“It wasn’t.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why did you come up, Frank?”
He didn’t answer. Ezra looked at him for a long time and then nodded as if the question had been answered.
“We agreed to let it go,” he said. “A lot of years ago, we agreed to let it go.”
They had agreed to some other things, too. Like the fact that the Willow was sacred ground, and that Devin—who’d betrayed two generations of loyalty and friendship that were anchored in this spot—should never be allowed to return to it. They wouldn’t pursue him, would let him sit down there in Florida for as many years as he could last, but they also wouldn’t tolerate him returning to this place. Not unchallenged, at least.
“That’s really what you want to do?” Frank said. “Let him come up here and sit in the cabin, have a nice little vacation, enjoy himself? He brought my dad into it, Ezra, used a lot of bullshit about loyalty to set the hook, and then he turned around and gave him up to buy himself immunity.”
“You think I’ve forgotten? I’m just wondering about your intentions.”
“I’d like to ask him some questions,” Frank said.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all,” Frank said, but he was thinking of the guns inside the cabin, beautiful, well-engineered pieces of equipment that had not been built to ask questions.
“Where’d you come from, anyhow?” Ezra asked, and Frank returned to the moment. “Postmarks on those letters bounced around a bit over the years.”
“I was in Indiana.”
“Working?”
“Taking classes.”
“What sort?”
“Writing. Had ideas about a book, but maybe a screenplay would be better.”
“I think that’s just fine,” Ezra said, and he seemed legitimately pleased. “You were a storyteller even as a kid. I remember that.”
“I just remember listening to the stories.”
“Well, sure, back then we had a good many more to tell than you. But I remember you had a way with it. Tell a story about a bike wreck and make it sound more exciting than anything I had to offer about a battle or a bear hunt.”
Frank laughed. Storytelling had been a big part of those trips, and eliciting any positive response from Ezra, a smile or a nod or one of those low, soft laughs, had been a serious reward.
“How long of a drive is it?” Ezra said. “Up from Indiana?”
“Took about ten hours.”
“Good trip, I take it?”
“Those hours I mentioned, that’s driving time. I left out a few hours of fun that started because I had a car wreck with someone I thought was Devin. He wasn’t Devin, but based on the guys who came after him, he’s not exactly peaceful, either.”
Ezra turned almost fully toward the fire and lifted his eyebrows in a way Frank had seen a thousand times before, usually in response to something his father remembered that contradicted Ezra’s memory.
“You want to provide a bit more detail on that?” Ezra said.
Frank provided the detail. Ezra listened quietly, shaking his head from time to time or making a quiet murmur of appreciation, but not speaking.
“Hell of a welcome back to town,” he said.
“No kidding.”
“I know Nora Stafford. Knew her father better, of course, but she’s a good girl. You sure she’s all right?”
“Other than the scare. I’d be surprised if the car she loaned out is ever returned to her, though.”
The half of Ezra’s face lit by the firelight went hard, his jaw shifting and eyes narrowing, and then he turned away and was entirely in the darkness.
“What kind of car you say that was?”
“It was a Mitsubishi SUV. Probably twenty years old. Little box of a thing. Blue paint, lots of rust.”
“Plate number six-five-three-E-four-two,” Ezra said, and Frank sat forward on the stump and stared at the older man.
“I don’t know if that’s the number. But you do. Want to explain that?”
Ezra sat quietly for a long time, as if there were a decision to be made and he wouldn’t be rushed toward it. At last he got to his feet.
“Let’s you and I take a drive.”
They walked back up the gravel road and then out to the Willow Wood Lodge without Ezra volunteering a word, no hint where they were headed. Got into Ezra’s truck and drove north, went across the dam and took Cedar Falls Road. Then it was left onto an uneven dirt road through the trees, Ezra taking it slow. He stopped the truck in the middle of the road, turned the lights off, and cut the motor.
“Now we walk.”
For ten minutes, they walked without speaking, the only sounds those of breathing and sticks breaking underfoot. As they pushed up a slope covered in pine needles, one of the loons called again, and the sound seemed less magical than before. Chilling, now. A note of warning.
They went up the hill and back into the trees, and then a dark shape showed itself. Ezra knelt and flicked a cigarette lighter to life. The glow caught a rusted blue bumper and a Wisconsin license plate. Nora Stafford’s car.
“How’d you find this?”
“Saw him pull it in this afternoon while I was on the lake.”
“So he dumped it here,” Frank said. “Left it in the woods and had somebody come get him.”
Ezra shook his head, then extinguished the lighter. When he spoke again, his voice floated out of the blackness.
“Got in a boat and went out to the island.”
Frank’s eyes had been stunned by the brief light, and he blinked hard and searched for Ezra’s face in the darkness.
“Devin’s island.”
“Yes.”
“You told me he wasn’t—”
“He’s not here, Frank. I don’t know who these people are, but Devin is not here.”
“But they’re connected to him,” he said. “That explains the guns.”
“I expect so.”
“So where’s Devin?”
No response.
“I knew it was him,” Frank said, speaking to himself as much as to Ezra. “Saw that damn Florida license plate, and between that and the message you’d left, I
It was quiet for a while, Frank’s mind filled with things like ghosts and legacies and the sort of fate he had long wondered if he could avoid. The answer was here, a rusted-out car hidden among the trees.
“I think,” he said softly, “that I’d better call Nora Stafford. If this guy’s staying in Devin Matteson’s cabin, he and everyone around him are a hell of a lot more dangerous than I thought originally.”
