the bear must have decided it was too much work to go down there.”
“That’s possible,” I said. “And if that had been the only thing, I might have let it go.”
Bob waited.
“But then, Dad found bear spray in Leonard’s backpack. It was sitting right there, near the top.”
“Leonard must have dropped his backpack,” Bob said.
“It was found with his body,” I said. “Why didn’t he try to spray the bear? Why couldn’t he have slipped the backpack off, reached in while he was running? Even if he didn’t want to stop and face the bear, he could have sprayed wildly over his shoulder. That’s what I did last night, when Wendell was chasing me through the woods. I never got a good shot at him, but at least I tried.”
“All I can think,” Bob said, “is that he just never had a chance. The bear was closing in on him. That had to be the way it was.”
“I suppose,” I said, lifting the lure out of the water and casting out again. “Maybe, if it had just been the bear not eating him, and the bear spray in his backpack, maybe even then, I might have let it go.”
Bob’s eyes moved about. He had to be wondering what else I had.
“Remember,” I said, “when you came back, and you described the bear?”
Bob, slowly, said, “Sure, I guess.”
“You said the bear had one torn ear, like it was clipped off.”
“I think, I guess I remember that.”
“That day, when we first met Timmy Wickens, when everyone was trying to figure out whose body that was in the woods by the cabins, Wickens said Morton Dewart was looking for a bear, a bear that had an ear torn off. So when you told us about the bear that chased you and Leonard, the one that chased Leonard off the side of the cliff, and said it had an ear torn off, we all figured, hey, it had to be the same bear that killed Dewart.”
Bob started to say something, then stopped himself.
“But Timmy Wickens made up the bear story. Made it all up that a bear killed Dewart, made up the story that Dewart was going out to track down a bear. Even made up a description of the bear, because, as he told me last night, he’s never even seen a bear around here. There may be some, but he’s never actually laid eyes on one.”
Bob said, “I see.”
“So you pinned Leonard’s death on an animal that doesn’t exist. You built your lie upon another lie. When the first one fell apart, so did yours.”
“That’s how you see it,” Bob said.
“So my question is, what really happened out there?”
Bob took his right hand off the reel, holding the line in place with the thumb of his left hand, and rubbed his gray whiskers. He hadn’t shaved this morning. Who had?
“We had an argument,” Bob said.
“Okay.”
“We were hiking through there, and I’d been talking to him about his proposal, this stupid fishing resort, told him it was all wrong, that it would ruin the area, that he should forget about it, that bringing in hundreds of fishermen would clean this lake out of fish in a couple of years. Told him he was out of his fucking mind.”
“How did he like that?”
“He didn’t like it much. He said he had powerful lawyers, that they’d find a way to get the council to approve it. That Mayor Holland would have to agree or she’d have to spend millions to fight it.”
“Not good,” I said.
“We kept walking, arguing, and we got to the top of this ridge, the cliff, and he told me to come look, that this was part of the property he was going to develop, and that down at the bottom of the ridge, he was going to take down all those trees, mow everything down, and put in some huge whale for kids to play in.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And then he said I shouldn’t even worry about the fish being depleted, that he’d stock the lake, maybe bring in fish from other places. Starts talking about bringing in swordfish, for Christ’s sake. Those aren’t freshwater fish, I told him. You can’t put goddamn swordfish in a lake with muskie and pickerel. I asked him if he was out of his fucking mind, even suggesting something that stupid.”
“That’s pretty crazy,” I said.
Bob’s cheeks got red. “I swear to you! He was going to destroy this lake, that’s what he was going to do. This is God’s country, Zachary. Look around.” Bob’s eyes got misty. “This is paradise.”
It was hard for me, just yet, after the kind of night I’d put in, to think of this as paradise, but Bob was right. If there was a more beautiful part of the world, I hadn’t seen it yet.
“So,” Bob said, “I guess I said something I shouldn’t have.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“I called him a fucking idiot. Plain as that. I said, ‘Leonard, you are a complete, total fucking idiot.’ ”
“How’d he take that?”
“He hit me. Well, shoved me, I guess. Told me I was a stupid old coot, standing in the way of progress. So, I don’t know, I guess I shoved him back.”
“And over?”
Bob nodded slowly, once.
“Leonard went off the edge, tumbled. Rolled down, ass over teakettle. Around the second time he rolled over, I swear, I thought I heard something snap. His neck, I guess.” Bob paused, breathed in. “He rolled to the bottom, and I called down to him. Jesus, I musta called down to him ten times. But he didn’t answer. So, I found a way down, the same way we all found our way down later, to check on him.”
“And he was dead,” I said.
Bob looked out over the water, looking for something that wasn’t there. Some sort of salvation, maybe.
“No,” Bob said.
Maybe my mouth dropped open, I’m not sure, but it wasn’t the answer I was expecting.
“He was alive?” I asked.
“I guess, just barely. He was breathing, but he was twisted up something awful. He managed, sort of whispered, something about not being able to feel anything. At all.”
A slight breeze caught the bow of the boat and gently turned us. I felt cold.
“What happened then, Bob?”
“I”-and the words were catching in his throat-“I, I started thinking about what had happened to him. How he’d probably busted his spine, done something horrible, how he’d never walk again, and I thought of my wife, how her life dragged on, how Leonard didn’t deserve something like that.”
“Is that really all you were thinking?” I asked.
Bob was quiet for a moment. “I suppose I was thinking a few other things, too.” He paused. “About what was going to happen. About how, once I got help, and we got Leonard to a hospital, and he told the police what had happened, that I had pushed him over the edge, that even if I didn’t get convicted of anything, even if I could somehow convince them that Leonard slipped, that his lawyers, these goddamn lawyers of his, they’d find a way to ruin me. To destroy me.”
“Probably,” I said.
“And so, I put my…I put my hand over his mouth, and I pinched his nose, and I pressed really hard, and he couldn’t do anything, he couldn’t move his arms, he couldn’t twist away or anything. It took, I don’t know, a minute or so, maybe more. I think I kept my hand there a lot longer than I needed to. I was scared, that maybe I wouldn’t have done it for long enough.”
Now neither of us spoke for a minute.
“That’s cold, Bob,” I said, finally. “Getting into a shoving match, accidentally knocking Leonard over the cliff, I could see that. But the finishing him off, the smothering him, I have to be honest. That surprises me.”
Bob kept looking away. “Me too.” He paused. “I’m not proud of what I did.”
“So what happened then?”
“Once I knew, knew that he was dead, I tried to think of what to do. And I thought about the bear that, supposedly, was roaming the woods. I thought up a story, about how we’d run into it, made a run for it and got split up. When I got back up top, I really did run, deliberately tripped, let myself get pretty scraped up, to make the
