Today, I trust my higher power to guide me to a realm of peace, light, and rapture. No longer will I allow shame and guilt to control my feelings, nor will I willfully prevent myself from grieving the losses in my life. I am fully human on this day, and every day going forward.
Jack Blackburn was my mentor and my friend. He taught me many things about life. Knowledge can be a gift, and it can be a burden. Everything Jack did was rooted in the desire to live life to its fullest possibilities. This on occasion led him to places of shame and hurtfulness. He was human. He meant harm to no one. His knowledge became a burden he could not bear. On that night in the woods, Jack and I entered into a suicide pact. Jack honored his end of our agreement. I was weak at the time, and did not, until now.
You should look for Jack’s body in Walleye Lake, if it hasn’t been swept into the river by now. I pray I’ll be forgiven for keeping this to myself for so long. I pray this will satisfy those who want the truth, and release any and all who might mistakenly be held responsible. I am now willing to surrender to the darkness with the knowledge that light awaits me.
Flapp handed the note back to the judge. The gallery sat silent, stunned. I had begun to transcribe Flapp’s reading in my notebook but had to stop when he came to the suicide pact. I listened in a daze, without believing, without knowing what to believe. Nothing added up. I tried to picture Coach putting the pistol to his temple. I imagined Leo depositing the snowmobile in Walleye Lake. What “knowledge” could have prompted such an end? Why had Leo let Blackburn end his life if he didn’t think he could end his own? And why now, ten years later, had Leo felt the need to “honor” his end of the pact? Why hadn’t he simply confessed to what happened and let it be? What was he afraid of? Jail? The town’s recriminations? How had he concluded that a journey to peace, light, and rapture led down the barrel of a gun? Even if what he said happened had truly happened, there had to be something more, something darker and more sinister that he had determined to take with him to his grave. I looked at Soupy. He had lowered his head to the table and was gently shaking it, no.
Gallagher broke the silence. “I will be giving this note to the county for handwriting analysis. We’ll deal with that at trial, which I’m setting for March seventeenth, nine-thirty a.m. Mr. Flapp, I’ll give your client twenty-four hours, bond one hundred thousand dollars. Naturally you’ll need to post ten percent. When the twenty-four hours is up, he goes back to the county jail. Mr. Campbell, do you understand?”
Soupy’s answer was barely audible. “Yes.”
The judge looked at Eileen Martin. “Objections, Counselor?”
“Your Honor-”
Gallagher stopped her. “Keep in mind, Miss Prosecutor, that you have no body. You might have the weapon, or you might not. Many of the people in this courtroom, and in our town, are probably wondering why we’re dredging this up at all. Because it’s the law, of course, and the law is sacred. But the fact is, Miss Martin, I could shut this down right now, and the law would be served well enough.”
“No objection, Your Honor.”
Cigar ashes and snowflakes flecked Delbert’s steel-wool beard when I found him outside the courthouse. An unruly gray mane spilled from his black fedora. He wore his camouflage jacket open and hid his eyes behind Ray- Ban shades.
“You know,” he said, “we had a perfectly good picture of the sheriff on file. Did you even bother to look?”
A few feet away, gawkers crowded the courthouse steps to eavesdrop on Tawny Jane Reese interviewing Flapp. With one hand Delbert raised his camera to his shades and snapped off a clicking whir of pictures. Behind me I heard someone call out, “Hey, Gus,” and I turned to see Elvis, grinning and pointing toward Flapp. “The puck’s over here,” he said.
I turned back to Delbert.
“Well,” he was saying, “if you have a bottomless budget for film stock and developing chemicals, fine with me, I’ll just keep shooting these people over and over again. Maybe you could make a flip book.”
“I have to talk to you,” I said.
“Talk.”
“Over here.” I motioned him toward the street. Standing close, I smelled the cigar smoke clinging to his beard. “You knew Blackburn, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Delbert said. “Fine man. Fine businessman.”
“You did some business with him?”
“Now just hang on, sir, I had permission from the publisher himself, Mr. Nelson P. Selby, to do my freelance work with whomever I chose. It didn’t cost the Pilot more than-”
“I don’t care about that, Delbert. What was it you did for Blackburn? Take pictures? Develop film?”
“Both, actually. I shot stills at hockey practices, a few things out at his place when he was building. I made him some prints. Mostly I sent stuff away for him.”
“You took pictures when I was playing?”
“That’s right, you played, didn’t you. Yeah, I was out there a few times.”
“And what stuff did you send away?”
“All film. Eight-millimeter. Sent it for developing.”
“You didn’t develop it yourself?”
“Nope. Wasn’t my thing. I got it done by a guy downstate. Cheap and reliable. But”-he chuckled-“he was mixed up with some shady characters. Like the Mafia or something. I think he got whacked.”
“Whacked?”
“Killed. Someone killed him.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know. I made a delivery down there once. Wasn’t pretty.”
“Uh-huh. What was on the film?”
He tilted his head forward so that his pinprick eyes appeared between the brim of his hat and the rims of his shades. “Why do you care?”
“Look, Delbert, I don’t care if you did it on the Pilot ’s dime, OK? Like I said, I played for Blackburn. He meant a lot to me. I noticed some film in boxes in the photo files and wondered if it had anything to do with the team.”
“Jack thought it’d be safer, better organized, filed at the paper.”
Safer? I thought. From what? “Of course,” I said. “Did you ever look at any of it, by chance? The film, I mean?”
Delbert snorted. “A bunch of runts playing hockey? I hate hockey. You can’t see the damn puck. No, I just sent it to my guy.”
“And you think your guy got whacked because of a film of kids playing hockey?”
“That’s not what I said.”
A sheriff’s cruiser slid up to the curb where we were standing, Darlene at the wheel.
“Can I go back to doing my job?” Delbert said.
“Get the sheriff,” I said.
Dingus was coming down the walk toward us. He didn’t look happy. Tawny Jane followed along asking questions Dingus ignored.
“Sheriff?” I said as he neared me. I thought he was going to brush past, but he stopped. For a second I thought he might grab me again. He kept his voice low.
“What made you think you could go see my Barbara?” he said. Before I could answer he got in the car and slammed the door as Darlene pulled away.
My mother’s Jeep wasn’t in the driveway when I approached her house ten minutes later. Good, I thought. The fresh snow, now nine inches deep, groaned beneath my tires as I parked on the road shoulder. While the truck idled, I unlocked the back door and hurried into Mom’s basement. Mildew hung on the dank air. I reached into the dark and pulled the string that lit the ceiling bulb.
The 8-millimeter Bell amp; Howell projector was sitting atop a stack of boxes in the storage room Dad had built next to the water heater. I wrapped the cord around my left hand and gathered up the projector, rushing to get out before my mother came home. Halfway up the stairs I realized I hadn’t turned off the basement bulb. Hurrying back down in my wet boots I lost my footing and fell smack on the same spot I’d banged when I slipped on Boynton’s fish. “Son of a bitch,” I grunted. I stood, grimacing and rubbing my butt, snapped the light off, and
