by Ron Corbett
“Treating me well. It’s steady work. Pays well. I like it enough.”
“Miss the bush?”
“Every day. Never cared for the city much. Some days, things don’t seem quite right down here.”
“I know what you’re saying. Feels broken some days, doesn’t it? I remember when everything seemed to work in Springfield. People had jobs. People paid their bills. I don’t know when that stopped working. It still surprises me that it did. The thing we had, you’d have thought we would have looked after it a bit better.”
They ate what the waiter called gourmet burgers, which were beef patties covered in sauces you didn’t need, and sweet potato fries instead of regular potato fries, another change Yakabuski didn’t think was an improvement. But the coffee was good and strong, and the tree-marker insisted on paying the bill, so he considered it a pleasant enough evening.
He drank his coffee and waited. As soon as he had seen the waitress, he knew why the tree-marker had called. He knew what the boy needed to say. But it wasn’t until they were out on the street that it happened. They had already said their goodbyes, and Marie was walking a few paces ahead, heading toward the boy’s truck, when he suddenly grabbed Yakabuski’s hand one last time and shook it.
“We’ll always be grateful for what you did in Ragged Lake, Mr. Yakabuski. I want you to know that.”
“Don’t need to mention it.”
“I never will. You have my word on that.” The boy leaned in to whisper, “We’re good, right?”
“We’re good, son.”
The boy was positively beaming when he ran to his truck. Yakabuski tried not to smile. It was what a tree-marker would do before he started a family.
. . .
On his way home, Yakabuski stopped at the hospital. His father had been at St. Michael’s more than a month, a bad infection in his hips that had gone internal. At its worst, he was incubated for three days. That was two weeks ago, and he was much improved. But he would still be staying at the hospital over Christmas.
It was past visiting hours but the nurse at the charge station buzzed him in, and Yakabuski found his dad sitting in his wheelchair, looking out the window of his room. A paperback copy of Cape Fear lay open on his lap.
“Late for you to be dropping by,” he said.
“Went out for dinner. Thought I’d come see you on my way home.”
“Who did you have dinner with?”
“The tree-marker and the waitress from Ragged Lake.”
“How are they doing?”
“All right. She’s pregnant. They’ll be parents in about two months.”
“Good parents?”
“I suspect.”
“So maybe something good came out of all this.”
“That would be a charitable way of looking at things.”
“Yes,” his father said, still staring out the window, the moon two days past full, the city beneath it. “I suppose you’re right about that. How are you doing?”
“I’m all right. I spread the ashes a few months back. Don’t know if I told you that. The family that got killed. She pretty much said in her journal where she wanted to go.”
“Strathconna Park.”
“That’s right.”
When Yakabuski signed for the bodies, he had been given a bag of personal effects. The journal was in it. His father asked if he could read it, and Yakabuski had given it to him. An old cop wanting to read a case file. Yakabuski had not seen any harm in it.
“That’s a lovely park,” said his dad, still staring at the moon. “She lived nearby, right?”
“Sandy Hill. It would have been just a few blocks away.”
His father nodded but didn’t say anything. They sat in silence until Yakabuski said, “Tommy Bangles said there was some new sort of evil out there. Something I’d never seen before. Said it was coming. I wonder sometimes if he was right. If good people are doomed and we just don’t know it yet.”
“I wouldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about anything Tommy Bangles said. The guy was a fuckin’ creep.”
“But did you ever see anything like Ragged Lake? In all your years?”
“No, can’t say I ever did.”
“So maybe something new is coming. Maybe he was right.”
“I don’t know, Frankie. I think you’re tired. And you’re thinking too much. You look tired to me.”
“I am tired. Doesn’t make me wrong.”
“No, but it doesn’t do you any good, either. I don’t think good people are doomed. You just told me the tree-marker is a stand-up guy. About to start a family. You just told me that, right?”
“I did.”
“Well, things aren’t as hopeless as you think.”
They fell quiet again until his father, turning finally from the window to look at his son, said, “And stop beating yourself up about that girl. There’s nothing you could have done to save her.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I’ve read the journal, Frankie. You missed something.”
EPILOGUE
The following spring, Yakabuski returned to Ragged Lake.
Bernard O’Toole had trouble believing it when Yakabuski said their investigation wasn’t finished. But he said nothing. Yakabuski had a wide berth in the police department now; he was looked upon as a folk hero by many and with open mistrust by many others, the older ones mostly, who were suspicious of any multiple-homicide crime scene that wrapped up so neatly no one was left standing to bring to court. To the chief, his senior detective had become a mystery. He found himself choosing his words carefully around him.
“You’ll drive up?” O’Toole asked.
“Thinking ’bout this weekend. I’ll need a couple bodies.”
“I can arrange that. Do you want them to meet you there?” The question was an assumption. That Yakabuski would prefer going up alone. That the other cops would prefer that arrangement, too.
“That works. Tell them to meet me at Cap Lake, noon, Saturday.”
. . .
When the two cops arrived with the backhoe, Yakabuski got them to start digging around the cabin. Any raised patch of ground. The backhoe moved from spot to spot like some ungainly animal. The lake in the background was still ringed by ice.
Why here? Yakabuski had been asking himself that question for more than a year. He had spent a long time wondering if Guillaume Roy had simply miscalculated, misread the terrain somehow, only to reach the conclusion he reached the day he read the man’s service file. No, he would not have made that mistake.
So why build your cabin on the lowest, darkest point of an otherwise beautiful lake? Yakabuski had considered various possibilities, right up to Roy going mad, becoming coco, as some in Ragged Lake believed. But he couldn’t accept it. The answer did not have the completeness you feel when things are right and proper, when they’re running true.
Then he reread the journal, as his father had suggested, and it came to him. The obvious answer. It wasn’t Roy who had chosen the spot. It had been her.
. . .
When the backhoe was finished with the high ground, Yakabuski got the cops to dig every six feet in a circular pattern starting fifty yards from the cabin and working inwards. They dug the rest of the day, stopping only when the sun had dipped below the treeline, forcing them to drive down the rail line to Ragged Lake in darkness. They booked into the Mattamy and, after saying he was tired, Yakabuski went straight to his room.
That night he had a dream, a first-time dream, which was rare for his age. He saw his father the morning after they had camped by the abandoned bush camp on Ragged Lake, hooking a muskie on his second pass, a huge fish, a serpent the boy thought when it was brought aboard, his father laughing and hoisting the muskie above his head like a trophy, splashing water all over himself, the boat, his son. The boy finally laughing along with
his father because surely this was a good thing. Even as the fish snapped and lunged at him.
He dreamed of Five Mile Camp the way it must have looked in the ’80s and ’90s, with hundreds of people living on the banks of the Old Duck, fish being smoked in pits scattered in the mud along the shoreline, brightly coloured cottages seen among the spruce. No fences anywhere. Then he saw the mill, men in dark-green factory clothes smoking by a gate. Hundreds of smoking men. Shortly before dawn, his dream turned to scenes of bad weather. A late afternoon thunderstorm in High River. The Clyde River swelling its banks and washing away the village of Snow Lake, which actually did happen back in ’32, killing more than forty people. Then came a snowstorm, a bad one, first at Snow Lake but then the land changed, the dream shifted, and he was back in Ragged Lake.
The dead were marching past him. Lucy Whiteduck, Guillaume Roy, Cassandra Roy, Roselyn and Gaetan Tremblay, Donnie Buckham, Matt Downey, John Holly, Tommy Bangles, Bobby Chance. Twenty-three ghosts marching through the snowstorm with heads turned down and eyes fixed to a point six inches in front of their feet. Turning for only the briefest of seconds when they were parallel to Yakabuski to look into his face, then turning their heads away and continuing their slow march through the storm.
When they were gone, the dream shifted one last time, and Yakabuski found himself standing in front of the squatters’ cabin. He saw a flash of light inside. Then two more flashes, and suddenly light was exploding around him, skittering dots of light flying around his head, his legs, his arms. The dots faded one by one until only a handful were left, and these final dots did not fade like the others but flew in ever-higher circles until Yakabuski lost sight of them.
It took a long time. He counted them twice. To make sure he was not mistaken about the number of dots that had flown away. Four.
When he awoke the next morning, the answer was right there in his head, waiting for him.
. . .
Yakabuski sipped his coffee and watched the cabin come down. The backhoe made clumsy, spirited runs into the walls until the beer-tin roof started to sag, then collapsed with a noise so loud it scared grey jays from their nests on the other side of the lake.
Who are we to judge, he thought. We each have complicated relationships with the ones we love. Offer remembrance and pay homage in different ways. Maybe it was possible for a heinous crime to be the foundation for love and family. The actual physical foundation.
“Where do you want us to start digging?” one of the cops shouted after the cabin had been pushed to the shoreline.
“Dead centre,” he yelled back.
They found the body less than five minutes later. Even from the lip of the freshly dug hole, Yakabuski could see the faded duck pattern on the tie around the skeleton’s neck.
He could never say with certainty if Roy knew what he had done. If he had been part of the secret. For a long time, he sought an answer to that question, believing it would reveal some grand truth about love and place, some arcane secret about family and home and secret deeds done on abandoned frontiers long ago. A sort of Book of Deeds for the country.
But it never came. In time, Yakabuski accepted what had happened at Ragged Lake, deciding in a way that seemed silly and illogical to him — although the conclusion always seemed right — that what was meant to happen had simply happened.
He came to feel much the same about the murder of Johnny Whiteduck, deciding after he had thought it through some, that the girl had good reason.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RON CORBETT is an author, journalist, and broadcaster. He is the author of seven non-fiction books, including the Canadian bestseller The Last Guide and the critically praised First Soldiers Down about Canada’s deployment to Afghanistan. A father of four, he is married to award-winning photojournalist Julie Oliver. This is his first novel.
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Copyright © Ron Corbett, 2017
Published by ECW Press
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Corbett, Ron, 1959–, author
Ragged Lake / Ron Corbett.
(A Frank Yakabuski mystery)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77041-394-8 (softcover)
Also issued as: 978-1-77305-094-2 (PDF),
978-1-77305-095-9 (ePUB)
I. Title.
PS8605.O7155R33 2017 C813’.6 C2017-902413-2 C2017-902992-4
Cover design: Michel Vrana
Cover photo: cabin in the woods © Thomas_Zsebok_Images/iStockPhoto; stormy winter sky © dimitris_k/iStockPhoto
The publication of Ragged Lake has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million t
o bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We also acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,737 individual artists and 1,095 organizations in 223 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
