The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

Last Cottage by Christopher Merkner

FROM The Cincinnati Review

WE KNOW THE LARSONS. They come to Slocum Lake each summer. We would like them to stop, but they do not stop. For fifteen years they have come to Slocum Lake to stay at their place on the waterfront. They own the only cottage remaining on the lake: they possess the only waterfront property that has not been developed commercially. Here, in Slocum Lake, we could use that development. We desperately wish they would sell. Instead, they bring their children and teach them the ways of traditional summertime Slocum Lake living. It's very depressing, it's very outmoded, and our tolerance is pressed.

In June someone paid to have someone electrocute Slocum Lake, to stun and then kill some of the fish. It wasn't terribly expensive. A collection was taken. The more expensive part of the process involved gathering the dead fish and corralling them into the part of the lake that runs about twenty yards out from the Larsons' beachfront and approximately fifty yards across. The expensive part, actually, was installing the concealed netted cage that would keep the dead fish where we wanted them-mysteriously pent up against the Larsons' beach.

The Larsons always arrive on one of the first days of July. They roll in at nighttime. We presume they are sheepish people. It is possible their drive down from the north of Wisconsin is longer than we know it to be, because perhaps their children make them stop frequently. We don't exactly know. We know they arrive late at night, as a general annual rule. We know they carry their children into the cottage, put them in their respective bunk beds, knock off the bedroom lights, lock up, and walk down to the beachfront.

This year they arrived this way again. When they walked down to the beachfront, they held hands. Their hot truck engine was still ticking in their gravel drive. Locusts were scorching the ears of the trees on their property, the only native trees remaining on the waterfront, inglorious poplars. Summer had come very early to Slocum Lake. The locusts had hatched early also. The nights were very warm and still. The Larsons exchanged a few inaudible remarks. Their shoulders were rubbing.

Once they had reached the waterfront, they turned to face one another, held one another, and kissed. They kissed for quite some time. They have kissed before, in years previous, and they usually stop kissing and go into the water together. This year they did not go into the water. They dropped onto their knees and continued kissing. Then Robert Larson took his shirt off, and we thought this signaled a move they might make toward the water. We were wrong. Robert embraced his wife very hard. Then he slipped his wife's shirt over her head.

They were kissing with great force, it seemed, and it seemed they would not stop kissing. Then they stopped kissing. We thought this was it. Instead of rising from his knees, however, Robert lowered himself onto his back. His wife, Penny Larson, laughed and put herself on top of him. It was dark, and we believe they then made love in this position. We watched it, thinking they would go swimming after, but instead they only made docile, unremarkable love, gathered their clothes, and ran naked back toward their cottage. They were laughing, but when they stepped onto the porch, they stopped laughing and were very quiet as they slipped in through their screen door. They never turned on any house lights. They simply vanished into the dark of their little dwarfish cottage that everyone on Slocum Lake wanted to blow up.

We would not want to hurt the Larsons. We certainly would not want to hurt children. The Larsons are good people with good intentions. They leave their home in northernmost Wisconsin and head south just as everyone in Illinois not affiliated with Slocum Lake and its general and perpetual state of impoverishment goes north to summer on the largely virgin beachwater up there. No doubt the Larsons know exactly what it feels like to have strange people perching on your property, behaving as though it were their own just because they had purchased it from you. We actually feel for the Larsons as people.

We feel for them enough, in any case, that we try not to be awkward about our determination to ouster them. We believe confronting them would be awkward and, in the end, because it would likely change nothing, needless. Instead, we have for years determined to be chilly and unwelcoming. We believed this would be enough. Then they had the children, and we could see the future we imagined-fiscal and otherwise-being denied us.

Two years ago, facing this reality, someone who did not identify himself vandalized the Larson's boat launch. Last year, we decided as a community to vandalize their roof. We tore large holes in their shingles with hammers late at night, in February. We believed the water damage from spring runoff would give them pause. They came in early July, studied the damage, left to stay at a hotel, and simply had someone come and rebuild the roof and interior. It was Bernie Benson they hired to do it, and he could not be bribed to do shoddy work, as no one outside of Chicago can be bribed in this way, and their roof is now better than any roof of ours and their interior looks like a catalog image.

The Larsons could not be heard at their windows, so we retired: we returned just after dawn. The children were awake. They are darling children, twins, towheaded beauties. They ate breakfast in their pajamas, careful not to wake their parents. They poked each other without laughing, covering their mouths with their hands, and spoke about their dreams for their vacation. They are good children, and we decided on the dead fish because it would impact them directly. We knew the Larsons would not like their children impacted. We did not want to harm children, and yet the stakes were very high. We believed we could impact the children without devastating them.

The sun had risen over the buildings on the eastern shore, and it was already blasting the buildings on the western shore. The insects had moved from the water to the grasses, because the water was warmer than the air temperature. The insects were horrific biting savages. You never get used to that. Time waiting in such conditions is not terribly pleasant. You look at your watch a lot.

Even in their central air conditioning, installed the year of the children's arrival, the twins had become a little restless. They had already dressed for swimming-at the age of four years, these remarkable, delightful twins had dressed all by themselves. Then they slipped out of the cottage, careful not let the screen door slam. They ran to the boat, which was still hitched to the Larsons' car. They pulled back the protective covering and went down inside the boat, under the covering. We do not know what they do in there. We presume they play make-believe games. Every year they play inside the boat. We think it is peculiar that children from so far north play with boats the way that children from down here do. We often think that, for children and adults from the north, boats are just like old wallpaper.

They were laughing and giggling in the boat for the better part of an hour. Eventually they slid out from under the covering, hopped off the boat, and returned to the cottage. They were inflating their flotation toys just as their parents emerged from their bedroom and sat down beside them on the renovated floor. The Larsons kissed their children on their heads and their hands and petted their hair, and you could see the sort of bliss in the eyes of the Larsons we desired very determinedly to remove.

Shortly thereafter, the children at last received approval to go down to the beachfront, and Robert and Penny stood up to watch their children run from the porch of their cottage down to their sandy beach. The children ran as quickly as four-year-olds can run, shoeless and in minimal swimming wear: both were topless, and the girl's bottoms were nearly obscene, and the boy wore only a baggy pair of briefs. We recognize that the Larsons felt they were alone on their property, and we believe, had they realized the public dimension of their daily events, they likely would have dressed their children differently. Certainly they would have exercised greater restraint in letting their children run down to the beach and plunge half nude into the infested water. We know the Larsons well enough to grasp that they are not reckless, thoughtless types. Like many people from Wisconsin, actually, they are prudent and wry. They remind us of our grandparents.

The Larson children tumbled face-first into the water. For approximately two minutes they rolled and played in innocence. They laughed and splashed and spread themselves lengthwise in the water. Then the boy screamed. Then the girl screamed. The two of them burst into a series of unpleasant sounds.

The Larsons sprinted from the cottage. They were pained. Their robes were encumbrances. The situation was tense, mortal. We had never seen Robert Larson move so swiftly. He shed his robe as he neared the water; Penny Larson's leg gave out, just at that moment, and she slipped, bent awkwardly, slid several feet, then lifted herself, clutching her knee, and continued running, hopping toward the children. Robert by then had hoisted them from the water. Penny took the girl. Penny and Robert exchanged only a few words in agitation, but we heard what we needed Robert to say: The beach is covered in dead fish.

Indeed. We waited. They walked quickly to the cottage, the twins in their arms. They went inside. There was very little to be heard. We believed we could see Robert pacing, if briefly, before emerging again and walking down to the water, where he kicked the fish with his sandaled foot. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand. The fish smelled even worse once you realized what you were smelling. Robert then shielded his eyes with his other hand and surveyed the water. From that vantage, dead fish carcasses spread out for what must have seemed miles. We'd paid good money for this.

There had been a fair bit of talk about the way to kill the fish. Plenty of the lake's sportsmen felt the need for careful electronic culling, separating the game fish-bass, bluegill, catfish-from those fish whose role in the lake seemed, by sportsmen standards, unclear. The mayor's office and Parks and Recreation, who in the end were footing the largest portion of the bill, contended that such careful culling would require an exorbitant amount of additional cash, and that it was cheaper to restock the game fish than to cull them and restore them once the electrocution was completed. Poets and local liberal activists like myself argued that the impact would be lessened if we merely blitzed the Larsons and their children with dead fish of all types; rather, we argued, if the fish were carefully selected-bottom-dwellers, suckers, waterway leeches all of the same genus-there would be no mistaking the message we were trying to send. It would be difficult, in other words, for the Larsons not to recognize a careful plan at work and to see themselves symbolized as sucking fish, disgusting bottom-dwellers left for dead on their beach.

Robert Larson moved slowly back up the sand, his hands in his pockets. He entered the cottage. He looked at his wife and shrugged. Then Penny shrugged. Then Robert Larson shrugged again. Then he said, Nature down here is funky, and he clicked his tongue and sat down.

The children, these fine and very sweet and well-mannered twins, were glancing back and forth between their parents, very forlorn and very anxious. Larson looked at his wife, and Penny looked at him. Larson nodded. The children darted through the screen door and ran to the beachfront again. They plunged into the water and seized the fish in large quantities, held them against their bodies, and threw them at one another. They lobbed them in various ways-like footballs, like hand grenades. They kissed them, and pretended to fall in love with them, and then they threw them back into the water, jilted. They rode on top of the big ones like dolphins. They pitched them onto the beach; some of the carp were more than five feet long, and by working together, the children were able to drag them onto the sand. The twins then began making forts and castles with them. We held our mouths.

We might have kept holding our mouths had Larson not sped out of the driveway. We turned to see him go. He drove quickly, but the stop signs slowed him. He had his arm out the window. He spat tobacco onto the road. He had his music on loudly-a local radio channel, country-western, not from the Chicago towers but from those in Kankakee. He turned into the Cat rental facility on the north end of Route 176, went inside, and according to Davis, the manager, rented a small skid steer loader for one half day at a holiday rate of $175. Davis also covered the cost of delivery, which would take place later that afternoon, as there was no demand for skid steers at that time. Repelling open or clandestine bribes is one thing; facilitating the enemy is really something entirely different. We sometimes look at Davis and wonder what Slocum Lake would feel like without him.

Larson stopped off at the Island Foods grocery. He called his wife two times on his cellular phone while he stood, looking uneasy, in the meats and seafood department. He bypassed the local bakery doughnuts and took three boxed Danish rings, the national brand. He brought his items to the counter and had the clerk fill several paper bags. He used coupons. He slid his credit card. He pushed his cart to the truck, dropped the bags in the back, and then returned the cart to the rack by the store entry. We never doubted Larson's goodness. He drove back to the cottage and joined his wife, who was sitting on the porch watching the twins bury each other in fish carcasses.

That night the Larsons barbecued the carp on an open grill and somehow managed to swallow it. Penny served the fillets with a mayonnaise and dill relish. We had not seen Robert purchase the dill. After dinner the kids climbed into their bunk beds, and the Larsons went down to the beach and rearranged the carp the kids had strewn across the sand. Given our distance, we did not know they had organized the fish into a sort of soft bed until, as they had the night before, they lay down to make sustained love.

Words cannot bring clarity to the feelings we had while watching the Larsons make love on top of the carp. We felt very depressed might be about as close as we can get. We left the Larsons' cottage to have meals with our own families. We figured we were back to the drawing board. We figured we had not impacted the children in the right way, and we therefore had failed to alter the Larsons' iron grip on their ownership of Lake Slocum waterfront property. Because of our depression, we had not foreseen Robert Larson's critical error.

Thankfully, we were not so depressed that we did not return the next morning, just after dawn. The twins were again playing in the boat, and Robert was already awake, running the skid steer, scooping large quantities of the carp and shunting them from the waterfront to the back of his property, where he had-apparently before sunrise-dug a massive grave for the fish. It did not strike all of us at the same time, but the image of Larson hoisting the fish and steering them away from our water gave one of us, and then every one of us, a rather brutal jolt.

We called Princess at the Parks and Recreation office to confirm the limit of carp a person could take from Slocum Lake on any single fishing day. Princess told us what we all well knew from the bylaws of the constitutional charter on fish reparation: one hundred carp is the maximum any one licensed person can catch and keep on a given day. We asked nicely if Princess would send someone over to have a look at the load of carp Mr. Robert Larson had taken from our Slocum Lake.

The fine for violating the charter ran $1,000 alone; the fine for each violating fish ran $100 per fish; the fine for not having a license issued by the state of Illinois for taking any fish from the water, $100. Princess herself came over with a clutch of Slocum Lake police officers to hand the Larsons their ticket for $250,000. She explained that the police estimated Larson had extracted no fewer than twenty-five hundred carp from Slocum Lake, and she pointed down into the massive pit. It would be difficult to doubt that estimate, certainly. She continued in explaining that Parks and Recreation was actually, probably, estimating low, and they were willing, also, to give the Larsons a break on the other violations and round off at a quarter of a million dollars, due October first of the current fiscal year. She touched Robert's shoulder and said, We only take money orders for fines that exceed one hundred thousand, Mister Larson, but we know we can trust your personal checks around here. Princess winked.

Robert Larson winced and recoiled from her hand. He attempted to explain that the fish were already dead, but Princess waved him down-irrelevant and subjective. Robert protested a second time. Princess simply extended the ticket. Robert refused to take it. Princess placed it on the ground near his feet. Robert raised his voice. The children came out from the boat to watch. The police officers adjusted their belts and crossed their arms. Princess withdrew. Robert picked up the ticket. He was sweating so completely, the sunlight glinted wildly off his face.

Robert took the ticket to the porch, where he had a brief conversation with Penny. They shook their heads. They retreated inside. Their children-so bright and sensitive-grasped the gravity of the situation and went inside, settled down into Indian-style sitting, and played cards with one another for the duration of the afternoon. The Larsons held protracted, at times heated dialogues inside the cottage. The skid steer simply sat out in the sun. Some of the carp baked in their pit, and still more lapped against the shoreline.

The sun shifted its weight against the east-facing side of the shore. Evening came and went. Night tumbled in. We were pretty drunk by then. Someone had brought tequila. We had a great deal to celebrate. We took a shot every time Robert Larson rubbed his eyes. We breathed very easily when the house went dark. We assumed we would retire early to our families. But then we heard the Larsons slip out of their screen door and head down to the beach again. The minxes! They took each other's clothes off and made love in the sand. They experimented a little bit. The locusts were screaming. The insects were loathsome. The Larsons rolled about for forty minutes, then ran naked back into their cottage. We wondered if we had all seen this, or if the most drunk of us had imagined it. How strange, these Larsons. What was Slocum Lake property to the kind of people who could make love in the face of its certain loss?

How brazen. We'd had someone at our bank evaluate the Larsons' portfolio: there was no way they could afford the fines. We shook our heads. These people from the northern fringe of Wisconsin were very much like our grandparents in so many ways. We knew them, and yet we knew them not at all.

We drank to this. Then we had a few more drinks. We became increasingly easy with one another as the night wore on. We did not return to our homes and families. We kissed a little bit ourselves, touching each other's limbs in the night. We became stupid in lust and mouthed one another. We did not hear Robert Larson leave the cottage. We did not at first hear the skid steer ignition. Sensuality creates a noise that cannot be rapidly punctured, but in time it became clear we were not hearing the thrumming of our bodies but rather Robert and the skid steer shifting gears in the middle of the night.

We cleared our throats and straightened. We had to adjust our eyes. We tapped our watches. Robert Larson was scooping out the grave of dead fish and, it became clear, trundling his scoops back down to the beach, where he was dumping them into his Shamrock 270 diesel. He had launched the Shamrock in the afternoon. It was a detail that meant very little to us while we were drinking. He was working very quickly with the skid steer. No sooner had he dumped a load into the Shamrock than he was racing back up toward the cottage, behind it, to the grave, to collect another scoop. Then back down to the beach and the boat. We tried to divine the meaning of this activity.

We discovered Penny Larson had also left the cottage and gone down to the water. She was in over her waist. She was wearing only a bra. She appeared to be moving the fish closer to the sand. She did not speak. She did not luxuriate. She seemed entirely devoted to the fish, a sort of shepherd, and we were perplexed until Robert emptied the grave and turned his scoop to the shoreline. Then the Larsons' intentions were made horribly clear and vivid to us. As Robert Larson loaded carp into the Shamrock-hoisting all our work and money very high in the air, water pouring from the hinges in the metal scoop, and dumping them with heavy thuds inside of the gunwales-we could see, very plainly, that Robert Larson planned to scuttle his fiscal and moral obligations to Slocum Lake. We were just sick. If the insects were draining us at that point, we were entirely unaware. We held each other.

And in what was surely less than thirty minutes, while we looked on, Robert Larson had filled his boat with every last fish from the grave and our mostly invisible netted cage. The sun was just beginning to illuminate Slocum Lake. The Larsons' boat sat low against the mooring. Robert killed the skid steer engine and hopped out. He walked the dock and stepped into the boat. With Penny's help, he proceeded to snap the canvas top over the entire boat, covering the fish with a sort of tightly fitted pall.

That's when one of us lost it. It was unspeakably hot. Heat like that, even under less demanding circumstances, it's cruel. Half of us were naked or drunk. All of us were slick with sweat. It is not surprising that one of us would break from our cover and rush the Larsons' cottage with a burning poplar branch in his arms.

Perhaps he thought the rest of us would join him. Perhaps the heat had harmed him. Perhaps he could just no longer operate in clandestine rage, as we all were, and let the Larsons prolong our suffering and embarrassment another year. But there he was-the Kubicka kid, we believed-thrusting a burning, limpid poplar branch at the Larsons' kitchen window, yelling the word crimes over and over again at the top of his childish pitch. Try as he might, he could not in the end break through the window with this flaming branch. The limb bent and splayed each time he thrust. But the boy kept at it, jabbing, stepping back a few steps, and charging, jousting, shouting crimes!

It was painful to watch, and we did what we could: we called him away. We tried to flag him down. We implored him to drop the branch and return to us. But Robert Larson ran quickly to apprehend the Kubicka boy. Had Larson been faster, he might have stopped the fire from torching the wooden shingles of the cottage. In that heat, the siding and the roof went up like gasoline. Penny had followed Robert and slipped inside the cottage. She emerged with their beautiful children, groggy, and pointed them down to the beachfront, away from the cottage.

The Larson kids, so precious, walked down toward the dock in silence and did not raise their eyes. Had the cottage not caught fire, the children would probably never have gone down to the water. But it did, and they did, and we owe a great debt to the Kubicka kid, whom we have never since seen. Robert Larson grappled with the lithe Kubicka boy in the grass beside the burning cottage until the boy broke from Robert's grip and fled into the dark glow of dawn.

Robert did not follow. He grabbed the hose, turned on the house spigot, and began dousing the fire before it could race to the other side of the cottage. Penny took down a pickax from the porch. She yanked the burned and burning siding away from the house and spread it across the lawn. She whacked at the flames when they flared up. To watch these two was like watching junior amateur firefighters in earnest judged competition, a sort of marvel of meticulous and urgent care, and all the while their children, those wonderful blond twins, stood in pajamas by the dock, looking upon the smoke rising from the last cottage on our Slocum Lake.

Those beautiful children, dear God, to think of them. So good. What we loved most were their good natures. They never knew mistrust. They never asked questions or doubted strangers. You could tell them to go inside the boat, lie down among the carp, that their mother had instructed you to help them bed down inside the boat, beneath the cover of the boat, and to close their eyes. And they would not doubt you. They would not fuss. They would not fear.

You could sing them a quiet song, hum a melody, and you could touch their fine hair, brush it from their cheeks, over their ears, and they would curl to the feel of your knuckles, and they would smile as their sleep took them back. You don't always know what you are doing in this sort of Slocum Lake midsummer heat, but the Larson kids could just slip beneath the canopy of a boat and never say a word, even as you snapped their covers securely over their heads. Those tender kids, the last thing you'd ever see of them, their hands folded beneath their chins, and that image could just shake you to the core, shatter your soul in a million ways.

And then we receded, and we watched Robert descend to the beach and the dock, and there we held our breath. Penny was scrambling about the inside of the house, working the interior wood paneling and insulation for any trace of smoldering. Robert Larson unmoored the boat, unlashed the tethers from its side, and hopped into the water. From there he pushed on the stern and, straining, moved the heavy, low-riding boat into deeper water. He pushed and built momentum until Slocum Lake was over his neck and nearly in his mouth. Then he let the boat go. In the placid water, it skated silently over our nearly invisible netted cage and into open water. No breeze touched its gentle, steady wake. Out it went.

Robert pulled himself on the dock and watched it go. Then he bent down, dripping, and lifted a rifle to his shoulder. He closed his eye. He aimed and, from his knee, fired two quick, resonant shots. We turned. We saw the boat pitch. It lurched, dropped, then plunged into the depths of Slocum Lake with enormous emissions of escaping air, like the blowing of cattle gas.

Then silence. Just like that. The hot Slocum Lake water was still. Our carp were gone, returned to the gunk of our lake bottom, and with them all our efforts to fleece and harry the Larsons. We felt some remorse. We do not like to devastate children, after all. But the sun was coming up. It shone on the Larsons' cottage. We waited. We watched Robert Larson walk inside, shower, and then sit down on the cottage's fine wood floor beside his wife. They talked as the sun rose. Penny had poured coffee. They wiped their eyes and their foreheads. They studied the fire damage to their interior wall. It was minor. They smiled and shook their heads. Then, as if pricked, Penny stuck up her head. We could see in her eyes the sudden flaming of awareness. She opened her mouth and ran to the empty bunk beds. She returned to Robert. She trembled. She took his shoulder. They began calling out the children's names. They searched the cottage. They moved outside to search the property. They yelled out. They shouted. They screamed in ways we could not have predicted. They ran to the water. They shielded their eyes from the sun in searching. Robert waded in several steps, and then he turned around to look at Penny. His face, we could see, was rent. He yelled to the skies above us all for states around. He entered and left our chests. We know the Larsons, yes. We have known them for years. Now we know they know loss. Now we know they know us.