all costs, we had to win.’”
“‘Rode him out on a rail?’”
“Yeah. I don’t know. I just know his team won the championship and then he was out of there for some reason.”
“Did you talk to the nephew?”
“I don’t know his name.”
“So we don’t really know what happened.”
“Maybe, but the same thing happened in Victoria.”
“To Blackburn? That was before St. Albert, right?”
“Yeah, I don’t know, I thought I’d just try another place. I made a bunch of calls. The funny thing was, it’s been like thirty years, but just about everybody remembers the guy. Most of them didn’t want to talk. But what I could piece together was that he had a pretty decent team but he did something to make the parents mad and as soon as the season was over, he just slipped away and took a year off. That’s the gap in his resume. Then he got hired in St. Albert.”
I stared at the floor, a dull linoleum checkerboard of beige and green. Who was this man? Coaches lost jobs all the time, of course, especially in the cutthroat Canadian junior leagues. But not after they won championships.
“This must be weird for you,” Joanie said.
“It’s fine.”
“Well, it’s all off the record anyway, for now at least.”
“How much of this did you tell Boynton?”
Now she cast her eyes down. “Not much. I was just trying stuff out on him to see what he knew. I don’t think he knew anything about the Canada stuff, at least not specifically. But he knew something.”
“How do you know?”
“I could just tell. When I said Blackburn might have gotten into trouble in Canada, he just seemed to understand. Then he kept asking if we were doing a story.”
“Did you tell Soupy Campbell?”
“Nope. Couldn’t find him.”
The picture was beginning to come slowly clear, like my truck windshield on a frosty morning. Soupy and Teddy were fighting over the marina settlement. Soupy told him to go to hell at the bar Saturday night. But Teddy had just been talking to Darlene, and then he talked to Joanie, whose address and phone number he had on that bar napkin. He then collected something from Joanie that he used to put the screws to Soupy. I had no idea what, but it had something to do with Coach’s past, and it was enough to drag Soupy up my stairs to cry at my feet on Sunday night. There was also a bullet hole in Blackburn’s snowmobile, Leo Redpath fleeing town, and the cops hauling a computer out of Leo’s house.
Actually, the windshield wasn’t clear at all.
“I hate to say this,” I said, “but Boynton pretty much picked your pocket.”
Joanie sighed. “Yeah. It won’t happen again. And on the press conference-”
“Forget it. How’d you know the cops had interviewed Leo?”
“Oh, God. D’Alessio.”
“Has he asked you out yet?”
“He asked me to come watch him bowl. I was like, kill me now, but I was nice, I just told him I couldn’t do it while I was covering this story. Then he told Tawny Jane Twitchy-Butt our story was ‘premature.’”
“Twitchy-butt?” I said.
nineteen
Deputy Esper, please.”
I’d let Joanie get ahead of me and pulled up to a pay phone outside the IGA.
“Esper,” came that voice.
“It’s me.”
An awkward silence followed. If she’d been home, she would’ve just hung up the phone, as she had every time I’d called her when I first came back to town. At work a hang-up might have attracted attention.
“What?”
“I just wanted to say thanks for giving me the heads-up the other night.”
“I shouldn’t have.”
“Well, thanks anyway. I wondered-”
“Gus, this is not fair.”
“Listen, this is work and we’re off the record, OK? I’ve just got to ask, Darl, you have to trust me, when you were talking with Boynton at Enright’s”-I felt a stab of jealousy-“he wasn’t-”
“I’m going to hang up, Gus.”
“It’s not what you’re thinking. He wasn’t asking you about Coach, was he?”
“I can’t talk.”
“Darlene, please, you’ve got to help me.”
After our sweet tryst in the county courthouse all those years ago, we’d begun dating. Around town we became, officially, an item, and there was talk that we would marry and settle on the lake. Not surprisingly, followers of the River Rats laced this talk with sarcasm about my gaffe in the state final. There were jokes about me falling down at the altar and dropping wedding rings. As for me, I can’t honestly say that I fell in love with Darlene then because I think I’d always been in love with her, as far back as the day I rescued her bike from Jitters Creek. Whatever I felt, it wasn’t enough to keep me in Starvation. We always knew I was going to leave, but even after I accepted the job at the Times and started preparing to move, we never talked about it. The pain we’d avoided for so long finally settled upon us. My last week in town, we didn’t speak.
Only after she married did she deign to talk with me again, but even then only in short, strained snatches, like the conversation we were now having. Most of the time, it was as if we were talking on a bad connection. Emotional static obscured our voices and blocked our ears. Darlene wavered between anger about her lousy marriage and fear that somehow the sound of my voice might lure her back to me and whatever sorrow I might inflict on her a second time. I waited apologetically for her walls of resolve to crack so that I might hear the slightest echo of her old kindness. In a way, the worst of returning to Starvation Lake was facing Darlene, whose icy distance accused me of having been a fool for ever leaving.
She was right, of course, that it was unfair of me to call her like this. I felt I had no choice.
“I told him no,” she said.
“No what?”
“No, I wasn’t going to tell him anything about your coach.”
“You didn’t tell him anything?”
She hesitated. “No, not-”
“Come on, Darlene.”
“I don’t have to talk to you at all.”
“I saw you taking the stuff out of Leo’s house today.”
The phone went silent. I waited for a dial tone. I heard Darlene sigh. “Boynton called me yesterday,” she said. “I told him to go to hell again, but he said he had information.”
By then Boynton had spoken with Joanie. He knew a little about Canada.
“What information?”
“It’s pretty creepy. He was asking-hold on.” I heard her close a door. She picked up the phone again. “He wanted to know about Blackburn’s criminal history.”
“Criminal history? Like felonies?”
“Blackburn didn’t have a record, though.”
“No record of what?”
