Starvation Lake

three

A narrow inner stairway descended conveniently from my apartment to the Pilot newsroom, but I rarely used it. I preferred to take the outside stairs to the parking lot out back and walk a block to Estelle Street, turn up to Main, and double back to the Pilot ’s front door. It got me some fresh morning air and helped me sustain the illusion that I had a life separate from work.

Walking up Estelle, I heard the staccato drip of melting ice in the rain gutters of Pine County State Bank. I turned onto Main, and the heart of the town opened before me. Two-story brick-and-clapboard buildings flanked the two-lane street, which ran flat between angled parking spaces to the lake. Down my side of Main stood the Pilot and the shuttered Avalon Cinema. Beyond lay Kepsel’s Ace Hardware, the law office of Parmelee Gilbert, a Dairy Queen, and, at the edge of the beach, Jordan Bait and Tackle, where Main veered west and disappeared. Across from the bait shop, Soupy’s marina squatted where the Hungry River spilled into Starvation. Coming back toward me along Main was Teddy Boynton’s office, Enright’s, Sally’s Dry Cleaning and Floral, Audrey’s Diner, and Fortune Drug.

The lake was named for a drought that had nearly dried it up in the 1930s until the Civilian Conservation Corps built a dam to divert the nearby Hungry River. From the sidewalk outside the Pilot, I could see clearly down to the lake, silent and white, a seven-mile-long crescent encircled by hills, palatial summer cottages, and smaller year-round homes snugged beneath the pines, oaks, and birches. Starvation’s population could more than triple with the vacationers who drove hundreds of miles from Detroit and Chicago to boat, swim, fish, ski, hunt, snowmobile, and party. Tourist dollars had built Starvation’s new schools and paved its roads and helped put its children through college. But the town had seen better days. In the past decade, roughly since Coach Blackburn died, more and more tourists had defected to the bigger resort towns on Lake Michigan and to Sandy Cove, a town seventeen miles east that had spent boatloads of money advertising its own clear blue lake in travel magazines and on billboards along I-75. Teddy Boynton had a big idea for fixing Starvation, which was why he was coming to see me this morning.

The front door to the Pilot jangled shut behind me. Like just about every door on Main Street, the Pilot ’s was equipped with little toy bells.

“Morning, Till,” I said.

“Good morning,” Tillie Spaulding said. “Did you bring me tea and croissants?”

“Gosh,” I said. “Forgot again.” This was our morning ritual. Tillie asked and I apologized. I supposed that someday I might actually bring in tea and croissants, though first I’d have to find croissants in Starvation Lake.

Matilda Spaulding had been Miss Michigan as a lissome blond teenager, the pride of Starvation Lake in 1963. Two hours after a Main Street parade in her honor, she left to make movies in Hollywood. She made a TV commercial for foot powder, met a producer, got married, got pregnant, got an abortion, got divorced, and came home. There was no parade upon her return. Since 1971 she’d been society columnist, occasional news reporter, and unofficial receptionist for the Pilot. She had dated virtually every eligible bachelor within thirty miles of town, and a few who weren’t bachelors anymore, while developing a fondness for whiskey, rocks, with a maraschino cherry. She leaned on an elbow at the front counter, a cigarette crooked in her long fingers. She pointed it at my chin.

“What happened to you?”

I instinctively touched the stitches on my jaw. They stung. “Boynton ran me over last night,” I said.

“Ted Boynton?” Her voice hadn’t yet lost its morning croak.

“Just about beheaded me,” I said. I grabbed a Pilot off the counter.

“Oh, pshaw, Gus. You boys have known each other forever.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.” Checking the front page, I noticed we had used the wrong photograph for the local youngster who had speared a six-pound bass on Blue Lake. “Anyway, he’s coming in this morning.”

She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. “Should I get doughnuts?”

“No. This is a business meeting, and I think Teddy convened it last night.” I started back to the newsroom.

“Hold on. You owe me a quarter.”

NLP Newspapers Inc., the company that three years before had purchased the Pilot from its original owners, Nelson P. and Gertrude X. Selby, had started making employees pay for their paper.

“Put it on my tab,” I said.

“Gus.”

I walked back and slapped two dimes and a nickel on the counter.

At ten o’clock, Tillie ushered Teddy Boynton and another man toting a briefcase back to the Pilot newsroom.

Buzzing fluorescent lamps lit the windowless room. It was just big enough for a watercooler, a knee-high refrigerator, a combination copier and fax, and four gray steel desks. The air tasted of stale coffee and copier ink. I cleared one swivel chair of grease-spattered chili-dog wrappers, another of a pile of newspapers. Teddy approached me with his big hand outstretched, flashing the smile I knew well from high school. These days it adorned refrigerator magnets advertising his real estate company. His eyes flicked over my bandaged jaw. “Hell of a game last night,” he said.

“Really? I don’t remember much. Must’ve hit my head on the crossbar.”

“It’ll sneak up on you. Meet Arthur Fleming.”

Fleming, a short, pear-shaped man in thick glasses, was an attorney from Sandy Cove. He had represented the town the summer before when a movie-theater chain was deciding whether to close the theater there or the Avalon in Starvation Lake. Sandy Cove prevailed after offering twenty thousand dollars to rebuild its theater’s balcony. I shook his hand. “You’re not representing Sandy Cove?”

His eyes wandered disapprovingly around the room. “Not on this matter.”

Boynton grinned again. “He’s all mine,” he said.

Boynton unrolled a blueprint and spread it across my desk. “You may think you’ve seen this before, but you haven’t,” he said. As big and broad as he looked in his hockey gear, he always seemed bigger in a jacket and tie. “We’ve tweaked a few things and, just between us, I’m not sure our zoned-out zoning board has absorbed it all.” I felt him peek to see if I was smiling. “Like here,” he said, pointing. “We’ve moved the Jet Ski docks farther down the beach so we don’t have kids shooting out in front of boats…”

Teddy wanted to build the Pines at Starvation Lake, a marina with a luxury hotel, a restaurant, and a fifty-foot-tall waterslide. He had the land. He had most of the money lined up. He just needed a change to the local zoning ordinance. But the zoning board, five old men who seemed flummoxed by all the legal, financial, and environmental issues involved, was balking. Plenty of townspeople felt the marina was just what Starvation needed to steal business back from Sandy Cove. Others thought Boynton owned enough.

I had written the editorial that led to the stitches on my jaw. I didn’t care how much of the town Teddy owned, and I thought the new marina was probably a good idea, but I argued that there were still questions about how the development might affect the lake. Unless Boynton offered more money to keep the water clean, I argued, the zoning board should think hard before approving the project. Besides, we already had Starvation Lake Marina, which Soupy had inherited when his father died the summer before. Although it was fifty-three years old and in need of repair, the town had to find ways to help it.

“You saw our editorial?” I said.

“I did,” Boynton said, his face hinting at a scowl. The zoning board was scheduled to meet again the following Monday and, with the editorial fresh in their minds, the members were likely to demand more money.

I propped a boot against my desk. “Well,” I said, “I doubt we’re going to change our view.”

“We’d welcome that, of course,” Boynton said, “but that’s actually not why we’re here. Arthur?”

Fleming jumped up and his glasses slid down his nose. He pushed them up with the heel of his left hand, set his briefcase on my desk, and pulled out a thick document sheathed in clear plastic. “We have some research we think might be enlightening, Mr. Carpenter, to the citizens of Starvation Lake,” he said. “We’d like to show this to you on an off-the-record basis.”

I hadn’t heard that phrase since Detroit. Fleming must have fantasized that he was a big-city lawyer rather than a glorified notary public with a mercenary streak. “Sorry,” I said. “No off the record.”

“Gus,” Boynton said. “All he means is, if you use this stuff, we’d prefer you didn’t say where you got it.”

“Mr. Carpenter,” Fleming said.

“Call me Gus.”

“Gus, then. We’ve simply compiled publicly available information that paints a broader picture of the implications of the zoning board’s responsibilities-and, in fact, the Pilot ’s responsibilities-to the community.”

I looked up at the clock over Joanie’s desk. There had been a time, not so long ago, when I’d believed that things were either true or they weren’t, no matter where they came from. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll look at it off the record. But if we think it’s worth a story, we’ll have to say who put us onto it.”

Fleming looked at Boynton, who shrugged. The document thudded on my desk. Beneath the plastic, the cover page was blank but for an identifying label, “Campbell/7364opp,” typed in tiny black letters. On the next page was a table of contents divided into four categories: (I) Recent Litigation, (II) Formal Complaints, (III) Affidavits, and (IV) Tax Liens and Related Matters. Beneath each were a variety of references to Starvation Lake Marina, Alden C. Campbell, and Angus F. Campbell. Alden Campbell was Soupy. Angus was his father, who had been the marina’s proprietor until Soupy found him lying faceup on a dock on the morning of July fourth, dead of a heart attack. I flipped through the document. There were excerpts of lawsuits, sworn statements by people who had business with the marina, copies of overdue tax bills, complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau. I’d known Soupy was having trouble running his father’s business, but not this much.

“Looks like Soup’s got his work cut out,” I said.

“The real question,” Fleming said, “is whether the young Mr. Campbell is cut out for the work. His record seems to demonstrate-”

“He’s only been doing it for, what, not even a year.”

“Come on, Gus,” Boynton said. “He grew up in the damn place.”

Fleming quieted his client with a raised palm. “It’s true Mr. Campbell has been managing the property for slightly in excess of seven months. But it’s also true that in that short span he has managed to exacerbate the relatively dire financial straits the business was experiencing at the time of his father’s death. It’s debatable as to whether his father would’ve been able to right this sinking ship. Perhaps. But he is not with us. Under his son, this ship has done nothing but take on more water.”

Enough with the nautical metaphors, I thought. “It’s not the Pilot ’s job to make judgments about who is or isn’t a good businessman.”

“Arguable,” Fleming said. “I would argue it is certainly your job to alert the public if a business’s lack of viability has the potential to impact the public interest. In the case of the Starvation Lake Marina, we fear that its next public filing will be for bankruptcy. That could have catastrophic consequences for this community-the loss of its sole marina, the very heart of its economy.”

“What do you care?” I said. “Then the zoning board would have to let you guys go ahead.”

“Too late,” Boynton said. “By the time all the shoes dropped, I’d lose an entire season. The lenders won’t go for it. I’ve put a lot of time and money into this. If Starvation Lake doesn’t want it, somebody else might.”

That explained the presence of the Sandy Cove lawyer. “Clever,” I said.

“It’s no sin to play hard.”

“No,” I said, scratching my stitches.

Fleming cleared his throat. “Incidentally, you should know that we’re contemplating showing this same material to Channel Eight.”

He was goading me. Although the Pilot ’s owners, NLP Newspapers, didn’t especially like controversial stories and the legal inconveniences they could sometimes bring, they hated it when Channel Eight had a story before any of its newspapers. If we got beat to an important story about the marina, I was certain to catch hell from corporate, and Fleming probably knew it.

“Jeez, Ted,” I said, “why didn’t you just tell me all this when you had your stick down my throat last night?”

Boynton hitched his chair up closer. The metal wheels squeaked on the linoleum. “Look, Gus,” he said. “Your buddy Soupy-our buddy Soupy-is a fuckup. Great guy, great hockey player. But a fuckup. You know it and I know it. Should the whole town suffer for that?”

“Who’s a screwup?”

We all turned to see Joanie standing there in her orange parka, clutching a notebook in her left hand. Over her shoulder hung a backpack that was half the size of her. Her hair, a wild, flaming bush that matched the color of her coat, billowed around her head and spilled over her shoulders. As always, she seemed out of breath.

“Where’s the fire?” I said.

“Just got back from the sheriff’s. Who’s a screwup?” She couldn’t bring herself to say “fuckup.” She didn’t like profanity, didn’t use it, didn’t like when anybody else used it. She gave me a little speech once about how senseless it was to use “fucking” as an adjective. “It’s not a pencil,” she’d said, “it’s a fucking pencil. It’s not a lamp, it’s a fucking lamp. Barbarians and fools talk like that.” I’d grinned and said, “ Fucking barbarians, you mean?”

Boynton stood and offered his hand. “Ted Boynton,” he said. “And it’s not me who’s the fuckup.”

Joanie frowned. “So who then?”

Boynton laughed. “I’m sure your boss will fill you in.”

Joanie’s eyes fell on the document. Then she looked at me. “What happened to your chin?” she said.

“Fell out of bed,” I said.

“I got some stuff on the snowmobile,” she said.

“OK,” I said. “Just give us five more minutes.”

“Going across the street,” she said, meaning Audrey’s Diner. “Looks like the thing was registered to someone, John Blackberg or Blackston or something.”

Teddy Boynton sat up and turned toward Joanie.

“What was that?” I said.

“I thought you needed five.”

“What was the name?”

She pulled out a notebook and flipped through it. “Blackburn,” she said, shooting me an irritated glance before she turned to leave.

Teddy turned back to me. “Holy shit,” he said.