Crime Machine

12

NORTHERN ONTARIO, AS THE TOURISM office is fond of declaring, is a land of lakes. Algonquin Bay itself sits between Lake Nipissing, one of the largest bodies of water in Ontario after the Great Lakes, and Trout Lake, which is small and bottomless. But there are many more within a hundred-mile radius, often linked by streams and rivers that were the traditional highways of the Nipissing First Nation and other Ontario tribes. Some are extremely isolated, rarely visited by anyone other than wildlife or the occasional lost hunter. Most lie within designated preservation areas controlled by the province. A few of the tinier ones are actually private property.

One of these, not so small, was Black Lake—accessible, but just barely, via a former logging road. Black Lake was owned by a man in his seventies named Lloyd Kreeger. He had made a lot of money in the fur industry, and his intention had been to build himself a perfectly comfortable place of retirement where he would spend his time fishing and reading and keeping a watchful eye on his investments via iPhone and Internet.

Kreeger was a man who liked his solitude. He’d had a wife or two along the way. One had divorced him because he basically ignored her and the other, to whom he had become much more warmly attached, had died. He never developed the inclination to pursue a third.

But it turned out Kreeger had overestimated his capacity for solitude, and underestimated his attachment to business. His solution to the first problem was to hire a full-time assistant, a skilful handyman named Henry, to help look after the place. His solution to the second was to turn his property on Black Lake into an exclusive hunting lodge. It was still mostly in the planning stages—construction would not begin until the spring—but it was good to have the feel of a future again, however short that future might prove to be. He certainly didn’t care to think of his life entirely in the past tense, and a few months alone in the woods had made it clear to him he was not someone who could live entirely in the present.

One night shortly after the murders at Trout Lake, Lloyd came out of the bathroom wearing his plaid robe. His skin was pink from a hot bath, and his white hair was damp and slicked back. He went down the stairs to the living room, not gripping the banister exactly but letting it glide under his hand.

The lower floor was an open-plan arrangement and he could see Henry setting out the breakfast things in the kitchen. Lloyd lowered himself into his favourite club chair and put his feet up on the ottoman. The big toe of his left foot was visible through a hole in the top of his slipper that had been developing for about a year. He heard the cereal box being set on the table, and the bowl and spoon.

“Do you need anything else tonight?”

“No thanks, Henry. You go on to bed or whatever it is you do out there in the bunkhouse.”

“Okay, then. Good night.”

“Listen, Henry …”

Henry was reaching for his big parka by the kitchen door. He stopped, with his hand poised above the hook..

“I was thinking maybe you should set two places for breakfast.”

Henry turned around and looked at Lloyd, at the silent house, and at the night-black kitchen window. “You’re expecting company in the morning?”

“Naw.” Lloyd fanned the air in front of his face, banishing the idea of visitors. “I was just thinking maybe it’s not right that you eat out there in the bunkhouse all by yourself.”

“Why not? You eat in here all by yourself.”

“Exactly. Seems kind of dumb. Also, I may have been fortunate in my life, made a lot of money and so on, but the fact is I wasn’t raised that way. I never had a servant the entire time I ran the company—unless you count a cleaning lady—and I never intended to have one now.”

Henry shrugged on his parka and folded his arms, making the fabric rustle. “You see a servant around here? I don’t see a servant. I see an old guy lives out in the woods needs things done. I’m ready to do them and he’s got the money to pay me. It’s just work. Doesn’t have to be called anything else.”

“I know, but it doesn’t seem right. Mind you, I don’t want chatter. Chatter’s what I came out here to avoid.”

Henry looked down at the floor for a moment then back up. “I appreciate your thoughts, but on the whole I think I’d prefer to keep things as they are. It’s a good arrangement. I like my bunkhouse. It’s the nicest place I’ve ever lived.”

“All right, if you’re comfortable being my slave, I’m not going to moan about it. Good night, then.”

“Good night, master.”

“Master.” Lloyd nodded. “Funny.”

Henry went out the door. It took a minute or so, but the wall of winter air eventually reached the living room and chilled Lloyd’s damp head. He clutched his robe together over his bony chest and picked up his book. His feet were already getting too hot from the fire Henry had built in the grate, and he shook his slippers off.

He heard the door of the bunkhouse open and looked up to see the wedge of light illuminate the snow before the door closed once more. He went back to his book. Now the only sound was the creak of various joints in the structure of the house, adjusting to the cold.

Even before he took his coat off, Henry knew the bunkhouse was much colder than it should have been. The wood stove was still glowing and he could feel its radiant heat from ten feet away, but the air inside was chill and fresh. He hung his coat on a peg and hung his scarf over it, and then took off his boots and put on a pair of moccasins decorated with beadwork.

The main room was basically a den with a kitchenette, a dining table and a lounge area with a couple of armchairs and a sofa. It would house four male staff members when Lloyd’s lodge opened two years from now. There were two bedrooms, each with two bunks. Henry could feel the cold air coming at him from the right, so he headed for that room. When he touched the light switch, a large hand grabbed his wrist and the muzzle of a gun was pushed up under his chin. The intruder must have broken in through the bedroom window, which faced away from the main house. Henry had seen no tracks outside, despite the fresh snow.

The man forced Henry back at gunpoint toward the eating area. Henry had been strong at one time, but his years as an alcoholic had taken that from him.

“Sit down,” the man said. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, with the kind of square moustache actors put on when they play bank robbers in the Wild West.

Henry sat on the chair closest to the door. It didn’t make any difference, though, because two other men came out of the second bedroom. One was a kid of about sixteen, the other a man in his late fifties, something military about him.

“Good job,” he said with a nod to the first man. He sat down opposite Henry and asked him his name. Not threatening, not friendly either. Just a request for information.

“Henry.”

“Henry? That your original name? You’re an Indian, aren’t you?”

“First Nations.”

“Oh, First Nations,” the man said with a deep sigh, as if this information had ended a long and exhausting search. “Not much of an Indian name, Henry.”

“I’m not much of an Indian.”

The man folded his forearms on the table and leaned forward, scanning Henry’s face. “Let me guess. Quit the reserve. Headed for the big lights. Discovered you had no immunity to firewater. Came crawling back here to dry out.”

“You got the order wrong. The grape juice came first. And I didn’t quit the rez, I was banned.”

“Is the old man alone up there?”

Henry shook his head. “He’s got me.”

The man sat back in his chair, making it creak. “So he’s alone.”

“If I told you he had a couple of bodyguards with forty-four Magnums, would it make any difference?”

“No.”

The boy was leaning against the counter near the fridge, no particular expression on his face. The young man with the gun had moved out of Henry’s line of vision, but Henry could feel his body heat on the back of his neck, he was that close.

The man sitting across the table didn’t take his eyes off Henry. Nor did his expression—an expression of interest, nothing more—change one iota as the two last words Henry would hear in his life came out of his mouth. “Kill him.”

Lloyd heard the shot and lowered his book to his lap. It was near. He was a long way from town out here, but he got hunters passing through now and again, even in winter. Their occasional shots were usually not much louder than a twig snapping, and they didn’t come at night.

He stuck his bookmark in the novel he was reading, closed it and put it on the side table. He got up, pushing himself up from the chair, and went to the picture window. The heavy curtains were closed, not because there was much chance of anybody breaching his privacy out here but because even the double glazing wouldn’t keep out the northern Ontario cold when winter got into its more serious stages. Lloyd parted the curtains about face-width, feeling the cold from the glass, and looked out.

The lights were on in the bunkhouse. The curtains in Henry’s small windows were closed, and Henry’s shadow moved across them. Lloyd thought Henry would come out on the stoop to take a look, but he didn’t. Nothing much visible out there, other than the thin coverlet of snow between the house and the bunkhouse, and Henry’s tracks between them.

Lloyd let the curtains fall back and went and switched off his reading lamp and the kitchen light, and then he switched on the outside lights. Nothing. Nothing on the dock. Nothing by the boathouse. And no tracks anywhere. Just the white snow and the still trees and the near edge of the frozen lake. Snow clouds hung low. No moon or stars. Beyond the lake the world fell away to darkness.

Lloyd switched off the outside lights and went back to his chair and his reading lamp and his book and settled down again. Hunters. The only thing you could hunt this time of year, legally, was pheasant and rabbit, and even the most avid hunters don’t do that at 10:45 on a moonless, starless night. Occasionally they’d let rip with their shotguns after drinking too many beers, just to make a noise. Trying to fill up all that darkness.

But he hadn’t heard any trucks or snowmobiles or anything like that all day.

He opened his book again. Bleak House by Charles Dickens. It was one of Lloyd’s retirement projects—along with building Algonquin Lodge—to read the entire works of Charles Dickens. To his surprise, he had discovered that Henry knew Dickens’ work very well. Though why that should have been a surprise, he didn’t like to think. Sheer prejudice probably.

Anyway, once he found that out, he started ordering two copies of the books from the online outlets, and he and Henry talked about the story and the characters almost every day. Henry was a little ahead of him in Bleak House, but that was because Henry slept even less than Lloyd.

The old man sat in his chair reading for a few more minutes, but standing by the window had chilled him, so he got up, finger holding his place in the book, and took it with him to his bedroom. He was just taking off his slippers when the front door burst open and three men he had never seen before made their entrance into his world.