“Let’s go swimming.” She grabbed a towel from the clothesline that hung between two of the pine trees nearest the porch and skipped down the stairs to the water’s edge. I tucked the shotgun under my arm and followed.
She waded out until she was waist-deep, then dived headfirst into the water. I took a seat on a sun-heated granite boulder beside the canoe and waited for her to come up for air.
But she didn’t.
Half a minute passed, and then a full minute. I knew she was playing with me, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. I felt my pulse quicken in spite of myself.
Finally her head appeared, maybe fifty feet from shore. “You should come in!”
I ignored her invitation and glanced instead over at the sporting camp across the cove. I saw Pelletier’s truck parked beside the lodge door, but there was no other sign of him.
“Hey, asshole, I’m talking to you!”
Brenda began swimming toward me until she was in just over her head, treading water. For maybe a minute she was silent, her expression pure anger. Then out of nowhere a smile broke across her face. It was as if a switch got thrown somewhere.
“You’re so uptight,” she said. “What is it with you cop types?”
“Was Bill Brodeur uptight, too?”
In an instant the anger was back. “Screw you,” she spat at me, before disappearing again beneath the surface.
She swam for a while longer. Then she emerged, dried off, spread the towel across a flat patch of pebble beach, and lay down in the sun. All without a word to me.
The lake was utterly still. Not a trace of a breeze ruffled the surface. The sky between the mountains was such a deep blue I would have believed the earth’s atmosphere was burning away with each advancing hour.
Brenda rolled over onto her stomach. Her back was slick with perspiration.
“You’re going to get burned,” I said.
“You already are.”
She was right. I hadn’t used sunscreen this morning, and the skin of my face was beginning to feel tight as a mask. I tried moving back into the shade of the pines, but it was only a little less bright and just as hot. A cicada whined in the tree above me, the sound jabbing through my eardrums.
“I want to go over to the sporting camp,” I said.
She opened her eyes. “What for?”
“I want to call Charley. I’d like to know what’s happening with Truman.”
“Pelletier would’ve come over if there was anything to report.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
She propped herself up on her elbows. “I’m not going.”
I rose to my feet. “I’m not asking you, Brenda. We’re going, both of us.”
She climbed to her feet. There were little dents in her knees from the gravel on the beach. “I want to put some clothes on.”
“What the hell for?”
“It’ll just take a second.”
Before I could respond she was running up the stairs.
A few minutes passed, and she didn’t reappear. I looked up at the camp, half-hidden amid the trees on the hillside. What the hell was she up to? Did she have another firearm up there?
“Shit,” I said aloud.
I removed the single shell from my pocket and slid it into the chamber of the shotgun. Slowly I climbed the plank steps, feeling certain that she was watching me from behind one of the darkened window screens.
As my head came level with the porch I said, “Brenda?”
“In here.”
Her voice came from the cabin on the left-the one where my father slept. With the sun shining directly against the side of the building, I couldn’t see inside.
“What’s the holdup?”
“It’s all right, you can come in.”
I gripped the door handle and pulled. A beam of dusty sunlight shined ahead of me. In it I saw a chest of drawers and my father’s big iron bed, but I didn’t see Brenda. I stepped inside.
She was standing naked in the near corner of the room.
“Jesus.” I turned my head away, tried to back up, missed the door. “Put some clothes on!”
“I saw how you were looking at me.”
“You’re crazy.” I kept my head turned but I could still see her out of the corner of one eye. She took a step closer.
“I could see what you wanted to do to me.”
“I’ll be outside.” I spun away and reached for the door.
She grabbed me from behind, her arms closing around my waist. Through my T-shirt I felt her breasts against my back. “I was in love with you first.”
“Brenda,” I said, reaching down to peel her hands away.
“I want you to fuck me, Mike.”
“Stop,” I said. “Stop.”
Her breath was heavy with alcohol. “Please.”
I closed my hand about her wrist and yanked it away. The force made her cry out with pain, and when I turned around her eyes were fierce and her mouth was open, and I could see her teeth.
“No.” I squeezed her wrist. “It’s not going to happen.”
“Jack likes it rough, too.”
I pushed her away. She was surprised and nearly fell back onto the bed. She knew I meant it now and her mouth curled up on one side. “What’s wrong with you? You afraid you can’t get it up?”
“Put some clothes on,” I said, turning my back to her.
“Jack was right,” she called after me. “You are a faggot.”
The unopened can of beer she’d brought me before was still on the railing. It was warm, but I opened it and drank it down.
How many beers had she had, anyway? Sally Reynolds had said she was a regular at the bar at the Dead River Inn. I could easily believe it. With each drink she seemed to grow more aggressive: conversationally, physically, sexually. Back in Flagstaff she’d seemed so helpless, so much in need of my protection. Now all that tamped-down anger inside her was coming out.
I heard the door open behind me.
She’d put on a T-shirt and the same damp cut-off denims she’d worn on the beach. The look she gave me when our eyes met showed nothing but disdain.
“Let’s go,” I said.
She didn’t budge. She shook a cigarette out of a pack and put it between her lips and tried to light it, but the lighter wouldn’t flame. “Shit.”
Just then, I heard a single, sharp, cracking noise in the distance.
“That sounded like a gunshot.”
“It’s Pelletier hammering again. He’s been doing it all day.”
“I don’t think so.” The truth was I had been distracted and wasn’t sure what I’d heard. But I had a bad feeling. “Come on, let’s go.”
She gestured toward the kitchen. “I need to get a match.”
I removed the cigarette from her lips and dropped it on the porch. This time, she didn’t fight me.
29
