Wild Thing: A Novel

  “Violet Hurst and Lionel Azimuth,” Violet says.

  “Their names are Violet Hurst and Lionel Azimuth,” the librarian says. “I’m sending them across right now.”

  “And Reggie Trager is running this tour?” Sheriff Albin says.

  Albin’s early thirties, with a small, knobby head and a slow way of talking, possibly due to the industrial-grade bullshit-detection software he seems to be running. Naturally, he’s done nothing since Carol sat us down in front of his desk except grill the shit out of us. And write down our names.

  “That doesn’t seem like something Reggie would do?” I ask, even though I’ve been trying to stay quiet enough that Albin doesn’t feel the need to look me up after we leave.

  He barely shrugs. “Who’s your employer?”

  “We’re not allowed to say,” Violet says, with the fearlessness of the just. “It’s a large private philanthropy.”

  For all I know that’s true, although I’m pretty sure the check I got was from a company with “Technologies” in its name.

  Albin weighs Violet’s nonresponse and decides to let it go. “Has any money changed hands between your employer and Reggie Trager?”

  “No. At least not yet,” Violet says.

  You can practically see Albin wondering if what Reggie’s doing is indictable in advance, under RICO, and if so whether Albin has a responsibility to take it to the DA. Not a lot of thanks in that, I’m guessing.

  “And has he stated specifically what kind of animal it is that you would be expected to find at White Lake?”

  “No,” Violet says.

  “Although your employer sent a paleontologist.”

  “I’m the only life sciences researcher he has on personal staff,” Violet says. “I think that has more to do with why I’m here.”

  Albin looks at me.

  “I don’t do research,” I say. Which is true.

  Then at his notes. “And the letter was on CFS stationery. How long is this ‘tour’ supposed to last?”

  “Six to twelve days,” Violet says.

  “Six to twelve days?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s just a long time to take people who aren’t canoers on a canoeing trip.”

  “I think we’ll be on land for most of that time,” Violet says.

  “Reggie said that?”

  “No…”

  “Then I would question that assumption. Do you know where White Lake is?”

  “No,” Violet says.

  Albin gets up and goes to a gun cabinet that turns out to have maps in it instead of shotguns. Cute. He takes one out and unrolls it on his desk.

  It’s a Fisher elevation map. Yellow land, tarp-blue water. I used to use them in my former line of work.

  On this one, though, there’s blue all over the place, like the holes in a sponge.

  “This is Lake Garner,” he says, pointing to an elongated blue horizontal oval. “And this is White Lake.”

  White Lake looks like a lightning bolt touching down at Lake Garner’s northeastern end. Together the two lakes look like a musical note with a jagged vertical stem.

  “White Lake looks so narrow,” Violet says.

  “That’s because Lake Garner is fairly big,” Albin says. “White Lake is about a hundred yards across where it touches Lake Garner, and it gets wider as it goes north.” Albin points to the southwest corner of the map. “Meanwhile, Ford is three maps that way.”

  “How long a trip is that usually?” Violet says.

  “Could take two days, could take a week,” Albin says. “Depends which portages you use.”

  “ ‘Portages’?”

  “Portahges,” he says, changing the pronunciation so that instead of rhyming with “cordage” it rhymes with “fromage.” “Same thing. Just American versus French-Canadian.”

  “I don’t—” Violet says. She looks at me.

  “No idea,” I say.

  Sheriff Albin lets his head drop in a moment of exasperation. “Okay. I’m going to have to teach you about portages. They’re the key to the whole Boundary Waters.”

  EXHIBIT E

  Ill-Star Lake, Dakota*

  Saturday, 2 April, AD 1076*

  Two Persons really gets his back into it now that he can hear the beat of an airborne ax whirling toward him from behind. But still his mind stays weirdly clear. Thinking, You couldn’t really throw a large ax from the canoe I’m in. It would just tip over. Unlike from the Dakota* warboat chasing him.

  The warboat, with its crew of six hard-rowing Dakota face-eaters, is the trunk of a single enormous red pine. Hollowing it out has to have taken months of work by a large group of people—Two Persons has had that job himself, though not, thank Gods, in years. Meanwhile, the canoe Two Persons is test-driving is so light and fragile that with each oar-stroke it digs its nose deep into the waterline, then shudders as it bobs free. Something else to report back to Knowledgeable Raccoon. If, of course, Two Persons survives the next few minutes.

  The ax, spinning horizontally—Why? he thinks. Just to show me that your giant fucking canoe is so stable you can throw things from it sideways?—passes just to the left of Two Persons’ ducked head, then curves to the right before it contacts the water. It skips once and heavily goes under. A moment later Two Persons is past the spot where it went down. It does move along, Knowledgeable Raccoon’s new all-bark, carryable, one-man canoe.

  Still, fuck Knowledgeable Raccoon, if for no other reason than the off chance that he’s the one who told the chief that Two Persons has been skimming the grouse take. For Two Persons to receive the virtual death sentence of trying out Knowledgeable Raccoon’s new boat just for stealing a few fucking grouse is ridiculous. Two Persons has screwed three of the chief’s daughters and two of his wives. But there you have it.

  Or maybe this assignment does have to do with the daughters and wives. Two Persons flinches as the shadow of something overhead crosses his face, and a falling ax head, spun to stay vertical, nicks cleanly through the bottom of the canoe right in front of him.

  You know, that could be a problem, “Knowledgeable.”

  The canoe immediately starts shipping water, but less so than Two Persons would have thought. Or maybe he actually has it flying now, his flailing arms turning the paddle into a wing.

  The canoe scrapes rock. Showtime: he hasn’t let himself believe he was this close to shore. He jumps out and lifts the front end like Knowledgeable taught him to, rolling the whole thing over so he can duck under it and run.

  Looking back, he gets a glimpse of Death itself. The Dakota warship is turning sideways, either so everyone in it can jump out and chase Two Persons onto land or so they can all hurl projectiles at him at once.

  Two Persons, figuring he’s about to find out, reminds himself that the sense he now has of his back being protected by the bark canoe is pure illusion. He lifts it high above his head and exits the water, dancing up a couple of boulders to reach the woods between Ill-Star Lake and Lake Waste-of-Time,* no problem. Because now the canoe really is up in the air—and it doesn’t weigh anything.

  Still, visibility’s not the greatest, and if he snags the tip of the canoe on a branch, or drives it into the ground, it’s Goodbye, face. Most of what he can see is the underbrush at his feet, which explodes into fleeing animal life with every step he takes. Two Persons has never made this much noise in his life. Among mammals alone he identifies a fisher, a martin, an ermine, and a wolverine.

  An ax ricochets off his right side, knocking him sideways and almost down but just missing him with its edge. Apparently the Dakota have joined him on land.

  But through the branches ahead he can see water again.

  Then he’s there: Lake Waste-of-Time. His instinct is to throw the canoe out onto the water, so you know what? That’s what he does. And it lands more or less upright, stabilizing quickly once it starts to take on water again through the gash in the bottom.

  Two Persons splashes out to where it
’s drifting, but uses Knowledgeable Raccoon’s recommended means of getting in, since he can’t afford to fuck this up: hands on either side, first foot down in the center, other foot drawn in beside it. Now he’s ready to row, and just in time: he can hear the Dakota crashing out of the trees.

  Looking around him, Two Persons realizes he no longer has the paddle. He can’t remember putting it down, but clearly he didn’t have it with him when he crossed between the lakes, because he was carrying the canoe with both hands.

  Fuck!

  He throws himself onto his stomach and starts rowing by hand. He can only reach one side at a time. Water has never felt thinner. The boat seems to move in a circle.

  He starts alternating sides more regularly. The shore behind him leaves his peripheral vision. The water turns deep. Even so, he can’t understand why the Dakota haven’t caught him and killed him until he looks back and sees them still standing on the shore a full sixty furlongs behind him.

  Staring at the canoe. And talking in low, serious voices.

  While on the far shore—the one that marks the border between the Dakota and Ojibwe* lands—Two Persons can now see his own platoon gathered. Including Knowledgeable Raccoon, who goes from frowning with concentration to howling in triumph like a wolf while giving the Dakota the “fuck you” sign.

  Fuck you is right, Two Persons thinks, rolling over in the water at the bottom of the canoe, exhausted.

  Fuck all of you.

  10

  Ely, Minnesota

  Still Friday, 14 September

  “Carrying a canoe from one lake to another is called portaging,” Sheriff Albin says. “The path you use to do it is called a portage.”

  “Huh,” I say.

  I haven’t really been listening to him. His story sounded like bullshit—particularly the part about the Dakota eating people’s faces—and was reminding me of this cologne that mob guys used to wear called Canoe. Maybe they still do.

  It also made me wonder why Sheriff Albin’s spending so much time on us. It’s one thing to try to get information about a potential crime being committed by Reggie Trager. It’s another to get out maps and take us back to Olde Indian Times.

  “Portages are tricky, is the thing,” he goes on. “They grow over, the shoreline changes, you’re not allowed to put up signs or score trees to mark them. Even if they’re still where your map says they are, they can be hard to spot from the water. And just because it’s a portage that you can get a forty-five-pound Kevlar tripper over doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to move a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound, four-person aluminum touring boat and all your gear through it. The trail could go straight up a cliff. It could just be too long.

  “So if you’re going lake to lake to lake, there might be a dozen different paths you could choose from, depending on what you need to portage and who’s going to be doing the portaging. Getting the right route from point A to point B is like opening a combination lock.”

  Jesus. Enough already.

  “What do you think happened to Benjy Schneke and Autumn Semmel?” Violet says, making me want to fuck her even more than usual.

  Albin’s face darkens. “Is Reggie Trager using that to sell his tour?”

  “No, he isn’t. We heard about it in Ford, then looked it up in the library.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  It calms him down a bit.

  “What do you think happened?” I say. I’d rather Albin get suspicious and look me up than go back to boring me to death.

  “It wasn’t within my jurisdiction.”

  “You don’t cover Ford?”

  “We do in most cases. Ford’s not in Lake County, but they contract with us for services—we send them a bill, they don’t pay it, we patrol there anyhow. Saves us trouble in the long run. But out in the actual Boundary Waters it’s usually Parks and Recreation, and homicides anywhere in the state except the Twin Cities go to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, down in Bemidji.”

  “So you didn’t take the call.”

  As far as I can tell, there is no reason at all for him to respond to that.

  “I did take the call.”

  “And you talked to the other two kids who were there?”

  “Numerous times. Both families have since moved, incidentally. Don’t go looking for them.”

  “We won’t. Did you see the bodies?”

  Violet gives me a sharp look. Albin still doesn’t get mad.

  “Yes, I did.”

  At which point I begin to understand what’s going on.

  Albin has to believe there’s a 90 percent chance that Violet and I are con artists, morons, or both. But it can’t be every day that people claiming to be a paleontologist and a physician walk into his office and express interest in a case that supposedly involves a human-eating lake monster. And which, two years later, still hasn’t been solved.

  “What do you think happened?” I say, for what feels like the fifth time.

  “The MBCA report called it a motorboat accident.”

  “I thought motorboats were illegal in the Boundary Waters.”

  “They are, but that doesn’t mean people don’t bring them in. A lot of the lakes around the edges of the Boundary Waters are half in and half out, and it’s legal to use motorboats on the half that’s out, so things get pretty porous. A couple of weeks ago, when it was warmer, people were waterskiing on Ford Lake. Which is legal on the third of the lake that’s closest to civilization.”

  I try to picture anyone from Ford waterskiing. I actually went waterskiing once myself, in the early nineties, with David Locano and his son. The three of us—no worthwhile human being in the group—with our own powerboat and stretch of pristine, previously drinkable water, all for a dumb rush lasting three minutes at a time. If that doesn’t make you feel like Pharaoh, nothing will.

  Violet says “But how would anybody get a motorboat as far in as White Lake, after what you’ve just told us about portaging?”

  “There are portages in the Boundary Waters for motorboats. Those are illegal too—they have been for decades. But there are a lot of them still out there. Dredged, usually. Sometimes with rails. Parks and Rec will pull rails if they find them, but it’s a big area out there, patrolled mostly by aircraft.”

  “Was there a motorboat found at White Lake?” she says.

  “No. The two kids who were nearby when Autumn and Benjy died said the four of them went out in two canoes, one of which the survivors used to get back to Ford. There was no way to prove that, though. There was a canoe from CFS still out there when I got there, but if the kids were using a stolen or borrowed motorboat, they might have towed a canoe just to paddle around in once they got there.”

  “CFS Lodge?” I say.

  “Outfitters and Lodge, yes,” Albin says.

  “Which Reggie Trager owns?”

  “Yes, although at the time Autumn’s father owned it. Reggie inherited it when Autumn’s father died.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “Chris Semmel Jr. owned CFS?”

  Albin squints, like he’s reviewing whether he should share this information.

  “Right,” he says.

  “And after Autumn and Chris Jr. died, five days apart, Reggie Trager inherited it?”

  “Correct. Chris Jr.’s wife could have kept it, but she wasn’t from around here, and for obvious reasons didn’t want to stay. Back when Chris Sr. left it to Chris Jr. in the first place, he said that if none of the Semmels was willing or able to stick around and run it, Reggie Trager should get the chance.”

  Yet another reason for Trager not to have mentioned any of this in his invitation. “Was Trager charged with the murders of Chris Jr. and Father Podominick?” I say.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “There was no evidence he committed them, and three people willing to say he couldn’t have because he was with them at the moment the shots were fired. Even the motive wasn’t as
exciting as it seems. Reggie gives something like eighty-five percent of the profits from CFS to Chris Jr.’s widow.”

  “Out of the goodness of his heart or because he has to?”

  “It was the deal in the will. In terms of money, Reggie probably makes around the same amount he did before, only now he has to run the whole place on his own.”

  “Maybe they were about to fire him.”

  “No one ever told me that they were. Chris Jr.’s widow included, who is no fan of Reggie Trager.”

  “What does she have against him?”

  “She thinks he’s guilty.”

  “On what basis?”

  “None that would interest a jury.”

  “Or you, from the sound of it.”

  “Obviously I prefer not to charge people with crimes they can’t be convicted of. But if you’re asking me whether I think Reggie did it, the answer’s no. I wouldn’t say I know him well, and I’m certainly aware that most people are capable of most things if they’re pushed to it, but with Reggie I just never saw the push.”

  “So who did you think did it?”

  He shakes his head. “I have no idea. Chris Jr. and Father Podominick were comfortably off, in a town of people who were a lot less comfortably off, but neither one of them seems to have had real enemies. Or even people who would have benefited from their deaths.”

  “Do you think the person who killed Chris Jr. and Father Podominick also killed Autumn and Benjy?”

  Albin gives it a couple of chair-rocks, looking at me.

  “No. I do not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not exactly a similar MO. Murder with a hunting rifle I can at least understand. And whoever shot Chris Jr. and Father Podominick was good enough at that to do it without leaving evidence. What happened to Autumn and Benjy seemed like something else entirely.”

  “Was White Lake searched for a portage that someone could have gotten a motorboat through?” Violet asks.

  “Yes, and I didn’t find one. I also didn’t find one in Lake Garner, but that’s a lot bigger and harder to scout. So maybe there was one and I missed it.”