Starvation Lake

twenty-nine

The sun woke me a little after seven. The floor of the Bonnie was a mess of foam cups and cellophane wrappers. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and peered at myself in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t look much worse than anyone wandering into a rink at this hour.

The lobby of the Fairfax Ice House was like most I’d seen. Black rubber mats covered the floor. Long benches waited for youngsters to sit and tie on their skates. The smell of popcorn lingered. To my right was a skate-rental window and hockey shop, closed at the moment, to my left a cluster of vending machines, video games, and pay phones. Facing me were two sets of double doors leading to the rink. Between the doors stood two banks of lockers, and over the lockers on the cinder-block wall hung five black-and-white photographs of people identified by name tags. Don Peacock managed the rink and Margie Peacock taught figure skating along with Kitty Petreault and Jeff Bender. Power skating was taught, appropriately enough, by Al Power. All of them wore white turtlenecks beneath purple nylon jackets.

No photograph accompanied the sixth name tag on the wall. “Richard Blackstone. Hockey Skills Coach,” it read. I wrote it down in my notebook. On the wall next to the skate-rental window hung a bulletin board listing the week’s activities: public skating sessions, figure skating classes, hockey leagues. On this Thursday, I saw Richard Blackstone was scheduled to teach a hockey class for kids aged five to seven at eleven forty-five, and another for eight-to twelve-year-olds at three forty-five. I wrote those down, too.

On a traffic-choked road called Route 50, I found a banged-up old diner squatting beneath a sign that said simply, EAT. There was no egg pie on the menu, and when I asked for fried potatoes, the waitress, a tubby woman wearing a dirty yellow smock stitched with “Shirley,” said, “Don’t you want grits, sugar?” I ate them with a cheese omelet and drank coffee reading the Washington Post until 9:00 a.m.. By then I figured the Fairfax County Clerk’s Office would be open.

The roads wound and twisted and doubled back in a bewildering asphalt pretzel. Wherever I turned, it all looked the same, clusters of townhouses squeezed between strip malls and fast-food joints and car dealerships. A perfect place to disappear.

At the clerk’s office, I paid for copies of every document containing the name Richard Blackstone. I went through them line by line sitting in the parking lot. Now I knew where Blackstone lived and what he drove. One piece of paper linked him to Richard Ltd., the company that owned Jack Blackburn’s property near Starvation Lake. The clerk gave me directions to a nearby electronics store. There I bought a point-and-shoot camera, a video camera with a tripod and zoom lens, and a tape recorder that fit into my breast pocket. I stuffed it all in my duffel bag and headed back toward the ice rink, noticing a FedEx store along the way. At a Mobil station I filled the Bonnie’s gas tank. Inside, I bought a cap adorned with the logo for the Washington Capitals, the local pro hockey team. A bony codger in an oil-stained sweatshirt changed my five-dollar bill for quarters.

I backed away from the gas pump and slid in next to a pay phone.

“ Pilot. McCarthy.”

“It’s me,” I said.

“Holy crap.” Joanie lowered her voice. “Where are you? When I got back from Audrey’s yesterday, there were four cops waiting. You didn’t give up your source, did you?”

“Nope. What did you tell the cops?”

“I told them to call Kerawhatshisname. What a jerk. He just called me and said he’d spike any story with the name ‘Blackburn’ in it.”

“Just keep writing.”

“First I’ve got to do something on this bank thing. The jerk gave me a bunch of crap for not running anything on it in today’s paper. And Tillie took off.”

“What bank thing?”

“I told you, the New York bank buying the banks up here? I guess one of whatshisname’s golf buddies is a banker.”

“Keep it short. What about Tillie?”

“She’s gone. Came back for about five minutes after you took off and cleared out. Didn’t say a word to me.”

The missing film files had finally spooked her. Or maybe my sudden departure. It worried me. Had she figured out where I was going?

“What else is going on?” I said.

“AP put out a short on the cops looking for you. Redpath’s funeral is tomorrow. The zoning board got postponed yesterday because of the snowstorm. And the chick from the clerk’s office dropped off a big envelope.”

The 1988 town council minutes. “Vicky?” I said.

“Yeah. She said she was sorry but she had to go get them from that bartender guy.”

“Loob. Can you open them up?”

“Already did. I don’t see much. But I’ll bet you wanted to know about the dredging vote.”

She was good and getting better. “Yeah.”

I heard her rustle some papers. “They voted on it at this April thirteenth meeting. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, like, duh, how else are you going to find a body? But the sheriff, this Spardell dude, was worried about how it might mess up his budget.”

“Yeah. He wanted a boat.”

“I’ll get to that. Anyway, first they voted three to two to dredge the lake. But the sheriff made a fuss and then the mayor-excuse me, the mayor pro tem, because the mayor wasn’t there-called the council into a closed session. They came out of that and voted three to two again, this time not to dredge.”

“Who called the session?”

“Mayor Pro Tem A. Campbell.”

“Soupy’s dad? Shit, that’s right, he was on the council. And who switched their vote?”

“You’ll love this,” Joanie said. “X. Perlmutter.”

“Huh? Clayton’s brother?”

“Oh, no, it’s Clayton. His first name is actually Xavier.”

I’d never known Clayton was on the council. But then I had been in Detroit. “What about the boat?”

“The last thing they did was authorize twenty-five thousand dollars for that, with Campbell abstaining since they were buying it from him.”

“What an upstanding guy. What kind of boat?”

“Doesn’t say. Just one ‘appropriate to the tasks of policing the lake and its shoreline.’ Why’s the town buying a boat for the county sheriff anyway?”

A recorded voice was telling me I had to insert more quarters. “Listen,” I said. “Go to my desk, second drawer on the right. Near the top you’ll find a photocopy of a receipt from the marina. Get it. Hurry.”

I waited. She came back on. “Got it. A receipt from the Starvation Lake Marina for twenty-five thousand dollars. Got to be for the boat, huh?”

“What’s the date on it?”

“Let’s see. April twelfth.”

“But the meeting was the thirteenth, right? How could the town give Angus Campbell the money before the council voted?”

“Good question. What does it have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t.

The recorded voice said the call was about to end.

“Hey, that reminds me,” she said. “On Perlmutter, I was going over some of the state grant stuff again and-”

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’m going to be sending you something overnight. Look for it. And do me a favor and call my mom and tell her I’m OK.”

“Gus, listen, one of the names on-”

The dial tone cut her off.

The Zamboni made its final circuit before the 11:45 a.m. hockey skills session. At the top of the bleachers, I placed the video camera on its tripod, slung the still camera around my neck, got out my pen and notebook. A dozen little skaters burst onto the ice in baggy socks and too-big pants, their faces obscured by cages. They swerved right and skated counterclockwise. I made sure the video camera was recording.

Behind the skaters, the door to their dressing room swung open and their teacher emerged. I tugged my Caps cap lower. Richard Blackstone wore his silver hair in a comb-over swept left to right and then back. My heart skipped a beat. Jack Blackburn never wore his hair that way. Blackstone seemed smaller and paunchier than Blackburn, and his face was obscured in a full silver beard. No, I thought. Is that really him? I zoomed the camera in on his eyes. They were downcast, watching his feet. Of course. Blackburn had just one superstition. Had he left it in Starvation Lake? Just before he reached the threshold, Richard Blackstone took a little hop and a skip to stagger his stride before he stepped out, so that his left blade would hit the ice before his right. A shudder went through me. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, he was circling behind the goalie net to my left and heading up the boards toward me. I took a deep breath and looked into the video camera. I caught a closer glimpse of his face, but he quickly passed. I watched him with my naked eye as he circled again. His black sweatsuit did nothing to hide the bulge at his waist. His stride was still smooth, but his legs had to work harder to move him along. As he turned toward me, I leaned into the video camera and focused on his face. His teeth seemed whiter and more prominent, probably false. They set off the dull yellow that tinged his sagging cheeks and the creases at his deep-set eyes. I pictured him in his house at night, drinking by the arid glow of his television. It made me feel good to think of him as alone and pathetic, a dried-up old man unloved and anonymous. He circled again and as he veered my way a third time he turned toward me and looked straight into the camera. It startled me. Maybe I merely imagined it, but I thought I saw a faint, knowing smile play across his lips before he was gone again. Had he recognized me? Had Tillie gotten to him? I hadn’t expected how hard it would be to see those eyes again as I’d seen them so many times across the Sunday dinner table.

Below me, three mothers in parkas stood along the boards, chatting, paying little attention to what was happening on the ice. As the coach gathered the boys around him, I felt the urge to walk down to those mothers and tell them everything I knew. I imagined myself talking and pointing, and the mothers’ eyes darting between me and the ice, and the disbelief on their faces, followed by horror, either at the truth of the matter or at me for telling it. Twice I yanked my cap lower and coat collar higher and ventured down to the edge of the ice where I could get clearer shots of his face. I snapped shots with the still camera and, when his back was turned, took notes.

He ran some of the same drills the River Rats had run. He took the boys by the shoulders and steered them to specific spots on the ice and showed them where to look for the puck and which way to hold their stick blades. He arranged short stacks of pucks around the ice and made the kids weave between and around them without ever touching them with their sticks. If he told them they had to be hungry for those biscuits, though, I couldn’t hear. Near the end of the session, he gathered the boys around him at center ice. Through the camera I watched their helmeted heads nod in unison as he turned this way and that, telling them they’d done well, patting each of them lightly on the head. I heard them laugh. I heard them shout, “Yeah!” I remembered standing there watching him reach out to the other Rats, waiting for his hand to touch me.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. One of the three mothers was standing next to me, wearing a nervous smile.

“Excuse me,” she said. “May I ask who you are?”

“Oh,” I said, startled again. “Just a second.” I repositioned the video camera so it was pointed at the dressing room door.

“There,” I said. “I’m, uh, I’m with a newspaper.”

“I see,” she said. I saw her friends watching. “You’re doing an article?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Are you with the Post?”

“I wish. I’m just with a little paper.”

“Really? Which?”

Of course I had no idea what papers were in the area. “The Pilot,” I said.

“The Pirate?”

“ Pilot, ma’am.”

“The Pilot,” she repeated. “I haven’t seen that one. But there are so many little papers around here, some days we get four or five on the drive. How could I get a copy of your article?”

“Well, why don’t I send you one? Here.” I handed her my pen and notebook. “Write down your address.”

“I didn’t know newspapers took video.”

“They don’t, usually, but it’s a good visual aid. I don’t take very good notes.” The kids were heading off the ice.

“Mm-hm,” the woman said. She handed the notebook and pen back and stuck out a mittened hand. “Well, I’m Miriam Belzer. If you’d like an interview”-she motioned toward her friends-“we’d be glad to help. What was your name?”

“A.J.,” I said.

“A.J. what?”

I peeked into the camera. The coach was looking up toward us. “Oops,” I said. “This thing is screwing up. Excuse me, ma’am.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ll watch for your story.”

She walked down. I hurried a fresh videotape into the camera. The first one wasn’t nearly used up, but I was going to need two. I refocused the camera as the coach followed the boys off the ice toward the dressing room. At the door, he stopped and turned and looked at me again. I felt an involuntary shiver of fear while I zoomed in on his face, the hard, certain face that nobody in Starvation Lake could fail to recognize, no matter how much they might want to. He held the camera’s gaze for a full two seconds before turning away. Again I wondered if he had recognized me. But this time I relished the thought that he might have stood there wondering, for even a split second, whether his past was about to crash down on him. thirty

I pulled into another gas station pay phone and inserted the rest of my quarters. A man answered at Channel Eight in Traverse

City. I told him Gus Carpenter was calling for Tawny Jane Reese. Five seconds later, a woman picked up.

“T.J. here,” she said.

“I’m holding for Ms. Reese.”

“That’s me.”

“T.J.,” I repeated, liking it.

“You know, you’re pretty famous around here.” Her voice was just as soothing on the phone as it was on TV. “Where are you now?”

“Am I on the air, T.J.?”

“You are not.”

“Good. I don’t have much time, so listen carefully: I’m going to FedEx you something. You’ll have it in the morning. But you have to promise you won’t air it until eight a.m. Saturday.”

As she thought about it, I imagined her furrowing her brow the way she did when she was telling her viewers about a bombing in Kosovo or a flood in Des Moines. The image appealed to me, at once so mundane and so glamorous.

“I don’t usually make deals,” she said.

“Really? So you just happened to be covering a men’s hockey game in the middle of the night when the cops showed up to arrest an alleged murderer?”

“Ah, well, we all make exceptions, Gus, as you ought to know.”

Touche, I thought. “Trust me, you’ll want to make an exception for this. It has to do with Jack Blackburn.”

“OK. What about you?”

“There’s something else you need to do. After you get this FedEx and you’re getting your story ready, you’ve got to call a guy for comment. His name is Kerasopoulos. He’s the lawyer at the company that owns the Pilot. ”

“I know that blowhard. Why do I have to call him?”

I was liking her more every second. “For one thing,” I said, “to find out what happened to Gus Carpenter.” That was partly true. Really I wanted her to let Kerasopoulos know that Channel Eight was working on a story so he would have to run Joanie’s story, unless he wanted to be scooped on the most explosive news ever to hit Starvation Lake. “The rest will be obvious once you see what I’m sending.”

“You’re just a voice on the phone.”

“No, I’m a FedEx package on your doorstep tomorrow morning.”

“OK, OK, it’s a deal. But let me ask could we just run a teaser the night-?”

“No. No teasers. Eight a.m. Saturday.”

“All right, but listen, we have a one-minute news break at seven-thirty that morning. Let me just mention it then. What difference will half an hour make? The Pilot’s out by then. That’s what you’re worried about, right?”

Tawny Jane Reese was all right. And, yes, I just wanted to make sure Elvis read the story in the Pilot before he saw it on TV. “OK,” I said.

I bought a Coke and a package of cheese crackers and ate as I drove to the FedEx store. I parked, pulled out my notebook, and transcribed my scribbling into readable print. Then I went inside and made a copy of the same notes on other pages. I slipped the copied notes, the videotapes, and the undeveloped stills into separate FedEx boxes and shipped one to Joanie at her apartment, the other to T.J. at Channel Eight.

I had originally planned to return to the rink and record Richard Blackstone’s three forty-five session with the eight-to twelve-year-olds, but decided it might spook him. Instead I backed the Bonnie into a spot at the rear of the rink parking lot with a clear view of his silver Toyota Camry. The sun was sliding down the sky when he emerged from the rink a little after five. He was carrying the puck bag, two hockey sticks, and his tackle box first-aid kit. A man and a boy walked along with him. The man carried a hockey bag. The boy, his dark hair matted with sweat, had a pair of goalie pads slung over a shoulder and a stick in his hand. He squinted up at the coach and the man as they talked. The coach lowered himself to a knee and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and spoke to him. The man regarded his son and the coach with a proud smile. The boy nodded.

I let anger rise up to suffocate my sadness.

I followed the Toyota at a distance of a few hundred yards. We ended up in a neighborhood of red-brick bungalows with greening end-of-winter yards, towering oaks, and one-car garages. The streets twisted and turned. At a four-way stop, a UPS truck got between me and the Toyota. Three houses down, the truck came to a lurching halt at an awkward angle and the driver hopped out with a package under an arm. With cars parked along both sides of the street, I couldn’t pass. “Son of a bitch,” I said, slapping the steering wheel as the Toyota disappeared around a curve.

I dug through my notes for the address I’d written down at the clerk’s office and, after doubling back once, located Blackstone’s house. I drove about half a block past it and pulled to the curb. As I waited for darkness to fall, I considered whether he’d seen me. Maybe as I sat there he was calling the police and I’d be hauled away before I could make anyone believe me. It didn’t really matter. This neighborhood where I’d never been before and probably never would be again was exactly where I was supposed to be. When the streetlights blinked on, I stuffed my cap in a coat pocket and pushed the record button on the miniature tape recorder.

“Home of Jack Blackburn,” I dictated, “214 East Luray, suburbs of Washington, D.C., Thursday, March fifth, five forty-nine p.m.” I slipped the recorder into my breast pocket and stepped outside.

Four shaggy pines obscured the front of his house, making it impossible to see inside. A lamp over the concrete porch was unlit. I climbed the porch steps and rapped on the door, standing away from the peephole. The last time I’d seen Jack Blackburn up close was on the sidewalk outside Kepsel’s Ace Hardware the summer before he left us. We’d said hello and nothing more.

I pressed my ear to the door but heard no stirring inside. I knocked again. Still no answer. I walked around to the backyard. The side drive was empty. Maybe he hadn’t driven home. Maybe he’d noticed me following and decided to lose me in the maze of his neighborhood. I tried to peek into the garage but couldn’t see a thing through the tinted windows.

Cyclone fence hemmed in the backyard. I unlatched a gate and stepped across a semicircle of turquoise patio stones to the back door. Laying an ear against the door, I heard only the flat ticking of a kitchen clock. I looked around at the shadows surrounding me, thinking maybe I had been foolish to come at night. I looked at the knob on the storm door. Did I really want to add breaking and entering to my list of crimes? I tried the door and it gave. The door inside gave, too. I eased it open two inches and called out softly, “Anyone here? Mr. Blackstone?” I stepped into the dark vestibule. A corn broom leaned on the wall beneath a flyswatter hanging on a hook. To my right was a sliding door, to my left two steps up into the kitchen.

I turned toward the kitchen, catching a whiff of Lysol. In my breast pocket, the record light on the tape recorder glowed red. I leaned my head down and whispered into it, “Inside now.” The immaculate kitchen was dressed in snow-white Formica countertops, a white tile floor, white appliances, blond cupboards. On the counter sat a dish drainer holding a clean plate, a coffee cup, a fork, a steak knife. Next to it stood two bottles of Jim Beam, one nearly empty, one unopened. Impulsively, I opened a cupboard door. There was no River Rats sticker on the inside.

I stepped through the kitchen into a small living room. The front window curtains were drawn. The beige walls were bare. An unlit floor lamp stood behind a recliner, which faced a television that stood in a corner. A TV remote rested on a copy of Business Week magazine atop a small folding table next to the recliner. Along the wall to my right stood a table hockey game, the kind with a plastic bubble top I’d seen in bars. Beyond it in the corner stood a garbage can filled nearly to the top with empty Coke and Mountain Dew cans.

“Mr. Blackstone?”

Across the living room a doorway beckoned to a darkened corridor. I felt an involuntary urge to leave. I could go back to the Bonnie and stake out his house until he returned. But what if he didn’t? What if he’d recognized me and was now fleeing? I might never find him again. I couldn’t go back to Dingus and the rest of the town and tell them Jack Blackburn was still alive without being able to say I had confronted him in the flesh. They might not believe me. They might not want to believe me.

I crossed the living room and stepped into the hallway, stopping to let my eyes adjust to the dark. I could still hear the kitchen clock ticking. There was a closed door to my left, one to my right, and a third facing me at the end of the short corridor. Two bedrooms and a bathroom, I figured. As I reached for the doorknob to my left, memory sucked me back to the schoolhouse Soupy and I had broken into as kids. For an instant I could smell the mold and must again. I pushed the door open.

The bedroom, the size of a child’s, had been converted into an office. A computer monitor and keyboard sat on a desk facing me. A stack of Wall Street Journal s leaned against it. Next to the computer was a box containing what looked like blank VCR tapes, a telephone wired to the computer, and two black marking pens. To the right of the desk stood a small television equipped with a VCR. The TV was angled so that the person sitting at the desk could watch as he worked.

Against the far wall stood a bookcase holding five shelves of videotapes. A few of the tapes bore labels indicating they were instructional hockey videos: Defense for Beginners. Shoot to Score. Dryden on Goaltending. Some were unlabeled. Many had thin white stuck-on labels bearing tiny black markings. I leaned in close enough to read one and a shiver raced down my spine: LP/0293/FX.

Blackburn had borrowed Delbert’s filing system. The numbers in the middle, as with Delbert’s, signified a date. Virtually all of the tapes were marked FX, which I assumed stood for Fairfax. I wondered if the first two letters could have been someone’s initials? A boy’s? An empty tape box rested next to Blackburn’s computer. I picked it up. “JJ/1297/FX,” the label read. I wondered why Blackburn hadn’t brought his old River Rat films with him when he fled to Virginia. Maybe there was no time. Tillie could have sent them, of course, but it dawned on me that those were her last claim on Blackburn, the thing that kept him, however distant, in her life.

I was filled at once with dread at what I had found and exhilaration at what I could now tell the world. There was so much here, and there had to be more in Blackburn’s computer and his video camera. If he had escaped, so be it; he’d left too much behind. I flipped open my notebook. As I put my pen to the paper, I felt something on my shoulder.

A hand.

“What?” I cried out. The hand firmed its grip, but I twisted away and stumbled backward against the wall, face-to-face with Jack Blackburn.

He wore black nylon sweatpants, slippers, and a faded gray Fairfax Hockey T-shirt puffed out at the waist to hide his paunch. He seemed to be smiling, though it was hard to know for sure because his upper teeth, obviously capped, stretched his mouth in an unnatural way, like a clown’s. In one hand he held a glass of what I assumed was whiskey. The other he extended to me. I reached for it without thinking.

“Hello, Gus,” he said.

“Going through my things?” The clown’s mouth chuckled. “Should I call the police?”

“Do what you need to do.”

“I hear some police may be looking for you, Gus.” He looked at the videotape box still in my hand. “Kind of late in life to be boning up on your hockey skills, isn’t it?”

I set the box down. “Those aren’t hockey tapes, Jack.”

“Jack?” he said. “The name’s Richard. Or Rich, if you prefer.” He laughed at this as if it were hilarious. “It’s nice to see your dad’s big boat again.” He’d recognized the Bonnie. “It’s looking pretty good for, what, thirty years old? Though it does stick out like a sore thumb around here. This is the nation’s capital. Nobody drives American.” Again he cackled. “So, what are you here for? An article? Is that what gives you the right to just break into somebody’s house?”

“I know what you did.”

That didn’t seem to register. “Is it one of those where-are-they-now stories?” he said. “Wait-aren’t you back at the little-league paper in Starvation again?” He took a sip of his drink and shook his head. “You remember how I used to say, ‘Losing’s good for winning’? Well, no offense, Gus, but I’m thinking maybe you’re the exception. Losing didn’t work so well for you, did it? You just kept on losing. The town goat. The hotshot reporter who let the big story go between his legs. Now here you are sneaking around an old man’s house, looking for who knows what.”

“I found what I’m looking for, Jack.”

“Rich, please. And, by all means, let’s talk if I can help with whatever you’re writing. I’d love to hear your questions.” He held his glass out and shook the cubes around. “Cocktail?”

“No, thanks.”

“I’m going to have another myself.”

I waited in the living room while Blackburn went into the kitchen. He was either perfectly at ease or putting on a fine act. I heard ice clinking and the top of a bottle being spun off. He emerged with a fresh drink, a second glass, one of the bottles of Jim Beam, and a kitchen chair. He put the chair down and motioned for me to sit. I remained standing. He set his drink, the other glass, and the whiskey on the table next to the recliner. Then he just stood there, looking me over.

“I owe you an apology,” he said. “See how your body has a certain flow to it, how the shoulders flow so nicely into your arms, the arms so nicely along your sides and hips, your hips into your legs? All that nice muscle tone, all that wonderful sinew, even all these years later.”

I wasn’t going to let him make me squirm. “I’ve got you,” I said. “I know everything you did.”

Blackburn sat down in the recliner. “When I first saw you,” he said, “way back when, I thought right off you’d be a flopper, because, you know, you were never too tall, and the stand-up goalies tend to be taller. Of course today they’re all floppers, that’s how it is. But the more I looked at you, the more I was convinced you were built to stand up. A runt, but a wiry runt. I figured you had the strength, you know, the sort of-what do you call it? — internal stature that makes a goalie unbeatable.” He paused to lick the rim of his glass. “But you didn’t, did you, Gus? You were weak. You’re still weak. Aren’t you?”

I sat down now and leaned forward, elbows on knees.

“I know what you did with Soupy,” I said.

“Do you still have that glove? What the hell did you call it? You guys and your idiotic superstitions.”

“And you and your films, huh?” I took out my pen and notebook.

He pointed his glass at me. “No notes. Or I can call the cops. You can shut off that tape recorder, too.”

He wasn’t going to call the police anymore than I was, but it didn’t matter. I snapped off the recorder and put my pen and notebook away while he drained his glass in one practiced swallow, then poured again. My coach. The long-dead hero of Starvation Lake. He actually lived alone in a dark house in a place that knew little of the game he supposedly loved. His cheeks had turned the color of a fading bruise. He had a Toyota and a bottle and a TV remote and a bookshelf filled with tapes of naked boys.

“I may be a failure, Jack, but I am what I am,” I said. “You call yourself a coach, but you aren’t really a coach. You only pretend. You’re a pedophile. You fuck little boys. You fuck their heads. Then you fuck their bodies.”

He actually laughed again.

“I know about the billets,” I said. “I know about Soupy and Tillie and Jeff Champagne. Pretty clever, put Champy back on the team so you could fuck him? I suppose he was weak, too, huh? I know about Brendan Blake, too. Remember him?” Now his defiant smile ebbed and an eyebrow twitched, once, then again, an insect shifting its weight. “I know all about your disgusting films, and how you sold them, and how you used the money to buy all your land and the billets and-Jesus, Jack-all that ice time you paid for. What a great guy, picking up the tab for the parents. I’m weak? Maybe so. But I’m not a disgusting, twisted old man who pretends to be something so he can have sex with boys.”

He reached for the whiskey.

“And I am not someone,” I said, “who would drive his best friend to suicide.”

He finished pouring. Then he sat back in his chair, took a drink, and smacked his lips.

“You know fuck-all,” he said.

“I know everything. I have your old films, with you in them. And there are others who are ready to speak up.”

“Let me get this straight. I forced your worthless, drunk, pathetic friend Swanny to have sex with an older woman who, I think we can agree, was quite a looker then. Yes? Having sex with foxy older women is something a sixteen-year-old boy would never do? Is that it?”

“It’s Soupy, not Swanny, and I think you-”

“As for my old friend Leo, when I came to town, he was working in the back of a dry cleaners or something. A nobody. I took him by the hand and next thing you know, he’s basically running the rink and working the door for one of the best damn hockey teams in Michigan. He’s a celebrity in Starvation Lake. A goddamn Zamboni driver.” As he spoke, I repeated his words in my head so they would stick like ink on paper. “And then, there he is, my last night in Starvation, waving a pistol around my head, telling me, ‘I’m drawing the line, Jack, I’m drawing the line right here.’ He’s drawing the line. What a joke. Come on, Gus. Leo didn’t really pull the trigger on himself. He couldn’t have. He didn’t have the balls.”

“He’s dead, Jack.”

“God rest his soul. He laid a damn good sheet, eh? Best Zamboni jockey I ever saw. But he got squirrelly on me. All that recovery crap. One minute he’s the porn king of Pine County, next minute he’s got all this horseshit religion and he’s waving a goddamn pistol at me. What was I supposed to do? He could have blown me away and he and Swanny would’ve told the cops it was all in self-defense. So here I am, Gus. Here I am.”

“I thought Leo didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger.”

“He didn’t.”

“Then why did you run?”

He hesitated. Then he shrugged. “I had no choice.”

“Was someone else there? Someone who could have pulled the trigger? It wasn’t Soupy. He ran before you did.”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“No. No one else.” He stared into his glass. A bitter smile slowly creased his face. “Look around. I rent. Eleven hundred bucks a month. Can you believe it? Eleven hundred bucks in Starvation, you’d have a mansion on the lake.” Again he gulped the rest of his drink, again he refilled, pouring carefully, as if he could not afford to spill one drop. “Let me ask you, Gus, do you ever think about these things you think you know? I know you believe I’m the bad guy here, I’m the guy who’s done all these terrible things. But do you really think I could have done all this stuff I supposedly did all by myself?”

“You were the star of the films. I saw you.”

“Do you know why you’re such a pathetic failure? Take today. First you exposed yourself to me at the rink, then you talked to that very helpful young mother, then you let me lead you here and get the jump on you. You didn’t see the big picture. All you could see was you and your little notebook and your little newspaper and your little ideas about what’s right and wrong. And now you’re missing the big picture again. All you see is your old coach, who let you down-poor Gus-because he blamed you for losing the only game that ever mattered in the whole damn history of your hometown. Which you did, son. You lost that game. Grow up and take the responsibility.”

I couldn’t help myself. “I kept us in that game. If not for me, we’d have been down five to zero before the second period.”

He dismissed me with a wave of his glass. “Yeah, the Fitters had a lot of shots, but they were hitting you right in the breadbasket”-he thumped his chest-“you weren’t making saves. Take a lesson from old Billy Hooper, Gus. Remember? ‘Can’t see it, can’t stop it’? One eye and he saw things clearer than you. Sorry, but everything bad that ever happened in Starvation Lake ain’t about me. There’s a whole world of shit out there, and I’m just a little fly buzzing around it. I mean, did you ever think about why the sheriff wouldn’t just drag the lake after I supposedly drowned in it? Seems logical, doesn’t it? But what did they do? Nothing. Why? You’d think a few folks might know.”

“Like?”

“Like, hell, maybe old Angus Campbell? Now there was one crafty sonofabitch. It wasn’t two days after I’d supposedly drowned that Angus had all the angles figured out and got himself to the right pers-the right people. And just like that, he had a couple of big checks, one from the town for Jerry’s boat, one from”-he hesitated-“’hell, it doesn’t matter. Jerry got his blessed boat, Angus got his cash, nobody ever said a thing.”

I shuddered. “Jerry’s boat?”

“Spardell. The sheriff. He wanted his boat, boy.”

Jerry’s boat. How could I be so stupid? The scribble at the bottom of the receipt Dingus had showed me wasn’t “Ferryboat.” It was “ Jerryboat. ” Whoever had scratched it there-maybe Soupy’s dad? — had made the J look like an F. I’d just read it wrong. And, as Joanie had told me, that receipt was for a check written April 12, 1988-the day before the town council appropriated $25,000 for a new boat-so it couldn’t have come from the town. Angus had that check in hand when the next day, as mayor pro tem, he called for the executive session at which Clayton Perlmutter changed his vote and the council decided not to dredge. Soon Angus had a second check for $25,000. One, written by the town of Starvation Lake, paid for Jerry’s boat. The other kept Angus’s mouth shut. Who wrote that one? And what did Perlmutter get for changing his vote?

“How would Angus have known anything?” I said.

“Ask his worthless son.”

“So it was hush money.”

“Call it whatever you like. They don’t care how, Gus, just how many. Remember?”

“Who paid the hush money?”

Again he peered into his drink, considering. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like to be dead in the eyes of all of your friends? To be dead in the eyes of everyone you know and love? I know, you don’t think I’m capable of feelings like that, but can you at least imagine it?”

I thought I could, actually, but I said, “I don’t care.”

“I left Starvation Lake. Isn’t that enough? I had a good life. I was a good coach. I made all of you into better hockey players. I put that place on the damn map. Here, where a little shitbox like this rents for a thousand bucks a month, you got a lot of rich guys from Boston and New York who think their kids are going to be the next Wayne Gretzky. It’s a joke. There ain’t no Swannies here. No River Rats. No state titles. And me, I’m a nobody, skating around with a bunch of tripods. I’m teaching girls to play, for God’s sake.”

“And how about the little boys, Jack?”

“You ungrateful little shit,” he said, thrusting his glass at me so hard that some whiskey slopped over the top. “I made you a goalie. You never would’ve started for the Rats-hell, you never would’ve made the team just to sit your ass on the bench-if it wasn’t for me. I was like a father to you. I had to be a goddamned saint, too?”

“I had a father. You were not my father.”

“Oh, listen, son, my daddy got hit by a train when I was six. He was stumbling around drunk in the dark and it came up out of nowhere and knocked him to Nova Scotia. So be it. All good things come to an end.” He took a long swallow of whiskey. “I’m glad you brought your daddy up, though, since you think you know so much, I’m sure you know all about the Friday night poker games then, eh?”

“I know-”

“You know zip. For your information, those games were going on a hell of a long time before I got to town. And there wasn’t a lot of poker either. The main attraction was your dear old dad-the late, great Rudy Carpenter and his late, great movie projector. Sometimes I’d even make popcorn. It wasn’t poker night; it was poke-her night. Get it? Poke her?” He jabbed a forefinger at the air. “That was quite a crew-old Lenny Ziolkowski, Angus, Jerry. And your old man. That projector of his made a hell of a racket, but the pictures were”-he looked up at the ceiling, as if seeking inspiration-“exquisite.”

He stopped and watched me, savoring my discomfort, then picked up the whiskey bottle, filled half of the other glass, and pushed it along the table toward me.

“Sorry, son,” he said. “This film business was doing just fine before I arrived in Starvation. They had a healthy little network of flicks moving around the state, some coming up from the South, a few as far out as Iowa. A nice little market. But it was mostly run-of-the-mill stuff, you know, guys and chicks, chicks and dogs, same old same old. It was getting difficult to-what would the Wall Street Journal say? — differentiate the product. I saw an opportunity and was able to, as they say, leverage it for a more profitable market niche. Because, whether you like it or not, there’s huge demand for that stuff out there. Huge.”

“It’s child pornography. It’s perverted and illegal.”

“Illegal if you get caught. And the rest, well, it really ain’t for me or you to judge. You know, in hockey, you play the puck where it goes, not where you think it ought to go. Business is no different. Where there’s demand, there’s going to be supply, so you might as well supply, because people are going to get it anyway, one way or the other, just like they get their guns and cigarettes and heroin and”-he jiggled his glass-“this. Sure, my heating-and-cooling business was for shit because everybody and his brother up there was selling furnaces. Too much supply. So I found something with lots of demand and not much supply, at least not then. But remember, Gus, it takes a team to succeed. One guy can screw everything up-you ought to know that, eh? — but it takes a bunch of people working together to succeed. I had a good idea, but I had no money. And it doesn’t matter how good your idea is, you don’t have money, you’re going nowhere. Which brings us back to your daddy.”

“My dad had no interest in your disgusting business.”

“You know, it’s really too bad old Rudy isn’t still around, because now we’ve got the Internet. Supply is so much more efficient. And demand is unlimited. Unlimited, Gus. And it’s never going to stop.”

“You’re lying.”

“I don’t know where he came up with the money either. But your dad was obviously a pretty determined guy.” He leaned forward in his chair. He grinned. “You don’t actually take after him, do you, Gus?”

My father had wanted a Cadillac, if only just for Sunday drives to Lake Michigan. For years he saved to buy one. But when he finally had enough money, he chose instead to buy a used Bonneville so he could put the rest of the money into an investment. What investment? A retirement fund? My college education? Anything, I hoped, but Blackburn’s “opportunity.” Not my father. Even if he had misled my mother about where he worked those Saturday nights, it was only because of the looming death sentence of his cancer and the duty he felt to make sure Mom and I were cared for.

“You’re a goddamn liar.”

“You don’t have to believe me,” Blackburn said. He sat back again and lifted his glass to his lips. “Ask your mother.”

“Fucking liar!” I leaped from my chair, knocking the table over and sending my untouched drink flying. I slapped his glass out of his hands and it shattered against the table hockey game. “This is not about my mother and father,” I yelled, “this is about you and all the kids you fucked over. You’re going to jail or I can take you out right here.”

I was hovering over him now, breathing hard, heart pumping, fists clenched. I wanted to rip Blackburn’s face off from the ears.

He didn’t move. “Take me out?” he said. “Starvation ain’t enough of a jail for you? What are you really going to do, Gus? You want to hit me? Go ahead. See what difference it makes in your life or mine.”

“It’s over. It’s over now.”

“That’s right!” he shouted, and before I could react, he bolted up straight in his chair and grabbed my shirt collar and yanked me down close to him. I struggled to free myself as hairy knuckles scraped my neck and liquor breath slithered up my nose. “That’s right, boy,” he snarled. “It’s over. Right…now!” In one motion he raised himself out of the chair and with a grunt from his belly flung me back against the wall. I righted myself and braced for him to charge, but he just stood there looking at me and gasping for breath. He leaned over and picked the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and took a long slug. Finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and let the bottle fall to his side.

“You know,” he said, “it could’ve been you. It could’ve been you and not the others. You didn’t see me over at Swanny’s when he was a squirt teaching him how to play the game, did you? But that’s the way you wanted it, or your mother wanted it, and now, here we are. You got away, I got away.” He took another swig from the bottle. “Now go home. Nobody knows you were here. Go home to your mommy. Let your father rot in peace.”

“My dad would spit in your face.”

“Yeah? Well, we’re done here. I’m calling the cops.”

He took the bottle into his office. I heard the beeps of numbers being punched into a phone.

I crossed Blackburn’s front lawn at a slow trot and hurried down the sidewalk to the Bonnie, relieved to have the cover of dark. I kept my headlights off until I was out of the neighborhood, where I pulled into a strip mall lot, parked, and wrote down everything I could remember.

The cop flashers blinked in my rearview mirror about an hour northwest of Pittsburgh. A tow truck dispatched the Bonnie while two Lawrence County sheriff’s deputies ferried me to the Ohio border, where they stopped and took me out of their car and ushered me to the backseat of a Mahoning County sheriff’s cruiser. None of the cops said much. Every hour or so, we’d stop and I’d be moved to a different car as one county sheriff handed me over to another and another until we pulled over at the southern border of Michigan. Through the windshield I saw two Monroe County sheriff’s cruisers, one from Pine County, and a burly officer wearing an earflap cap and puffing on a thin brown cigar.

“You know a lot of sheriffs,” I said.

We’d driven about half an hour into Michigan, Dingus at the wheel, me in the back. It was nearly three o’clock Friday morning.

“It was either that or let the state boys grab you,” he said. “I have a little piece of paper here from Judge Gallagher that says you’re mine until six o’clock tonight. Then I’ll be having to hand you over to the state police, depending.”

“Depending on what?”

“Depending on what you tell me.”

Of course I was bursting to tell someone what I knew, and the longer I waited, the more time Blackburn had to get away. But I had no idea what Dingus was going to do with me. I wouldn’t be able to help Joanie much with that FedEx delivery if I was in jail. And where would Blackburn go anyway? Once the world knew he was alive, he wouldn’t be hard to track down.

I was thinking, too, about my father and what he had or hadn’t done. I told myself that Blackburn was lying, that Blackburn was just trying to manipulate me yet again. But what if he wasn’t? What shame might be brought down upon my father’s grave and, inevitably, my mother?

“It’s not my job to help you do your job,” I said.

“Oh, really?” Dingus caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Did you think you fooled me on your way out of Starvation? Did you think I don’t know those back roads?”

I didn’t say anything.

“For the record, we had you at every turn until you hit Old Twenty-seven. Not too hard to keep track of a car the size of a battleship.”

“Wait. You’re saying you just let me go?”

He lit another Tiparillo. “Sheriff Aho declined to comment.”

“You’re a funny guy, Dingus.”

The car filled with the smell of the cherry-sweet smoke. We drove in silence for a while.

“So,” he finally said. His eyes were in the rearview again. “Are you going to tell me what you learned on your little trip?”