Ragged Lake

by Ron Corbett

  It is this person who has kept me up all night writing. Even though as I sit here, nothing seems clearer to me and I am beginning to think I am playing games with myself. That this is a problem that has no solution. That maybe there is karmic weight to bad decisions and it catches up with you after a while, leaves you waterlogged and useless, unable to get out of the way of danger, two thousand pounds of every bad move you ever made weighing you down.

  It was bitterly cold most of January, but it changed last week. Warm air pushed its way up the Valley and was finally able to push over the Highlands and reach us. So I bundled Cassandra in layers of clothing, put her in the toboggan Guillaume made from old barrel slats, and we went to Ragged Lake to pick up his cheque.

  When we got to the Mattamy, I stayed outside so I could avoid the bartender. I have wondered about this, but I don’t think it would have made any difference. There was no way he was going to miss me. With all the things that needed to line up right for him to be there in the first place and then for him to not see me? No way that was going to happen. At least outside I wasn’t right away trapped.

  I was standing by the biplane dock with my back to the lodge, Cassandra holding my hand, and we were looking at the lake. I was trying to will my eyes past the horizon, like I’ve been doing since I was a girl, and I heard the kitchen door of the Mattamy open and shut. Heard two men arguing. The cook and someone else.

  The second voice sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it. I was standing about fifty yards away, with the wind blowing in my face, so there was no surprise in that.

  But I must have sensed something, because my back stiffened, all my limbs went straight as a board, and I stood for a long time feeling threatened for no reason that seemed obvious. Cassandra looked at me with a puzzled look on her face, a look that seemed to sense danger, and I wondered how a three-year-old could do that.

  Finally I turned around to see the man the cook was arguing with. And there was Tommy Bangles, staring right at me.

  I couldn’t have hidden if I’d wanted. There were no buildings anywhere near me. No people. Nothing in Tommy’s line of vision. I stood there as though placed in the foreground of a painting.

  And Tommy didn’t do a thing. Just kept staring out over the lake as though that was the only thing he was doing, as though that lake was fascinating right then, in the middle of his argument with the cook, utterly fascinated by that frozen lake. Then he tilted his head, a small gesture you could easily miss, and went back to swearing at the cook. A minute later, they were back inside the Mattamy.

  I ran to the front of the lodge, where Guillaume was walking down the front steps muttering about the cook not being able to see him that day. I took him by the hand and started walking away. Then I began to run, saying Cassandra liked it that way, the faster the better, let’s all run. I’ll race you back to the cabin. I strapped her to the toboggan and took off. Running down the trail. Guillaume following. Me looking back every few seconds to make sure it was only Guillaume following us.

  That was two days ago.

  . . .

  What is Tommy Bangles doing in Ragged Lake? What in the world? If Tommy had come looking for me, then things would have gone differently when he saw me. He had been surprised. I could tell that, even though he tried hard not to show it. Which is what Tommy would do. He told me once surprise was the look a man had on his face right before he died. So Tommy tried to never look surprised.

  But if he didn’t come looking for me, what in the world would bring someone like Tommy Bangles to Ragged Lake? Tommy hates the outdoors. He and Sean were Irish kids from Cork’s Town, and I don’t think either of them had gone much beyond the eight blocks of workers cottages, diners, and bars that made up Cork’s Town until they were teenagers. I remember Tommy rolling up windows on cars during drives in the country, because he didn’t like the smell. Complaining whenever he and Sean had to meet Papa or some other high-ranking biker, because the bikers tended to like secluded farmhouses down country roads.

  He isn’t here visiting. He isn’t here planning a fishing trip. He knows the cook. Tommy knows the cook.

  This thought paralyses me. Leaves me gasping for air. The cook has never struck me as a man who is where he belongs. He is a poor cook, his kitchen always a mess — dishes not put away and utensils scattered. Perhaps the cook is in Ragged Lake trying to disappear, just like we are. He was a bad drunk and something catastrophic happened to him. He owed money and had run, but now Tommy had found him.

  The more I think about this, the more sense it makes to me. Tommy was always the one who collected debts. Tommy was the one who tracked people down. He was talking to the cook as if the man were someone he’d just tracked down.

  If I play it out, with this being the right assumption — Tommy came to find the cook, not me — how much time does this give me? Tommy likely left on yesterday’s train. Which means the earliest he could have been back in the Silver Dollar was last night.

  If I were starting cold, with no one having thought of me in more than two years, it would take time to build. The need to do something. Men would hear my name and remember. Some would smile. Tell a story. That Lucy. Then it would come back to them — a thought long dormant, not coming to them right away — that they had been worried about me once. That’s right. The last time I was living in Springfield, they had been worried about me.

  This is my best-case scenario. That it will take time to rouse them. If I am lucky, I might have as much as a month before someone comes back.

  My worst case is they never forgot. They went looking for me after the birth of Cassandra, but I was gone. The men Tommy is drinking with might already be thinking I am an unresolved problem.

  That gives me a week.

  . . .

  Last night I dreamed someone had entered our cabin, rummaged around, come to our bedroom, and stared at us while we slept. It was a dream that seemed so real, when I awoke I had the sensation someone was still in the cabin. I was scared to turn around and kept my arms straddled around Guillaume’s chest, my face buried in his hair. I took deep breaths and waited several moments until I threw off my blankets.

  And maybe it is delusion, or maybe I have no proper recollection of where I live, but it seemed to me a curtain was drawn where it had been left open the night before. A teacup was on the stand beside the sink, something we would not normally do. And there was what appeared to be a footprint in a knothole of dust in a plank of flooring beneath the kitchen window, a plank I can never clean properly. I looked at that knothole a long time but never thought I was looking at anything other than a footprint.

  We went for a long walk that afternoon, Guillaume pulling Cassandra in her toboggan, me saying I wanted to get outside, we had been staying in the cabin too much.

  We were outside for hours, but I saw no sign of something out of place. The spruce and white pine refracted the same weak light they had refracted the day before. The rivers made no different sound when I bent to listen, still the soft moan of a thing trapped, some old thing complaining. The snow slanted the same way in the wind and the horizon was still a grey-blue ridge of low hills. I still heard grey jays and ravens, and, on this day, with little wind, gulls from the Bay.

  No sign of an intruder. Until the walk home, when we crested a small hill and in the distance saw a snowmobile heading from our cabin. Guillaume shielded his eyes, looked over the plain the snowmobile was travelling across, then dropped his rucksack and took out a pair of binoculars. He stared at the snowmobile for several minutes, adjusted the ring a few times, and said, “Whoever it is, they’re wearing a hood. I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.”

  “What about the sled?”

  “It’s a Polaris. It’s white. Can’t tell anything more than that. It could be one of the sleds from the Mattamy.”

  “Why would anyone be at our cabin?”

  Guillaume shrugged. We watched
the snowmobile hook up with the S and P and turn toward town. As we continued to the cabin, we looked for tracks, and it was Guillaume who found them, twin-skied tracks that did not approach our cabin, but circled and stopped fifty yards away. For several minutes it must have been, judging by how far the snow was pushed down. For no good reason, when you stood in the exact same spot and looked around, than to stare at our cabin.

  Fifty yards away. For several minutes. Whoever it was, they had been using binoculars.

  Less than a week.

  . . .

  “People are coming.”

  I said it quietly, sitting on the rug by the airtight, my head nestled on Guillaume’s chest. We hadn’t spoken for several minutes and I knew he could sense it, or perhaps even know it with certainty. Our quiet days are finished. The days of peace and rest are finished. We were given twenty-seven months, and maybe one day that will seem like a good deal to us. More than either of us had been given before.

  “What sort of people?”

  “People you would never want to know.”

  “Why are they coming?”

  “They’re coming for me. Because of stupid stuff from a long time ago.”

  “Is Cassandra in danger?”

  “Yes. I would think so. Yes.”

  “What makes you sure they are coming?”

  “I saw one of them. Two days ago. At the Mattamy.”

  “The man arguing with the cook?”

  “Yes.”

  Guillaume didn’t say anything. It was a cold night and we were wearing Cowichan sweaters, thick flannel pants, two pairs of socks. We stared into the fire in the dull-witted way people have about them when they stare into a fire too long, not thinking clearly. I had the first wave of remorse and self-pity, wondering why, no matter how much I try to do the right things, I always end up back in the same spot. Maybe Guillaume was right about this being the wrong world in which to expect good things.

  “I don’t think you’ve ever asked me a single question about my past,” I said, turning from the fire to look at him. “Do you know that? Not a single question. Why is that?”

  Guillaume shrugged. I already knew the answer. Don’t ask a question and you won’t have to answer a question. Johnny taught me that — Johnny, who was always of the opinion that people asked far too many questions in this world. If you ever stopped and thought it through, you would soon realize there are only a handful of questions that truly need answering. Maybe fewer. I don’t believe Johnny even wanted to know how he was going to die.

  “It’s never mattered to me,” said Guillaume. “And that’s no bullshit, Lucy. It’s never mattered. You’re free to tell me what you want, when you want. I don’t need a history lesson to tell me what sort of person is standing in front of me.”

  “I don’t need one either, Guillaume. I’ve always known you are a good man.”

  “And I’ve always known you are good, too, Lucy. History can just muddy the waters, don’t you think?”

  I came the closest to crying than I had in years. As though sensing it coming, and wanting to keep my mind focused, Guillaume asked a question.

  “What do I need to know about these people?”

  “They’re bad people,” I said. “They don’t operate with rules or anything holding them back. I was told once they would come looking for me. I should have told you. I was hoping it would go away. That it wouldn’t be true.”

  “It still might not be true. We don’t know why he was here. How bad are they?”

  I thought for a moment before saying, “Tommy, the guy I saw at the Mattamy — I saw him kill a man once behind the Silver Dollar. He stomped the guy unconscious, then left him in the mud, went back into the club, and came out with a Drano bottle. He opened the guy’s mouth and poured the Drano down. Then he sat on him with his hand over the guy’s mouth to keep him from throwing up when he started to convulse.

  “I was hiding in the shadows and Tommy didn’t know I was there, but I saw everything. The look on Tommy’s face when the guy died, bucking around on the ground . . . Tommy got off on it, like he was a cowboy at some rodeo. I’ve never forgotten it. It comes to me in dreams sometimes. That exact moment.”

  Guillaume didn’t say anything right away. Stood and stretched. Went to the kitchen to refresh his tea.

  “There’s some work we should do to the cabin,” he said, when he returned.

  “When should we start?”

  “Probably right away.”

  . . .

  There is nothing to do now but wait. Guillaume has set up trip lines on the three approaches to the cabin, strung twine and tin cans, and there is no way a person or animal can approach and not set off a warning. The lake is trickier, but Guillaume has rolled boulders to the shoreline, placing them in such a way that the easiest approach would be to skirt the boulders and cut through the forest. If a man is smart and scurries over the boulders, then we have a problem. The back of the cabin has a large window. There is a good view of the lake. Guillaume has left his gun on a ledge above the window. We are telling ourselves we have done all we can.

  This journal has come to matter a great deal to me. Dr. Mackenzie told me it would one day, and I never believed him. Now I am sitting here, waiting to see if Tommy is coming back to Ragged Lake or if they’ll send a crew, and it occurs to me that if this is a complete op, our bodies may never be found. The place where we die may never be found. Our lives the past two years may never be known. I get angry when I think about this. One more unfairness. In a world that is about to steamroller over us with its constant, flattening, fucking unfairness.

  Cassandra. When I think of my daughter, my anger grows. She will be forgotten as well. No, it is worse for my daughter. She will never be remembered. She will disappear more completely than her parents, who may have a distant aunt somewhere who will remember them one day, if anyone cares to ask. For Cassandra, there will be no one.

  Maybe that’s why I have been writing all night. To make sure there is at least this record. And if I did all that work, then stashing this journal is the right thing to do. The right, crazy thing to do. I need to find a safe place.

  I guess this will be my last entry for a while. Maybe my last entry for—

  I hadn’t thought of that. If we lose this fight . . . I need to say something.

  I am grateful for my time with Guillaume. I want to say that. I still have faith but wish things had played out differently for us. Sometimes free will is real and sometimes it isn’t. My last thoughts on that subject.

  Cassandra would have been a beautiful woman. I regret Guillaume and I are the only ones to know this. If someone ever reads this journal, perhaps it will be possible to remember her in some way. There was a spot in Strathconna Park, in Springfield, where you can watch kayakers run a course. That place meant something to her parents.

  We came close to making it. I honestly believe we did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  There was no sun the next morning. The snowstorm continued unabated and the darkness of night did not disappear or retreat come morning but merely turned a lighter shade. The wind stayed strong and hard from the northeast, and the snow still fell from low-hanging clouds, thick, wet flakes that were too heavy to be swept out over the lake. When people awoke that morning, they found the village blanketed in snow, the rail line disappeared, east-facing windows shuttered, and the drift outside the back door of the Mattamy so high the door would not open.

  It was a day that could have come from a book of fairy tales, with everyday reference points vanished and boundaries obliterated; a fantasy day of cloistered rooms and heightened emotion, slow-moving action and out-of-focus seclusion; a day when it would not have seemed all that strange to learn a princess was sleeping nearby, or that a sad king was looking down from a watchtower somewhere as a winter storm moved across his land.

  Yakabuski had read the journal
most of the night, stopping only when the darkness outside his window had begun to turn a mottled grey. He put down the book, stood, and stretched, counting the popping sounds coming from his back. Then he grabbed his service revolver from the nightstand, put on his shoes, and went to Downey, who was sitting at the end of the hallway.

  “How you doing, Matt?”

  “Doing good, Yak. It’s not time for you to relieve me.”

  “I know. I want to grab a coffee before we get the day started. You up for some fun?”

  “What sort of fun?”

  “We’re going to throw that cook and that bartender into the storage closet.”

  . . .

  It was two in the morning when the crew assembled at the Buckham’s Bay trailhead. They had drilled the day before, so there was little talking. Tommy Bangles took what he needed from a roofer’s trailer that an old man had driven to the trailhead, doing only a cursory check of the guns and clips, the GPS machine, and the satphone. Most of the kit still had the rubber bands and numbered paper he had placed there the day before. The three men standing with him did only a cursory check of their kit as well.

  The old man was a mechanic from a garage in Cork’s Town and was extra careful when he drove the sleds off the trailer. There could be no mistakes with these men. When he was nearly finished checking the fuel levels and the lights, Bangles walked away from the group, pulled a cellphone from his pocket, and punched a pre-set number.

  “Are you at the trailhead?”

  “Yes.”

  “I spoke to our friend yesterday. He suspects something. He doesn’t know what.”

  “I’m not surprised, Sean. There is something odd going on up there. ”

  “You’ve spoken to him. What is he thinking?”

  “How can you tell with that guy?”

  Sean Morrissey looked out the window of his office. The snow was falling as heavily as it had been twelve hours earlier. This would turn out to be one of the biggest storms of the season.