Wolf Lake

by John Verdon

  “I appreciate your concern. But I’m curious about one thing. Why are you still here?”

  Landon appeared taken aback.

  “I mean here at the lodge. After all that’s happened. Ethan’s death. The deaths of the other guests. The place being essentially shut down. The lurid history and general eeriness of the place. All good reasons not to be here.”

  Landon smiled. “It’s all relative, isn’t it? One man’s reason to leave is another man’s reason to stay. I find the absence of other guests a plus, not a minus.”

  “And the four unexplained deaths?”

  “The fact is, mysteries intrigue me, and those four deaths fascinate me. Which raises an interesting question. I have only myself to be concerned about. But your own situation is more complicated. Another life is involved. You’re not subjecting just yourself to those problems you reeled off. If they apply to me, they apply doubly to you. So the real question is, why are you here?”

  “I was invited here to do a job. I feel I should stay until the job is done.”

  Landon raised a skeptical eyebrow. “If I had a wife with me, I might not feel that way.”

  Gurney produced a polite smile. “I appreciate your perspective. Incidentally, if you have any ideas about the four deaths, I hope you’ll share them with me.” He stepped back, his hand on the door, about to close it.

  “What sort of ideas?”

  “Ideas about who might be responsible.”

  Landon shrugged. “I suppose one does have to remain open to the possibility that Richard orchestrated it. Isn’t the man famous for pushing the boundaries of hypnotic persuasion?”

  There was something playful in Landon’s bright, intelligent gaze. And something provocative in his blasé tone. Not to mention the disconnect between his comments and his apparently warm relationship with Jane Hammond.

  But Gurney resisted the urge to pursue the issue. He had a more pressing concern.

  CHAPTER 37

  After locking the door and sliding the bolt in place, he headed for the bedroom to check on Madeleine.

  He was startled to find the bed covers thrown back and the bed empty.

  His eyes went straight to the balcony, but the door to it was clearly locked. The glass had accumulated a fine layer of snow.

  “Maddie,” he called out.

  He checked the floor on both sides of the bed, then rushed back out into the main room, frantic now, looking everywhere.

  The guitar music playing on her tablet had shifted into a dramatic style with florid Spanish rhythms.

  He double-checked the bathroom, even though he was sure she wasn’t there.

  But there she was—standing in a shadowed corner, out of his original line of sight.

  She’d wrapped herself in a white blanket. Her hair was disarranged. Her gaze was fixed again on the tub.

  She was shaking her head slowly. “I don’t understand.”

  He stepped closer to the tub and peered into it. “What don’t you understand?”

  “How it could have happened.”

  “It may be simpler than you think,” he suggested.

  Seeing her baffled look as a good sign, one open to a reasonable explanation, he launched into an account of how the human mind can “see” things that aren’t actually there.

  She showed little interest in what he was saying, but he pressed on. “Two eyewitnesses to the same event often give contradictory descriptions. They’re both absolutely certain they saw what they saw. The problem is, what they ‘saw’ occurred mainly in their brain circuits, not in the external world.”

  “Colin’s body was in the tub.”

  “Maddie, everything we ‘see’ is a combination of new data coming in through our eyes and old information stored in our brains. It’s like what happens on the Internet. You type in the first few letters of a word, and it jumps to a word in its data memory that starts with those letters. But when we’re under stress, and our brains are trying to work faster, they sometimes jump to the wrong conclusion. They create the wrong image. We’re positive we’re seeing it. But it’s not really there. We’d swear that it’s out there, but it only exists in our brain.”

  Her gaze was moving around the walls of the bathroom. “You’re saying I’m delusional?”

  “I’m saying that we’re wired to ‘see’ more than our optic nerves are actually reporting. And sometimes the brain’s image factory races ahead of the optical data and turns the rope on the floor into a snake.”

  She pulled the blanket around her like a cloak. “That wasn’t a rope I saw. How could Colin’s body . . . get from Grayson Lake . . . into that tub?”

  “Maddie, maybe you should put on some clothes?”

  “You know, they never found his body. Did I tell you that?”

  “Yes. You told me that.”

  “They never found his body,” she repeated slowly, as though that troubling fact could explain what had just happened.

  “Maddie? Sweetheart? You had a bad fall. It might be a good idea to lie down.”

  “They never found his body. Then it was there.” She pointed at the tub, letting the blanket slip as she did so. It fell from her body to the floor around her feet.

  Gurney wrapped his arms around her. He could feel tremors running through her body. The aftershocks of an earthquake.

  He held her tightly for a long time.

  LATER, AFTER SHE’D FINALLY COLLAPSED INTO A TROUBLED SLEEP, Gurney sat in front of the cold hearth and tried to figure out what to do next.

  The wind was keening softly in the chimney, things at Wolf Lake were making less and less sense, and Madeleine’s mental state was undermining his ability to think straight.

  Her possible need for psychiatric intervention came to mind, but he pushed the thought aside with a sick feeling. He had no illusions about the dismal state of that art and the practitioners who were too eager to experiment with their mind-altering chemistry sets.

  He just wanted her to be all right.

  To be herself again.

  That train of thought was cut short by the ringing of his phone—and the presence on the screen of an unexpected ID. It was Moe Blumberg, former owner of Camp Brightwater.

  “Mr. Gurney?”

  “I thought by now you’d be en route to Tel Aviv.”

  “We’re sitting on the plane, still at the gate at JFK. A fucking Hamas madman blew himself up at Ben Gurion airport. So here we sit. Nobody knows nothing.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Me too, along with the three hundred other sardines on this plane. But that’s the world we live in now. Get used to it, right?”

  “I guess so. What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing. Just a thought I had. Your question. Wondering if I recognized any names?”

  That got Gurney’s attention and triggered his sense of caution. He wanted to get safely out of range of the room’s surveillance devices.

  “Just a second. My wife’s asleep. Let me step into the bathroom so I don’t wake her.”

  Gurney shut the bathroom door behind him. “Okay. You were saying?”

  “Sometimes a little corner of my brain lights up when I leave it alone for a while. Things pop up when I stop trying to make them pop up.”

  “You recall something about the names I mentioned?”

  “No, those names don’t mean a thing to me. But I’ll tell you what I did remember. That summer, there was a secret club. There were four boys. Lion, Spider, Wolf, Weasel.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Lion, Spider, Wolf, Weasel. Those were their nicknames. They sprayed those four damn words—in red-paint graffiti—on cabins, tents, trees. Even on my goddamn canoe.”

  “Did you ever find out who they were?”

  “No. Sneaky little bastards. Maybe some of the other boys knew who they were, but I think they were scared of them. Nobody would say nothing.”

  “You think there was some connection between those four boys with the nicknames
and the boy who disappeared?”

  “Who knows? Your visit just got wheels turning in my head, and that’s what popped up—those animal names. So I was thinking I should call you.”

  “Did the police investigating Scott Fallon’s disappearance pursue this ‘secret club’ angle?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Like I said before, to them the Fallon incident was just another runaway situation. And boys are always forming secret clubs. So maybe they were right, and this is a waste of your time.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Blumberg. This could help a lot. While I have you on the phone, let me ask you something else. Do you recall anything about Scott Fallon’s parents—their first names, where they lived?”

  “Hah! How could I ever forget? The mother—there was no father, just the mother—she kept coming up to the camp every weekend. Searching. Walking through the woods. Calling his name, even weeks later.”

  “Do you remember the mother’s name?”

  “Kimberly. Kimberly Fallon.”

  “Do you by any chance have an address for her?”

  “Sure. Address, email, phone number, everything. After she stopped coming to Brightwater, she’d call me once a week, then once a month, now maybe once a year. But what can I do? I talk to her.”

  Because of the woman’s persistent communication with Blumberg, he had her contact information on his phone. Gurney entered it all on his own phone, thanked Blumberg, and wished him a safe trip. He also made a note of the four nicknames.

  Lion. Spider. Wolf. Weasel.

  He wondered if the nature of each animal described some characteristic of the boy who chose it. And he couldn’t help thinking that the number of boys in the secret club might be significant.

  Four.

  Four troublemaking boys who were at the camp when Scott Fallon disappeared.

  Now, in this strange case, there were four dead men. And at least one of the four, Steven Pardosa, had been at Brightwater that summer.

  Gurney still had his phone in his hand when it rang again.

  This time it was Jack Hardwick.

  “Good news. My buddy in Teaneck is even more ticked off than I thought.”

  “About the order to back away from the Balzac case?”

  “About the order coming from so high up he’s not allowed to know where it came from. That really frosted his balls.”

  “And this is doing us some good?”

  “I’d say so. After I saw him this morning he paid another visit to the therapist Balzac shared his weird-ass dream with. He asked her about the gay angle.”

  “And?”

  “First she just repeated that the dream was full of homoerotic imagery, which we already knew. But then she added that it was especially upsetting to Balzac because of his strong anti-homosexual feelings.”

  Gurney smiled. It was nice to see a corner of the puzzle begin to take shape.

  “There’s more,” added Hardwick.

  “From the therapist?”

  “From my buddy—who’s eager to help in every way he’s not supposed to. He told me that Balzac resigned from his job a few hours before he cut his wrists. Sent the owner of the tobacco shop an email. ‘Effective immediately, I am resigning from my management position at Smokers Happiness. Respectfully, Leo Balzac.’ Short and sweet, eh?”

  “That seems an odd gesture.”

  “So my detective friend thought.”

  “Did he pursue it?”

  “He was told that the details of the case were no longer his concern.”

  “Because wiser minds up the ladder were taking over?”

  “Words to that effect.”

  “People on the verge of cutting their wrists don’t usually spend time writing resignation notes.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “People usually resign for one of two reasons. They can’t stand what they’re doing. Or they’ve been offered something more attractive.”

  “So where does that take us?”

  “Maybe nowhere.” Gurney paused a moment to think about it. “I guess, if he wanted to stop smoking, he could have resigned to get away from tobacco. On the other hand, didn’t Steven Pardosa’s parents tell you that Steven was on the brink of turning his life around, that great things were just around the corner, something like that?”

  “They did, but I wrote that off as bullshit. Like, if only he’d lived, our wonderful son could’ve cured cancer. Crap like that.”

  “But suppose Pardosa actually was looking forward to something. And suppose Leo Balzac resigned because he was looking forward to something, too. Makes me curious whether Christopher Wenzel down in Florida had the same happy feeling about his future. Maybe you could call Bobby Becker at Palm Beach PD and ask him if there was any evidence of that.”

  “What are you trying to prove? That the dead guys were all homophobic shitheads with rosy views of happy times ahead?”

  “I’m trying to find puzzle pieces that fit together. And speaking of things fitting together—about ten minutes ago I got an interesting call from Moe Blumberg.”

  “Anything useful?”

  “He remembered four nicknames of the boys who belonged to a secret club at Brightwater the summer Scott Fallon disappeared. They called themselves Lion, Spider, Wolf, and Weasel.”

  “So what does this mean to you?”

  “The specific animal names don’t mean much to me, apart from the fact that they’re all predators. Of course, there’s the ‘wolf’ echo, but that could be a coincidence. If a kid wanted to pick a vicious nickname, it would be an obvious choice. What strikes me as possibly significant is the fact that there were four of them. And that the other campers were afraid of them. I got the impression from Moe that he wouldn’t be surprised if they had something to do with Scott Fallon’s disappearance. It’s a fact that Steven Pardosa was at Brightwater that summer. We need to find out if our other three ‘suicide’ victims were there at the same time. Given their ages, it’s possible.”

  “Wasn’t Ethan a bit older than the other three?”

  “A few years. He could have been there as a counselor.”

  “Ask Peyton. He ought to know.”

  “I’ll give it a try, but I wouldn’t put much faith in anything Peyton says. In the meantime, Blumberg gave me contact information for Scott’s mother. If she’ll talk to me, maybe I can find out if I’m on the right track.”

  “Good luck with that, Davey boy. I have a feeling you’ll need it.”

  CHAPTER 38

  During his phone conversations with Blumberg and Hardwick, Gurney had been pacing back and forth in the bathroom. With the door closed and his voice low, he’d felt safe from the audio bugs in the outer room. He figured it would also be a good place from which to call Kimberly Fallon.

  But first he wanted to go and check on Madeleine.

  In the light of the bedside lamp he could see that she was sleeping, but not peacefully. There were tiny movements at the corners of her mouth and eyes. Some of her exhalations were accompanied by small, plaintive sounds. He was tempted to wake her, but then he decided that even restless sleep might do her more good than no sleep at all.

  He went back to the bathroom to call Kimberly Fallon.

  He was surprised when the phone was answered by a live female voice.

  “Tashi delek.”

  “My name is Dave Gurney. I’m trying to reach Kimberly Fallon.”

  “This is Kimberly.”

  “I’m sorry, Kimberly, I didn’t understand what you said when you picked up.”

  “Tashi delek. Peace and good fortune. It’s a Tibetan greeting.”

  “I see. Well, I wish you the same.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was something odd in her tone, an off-center quality he associated with potheads.

  “Kimberly, I’m a detective. I’m calling about your son, Scott.”

  There was silence.

  “I’m calling about what happened at Camp Brightwater the summer he disappeared. I was
wondering if you’d be willing to help me by answering some questions.”

  More silence.

  “Kimberly?”

  “I have to see you.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I can’t talk about Scott unless I can see you.”

  “Are you saying that you want me to come to your home?”

  “I just want to see your eyes.”

  “My eyes?”

  “Your eyes are the windows of your soul. Do you have Skype?”

  IT TOOK GURNEY ONLY A FEW MINUTES TO GET HIS NOTEBOOK COMPUTER from his duffle bag, move a pile of towels off a low table in the bathroom, set the computer on it, open the Skype program, and position himself in front of the screen’s built-in camera.

  At Kimberly Fallon’s request he’d given her his Skype address. She wanted to place the video call from her end. So he got everything ready and waited.

  When he was thinking it wasn’t going to happen after all, the call came through.

  On his computer screen he saw a slim woman in her late forties or early fifties with a druggy smile and large blue eyes. Her hair was dark brown with streaks of coppery red. Her white peasant blouse and a string of large colored-glass beads around her neck gave her a retro-hippy look. There was an oversized painting covering most of the wall behind her, a swirl of green leaves against a cerulean sky.

  With her head inclined slightly to the side, she appeared to be studying his face.

  “You have amazing eyes,” she said.

  Having no idea how to respond, he thought it best to say nothing.

  “There’s a lot of sadness in your soul.”

  Her own eyes had the half-inward look of someone viewing the world through the lens of some secret knowledge, perhaps psychedelically inspired.

  “Why do you want to know about Scott?”

  It was an obvious question for which he should have prepared a careful answer, but he’d had no time for that. “I think . . . what happened that summer . . . may have had some delayed effects. There’ve been some suspicious deaths . . . of people who I believe may have been at Brightwater thirteen years ago, at the same time as Scott. There may be a connection between what’s happening now and what happened back then. I realize I’m bringing up painful memories. I’m sorry about that.”