Before leaving the office with Dani in tow, Beth said, “Chief Ferris, I’m afraid I cannot put in unlimited time on this. I have four young children and a husband who also has a full time job as an engineer—so I’ll be asking Dani to handle the late hours.
“Also, I lost a very close friend this week, and I’m helping her husband with the family and the funeral service. They are devastated. I have to be there.”
“Do you mind if I ask who you are referring to?” asked Lew. “Someone local, I take it?”
“Kathy Beltner, the wife of my husband’s partner and one of my closest friends. Rob Beltner and my husband, Bart, run Krist Engineering and—”
“Look, Beth,” said Lew, “you take the time you need to. I’ll plan to handle any surveillance required here at the college. If Dani has to work late, I will be here, too.”
“Thank you for understanding,” said Beth. She turned and left.
“Lew,” said Doc, as they walked to their cars, “you don’t have time to be here every night until midnight—or later.”
“Doc, this is my job. Right now there is no one else to do it. No way will I allow young Dani to be electronically tracking some criminal on-line without my being on the premises.”
CHAPTER 19
At two thirty that Sunday afternoon, and then only after leaving three voicemail messages of increasing urgency, Osborne was able to reclaim his car, which Ray had asked to borrow while Osborne was wolfing down a late lunch. His excuse was he had offered to drive an elderly widow living down the road from them to a church gathering. That was over an hour and a half ago.
When the car finally arrived, it contained an unapologetic driver and a Ziploc of half-frozen fresh-caught crappies on the passenger seat.
“I wish you had told me you were going fishing,” said Osborne, irritated.
“Was only out for about an hour,” said Ray as if time was the issue rather than the hijacking of someone else’s vehicle. “Plus … I had research to undertake and that … had to be undertaken in strictest confidence.”
“Research? Research for what?”
Ray put a finger to his lips. “Sworn to secrecy, sorry. So hey, Doc, okay with you if we buzz out to the swamp and check it out? Do our best to be back by four? I’ll be needing to shower and get ready to pick up Suzanne—”
“Why don’t you just follow me in your truck? In that case, should we run late you can take off whenever you want to.”
“Nah. This’ll be fine.” Osborne had suggested the other only to tease his neighbor. The current temperature was twenty below zero and that was not counting the wind chill. If anything in Ray’s world could be relied upon that day, it would be the heat in Osborne’s Subaru.
They parked near the first spot where Ray thought he had seen lights and discovered a snowmobile trail running parallel to the road. A swift walk along the trail brought them to an intersection where two trails crossed. The snow was packed down, indicating a number of snowmobiles had been parked there. A well-trodden path led to a clearing where they found the remains of a party: smashed beer cans, cigarette butts, crumpled popcorn and potato chip bags as well as a scattering of blackened stumps left from a bonfire.
“Okay, so much for this place,” said Ray. He checked a page that had been torn from a Gazetteer and overlaid with hand-drawn sketches of logging lanes. “Got Butch Day to show me these,” he said, scanning the map. “Okay.” Ray shoved the map into his jacket pocket. “Let’s drive down past Wind Pudding Road and see what we see.”
Just past Wind Pudding, Ray motioned for Osborne to pull into a snowy lane that had not seen a plow in weeks. “Not sure about this,” said Osborne, “four-wheel drive can only take us so far. We’d be wise to walk in. Either that or you’ll be late for your date because we’ll be digging ourselves out of here.”
“Walking works for me,” said Ray, opening the car door. They trudged ahead, pushing through the shin-shearing crust over snow so deep it spilled into the tops of their boots. It was hard going.
Ten minutes into the workout, Osborne balked. “You sure about this? I am not having fun. Wish we had those snowshoes, darn. Too bad we left those in your truck.”
“Hang in there, Doc,” said Ray, plunging through the snow twenty feet ahead of Osborne. “Hey! Got somebody living back here …”
Coming around a bend in the lane, Osborne glimpsed a small dark green shack not unlike hundreds of others left over from the region’s heydays of logging in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As they got closer he could see a lean-to attached to the shed. Inside the lean-to was a pile of plastic gallon jugs and parked next to the lean-to was a rusted-out pick-up that hinted at once being bright red. That it still ran was evident from tire tracks in the snow. The tracks lead off in the opposite direction.
“Jeez,” said Osborne, “there is a road in here—and plowed to boot. Too bad we didn’t know that.”
Ray was already knocking on the door of the shack. After a few knocks, the stained metal knob on the door rattled for a few seconds until the mechanism caught and the door was opened by the bent figure of a man who looked to be at least a hundred years old. He was dressed in heavy grey wool hunting pants held up with black suspenders and a red and black checked wool shirt. He was bald and his eyes bleary.
“Walter Frisch!” said Ray, stepping back in surprise. “What the hell you doing way out here?”
“Oh,” the old man leaned forward to squint at him then chewed his gums for a moment before continuing, “oh, hi there. So it’s you, Ray?” He peered past Ray and Osborne was going to be surprised if the old guy could see more than a shadow. “Got somebody there with you? Come on in and warm up.”
“Don’t mind if I do. Doc, you know old Walter—he’s the hermit used to live up on Shepard Lake road. When’d you move out here, Walt?”
“My niece inherited that property from my sister and after Sis died, well, she kicked me off. Wants to develop the place. Take a seat over there, you two.”
Walter waved a hand indicating the two of them should sit on a sagging daybed wedged into one corner of the one room shack. The entire room could not be much more than eight by ten feet. Tiny. Tiny, but warm and cozy and lit with two kerosene lamps, the glow from which made Walter’s bald head shine. Glancing around the room Osborne noticed it was sparsely furnished with neatly stacked belongings that included a few canned goods and boxes of other foodstuffs. A gallon jug of water was set under a small table in one corner that also held a miniature portable television set.
Osborne recalled random sightings of the old hermit over the years, Walter walking or running along the strange fence line he had created along Shepard Lake Road, saplings he bent and tied in odd patterns. In time Walter became a Loon Lake phenomenon, and people took visitors to see their own homegrown folk artist of sorts.
More than one parent made it a practice to take Sunday afternoon drives along Shepard Lake Road and point out Walter’s peculiar sculptures to wide-eyed children with the warning: “that’s what you’ll be doing if you don’t keep your grades up …” A warning that had had a significant effect on Osborne’s youngest daughter.
Not long after he had intoned the dire future that might lie ahead for any child scoring a C or worse at school, Erin had run home with her third grade report card. Refusing to go out and play, she had waited for her father to get home from the dental office. Then, with eyes so serious he had to look away to avoid smiling, she had shown him the card filled with straight A’s and said as only a worried child can: “So now I don’t have to grow up and be a hermit—right, Dad?”
“Yep, yep, when my niece kicked me off I remembered this place from when I was a kid and we hunted frogs out here,” Walter was saying. “Look,” he banged on the wall, “solid oak and no holes for the wind to come through. Some logger built it and lived here ‘round nineteen hun’erd, I’ll betcha.
“Got my propane heater there, use the outdoors for a refrigerator, got my battery-powered TV. Got an outhouse
out back. Yep, yep, livin’ off my military pension and most days I drive in to eat at Wal-Mart in that diner. They got good specials, y’know.”
“But,” Ray looked around the place before saying, “how do you get your pension check? You can’t get mail out here. You don’t have a fire number.”
“Don’t need a fire number to get a post office box. Say, I know this don’t look like much but I like it. Hey, I even got HBO—one of my nephews felt sorry when his sister kicked me off the property. He rigged it up for me to get it off the satellite somehow.”
As Walter spoke, he scuttled quickly across the room to pull out the one remaining chair—a kitchen chair with a yellow vinyl seat torn down the middle—and sat down. He leaned towards them as he talked. Every word seemed to require a lengthy working of his jaw so Osborne didn’t want to put him out too much.
“Know of anyone else living back in here?” asked Osborne. “I can’t imagine you see too many people with all this wetland around …”
“Oh,” Walter said, gumming away, “there’s plenty high ground. Summertime your boots might get a little wet, yeah, and the mosquitoes are bad, but plenty high ground if you know where to look. Why, you fellas looking to start a homes association? Heh, heh.” Walter laughed at his own joke. The eyes could barely see, the body could not straighten up, but he had not lost his sense of humor.
“Walter, Doc Osborne and I are working with the Loon Lake Police. A woman was found shot to death over on the Merriman Trails. Any chance you’ve heard anything about that?”
“No-o-o, I don’t believe I have. Hear lots of gunshots though,” said the old man. “Got a fella took over that camp where the Russians used to hang out, y’know? And he’s always shooting. Going after rabbits is what he told me.”
“You shoot rabbits?” asked Ray.
“Me? Hell, I haven’t had the strength to lift a rifle for years now. Nope, but I sure wish I could—”
“The Russian camp? Gosh, I forgot all about that place,” said Osborne, turning to Ray. “You know what Walter is talking about?”
“Nope.”
“Well, when I was a kid, I used to play with a friend whose family had a farm about a mile from here. My friend and I would walk up to the swamp and we knew a path that ran in a ways to a spot where we could hide and watch these old Russians who lived in a cabin out here. Who knows if they really were Russian but there were five or six men and everyone just called them ‘those old Russians.’
“Doesn’t take much to intrigue little kids so my buddy and I would hide out and watch them chopping wood, carrying their water. Yeah, I know that place but I don’t know if I could find it today.”
“Hmm, yeah, I’ll show ya,” said Walter. “It still ain’t easy to find. You take my road out and when you get to the fork, you go past a ways and on your right you’ll see a big hemlock got hit by lightning. Just past that you’ll see a logging lane, take that in a quarter mile to where it forks and you take the lane to your right.”
“Oh sure,” said Osborne. “I remember the fork. Boy, in my day that was not a drivable road.”
“Ha,” said Walter, “you can drive it now. Guy who’s rebuilding that place takes a truck and an ATV in there. If that’s where you’re heading, be careful when you go in. He tried to make rabbit stew out of me when I was going by one day. Don’t scare me none. He’s a squatter just like me—I’ll go where I wanna go—and I walk every day, y’know. Keeps me young.”
“Walter? How the hell old are you?” asked Ray.
“Ninety-two,” said the old man, his eyes crinkling with satisfaction.
“You cook out here ever?” asked Ray, jumping to his feet.
“Yep, yep, got myself a little grill out behind the shack here. Works fine. Why?”
“Doc, you stay here with Walter and I’ll be right back.”
“Okay,” said Osborne, “while you’re at the car, figure out how we can find our way over to Lumen Lane. Too cold to risk getting lost.”
In less than five minutes, Ray was back with his Ziploc of crappies. “Walter, you are a gentleman and a scholar and I want you to have these. Fresh caught at lunchtime. Got some butter or oil to cook ‘em in?” Osborne got to his feet as they talked.
“Yep, yep. Okay, fellas, you come back any time now.”
“You’re pretty friendly for an old hermit,” said Ray.
“Never said I didn’t like visitors. People seemed to like to keep their distance on their own for some reason and that was okay. When a few of ‘em did stop—mostly young boys on bikes like Ray here, well, it was nice to chat. But I understand folks not understanding someone like me.
“Had plenty of time for myself in those days. Took a while to recover from the war, y’know.” He looked like he was about to go off on a long tangent and Osborne was anxious to get back to their search before the sun set.
“Well, Walter, if you see or hear anything you think we should know about, drop by the police station and leave me a note. Ask the woman on the switchboard to call Dr. Osborne and she’ll know how to reach me.”
“Yep, yep, will do.”
“Doc, you ready?” Ray opened the door.
“Where you boys off to now?”
“Looking for the impossible, Walt,” said Ray. “The victim was snowshoeing and we’re trying to find some sign of where she might have been killed. Or even where she was walking before it happened.”
“Snowshoeing? Like on those new metal things they got? Hold on.” Walter moved past them and out the door to the lean-to where he reached down. “Found this on the road when I was walking the other day. Is this the kind of thing you’re looking for?”
He held up one of Kathy Beltner’s red aluminum snowshoes.
“What road was that, Walter?” asked Osborne.
“Right by that hemlock I told you about. Before you reach the logging lane into the Russian camp.”
“You see much traffic out here? Skiers? Folks on snowshoes?”
“Loggers mostly. No skiers. Least I haven’t seen any.”
“Mind if we take this snowshoe with us?” asked Osborne.
“Sure. Happy to help. I’ll check with that ATV fella—see if he might have found the other one.”
“No, don’t do that, Walter,” said Osborne. “That’s our job. Right, Ray?”
“Okedoke.”
CHAPTER 20
“I’m going to stop in off and on to visit that old guy, Doc. He shouldn’t be living all alone out here,” said Ray, sliding into the passenger seat Osborne’s car.
“I’d be careful about that if I were you,” said Osborne. “You put someone like Walter Frisch in assisting living or a nursing home and he’ll be dead in days. Out here the man may be at risk but he’s happy. If I were him, I’d want to die during one of those long walks of his—not sitting in a wheelchair.”
“You’re right. But I’m worried about him keeping an eye on that guy at the Russian camp. Good thing you told him to mind his own business.”
Osborne laughed. “Lew needs all the help she can get but I’m sure she’d draw the line at a ninety-two year old deputy. But, you know, I bet you anything old Walter is watching every step that guy takes. What the hell else does he have to do after breakfast at Wal-Mart?”
“Very interesting he found that snowshoe,” said Ray. “We’ll have to show it to Rob Beltner, but it has to be his wife’s. Funny Walter found only one. And just as strange that he found it so far from the trail. Almost as if it fell off a vehicle.”
Osborne nodded in agreement. “Say, I’m curious as to what’s happening at the old Russian camp. We have time to swing by that place, don’t we?”
Ray checked his watch. “Sure. It’s only three-fifteen, Doc.”
“Take us ten minutes at the most. God forbid we make you late for Suzanne. Hey, here’s where we go straight …”
Osborne slowed to pass the hemlock that had been shattered by lightning. Sure enough, not far beyond was the logging lane just as Walter had s
aid. Turning right onto the lane, he was relieved to see it was well traveled enough that four-wheel drive would get them in and out okay.
The lane forked and he bore right again, memories of the old Russian camp he had known as a kid vivid in his mind. But the structure they drove up to bore little resemblance to the ancient log cabin he remembered.
Someone had shored up the sagging log walls and the exterior appeared to have been power-washed and re-grouted, giving the cabin a fresh, new look. Telephone and power lines had been run in to the back of the building, too. “Looks like whoever lives here now has electricity and running water?” asked Osborne. “I shouldn’t be so surprised. It’s been fifty years since I last saw this place.”
“Maybe running water,” said Ray. “I can see putting a well in out here but a septic? I doubt that. Not in these wetlands.” Sure enough, even as they spoke they caught sight of an outhouse beyond the main cabin.
“The original cabin had a tarpaper roof,” said Osborne. “Looks like they’ve added a modern version of a deer stand up there.” He pointed to the rooftop, which now sported a crow’s nest lined with windows.
“Wow. Look at that! That’s something you don’t see that very often but handy, for sure,” said Ray. “Lots of deer in this swamp. Let’s get out and take a closer look. Nobody’s around that I can see though over there,” he pointed, “I see ruts from a truck coming and going.”
“Isn’t it peculiar that with all these improvements there’s still no fire number?” asked Osborne. He opened the car door and stepped out, “I think the place is developed enough the tax man would be interested–”
“If he can find it,” said Ray. He walked over to the cabin to peer through one of the windows.
“Hold on,” said Osborne, “I think I hear someone …” He looked in the direction of a low rumbling noise to see a beat-up black Dodge pick-up approaching. The truck looked overwhelmed by a shiny new snowmobile that it was carrying in its bed. As the pick-up neared, Osborne could make out a dingy red “Dakota Sport” emblazoned on the driver’s side. “Yeah, looks like the guy who’s rebuilding the place. Let’s have a little chat.”
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