Misery Bay: An Alex McKnight Novel

by Steve Hamilton

  “No grandkids?”

  “No, not yet. There’s still time.”

  We were sounding like two human beings actually talking to each other. The first of many surprises we’d run into that day. I headed out to Newberry and it was starting to feel like the trip I had just made a week before to Houghton. This time, instead of that ruler-straight shot across the UP, we cut south and headed down toward Lake Michigan, passing through a string of small towns along the southern coast. Gulliver, Manistique, Thompson, and Cooks, places I hardly ever had any reason to see. As we drove, I gave him all the details from my two phone calls.

  “The undersheriff was very helpful,” I said. “He didn’t understand why I’d want to know more about this other suicide, but I just told him I had a gut feeling that I wanted to follow up on. That was enough for him. He gave me the man’s name and number. Donald Steele. He’s a sergeant in the state police, stationed at the Iron Mountain post.”

  “So you talked to him next?”

  “Well, I called, but he wasn’t at the post. I gave the guy on the phone the undersheriff’s name, told him he had sent me, and he was nice enough to give me Sergeant Steele’s home number. Steele wasn’t at home either, but I talked to his wife. I wasn’t so sure about pressing her for details. I mean, it’s only been a couple of months since it happened, but she seemed to want to talk to somebody about it. So I just listened.”

  “Another kid kills himself. Two more parents going through God knows what. I can’t imagine and I hope I never have to.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  “You don’t have any kids, McKnight.”

  “I was talking about you,” I said. Thinking, okay, here we go, so much for talking like two human beings. “I’m hoping you never have to live through something like that.”

  “I apologize.” As far I could remember, the first time he ever said those two words together in my presence. “Continue.”

  “Their son’s name is Brandon. He killed himself on January fifteenth.”

  “Two weeks after Charlie.”

  “Yes. Although in this case, he didn’t hang himself. He shot himself in the head.”

  “Damn, and she’s telling you all this?”

  “It just started coming out. I got the whole story. He was target shooting behind their barn. That afternoon he went out to shoot, and about an hour later, they notice that they’re not hearing the gunshots anymore. When they went out there, he was lying on the ground. One bullet right to the temple.”

  “No note?”

  “No note. But as you already know…”

  “They usually don’t. Yeah, I know. But still. Did she say anything about any troubles he might have been having?”

  “She didn’t get that far,” I said. “By that time, I was wishing we were there in person. It just doesn’t feel right to ask somebody these kinds of questions over the phone.”

  “So we’re driving all the way out here just to drag these poor people through their misery again? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I didn’t force you to come, Chief.”

  He didn’t answer that. He looked out the window at the snow on the trees and the rocks and the great nothingness that lies between the towns.

  “You have the same feeling I do,” I said. “Am I right?”

  “Yes, you’re right. Something’s not adding up.”

  “She did ask me to make her a promise.”

  “Who, Mrs. Steele?”

  “Yeah. When I asked her if we could come out and talk to her, she said we could, as long as we promised to do one thing for her in return.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”

  * * *

  We kept hugging the shoreline as we made our way around the bottom rim of the UP, Lake Huron looking calmer and bluer than Lake Superior. We hit Escanaba, the closest thing to a real city we’d seen since leaving Sault Ste. Marie, stopped for gas and a bathroom break. We’d been on the road for a good three hours, with another hour to go. I had told Mrs. Steele we’d be there around eleven o’clock, but as we were ordering our food to go I remembered the thing about the Michigan time zones. With virtually the entire state on Eastern time, it’s easy to forget that there are four counties, all bordering Wisconsin, that are on Central time. So we’d be picking up an hour before we got to Iron Mountain. As tough as this visit would be, there was no reason to make it worse by arriving an hour early.

  So we sat down with our food and Maven told me a few more stories about his old friend and fellow state cop, Charlie Razniewski. He made it sound like being a trooper was all about spending a lot of time in the patrol car, driving up and down I-75. If you do it for a while, you can eventually move on to other things, but Raz just wasn’t cut out for it. He wanted to go go go every minute of the day, and sitting behind a big rock with a speed gun in his lap was not his idea of time well spent.

  “We did have some excitement now and then,” Maven said. We were sitting by the window in a place called Elmer’s, while the snowplows rumbled by on the main road. “There were a few big arrests. A couple of really terrible accidents. That’s when you find out if a rookie recruit can carry his weight.”

  “And he did?”

  “Hell yes. That’s when he showed his true colors. I could tell he’d make a fantastic trooper if he stuck with it. It was all the other stuff he couldn’t deal with. The paperwork. The riding around all day. Being patient. Putting your time in, you know, playing the game. It’s not an easy life if you’re not wired for it.”

  “So tell me,” I said, thinking maybe now’s the time I can finally ask this question. “When he was killed, you seemed to take it especially hard.”

  “He was a fellow cop, McKnight. I’m supposed to take care of him.”

  “I know, I know, but you weren’t together for long. And it was a long time ago.”

  “Spending all that time with me was supposed to be his punishment for mouthing off to a lieutenant, if you can believe that.”

  I remembered what Raz had told me about Maven being nicknamed “Sergeant Cooler,” but I figured I should keep my promise to Raz and not mention it. Even if he was dead now.

  “But we ended up hitting it off,” Maven went on. “You don’t really get a partner when you’re with the state police, but that’s what it felt like to me. He was my partner. Now all these years later, he comes to me for help and he ends up dead on my kitchen floor. How do you expect me to react?”

  “You’re right,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. “If he’s your partner, he’s your partner, no matter what. I would have reacted the same way.”

  “Except you were there when your partner died.”

  I let that one hang in the air for a long moment. I looked at him and he looked right back at me. The waitress was about to come over and offer us more coffee but thought better of it and kept on walking.

  “What do you mean by that?” I finally said.

  “You were with him at the end. I didn’t get that chance. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “You didn’t get the chance to save him, you mean? The chance I had? Which I didn’t use?”

  “Easy, McKnight. I wasn’t going there.”

  “It sounds like you were.”

  “Raz died alone, is all I’m saying. Or with his killer there watching him, which is even worse. I can’t stop thinking about it. That’s all I meant. Honestly.”

  “Okay,” I said, mostly believing him. I waved at the waitress to bring us our check.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. The second apology from Chief Maven in one day. “So let’s go talk to the Steeles.”

  * * *

  If you want to get to Iron Mountain, you need to leave the shoreline at Escanaba and drive straight into the heart of the woods. That’s all you’ll see for miles on end—trees and more trees. An hour of this and you’ll finally see Hermansville and Norway flash by, until you finally
come to the very edge of the state. There, on the northern bank of the Menominee River, is the small town of Iron Mountain.

  By the time we got this far, the roads were starting to rise and fall again. We were close enough to the Porcupine Mountains to see some real elevation, even though Copper Country was way the hell north of us, on the other end of the UP. It wasn’t about copper down here at all, and never had been. As we got close to town we saw an iron miner with a pickax standing two hundred feet above us. It was just a huge billboard, of course, and the sign between the giant miner’s legs read, BIG JOHN WELCOMES YOU TO IRON MOUNTAIN IRON MINE!

  “Hard to miss that one,” Maven said. “I guess that means we’re here.”

  “The Steeles live just south of town,” I said. “They’ve got a farm down by the river.”

  I found the road and turned off. The road twisted back and forth through the woods until we were finally going up a big hill. I felt my tires start to slip, and I wondered how many other vehicles had gone into the ditch here. When we got to the top of the hill we were looking down at an old farmhouse with a great red barn just behind it.

  “This has got to be it.” I stopped there and stared down at the scene below me.

  “Yeah? So what’s the problem?”

  “No problem. I’m just noticing something here. See that barn down there?”

  He leaned over toward my side and looked out the window. “Yes?”

  “We could sit right here and see everything that’s happening behind the barn, would you agree?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “I’m just saying, if you were trying to figure out if there was any kind of routine, you could drive right by here a few times and observe everything that goes on down there.”

  I hit the gas and we kept on going. As we looped around to the driveway, I saw that it was covered with a good ten inches of snow, so I put down my plow and started pushing.

  “Mighty neighborly of you,” Maven said.

  “She said she wanted to ask us a favor, right? Maybe this was it.”

  I ran the length of the driveway, then backed up to do it all over again. If I’m going to plow, I’m going to do it right. Maven started getting a little impatient, but I finished the job and then we finally got out of the truck.

  “Tell me the truth,” he said as we walked to the door. “Are you trying to get on their good side? Or would you have done that anyway?”

  “I’ll pretend you didn’t ask that.”

  I pressed the doorbell and heard a three-note chiming deep within the house. As we waited I looked around and saw nothing but the road curving around the farm, the woods, the barn, an old fence and a piece of rusted farm equipment here and there. Plus a hell of a lot of snow. Besides that there were no signs of life at all.

  “Did they tell you they’d be here?” Maven said.

  “Mrs. Steele did, yes.”

  Finally, the door cracked open and we saw a woman’s face.

  “Mrs. Steele?”

  “Yes,” she said, pulling the door open a few more inches. She was thin and pale and I got the feeling she wasn’t quite as old as she looked. But then she’d been through a hell of a winter. “You must be the man who called.”

  “I am. Can we bother you to come inside for a moment?”

  “Of course.” She stepped aside and let us in. She was wearing something that looked almost like a bathrobe. A housecoat, I guess you’d call it. She went through the motions of offering us coffee, but we told her we were good and we didn’t want to take up any more of her time than we had to.

  “Is Sergeant Steele around today?” I asked. “I was hoping to talk to him at some point.”

  “No, he’s not.” She looked away from us as she said it. “He’s not here.”

  “Oh, is he at work today?”

  “No, he hasn’t been back to work yet. Since it happened.” Still not looking at us.

  “Um … do you expect him back soon?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why don’t we sit down,” Maven said, his voice softer than any time I’d ever heard him. “I hope we haven’t come at a bad time.”

  “It’s all bad times anymore.” We were sort of lingering at the entrance to her kitchen. There was a table full of papers in the middle with four chairs around it. She pulled out the closest chair and sat down.

  “Mrs. Steele,” I said, “are you all right?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Can I get you anything? A drink of water?”

  She shook her head again.

  “We’re terribly sorry to hear about your loss,” Maven said. He took one of the other chairs. I did the same.

  “I shouldn’t have asked to come out here,” I said. “I’m sorry. This was clearly a mistake.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m glad you came. I saw you outside, plowing the driveway. Now I can get out and go to the store.”

  “Mrs. Steele, where’s your husband?”

  “I don’t have snow tires, you know.”

  “Mrs. Steele. Your husband.”

  “He hasn’t been spending much time at home,” she said. “Ever since it happened. I guess I can’t blame him for that much. If I had somewhere to go, I wouldn’t be here, either.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Brandon never saw his eighteenth birthday. Did you know that? It happened just a few days before he turned eighteen.”

  “We didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. We could have kept on saying we were sorry for a thousand years and it wouldn’t have helped her one little bit.

  “He liked lemon cake. I was going to make him a lemon cake for his birthday.”

  She stopped talking for a while. We sat there, one on each side of her. All of us staring at the floor. Then finally she sat up straight and smoothed out her hair.

  “Brandon was very much into his guns,” she said, her eyes suddenly more alert, her voice more animated. “I wasn’t so sure what to think about this, but Donald felt that it would be a healthy activity for him. Something to get him outside and away from the television set. There’s a big sand pit behind the barn. If you go out there you won’t be able to see much now with the snow, but you’ll see where Brandon had put some wooden posts along the edge there, in front of the incline. It was very safe that way. Because he could shoot all he wanted to and none of the bullets could ever go anywhere.”

  She seemed to lose steam there for a moment.

  “It was very safe,” she said. “Very safe.”

  I was sure we were about to lose her again, but then she snapped right back.

  “On the day it happened, he went outside with two of his guns. Two pistols. I’m sorry, I don’t know what kind they were. What exact caliber or anything like that. All I know is that one was a revolver and one was an automatic. Or a semiautomatic, I think he said. I don’t know the difference. Anyway, he went behind the barn to shoot at his cans. I was in here doing the dishes and listening to the shots going off. In the wintertime, it doesn’t seem to be so loud. The snow absorbs some of the sound, I guess. He was shooting and shooting, just like always, but then I didn’t hear the sound anymore. I was waiting for him to come inside, but he never did, so I went out to see if he was still out there and there he was, lying in the snow.”

  She stopped again and this time she drummed her fingers together. I looked at Maven and he looked back at me and we both knew there was no way we’d be leaving this place without trying to get her some help. All this time alone in this house, right next to that barn we could see from our chairs, right out that kitchen window. It wasn’t good for her to be here.

  “We had a service for him up at the church right up there on H Street. We don’t have more than a dozen streets in town so why they used letters to name them, I can’t even imagine. But that’s neither here nor there.”

  “Mrs. Steele…” I said.

  “He’s buried out in that place on Old U.S. 141. That�
�s just a number, but it used to be the highway so I guess you can understand it.”

  “Is there somebody we can call for you?” Maven said. “I’m not sure you want to be here all by yourself, do you?”

  “No. No, I don’t want to be alone. That’s what I wanted to ask you to do for me.”

  “This is the favor you were talking about,” I said. “On the phone, you said you had a favor you wanted to ask us.”

  “My husband. I want you to bring my husband back. Will you do that for me, please?”

  “I don’t think you mentioned where he is. If you tell us, I’m sure we can—”

  “He’s across the river. At his girlfriend’s house.”

  “Mrs. Steele,” Maven said, shooting me another look, “this sounds like it might be a bad situation all the way around. God knows you’ve got enough to deal with already.”

  “Just go talk to him. Man-to-man. Tell him this is where he belongs. I know it’s not easy, but we have to face it. Tell him I’ll let him go forever if he just comes back and helps me get through this. That’s all I want him to do. Is that so much? Just be a man and come back until we can find some way to—”

  She started waving her arms around, and the tears started coming down her face.

  “Tell you what,” Maven said. “Let’s call his post and get one of the troopers to come down here. Then we can go find your husband.”

  “No. No trooper. I want my husband.”

  “I’m just saying, for the time being…”

  “Did you hear what I said? I said I don’t want a trooper in this house. Or anybody else from his little circle of boys up there. All I want is my husband here in this house, where he belongs. Okay?”

  “Maybe somebody else? Just for now? A neighbor?”

  “Bring him home!” she half yelled, half sobbed. “Do you hear me?”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, reaching out to touch her arm. “We’ll bring him home. Just tell us where he is.”

  “Her name’s Donna. She works at the Starlight, across the border in Niagara. That’s where you’ll find him.”