Lone Wolf

by Linwood Barclay

  “You think?” I said.

  “Advertising’s the key. You do a campaign, sign on somebody like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or like Bob Dole, remember when he did the Viagra ads? Somebody like that, respectable, big name.”

  I looked at Bob and we both shrugged.

  “Anyway, you get someone famous, the viewer knows they’re doing it in their pants, they think, ‘Hey, I can get my head around that.’ ”

  Bob grabbed his beer by the neck of the bottle and took a very long swig.

  “And let me tell ya,” Leonard said, “there’s more in diapers than what you think. There’s millions. Enough to build a first-class resort up here.”

  Bob turned his head. “What resort is that, Leonard?”

  “I’ve got a proposal for a chunk of land just up the lake”—he pointed north—“closer to Braynor. Sometime, we’ll take a walk, we’ll drive up there and hike in, I can show you. Both of you.”

  Bob persisted. “What are you talking about, a resort?”

  “A fishing resort. It’ll be beautiful. Like nothing this lake or any of the Fifty Lakes up around here have ever seen. First class all the way. Five hundred rooms by the time it’s done. First phase, we’ll have a hundred rooms I figure, then gear up the rest, a hundred at a time. Gives us time to get the waterfront redeveloped, put in a wharf—”

  “Wait a minute, hold on a sec,” Bob said. “What lake are you talking about? You don’t mean this lake?”

  “What lake you think I’m talking about?” Leonard said. To me, he said, “I don’t want you getting the idea I’m trying to put your dad out of business. There’s always going to be people, you know, people on a budget, need to come to a place like this.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “My place’ll be first-class all the way. And we’ll hire first-class guides, to run charters. Get half a dozen guys on a boat, take them out to the lake to fish. Maybe have a dozen boats or more. That should be enough. You figure, a lot of people, they’ll bring their own boats up. We’ll need a marina, to sell gas down by the water. Say, I just had an idea, Bob.”

  Bob looked almost too horrified to speak. “What?”

  “I could hire you on, to run charters. You could spend your whole summer up here, running fishing tours. No one knows this lake better than you. You’d know every little nook and cranny where someone could find a fish.”

  “If there are any left,” Bob said. “There’s already fewer fish in these waters now than five years ago, ten years ago. You put up some big resort, this lake’ll be fished out in no time. You’ll ruin it.”

  Leonard waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about that. There’ll always be fish. And listen, I gotta spend all this diaper money somehow!” He laughed.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said.

  “Shoot,” said Leonard.

  “Are you wearing a diaper right now?”

  Leonard smiled. “You can’t tell one way or another, can you?”

  Bob got up abruptly. “I’m turning in,” he said. He looked at me, a sadness in his eyes. “We still on to go fishing in the morning?” He was asking like it was the last time he’d ever be able to do it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “What time should I be ready?”

  “Six-thirty?”

  I swallowed. “Six-thirty?”

  Bob smiled. “You want to catch fish or not?”

  I sighed. “Sure, I’ll be ready.”

  “And we’ll take a walk up there, right?” Leonard said to Bob. “Before the week’s over? Show you where the hotel’s going, the dining hall? Maybe, someday, even a casino? If I can get the license.”

  Bob left without responding. Leonard watched Bob walk back to his cabin, then said to me, “He seems a bit upset about something, doesn’t he?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Hard to know what it could be.”

  “Anyway,” Leonard said, recovering quickly from Bob’s slight, “my company’s also going to sponsor this new reality show. It’s just a blast, listen. They take this guy, and they tell him, you’re gonna love this, they tell him his parents are dead, killed in an accident, whatever. But the parents are alive, and in on the joke, and they get to watch their son planning the funeral arrangements, going to the funeral. It’s absolutely hilarious. Then, at the reading of the will, the guy finds out he’s been stiffed, he’s not getting anything, and then they bring in the parents, who are really alive, and, here’s the best part, because we’re the sponsor, it’s worked right into the whole plotline that everyone has to wear a diaper, because when this guy sees his parents are still alive, you know he’s going to shit his pants, right? So when…”

  I went back into the cabin, unconcerned about seeming rude to Leonard. He seemed impervious to offense, giving or receiving.

  Dad and Betty and Hank were sitting at his table, dirty plates stacked to one side, a dozen empty beer bottles here and there. I said, “I think the bear got the wrong person.”

  Betty said, “That’s sort of what we were talking about.”

  Dad said, “Come on, Betty, this doesn’t make any sense.”

  I grabbed a beer, twisted off the cap, and took a chair at the table. “What doesn’t make any sense?” I asked.

  “You knew Betty was a nurse, right?” Hank said.

  I nodded. “You guys told me, you’re retired now.”

  “Don’t even tell him,” Dad said. “He’ll just make something of it.”

  “Arlen, I’m just telling you what I saw,” Betty said.

  “What did you see?” I asked. I remembered how Betty and her husband had gone back into the woods alone, how he’d held up the tarp for her so she could get another look. I’d branded them ghouls at the time.

  Dad shook his head, gazed down at the table, realizing it was pointless trying to keep Betty from telling me whatever it was she wanted to.

  “I worked in Emerg for years,” she said. “Off and on, but I was down there a lot. In a lot of different hospitals, too. Most of that time, down in the city, but when we first got married, Hank and I, we lived up in Alaska.”

  “No kidding?” I said. “I’ve never been up there, but have always wanted to see it. Ever since I saw that movie, with Pacino and Robin Williams, he’s the killer, and Pacino can’t get to sleep because the sun never goes down.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Hank said. “You should go.”

  “Sarah would love it, I bet. Can’t you take one of those cruises, see whales or something?”

  “Can I tell my story?” Betty said. Hank and I shut up. Betty continued, “So I’ve seen the whole gamut, you know? From guys who’ve fallen off their fishing boats to teenage gang members who’ve been knifed in the head.”

  “Yuck,” I said.

  Betty shrugged. “A few times, in Alaska, I helped treat people who’d been attacked by bears. Maybe you saw that documentary, the one about the guy who lived with grizzlies, got killed by one? Remember how they brought bits of him back in garbage bags? I’ve seen that kind of thing. I’ve seen what bears can do, when they attack, which is still very rare.”

  “I read that on the net,” I said. “They’d just as soon avoid people as have a run-in with them.”

  “But when they do,” Betty went on, paying little attention to me, “they maul their victims, swat them about, and they’ve got these huge paws, with claws. Person gets swiped with one of those, they’ve got scratches a couple inches apart. And bears got big jaws. They take a bite out of you, you notice something’s missing.”

  “Okay,” I said, getting interested.

  “I took a long look at that body, of Morton Dewart. And you know, I could be wrong, but he didn’t look to me like someone who’d been killed by a bear.”

  Dad said, “It could have been a wolf, you know. Maybe a cougar. They’ve got cougars up here, I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “Dad,” I said. “Let her tell it.”

  “And when I’ve worked in ERs in the city, I’ve seen things there, too,
that reminded me of how this Dewart guy looked. He was torn apart, in a frenzy, by an animal, or animals, with jaws a lot smaller than a bear’s.”

  A tiny shiver went down my spine. “Let me guess,” I said. “Dogs.”

  Betty nodded. “Like I say, it’s not like I did an autopsy out there in the woods or anything, but based on what I’ve seen over the years, and believe me, I’ve seen a lot, I’d say so.”

  Suddenly, we were interrupted.

  Leonard Colebert stepped into the cabin, threw his arms proudly into the air, like he’d scored a touchdown. “I’ll bet you can’t tell, to look at me, what I’ve just done.”

  8

  I TURNED IN SOON AFTER THAT, but didn’t sleep very well in my bed in cabin 3. The mattress sagged a bit in the middle, but that wasn’t the problem. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Betty had to say, that the death of Morton Dewart might not be as straightforward as it looked, plus there was something else that was gnawing at me in the middle of the night. I kept wanting the sun to come up so I could go outside and look for something I thought should be there, but which no one had found.

  So when it got to be six, the time I’d hoped to wake up to join Bob to go fishing, I was already awake. I sat up in bed, tired and logy-headed.

  The sun was streaming into my bedroom window from a low angle as I threw back the covers and touched my feet to the cold plank floors. I padded into the bathroom, where I had a quick shower. I’d grabbed a couple of towels, in addition to bedding, from Dad before heading over to my own, private accommodation. Other than my new socks and underwear, I had nothing that you could call a travel kit. I wished I had thought, when I’d bought my clothes, to pick up a toothbrush, razor, shaving cream, and a few other items.

  My teeth felt furry.

  Some stuff I could probably borrow from Dad, but the rest I’d need to get next time I was in Braynor. Once I was dressed and had combed my hair with my fingers and run my index finger over my teeth, I went outside. Rather than head down to the lake, or over to Dad’s cabin for some breakfast, I went straight into the woods.

  It wasn’t hard to find where Morton Dewart’s body had been. The grass was tramped down in the area around where the tarp had been draped over him. I’m no tracker, but I looked off into the forest, as if the location of the body were the center of a wheel, and imagined spokes leading off from it. All the possible routes Dewart might have taken to reach the point where he’d met his end. I was looking for disturbances in the pine needle–covered forest floor, or broken branches, anything to indicate what path he, or a bear, might have taken here.

  I didn’t see a damn thing.

  So I began walking in ever growing circles, starting at the point where the body had been found, searching the ground, scanning back and forth ahead of me. I ducked under branches, stepped over rocks, hopped over small dips in the terrain.

  I did not find what I was looking for.

  I walked back down to the lake, which was still and shimmering from the early morning sun. Down by the dock, Bob was sitting in his boat, examining lures in his tackle box, getting ready.

  “Morning!” he called. Very cheerful for so early in the day.

  “Be over in a minute,” I said, heading for Dad’s cabin. If I could get a dab of toothpaste, I’d take another run at my teeth with my finger.

  Dad’s cabin was unlocked and I opened the door quietly, figuring he’d still be asleep. There was no radio going, no sounds of bacon frying in a pan. But there was snoring. As I passed by Dad’s open bedroom door, I caught a peek of him in there, on his back on the far side of his double bed, making noises like a Union Pacific freight. Dad had done me a favor, putting me in cabin 3, instead of letting me crash on the couch and try to get to sleep with that racket going on.

  I crept past his door to the bathroom. The door was barely ajar, and I eased it open with my hand, hoping it wouldn’t squeak too much on its hinges.

  “Hey, sweetie,” came a voice from inside the bathroom. A voice that sounded very female. “I didn’t wake you up, did—”

  And then, when she saw who was coming in to see her, this woman with brown hair who looked, at a glance, to be about my father’s age, standing there in a white bra and black slacks that she was in the process of zipping up, screamed.

  Not a blood-curdling, oh-my-God-you’ve-come-here-to-kill-me scream, just a short one, of pure surprise. More a whoop, really, than a scream.

  I didn’t scream myself, although I might easily have done so. Instead, I was blabbering, “Sorry! Sorry! Didn’t know anyone was in here! Sorry!” I grabbed hold of the doorknob and yanked so hard on it that I slammed the door into my head, knocking myself back into the main room, almost stumbling over the couch before I caught myself.

  Dad was hopping out his bedroom door now, shouting, “Lana! What’s wrong?” And then he saw me, then clutched at the wall for support, and even in his barely awake state, started putting it all together. “Oh shit,” he said, looking at me. “What are you doing up this early?”

  “I’m going fishing,” I said. “I just wanted to rub some toothpaste on my teeth and jeez I didn’t know you had someone here why didn’t you tell me you were having company and I wouldn’t have walked in?”

  “Didn’t you bring a toothbrush?”

  “No, I did not bring a toothbrush. When I heard you were dead, for some reason, my first stop was not for a toothbrush and floss.”

  “You don’t have any floss either?”

  “Dad.”

  “What about when we were in town yesterday? Couldn’t you have picked up what you needed then? Honestly, can’t a person have even a little privacy around—”

  The bathroom door swung open and Lana stepped out, a pink button-up-the-front blouse pulled on, her fingers doing up the top button. “Arlen, stop, please, it was just an accident.”

  Again, I said, “Listen, I’m sorry, I had no idea anyone was in there. I just wanted to brush my teeth was all and—”

  “Yeah, well, the bathroom’s free now, so why don’t you do what you have to do,” Dad suggested.

  “I’m Lana,” she said, extending a hand. “You must be Zachary.”

  “Yeah, Zack, yes,” I said, shaking her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lana.”

  “Lana Gantry,” she said. “I’m a friend of your father’s.” She smiled. “Although you probably figured that out by now.”

  The implications of what I’d stumbled into were now starting to sink in. This woman was a friend of my father’s. She was in his cabin at 6:20 in the morning. No one came to visit at 6:20 in the morning. Which meant that she must have arrived late last night, after the party broke up. Which meant that she must have spent the night with my father and oh God there are just some things you don’t want to think about why did I have to walk in here and how do I get out of this gracefully?

  “I know all about you.” Lana smiled. “You’re a writer for The Metropolitan now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, looking at her closely for the first time now. She was probably in her early sixties, trim, a pretty impressive figure, which I was able to discern even now that she had her top on. A beautiful face with full, already red, lips, high cheekbones, brown hair with subtle streaks of silver in it that would probably have fallen just to her shoulders if she didn’t have it pulled back and clipped.

  “It’s a real treat to see you again,” Lana said. “Needless to say, you’ve sure grown up.”

  A puzzled looked must have crossed my face. “I’m sorry, I’m having just a bit of trouble placing you…Wait a minute.”

  Dad shook his head, annoyed, and was about to say something when Lana turned to him, putting a finger to her lips. “Let’s see if he remembers.”

  Dad said, “Lana, it’s really not necessary that—”

  “Shhh,” Lana said to him.

  There was something about her that was familiar. “What did you say your last name was?” I asked.

  “Gantry.”

&
nbsp; “Mrs. Gantry?”

  “I think he’s getting warm.” Lana smiled at Dad.

  “You used to live down the street from us? And moved away, when I was, like, thirteen?”

  She smiled, stepped forward and gave me a hug, followed by a peck on the cheek. “Good memory.”

  “Lana’s husband, Walter, died a few years back,” Dad said. “We both ended moving up this way, ran into each other in Braynor. It was, uh, sort of a coincidence.” Dad reached around behind the bedroom door and came out with his crutches, which he tucked under each arm so he could come out into the room.

  “Have you had any breakfast?” Lana asked me.

  “Uh, no, but listen…I have to get going anyway. Bob’s taking me out fishing this morning, and I don’t want to intrude.”

  “Nonsense. Let me make you up something. You can take it out with you, if you want.” She was already heading over to the kitchen counter. “How about peanut butter and toast? Or a fried egg sandwich? That would only take a moment.”

  Dad said, “Do you really have time, Lana?” To me, he said, “Lana runs the café in town.”

  “This’ll only take a sec,” she said. “I’ve got the girls trained to open up, I don’t have to be there first thing. So how about a fried egg sandwich?”

  “A fried egg sandwich would be great,” I said. She had a small frying pan out before I could finish the sentence, and now was in the fridge getting out a carton of eggs.

  “That’s something, the two of you running into each other, years after you left the neighborhood,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” Lana Gantry said, putting two slices of bread into the toaster. “By the way, I think you’ve met my nephew, Orville?”

  I blinked. “The chief? Of police?”

  “I know he was out here, what with that horrible business of the man who was killed by the bear. What a terrible, terrible thing that was.”