by Dusty Miller
What sort of things might he say…but this was fruitless territory. She was rarely tempted or even attracted by a guest. Not since she’d fallen, a hopeless crush, on a college-age boy named Neill all those years ago.
She had been fifteen at the time, and what a horrible thing it was, too.
It was a terrible cliché, but Neill hadn’t even known of her existence.
Even now, she thought of him from time to time…in a wistful kind of self-loathing.
But it really was stupid.
Chapter Three
Lindsey tossed and turned. It was predictable enough. One too many cups of coffee, even though she usually stopped drinking any sort of caffeinated beverage well before nine p.m.,
She’d had all sorts of plans for her summer at home. As soon as she laid eyes on the place, she knew it was nonsense. It was wishful thinking all the way. And yet, she’d sort of hung back, dating a bit, but not plunging into the sexual vortex that was college life. She’d had one fling, a guy named Eric. He was nice enough and everything, but she had the impression, and that’s all it was, that Eric was still seeing someone when he went home for weekends and Christmas. Other than that, he wasn’t terribly ambitious. All he seemed to want out of life was to drink, smoke pot and party. She was more of an accessory. He treated her all right. He seemed gentlemanly and solicitous, but not all that sincere at times. He went through the motions to satisfy her—to keep her.
She couldn’t recall one serious conversation that they had ever had, and any talk of the future was laughed off the agenda. Not once had they ever opened up to each other. It was purely superficial, a thing of convenience.
After a while, she’d figured it out.
Eric quickly found someone else.
She hadn’t.
But this was a kind of purgatory, this place. She’d get a day and a half off a week—and it would either be spent right here at home, or in Espanola, or maybe a day (drum roll please) spent on the lake, in a boat, fishing or swimming or waterskiing or whatever. But even those boys—some of them could perhaps be called men by now, most of them were in college or university. The nature of their interests of their careers or their interests, or perhaps it was just luck, had conspired to take them to other places for their summer employment. She had her little list of names of course. Guys she would go out with and guys that she wouldn’t.
All women had such a list.
Hers wasn’t all that extensive.
The town was that small.
She knew all the prospects.
The best things in life were already taken.
With the best and the brightest gone, that didn’t leave much. A friend of hers had married a guy three years younger, and at the time Lindsey had wondered why.
It had never occurred to her that just getting through summer without going mad would be an achievement, and that getting back to school would be a relief. In that sense, Toronto really had become her home. It was hard to say if she still felt that way…looking back from here.
Hopefully the landlord would keep a promise and her room would be available. If she wanted better than that, then she would need some real money…
Her mind wouldn’t stop going. This was typical of the first big weekend of the season, where every deficiency in planning or preparation was revealed, every problem that might manifest itself had already done so—for example the pop cooler breaking down and leaking refrigerant all over the place.
With the blankets on, she was too hot, when she threw them aside, she was too cold. No matter how she fluffed up or curled up and plumped-up her pillows, she could not get her neck right. She was uncomfortable on her back, her side, and the other side. Finally she kicked the covers off and sat up on the edge of the bed. The luminous numbers of her bedside clock showed that it was about twenty after two in the morning. If only she could drop off right now. Of course it wouldn’t be so. Watching TV in the living room, where Dale might even now be ensconced in his chair, smelling of booze, old socks, and snoring loudly, somehow didn’t appeal to her.
Thank God he had his own bathroom. Cleaning it was one thing, sharing it was another.
There was the hint of thunder in the air, off to the southwest she thought.
There was a branch scratching away at the eaves-trough in the light breeze. Tree-trimming. Another chore to put on Mark’s list. She wouldn’t trust Dale on a ladder these days.
“Ugh.” Shivering, she quickly found a thin sweater, a turtleneck, and slipped into her baggy old sweat pants.
She grabbed a baseball hat to control her hair and pulled on a faded jean jacket. She stepped into her loosely tied runners. One of the compensations of living in a camp all summer had always been those impromptu little adventures. Why then, the moisture in her eyes?
The night was clear, and there were probably a million stars out there. Solitude wasn’t necessarily the same thing as aloneness.
You just had to teach yourself to believe it.
Lindsey left the room, seeking peace.
The call of a loon far out on the lake came as she gently closed the patio door behind her. Not unexpectedly, there was the dim glow of one or two fires. They were fifty or seventy-five metres away, back in the little circle of cabins and their access track. With a few lit windows and the reflections from reflectors and shiny vehicles, the beams of ruddy light straggled up and back, following the irregular contours of the hillside.
She wandered down to the docks. The water was mirror-like in its black stillness and the pin-pricks of the stars reflecting on water meant for a moment that she stood on the edge of an abyss.
“Oh, my.” She let out a big breath.
It made up for a lot, although a proper night’s sleep would have been preferable. For a moment she debated taking a boat out for a proper look. She’d often thought of taking some night photos out on the lake, but she didn’t know much about it. The odds were she wouldn’t get anything anyway. The odds were she’d go over and drown. Nice thought that was, yelling and yelling for help and by the time anyone came—if anyone even heard or bothered to investigate, she’d be gone.
They might never find the body either.
There were canoes and paddles right there. She didn’t feel like going back inside for the keys and getting a lifejacket out of Mark’s little dockside service kiosk. To hell with it. She stood on the narrow sandy beach, hugging herself to keep in the warmth and looking up at the blazing northern sky.
She turned to the right, picking her way carefully in the darkness. The light thrown from further up the bank made for impenetrable black shadows under the rim. Dead logs showed up pale and there were glimmers of the lighter boulders a few metres off from the beach. Out on the water there was a brighter line of bleach bottles used as marker buoys along the deepest approach to the camp.
There was a scrabbling noise up the bank, and at first she thought it was a raccoon. Big, bold and inquisitive as all hell, they were a constant problem. All of the camp’s garbage receptacles were steel, with stiff spring-latches on the lid. She was just near the small sandy strip behind Cabin Seven, where Liam had a deck chair stationed for the daylight hours. The snapping of a large dry twig caught her attention and then it came again. It was very near, and Cabin Seven was closest to the water.
The sound of hard breathing sent a chill of fear go through Lindsey. She froze in place, a tingling wave of adrenalin sweeping over her. There was a straggle of brush along the shoreline and whoever, or whatever it was, might not know she was there. Until she knew what it was, it was so much better that way.
She held her breath, the pounding of her heart loud in her ears.
A dark figure stepped away from near the back door of Cabin Seven. The dark hole where their face would have been if they weren’t wearing a hoodie turned her way, and then they lunged into the far shadows and disappeared from sight. A couple of quick thuds, running footsteps on a thin layer of turf lying on solid rock, indicated that they had gone around the buildi
ng and up the hill.
That quick slithering sound was someone forcing their way through the thin screen of brush between cabins.
***
The man known as Liam Kimball stood well back in the room. He had been lying in bed, maybe even fast asleep. Something had awoken him. There were sounds of course, for example the wind noise from the tops of the tall white pines which overhung the entire camp. The sound penetrated all but the thickest walls when the wind got up.
He’d heard another sound, and something about that one made his hair prickle. It was an odd little crack, down low and just on the other side of his bedroom wall. He had gotten silently out of bed, going to have a look out the back door. Some atavistic element of caution had held him back from going straight up to the door, popping it open and having a look. He’d hung back just long enough to see a dim shadow cross in front of the glass. There came a couple of good snaps and then he had the impression something big went up the east side of the cabin.
When he stepped to the door it was already too late to catch a glimpse.
That was when he saw the pale figure on the beach. It was unmistakeably the girl, Lindsey.
The light was all wrong and she would never see him in the darkened kitchen doorway.
He watched as she turned and headed back down the sandy strip, heading for the dock and the lodge. Liam was pretty sure she couldn’t have quite done it. She couldn’t have gotten from his back door to the shore in that short a time. She had been facing this way. He wondered what she might have seen, or heard, or been doing out at all, for that matter. He glanced at his watch.
“Hmn. I wonder what that was all about.” And someone had been in his car earlier.
There was a two-foot wide concrete apron around the cabin. Considering the nature of the terrain, mostly huge shelves and ledges of rock, interspersed with a little moss and dirt, he wondered if there would be any kind of sign in the morning. He shrugged it off. It was a camp, and people wandered everywhere. He had a little knowledge, but he wasn’t a born tracker.
It was also a camp that required reservations well ahead of time.
It was all fresh tracks around the camp. Bringing in a hound would be a giveaway and probably just lead to a couple of underage drinkers or a boy and his girl…
The girl, now, that was interesting.
There was the beginning of a small knot forming in his stomach, although he rarely allowed that sort of thing to upset his equilibrium.
What was even more interesting was how someone had entered his locked cabin, picked the expensive lock of his case, then the (allegedly) cheap little one on his laptop computer without breaking it—no mean feat in itself, and then turned it on and attempted to hack into it. They had abandoned the attempt, putting it all away again. They had known something, and they were also quite good about shutting things down and locking everything back up on their way out. They’d even wiped the machine and everything else they’d touched during their little courtesy-call.
However, there were certain indications. He had no doubt about what had happened. He was even pretty sure who.
Checking him out was a bit of a mistake on their part.
***
With twenty-four cabins, all of them occupied, Lindsey’s attention was fully engaged. If there was something vaguely disturbing about the two dark foreign men getting into a boat shortly after Liam had gone up the river, it escaped her. The men were in Cabin Eleven. It was right across from his in the crazy hodgepodge that was The Pines. They didn’t look much different from anyone else. Just like anyone else, the one on the back was hunched over the motor. The one in front sat facing the rear, his pale face standing out against the green windbreaker. The only thing was that it had a hood. Most of them did as the weather was notoriously fickle and fishermen were out in all weathers.
Dale floated about from dawn until late, between the dock and the store. Mark worked straight days, six days a week all summer long. Mark or Dale fixed anything that was broken, within reason, which saved them from calling in expensive service people from town. Mark, nearing forty now, a perennial bachelor and scrupulously polite with Lindsey at all times, had somehow managed to never become a part of the family.
Lindsey had the impression Dale simply wasn’t capable anymore, and yet living in a shitty little apartment in Sudbury all winter just encouraged him to drink. They had tried that and she was sort of grateful when he said he didn’t want to do it again. The camp was the only real home he’d had in decades, and he saw no reason to put down firmer roots in any town. What few friends he had were around here. For Dale, to go to the coffee shop once a week, Sunday mornings regular as clockwork, was a kind of social life. But even he had reluctantly agreed that having Mark around in the winter would be a help and it was better if Dale wasn’t left alone.
Dale’s first little heart attack three years ago had been a godsend. He had woken up and realized that he really did need another man to help run the place. There would be someone there in an emergency. Dale knew that Lindsey must ultimately leave. She wondered if he had even missed her, and yet he must—he must. He simply didn’t know how to say it. To say it would be to confront that ultimate goodbye. That would be the day when she packed her bags for good, threw out a lot of childish stuff and then walked out of his life for all intents and purposes. Dale probably assumed she’d just get a job as a substitute teacher or something and stay in Espanola.
Never.
The guests were a distraction from all of that other world, that private world.
There were Japanese businessmen in Cabin Four. They were pretty easy to read. So far they had rented about half of the rather tacky porn videos on hand, in a dingy back room with an Adults Only sign above the door. When they saw her coming and going, they would spurt Japanese back and forth. Nothing shocked her anymore. She took their money and handed over the receipt for the DVDs and that was all she cared.
She had her story, and she figured everyone else did too. Some were merely more interesting than others.
Hopefully hers would turn out as well as any.
Don’t expect too much—
Cabin Eight was a trio of young married couples, and they hadn’t been seen since check-in. It wasn’t all that different from a bunch of undoubtedly married Japanese businessmen, away from their docile little wives and rice-paper houses, drinking scotch with the boss and pretending they really cared about trout and small-mouth bass.
What you really want is a promotion.
A title, and a plastic sign on the door.
Suck-holing around a bad boss was the life for them.
No price was too high.
They were so bored they spent their time drinking and watching bad porn.
She tried to avoid obvious mental pictures of wedded bliss, the quiet and confident companionship, exhibited in at least one friend’s marriage,
When she took a good look at some of her other friends’ choices, it was easy to be contemptuous. Contemptuous for what little they had settled for. What was terrifying was how quickly some of them had settled down for the long haul, dishes and laundry and diapers, kids, kids, kids, and ultimately, a long twilight followed by death. Their menial jobs would eventually kill the men, most of whom did not enjoy a long and golden retirement. Sometimes it seemed the whole town was like that—the whole world as she had known it.
Toronto had been an education in more ways than one. Toronto was a glittering paradise, with a million desperately lonely, isolated people. They all lived close together and in the same place.
Most of them at least had somebody.
Soon, two more years, she would have no one—she’d be just starting off.
So far she had avoided all that. Not that there weren’t longings, even temptations. There was always that distant purpose—to get her degree in History and get the hell out of Dodge City as Dale called it.
Perhaps there was a smidgeon of contempt there after all. Or maybe it was jealousy. They were at l
east having a life. Her monthlies were almost due and that might have had something to do with her mood. The notion that one was responsible for one’s own thoughts and feelings was vile in that it just added to the problem. It was a piling-on of the guilt.
The pain.
The misery.
The thing to do was to focus on the work and push the bitter, lonely thoughts aside.
With all of those cabins strung along their sandy road under the pines, someone was always wanting something, someone always had a problem, and someone always had a question. There was always someone coming and going, always someone in the store, always someone on the dock, either setting out if it was early or coming in if the hour was late.
It was only after a long and busy day that she thought of Liam again.
***
Liam Kimball trolled slowly from lake to lake, up and down the river, studying what any casual observer would have thought was a fish finder. This was clamped to the gunwale at a convenient height and distance. What the casual observer might not see was below the surface. With the monitor plugged into the trailing aquatic sensor array, he could follow a pattern and survey the bottom, looking for anomalies. But a bigger problem right now was what to do about the opposition.
His instinct was very strong about these two. They kept popping up, not that some of the other guests didn’t as well. Some of those other parties made much more noise, they were animated in a way these two weren’t. These two didn’t even seem to like fishing. It was like they just couldn’t act. They lacked enthusiasm in everything, even in barbecuing and drinking beer. They sat there beside their campfire at night, hardly speaking, and yet hyperaware of everything he was doing. When coming and going, one of them always stayed around to keep an eye on him. They took turns doing their small errands.
