together a version of what had happened.

As they often did on Sunday nights in winter, Coach and Leo had gone riding on the trails that wound through the woods north of the lake. They stopped at their usual places, the Hide-A-Way, Dingman’s, the Just One More Saloon. A bit before midnight, they parked their snowmobiles in a clearing a mile from Starvation’s western shore, built a bonfire, and shared a bottle.

Coach wanted to do some “skimming.” I’d done it a few times with Soupy and other friends, mostly in high school, always when we were drunk. We’d take our snowmobiles and find patches of open water on Starvation or Walleye or one of the other area lakes, and we’d hammer the throttles until we were moving fast enough to skim across the water to solid ice. It was kind of like jumping barrels on a motorcycle, only dumber, because it was usually dark and, as I said, we were drunk. Pine County outlawed skimming after two kids drowned on Little Twin Lake one night in 1982.

Everyone knew Coach loved to skim as much as he loved to dodge the cops who tried to catch him at it. “I’m going to die with my helmet on,” he liked to say, and Leo would invariably respond, “You just might get your wish.” Leo, who had never learned to swim, wanted nothing to do with skimming. Coach taunted him, but Leo would say, “I have no desire to spend my retirement years at the bottom of a lake.” He didn’t even like to watch. When Coach went looking for open water, Leo waited onshore, nipping at a bottle. On this March night, though, Leo relented.

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