Starvation Lake (31 page)

“Whacked?”

“Killed. Someone killed him.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know. I made a delivery down there once. Wasn’t pretty.”

“Uh-huh. What was on the film?”

He tilted his head forward so that his pinprick eyes appeared between the brim of his hat and the rims of his shades. “Why do you care?”

“Look, Delbert, I don’t care if you did it on the
Pilot
’s dime, OK? Like I said, I played for Blackburn. He meant a lot to me. I noticed some film in boxes in the photo files and wondered if it had anything to do with the team.”

“Jack thought it’d be safer, better organized, filed at the paper.”

Safer? I thought. From what? “Of course,” I said. “Did you ever look at any of it, by chance? The film, I mean?”

Delbert snorted. “A bunch of runts playing hockey? I hate hockey. You can’t see the damn puck. No, I just sent it to my guy.”

“And you think your guy got whacked because of a film of kids playing hockey?”

“That’s not what I said.”

A sheriff’s cruiser slid up to the curb where we were standing, Darlene at the wheel.

“Can I go back to doing my job?” Delbert said.

“Get the sheriff,” I said.

Dingus was coming down the walk toward us. He didn’t look happy. Tawny Jane followed along asking questions Dingus ignored.

“Sheriff?” I said as he neared me. I thought he was going to brush past, but he stopped. For a second I thought he might grab me again. He kept his voice low.

“What made you think you could go see my Barbara?” he said. Before I could answer he got in the car and slammed the door as Darlene pulled away.

   My mother’s Jeep wasn’t in the driveway when I approached her house ten minutes later. Good, I thought. The fresh snow, now nine inches deep, groaned beneath my tires as I parked on the road shoulder. While the truck idled, I unlocked the back door and hurried into Mom’s basement. Mildew hung on the dank air. I reached into the dark and pulled the string that lit the ceiling bulb.

The 8-millimeter Bell & Howell projector was sitting atop a stack of boxes in the storage room Dad had built next to the water heater. I wrapped the cord around my left hand and gathered up the projector, rushing to get out before my mother came home. Halfway up the stairs I realized I hadn’t turned off the basement bulb. Hurrying back down in my wet boots I lost my footing and fell smack on the same spot I’d banged when I slipped on Boynton’s fish. “Son of a bitch,” I grunted. I stood, grimacing and rubbing my butt, snapped the light off, and struggled back up. At the top I looked out the kitchen window to see my mother pulling into the driveway.

“Gussy,” she said as she stepped into the kitchen, stamping the snow off her boots. She stared at the projector bundled under my arm. “What’s that for?”

“Oh,” I said, “I found some of these old films of our hockey practices and I thought, you know, with all that’s going on, it might be interesting to watch them.”

In silence she hung her coat and scarf in a closet by the door. She knew I was lying. She shut the closet and went to the kitchen sink to wash her hands. “Can I fix you something to eat?” she said.

“No, thanks, I’ve got to get back. I didn’t see you at the hearing.”

“I didn’t go.”

“I thought I’d see you.”

“Well, maybe I’ve had enough of the past for one week.”

She was upset. She closed her eyes and leaned against the counter, letting her hands hang over the sink, dripping. I set the projector down, stepped behind her, and put my hands on her shoulders.

“Are you OK?”

She shook her head. “It just seems like the whole town is falling apart.”

“Come on.”

“Leo. All these questions about Jack. Everything was fine before that snowmobile. Now wherever I go, everybody’s talking about what
really
happened to Jack, what
really
happened to Leo, and I know they’re all thinking I have the answers, just because I happened to be here that night, trying to get some sleep. But I don’t have any answers. I don’t have any answers, Gus.”

She pulled away and went to the fridge and removed a carton of orange juice. As she took a glass from the dish drainer and poured, I saw that her hands were trembling. I grasped her shoulders and gently turned her to face me.

“Mom.”

“Dingus called,” she said. She took a sip of the juice, then set it on the counter. “The police want to see me. And that TV woman called.”

“You didn’t talk to her, did you?”

“I’m afraid I wasn’t polite.”

“What can you tell Dingus that you didn’t tell him ten years ago?”

Her eyes flitted over the projector on the floor. “I worry,” she said.

“About what?”

She folded her arms. “Do you remember the time you called me a bitch?”

Of course. We’d been fighting for the hundredth time about whether I could spend the night in Coach’s billets with the other River Rats. Unlike other kids my age, I didn’t fight much with my mother, maybe because since Dad died we were all each other had. But this time I might as well have slapped her across the face. We didn’t speak to each other for two days. When I finally apologized, all she said was, “You’re too young to understand,” and it made me so mad that I almost called her a bitch again.

“Yes,” I said.

“I wasn’t just being a bitch.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“No. You don’t know.”

“What? Why do you keep talking in riddles?”

She took my hands off of her shoulders. “Those little houses,” she said.

“What? It’s not like we had to go there to drink and smoke dope.”

“Never mind,” she said. “Why do you care if I talk to that TV woman?”

“I don’t.”

“Please.” She turned back to the sink and started wiping the counter, which needed no wiping. “Don’t you need to get to work?”

“Mom,” I said. “Tell me.”

“That night,” she said. “Leo…” She dabbed at an eye with the towel. “Leo told me…he said he did a terrible thing.”

“What terrible thing?”

“I wouldn’t let him,” she said. “He kept trying to tell me. I wouldn’t let him. Then the police came, and we never talked about it again.”

“Do you mean he killed Coach? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying.” She put the towel down. “Go to work.”

“Mom.”

“Be careful with your father’s projector.”

She pushed past me and disappeared into her bedroom.

   When I walked into the
Pilot
newsroom, Joanie was on the phone, frantically scribbling notes. I went up front and found Tillie hunched at her computer, smoking and typing. “You have a message,” she said, gesturing toward a pink While You Were Out sheet on the counter. Someone had scribbled on it, “Mr. Carpenter, I’m a reporter with the
Detroit Times.
Any chance I could borrow your newsroom to file a story this afternoon? Many thanks, R. Kullenberg.”

“Someone from Chicago called too,” Tillie said. “Didn’t leave a message.”

“They’re descending,” I said. The out-of-town reporters would come and interview the regulars at Audrey’s and Enright’s and then write their overwrought stories about the little town with the big trial. And in a day or two they’d all be gone again, and I’d be stuck putting out the
Pilot
. I tossed the message in the garbage. “Did all the stringers’ stuff come in?”

“Except for the wrestling meet, yes,” Tillie said.

“Can you handle the wrestling story?”

“I cannot wait.”

On her phone the number 38 glowed red in the message window. “Whoa,” I said. “Did we get that many Sound Off calls?”

“It’s not many more than we usually get,” she said.

I let it go and punched the button to hear the first message: “This is Phyllis T. Fraser of 661 Oak Lane.” The elderly woman sounded like she was underwater. “My opinion is that of course there are tunnels in the lake. In point of fact my uncle Sherman’s boy Kevin, a graduate of the Michigan Technological University, says it has been studied by hydrogenists from his institution. And anyway, the tunnels are a tradition we’ve held dear for as long as I can remember, and I’m seventy-six, actually almost seventy-seven. We’ve always believed it. Who would think—”

“Hydrologists?” I said, while pushing the button for the next message. A man’s voice came on. “Can I ask you something?” he croaked. He cleared his throat, coughed, coughed again. “May I ask why you waste valuable space on items like this? Who cares about tunnels when we have a Social Security system that is—” I shut the machine off. Tillie was smiling.

“Any good ones?” I said.

“I’m on deadline.” She waved her hand in Joanie’s general direction. “Worry about your star reporter. She’s getting her precious career started, and what better way than to shovel dirt on a dead man’s grave?”

“What’s with you?” I said.

“Gus!” Joanie called out.

I went back to her desk. “What’s her problem?” I said.

Joanie glared past me in Tillie’s direction. “She spends most of her day eavesdropping,” she said. “My sources are always asking why I’m whispering.”

“What’s up?”

She lowered her voice. “The lawyers are going to be too chicken to run this story. Maybe you will be, too.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. What is it?”

“I got the kid in Canada.”

“Which kid?”

“The kid who was a big star for Blackburn and just quit? The one with the diary? He’s an adult now, of course. His aunt, the newspaper lady in St. Albert, told him about me. He just called me out of the blue.”

She seemed at once excited and oddly put off, almost as if something had offended her.

“What’d he say?”

“I’m warning you. This is nasty stuff.”

“What?”

She made me sit closer to her on her desk and whispered, “This kid’s name was—is—Brendan Blake. He was a good player. A really good player. Pro scouts were watching him. I guess Blackburn knew some of the scouts, and he got them to come out. That’s about when the weird stuff started. A couple years later, Brendan was out of hockey altogether.”

“What weird stuff?”

“Bad stuff, Gus.”

“OK. Just tell me.”

She took a deep breath. “Blackburn started getting this kid alone,” she said. “Mostly on road trips. Sometimes at home. He was abusing him.”

“You mean—”

“Sexually, yes. It’s all in the diary.”

“Jesus. How?”

She told me in a flat, clinical whisper. As I listened, I felt my throat constrict. How could a teenaged boy write such things down?

“Why would a kid—why wouldn’t his parents have called the cops?” I said.

“Come on, Gus. These are hockey parents in a hockey town. How do you think their kid would’ve been treated?”

That I could certainly imagine. Regardless of what happened to Blackburn, the kid would’ve been branded a pansy who should have fended off his coach’s advances. The players, some of the other coaches, even some of the fans would have called him “fag” and “homo” and worse. He would’ve had to leave town himself. Which he apparently did anyway.

“So they just got Blackburn to leave?”

“Yeah.”

“Like in the other place.”

“I’m betting. I’m not sure yet. I have some calls in.”

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

“Why wouldn’t he? What’s he got to gain now? It was like he was glad to talk to me, like he’d been waiting for me to call. And he was dying to know what happened to Blackburn. Said he was sorry to hear it.”

“He was sorry to hear the guy who supposedly abused him was dead?”

“Not supposedly.”

“You look a little pale. You all right?”

She shook her head. “You know,” she said, “we had a priest like this at my high school.”

I imagined a middle-aged man, baggy-eyed and paunchy in a black cassock. “Was Brendan angry?” I said.

“I don’t think so. At least not anymore. I mean, it’s been thirty years.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“He’s an electrician. Married. Two little girls.”

I’d heard enough. “OK,” I said. “Write it.”

“Write a story, Gus? Are you sure?”

“He’s on the record, right?”

“Yes.”

“And his story checks out with the folks back in St. Albert?”

“Yes, I went back to them.”

“And it goes to motive, right?” Soupy’s motive, I had to admit.

“Well, only indirectly, unless we know that Blackburn sexually abused players here in Starvation Lake.” Her tone was expectant. But I had no answer for her. This man she was describing was not the one who’d taught me to play goalie and sat at my Sunday dinner table.

“If it happened here,” I said, “I didn’t know about it. Just write it. Straight and simple.”

“OK. I already filed the arraignment story. Boy, was that weird. Do you believe this suicide pact stuff?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” I said. I went to my desk and sat down. And I remembered.

   Men,” Coach Blackburn said. We were gathered around him at center ice, having just finished practice the day before the 1981 Michigan state hockey championship was to begin on our home rink in Starvation Lake. Coach held his stick high over his head, pointing at the four blue-and-gold banners hanging in the rafters. Behind the one that said, “Regional Finalist, 1977,” we saw Leo crouched on a narrow catwalk.

“You’ve heard me say it a million times,” Coach said. “Losing is good for winning. You know I believe that. Losing has made us strong. It has helped us see our weaknesses so we could eliminate them. It has made us keenly aware that at any moment the thing we desire most can be snatched away.” He paused. “Now, men, we are done with losing. We have learned its lessons. Now it is time to win.”

After four years of lobbying, Coach had persuaded Michigan’s amateur hockey officials to hold the state tournament in Starvation Lake. Players, coaches, families, and fans from across the state jammed the town’s only hotel and all the motels along Route 816. A line spilled out the door of Audrey’s by seven each morning. Visitors clamored for the glossy tournament program, the souvenir pucks embossed with the River Rats logo, the kielbasa and bratwurst sizzling on grills in the rink parking lot. All week, people from Grand Rapids and Marquette and Trenton and Ann Arbor sought out Coach to tell him what a great tournament and a beautiful place this was.