Dead Creek

by Victoria Houston

  “I can tell you right now, though, that I’ll not find that record in my permanent patient files. I am convinced I would have recognized the face if that victim was one of my regular patients. Loon Lake only has 2,762 people, for heaven’s sake—and I know just about everyone. If I didn’t recognize him, someone else here would—right?” Everyone nodded in agreement.

  “If I find it, it’ll be in my one-shots—the files I kept on summer people. Tourists, camp kids. But I’ll search high and low tomorrow and give you a call right away if I find anything.”

  “I’d appreciate that.” Sloan wiped his mouth and set both his arms on the table. He cleared his throat and coughed, turning away. “Sorry, I think I’m coming down with something.”

  Though he was in his late sixties, he’d inherited Italian genes that gave him an olive complexion with so few lines in his big, oblong face that he looked twenty years younger. Even so, his smooth forehead was heavily furrowed in thought as he pushed back from the table and walked over to the sink to wash his hands. “This is a humdinger, y’know? When I talk to Lew tonight, I’m gonna see if she can grab an earlier flight tomorrow. We need to get her into the loop on this as soon as possible.”

  An hour later, Osborne had barely shut the door to his house and flicked on the kitchen light when his phone rang. It was Ray.

  “Did you find those files yet?”

  “Ray …” Osborne let his irritation show in his voice. “I just walked in, and I’m exhausted. I’ll look for them in the morning.”

  “If it was me, I couldn’t wait….”

  “Well, you’re not me. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “That’s why I called. I’m going up to see old Herman the German first thing, and I thought you might like to go along.”

  “I can’t do two things at once.” Osborne closed his eyes against the fatigue as he filled Mike’s bowl with dog food. He sighed heavily. “Now, why are you going see the old man?” Much as he hated to get into a conversation of any length, Osborne was puzzled. Herman lived far on the other side of the county, deep in the McNaughton wilderness forest. If anyone could be less connected to everyday life in Loon Lake, it was that old hermit.

  Ray dropped his voice conspiratorially. “He told me a Dead Creek story a long time ago when I was a kid…. I’m gonna check it out for Shanley. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

  “I see,” said Osborne. It suddenly occurred to him that Ray would like nothing better than to beat former police chief John Sloan at his own game. Sloan, who’d locked him up in the Loon Lake jail for smoking marijuana in the high school locker room, causing him to miss the league basketball championship game the first year that he was star forward.

  A few minutes later, as he pulled the covers up around his ears, Osborne made a mental note to mention to Ray that he should be careful what he said on the phone from now on. Osborne had heard at least two soft clicks on the party line after Ray’d hung up. It drove him crazy that he couldn’t get a private phone line until the three old biddies, who were holding out on the pretense their phone bills would go up, agreed to the change. And there was nothing he could do. The damn phone company had a stupid rule that every subscriber on the line had to agree, or they wouldn’t make the change. Saved them the cost of all the new cable that had to be laid.

  Jeez, thought Osborne, as he drifted off to sleep, by the time I get a decent phone line, the rest of the world’ll have fiber optics to Mars.

  six

  Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.

  Henry David Thoreau

  The last place Osborne had expected to find himself at four o’clock the next afternoon was sitting at the bar of a stripper joint. And not just any stripper joint, but the infamous Thunder Bay Bar. Beside him, chattering away quite easily with no evidence of any embarrassment whatsoever, was Loon Lake’s police chief, Lew Ferris. It was she whom he’d had to convince that Ray Pradt was missing. Not an easy thing to do.

  The morning had begun innocently enough. Osborne got up later than usual for a Saturday, but all the excitement of the night before had been a little overwhelming.

  He was just setting Mr. Coffee to brew when Ray’s truck had rattled up and stopped sideways to Osborne’s driveway, just long enough for Ray to lean out of the cab and give two perfect loon calls. Almost perfect. Even if he hadn’t been able to see him, Osborne would have known it was Ray by the crazy cackle at the end of each. Osborne grinned. The annual loon call contest was happening

  Sunday in Boulder Junction, and if Ray could call like that, Osborne knew he’d knock the competition right out of the water.

  Then Osborne had waved from where he sat at his kitchen table, knowing his friend could see him through the window, and Ray had trucked off, Osborne had figured, to do what he’d said he was going to do: see the hermit.

  He did not have the dogs in the back of the truck, a signal to Osborne that he’d be back by noon. Ray always fed his dogs at noon. He was quite scientific about his dogs and their feeding habits, making sure they were never likely to be hungry during the hours they were used to hunt. These dogs got their food at nine P.M. and at noon without fail.

  When Osborne had his first cup of coffee in hand, he set out to walk the property to see what that damn Mary Lee might have done with his files. Going to sleep before his search may have been the smartest thing he did, because as he was waking up, he had a vague recollection of seeing those old files behind a door he hadn’t opened in at least five years: the storage room behind the fish shed. He stepped out into a crisp, sunny morning, temperature about forty degrees. Even though it wasn’t yet eight a.m., the sun was climbing, and the air was full of spring smells.

  He walked from the kitchen door across his yard to the back of the large garage where to the right and facing the house was a small room that held his lures, his tackle boxes, minnow buckets, old rods that he no longer wished to hang in the living room, and a beat-up wooden table where he cleaned his fish. At the back of the room was the door to a narrow storage room that ran along the side of the garage. Mary Lee had refused to use it much, saying the weather changes would damage anything good she might want to store there.

  He pushed and tugged on the darn thing. The wood had swollen in the warm spring air. Finally, it creaked open. There they were: his two oak files, dusty and cobwebbed but stalwart and full of secrets. Osborne stared at them with great satisfaction. He was happy he’d stood up to Mary Lee, miserable though the experience had been. He’d always known they’d come in handy someday.

  Osborne set his coffee cup down on the windowsill and pulled the door wide open to maximize the sunlight so he could work. As he opened the middle drawer of the file closest to him, a breeze through the open door chilled the back of his neck.

  Yes—his eyes scanned the contents swiftly—everything was there. By the time he’d finished his first cup of coffee, he knew the records he wanted weren’t in the middle drawer. He went back to the kitchen to refill the coffee cup and call Sloan, but before he got there, he decided against calling Sloan until he knew exactly what he had, so he just refilled his cup and headed back to the shed. He hoped, too, that by the time he called, Sloan would know if Lew had caught an earlier flight.

  He started through the records in the top drawer, the ones from the fifties. At first, he took his time. The familiar names on the manila files conjured the sights and sounds of old friends, now dead or moved away long ago, buddies with whom he’d fished and laughed and enjoyed the prime years of his manhood. Here was a file that brought back every instant of landing his first really big muskie: his good friend and patient Harry Everson had been so excited that day, he tipped himself right out of the boat. They used pistols on the big fish in those days, and with that monster moving every which way, Harry had done his best to keep from shooting the boat out from under the two of them. Harry got wet, but Osborne got his fish. Then Harry was gone. Prostate cancer. Osb
orne set the file aside gently. That was one he’d like to examine more closely later.

  Another file reminded him of a very unpleasant feud

  Mary Lee had had with a woman in her bridge club whose husband had been a partner in his hunting shack and, for a few years, one of his close friends. The women’s disagreements had put an end to that friendship, however. His finger lingering on the tab, Osborne paused and sighed, feeling a sense of regret that time hadn’t dulled. As the years went by, he’d come to see that Mary Lee was, more often than not, the troublemaker. Why on earth had she been such an unhappy woman? Osborne moved quickly on to the next drawer.

  Because there had been only two dentists in town for many years, his life and his patients’ lives were so deeply intertwined that when he treated a patient for a gum problem, he usually knew without asking what kind of stress was as much a cause of the problem as any physical factors. As he read the names on his records, ghosts of whole human beings rose before him. He heard their voices and remembered why they couldn’t pay their bill for another month or needed to barter with venison chops or a summer’s harvest of tomatoes instead of cash.

  As he moved through the files, Osborne felt more sure than ever that the fourth body could not have been a permanent resident of Loon Lake. In a town so small, faces do not go unregistered, and this was one he certainly hadn’t seen in the last ten to fifteen years.

  When it came to one-shots, he had plenty in the fifties: thirty or more two-page folders tucked into hanging files, one for each year. Those years were the heydey of tourism in the Northwoods. First, the expensive private camps that flourished as the rich sent their offspring direct from private school to summer camp with scarcely a break between. Then the middle- and upper-middle-class families from Milwaukee, Chicago, Saint Louis, and Kansas City flooded in to stay in rustic little cabins at the lake resorts, resorts now closed as America’s leisure habits had changed. Osborne shrugged. That fact of Northwoods life was a constant topic of the McDonald’s coffee klatch: Dad wants Montana fly-fishing, Mom wants the New Mexico spa, and the kids want Disney World. “Goofy,” they said in unison as coffee cups were emptied.

  The early fifties yielded nothing. By the time he hit 1957, his back was starting to ache from leaning over the open drawers, so he gathered up the next four years’ worth of files and headed back to the house. He poured another cup of coffee and walked out onto the screened porch that overlooked the lake. The day was gorgeous. Osborne paused for a moment to enjoy the soft shimmer of the diamonds dusting the gentle waves. He settled into the beat-up easy chair and noticed it was already 11:15. Ray should be back any time.

  He looked through 1957. Nothing. He opened 1958. In the middle of the folder, he found it.

  Osborne sat straight up in the chair to examine and reexamine the file. He couldn’t believe how perfectly his marks on the printed diagram in the upper left-hand corner of the page mirrored the work in the mouth he’d felt the night before. This was it. A small manila envelope paper-clipped to the file held X rays. Obviously, he’d been pleased with the work at the time because he’d shot X rays of the finished inlays. Those may have been the days when X rays were used a little too carelessly, he thought, but here was one instance when some people would be glad he had shot plenty.

  He checked the name and address on the file. The patient was a boy from Kansas City, age 10. That would put him in his mid-forties, which seemed reasonable. Name, parents, address—the information was all there. The patient had been a camper at Camp Deerhorn, a camp just outside Rhinelander, which was about ten miles from Loon Lake.

  Osborne hurried to call Sloan. Not in yet. That surprised Osborne. He left a message for Sloan to call the minute he arrived—it was urgent.

  After he hung up, he decided to walk over to Ray’s and wait. As he walked, he remembered that Ray’s sister, the lawyer who lived in Chicago. had married a man who’d been a counselor at Camp Deerhorn. They met one summer at a local bar where all the college kids hung out. Osborne remembered it well because Ray’s mother had been so pleased her daughter had snagged a wealthy boyfriend that Mary Lee had been disgruntled for months. The wedding had been quite splendid with the reception held, not in Loon Lake. but at the Rhinelander Country Club, of course.

  If we’re lucky, thought Osborne as he leaned against a fence post outside Ray’s trailer. Ray’s brother-in-law may remember the kid. Now, that would be interesting. Osborne checked his watch. It was a quarter past noon. Ray should be there any minute. Ruff knew it. too. The dog was running in nervous patterns in his pen. anxious for lunch.

  “Hey. boy. where’s Ready?” Osborne was puzzled. Where was the other dog? That’s strange. He tried the door to Ray’s trailer. The wind was kicking up pretty strong off the lake, and he knew Ray wouldn’t mind if he waited inside. He stepped into the trailer home. All the dishes from the chicken dinner had been washed and put away. The place looked pristine, as usual. But he heard scrabbling toward the back of the trailer where there was a little room in which Ray kept his washer and dryer, wading boots, and other outdoor gear. The door was pulled shut.

  Osborne walked down the hall toward the door and listened. He heard movement. It sounded like the dog, skittering and yelping. He cracked the door open, then pulled it shut quickly. He had glimpsed small smears of blood on the tile floor. Now he remembered that one of the dogs had gotten into it with a racoon and hurt his paw. Ray must be keeping Ready inside with his sore paw. The dog yelped again as if in pain. Ray knew better than anyone the dog would be needing a new bandage. Where was he?

  “Sorry, boy,” said Osborne from outside the door. “This old man can’t help you. Ray’ll be here any minute.” But he wasn’t. Five, ten more minutes went by. Osborne got anxious. He walked back up the drive to his place and waited. Sloan didn’t call either.

  By one-thirty, with a constant chorus from the famished Ruff in the background, Osborne was really getting worried. He had just walked up to feed the dogs himself when Gordy O’Hearne from the Catholic cemetery drove in looking for Ray because he hadn’t shown up to dig a couple of graves scheduled to be finished by four. Gordy wasn’t worried, he was just plain mad. Now he had to dig the damn graves.

  Lew Ferris picked up the nonemergency line in the Loon Lake Police Station when Osborne called in around two.

  “Hey, Doc, I just walked in.” Lew sighed, more than a hint of fatigue in her voice. “The place is crazy. The switchboard is all lit up, and I got stacks of messages on my desk. Can I call you back?”

  “Didn’t John tell you the news?” The last thing Osborne was going to do was hang up.

  A brief pause, then Lew spoke. “Doc, what is going on? All I got so far is a message left at my hotel last night ordering me back here—as if Stoneface thinks he still runs the joint.” She was tired. And crabby.

  “So you haven’t talked to him.”

  “No, I have not,” Lew barked into the phone. She was beyond irritation, she was angry. “But I drove three hours in the dead of night to the Albany airport to catch a 5 a.m. flight. Now I’m here and no Sloan. No Lucy either, might I add. Bridget replaced her on the switchboard at midnight. All she left me is this cryptic message: ‘Emergency! Talk to Chief Sloan ASAP.’ Nice of her to forget who’s chief around here. And ASAP? Well, hell—the man’s nowhere in sight. I tell ya, Doc, is this some kind of punishment for taking three of the goddam fourteen vacation days I’m owed? I mean, jeez Louise. So if you know anything about anything, I would sure appreciate hearing about it.”

  Osborne couldn’t have asked for a better opening. Without taking a breath, he rushed into the details.

  “Whoa, hold up, slow down—let me grab a pen….” Irritation subsiding, her voice took on a blunt, staccato edge. Lew was back all right, back and focused. Osborne started over. He tried to speak slowly. He could hear tremors in his voice, which surprised him. Quickly, he laid out the sequence of the previous night’s events, anxious to get to the point.

  “I’m so
rry,” Lew interrupted, “hold on a second, Doc. Bridget just handed me an envelope with a confidential memo from Sloan. I guess she finally moved her purse and there it was. Let me check … okay … and photos…. Holy cow! Doc, you found this? Wow! Am I glad John called.”

  “I thought you would be,” said Osborne. “He and Roger and that new guy worked with me and Ray to get those bodies out of the water. I hope you don’t mind; he deputized me again—”

  “Heck, no, I don’t mind. Good.”

  “I can’t imagine why John isn’t there, Lew, but I’ve tried to reach him three times this morning myself.”

  “I don’t know either. After I got the message last night, I tried him at his house around eleven but got no answer.”

  “We were still at Ray’s developing those photos—”

  “I tried again from the airport early this morning and still no answer. I’ve asked Bridget to call Lucy at home, maybe she knows where … wait….”

  Muffled noises followed as Lew held her hand over the receiver.

  “All right, all right, one mystery solved. Lucy said John felt like hell last night and was driving over to Rhinelander first thing this morning to see a doctor, get a prescription for antibiotics. You know him and his diabetes, he freaks out over the smallest infection. So let me finish reading his memo, catch up with a few things, and call you back, Doc.”

  “No. We can’t wait, Lew. Something is wrong. Ray is missing.”

  Osborne invested the last three words with all the authority he could muster, all the authority of his years of being listened to as if his was the ultimate word on all matters dental, medical, and even, on occasion, ethical. Being a professional in one field often, in a tiny backwoods community, translated to being a professional in all fields. Right now he hoped against hope that Lew would be intimidated by his tone and do what he was desperate for her to do: put Ray’s disappearance first on her agenda.

  “Ray missing? That’s an oxymoron, Doc.” Intimidated she was not. Osborne scrambled for a new and better approach as if fishing hazardous terrain: when one bait doesn’t work, switch fast.