Chapter 3
What the Lake Remembers
The woman at Great Lakes Casualty & Surety in Chicago was very kind, and very sure, and she had never heard of Aaron Pell.
"We don't have a claims adjuster by that name, sir," she said, down a line that crackled with the faint rustle of a large office. "Not in the Midwest region. I've checked the directory twice. May I ask where you received the card?"
"It was left with a neighbor."
"Then I'd be careful. We've had reports of a few people posing as adjusters, usually for older customers. They ask for personal details. If he calls again, don't give him anything. You can report it through our website, or I can transfer you to our fraud line."
"That's all right," said Damen. "Thank you. You've been very helpful."
He put down the telephone. It was ten to seven on Tuesday morning and the shed was empty. Mist was still lying on the lake in long white bars, and a heron stood in the shallows beside the middle dock like a man waiting to be introduced. Behind him the old Evinrude sat on its stand with its cowling open, dripping a thin black line of oil into the tray. He stood for a while looking at it, with his hand on the receiver.
Great Lakes Casualty, he thought. They chose a real company.
That was the part that troubled him. Not that the man had lied: men lied. But the lie had been put together with care. A real name, a real office, a real fraud line. Whoever had sent Pell had known that a man living quietly in a small town would call the number on the card, and had arranged for him to find that the number belonged to nobody. It was not meant to deceive him. It was meant to be checked. It was a visit card. The only thing that could have been said by it was we know where you are, and we're not afraid that you know.
Or it's nothing, said the voice. Or an insurance man with a clerical error.
He took the card out of his shirt pocket. He looked at it a moment, the heavy paper, the glossy ink. Then he walked to the sink at the back of the shed, held it over the drain, and set the corner alight with a match. It burned slowly, curling black and yellow, and he let it fall.
He did not take the box down until Cody left for lunch.
It lived above the ceiling at the very back of the shed, over the paint locker, where the corrugated roof sloped low and a man of ordinary height would have had to crawl. He had built the cavity himself in the second month, working at night with a flashlight in his teeth, and had lined it with sheet lead so that no one could pass a metal detector over the roof and learn that there was anything inside. He had told himself he would take it out in a year. Then in five. Then, one spring, in the middle of a Friday, when Naomi was laughing at something in the kitchen and Ivy was learning to write her name, he had stood in the shed with a pry bar in his hand and thought: If I take it out, I'm saying I'm sure. And he had put the bar down.
Now he stood on a stepladder with his head in the dark, and put out his hand, and felt for the cold tin.
It was a plain gray steel ammunition box. He slid it out, got down, set it on the bench beside the vise, and thumbed back the clasp.
Inside, under a folded oilcloth, there was a brick of cash in a sealed bag, forty thousand dollars in used hundreds. There were two passports and a driver's license, none of which had a face that was entirely his. There was a prepaid phone, in its packet, never opened. A roll of tape. A small bright flashlight. And beneath them, wrapped in a soft yellow cloth, the shape of which he did not need to look at in order to know, a pistol.
He did not touch it. He looked at it, lying in its cloth in the gray light of the shed, and a thing happened inside him that he had not allowed in nine years: a sort of low, slow, quiet turning, as of a lock in an old door that has been oiled. His hands knew the weight of it. They had not forgotten. The knowledge sat in his palms like warmth.
This is why you kept it, said the voice, mildly. Not for the day you'd need it. For the day you'd want to.
He closed the lid.
He took the phone out of its packet and charged it from the wall socket and put it, with a spare battery, into the toolbox on the truck seat. He didn't take the gun. He put the box back in the dark above the paint locker. Then he stood on the ladder with his arm resting on the rafter and his forehead against the cool corrugated iron, and said, aloud and very softly, to nobody:
"I promised."
Nobody answered. The roof ticked in the sun.
On Wednesday, he took Ivy fishing.
It had been planned for a week. The boat was a sixteen-foot aluminum skiff with a green stripe and a five-horse Mercury on the stern, bought secondhand the year Ivy was born, and christened by her mother, with a bottle of ginger beer, the Naomi Jane. It lived at the end of the middle dock and was used for the sole purpose of drifting. Damen sat in the stern with the tiller under his arm and a thermos between his boots, and in the bow, wrapped in an adult's life jacket three sizes too large, with her yellow boots propped on a cooler and her hat pulled down to her ears, his daughter held her rod like a conductor's baton.
"There's no fish," she said.
"There's plenty of fish."
"Then why won't they bite?"
"Because they're thinking."
"About what?"
"Whether you're a danger."
Ivy turned and gave him a long look under the brim of the hat. "I'm twelve on Saturday," she said, with great dignity. "I'm not a danger. I'm basically a grown-up."
"That's what I'd say if I were a fish. It's what they'd be afraid of."
She considered this, and found it logical, and turned back to the water.
It was five in the afternoon and the sun had gone long and gold. The lake lay flat and perfect, shining like a plate, with a drift of cloud reflected in it so exactly that the boat seemed to float on the sky. A quarter of a mile off the point, in the middle of the sheet of light, a fish rose, and the rings went out and out and out. There was no wind. The motor was shut. Somewhere across the water a screen door slammed and the sound reached them, thin and clear, a full two seconds late.
He sat very still with the line on his knee and let the world arrive, as he had done a thousand times: the creak of the oarlocks, the smell of weed and warm aluminum, the slap of the lake on the hull. His daughter's small figure, bent forward with intense concentration. This was what he had wanted. He had known it all along, in the way one knows a word he cannot say. Not a house, not a name. This. A boat on a flat lake, and a child who trusted that the next hour would be like the last.
"Dad?" said Ivy. "Where's your mom and dad?"
He did not move. "Why do you ask?"
"Mom has Grandma Rosa. And she has Grandpa Luis in the picture on the piano. But you've got nobody. I asked Emma at camp and she said everybody's got grandparents or they're dead."
"They're dead," said Damen.
"Oh." She absorbed it. "Both?"
"I never knew my father. My mother died when I was eight. After that I lived in some houses that weren't mine."
"What kind of houses?"
"Other people's. They were mostly kind. Some of them were not." He said it evenly, because he had decided long ago that the day she asked he would say it plainly, and that he would not lie to her about anything that could be told in a sentence. "I didn't have anyone who sat with me, the way I sit with you. I decided that if I ever had a child I'd do it differently."
"So you do the five things."
"So I do the five things."
"Because nobody did them with you."
He smiled. It came out crooked. "Somebody should have," he said.
She was silent for a time. A dragonfly came and sat on the end of her rod, and she watched it without breathing. Then, without turning, in a small flat practical voice that carried clearly across the boat, she said, "I'm glad you've got us."
The line in his hand went slack. He realized that his knuckles were white on the cork of the thermos and made them let go.
"So am I," said Damen. "More than I can say."
They played hide-and-seek afterward, on the shore, in the long grass by the old boat ramp.
It was Ivy's idea. She had caught a perch, a small silver one that she had insisted on throwing back with a speech, and she had stood on the end of the dock afterward, glowing, with her arms out, and declared that the day had reached its climax. Then she had pointed at the ramp, a quarter mile along the shore, where the woods came down to the water and the grass was long, and said it was the best place in the world to be lost. So he had tied up the skiff and carried the cooler, and they had walked together, hand in hand, along the stony beach with the gold light behind them.
"You count," she said. "You have to count to a thousand."
"It's usually a hundred."
"It's better at a thousand. It's more fair."
"It's more fair for who?"
"For me, because I'm small and I need more time."
He laughed. He turned and put his hands over his eyes and leaned his forehead against the trunk of a birch, in the warm quiet, and began.
"One. Two. Three."
He heard her feet go away through the grass, and a rustle, and a small suppressed giggle, and the sound of a child trying with all her might to be silent. The river flies hung in the light. The birch bark smelled of dust and sun.
"Forty-one. Forty-two."
And somewhere between forty-two and forty-three, with the warm bark under his forehead and his daughter's laughter still dying away behind him, the world turned over, as a leaf turns, to show its other side.
Four hundred and twelve, said a voice, very small and very high, in the dark behind a door.
He stood quite still.
His hands were over his eyes. He could feel the heat of his own palms. The light came through his fingers red and gold, and under it, in the red, in the dark, he saw a wet porch, a ticking clock, a narrow door under a staircase and a thread of yellow beneath it. He saw it as clearly as he saw the tree. He heard it. Four hundred and thirteen.
"Dad?" called Ivy from somewhere in the grass. "You stopped!"
He took a breath. He made his lips move. "Forty-three," he said, in a voice that sounded perfectly ordinary. "Forty-four."
"You went all quiet!"
"I'm thinking about where you are."
"You can't think, you have to count!"
"Forty-five."
He counted to a hundred. He counted to two hundred, with his eyes shut, standing at the foot of a birch tree with his heart going like a hammer, saying the numbers in a level voice, one after another, until the other voice faded, as it always did, and went down into whatever dark well it lived in. Then he opened his eyes and turned and said, "Ready or not," and walked into the grass, smiling, and found her in under a minute, curled in a hollow with her hat pulled over her face and her boots sticking out like a pair of lemons.
"How did you know?" she wailed.
"I noticed," said Damen.
She flung herself at him. He caught her, and swung her, and put her down, and she ran off along the ramp, shrieking. He watched her go. He was still holding the wet-grass warmth of her small body against his chest when he turned to follow, and saw what was lying in the weeds.
It was at the foot of the old concrete ramp, at the edge of the trees, where the ground was soft. Someone had been parked there. Not long ago. There were two deep tread marks in the dirt, side by side, tapering into the undergrowth, where a vehicle had backed into the brush to get under the shade. The ruts were clean and sharp-edged, the weeds crushed flat. One was still wet.
He crouched. He did not touch anything. He looked, at the scatter of small things around the ruts, as he would have looked at the aftermath of a room.
A paper cup, the lid still on, with a ring of lipstick on the rim. A half-eaten granola bar, the wrapper folded back neatly. A water bottle, nearly full. A pack of tissues with three left. A purple elastic hair tie, the kind a girl wears on her wrist, lying in the dust where it had been dropped and trodden. And about four feet away, pressed into the mud by the heel of a sneaker, a slip of white paper that had once been folded very small and had come out of a pocket: a library receipt. The ink was smeared. He picked it up with two fingers and tilted it to the light.
MILLBROOK UNIVERSITY — WALKER LIBRARY. 07/29. Patron: The rest had been torn away.
He read it again. Then he stayed where he was, squatting in the long grass, with the paper in his hand and the dragonflies spinning over the water behind him, and for the first time since Monday the dry voice in his head had nothing at all to say.
It was wrong. All of it was wrong.
A professional left nothing. A professional didn't buy a cup of coffee with lipstick on it and put the lid back on. A professional did not carry a granola bar, because he had eaten before and would eat after; he did not drop an elastic; he did not park in a place where the ruts could be read by anyone with eyes. This was the camp of somebody who had sat here for hours, bored and frightened and underfed, watching a house through a gap in the trees, and had gone home in a hurry when a man in a boat had turned the engine on.
Amateur, thought Damen. Someone young.
It was an odd thing to find reassuring. It was not. It was worse. A professional could be understood. Understood, he could be handled, and stopped. A frightened girl in a gray van with a purple elastic on her wrist was a different order of problem, because he had no idea what she wanted. He didn't know who had sent her. And he had a terrible, quiet, unreasoning conviction, kneeling in the weeds with a stranger's litter in his hand, that nobody had.
He looked up at the clearing. The grass had been trampled flat in a ring, and in the middle of it lay a black circle of old fire. A beer can. A broken guitar pick. It was where the older children of Alder Falls came on summer Saturdays, with a stolen six-pack and somebody's brother's speakers, and where his elder daughter had spent half of every August since she was sixteen, believing that he did not know.
Sofi comes here, he thought.
Every Saturday.
He put the thought away. It did not stay put.
"Dad!" Ivy's voice came from the ramp, high and happy. "Come and see! There's a frog! He's got a face!"
"Coming," said Damen.
He folded the receipt in half and put it in his shirt pocket, beside the place where the card had been. He stood. He looked once across the lake, across the long sheet of gold, to the far shore where a thin gray road ran along the foot of the hills and the pines came down black to the water. For a moment, a single point of light flashed there, small and white, as a lens flashes when it catches the sun. Then it was gone.
He didn't wave. He didn't look away. He stood on the old ramp in the light with the wind in his hair, a tall quiet man in a straw hat, and let whoever it was see his face.
Then he went down to the water to look at the frog.