Envy the Night

10

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Looking back, Grady figured at least one reason he’d grown so attached to the Temple boy didn’t involve guilt. He understood something about family legacies. About becoming something you didn’t want to become simply because it was what you knew. What you’d seen, what you’d been taught, what ran through your veins.

Grady lived alone now, in an apartment that was about the same size of the kitchen in the house he’d shared with Adrian, and though it still felt relatively new and certainly nothing like home, it had been nine years since he moved in. Nine years.

His father had been a good-natured drunk who never lifted a hand to his son, not once in all those twelve-beer nights. Instead, he’d come through the door unsteady and mumbling, walk into Grady’s room, and apologize. Sometimes they were short speeches; sometimes they went on for an hour or more. Tearful, choked-voice monologues in which the old man would take blame for all the wrongs of the world, acknowledge they were all his fault. He was sorry for being a bad father, sorry for being a bad husband, sorry they didn’t have more money, sorry they never took a vacation, sorry Grady was an only child, sorry their landlord wouldn’t allow pets because every boy should have a dog.

There were nights when Grady would lie there and wish his dad would just come in swinging, the way drunks were supposed to. Hit me, damn it, he’d think, slap me around, do anything but this crying and apologizing, you pussy.

He never hit him, though. Just kept right on apologizing until the day he had a heart attack on the corner of Addison and Clark, walking into Wrigley for a baseball game. Grady, who’d been home from college and waiting at their seats inside the park, was sure his father would have apologized for that, too, if only he could.

He’d made up his mind, though, that he would not become his father. No chance in this world. He’d make some mistakes, sure, but he would not let remorse over them haunt his days, not spend his life apologizing for faults that he never attempted to correct. He’d be assertive, he’d be strong, and any character flaws acquaintances might whisper about during parties would be borne forth from those qualities. Too cocky, they’d say, too stubborn, too sure of himself. Never admits when he’s wrong.

He’d been wrong with Frank Temple. Hadn’t admitted it. Made his mistake, moved on. Except for those computer checks. Except for those. One of the reasons he kept monitoring the kid was that Grady knew a few things about legacies. But his had only been, well, pathetic. Not dangerous, not in the way Frank Temple’s could be. The kid wanted to beat it, wanted to leave that bloody coat of arms behind, but it wasn’t going to be an easy task. And Grady surely hadn’t helped him. If anything, he’d given him a firm push in the wrong direction. What he’d done in his time with seventeen-year-old Frank Temple III was his greatest professional and personal shame. With the exception of Jim Saul, an agent down in Miami, it was also a private shame. Nobody else knew the way Grady had manipulated that kid. Frank surely did not, and that, more than anything else, was what kept Grady checking the computers, always monitoring the young man he hadn’t seen in years and wondering what it meant that he’d show more devotion out of guilt than he ever had out of love.

The case against Frank’s father had been a huge story—nothing attracted attention like the story of a federal agent turned contract killer—and when it broke the accolades and praise were rolling in and the media was loving the Bureau, loving Grady. What they didn’t understand was that when Frank’s father killed himself he had effectively aborted the future of the investigation. He’d known so much, could have provided information that would have taken Manuel DeCaster down, destroyed one of the deadliest and most powerful crime entities in Florida, hell, in the country. It had been shaping up to be one of the most significant organized crime prosecutions in years, and then Frank Temple II lifted his gun to his lips, squeezed the trigger, and killed the case along with himself.

So even as the story was arriving it was dying, and while the media didn’t understand that at first, Grady and Jim Saul sure as hell did. All they had left was Frank Temple III. The boy was supposedly closer to his father than anyone else had been, and the stories of his unusual education, the molding process that had been going on, were legion. He’d even made a trip down to Miami with his father, and there had been at least a short visit with Devin Matteson.

It was for Devin that Jim Saul most hungered. Devin was a phantom, involved in every level of DeCaster’s operation, investigated by the DEA and FBI and Miami PD for years without a single conviction. Temple was supposed to be the first domino, Matteson the second, but Temple had managed to go down without touching any of the others. They could start the chain over with Matteson, Saul was sure. And there was a chance, maybe even a strong one, that Temple’s son knew far more than they dared imagine. It would take a little bit of a sales pitch, that was all. A few talks about betrayed legacies, a few reminders of just how much Devin deserved his share of the punishment, what a shame, no, what a crime it would be to see Frank’s father alone bear that load.

He’d walked into that kid’s house knowing the truth, but with a promise—a professional oath—not to share it. Nothing evil in that, right? Except he’d shared another story and passed it off as the truth, a story that filled a grieving child with white-hot hate and a vendetta.

Grady had spent some time on it. He and the boy had a good many conversations about those things before Frank’s mother grew concerned and a newspaper reporter learned of the unusual bond and began to ask for interviews and the whole thing fell apart, leaving Frank with his hate and Grady and Saul with nothing to show for the ploy.

It had been worth the effort, though. That’s what they’d told each other early on, that if it had paid off and the kid actually knew something and shared it, well, then it absolutely would have been worth it. You had to prioritize, after all. Without the boy, they had no case, and they needed a case.

Except they already had one. While Grady was down in the basement of that house in Kenilworth, showing Frank pictures of his father with Devin Matteson and talking of loyalty and betrayal, trying to build enough hatred to coax a reaction, a group of rookie agents in Miami were working the streets and chasing bank records, and a few years and two ugly trials later DeCaster was in prison. No help needed from Frank Temple III, no lies to a grieving son, a child, required.

It was the sort of thing that was hard to put out of your mind.

Grady kept his eye on the kid, though, and found a measure of relief in each year that passed without incident. Frank was making his own place in the world, and it looked like a peaceful one.

Had looked that way, at least, until the day after his arrest for public intoxication down in Indiana, when Jim Saul called Grady at home on a Friday night and asked if he’d heard about Devin Matteson.

Grady took his feet down off the ottoman and set his beer aside and leaned forward, his grip tight on the phone.

“Heard what about him, Jimmy?”

“He’s in the hospital down in Miami, with three gunshot wounds. Looked like he was going to die when they brought him in, but he’s been making a furious recovery ever since. You know the kind of shape that prick was in. Ironman, right? He’s conscious again, and it’s almost a sure bet he’ll make it.”

“They have the shooter?”

“Nope. And if Matteson knows, he’s not saying. But somebody plugged him three in the back, and you know how he will want to handle that.”

“Personally,” Grady said, and he felt cold. “What do you hear on suspects?”

“Could be anybody. If they’ve got good leads, I’m not aware of them.”

“Temple’s son was arrested in Indiana night before last. Public intoxication. When was Matteson shot?”

“The day before that,” Saul said slowly. “And how do you know the Temple kid was arrested for a PI?”

“Word travels,” Grady said.

“Right,” Saul said. “Well, I thought you’d like to hear about it. And if I hear something new, you’ll be the first to know.”

They hung up, and Grady dropped the phone onto the cushion beside him and stared at the wall.

Devin Matteson shot in the back, Frank Temple III arrested for drinking in Indiana a day later. Celebration, maybe? A few champagne toasts to the dead?

No. No, that couldn’t be it. The kid was doing fine, and Matteson had any number of enemies. The list probably grew by the day.

Frank had wanted him, though. Frank had wanted Matteson badly, and by the end, when Grady was trying to make amends, he’d urged the boy to put that away. Told him that he’d have to ignore it if he wanted to stay away from his father’s sort of end. Frank had accepted it, too, at least verbally, but Grady remembered going back to the range with him a few weeks after the lies had started, remembered the look on Frank’s face and the perfect cluster of bullets in the target. He’d known damn well the kid was seeing Devin Matteson down there.

And whose fault was that, Grady? Whose fault?

He picked up the beer again, drank what was left, and stood up to go after another one.

“I should have asked about the wounds,” he said aloud, talking to his empty apartment. That would have settled it. Because if there’d been more than an inch or two between those bullet holes, then Frank Temple III hadn’t been pulling the trigger.

Ezra Ballard ran an electric fillet knife down the perch’s side in a smooth, quick stroke. Turned the fish over and repeated the motion. Moved the filets to the side and then lobbed the fish head over the fence and into the dog kennel. Two of his hounds hit the fish carcass together. There was a soft growl, the sound of snapping teeth, and then the winner retreated with his prize.

Last summer, an architect from Madison had given Ezra a nice lecture after watching him feed the leftover fish to his dogs. Fish in that condition wasn’t suitable for dogs. Could do serious harm. Ezra had tried to stay polite, listening to him. Finally Ezra asked him if he had any experience with bear hounds. No, not with bear hounds, the guy said. Plenty of experience with dogs, though. What kind of dogs, Ezra asked. Pugs, the guy said. Took all Ezra had to smile and nod, wait till the guy wrote out the check and went on his way. Pugs.

Ezra had selected all four of his hounds when they were just weeks-old puppies, watched them in their litters and picked up on traits of personality that set them apart. Trained them himself, spent long summer hours in the woods and brush with them, teaching them to work as a team. Though the hunting season wasn’t till October, you could run bear in the summers in Wisconsin for dog-training purposes. On days when he didn’t have to guide, he generally loaded the hounds into their crates and into the back of the truck and set off to take advantage of the free time in the way he loved best: out in the woods, alone except for the dogs. Of course, it wasn’t like being alone at all. The dogs were Ezra’s family. More than pets, more than friends. And when the air turned chill as fall began to lose its early skirmishes with winter, and the dogs bayed long and loud in the dark woods, Ezra with gun in hand as they chased their prey? Then, the dogs were something altogether nearer to his heart: comrades.

Boone, a six-year-old bluetick, was the pack’s alpha male even though he wasn’t the largest. Bridger (they were all named after famous woodsmen—Boone, Carson, Bridger, Crockett) was bigger in size, taller and fifteen pounds heavier, but he lacked the aggressive edge that dogs respected in a leader. He was a diplomat, Ezra had decided, whereas Boone tended toward the preemptive strike. Ezra felt closest to Boone, but he spoiled Bridger and tried to put out the idea that he was the favorite.

He cleaned a final fish, tossed its remains into the kennel, and then gathered up the filets and his knife, turned off the floodlight above the cleaning station, and went into the house. He cooked the fish and ate it with potatoes and carrots that he’d seasoned and wrapped in foil and cooked outside on the propane grill, ate at the kitchen table, facing the mounted head of a ten-point buck he’d taken five years earlier. Everything from the décor of his room to his clothing to his daily activity told him what he was, reminded him of it, pushed the essence of his life into him from the outside. He was a fishing and hunting guide, a woodsman, a local. His clients knew it, his friends knew it, his neighbors knew it. After nearly forty years, he was starting to know it, too. Mission accomplished.

You became what you wanted to become. That’s what Ezra believed. You could become it if you tried hard enough, could take what you really were and change it, force-feed yourself a new life until it became your old life, too, blurred together until a better self emerged.

He’d spent twenty years in Detroit and another four in the jungle trying to decide what he’d be if he could choose. Nothing stopping him, he’d move back in time, open up the west with Frémont and Carson and the others who were there, see this country in all the beauty it had once held. Reality did stop him on that one, and so he chose the next best thing, a life spent on the water and in the woods and far away from the urban world of greed and hustles and constant violence that he’d known growing up. He’d been twenty-five when he arrived here, a young man with an old warrior’s body count behind him, had no idea where to find a walleye, no idea how to track a deer or run a bear. He learned those things, and now he taught those things, and there were moments when it seemed that the perception of others—that idea that he’d always been here—was true.

He finished his meal and washed his dishes and gathered his car keys and went out to the truck. Took Cedar Falls Road to the logging road, went bouncing over the uneven track. Anybody else would spend hours, maybe even a full day, trying to locate that car from the land. Ezra was different, though. A tree that looked identical to the rest stood out as a landmark to him, each bay and inlet and island as familiar as the houses of neighbors in a suburb. He knew the gray-haired man had taken the logging road, and he knew which fork of it he’d followed.

The road went on a good half mile past the point where Ezra brought his truck to a halt, but he didn’t want to drive all the way down to the water, have his headlights visible from the island. He took the rest of it on foot, the wet earth sucking at his boots. Here the soil was almost boglike, holding moisture long after the last rain had passed. The lake was surrounded by more than sixteen thousand acres of forest that were protected by the state, home to bear and deer and three wolf packs. Home to Ezra.

There was a boat ramp farther south, but Ezra knew people who used this logging road as a put-in area for canoes, saved some paddling time if they were headed north. You’d put your canoe in the water and take off across the lake, splitting either north or south around an overgrown island with a few no trespassing signs posted. The only privately owned island in the entire flowage, out of more than a hundred possibilities. It should never have been privately owned, either. Dan Matteson’s grandfather had won it in a bizarre legal case.

Matteson’s grandfather, a Rhinelander native, had owned forty acres of good timberland several miles east of the Willow and adjacent to hundreds of acres owned by one of the state’s major paper mills. When the mill accidentally clear-cut his property, he sued. The case had gone to arbitration, and the arbitrator had decided to award Matteson property of comparable value instead of cash. Back then most of the land around the flowage was owned by the paper mills rather than the state, and the arbitrator had issued Matteson a small tract on a point of land on the eastern shore and one of the only islands in the whole lake that was high enough to avoid regular flooding. The total land came to just under five acres, a fraction of what he’d lost, but the arbitrator argued that it was waterfront property and therefore worth more. Matteson had accepted, and now, sixty years later, there remained one privately owned island on the flowage.

Dan had grown up around here, and on long days and longer nights in Vietnam, he’d talked of the place. To Ezra, who’d never been more than forty miles from Detroit until he shipped out, the flowage had sounded like a dream world. Miles of towering dark forests, pristine lakes, islands. The island that Dan owned held appeal that Ezra couldn’t even put into words, but the longer they stayed overseas the more attached he grew to the idea of the place. He couldn’t go back to Detroit. Not if he hoped to avoid the sort of existence he’d left behind.

Just before he’d enlisted, Ezra had gone out with his older brother, Ken, to settle up a debt. The sum owed was four hundred dollars. Ezra had held the arms of an alcoholic factory worker while his brother swung on the guy with a bottle. When the bottle fractured, Ken had hit him one more time in the face, a driving uppercut, and the jagged glass bit into the unconscious man’s chin and continued upward, peeling a strip of pink flesh off the bone from jaw to eye socket. They’d left him in the alley after emptying nine dollars from his pockets. The next day, Ezra went to talk to a recruiter.

As his tour wound to a close, and the prospect of returning home became more real, Ezra made an official request to Dan: Could he head up to this place, this Willow Flowage, for just a few months, until he figured something else out?

You’re shit-brained, Dan had said. It’s going to be winter, man. Three feet of snow on the ground, you want a cabin with no electricity?

Snow doesn’t sound so bad right now, Ezra answered.

Dan had agreed to it. He headed south for Miami while Ezra went north, Frank Temple taking his job with the marshals and landing in St. Louis at the time, right in the middle.

Miami ruined Dan. The Willow saved Ezra. Absolutely saved Ezra. It was hard living but clean living, where you invested your strength and sweat into clearing snow and starting fires, not breaking legs and wielding guns. And there were certain moments, when the evening sun cast a pale red stain across silent snow or when an early spring wind blew up out of the lake with a surprising touch of warmth, that made you want to drop to your knees and thank whatever God you believed in—or maybe one you hadn’t believed in—for putting you in that place at that time.

Ezra had been on the island five months when he learned his brother’s body had been found in the trunk of a Caprice off Lafayette in Detroit. He skipped the funeral. That summer, Dan and Frank came up for a visit, and Ezra made his pitch. He and Frank should pool resources and buy the additional parcel Dan owned on the point, build a cabin there and create a camp that they could share and pass down to their families. It was the sort of grand plan you can only have when you’re young and friendships seem guaranteed to last forever.

Go on, Dan had laughed. I’ll sell you the land, man. But I’m not spending much time out on that damn island, middle of nowhere and nothing to do.

Then sell it to me, Ezra suggested, the island already sacred ground to him.

Dan shook his head. Slow, with some of the mocking humor gone from his face.

Nah, he said. I can’t sell that one. Not the island. It’s in a trust, a legacy deal, to keep the state from taking it. The island goes way back in my family, you know that. I’ve got a son, and it’ll be his someday. I want it to be his.

So he’d kept his island but rarely appeared there, and Ezra and Frank built a cabin on the smaller parcel around the point and shared some summers and memories. Now, with a few decades of separation, Ezra could look back on it and see that it had been the bellwether, Dan’s life moving in a different direction, to a place hidden from Ezra and Frank. The real shame was that it hadn’t stayed that way for Frank.

Ezra had lived in the lake cabin for a time, but as soon as he could afford to he bought more land a few miles up the road and built his own house. Eventually Frank Temple bought the lake property in full, put it in a legacy trust for his son. Now it had been years since anyone spent a night in either the lake cabin or the one on the island. So much for the legacies.

As he reached the top of the hill he left the road and moved toward the waterline, reentered the trees near where he imagined the car to be, and found it easily. Driven right up to the last tree, all those boughs mashed against it, bleeding sap onto the roof. He ducked beneath the branches, his jeans soaking in moisture when his knee touched the grass, and then came out at the back of the car. Reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew his lighter, flicked the wheel, and held the flame close to the bumper, so he could read the license plate.

It was local. Wisconsin and Lincoln County. That was a surprise. He memorized the numbers and then took his thumb off the lighter and let the flame go out. He hadn’t expected a local vehicle. The only people he believed should have access to the island cabin were some thousand miles away. The Lexus had carried a Florida plate, as expected, but now it was gone, and this old heap with a local plate had taken its place. Why?

He left the car and returned the way he’d come through the silent woods. When he reached his truck he decided to go the Willow Wood Lodge instead of home, have a drink and do some thinking before calling it a night. No tourists, this time of year. There were six cars in the parking lot when he arrived, laughter carrying outside. He walked in and found an empty stool at the far end of the bar, had hardly settled onto it before a glass of Wild Turkey and an ice water were placed in front of him. Carolyn, the bartender, didn’t need to wait on an order.

“Glad you came in,” she said. “Been meaning to give you a call.”

“Yeah?”

“Dwight Simonton came in about an hour ago. You know Dwight.”

“Sure. He’s a good man.”

“He said somebody’s down at the Temple place. Said there was a fire going outside, somebody sitting there.”

“Right idea, wrong owner. Somebody showed up at the island cabin.”

Carolyn shook her head. “Dwight said it was the Temple place.”

Ezra frowned. “I don’t think so. I was just out there today, had a look at it from the water. Nobody’s staying there. Been so long since anyone visited either one of those cabins, Dwight probably was confused. Heard something about the island cabin, got it mixed up.”

Now Carolyn leaned back and raised her eyebrows. “Come on. Not a soul who lives on this lake doesn’t know the Temple place, after the way that crazy guy went out. Dwight told me the fire was right down on the point. You think Dwight can’t tell a fire on the island from one on the shore two miles away?”

She was right; Dwight Simonton wouldn’t have made that mistake. He and his wife, Fran, had owned a place up here for more than a decade and were the closest things to neighbors the Temple cabin had. If Dwight said it was the Temple cabin, then it was the Temple cabin.

“You don’t think,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning closer, “it’s his kid?”

Of course it was his kid, responding to the message Ezra himself had left, but rather than confirm it, Ezra simply shrugged.

“That’d be something,” Carolyn said.

Yeah. That’d be something, all right. Ezra finished his bourbon without a word, tossed some money on the bar, and got to his feet.

“You going down there?” Carolyn asked, her face alight with curiosity.

“Figure I ought to.”

She was ready with another question, but Ezra turned away and went to the door, stepped out into a night that now seemed electric. First there’d been the beautiful woman and her gray-haired companion in the Lexus. Then the Lexus was gone and the man hid a new car in the trees. Now someone, probably Frank’s son, was back at the Temple cabin. Ezra didn’t like the feel of it, the way this group was gathering on his lake. He was responsible for them, he knew. A generation later, maybe, but he’d brought them here all the same.