North of Nowhere

by Steve Hamilton

  “Keep the game right here in the bar. We don’t play at some stranger’s house.”

  “Typical,” he said. “You never want to go anywhere.”

  That’s how I knew Jackie was getting over it. Every day, he was acting a little bit more like his old self again. Whether I liked it or not.

  The summer passed. It got colder at night. The sunsets came earlier. They kept working on the golf course down in Brimley, but nobody was talking about major development. The new money hadn’t found us yet.

  For now at least, our secret was still safe.

  I worked on the last cabin every day, making runs to the dump with half-melted bed frames and blackened pipes, clearing away all the charred wood, getting the site ready. In another couple of weeks they’d deliver my load of white pine logs. I’d rebuild the cabin by hand, doing it the right way, the way my father had taught me back when I was eighteen years old. I’d use the original foundation, and my father’s stone chimney, and I’d rebuild the whole thing from the ground up, no matter how long it took me.

  All that work, out in the sun, it should have cleared my head. It should have helped me get over it.

  But it kept coming back to me, usually at night. Just as I closed my eyes, I’d be back on the boat. I’d see the same scene, played out over and over, hear the same words spoken.

  Then one day, one of the last warm days of the summer, I was breaking up the one corner of the old cabin that hadn’t burned. I would use it for firewood. I had sharpened my ax, and was swinging it in the air, splitting the logs in half, and then into quarters.

  Swing. Chunk. Swing. Chunk. Swing.

  I stopped.

  The ax hung in the air. I dropped it to the ground.

  I stood there and thought about it, played it back again and again, just the one piece of it, one small loop out of the whole episode.

  I got in my truck and drove.

  Bennett was sitting at one of the tables when I walked in. Ham was behind the bar. I didn’t see Margaret anywhere.

  “Alex!” Bennett said when he looked up at me. “How the hell are you? I’m glad you stopped in! Ham, pour the man a beer.”

  I sat down. Ham brought the beer over. He put his hand on my shoulder as he put the beer down in front of me. “On the house,” he said.

  “Damned straight,” Bennett said. “This man never pays for another drink. Not in this bar.”

  I didn’t drink the beer.

  “Tell me again,” I said. “How did he get the money out of the house?”

  “What?”

  “Your son, Sean. The one who took off with all the money. How did he get it out of the house?”

  “We were assuming he had it under the bag—you know, those black plastic bags they were wearing.”

  “Seven hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “Minus thirty thousand for his partners. He had all that money under that bag?”

  “He must have, Alex. How else would he have gotten it out of the house?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “How else?”

  “Alex, what are you talking about? What’s the problem here?”

  “I’m just wondering,” I said. “Maybe he did something else with all that money. Maybe he threw it out the window. It would explain why he broke the window in the first place.”

  Bennett looked at me. He raised his hands in the air. “I don’t get it.”

  “If he threw it out the window, somebody else must have picked it up.”

  I looked over my shoulder. Ham was pouring another beer. He stopped.

  “How did it work, Ham? Were you on the shoreline? Or on the river?”

  “Hold on one minute,” Bennett said. “Surely you’re not accusing Ham. You can’t come in here and say that about my son, Alex. Not my good son. Not Ham.”

  “It wasn’t just Sean and Ham, your good son,” I said. “It was you. You were in on this from the beginning, Bennett. And you know what the best part is? That little speech you gave me on the boat. Remember? ‘There’s no good money, Alex. It’s all bad. I hate money, Alex.’”

  “Alex, you are so out of line right now. I know you helped us out, but…”

  “When your friends got arrested, you kept lying about it,” I said. “When Jackie got fucking kidnapped, you kept lying about it.”

  “All right, that’s enough. You’re gonna have to leave, Alex.”

  “What are you gonna buy with that money?” I said. “A nice new SUV to drive around? An even bigger television?”

  “Alex, out.”

  “Don’t you want to know how I figured it out?”

  Bennett sat there with his arms folded. He didn’t say a word.

  “When we were on that boat, before Vargas’s boat got to us, I was telling Blondie to take the money. You remember that? I was saying, ‘Here, take it. Give us Jackie. Take the money and run before Isabella’s men get here.’ You were behind me saying, ‘Don’t be a fool, take the money.’ And I was just thinking, Bennett, shut up for God’s sake. I wasn’t really paying attention to what you were saying. It didn’t come to me until today, as a matter of fact. You told him there was seven hundred thousand dollars in the bag. You used that exact figure.”

  “That’s how much we were talking about,” Bennett said. “You just said so yourself, when you asked me where Sean had put the money. You said seven hundred thousand dollars. That’s how much Vargas had in his safe.”

  “You didn’t know that,” I said. “At the time, you had no idea. Or at least you shouldn’t have. First you told me there was only thirty thousand, and Sean got nothing. Remember? Then you told me there must have been more after all, and that Sean had disappeared. You never could have known how much money was in that safe, Bennett. Unless you were in on it yourself.”

  I could hear Ham coming back out from behind the bar.

  “How long has Jackie known you?” I said. “Fifty years? A half a century of being your best friend?”

  This is what the whole summer had come down to. This summer of secrets. The biggest secret of all was what a bag full of money could make a man do.

  “It’s all on you, Bennett. Everything we had to go through. Vargas dead, your son’s friend dead. Jackie almost dead. It’s all on you.”

  Ham was right behind me. Bennett was standing up. They were both a hell of a lot bigger than I was.

  I didn’t care.

  It’s like I told the dog. If I know I’m right, I’ll fight anybody.

  A few hours later, I stopped in at the Glasgow Inn. It was cold that night. It was cold and the wind was blowing hard enough to drive three-foot waves against the rocks. The sound was familiar to me. It came to me as soon as I turned off the truck and listened.

  Summer was over, that’s what the sound said. No matter what the calendar said, the lake was turning the page to fall. For the last ten thousand years, the lake has always had its way.

  When I walked in, I saw a nice fire going. It was a welcome sight. I sat down in one of the big, overstuffed chairs and put my feet up. Jackie took one look at me, then brought over an ice bag and a Canadian.

  “Now what?” he said.

  “My face is having a hell of a week,” I said. I held the ice bag over my left eye.

  “You gonna tell me what happened?”

  “Sit down.”

  He sat in the other chair and put his feet up next to mine.

  “First you gotta tell me something,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You gotta tell me about your father.”

  “Come on, Alex.”

  “I’m serious. I want to hear it. Start at the beginning.”

  “It’s a long story,” he said. He looked into the fire.

  “My evening is free,” I said. “Tell me.”

  So he did. While the wind blew outside, I sat by the fire and listened to the story of Elias Connery, how he came to Lake Superior when he was twenty years old, how he fell in love with a girl in a bar, and also with the lake itself. He went to wa
r, he had a son, he came back to the lake, and now he was a part of it. And would be forever.

  I didn’t want him to finish, because then it would be my turn. I’d have to tell him what had happened over at O’Dell’s place. After fifty years, he was about to lose his best friend. Meaning he’d be stuck with me now. Alex McKnight would be his best friend in the world.

  Talk about a big job. I hoped I could handle it.

  I sure as hell was gonna try.

  Keep Reading for an Excerpt

  from Steve Hamilton’s Next Alex McKnight Mystery

  BLOOD IS THE SKY

  Available in Hardcover

  from St. Martin’s Minotaur!

  I saw a lot of fires when I was a cop in Detroit. I was supposed to help secure the scene and then get the hell out of the way, but sometimes I’d stick around and watch the firefighters doing their work. I saw some real battles, but when they were done, the building would always still be standing. That was the thing that got to me. The windows would be blown out, and maybe there’d be a big hole in the roof, but the building would still be there.

  Years later, I watched a Lake Superior storm taking down a boathouse. When the storm let up, there was nothing left but a concrete slab covered with sand. It wasn’t surprising. Anyone who lives up here knows that water is stronger than fire. Water wins that one going away. But at least water cleans up after itself. It does the job all the way. When water destroys, it makes everything look new. It can even be beautiful.

  Fire doesn’t do that. When a fire is done, what’s left is only half destroyed. It is charred and brittle. It is obscene. There is nothing so ugly in all the world as what a fire leaves behind, covered in ashes and smoke and a smell you’ll think about every day for the rest of your life.

  That’s why I had to start rebuilding the cabin. Maybe I was fooling myself, but it was something I had to do. Even though the days were getting shorter. Even though the pine trees were bending in the cold October wind. No man in his right mind would have started rebuilding then. So of course I did.

  I had already taken away most of the old wood, those logs that would have lasted another three hundred years if they hadn’t burned. I had hauled them away along with the pipes burned black and the bed frames twisted by the heat. There was nothing now but the stone foundation, stripped of the wooden floor, and the chimney, the last thing my father had made with his bare hands before he died. I knew that the snow would come, and it would cover the black stains on the ground, and the chimney would stand alone in the cold silence like a grave marker. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  The rebuilding didn’t start well. The man who said he’d be there on Monday with my white pine logs rolled up on Wednesday morning, acting like he had nothing to apologize for. He had one of those long flatbeds with the crane on it, with enough lifting power to set every last log down as gently as a teacup. But it took him all morning to clear the truck, and he damn near knocked over the chimney in the process. Then he stood around for a while, trying to tell me about his own cabin down in Traverse City. “The cabins I passed on the way in,” he finally said. “You built those?”

  “My father did.”

  “Looks like you had a big one here,” he said. He hitched his pants up as he looked around the clearing. “What happened? Did it burn down?”

  “It did.”

  “Hell of a thing,” he said. “You gotta be careful with those wood stoves.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “Looks like you learned the hard way.”

  I let a few seconds tick by. “It wasn’t a wood stove,” I finally said. “Somebody burned it down.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “This gentleman and I, we had a little disagreement.”

  It took a moment for that one to sink in. “Are you shittin’ me, man? You gotta be shittin’ me.”

  “You don’t have to believe it.”

  “I suppose you’re gonna rebuild this all by yourself, too.”

  “I’m gonna try.”

  “Seriously, where’s all your help at?”

  “If I need help, I’ll get it.”

  “It’s October,” he said. “You’re not thinking of starting this now, are you?”

  “I’d have to be crazy, you mean.”

  “Is what I’m saying, yeah. Unless you’re just shittin’ me some more.”

  “Well, I appreciate your concern,” I said. “And I appreciate you bringing up my logs. You were only two days late. Have a good trip back home.”

  He was still shaking his head as he drove away. I listened to the distant sound of his truck as he rumbled onto the main road and headed south. When he was gone, there was nothing left to hear but a steady wind coming off the lake.

  “Well, Pops,” I said to the wind, “let’s see if I remember how to do this.”

  This was the cabin he had built in the summers of 1980 and 1981. I helped him for a few weeks in that second year. I was already out of baseball and working as a police officer in Detroit, and this was my last attempt to make peace with him. The days were hot. I remember that. And as I helped him peel and scribe the logs, it brought back yet another summer, back in 1968, the first time I had ever been up here in Paradise, Michigan. I was only seventeen then, with one more year of school ahead of me before heading off to single A ball in Sarasota. He wanted me to go to college, but I had my own ideas. Thirteen years later, he finished this cabin, his biggest and best. His masterpiece. Six months after that he was dead.

  The cabin may have burned to the ground, but at least we had those summers.

  Twenty years later, on a cold October day, I started all over again. I cut the sill logs first, the logs that would run along the bottom of each wall, then secured them to the foundation with J-bolts. I cut a groove along the outside edge with the chain saw, just as he had taught me. When it rained, the water would collect in the groove and drip away instead of running down the foundation. Then I cut the grooves for the floor joists. I put rough plywood down for the time being—I’d put the nice hardwood floorboards down when the outside was finished.

  That was the first day.

  When the light was gone, I went down to the Glasgow Inn for dinner. My friend Jackie owns the place. If you ever find yourself in Paradise, just go to the one blinking light in the center of town, then go north another hundred yards or so. It’ll be there on the right. When you step into the place, you won’t see a typical American bar—there are no mirrors to stare into while you drink, no smoky dark corners to nurse a bad mood in. The chairs are comfortable, there’s a fire going in the hearth every night, regardless of the weather, and there’s a man there named Jackie Connery who looks like an old Scottish golf caddie. If you ask him the right way, Jackie will even risk his liquor license and give you a cold Canadian beer.

  I take that last part back. Those Canadian beers are just for me.

  I felt like hell the next morning. My hands were sore, my arms were sore, my legs were sore, and my back was sore. Aside from that I was fine.

  I had my coffee and looked up at the dark clouds. Rain was the last thing I needed, because today was the day I’d start building the walls.

  I scribed each log the way my father had done. I did most of the heavy cutting with the chain saw, stopping every half hour to sharpen it. I used an ax to cut the notches, keeping both hands together as I swung it, like a baseball bat. That much he didn’t have to teach me. You can’t be accurate with your hands apart.

  Of course, cutting the scarf just right is the hard part. Or as the old man liked to say, this is where you separated the men from the boys. The idea is to cut it so perfectly that one log will rest on top of the other with no daylight in between. If you do it right, you don’t need any chinking. If you don’t do it right, then God help you. You’ve got no business building a cabin in the first place.

  The first log I tried cutting that morning, I didn’t get right. The second log was worse. The third log you could have
put in a carnival and charged people five dollars a head to come laugh at it.

  The wind picked up. It looked like rain was coming. I kept working. I was halfway through the fourth log when the hornets attacked me.

  The nest was hanging from one of the birch trees. They had already been smoked out the night of the fire, the nest partially caved in by the spray of the fire hoses. They were trying to rebuild, just like I was, but they had run out of time. Now half-crazed by the cold weather, most of them near the end of their natural lives, they saw me moving around below them, rattling around with my chain saw. They decided to go down fighting.

  I slapped two off the back of my neck, another off my arm. “Crazy fucking things! Get away from me!” The next one caught me right on the cheek and that was it for me. The day was already going bad enough.

  I had my extension ladder there, figuring I’d need it eventually, so I braced it up against the birch tree and climbed up with my ax. I was just about to swing at the branch. I was going to take the whole thing down with one good whack, and then I was going to soak the nest with gasoline and set it on fire. Knowing me, I would have emptied the can, a full two gallons of gasoline, and then I would have thrown a lit match right in the middle of it. All the leaves on the ground would have gone up at once and I’d be running around with my pants on fire and both eyebrows singed right off my face.

  I stopped myself just in time.

  I took a deep breath and climbed back down the ladder. I dropped the ax.

  It wasn’t worth it. Watching the nest burn, sending the rest of those hornets to hell. They’d all be dead in another week, anyway.

  It was a lesson I had taken most of my life to learn. Sometimes you have to let things go.

  The rain came. The dark clouds stayed in the sky. I went back to work.

  I had come back up here in 1987. My marriage was over and I was off the police force, with a dead partner in the ground and a bullet in my chest. I came up here intending to sell off the land and the six cabins my father had built, but I didn’t do it. Somehow the Upper Peninsula was just what I needed. It was cold and unforgiving, even in the heart of summer. There was a terrible beauty to the place, and I could be alone up here in a part of the world where being alone was the rule and not the exception. I moved into the first cabin, the cabin I had helped him build myself, back when I was seventeen years old. I stayed up here and lived day to day and never thought I’d have to face my past again.