Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  He pushed his hair back from his face. “Read me the rest, Val,” he said, studying the tip of the cigar, but only out of habit. He couldn’t seem to focus. Out on the lake, close, a loon made its three-note ghostly call. The sound settled her heart. Not every pleasurable thing could be flung away from them by Leslie Decker. But then she cleared her throat and started to read the last part of the final entry to the broken man beside her, and she wasn’t at all sure:

  I finally got some good pictures today with my new camera. Dad’s right, candid shots are best. Of course now I’m going to have to think of something else to make Caroline do for me since night shifts won’t be a problem anymore. But there’s been so much excitement in camp afterwards that I can hardly think about it yet. Maybe I should have her do my laundry? Or let me out of waterfront search drills? Well, I’ll think of something.

  So today was day three of the trip to the waterfalls—big whoop—and same old same old. We let the kids play around in the waterfall pool for what seemed like hours. I was so bored. Alex, who’s nineteen and kind of likes me, says I can go spot at the bottom of the water chute and we can start letting the kids go down the chute.

  Then he gets Max and Belinda to get them to wear their life jackets like diapers. The girls always shriek and hug each other, falling all over themselves and tugging at their bikinis while the boys waddle around in their life jacket diapers going “goo goo.” Off to the side that idiot Marcus is fumbling with straps and looking at the others, not wanting to make himself look any more like an idiot than he is but still none of them will want to go down the chute with him.

  I follow the rushing water over the boulders, it’s maybe a meter and a half deep, and not very steep at all. It just seems like fun because of the twists and turns, and the water foams up high and makes a lot of noise. It’s pretty fast. So they’re all out of sight back at the waterfall pool and I’m down on the rocks near the last big turn in the chute.

  I crouch down in the water and go under just long enough to try out the camera. The picture’s pretty sharp in the viewfinder. I take a shot of my long hair swirling all around my face. We’ll see how it comes out but I’m thinking it’s going to be very cool. My hair might even look like snakes!

  “Ready?” Alex shouts, and then again, “ready?” I yell back ready, rolling my eyes, wondering if he can hear me over the noise of the water. All of a sudden I see a kid’s legs come around the bend, then the force of the water tumbles him right over, and it’s Marcus Cadotte and the life jacket slips off one of his legs—of course he wasn’t doing it right—and he’s flailing around and goes completely underwater. It’s amazing how the water can take even a big fat kid like Marcus.

  I figure he’ll pop up closer to me any minute now, but he doesn’t, he’s such a bother, so I plunge in and look around. My snake hair is getting in the way, but I can see Marcus on the far side of the chute, pulling at his foot where it’s got stuck between a couple of big rocks. His swim trunks are that blue and white Hawaiian print they were showing maybe three years ago so he must have got them at a thrift shop. No one the size of Marcus Cadotte should wear a print like that. I look through my viewfinder at him and that swimsuit practically fills the entire frame, so I scan up and find his face.

  He sees me, his eyes are big and his mouth opens. The bubbles that come out—is he trying to say something?—make a cool shot and I think this will be the first in the Mar-curse series. He flings his body this way and that, bucking so hard I think he’s going to pull his foot off. I move closer underwater and get another shot of his face, it’s so expressive. I should get help, but when will I ever get a chance like this again? This is real. This is real and everything that’s safe and boring is ripped away, and everything else we ever are in the world is less less less than this moment.

  Marcus sinks, his bum bouncing on the rock bottom, and his arms look graceful. Marcus’s arms and my hair make a kind of dance, I’m dancing with Marcus Cadotte, his eyes staring without blinking up at the sunlight on the water’s surface. Three quick strokes and I’m back on shore, calling for Alex and Max and Belinda, yelling, “Stop, stop! There’s something wrong with Marcus.”

  But two kids make it through the natural water chute, bumping up against the obstruction near the end, before Alex stops the fun and the world shuts down. Because I’m wet I later get the credit for trying to free the Cadotte kid’s foot, even though we all stood around watching Alex and Belinda, the strongest swimmers, dive again and again, crying, trying to do something, to change the course of history.

  They choppered us all back. Pretty cool. Not even Caroline has ever been choppered.

  I wonder if we can get the Toronto Star reporter back up here to do a new piece? We can put that cute Jeremy out in front. He’s got the right look for us, he really does, and it would be great to get that U.C.C. sweatshirt in the picture. I wonder if club soda would take out that Kool-Aid stain?

  27

  Afterward.

  In the middle of the night, Val’s life felt like one long afterward. There was her voice in Decker’s dimly lit bedroom as she read the final entry in Leslie Selkirk’s spiral notebook. And then there was afterward. Decker sank into silence as his cigar burned down—just one more pleasurable thing Leslie Decker got between—but he seemed more alert. For him, there were no surprises, not really.

  But for Val, it was different. Val worried that, back home in her New York life, every melon she’d press for ripeness, every wine list she’d scan for something Chilean, every shampoo bottle she’d check for silicone before buying, and wondering whether it mattered, would get stacked against what she had read in Leslie’s diary. Every smallest action would bleed into the terrible truth of a teenager letting a boy drown. Watching death happen. Seeing an opportunity to snap a picture, to dispel a boredom that went deeper than boredom. Would Val ever get past the hot pink scrawl that—afterwards—showed a chilling lack of satisfaction in the act? Wondering only about a Kool-Aid stain on a cute guy’s shirt.

  Afterwards, she had held up the camera and asked Decker whether this was the one. Whether the chronicle of a drowning was still on it. He couldn’t say and they agreed that on it, not on it, either way was awful. No more tonight, she had said. And when he said, It’ll keep, she knew he was right and she knew it was all just more afterward. She set the camera back in the Army surplus box that held horrors. And she closed the journal of someone who seemed other than completely human, and slid it back inside. Back down with Janie’s Weebles and Marcus’s cross and Jeremy’s wallet.

  Outside the open window, where mosquitoes bounced against the screen, the moon was high, and the narrow strip of its white rippling light shot across the surface of the lake to where she and Wade Decker sat in his room without speaking. Her eyes stared into the white light, wondering whether what the two of them had discovered gave her any new insight into the murder. It had to. The death of Marcus Cadotte had been a terrible event in the lives of anyone who had loved the boy. And a terrible mark against the camp, which had never fully recovered.

  The Selkirks had survived it, somehow, and surely Caroline’s new annual vernal rite that had nothing to do with sex—opening a summer camp, year after year, with dwindling numbers—was an act of such cockeyed hope that she couldn’t have held her sister responsible for what Caroline herself didn’t even see as a failure. And Charlie Cable hadn’t known that Marcus was his son—hadn’t known Marcus at all, for that matter. And although Kay knew and loved him, her tale to Val about the discovery of Leslie’s body made it clear that she loved Leslie as well.

  She couldn’t bring Martin Kelleher into the picture for Leslie’s death based on what she had done to Marcus. It just didn’t work. On some level, Caroline had loved her sister. And Kay Stanley had loved her. And, of course, Charlie had revered her in that innocent warrior way he had. The Leslie who triumphed in that newspaper photo of the two of them on Parliament Hill after an im
portant vote. The Leslie who had genuinely worked to preserve the lake environment, before she seemed to shift her allegiances to the devious Martin.

  If she had, then why had she? Was she sick of watching the historic Camp Sajo sink slowly to its death, the way she had watched Marcus when she was just seventeen? Sick of being pulled down with it? Just plain wanting out and seeing what seemed like the only way—sell off Selkirk Peninsula and Camp Sajo to Martin Kelleher—of pulling her poor, misguided sister out with her, without her even realizing it?

  Just as she was slipping the stick pin through the latch of Leslie Selkirk Decker’s little box of horrors, she remembered the flash drive, and pulled it out. MY FOOLPROOF PLAN FOR SAVING OUR BELOVED CAMP, rubber-banded around the drive. How could Leslie have been plotting with Martin to sell off all the Selkirk property on the one hand, and yet coming up with foolproof plans to save it on the other? It struck Val that to Leslie maybe saving the property meant something other than retaining ownership. Maybe, for her, it was still all about the environment, a throwback to her eco-warrior days shoulder to shoulder with Charlie Cable.

  She handed Decker a glass of water and left him in the room lit partly by the hurricane lamp and partly by the pale moon. He seemed restless. So was she. As soon after dawn as she could handle the boat comfortably, she’d get him to the nearest hospital. With her penlight in one hand and Leslie’s flash drive in the other, she quietly let herself out of the cottage and headed down the path to Decker’s boat.

  It was three a.m. and even the night seemed drained, like it had gone on too long. She kept her eyes on the path, feeling all around her the strange heavy emptiness of summer nights. A rustle off to the left, a snap off to the right. On the dock, she lifted her laptop out of Decker’s boat and carried it back up to the cottage. A quick check found Decker still awake, still silent, his head turned toward the moonlight.

  Val powered up the laptop in Decker’s kitchen, her eyes squinting against the bright screen, and inserted the flash drive with the foolproof plan for saving their beloved camp into the USB port. The directory showed just one file: InCubeOps.docx. Surprised, Val sat back. What on Earth was Leslie Decker doing with the file for one of Schlesinger’s biggest sellers? She opened the file.

  InCubeOps:

  America’s Secret Program to Destabilize its Allies

  by

  Anonymous

  The book had been published five years ago, with Peter Hathaway as the editor who had acquired it. And the only one who knew the identity of Anonymous. Twelve printings, one sequel, and a Pulitzer Prize. It was one of those dramatic exposés that combines a high moral tone with a fast, sexy prose style. Not too high and moral to kill sales, not too fast and sexy to be dismissed. Anonymous had hit all the right notes: government plot, covert dickishness, bewildered allies, intimidated enemies, policy wonk clubbishness, and scores of “necessary casualties.” All in service to what some stolen, highly classified documents termed “geopolitical redistricting.” Anonymous even managed to trot some sexual intrigue into the mix.

  Not at all Val Cameron’s kind of story—but certainly Peter Hathaway’s. It was his prize and he guarded it more closely, he’d have them all believe, than the U.S. government had guarded the whole InCubeOps secret program. On the strength of this find, and because Anonymous wasn’t turning up, he was booked on the major news magazine shows, and finally given his own imprint. It had made his career.

  And here the file was, in Leslie Decker’s hands.

  Even Val hadn’t seen the book in manuscript form.

  In the semi-darkness, she poured herself a glass of water and took a little tour around Decker’s cottage kitchen. Her eyes strayed over the canned goods stacked neatly on the open shelves, over the cooking utensils hung up on a pegboard. She sipped. Then she sat and stared again at the prose on her screen. And in the next moment, she grew cold very quickly.

  What if this book was a work of fiction? The government had denounced it loudly when it came out, but when that only made people believe it was all true, it had distanced itself quickly and refused, ever after, to comment. Had Leslie Selkirk Decker written this book? Was that it? Had the dangerous woman who watched, unperturbed, as a peer drowned, who had stolen keepsakes, who had managed her own treacherous covert operation with the acquisitive Martin Kelleher, been capable of this story? The girl with the childish scrawl in hot pink. The girl with a deadly conversational style. The girl who had taken a knife to the afghan her fucking bitch sister had used to cover up herself and Leslie’s own object of desire. Could such a woman have written this book that had yielded millions in sales? Was that her foolproof plan to save their beloved camp?

  Was she Anonymous?

  Did Peter Hathaway know? Had he encouraged her, brought her along, played nursemaid to the project as she wrote? She recalled Caroline’s telling her that the Camp Sajo office had been temporary space for different cottager friends—including Peter Hathaway, who had spent a month with them, when he needed an office and his cottage was being re-roofed and logs were being replaced. That must have been about half a dozen years ago, and Val remembered that month he had tried telecommuting from his cottage.

  Was that when he had worked out a secret deal with Leslie Decker, who was watching the Selkirk family camp head toward bankruptcy? Or had the strange, perfidious Leslie really stayed anonymous, even to him, and submitted the work to Peter Hathaway at Schlesinger Publishing Company just because she knew him from years and years on Lake Wendaban? But where was the money? She remembered the Toronto Dominion deposit slips in Leslie’s office for thirty and forty grand—a start? But there was only a single question that gripped Val: Could Leslie Decker have written such a hefty book without Wade’s knowing about it?

  Yet here was the file.

  Val scrolled down, through the Track Changes, where it was clear to her it was the author, not the editor, making changes. In one margin: Too far-fetched? Should I pull back here, maybe change the name of the French contact from Henri to Henriette? Make it female? Val kept scrolling down. In another margin: If anyone ever catches me on this Tony Blair thing, I can say I met him at a conference back in 2005, and that I was Anon’s source on this.

  Page after page, Val saw paragraphs deleted, self-questionings about word choice, corrections of punctuation, tough marginal questions about how to represent sources, and ongoing monologues about troubling passages. Won’t be my last chance to fix this section! Midway through the revision of InCubeOps Val came across one of the writer’s marginal comments that made her breath catch in her throat: Get Val to fact-check these dates. Whole section needs verisimilitude.

  Val?

  Val had never met Leslie Selkirk Decker.

  And she found it hard to believe that the woman who stole keepsakes of her heartless triumphs knew the word verisimilitude. The dates Anonymous had needed fact-checking covered a miserable series of bombings in Paris that was part of the so-called InCubeOps operation but had been chalked up to Islamic militants. Get Val to fact check these dates—

  Get Val.

  And then her shoulders drooped.

  It was Peter. Not Leslie.

  Peter Hathaway had written InCubeOps.

  The twelve printings, the sequel, the talk shows, the Pulitzer, the publishing coup, the imprint of his own, the…hoax.

  His career had been built on a hoax.

  But why had he given the file to Leslie Decker? What service could she possibly—

  She couldn’t. And he didn’t.

  Val’s mind worked slowly, but she stayed with where it was taking her. Leslie Selkirk had come across the file, somehow—maybe InCubeOps was what Peter Hathaway was working on in the office at Camp Sajo—and had made herself a copy of it on this flash drive. If she had cagily asked Peter what he was working on, he might have laughed it off, shrugged it off, telling her, oh, just some boring work stuff—memos, you kno
w the kind of thing.

  And when she had checked out the file she had copied, sometime later, when she was alone, Leslie Decker, the Leslie who may not have known the word verisimilitude but who knew just how long it took a fourteen-year-old kid to drown, that Leslie Decker had indeed found a foolproof plan to save her beloved camp—the camp she had doomed when she let Marcus Cadotte die.

  She blackmailed him.

  She couldn’t have written that book.

  But she could damn well blackmail the man who did.

  And the purple flash drive with just one file, wrapped in a victorious note—MY FOOLPROOF PLAN TO SAVE OUR BELOVED CAMP—was just another one of this unfinished human’s trophies. Like a camera. A cross. A wallet. Some toys. Who would care? Who would look? Foolproof, save, beloved, exclamation points. Just another half-cracked Leslie plan that would only end in vapor, like all the others. Who would possibly know that the woman who had protested with Charlie Cable and plotted with Martin Kelleher had finally hit pay dirt?

  With this one small weapon, this flash drive, Leslie Decker could do more to Peter Hathaway, in a sense, than she had ever done to anyone else. He was without a doubt her masterpiece. She was stealing a bigger wallet than Jeremy Nolan’s and watching a man drown horribly that, for him, had nothing to do with a clumsy, sneakered foot stuck between two unforgiving underwater boulders.

  Very carefully, Val saved and closed the file, ejected the flash drive, and zipped it into the inside pocket of her briefcase. 4:33 a.m. She wondered if she would always remember that time. Had she tumbled down the rabbit hole? Or finally climbed her way out? She turned off her laptop. While she waited for it to shut down, she shivered, and remembered the top she had stashed in her briefcase. Still there? Her hand pulled out the book weighing it down—the advanced reading copy of Cling! that she had mistakenly packed at the Hathaway cottage—and set it on the smooth green metal of Decker’s table. By the time she got the top over her head, the trembling was worse, and the top wasn’t helping.