Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  Too good for this goddamn world.

  Reason for suicide?

  Or reason for murder? Had the goddamn world according to Charlie Cable finally destroyed something in Leslie Selkirk Decker that he killed her out of some kind of perverted love for who she had been? In his strange mind, did he have to kill her to save her?

  20

  She nearly collapsed with relief when she realized she could hear the motor of the approaching boat. “Here’s your meeting, Charlie,” Val managed to get out as he fumbled the clipboard, which clattered to the floor of Wade Decker’s little boat. She stumbled over a seat to snatch it and hold it out with a shaking hand. All she wanted, all she ever wanted, was to find her way home. She was no good here. She had nothing to give. Right now all she could say for sure about Valjean Cameron was that her heart fluttered like feathers, like wings, like bird song. It was all she was, and all she had left to her.

  Charlie Cable gave her a pat on the shoulder, and turned away to wave like he was signaling a rescue plane. Someone tooted a boat horn. He straightened up, the breeze that had blown her in now tossing his wild hair as he steeled himself to represent loons anywhere on this benighted planet before a committee that could make a difference. Maybe a t-shirt and hip waders were Cable’s idea of dressing for success.

  Val pressed the electric start button and with exquisite slowness backed away from the man who would very likely keep Peter Hathaway in business. In industry news. In serf pants and shoes of the fisherman. In something that passed for love with women who provided enough of a floor show that it took his mind off his own inner spaces. Where the problem was that maybe there wasn’t really so much space, after all, when it came right down to it.

  Distracted, Charlie Cable gave Decker’s boat a shove away from the houseboat and actually blew her a funny little kiss, with his big paw flattened across his mouth the extravagant way kids do, covering up the whole bottom halves of their faces. Val gave the motor some gas, putting more distance between herself and the federal loon squad as they closed in effortlessly toward the rented houseboat that looked like a log cabin afloat on the lake.

  Two men, two women with lots of power and inscrutable goals, coming to meet with a blockbuster writer who thought Leslie Decker had been too good for this goddamn world. Voices, back and forth, hallooing, joking, and in the end, Val wondered whether anything terribly important would come out of the meeting.

  Val shifted into neutral long enough to slip the folded contract, the thing of gold that—in the end, really—had nothing to do with pleasing Peter Hathaway, into Decker’s waterproof map case and zipped it shut. If she had managed to get the contract signed a couple of days ago, she would have enjoyed staring at it in a moment of quiet triumph, but not now. Everything was too late.

  Including—here she smiled—Peter Hathaway.

  She shifted into forward, made a wide, safe circle in a direction that surprised her, and headed toward the main channel. A distant speck to the south could have been a canoe, but too far away to tell. No confident blond skippering a silver boat with right of way. No Dixon Foote barging along imperceptibly. Behind her, the houseboat grew small, smaller, until, as she veered, Point of No Return slipped from sight along with the ministry boat.

  Val bounced the boat over the little waves that were coming at her and forced herself not to think about how uncomfortable she felt in wide open spaces with no one else in sight. Was there really just no pleasing her? She didn’t like Lake Wendaban when she was in the company of its residents because they were all so completely unlike her. But she didn’t like the lake any better when nobody was around because the place itself was so completely unlike her. It was a sly place where anything could happen even when doors were closed and snakes still turned up in cake pans. Even when windows were closed and women were hurled through them. The wilderness just seemed like a place that could absorb an infinite amount of human fear, without ever taking pity.

  As she neared the wide open channel she would follow to the West Arm, and from there to the Hathaway cottage where all she still had to do was pack, Val thought again about Leslie Decker, the woman she couldn’t get any straight answers about—not from Decker, not from Charlie, not from Caroline or Kay or Martin Kelleher or even Dixon Foote. Had she been so utterly unknowable? Was she such a shifting thing that there was not a single Leslie Selkirk Decker people could agree on? Had she kept everything important about herself stashed away in such an inaccessible place inside her that it could never get out?

  Val suddenly slowed, but without trying.

  Was she talking about Leslie Decker…or herself?

  The boat puttered along, but the motor seemed to be hacking. All she could do was glare at it. Finally, it died. Val stood, her legs apart, and huffed at the motor. She shifted into neutral and tried the electric start. Nothing. Then she ripped at the pull cord, hard, four times, with no luck. She sank down to the seat. Had Josie Blanton left out some important piece of information? For a full minute Val stared at nothing. She was completely out of ideas. Only one truth niggled at her brain: the lake was not about to let her go. It wasn’t done yet with Valjean Cameron, plaything of wilderness waterways.

  With a wry smile lost on everything around her, she pulled on a cord and lifted the neon orange whistle to her lips and blew shrilly until she had to come up for air. No response, but no surprise. The whistle seemed like an unbearably stupid thing to make part of the required equipment. Whistling couldn’t do you any good if no one was in sight, and if someone was in sight, you wouldn’t need to whistle. If she ever got off Lake Wendaban, she vowed to write a letter to the appropriate ministry of boating.

  Buoyant line? Throw to what? Throw to whom?

  Bleach bottle bailer? As yet, no leak.

  Life jacket? Possibly, she heaved a sigh, if abandoning ship became the last resort. But last resorts were called that for what were usually very good reasons.

  Oars? Yes. Yes! Rowing toward the West Arm had to be better than swimming, didn’t it? For a moment, it felt like a true toss-up, a final indignity either way. She prepared herself to feel worse than whenever she’d get off the elliptical at the gym—not that it was a recent experience or a perfect memory. At that moment she found the finest use of wilderness. It was made for shouting into it. If it could absorb all human fear until the end of time, it could damn well absorb her frustrated screams. Val lumbered to her feet, which set the boat rocking, and with her fists at her sides, she let it rip.

  She screamed because Peter Hathaway had no faith. She screamed because it had taken her five days to accomplish what she should have done in one—so then she screamed because maybe Peter Hathaway was right. She screamed because a woman like Leslie Selkirk got a guy like Wade Decker, which surprised her because she wasn’t even sure what she meant by it. She screamed because she should have gone into the waterfall. Spent, she glanced down and noticed the black bulb on the gas line. With a sudden, bad feeling, she squeezed the bulb which felt as yielding as Daria Flottner’s thighs. Her eye followed the line to the red plastic gas tank on the floor in the bow of the boat.

  Slowly and carefully, Val stepped over seats, heading toward the tank Josie Blanton had neglected to tell her about. Bracing herself, she leaned over the tank and checked the gauge, where the black pointer flickered over the E. How could the sky still be so clear and cheerful? Face it, she was out of gas. In more ways than one. Had Wade Decker forgotten to check? Or had he assumed Josie Blanton would check? No, when it came right down to it, she herself should have checked. It just never occurred to her that she should.

  In New York, gas tanks were most definitely other people’s responsibility—cabbies, the MTA, limo services. If she keeled over here, she could fall out of the boat and drown. If she keeled over there, a few people might step over her, but there would be those who would call 911. And then step over her. Altogether the better option.

  Val
stood in the center of the gently rocking boat. In every direction all she saw was some combination of water hundreds of feet deep, treacherous shoals, islands of rock and pine that had never needed anything from humans for millions of years, and mainland impossible to tell apart from the islands.

  No boaters.

  Anywhere.

  Well, there was nothing to do but roll up her sleeves, sit, grab the weather-beaten old oars (ah, Decker), and row. The rhythmic squeak of metal on metal. The rhythmic bang of wood on aluminum. She was just one big racket of activity. When she discovered it was hard to match her strokes, left arm, right arm, she decided she may be swerving her way back to the Hathaway family cottage, but sooner or later she’d get there.

  But would she have time to change clothes before Decker picked her up for the “gala”? Could he bring something clean and corny she could wear? An A-line clunky denim skirt that comes to the middle of her calf, say? Or floppy gaucho pants and ankle boots. True wilderness chic. Did Leslie have such a thing? Or Josie?

  Her upper arms were beginning to hurt when Val noticed two things. More clouds had appeared, out of nowhere. And a speck on the horizon was getting bigger. It was a boat. A red boat. With gas. And a working motor. It cut through the water, running parallel to Val, so it was too far away to notice her, and not getting any closer. Damn. It was heading straight for the West Arm. She even thought she could hear the motor, but maybe she was imagining it. Nothing to do but to flay her arms raw and head for the cottage. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. More clouds gathered. Slowly, still, but with the uncoiling sureness of Lake Wendaban clouds that wanted to work up to a good, sudden downpour.

  She could put up with anything that didn’t include bears.

  Hell, she already had.

  Between the metal scrapes and wooden clangs of her rowing, another sound started to dominate. Val let go of the oars, and one nearly slipped out of the oarlock. As she made a grab for it, she looked around. The red boat that had been running parallel to her was now heading toward her. With her luck, it would turn out to be a waterborne cop who’d present her with a ticket for pleasure boating without a license. She would have to argue the “pleasure” part, cop or no cop, but if she needed a license, she was definitely going down.

  The bow of the approaching boat was just a little too high for Val to see the skipper. So she sat, biceps aching, her hands clutching the handles of the oars, and waited to see what would happen. An official police boat would look more, well, official, she thought. As the boat came in range of her, it slowed, the bow settled, and she could see a young man with a close-shaved head in the stern. He was wearing a light purple sleeveless vest, unzipped, and baggy black nylon shorts. As he came alongside, he flashed her a smile of recognition, then turned away long enough for Val to see Go Jays across his skull.

  It was Arlo.

  From the bait shop.

  “Hey, Miss.”

  “Arlo, hi,” she cried, as they grabbed hold of each other’s boat. “I ran out of gas.”

  The kid grunted in a way that suggested the very same thing had happened to him once. Then he craned his neck as he gave her boat a quick onceover. “No spare can, eh?” He easily flipped his two side bumpers between them, softening the bumps.

  “No.”

  With a sniff and a nod, Arlo the bait boy disconnected the fuel line from his own tank. “You found Mr. Wade okay that day, then,” he said, a little awkwardly.

  “I did, thanks.” She sat up straighter. “He helped me find Charles Cable,” she explained, making a vague gesture. “My work sent me up to Lake Wendaban to get him to agree to work for us.”

  Arlo gave her a quick look as he grabbed the handle of the gas tank with both hands and hauled it closer to the center of his boat. “New book?”

  Her eyes widened. “New book.”

  “Hold on now to both boats, okay?” He tipped his broad chin at her. “You hold us close.”

  Spreading her hands, Val clamped them tight over the rims of both boats, careful to keep her skin from getting caught as the boats slammed together. “Charlie Cable,” said Arlo as he stepped first one beefy leg and then the other into her disabled boat. “Him and me do some jobs together.” As he heaved his gas tank over the sides of the joined boats, he said between gritted teeth, “He knows I’m a good worker. He pays good and he loves the lake.”

  “Like Leslie Decker,” she heard herself say.

  Arlo started to say something, then thought better of it. He scowled at the gas tank as he lowered it to the seat behind her own empty tank. “I know Charlie pretty good, from the jobs him and me do.”

  It struck Val that the kid Arlo worked in a bait shop literally on the municipal dock, a particularly fine spot for watching people come and go. And it happened to be the place where Charlie Cable docked the boat Kay Stanley remembered having seen disappear just out of sight around the point of Selkirk Peninsula on the morning of Leslie Decker’s murder.

  “Kay tells me Charlie keeps a boat tied up at the dock in town.”

  “That he does.” Arlo gripped his tank and carefully started to pour some of his gas into hers.

  “The one with the Jolly Roger he flies off the—the—”

  “The stern, yeah. Funny.” Arlo laughed.

  “It was out on the lake the day Leslie Decker died.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, it wasn’t Charlie.”

  “No?”

  “Nah. He leaves the key in it. He just don’t care about material things like boats and stuff.”

  Having seen where the man lives, she had to agree. Could someone else have taken out the Jolly Roger boat that day? “How can you be so sure, Arlo?”

  The kid actually looked around as though they could be overheard, and set a finger against his lips. “Me and Charlie was on a job together that day.”

  “Really?”

  The kid seemed to be debating with himself. “I shouldn’t say,” he mumbled.

  “Are you sure it was that day?”

  “Yeah, when we got back to town sometime that afternoon, we heard about the—the murder.” His face darkened. The admission seemed huge to Val, who couldn’t understand why this alibi for Charlie Cable for Leslie Decker’s murder wasn’t common, boring knowledge all over the lake. What was she missing? “Charlie was broke up something terrible,” Arlo said softly.

  “What job were you and Charlie doing that morning, Arlo?” She didn’t know how she could possibly persuade him to tell her. She could only hope he’d already forgotten he decided against letting her in on it.

  Arlo gave her a long, blank look that gave nothing away but his mind seemed very active behind his unreadable expression. She was an outsider, that was for sure, and one he didn’t know. All she could do was watch him come to some conclusion she was powerless to affect. “You’re not from here, Miss,” he said finally. She sighed and looked at her feet. In a way, she understood. “So I think it’s okay to tell you.”

  Her breath caught.

  Arlo went on, “It’s the police chief.”

  Val was baffled.

  “He calls Charlie in when it’s what they call a delicate matter.”

  “Such as?” said Val slowly.

  “The police chief and tribal chief and Charlie Cable had worked on a plan for dismantling a dam on a river on tribal land up the highway—” here he jerked his Go Jays head in the direction of a far-off town, “—which was one of them so-called delicate matters because the tribe and the whites needed to work together, but they couldn’t be seen working together, if you get what I mean.”

  “Where did Charlie Cable come in?”

  Half squatting, Arlo tipped his own gas tank over Decker’s empty one, working the spout into place. As the gasoline flowed, the smell rose around them. “So the dam was bad for what he called the ecosystem downriver, which empties into the main lake, and taking it do
wn had to be an under-the-table arrangement.”

  Val narrowed her eyes, trying to understand what she was hearing. “In what way?”

  Arlo went on patiently, “It had to appear to the tribe and the whites alike like an act of vandalism—”

  And then she got it. “So responsibility couldn’t get laid off on one group or the other.”

  Eyeing the soft glug of the gasoline, Arlo kept nodding. “That morning, me and Charlie bushwhacked through the forest to where the dam was and spray painted some stupid graffiti to look like random kids. Then we set a couple sticks of dynamite and took out the dam. Days later,” Arlo went on, “the police chief thanked us, but by then that murder was taking up his time and that was the last we heard about it. Some jobs are like that,” said Arlo, like he was talking about working the stock room at IKEA, wrinkling his broad nose at her. “Nice and clean.”

  With a quick smile, he tightened down the cap of her gas tank and squeezed the bulb until it was tight. While he climbed back over to his boat with his tank in his arms, Val thanked him absently. All she could think about was the revelation that Charlie Cable’s alibi for the murder of Leslie Decker may not be known to the rest of the lake, but it was well known to the chief of police, and that’s what counted.

  Val watched her best suspect burn into vapor like the mist on Lake Wendaban. If Charlie Cable hadn’t thrown Leslie Decker out that window, it meant someone else had.