Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  Kay was all business, setting herself up in front of a short row of commercial washers and dryers. What looked like two of each. Giving Val an apologetic look, she waved a jug of detergent, saying, “After Leslie died this place worked out good for camp stuff like laundry. Storage.” Her thick, competent hands started stuffing thin, well-used white towels into one of the washers.

  Val scanned the room. The interior walls had been left unfinished, and it was clear the boathouse hadn’t been winterized. But here, too, a few of the vertical studs had been painted with green vines and blue flowers. Leslie? Some were left undone. Maybe just a small thing cut off by her murder. But Val warmed to the look, like living in an illustrated fairy tale, and wondered what it said about Decker’s dead wife. Slashes of sunlight slipped through the horizontal spaces between the boards, falling on the broad plank flooring that Leslie had installed.

  Just then Kay flicked on a switch and two rails of overhead track lighting sprang into life. Against the near wall was a sleek, built-in kitchenette in stainless steel and high-gloss maple. But stacked against Leslie’s high-end workspace were rusting bed springs, three-legged chairs, unglued table tops, and stained mattresses.

  Along the long wall overlooking the rocks where Leslie had landed in a torrent of shattered window glass, broken masts for camp sailboats were piled in front of three overturned old canvas canoes with cracked and faded yellow paint. Life jackets that had seen better days were tossed on the heap. And then there were baskets storing what looked like chipped crockery, hurricane lamps without chimneys, camping skillets without handles—junk. And lots of it.

  A broken Leslie in a place of broken things.

  But then Val noticed the far end of this downstairs room where the beautiful new line of casement windows looked out over the lake, and saw what was left of Leslie Decker’s home. A gleaming black wood-burning stove of a modern circular design. A daybed with thick off-white throw pillows set in an expensive, dark hardwood frame. A matching glass coffee table. A Persian rug. In caches built into the studs in the wall overlooking the water, Leslie had set a collection of natural crystal lamps that must’ve been beautiful when lighted. More fairy tale.

  Val shot Kay a glance. “Leslie had some very nice things. What’s it like upstairs?”

  Kay kept shaking her head. “I haven’t been up there since it happened,” she said breathlessly. “It was Leslie’s bedroom before she got married, and also her office. I don’t think Caroline cleaned it out at all after the police finished up.” Then she added with a little shrug, “Neither has Wade.”

  “Why not?” Why enshrine a murder scene?

  When Kay lifted her arms helplessly, Val could tell it was something that bothered her. “Oh, I wanted to clean it up real good. At first she let me mop the floor—” here Kay’s head drooped, “—but no more. I threw out a couple of broken things, a lamp, a flower pot, that sort of thing, and I put the furniture back.” At that Kay Stanley looked Val in the eye. “A couple of chairs got knocked over in the fight before, well…” And her mouth went grim.

  Before Leslie was thrown out the window.

  “Can I see the upstairs?”

  “Oh.” Kay looked shocked. “I thought you understood. Caroline doesn’t want people going up there.” Just one more rule at Camp Sajo…

  Val leaned across the broken masts that blocked the side windows, craning to see the rocks below. “Who found Leslie that day?” she called over to Kay, who suddenly stood still.

  Turning slowly to Val, she said, “I did.” As the washers churned away at threadbare camp towels and the distant rip of Luke’s chainsaw indicated some decisions had been made about spruces and cedars, Val listened to Kay Stanley describe the day Leslie was murdered.

  Kay lived alone in the town of Wendaban, just behind the train station, no family left, not since her Pa up and died on her just a few years ago. But before the lake freezes and winter weather hits, she runs her little boat out to Camp Sajo once a week just to check on things. There’s no permanent caretaker anymore—too expensive, and Caroline just can’t swing it. Kay likes her mornings at the empty camp. When nobody at all is there, she can still think it’s a proud place, a successful place, a place with a fine history. And all the ghosts are just the high, remembered voices of healthy young folks over the decades.

  But that day in October…Kay shook her dark head sadly, looking down at nothing. That day in October was really the end for Camp Sajo, after all the lean years even the charming, hardworking Trey Selkirk couldn’t help. The morning was cool but the wind was still, and she was glad to be out on the lake on just that fine day. It was almost enough to make her believe that things would turn around for Caroline and Leslie’s beloved Camp Sajo, that campers as numerous as the stars in the Big Dipper would swarm the property next summer. As she headed into the West Arm, she could almost hear the ghost voices rising above the treetops, carried out to her from the best past years of Camp Sajo.

  But as she got close, Kay Stanley knew right away something was wrong: a second-story window in the boathouse was open. No, not open, gone. But how? And through the gaping hole that had been the window, the sheer curtains were dangling against the outside wall.

  And then she saw the rocks.

  And she couldn’t make sense of what was on them.

  Clothing?

  With shaking hands, she managed to dock with a thud and nearly fell out of the boat onto the warm wooden boards. As she struggled to her feet, she glanced quickly out over the lake. Flying east, well out of range of her yells, was a black and silver speedboat she didn’t recognize.

  Kay Stanley ran toward the boathouse where something was terribly wrong. Only she slowed as she got close enough to see what was on the rocks, too close to tell herself a moment longer that there had to be a reasonable explanation. Someone had dumped clothes out of the second floor window. Someone was sleeping on the warm rocks. Someone, someone. Finally, not just someone.

  Leslie Selkirk Decker.

  Kay walked the last twenty feet on legs she didn’t recognize, legs that must belong to somebody else, smaller, slighter, less in need of support. She felt white-blind from the sight of the bloody, broken body, the kind of blind where the world goes clean, scrubbed white on you. She stumbled those last few feet to the body of the girl she had known from infancy, willing Leslie to stand up and shake herself off away from the glass and blood and broken bones. With her white-blind eyes fixed on the dead girl’s back, Kay howled at a morning that changed everything forever. Somehow Leslie Selkirk Decker had fallen out the window to her death.

  Finally, with a long, sad look at Val, Kay said, “And there she was, and I—” She stopped talking suddenly, tipping her head. Her eyes narrowed as though she was trying to make sense of a sudden recollection.

  “What?” said Val softly, standing with her arms folded.

  Kay shrugged, laughing just a little. “Funny I only just remembered…” She grabbed a rag and wiped down the lid of the washing machine. “Rounding the tip of Selkirk Peninsula, almost out of sight. If only he’d heard me, he could have helped.” She bit her lip, knowing there hadn’t been enough help anywhere on the planet that day for Leslie. Leslie in her high-end storybook apartment painted with blue morning glories forever open. “Charlie.” She gave Val a fond little smile.

  Val felt a chill. “Charlie Cable?”

  It was the stern of the boat Charlie keeps at the municipal dock in town. Definitely, nodded Kay. “It’s a Stanley all-aluminum boat,” she said proudly, “and it’s got two little flags, port and starboard, he flies off the stern—the Maple Leaf and the Jolly Roger. Well, that’s Charlie for you.”

  So Charlie Cable was on the lake the morning Leslie was murdered. As his future publisher, assuming she could wrestle him to the ground and get his signature on the contract, Val felt disturbed, her heart pounding. How could she get more information about what
he was doing in his silly Jolly Roger boat that morning? Had he gone to the cops once he heard about the murder? If he had, wouldn’t Kay Stanley have heard about it somehow? And if he hadn’t...why not?

  Suddenly she knew due diligence when it stared her in the face. In the case of the problem with the author of Downy, all along the way, due diligence had failed horribly. The agent, the publicist, the cops, Val, Peter, Ivy League Ivy, CEO Henry Schlesinger himself—any one of them could have discovered the truth about the author, but it was Val who took on the responsibility. Now here in this wilderness called Wendaban, where the author of The Asteroid Mandate—who was thought to be “not right in the head”—was spotted near the scene of the murder, due diligence fell like an anvil across the trembling shoulders of senior editor Val Cameron, and no one else. All hers. All.

  The door swung open and a brawny blond man in a Roots t-shirt stood leaning in the doorway in a bright square of sudden sunlight. Kay kept sorting the laundry, her face tight with the memory of the murder. “I figure I can make it up to you,” he called over to Val.

  Then she recognized him. “Ah,” she said. “Dixon Foote.” Backlit by the sun, even the veins on his biceps stood out. Which may have been part of the problem when his fist had hurtled toward her face. Long in the waist, he wore loose-fitting work jeans and Teva sandals. A bit of a belly pushed at his waistband.

  “There’s been a Cable sighting.” Now he had her interest.

  Val approached him. “Where?”

  “Putting up cranky signs at the landing, near Portage Airlines.”

  How was that going to help her, the ultimate landlubber? “And?”

  “Come on.” He waved her over like he was organizing his kids for a ride in the car. “I’ll take you, but it’s got to be now. My way of saying sorry for the KO last night.” He rubbed at his nose.

  She gave him a wan smile. “How can I refuse?” Although the prospect of getting into a boat—at least she hoped it was a boat—with the man who had decked her but good was pretty tepid. Still, the chance to catch Cable had fallen into her lap and, while she permitted herself some good brooding time over the murder of Leslie Decker, some altogether new company—even Dixon Foote—seemed appealing.

  Kay pushed a hand at her. “Go,” she said, “go. I’ll set your top back in the office when it’s dry, okay?”

  With a quick shout goodbye to Caroline, who was walking toward her on a path along the waterfront, Val followed Dixon Foote as he headed down to the docks, noting he was a bit bowlegged. He had a jerky vitality, the sort of guy who waits impatiently for the next task to shimmer at him in the wings of his life. His shoulder blades tucked back so far they were nearly touching, he led with his chest, like a street fighter.

  Tied up at the first dock was one boat, maybe forty feet long, the pontoons keeping it level with the surface of the dock. In just a few long steps Dixon Foote was ducking inside a tiny wheelhouse of weather-beaten wood, and then an outboard motor the size of a doghouse rumbled into life. Painted in beige and covering most of the side of the wheelhouse was a disembodied foot outlined in black. It had a rough heel and curling toes and bore a strong resemblance to the kind of appendage she’d seen in illustrated editions of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” The foot hovered over bright blue ripples and a single word in big glossy letters, CONSTRUCTION.

  Dixon Foote waved her aboard, which was when Val saw that the “logo” decorated the front of the wheelhouse too. She was guessing the other two sides hadn’t escaped the gigantic foot. With her arms floating at her sides to steady herself, she walked straight onto the deck, which sported thin, wet old indoor-outdoor carpet worn clean through to the fiberglass in some places.

  Suddenly Dixon Foote charged out of the wheelhouse, cast off the lines, and ducked back inside, yelling something to Val she couldn’t hear over the motor. As they started to pull away from the Camp Sajo dock, she stumbled closer to the open side of Foote’s commercial barge and longed to be back where her favorite form of dangerous transportation was a Yellow Cab.

  9

  Val clung to the frame of the wheelhouse and stepped inside next to the skipper. After a few minutes of no conversation, which Foote passed by whistling “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” through his teeth, Val realized that chasing down Charlie Cable on the Foote Construction barge was like joining a high-speed car chase on a scooter. A river cruise on the Rhone could putter along at that speed and seem incredibly romantic, when maybe the only thing you wanted to catch was a good night’s sleep and not the elusive bestselling writer of the kind of crap professional editing careers depended on. Off one side of the barge, she could swear a cruising duck passed them.

  “Can you let it out all the way?” she asked Foote, not even sure that was quite the way to suggest anything at all about speed, barges, and desperation. Still, she tried to sound optimistic.

  He gave her a serene look. “She’s running full throttle,” he explained, which Val took to mean this was as fast as it got. “Fastest barge on Lake Wendaban,” he added proudly.

  Eventually they oozed around the islands closer to the beginning of the West Arm of the lake, and Val took a long look at Charlie Cable’s old place, where a small shingled cottage had been boarded up and the rubble of the boathouse he had dismantled was heaped behind his TAX THIS! sign. The work of a madman? Someone with the kind of anger that gets him turfed to a court-ordered anger management class? Did it signal the kind of rage that leads to murder? Maybe writing space junk thrillers was this guy’s occupational therapy. The rest of the property was overrun with late-flowering purple weeds. Maybe, given enough time, the weeds would hide the rubble, hide the crazy sign.

  “Kind of an eyesore,” she put out there to see Dixon Foote’s reaction. After all, her personal ferryman, a lifer on this remote lake, was no natural ally of an eco-warrior like Charlie Cable.

  Dixon Foote snorted. “Agreed,” he blurted. “But I got to feel a little sorry for the bugger. Poor old Charlie can’t get his messages sorted out. Municipal taxes keep us strong, you know,” he flicked her a quick look, “and strong means less likely to go after the prospecting and timbering he’s been fighting for decades,” he said slowly, negotiating some shoals peeping out over the surface of the water. “But he went kind of wrong in the head after that Decker woman died.”

  Or maybe just a minute before, thought Val.

  No, wrong in the head was definitely not going to play well under the author photo on the back cover of The Asteroid Mandate. She started to feel the kind of queasy that had nothing to do with seasickness. All she could do was listen while Dixon Foote spoke up over the rumble of the motor.

  “That place is cursed, that Camp Sajo, all the way back, back even before the blond went out the window. Back before the dad, that mountain man Selkirk himself—” here Dixon Foote flung up a hand in a futile kind of a gesture, “—back before the old man fell off some mountain and the family didn’t know which end was up anymore. They lost campers when those things happened. Who’d want to go to a camp where the black flies eat you alive, and it can rain like hell for weeks, if now the famous guy was dead?” Foote looked around, trying to find just the right idea to make his point. “It’d be like going to a Stones concert after Mick Jagger’s in the ground, see what I mean? And the killing of the blond, well, that’s the sort of thing that makes people nervous, you can understand.”

  Val thought she could.

  “But the curse on that Selkirk camp started all those years ago—” Dixon Foote punctuated the idea by pushing the air and years away from himself, “—when that Cadotte kid died on one of their wilderness canoe trips.” Dixon himself was twenty-seven at the time, but his cousin Max Foote, who was nineteen, was one of the counselors on that trip and was there when it happened. “His life was hell for months after that, what with cops and media and so on—and the old guy himself, Trey Selkirk, fired him right away. He called it a blot on Sajo�
��s perfect safety record.” Selkirk was trying for some damage control, everyone on the lake thought, giving interviews about what a fine lad the fourteen-year-old Marcus had been. Terrible accident. A scholarship kid. “Selkirk kept emphasizing that,” Dixon Foote glanced at Val, “making it sound like scholarship kids were a dime a dozen at his precious fancy camp.”

  “Weren’t they?” asked Val, interested.

  He snorted at her. “Are you kidding? Far as I know, the Cadotte kid was the first ever, with nothing special to recommend him, from what Max told me. Barely passing in school. Living all the way off in Newfoundland with adoptive parents. How did a kid like that suddenly get on the radar of a place like Camp Sajo?”

  It was a good question.

  “Poor Max and the other counselor, Belinda Conroy, wanted to send the parents a condolence card—pretty stand-up, I thought, considering,” he said, eying Val, “but when they went through the camper files, they couldn’t find the usual paperwork on the dead Marcus Cadotte. Even Selkirk’s own kid—that blond who went out the window—she’d been assistant counselor or whatever they call them on that trip, she couldn’t get any address. Which—” Dixon Foote said quietly, narrowing his eyes against the sun as the lake opened up and he headed for the landing, “—was enough to make me believe that something else had to explain the only scholarship kid Camp Sajo had ever taken.”

  Squinting at the landing, where already she could tell there was no soft-in-the-head old Charlie Cable tacking up cranky signs, Val felt distracted.

  “What are you saying?” she slid a look at Dixon Foote, who shrugged.

  “I always thought there had to be some kind of personal connection between that kid Marcus Cadotte and the only person who could ship the kid in from Newfoundland, write off all the expenses, and waive the paperwork.”