The Confessors' Club

TWENTY-EIGHT

I followed the bartender’s napkin map down roads designated with alphabet letters to junctions with roads marked with other letters, and finally came to the bridge on County M that the bartender had warned me about. It was a rickety, single-lane contraption of bleached wood and rusted brackets that looked to be spanning the narrow frothing river below more from habit than any lingering structural integrity. The bartender said the knee-high side rails were loose and the whole thing suffered dry rot. I took his concern seriously, and eased forward in first gear. Even barely crawling, the old planks shifted and rattled loudly, like I was disturbing old bones.

A fire lane had been cut into the woods one mile farther on. A half-mile after that, an eight-inch white board, with ‘Lamm’ written on it, was nailed to a tree beside two narrow clay ruts heading into the trees. I followed them to a clearing.

Herman Canty’s shiny blue pickup truck was parked beside a dark Mercedes 500 series sedan made opaque from a rain-pocked mixture of dirt and bird droppings. I parked the Porsche and got out.

The log cottage facing the lake looked right for a rich man wanting to pass as poor. The timbers were splotched with moss, the black tarpaper roof was curling at the bottom, and green paint was flaking off the door and window facing the parking area. There was no lawn, just weeds in abundance, some two feet tall.

Capping the rusticity of the entire enterprise was a privy set far enough into the woods to provide splendid opportunities, while enthroned, for the intimate study of thousands of insects. I would have visited such a privy only under extreme distress, and then at warp speed.

The Mercedes was locked. I’d just begun rubbing the grime off the driver’s window when a man stepped out of the cottage. He was lean, tall and grizzled with unkempt gray hair and a week’s worth of unshaved beard stubble. Without doubt, he was tough enough to get through every word of the entire Sunday New York Times in the privy in the woods. Assuming, of course, that the man knew how to read.

‘Herman?’ I asked.

‘Yep.’

‘I came up to see Mr Lamm, but I understand he’s not here.’

‘Yep.’

‘People from his Chicago office reported him missing?’

‘Yep.’

For sure, the man must have enjoyed old cowboy movies.

‘You told the sheriff there’s no need for worry because Arthur takes off sometimes, for days on end, to go camping and fishing?’

He said nothing.

‘That’s a yep?’

‘Yep,’ he said. ‘His business friends called me over at Loons’. Told them the same thing.’

‘You didn’t know he’d come up until you saw his car? You didn’t actually see him?’

He stared off into the woods. ‘Mr Lamm likes to take off, is all.’

I looked past him, toward the lake. An orange rowboat, barely floating above the waterline, was tied to a collapsing dock. ‘Lamm’s boat is still there.’

‘Huh?’

‘How can Lamm be off camping if his boat is still here?’

He blinked rapidly and licked his lips. After a minute, he said, ‘He has two.’

‘Mind if I look around?’

There was nothing friendly about the way he was now looking at me. ‘What are you doing here, mister?’

‘Arthur told me to come up any time for the fishing.’

Herman spat into the clay. ‘Sure he did.’

I started walking toward the lake. Herman bird-dogged me from ten paces behind like he was worried I was going to make off with one of the trees.

When I got to the dock, I pointed at the boat. Barely two inches rode above the water. ‘You’re sure Arthur took a boat like this one?’

‘Yep.’

‘Must have bailed it out first.’

He spat again. ‘I imagine.’

‘Why didn’t he bail out this one while he was at it?’

Herman shrugged. ‘He only needed the one.’

‘You’re the caretaker here, right?’

‘I look after things.’

‘Why haven’t you bailed out the boat?’

He looked away again.

‘When Arthur gets back, tell him I came up to drop a few worms,’ I said. I felt his eyes on me all the way to the Porsche. I hadn’t bothered to give him a name. More importantly, he hadn’t bothered to ask for one, as though he never expected to talk to Lamm again.

I drove the half-mile to the fire lane and pulled far enough into the leafless trees to hope the Porsche would be hidden from the road. The day had warmed. I left my pea coat in the car and doubled back through the woods. I wanted another look at Lamm’s camp without Herman’s breath misting the back of my neck. I got within sight of the privy when the sound of a loud engine came rumbling low along County M.

The woods hid the vehicle, but I guessed it was a truck, shiny and new and blue. Herman Canty, the man who’d made sure I’d left Lamm’s clearing knowing nothing more than when I arrived, was driving slowly, maybe searching into the trees to make sure I had gone.

I held my breath, straining to hear any easing of his gas pedal. The engine loped on, low and steady. He didn’t slow at the fire lane and, in another minute, the big-barreled exhaust had gone.

I ran the last yards through the trees and down to the shore. I could see no other cottages or clearings at Lamm’s end of the lake, no places where someone could see me prowling around. Several channels split the shoreline across the lake, leading to other lakes.

I stepped onto the narrow dock. The orange rowboat shifted uneasily in the water. The next rain, even if it was light, would drop it to the bottom of the shallows.

I went up to the cottage. It had three windows at the front, facing the lake. The middle one was unlatched. I slid it open and slipped through.

There was one big room, furnished simply with two vinyl sofas, a couple of sturdy wood rockers, a table and four straight-back wood chairs. Two gray metal-frame cots were folded up in the corner. I imagined the sofas would pull out for extra sleeping. A small, butane cook stove stood next to a large, wood-burning heat stove. Burned-down candle stubs stuck in glass ash trays were set beside two lanterns on a shelf above the back window. There was no refrigerator because there was no electricity; a dented green metal cooler rested in the corner, ready for ice or chilled water from the lake.

I went back out the window and down to the shore. The almost-submerged orange wood boat still nagged. Unless it had a hole in it, Lamm should have bailed it when he was emptying the other. Or Herman, simply because that should have been his responsibility.

Unless neither of them expected Lamm would ever come back.

I bent to look closer at the boat.

Something zipped like a bug into the water five feet from my arm. In the fraction of the instant I needed to think it was an insect, rifle fire exploded the stillness around me. A second bullet zipped even closer, not two feet away.

I dove into the murk of the lake.