I thank him for the beers, say we should do it again sometime soon. Raise myself as he assembles his notes and photocopies into a pile and pushes them across the table at me. But I shake my head, eyes held above the words on the paper.
''Don't think I'll need that, thanks.''
Pittle frowns briefly, launches back into his chair. ''How's the trial going?'' he asks as I put on my coat to leave.
Struggle for a moment to think what it is I'm being asked.
''It's only just started,'' I say.
Outside, the clouds have broken up into islands of ice. The air cold enough to tighten skin against nose, chin, and forehead. Make my way over to where the Lincoln's parked with the unsure steps of a Legion Hall drunk, an old man crumpled under the burdens of solitude and war stories.
I keep both hands buried in coat pockets. The right plays its fingers over a slip of glossy paper. No larger than a pack of matches but it fills my hand, warms through the layers of fabric to the skin. A picture of a woman, a face stolen from an unfinished history.
chapter 31
Everyone loves a crime scene. This is where I'm parked, looking out the Lincoln's passenger window at Murdoch's most recent historical site. It must be that I love a crime scene as much as the next guy, or at least as much as the guys and their guests who came out here last night and built a fire on the other side of the police tape using an empty beer case for kindling. Around it the evidence of secondary entertainments: strewn beer bottles and a mickey of Captain Morgan, a forgotten hash pipe and a condom (unused) left wrinkled in the dirt like a shed snakeskin. The Murdoch Tourist Board is clearly missing an opportunity here. They should be commissioning a statue. There should be guided tours.
I'm here for a tour myself. A search for a derelict cottage that, if Mrs. Arthurs is to be believed, lies somewhere down the trail on the undeveloped side of the lake. Pop a couple of Extra Strength Tylenols to combat the headache that threatens to claw through my forehead. Blast the car's heater to full and let it blow over hands and face until the skin feels like it's about to curl back from the bone. Ready.
I follow the trail past Mrs. Arthurs's, keeping my eyes straight ahead in case she happens to be fussing around her woodpile again. Beyond her property the path narrows and reduces my progress to a hunched stumble, an arch of cedar branches scrabbling across my back. Twice my head connects with wet bark and twice a
How is it that if one walks far enough in the woods one eventually comes across the rusted frame of an abandoned car? There's never an obvious indication of how it got there, no nearby road, level field, or habitation. In fact the fin-tailed sedan I see now, fifty feet off the trail and obscured among the high ferns, is so tightly encircled by a half-dozen glacial boulders, there seems no way it could have gotten there unless dropped from above. Stripped of all rubber, leather, and glass, its rims buried in the soft earth, the hood gaping open. For a time I stare at its drooping front grille and its headlight sockets stare back at me, bewildered, watery with moss.
Farther along, farther in. On either side grass-riddled rock pushes up through the earth like hairy moles. My nose four feet above the root-veined earth sniffing its damp, vegetative perfumes. Keep looking to one side and the other, but aside from occasional garbage and a couple outhouse-size sheds with unclear functions there's no sign of the manmade.
Then I see something. It's only because half the leaves have fallen and I happen to be looking in the right direction that I notice it at all. The forest hides it, claiming it for its own, the mounded sod of the once-cleared lot now taken over by the looping vines and saplings straining up over others to take a greater share of the light. Inside this wild growth, a long-abandoned cottage.
I crunch through the weave of mature branches that block my way off the trail and walk around the building's exterior. It's not unlike the other cottages on the far side of the lake: same sturdy rectangle with a framed window at the front looking down to the water, a door opening up onto a narrow deck that sags into a frown, and at the back, three windows for each of the bedrooms. What's different is twenty-odd years of neglect evidenced in the warped roof, missing shingles, and windows shattered by bored canoeists or the impact of birds who saw the glass as a reflected piece of sky. Under the mildewed eaves, plate-size holes where the raccoons have broken through, and two watery bundles of gray paper, one tattered and loose, the other the current home of a thousand sleeping yellowjackets. All of this crumbling rot in only a couple decades of expired winters and summers. And in a couple decades more it would completely lose its definition as a place where people once ate and slept. That's how conservative Mother Nature is, the fusty old dear. Always undoing change, turning everything back into itself, taking all the neatly assembled elements apart and making it all green and brown chaos again.
Step up onto the front deck and the wood moans in soggy complaint under my feet. The front window cracked in a zigzag from the top left corner to the bottom right, but it's otherwise intact and keeps the wind that comes up off the water from carrying its moisture inside. It also protects the spiders from the elements, who have established layers of web thick enough to create a gauzy haze between inside and out. But if I cup my hands around my eyes there's still sufficient light to distinguish interior details, wan outlines standing out from the dusting of shade. What's surprising is how much stuff is still here. A couch with leaping deer over its upholstery, a pine dining table standing on three legs, a wagon-wheel coffee table sheltering Scrabble and Monopoly games, even a Ouija board with the alphabet, numbers zero through nine, and YES and NO in the corners. Most remarkable are the bookshelves occupying every available inch of wall space. There's a shattered bottle of Crown Royal against the far wall and empty soup tins littering the entire living room floor, but by the look of it the books have been left not only unharmed but untouched.
I pull away from the glass and try the front door, which swings open after a couple scrapes across the uneven floor. The room trembles as I walk in, unused to the moving presence of weight. I wipe my feet on an old
But I don't leave yet. Instead, I gravitate toward the opposite shelf and randomly thumb through some of the books. Penciled notes in all the margins now in varying states of dissolve depending on their exposure to the air and moisture and the type of cover that bound them. After a time I stop trying to read at all and pull my thumb across the edge of the pages, the old paper sending a breezy caress across my face. Let the tips of my fingers play over the dusty lead of the print, feel for the indentations the words have left in the paper's surface, and close my eyes. Imagine how meaning might exist in the touch, like the shape of a familiar face, like Braille.
When I open my eyes I slide the book in my hands back into the precise slot I took it from, straighten the room so that it appears with the same even face as before. The room's trembling and the wind's free movement through the open door have brought an odd animation to the space. A can rolls and clinks across the floor. A flock of leaves blow in from the deck. From somewhere within the walls the release of an aggrieved sigh.
I'm startled by the noise my shoes make in the sudden lunge to get out before the door is blown shut. Grab the handle and plow it back against the wall, my heart popping out a syncopated drum solo high in my chest.
The rain coming down harder now, but it's not the rain that quickens my step back up to the trail. It's the feeling that I've disturbed something that was meant to be left alone, like one of those ancient Egyptian crypts that was carefully hidden underground at the end of a complicated maze but that people eventually discovered and busted open anyway just for the hell of it. On my return I pass Mrs. Arthurs's place as the trail curves back toward the road but I don't slow down. I can't stop from turning to look as my stride turns into an awkward jog. And though the trees obscure my view and the afternoon's light has almost completely yielded to the sudden dusk I'm sure I see the old woman's face in the window with a single kerosene lamp flickering on the table behind her, staring back at me with the palms of her hands held white against the glass.
