Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  “So I saw.”

  And Val went on to tell him about Martin Kelleher’s deep betrayal of the cottagers on the lake, all for his own gain. The ream of incriminating papers in the messenger bag—the emails, the letters of intent, incorporation documents, invoices. At the end of it, Wade Decker’s eyes were fixed on the forest of Selkirk Peninsula, outside the boundaries of Camp Sajo, as if he were trying to comprehend what motivated Martin Kelleher. “Aside from feeling sad,” he said, finally, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  A quick smile. “You’re pretty good at that.”

  “It’s just survival, Val.” And then he added so quietly she barely heard it, “Coming back is hard.” She felt it cost him to tell her that. “We should get going.”

  She’d change into the new paisley dress in the camp office. But first she’d grab her makeup kit out of the overnight bag she’d left on the boathouse porch. As Decker followed her, she said over her shoulder, “What if Leslie set Martin up?”

  Decker sighed, suddenly weary. “Please don’t push me too much on Leslie Selkirk, Val.”

  Leslie Selkirk. As if she was just an acquaintance. Was that what Diane had meant when she talked about indifference? “What if Leslie had figured out what he was up to?”

  “Just let it go, all right?”

  “What if he found out…” She tried to work it out as they reached the porch of the boathouse.

  “For tonight, please, just let it go—”

  “—and he killed her. Right here.” Val pointed toward the rocks along the side of the building.

  Decker grabbed her arm and pulled her close. “I know where it happened,” he said intensely. “I saw the spot. I saw the body.” Breathing hard, he spoke softly, close to Val’s ear. “I’ve known her alive, and I’ve known her dead, and I can tell you this much—I don’t know which is worse. You,” he said, releasing her arm, and patting it once, gently, “don’t understand.”

  Maybe she didn’t. Maybe, when it came right down to it, the murder was one of the less complicated things on this lake she was putting behind her for good. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

  His face softened. “Oh,” he said. “Did you—?” And then he seemed to forget why she had come in the first place.

  She folded the dress and held it in her two hands. “I got Charlie Cable’s signature.”

  He straightened up. “Well, then,” was all he could say.

  Staring at her briefcase, waiting out the awkward silence, Val could picture what was inside—what she still needed to get back upstairs when nobody was looking. The file, the kaleidoscope. Probably no bearing on Leslie Decker’s murder, but Val thought there might be implications for the Selkirk family as a whole. “How well did you know Trey Selkirk?” she asked.

  Decker shrugged. “Pretty well, I guess. Why?”

  “Did you know he had a kid? A kid other than Caroline or Leslie?”

  He looked at her sideways. “What are you talking about?”

  “He and Kay Stanley had a baby.”

  “Kay?”

  There, on the narrow porch of the old Camp Sajo boathouse, she laid it out for him. The letters from Kay in her self-imposed exile in Iqaluit, hidden in the broken kaleidoscope. From the stack of photos from Trey’s basket.

  “It’s called a wannigan,” he told her. “It’s how camps used to carry food on canoe trips. I’ve seen Trey’s, up in Leslie’s office. That one?”

  “That one. There’s the June 1981 photo of a pregnant Kay, alone with Trey Selkirk. But in all the photos after that date, no baby.”

  “So what happened to it?”

  “In the one letter, all she mentions are her plans for the baby, something about St. John’s.”

  “Newfoundland?”

  “I don’t know.” Val eyed the garden by the lodge. No Kay.

  “St. John’s.” His eyes narrowed in an effort of memory. “What was the year again?”

  “1981. I figure she had the baby in September. There was the letter about the wolves…”

  He leaned against the railing, where he slumped. “I’m having a bad feeling.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, there was that kid,” Decker said, biting his lip. “At camp. The summer of 1995. The kid who drowned.” He looked at her, then scratched his face. “Big kid, kind of goofy, but fourteen. We’re all goofy at fourteen. I played a game of tetherball with him on the lower sports field one day and he told me he came all the way from St. John’s. There were whispers at camp—he was the scholarship kid.” Decker let out a little laugh. “I remember Caroline joking that Marcus Cadotte was probably her dad’s love child.”

  “Do you think she knew?”

  He thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. “No. I just think she was trying to make sense of why this one kid, and only this one kid, in the history of the Selkirks owning Camp Sajo, got to come for free. All the way from bloody Newfoundland. She thought it was great—and about time.” A quick look. “And you say Kay’s baby was born in 1981.”

  Val nodded slowly, feeling colder.

  Decker pushed himself away from the railing. “He’d be the right age, then, in 1995,” he said softly. “So I’m wondering if Marcus Cadotte was Kay’s son.”

  “And, if you read the letters, Trey’s.”

  The look Wade Decker gave her was awful. It was as if he had been cast back to the day of the drowning. As if he had been present and helpless. A swift look of revulsion passed over his face. She could tell he was putting together something in his own mind, something that brought in a rush of possibilities in. “Do you think Leslie knew?” he blurted.

  She stepped right in front of him. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Is it about the murder?”

  “It’s all about the murder,” he said in a strange voice. “Everything for the last two years has been all about the murder.”

  At that moment, the door to the old boathouse, which had been slightly ajar, opened, and Val felt horrified to see Kay Stanley standing in the doorway. “Oh, Kay…” Decker murmured, as she looked past both of them through the screen door.

  She stood nodding, empty-handed, the sounds of the washing machine at work behind her. “Marcus was my son,” the woman said finally, the words hanging between them in the summer air. It may have been the first time in thirty years that Kay Stanley had spoken them. What was there to remember, wondered Val, that didn’t have something to do with pain? Then she looked first at Val, and then at Wade Decker. “But he wasn’t Trey’s,” she said in a low, steady voice, wanting them to understand. “He was Charlie’s.”

  The Lake Wendaban Community Center was a one-story sprawling building that had been built back in the fifties out of what Decker told her was post and beam construction. It sprawled over low boulders on the shore of an island close to the municipal docks in the town. Over the years it had changed with the times, serving as an outfitting store for wilderness adventures, a canoe manufacturing company for more wilderness adventures, a grocery store for no wilderness adventures, and a library for reading about wilderness adventures. For the past three years, as the Lake Wendaban Community Center, it had hosted modest little job fairs, amateur theatricals, political rallies, weekly bingo, and ecumenical church services.

  At seven thirty on Val’s last night on the lake, the sound of the bass thumped out over the water as Decker puttered them slowly along the line of boats tied up at the docks and, when there were no more slips, each other. He had loaded Val’s bags into his boat, since getting her to the motel in town where she had booked a room would be easy to do when the gala ended, and he and Val talked Kay Stanley into coming with them. The gala emptied out Camp Sajo—the maintenance crew took the Sajo pontoon boat, and Kay thought Luke Croy might persuade Caroline, but she wasn’t sure.

  She sat serenely in front of Val, who spent a bad moment rememberi
ng her first night on Lake Wendaban, scrambling across rocking boats tied to each other for the meeting that had ended for her in unconsciousness. In some ways, she thought as she stared at a scuff on the tip of Kay Stanley’s clog, it seemed like a very long time ago. As Decker sidled the boat up to a dazzling silver Stanley vessel that looked like it could transport an invading army, Kay grabbed the side. She hadn’t changed out of her gardening clothes—the loose shirt and black capris seemed to be the outfit for all occasions—but she slipped into what she called her “dress clogs.” Back on the porch of the Camp Sajo boathouse, Kay explained what had happened.

  Charlie Cable was what you might call the love of her life. She was twenty-one and had knocked around the lake long enough to know she had no money and no prospects. He was thirty-one and wasn’t smart enough to know that money and prospects, if he was going to have them, would already be on their way. She had high school and a job at the laundromat in town. He was working as the world’s oldest stringer for a newspaper three hours away, and getting arrested for illegal protests over the environment was what he enjoyed instead of playing catch or taking a family out for ice cream.

  These truths about Charles Cable were so very clear to Kay. Two times of almost accidental sex had happened between them, months apart. And he seemed to forget both of them. Not like a prick “forgets,” and wants you to know in some cruel way that it was a mistake, when all you ever thought was that it was love and the beginning of a future together. No, with Charlie there was never any bad morning after, no careful attempt to distance himself from Kay. She could tell that for Charlie, those two nights fell somewhere between pulling off his socks and shaving his face. Natural and automatic, hardly a brain required.

  So when she turned up pregnant, there was no question of telling him, of forcing a family on him—he was already starting to kick around some story ideas—but Kay wanted to give that Kay and Charlie baby a life somewhere, even if it meant the mom with nothing better than high school and a laundromat job couldn’t be part of it. So she went to stay with her Auntie LeFay in Iqaluit. The only person she told was Trey Selkirk, who knew her well enough to guess it anyway, and he was a good friend to her during that time. Not even Hope or the girls knew.

  It had been Trey’s idea, fourteen years later, to offer the boy she had given up for adoption a place at camp that summer. But only if Kay could handle it. And she could. He was somebody else’s son, she told herself, no longer hers in any real way.

  And when Marcus Cadotte showed up on one of the camp buses, she thought just everyone would recognize him as Charlie Cable’s boy. Tall and fleshy and goofy, with the lumbering walk and the kind of hair no barber could tame, with the same way of scratching his chest when he was thinking, and the same way of biting his lip when he thought you were full of shit. Kay’s heart sprang every time she saw the boy loping around camp. Caroline was nice to the scholarship kid.

  And the other campers, well, those who knew the Cadotte kid got to come for free thought it had less to do with inability to pay than it did with “having connections”—kind of a prize the wealthy give each other—and, of course, they were right, as kids often are. Leslie either avoided him when he wasn’t noticing, or fake-niced him when he was. But she was just seventeen, and fake-nice is right up there with personal grooming at that age, so Kay didn’t hold it against her.

  And then came the day the boy drowned.

  What were the chances?

  And only she and Trey Selkirk knew the dead scholarship kid Marcus Cadotte was her flesh and blood. Those two weeks before the accident, when he had been running around at camp, were the only time that child signified something other than deep and never-ending loss for Kay Stanley. Aside from those days, he was born and left. And then he died and left. And joy was compacted into fourteen days of watching him try his hand at tetherball and tennis, and watching him find a spot in a group of boys belly-whopping off the swim dock. And joy was thinking maybe he had prospects neither she nor Charlie nor Ron and Francie Cadotte knew anything about.

  It all, all felt like better than enough, and she was content as she slipped the scholarship boy Marcus Cadotte a special ginger cookie she had iced with a chocolate heart, and he grinned up at her, “Say, thanks, ma’am!” and their hands touched. For the first time since the tiny hospital in Iqaluit, when five little fingers had curled around one of hers, not knowing they never would again.

  When they brought the campers back that day from the water chutes, the body was in a separate chopper, alone, and Kay was frozen before grief could fully hit to tell her she was still human. And Trey Selkirk walked her over, they leaned on each other as the paramedic drew back the wet sheet like a shroud, and Kay heard herself let out a sound like a long yelp. All the other yelps inside her she forced back down because in that terrible moment she felt she was stealing a woman named Francie Cadotte’s grief.

  Val took in the string of lighted Chinese lanterns draped across the overhang of the Lake Wendaban Community Center: blue, red, yellow, green. Two sets of double doors stood propped open and lake people—cottagers, Ojibways, townspeople, outfitters, permanent residents, youth camp owners—streamed in, stopping at the ticket table to pay the ten dollar price of admission. Val, Kay, and Decker made their way up the sets of new wooden steps set into the rock, heading for the live music by the Finger Pickin’ Pea Pickers that would any minute now turn into square dancing. Gripping all the skirting of her new dress closer to her legs to keep from catching them on the rough wood railings, Val stepped lightly in a pair of soft leather flats she borrowed from the closet in the Camp Sajo office. Caroline Selkirk was nowhere around to ask, but Decker thought she wouldn’t mind.

  Or, for that matter, even care.

  At the table by the entrance, where the Lake Wendaban Youth Alliance banner was hung, Decker presented a check made out ahead of time that made a big impression on the ticket sellers. Through the two sets of double doors at the back, Val could see a line of barbecues set up for grilling burgers and hot dogs. A portable bar was selling beer and soft drinks.

  The five-piece band was at the far end of the room that served as a bingo hall for the lake and town, and was lustily riding what even Val recognized as the “Wabash Cannonball.” The sound system was strong enough to let the banjos outtalk the people clustered all around the community center, some café tables and chairs had been set around for sore feet, and a silent raffle for quilts hung over dowels suspended on the far side, away from the band.

  Val recognized some players from the night she stumbled into the meeting at Camp Sajo and got knocked out during her attempt to chase down a disappearing Charlie Cable. A couple of white-haired men were wearing panama hats to keep the sun, that was getting close to setting, out of their eyes and Canoe Head t-shirts tucked into their elastic-waist pants. There were the outfitters, dressed in neutral baseball caps and tops and shorts made to dry in five minutes. There were youth camp directors and townsfolk, and all the beer was pale ale in plastic glasses.

  Shelley Timms, the square dance caller, introduced herself and her handsome springer spaniel Finnegan, who was waiting for the human entertainment to begin. The caller, an energetic brunette wearing tight jeans, a pink checkered shirt, and a blue neckerchief, was exhorting all you lads and lassies to pair up for the Virginia Reel and be careful where you grab—this met with a thunderous laugh—because inappropriate feeling up will not be allowed. Appropriate feeling up is encouraged outside in back of the center, where the lights have been shot out. Another thunderous laugh. While she continued to encourage bad behavior, and Val wondered what the wide-eyed kids in the community center were making of it, she happened to get a view of the docks and saw the Water Taxi—WE GET YOU THERE AND KEEP YOU WARM AND DRY—disgorging a couple of passengers.

  24

  It was Peter Hathaway—she’d recognize those muslin pants anywhere—and what she could only assume was his personal peppermint foo
t bather, Daria Flottner. Daria was indeed bald by choice, but she sported, erupting from the boniest part of her skull, a brown rat-tail of braided hair. She appeared to be wearing a toga, like a retro Hare Krishna. In their His and Hers shoes of the fisherman, they headed for the steps, and Val felt a moment of panic. So when Decker looked at her inquiringly, pointing to the dance floor where the couples were lining up, facing each other, she practically fell into him, nodding like she’d suddenly developed a palsy.

  Since the Virginia Reel was something Val thought was altogether best left to things called hoedowns and shindigs, quaint social customs occurring west of the Hudson River, she had never danced it. She looked around in another panic when the fiddle started up and Dixon Foote, next to Wade, was bobbing completely out of time from the music. “That there’s my oldest girl LeeAnn, Val,” he yelled over to her, and Val smiled grimly at the blond teen with a thick blue headband standing next to her.

  Hands on his hips, Decker was trying to give her looks of encouragement which was a little hard to distinguish from indigestion. Then the caller took them once through the steps and she realized they were the second couple down from the head couple, which meant they’d be leading before she knew it. When the music started up in earnest, out of the corner of her eye, Val saw Peter Hathaway swagger tastefully through the doorway, surveying the gathering like Gatsby overlooking his glitzy paper kingdom. If he had cuffs instead of a loose collarless shirt made in Sri Lanka, he’d tug at them. Daria appeared beside him in a swath of fabric the color of jaundice.

  Suddenly Val and Decker were the head couple. Bow, skip, elbow, skip, two hands, skip, do-si-do, skip. If she kept skipping she’d be all right. And then the slide, their solo, arms spread, holding hands, down the center of the aisle while the couples clapped them on, and Dixon Foote delivered a shrill whistle. And back the other way.