“I just got off the phone with her,” Sarah said. “She’s got this story about a possible bear attack. Pretty vicious.”
I could guess where this was going. Tracy was an okay reporter, she could file a basic story, but the city desk was wanting something more, some color, maybe a piece for the weekend paper. The sort of thing I was born to do. “Sarah, just get to it.”
“Would you shut up and listen? It was in Braynor, well, in the woods outside Braynor.”
“Yeah, okay. Braynor’s where my dad’s camp is.”
“I know. Well, here’s the thing. They found this body, this man, and I guess there wasn’t a whole lot of him left to identify, and they found him right by Crystal Lake.”
That was the lake where Dad ran his fishing camp. A handful of cabins, rental boats. I mentioned that to Sarah.
“I know, Zack. That’s where they found the body. In the woods by your father’s place.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I guess I should give him a call.” I paused. “I can’t even remember the last time I talked to him. It’s been a while.”
“Here’s the thing,” Sarah said, hesitating. “Nobody’s seen your dad for a while. And they haven’t identified this body yet.”
A chill ran through me.
“I phoned your dad’s place,” Sarah added. “But there wasn’t any answer.”
I slipped the phone back into my jacket and said apologetically to Trixie, “Hold that thought. Something’s sort of come up.”
2
MY PARENTS WOULD TAKE ME and my older sister Cindy up to Fifty Lakes when we were kids. I guess we went up there two or three summers in a row, when Dad took a week off from his job at the accounting firm. There was a camp that rented out spots to people with travel trailers-Airstreams and the like- before everyone started going to Winnebago-style RVs that you didn’t tow but drove.
We didn’t have anything as upscale as an Airstream. Dad had gotten a deal, from someone he worked with at the accounting firm, on a tent trailer, which looked like a flattened box while en route, hitched to the back of the car. When you reached your destination, the contraption opened up with a canvas top, high enough to stand in, a big bed at each end, and a little sink with running water. Cindy and I weren’t in our teens yet back then, so our parents had us sleep together on one side, while they took the other. I’d spend most of the night lightly running my finger along Cindy’s neck so she’d think her sleeping bag was infested with spiders, and when she’d awake at midnight, screaming, I’d pretend to have been roused from a deep sleep just like my parents, who’d shout at her to be quiet, sometimes waking other campers in nearby spots. The hard part then was trying to roll over and not pee myself laughing.
That was probably the most fun thing about camping. The swimming and the fishing, those things were okay. But Dad spent so much time enforcing rules of behavior to keep us from hurting ourselves, or any of our secondhand camping equipment, that the appeal of vacationing was limited. Zip up the door fast so the bugs don’t get in. Don’t lean on the canvas or you’ll rip it. Don’t run on the dock with wet feet. Put on your life jacket. So what if the boat’s still tied to the dock and the water’s only two feet deep, put on your life jacket. Watch those fishhooks, for crying out loud, you get one of those in your finger and you’ll get an infection and be dead before dinner.
He was something of a worrier, Arlen Walker was, and I’ll understand if you find that amusing. His perpetual state of anxiety was as much of an annoyance for his wife and my mother, Evelyn Walker, as my conviction in the certainty of worst-case scenarios has been for my long-suffering Sarah.
“For God’s sake, Arlen,” Evelyn would say, “loosen your gas cap a bit and let the pressure off.”
While family trips seemed to be sources of great anxiety for Dad, he still enjoyed his time in Fifty Lakes, away from the city, away from work. There were rare glimpses of something approaching contentment in this man who seemed unable to relax. I remember seeing him once, his butt perched on a rock at the water’s edge, his bare feet planted on the lake bottom, water lapping up over his ankles. His shoes, a balled sock tucked neatly into each one, rested perfectly side by side on a nearby dock.
I approached, wondering whether I could get a couple of quarters out of him so Cindy and I could buy candy bars at the camp snack bar, and instead of reprimanding me for some misdeed of which I was not yet aware, he reached out a hand and tousled the hair on top of my head.
“Someday,” he said, smiling at me and then looking out over the small lake.
And that was it.
“Someday” came eight years ago. Mom had been dead for four years at the time, and Dad decided the time had come to make a change. He retired from the accounting firm, sold the mortgage-free house in the city my sister and I had grown up in, and bought a twenty-acre parcel of land up in the Fifty Lakes District, south of the village of Braynor, that had two hundred feet of frontage on Crystal Lake.
He hadn’t just bought a getaway property. He’d bought a small business, called Denny’s Cabins (named for the man who’d originally built them back in the sixties). There were five rustic cottages, a few docks, and half a dozen small aluminum fishing boats with low-powered outboard motors bolted to the back. There was always one available for Dad to go fishing whenever he felt the urge, which actually wasn’t all that often. He liked the tranquility of living at a fishing camp, even if he didn’t drop his line into the water every day.
I’d only been up there a couple of times, the first soon after he bought it, to see what he’d gotten himself into. There was a two-story farmhouse and barn on the property, a couple of hundred yards up from the lake, but Dad had chosen not to live in it, preferring instead to take the largest of the five cabins, fully winterize it and spruce it up with new furniture and flooring and appliances, and live year-round at the water’s edge, even in winter, when the lake froze over and the winds howled and the only people you were likely to see were lost snowmobilers and the guy who plowed the lane that wound its way in from the main road. Living in the farmhouse, with all that room to roam around in, would have been a constant reminder to Dad of how alone he was.
The second time I went up, a year or so later, I took Paul. He was eleven, and I’d had this notion that a father-son fishing trip would be the ultimate bonding experience, which it was not, because children who have grown up accustomed to blasting space aliens on a TV screen are ill equipped to sit in a boat for five hours waiting for something to happen. Anyway, I had phoned Dad and asked about renting a cabin for a weekend, not knowing that he’d berate me for two solid days about not getting our Camry rust-proofed.
“You might as well take a power drill to it now, get it over with,” he told me. “Honestly, you spend that money on a car and don’t get it rust-proofed, it’s beyond me.”
“Dad, the new cars already have perforation warranties.”
“Oh yeah, right, like they honor those things.”
We talked on the phone now and then, but not much. He’d actually bought himself a computer and occasionally I’d get an e-mail message from him, usually just a line or two to explain an attached photograph of some big muskie or pickerel he’d caught. For an old guy who was resistant to change, he’d embraced some of the new technologies with enthusiasm. I think it must have been those long, cold winters that brought him around. He was tired of being isolated, and his computer connected him to the world in ways he’d never imagined possible.
And now, from the sounds of things, he could be dead.
I quickly explained to Trixie what Sarah had said, and, after she’d hugged me, she had but one word to say: “Go.”
Once I was on the highway that led north out of the city, behind the wheel of our hybrid Virtue, pushing the little car as hard as it would go, I got Sarah on my cell again, asked her to tell me again what she knew.
The freelancer, Tracy, had learned of the incident about the same time as the authorities. She was being treated for a sore throat at her doctor’s, an elderly man who should have retired years ago but still practiced because it was hard to attract new GPs to an out-of-the-way place like Braynor. He did double duty in Fifty Lakes as a coroner, and Tracy was there when the call came in that a body had been found up by Crystal Lake, that it had been mauled pretty badly, and the first thing that had come to everyone’s mind was that a bear was to blame.
