toilet and old copies of Redbook and Vogue. The toilet and bathtub were both pink. The tile was pink. No sign of a man. No pictures, no
mail with his name on it, no men’s shoes by the front door. Lewis
turned off the water. He thought again of the little boy’s face, and the way the older boy had looked at him.
When he returned to the kitchen, the detectives were thanking
Evelina for speaking to them, for the coffee. Now what? They were
going to leave? This Vera woman needed to be found. He felt some-
thing slimy in the pit of his stomach. What if they never found her?
No matter how smart he felt himself to be, he felt the limitations of his own knowledge so strongly it was almost unbearable. The detectives had brushed Vera’s car for fingerprints and he hoped the results were back, and that something would come of it.
Of course it had to be Denny, right? The husband was always
guilty! Lewis couldn’t quite believe it. He liked Denny. But anyone,
even affable Denny, could make a death look accidental. All day and
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for him to burst forth from the door and offer his confession. And
what to make of the phone call? Why had Vera called Evelina? This
clue was far more interesting to Lewis than the broken picture frame
in Denny’s garbage can. It was too much of a coincidence that Evelina’s sons had been at Squire Point that day, the little one’s face all busted up like that.
He lingered a moment in the doorway, surveying the house one
more time, and then Evelina. Her peacock earrings caught the light
coming in from the open door, and Lewis saw they were many shades
of dazzling blue. Something about her face—how it caught the light—
made him hope he would see her and her boys again. He hoped this
wasn’t the end.
“Thanks again,” he said to her, and then they were out the door.
When he got back to the station late that night, a group of men
were waiting, grinning. It was after midnight. The men’s clothes were wet, their noses and fingers bright red. They were old men, and some
of them held steaming cups of coffee. Some had unlit cigarettes dan-
gling from their mouths.
The oldest among them stood. He had something cradled in his
arms, wrapped in a blanket, so that at first Lewis thought he was
being handed a baby.
He stumbled back, not wanting to take it. He’d never held a baby
before, let alone a dead one.
The old man frowned and turned to one of the detectives instead.
“I found this,” the old man said, his arms outstretched, “buried in
the snow out at Squire Point.”
The detective took the bundle from the old man. He opened the
blanket bit by bit, and Lewis looked over the detective’s shoulder.
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“Oh,” said the detective. “This is a beaut.” He opened the blanket
and looked at Lewis. “Look at that mahogany.”
Lewis looked down at the mahogany stock, the nickel-plated
receiver and gold inlay. He supposed anything could be beautiful, if
made by the right hands.
“It’s an old Remington,” the detective said to Lewis, and the old
men nodded at them, beaming.
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C h a p t e r T h i r t e e n
Leo
He couldn’t remember how to walk. How to swing his arms.
Whether he took long strides or short ones. He thought an
interrogation room would have a two-way mirror, like on television,
but there was only a metal table and two chairs. Concrete wal s, a
fluorescent light overhead. He sat, and the detective sat across from him, a stack of files on the table. The detective tapped out a cigarette and offered it to Leo.
“Thank you.” He put it between his lips and leaned into the
flame of the detective’s lighter. The detective slid a black plastic ashtray toward him and sat back in his chair.
Evelina had told Leo once that he was made of stone, impossible
to hurt, that nothing she could ever say or do would hurt him. It
wasn’t true. Nothing had ever made him feel as bleak as this: the
reality that Jesse hated him so much that he had pretended Dmitri
had drowned. And now this detective, saying he wanted to speak to
him, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. He assumed Evelina was
pressing charges against him for Dmitri.
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He took a deep drag of the cigarette. “Well, look,” he said. “Let
me tell the story from the beginning.”
Dad. Dad, it’s Dmitri. Do something.
He hadn’t meant to hit Dmitri so hard. Surely the detective would
understand, once he had told him the full story. “I was trying to break through the ice,” he said. “I have these bruises.” He put the cigarette in his mouth and pushed up his shirt sleeves to reveal his beat-up
forearms. He showed the detective his scabbed-up hands.
The detective stared at Leo’s wounds for a moment, then sifted
through the file folders on the table. “This your rifle?” he said, and slid a picture of Leo’s old Remington across the table.
Leo felt the smoke from the cigarette catch in his throat. He must
have dropped the rifle in the snow. He couldn’t remember putting it
down, or even the last time he had held it. He could only remember
the ice, and the pain that radiated from his forearms as he tried to
bust through it. He’d been so careful to pick up his beer cans. He
couldn’t believe it—he’d left the goddamn rifle out at Squire Point.
His most prized possession.
The detective reached for his pen and looked up at Leo. “It’s a real
beaut. That mahogany, it’s really something.”
“It was my father’s,” said Leo. He blew smoke out into the room
and ashed the cigarette. He took another drag and looked at the
detective.
“Well then,” said the detective. “Now that we’ve established it’s
yours, why don’t you walk me through what happened on New
Year’s Day.”
What was the worst thing that could happen—he might have
to take parenting classes? Evelina wouldn’t be cruel enough to try to keep him away from his sons. She didn’t have that kind of spite in
her. And, besides, he hadn’t meant to hit Dmitri. It had all been such Celo_9780735235823_4p_all_r1.indd 91
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a terrible accident. He would tell the story plainly to the detective, and surely he would understand. The rifle had nothing to do with anything.
“We made these paper boats, see,” he began, then set the cigarette
down and walked the detective through the little folds. “It was a way of starting fresh—new resolutions. Getting it right this time,” he said.
But he’d left his cigarettes in the car. He left the boys on the trail, and when he returned Jesse was pounding on a little patch of thin ice in
the middle of the lake, yelling that his brother had fallen through.
/>
But he hadn’t. It was a prank. An awful prank. Leo couldn’t under-
stand it. The cruelty of it. Dmitri had jumped on his back and he had hit him, he told the detective, as a reflex. An unintended action.
“I didn’t mean to hit him so hard. I was out of my mind. I take
full responsibility for that. I am truly sorry about that.”
“I might have killed my kid, had he pulled that on me,” said the
detective. He then produced a piece of paper and thrust it on the table: the hospital report with a description of Dmitri’s injuries.
“I told you I was angry,” said Leo. “I was. But I didn’t mean to hurt him like this.”
A reflex. That’s what it was. He hadn’t been in control of his own
hand. Besides, the punch had been meant for Jesse. But he couldn’t
say that now.
“I think what happened was you snapped,” said the detective.
“And that poor woman saw you do it.”
That poor woman. His cigarette was smouldering in the ashtray and the detective reached over and stubbed it out.
“What woman?” said Leo. “I thought this was about my son.”
The detective held up his hand to silence him. He put a photo-
graph of a dark-haired woman down on the table. She sat on a grey
velvet couch, her arms wrapped around a big dog. “She’s been miss-
ing since New Year’s Day,” said the detective.
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“I don’t know this woman,” said Leo. He pushed the photograph
away from him. His voice was quiet and low. “I promise you, I’ve
never seen her before.” He said it again: “I have never seen her before.
My son—isn’t that what this is about?”
“This woman called the police from the Squire Point pay phone
on New Year’s Day, saying she found a little boy,” said the detective.
“What little boy?” said Leo. He leaned toward the detective. He
was lost. He raised his hands. He didn’t know what was happening
anymore. The woman had called the police? When? Why?
“One of your sons?” asked the detective.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Leo, but his hands
had begun to shake. He put them down by his sides, out of sight.
“Okay,” said the detective. “She also called your ex-wife.”
“Evelina?”
“Back to the rifle—so you were shooting, doing some kind of
target practice? Maybe you shot the woman by accident?”
“No,” said Leo. He could feel spit forming on the sides of his
mouth and he wiped it with his sleeve, fought the urge to grab the
detective by the lapels and beat his face. “I was going to teach the boys to shoot. My dad did that with me, you know? I was trying to do
something like that for the boys.” He leaned across the table until he was inches from the detective’s face. “I never fired the rifle—I told you what happened already, with Dmitri. I needed to get away from Jesse
is all. I needed to get away from him. I left him so I could calm down.
I left for maybe twenty, thirty minutes. Dmitri and I drove around.
Then we returned to Squire Point, got Jesse, and I drove the boys
home to their mother.”
“Okay,” said the detective. “Take a breath and calm down.” He
offered his pen to Leo and continued: “It would help me to be able
to visualize this. Can you show me”—at this the detective unfolded a
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map of Squire Point, the lake in its centre, the two parking lots both leading to it—“where you were, precisely? Retrace your steps for me,
show me on the map.”
“Which steps?”
“All of them,” said the detective. “From the moment you arrived
to the moment you left.”
“Okay.” He paused a minute, considering where to start, what to
say. “I parked here, in this parking lot,” said Leo. He tapped the picture of the first parking lot with the pen. “We walked here, on this trail, with the paper boats.” He dragged the pen along the map, showing the
detective his route to the lake. “Then I walked back to the parking lot to get my cigarettes, then back to the lake. That’s when I saw Jesse in the middle of the lake. Do you follow? Okay, then I left Jesse on the trail and Dmitri and I walked back to the car and we left for a while.”
“And when did you encounter Vera Gusev?”
“Who? No, I never met her. I have never met her, I said. I drove
around with Dmitri—then I parked where I’d parked before. Jesse
was waiting for me. I simply took the boys home.” He removed the
pen from the map and stared at the detective. “There’s nothing else to say. I don’t know this woman.”
The detective clicked his tongue.
“I don’t know this woman,” he said again, louder this time.
The detective nodded. “So you’ve never met her. And you never
fired your rifle. And you don’t remember dropping it in the snow.”
“That’s correct, yes.”
“What about her car? Do you remember Vera Gusev’s car in the
parking lot?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t. I was—as I said, I was upset, I’d had a drink—”
“I’m thinking,” said the detective, “that Vera must have found Jesse
in the woods when you left him.” He leaned back, capped the pen, and
slipped it into his pocket. “And maybe she was calling the police when Celo_9780735235823_4p_all_r1.indd 94
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you and Dmitri returned to Squire Point. And when she saw that you
had hurt your other son—perhaps she—perhaps she accused you of
child abuse—”
“No, that is not—”
“And then, as I said before, you snapped.”
“No,” said Leo, “that isn’t what happened at all.”
The detective made a snorting sound. “Okay, well, you might,
though—you might try to help me understand something then.”
“Understand what?”
“Why Jesse’s fingerprints were found in Vera Gusev’s car.”
Leo looked at the table, at the photo of the woman and her dog.
He stared into her eyes. What a mess this was. What a monstrous mess.
“His fingerprints?” he whispered. He wasn’t sure he could speak,
even if he had to. Something had happened to his voice.
“Indeed.”
“What?”
“It’s as I said,” said the detective. “We found Jesse’s fingerprints in Vera Gusev’s car.”
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C h a p t e r F o u r t e e n
Jesse
“Yes,” Jesse was saying to the other detective, his mother and
Dmitri by his side. “Yes, I was in the woman’s car.”
It had been three days, but the leathery smell of her fancy car was
still bright in his memory. And the dull scent of her cigarettes, like in his father’s car.
He looked at the detective, then at his hands. What came out of
his mouth next was a mixture of the truth and something he had
rehearsed with his mother until it had felt true. He could feel the
bruises forming underneath the skin on his shoulders, where his
mother’s fingers had been.
/>
“It’s okay,” said the detective. “I’m listening.”
Jesse saw a lollipop in the detective’s front pocket and wondered
whether the detective would give it to him when all of this was
over, as if he were a baby. It was a red lollipop. Dmitri was looking at it, too.
“You can tell him,” said his mother.
It was a very brightly lit room. So bright it hurt Jesse’s eyes. He
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matters, his mother had told him. They won’t believe your father anyway, no matter what he says. It’s you who they will trust.
And so Jesse took a deep breath and told the detective that his
father had left him in the woods after he pretended his brother had
fallen through the ice. That was true but it was difficult to say because of the shame he felt. He then said he met the woman on the trail. She had thought he was lost. That was true as well; she did think that.
“We walked to her car. We drove to the other parking lot to look
for my dad. She called my mom, and then she called the police.”
He looked at the detective and then at his mother. The detective
was writing down everything he said, nodding at him to continue.
His mother was holding Dmitri’s hand and he wished she would hold
his hand, too.
He said the next bit in a monotone, his eyes cast downward, his foot
tapping the floor. “I got scared and opened the door, and her dog
jumped out and ran into the woods. She ran after the dog and I never
saw her again after that. My father came back and he drove us home.”
Another man entered the room, and Jesse saw that it was the
policeman who had come into his bedroom. The one who had let
Dmitri feel his badge. The one who had looked at him with kind
eyes. Who had asked if he was okay.
He wasn’t sure anyone had ever asked him that before.
The policeman whispered something to the detective, then took a
seat. Jesse saw that the policeman was staring at his mother. His mother straightened her back, crossed her legs at the ankles. She pushed her hair behind her ears. There was some small change in her mouth, in
her voice.
“I’m sorry we can’t be more helpful,” his mother said, looking at
the policeman and then the detective. “This is really all he knows.”
How a Woman Becomes a Lake (ARC) Page 10
