"No, England, remember? That's when we'd read books out loud. After lights out. I'd read you some Dickens story. And we were going to live in Mayfair."
"No, it was Sherlock Holmes. I didn't mind them. But Dickens you did solo. That was more than I could take."
"You're right. Baker Street. Mrs. Hudson. I think it was the idea of a housekeeper bringing us tea in the afternoon that we liked best."
"And doing the dishes afterwards. Can you sail to Boston from here?"
"I can't sail to the other side of the lake from here."
Portia peered into the water. "I'd forgotten all about the beach. I think one of my dolls drowned here. Barbie. Probably worth a hundred bucks nowadays. And we'd steal Oreos, then sneak down here and eat them. We'd come here all the time." She tried unsuccessfully to skip a stone. "Until the picnic."
"Until the picnic," Lis echoed softly, dipping a hand into the dark water. "This is the first time I've been back."
Portia was astonished. "Since then?"
"Yep."
"That was when? Twenty years ago?"
"Try thirty."
Portia shook her head as the number sunk in. The rowboat gave a hard thud and bounced into the dam. She watched it for a moment then said, "It'll go over if we don't do something." Portia eased the boat to the beach and tied it to a sapling. She stepped back, wiping the bits of rotten rope from her hands, and exhaled a fast laugh.
"What?"
"I was thinking. I don't know if I ever asked what happened."
"Happened?" Lis asked.
"That day? The picnic? I'd seen him mad but I'd never seen him that mad."
Was it true? Had they never talked about it? Lis's eyes were fixed on the jagged tops of three pines, rising out of the forest; the protruding trees were all different heights and for some reason put her in mind of Calvary. "I don't know," Lis answered. "I sassed him, probably. I don't remember."
"I wish I'd been older. I'd've turned him in."
Lis didn't speak for a moment. "See that?" She pointed to a rock the size of a grapefruit sticking up out of the sand and mud. The water was now an inch away from it. "After he finished spanking me, I crawled over to it. Tried to pick it up. I was going to hit him and push him into the lake."
"You? The girl who never fought back?"
"I remember being on my hands and knees, wondering what it'd be like to be in jail--whether they had separate jails for boys and girls. I didn't want to be in jail with a boy."
"Why didn't you do it?"
After a moment Lis replied, "I couldn't get it out. That's why." Then abruptly she said, "We better get some sandbags here. It looks like we've got about a half hour till it overflows."
Trenton Heck stared into the night sky through the sliding door of his trailer. In front of him, on a red vinyl place mat, sat a plate of tuna salad and rice; at Emil's feet was a bowl filled with Alpo and spinach. Neither had eaten very much.
"Oh, Lord."
The plate got pushed across the table and Heck swiped up a quart bottle of Budweiser, gulping three stiff swallows. He realized that he'd lost his taste for beer as well as his appetite and set the bottle back on the table.
Aside from a glaring light above the table the trailer was dark. He walked over the yellow-and-brown shag carpet to his green easy chair, a Sears "Best," and clicked on the pole lamp. It gave an immediate comfort to the long space. The trailer was large, a three-bedroom model. It was sided in sunlight-yellow aluminum, the windows flanked by black vinyl shingles.
Although Heck had lived here for four and a half years and had accumulated almost everything that a married then divorced man would by rights accumulate in that time, the rooms were not cluttered. Trailer makers are savvy about closets and storage areas; most of Heck's earthly possessions were stowed. Apart from the furniture and lamps the only visible accessories were photographs (family, dogs), trophies (silver-plated men holding pistols in outstretched hands, gold-plated dogs), a half dozen needlepoints that his mother had produced during the period of her chemotherapy (easy sentiments--"Love is where the home is"), cassettes for the stereo (Willie, Waylon, Dwight, Randy, Garth, Bonnie, k.d.,) and a couple of small-bore targets (center-riddled with tight groupings).
Because he was feeling sorry for himself he read the foreclosure notice again. Heck opened the blue-backed paper and laughed bitterly as he thought, Damn, that bank moves fast. The auction was a week from Saturday. Heck had to vacate the Friday before. That part was as unpleasant to read as the next paragraph--the one explaining that the bank was entitled to sue him for the difference between what they made by selling his property in the foreclosure and the amount he still owed.
"Damn!" His palm crashed down. Emil jumped. "Goddamn them! They're taking everything!"
How, he thought bitterly, can I owe more than what I bought with the money they lent me? Yet he knew some things about the law and supposed that suing him for this sum was well within their rights as long as they gave him notice.
Trenton Heck knew how fast and bad you could ruin a man's life as long as you gave him notice first.
He figured he could live without the trailer. The worse tragedy--what hurt him like a broken bone--was losing the land. The trailer had always been intended as a temporary residence at best. Heck had bought these acres--half pine forest and half low grass--with some money an aunt had left him. The first time he'd seen the property he knew he had to own it. The thick, fragrant woods giving way to yellow-green hills gently sloped like a young girl's back. A wide stream slicing off the corner of the property, no good for fishing but wonderful just for sitting beside as you listened to the water gush over smooth rocks.
And so he'd bought it. He hadn't asked the advice of his sensible father, or his temperamental fiancee, Jill. He went to the bank, horrified at the thought of depleting a savings account larger than any he'd ever possessed in his life, and put the money down. He walked away from the office of a surly lawyer the owner of four and seven-eighths acres of land that featured no driveway, well or septic tank.
Or a dwelling either.
Unable to afford a house, Heck bought a trailer. He'd allowed Jill a part in that decision, and the young waitress--born never to be cheated--had slugged walls and measured closets and interrogated salesmen about BTUs and insulation before insisting that they buy the big one, the fancy one, the Danger--Wide Load trailer ("You owe me it, Trenton"). The dealer's men eased the long vehicle onto the pinnacle of the prettiest hill on the property, right next to the spot where he planned to build his dream split-level.
These hopes of construction he believed could be achieved as easily as he'd built his hundred-yard driveway: easing his pickup back and forth between the trailer and the road fifty times. But the savings he'd planned to replenish never materialized, and therefore neither did the house. Finally it came to the point where he could no longer afford the trailer either. When the first overdue notices arrived, Heck recalled to his dismay that the bank had loaned for the trailer on condition it take back a mortgage on the land as well--all his beautiful acreage.
The same land that as of a week from Saturday was going to be somebody else's.
Heck folded the papers and stuffed them behind a statement from the veterinarian. He walked to the plate-glass picture window, which faced west, the direction the storm would be coming from in just a few hours. In the truck, on the drive back home, he'd heard several announcements about the storm. One of them reported that a twister had cut a swath through a trailer park in a town seventy miles west of here. There'd been no deaths but several injuries and a great deal of damage.
Hearing this newscast, just as he happened to click on the old radio, seemed to Heck a bad omen. Would his trailer survive intact? he wondered, then whispered, "And what the hell does it matter?" He picked up a roll of masking tape and peeled off a long strip. He laid down one long diagonal of an X. He started to do the cross strip, then paused and flung the tape across the room.
Walking into th
e bedroom he sat on the spongy double bed. He imagined himself explaining this whole matter to Jill--the foreclosure, the lawsuit--although he often grew distracted because when he pictured this conversation he pictured it very explicitly and couldn't help but notice that his ex was wearing a hot-pink peekaboo nightgown.
Heck continued to speak to her for a few minutes then became embarrassed at the unilateral dialogue. He lay back on the bed, gazing at the roiling clouds, and began another silent conversation--this time not with Jill but with Heck's own father, who at this moment was many miles away, presumably asleep, in a big colonial house that he'd owned for twenty years, no mortgage, free and clear. Trenton Heck was saying to him, It's just for a little while, Dad. Maybe a month or so. It'll help me get my life together. My old room'll be fine. Just fine.
Oh, those words sounded flat. They sounded like the excuses offered by the red-handed burglars and joyriders Heck used to nab. And in response his father glanced down the long nose that Heck was grateful he hadn't inherited and said, "For as long as you like, son, sure," though he was really saying: "I knew all along you couldn't handle it. I knew it when you married that blonde, not a woman like your mother, I knew. . . ." The old man didn't tell his son the story about the time he was laid off from the ironworks in '59 then got himself together and started his own dealership and made himself a comfortable living though it was tough. . . . He didn't have to, because the story'd been told--a dozen times, a hundred--and was sitting right there, perched in front of their similar but very different faces.
Times aren't what they were, Heck thought as he nodded his flushed thanks. Though he was also thinking, I'm just not like you, Dad, and that's the long and the short of it.
He took a swig of beer he didn't really want and wished that Jill were back. He imagined the two of them packing boxes together, looking forward to a joint move.
A truck horn sounded in the distance, an eerie carrying wail, and he thought of the lonely whippoorwill in the old Hank Williams song.
Oh, come on, he thought, rain like a son of a bitch. Heck loved the sound of the rain on the metal roof of the trailer. Nothing sent him off to sleep better. If I ain't going to get my reward money, at least give me a good night's sleep.
Trenton Heck closed his eyes, and, as he began to doze, he heard the truck's plaintive horn wail once more in the distance.
12
Owen Atcheson knew the harrowing logic of cornered animals and he understood the cold strategy of instinct that flowed like blood through the body of both hunter and prey.
He would stand motionless for hours, in icy marshes, so still that a drake or goose would pulse carelessly thirty feet above his head and die instantly in the shattering explosion from Owen's long ten-gauge. He'd move silently--almost invisibly--inches at a time, along rock faces to ease downwind of a deer and without using a telescopic sight place a .30 slug through the relaxed shoulder and strong heart of the buck.
When he was a boy he'd doggedly follow fox paths and set dull metal traps exactly where the lithe blond animals would pass. He'd smell their musk, he'd see the hint of their passage in the grass and weeds. He'd collect their broken bodies and if one chewed through the stake line he'd track it for miles--not just to recover the trap but to kill the suffering animal, which he did almost ceremoniously; pain, in Owen Atcheson's philosophy, was weakness, but death was strength.
He'd killed men too. Picked them off calmly, efficiently, with his black M-16, the empty bullet casings cartwheeling through the air and ringing as they landed. (For him, the jangle of spent shells had been the most distinctive sound of the war, much more evocative than the oddly quiet cracks of the gunfire itself.) They charged at him like children playing soldier, these men and women, working the long bolts of their ancient guns, and he'd picked them off, ring, ring, ring.
But Michael Hrubek wasn't an animal driven by instinct. He wasn't a soldier propelled by battle frenzy and love--or fear--of country.
Yet what was he?
Owen Atcheson simply didn't know.
Driving slowly along Route 236 near Stinson, he looked about for a roadside store or gas station that might have a phone. He wanted to call Lis. But this was a deserted part of the county. He could see no lights except those from distant houses clinging to a hilltop miles away. He continued down the road several hundred yards to a place where the shoulder widened. Here he parked the Cherokee and reached into the back. He slipped the bolt out of his deer rifle, pocketing the well-oiled piece of metal. From the glove compartment he took a long black flashlight, a halogen with six D cells in the tube, the lens masked by a piece of shirt cardboard to limit the refraction of the light. Locking the doors he once again checked to see that his pistol was loaded then walked in a zigzag pattern along the shoulder until he found four hyphens of skid marks--where a car had stopped abruptly then sped off just as fast.
Playing the light over the ground he found where Hrubek had jumped from the hearse: the bent grass, the overturned stones, the muddy bare footprints. Owen continued in a slow circle. Why, he wondered, had Hrubek rolled in the grass? Why had he ripped up several handsfuls of it? To staunch a wound? Was he trying to force himself to vomit? Was it part of a disguise? Camouflage?
What was in his mind?
Six feet from the shoulder was a muddle of prints, many of them Hrubek's, most of them the trackers' boot prints and the dogs' paw prints. Three animals, he noticed. Here Hrubek had paced for a time then started running east through the grass and brush just beyond the shoulder. Owen followed the trail for a hundred yards then noted that Hrubek had turned off the road, plowing south, aiming for a ridge of hill paralleling the highway fifty feet away.
Owen continued along this track until it simply vanished altogether. Dropping to his knees he scanned the area, wondering if the man was smart enough to deer-walk, an evasion technique used by professional poachers: stepping straight down on the ground, avoiding the most telltale signs of passage (not prints but overturned pebbles, leaves and twigs). But he could find no bent blades of grass--the only evidence most deer walkers leave behind. He concluded Hrubek had simply backtracked, aborting his southward journey and returning to the path beside the road.
Fifty yards east he found where Hrubek had once again done the same--turned south, walked a short way then backtracked. So, yes, he was moving east but at the same time was drawn to something south of the road. Owen followed this second detour some distance from the highway. He stood in the midst of a field of tall grass and once more saw that the trackers had paused here.
Shutting off the flashlight, he took his pistol from his pocket and waded into the pool of cold darkness that rolled off the rocky hills in front of him and gathered at his feet like snow. He paused here and, against all reason, closed his eyes.
Owen Atcheson tried to rid himself of the hardened, savvy, forty-eight-year-old WASP lawyer inside him. He struggled to become Michael Hrubek, a man consumed by madness. He stood this way, swaying in the darkness, for several minutes.
Nothing.
He could get no sense whatsoever of Hrubek's mind. He opened his eyes, fingering his pistol.
He was about to return to the Cherokee and drive on to the truck stop in Watertown when a thought came to him. What if he was allowing Hrubek too much madness?> Was it possible that, even if his world was demented, the rules that governed that world were as logical as everyone else's? Adler was fast to talk about mix-ups and doped-up patients ambling off. But step back, Owen told himself. Why, look at what Michael Hrubek's done--he's devised a plan to escape from a hospital for the criminally insane, he's executed it and he's managed to evade professional pursuers. Owen decided it was time to give Hrubek a little more credit.
Returning to the spot where Hrubek's trail ended he placed his feet squarely in the huge muddy indentations left by the madman's feet. With eyes open this time, he found himself looking directly at the crest of the rocky hill. He gazed at it for a moment then walked to the base of the rock. He da
bbed his fingers in mud and smeared it on his cheekbones and forehead. From his back pocket he took a navy-blue stocking cap and pulled it over his head. He started to climb.
In five minutes he found what he sought. The nest on the top of the rocks contained broken twigs and grass and the marks of boots. Their indentations were deep--made by someone who'd weigh close to three hundred pounds. And they were fresh. He also found button marks from where the man had lain prone and looked at the highway below, maybe waiting for the trackers and their dogs to leave. Pressed into the mud was a huge handprint above the word rEVEnge. Hrubek had been here no more than an hour before. He'd gone east, yes, but only for clothes, perhaps, or to lead his pursuers astray. Then he'd backtracked west along a different route to this outcropping, which he'd spotted on his way east.
The son of a bitch! Owen descended slowly, forcing himself to be careful, despite his exhilaration. He couldn't afford a broken bone now. At the bottom of the rocks he played his flashlight over the ground. He found a small patch of mud nearby and observed bootprints walking away from the rocks--the same prints he'd seen on the top of the cliff. Although they weren't widely spaced, they were toe-heavy, an indication that Hrubek was jogging or walking fast. They led to the road then back south into the fields, where they turned due west.
Following these clear imprints Owen walked for a short way through the grass. He decided that he would make certain that Hrubek was indeed going west then would return to his truck and cruise slowly along the highway, looking for his quarry from the road. Just another ten yards, he decided, and climbed through a notch in a low stone fence, leading to a large field beyond.
It was there that he tripped over the hidden wire and fell, face forward, toward the steel trap.
The big Ottawa Manufacturing coyote trap had been laid brilliantly--in a section of the path with no handholds for arresting falls, just beyond the stone wall so that a searcher couldn't get his other foot to the ground in time to stop his tumble. In an instant Owen dropped the flashlight and covered his face with his left arm, lifting his pistol and firing four .357 Magnum rounds at the round trigger plate in a desperate effort to snap it closed before he struck it. The blue-steel device danced under the impact of the powerful slugs. Stones, twigs and hot bits of shattered bullets flew into the air as Owen twisted sideways to let his broad shoulder take the impact of the fall.