Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought.
“Besides,” Verna continued, arching a thin eyebrow, “why is it necessary for the newspaper to monopolize the viewing of certain records?”
“Monopolize? What are you talking about?”
She took a set of keys from a pocket in her dress. “For someone who renders such harsh verdicts about our county’s operations, you appear to run a remarkably inefficient operation yourself. Perhaps you, too, should try being prudent.”
The word “prudent” had been in the headline of that damned editorial. “Are you telling me someone else from the Pilot was here?”
“This is apparently a very popular batch of records. I seem to recall someone from downstate requesting the very same papers not two years ago.”
“Really?”
“Really. We are now closed for the lunch hour, sir. You’ll need to leave.”
“Wait, Vern-Mrs. Clark. Are you saying my colleague was here? Luke Whistler?”
Her face betrayed the faintest hint of a smile. She was enjoying this. Verna Clark may have been a bitch, but she was a smart bitch.
“Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to discuss individual requests for records. But you seem like you’re at least intelligent enough to put two and two together.” She pointed a finger past me. “I’ll thank you for closing the door on your way out.”
I walked out thinking, Whistler wanted those records? For what?
“Poppy,” I said into my phone as I swung my pickup onto Main.
“Hey,” said Dick Popovich, head coach of the Hungry River Rats. I helped him with the goaltenders. “I’m so sorry about what happened.”
“Yeah.”
“Phyllis was all class. Good to the town. Good to the hockey program.”
Mrs. B wasn’t a big hockey fan, but she had worked the ticket table in the rink lobby since I played for the Rats, and brought big boxes of her molasses cookies and chocolate-covered macaroons to the Rats’ annual preseason fund-raiser. Whenever people in Starvation Lake wanted to raise money, they went to Mrs. B for cookies. She never said no. A hundred people must have told her she should open her own cookie shop, to which she would always say, “I bake cookies. If I could bake money, I would bake money.”
“She was,” I said. “I wanted to let you know I might be late to the pregame skate. Got a few things to do.”
“Understood. Glad you called, though. We gotta have a talk with Tex.”
Matthew Dobrick, sixteen years old, was the River Rats’ big, fast, crafty left wing. His teammates had nicknamed him “Tex” for the garish green-and-gold Dallas Stars jacket he wore. He insisted he had won the jacket new in a raffle downstate. But the seams coming apart along the shoulders and the torn left pocket made me think it had been plucked from a bin at a consignment store.
Tex had never known his father. His mother, from what I had heard, had played the role of dutiful hockey mom, shuttling her son from practice to game to practice while carrying on an affair with a team dad who worked as a shoe salesman by day and dealt marijuana and cocaine on nights and weekends. When the police appeared at his apartment one evening with a search warrant, Tex’s mother was there and, maybe because she was using, took a swing at one of the cops. It was not the first time she’d run afoul of the law. Even after she had ratted out her boyfriend, the judge sentenced her to eighteen months at the prison in Decatur.
So Tex had come to Starvation Lake to live with his uncle Roy, known to us as Tatch, and just like that, for the first time in almost twenty years, the River Rats were contenders for the state championship. In his first and only season with the Rats, Tex had scored more goals than the rest of the team combined. Unfortunately, he had also tallied the most minutes in penalties, which was why Poppy and I needed to have a talk with him.
“Yeah, but let’s go easy,” I said. “The kid plays angry. It helps him.”
“It doesn’t help when he’s sitting in the penalty box. Mic-Mac knows his deal. They’ll be goading him. He’s got to keep his cool.”
Mic-Mac, a scrappy bunch of bumblebees from Detroit’s northwest side, was to be our opponent in the state quarterfinal that evening.
“I’m taking his skates out to him in a bit,” I said. “You want me to say something?”
“Going up to that religious camp?”
“Yeah, part of the drill. The kid plays superstitious, too.”
As I approached Mom’s little yellow house, I looked through the bare trees to the frozen white crescent of the lake curling north and then west. A crow settled in the branches of a beech, a black blot on the smoky quilt of sky.
You have a nice, simple life, I thought as I watched it.
I wanted to check on Mom before I took Tex his skates. Then I had to drop by the pregame skate, then get back to the Pilot and move a few stories for the next day’s paper. I wanted to get to puzzling out what or who nye- less was. Maybe just the gibberish of a woman who’d suffered a serious blow to the head. Or maybe not.
I pulled onto the shoulder just short of the driveway and the do-not-cross tape ringing the yard of grass and trees between Mom’s house and Mrs. B’s. As kids, Darlene and Soupy and I had called it the “big yard,” and we’d spent a lot of time there, building snow forts in winter, racing our bicycles between the trees in summer.
One late evening, I had tried to kiss Darlene as we balanced next to each other on our bikes watching the sun dip behind the bluffs across the lake. “Ewww!” she yelled, punching me in the chest before I could get my lips on hers. I toppled over into a pricker bush and scrambled out bleeding while Darlene pedaled away laughing.
Would she really leave Starvation Lake?
I shut off my truck and sat there a minute, thinking. The tape strung closer to the house was at the end with the dining room and bathroom and Mom’s bedroom. The cops must have figured the intruder had entered through the glass door into the dining room; otherwise, the kitchen would be taped off, too, wouldn’t it? Mom normally locked the door, but the lock had been sticking, so she might have left it undone. I had been promising to fix it but hadn’t gotten around to it.
I heard rapping at the passenger-side window and turned to look. Luke Whistler was standing there, notebook in hand. I rolled the window down.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Isn’t this where the story is?”
I rolled up the window and got out, walked around to Whistler. Under his down vest today he wore a black Detroit Police Athletic League sweatshirt striped with bleach stains.
“Did you talk to my mother?” I said.
“Nah,” he said. “This is as close as I got. Channel Eight came by, too. T.J. tried to sweet-talk her way in, but the cops wouldn’t budge.”
“T.J.? You know her?”
Whistler grinned. “A little.”
“What’s that mean, ‘a little’?”
“She likes white wine,” he said.
He was sleeping with Tawny Jane Reese? Every loser in Starvation Lake had jerked off at least once to Channel Eight’s slinky, fortyish reporter.
“No way,” I said.
“She has a police scanner on her nightstand. So do I.”
“When my mother’s house was-wait. I don’t want to hear this.”
I put my hands in my coat pockets and walked toward Mom’s, stopping where the driveway met the road. A sheriff’s cruiser and an unmarked police car sat there, flashers on. I saw Mom sitting at the dining room table in her fuzzy blue bathrobe.
“How’s she doing?” Whistler said.
“Who? Tawny Jane?”
“Come on, man.”
“You got anything more for tomorrow’s paper?”
