Last Exit to Pine Lake
Page 13
“Can I get your phone number?” Peter tried. Kimberley continued packing without comment. “I’ll be spending the night here. That met with similar lack of response. “At least,” Peter asked, “can you spare something to put some of my stuff into? Paul took my big pack.”
Without comment, the student walked over and deposited one green garbage bag in front of Peter. Then she held out her hand with an object in it. Peter took it; it was a voice recorder smaller than the one he’d lost in the lake. “Thanks,” he said.
When her canoe was loaded, Kimberley pushed into Pine Lake without at look back, and within ten minutes had disappeared up the portage trail, the entrance barely visible among the shore shrubs in the late afternoon sunlight. She took her pack and paddles to the top of the hill, then came back for the canoe. She could see Peter still sitting on the island, making notes in his little notebook.
She had time to work on it as she climbed uphill with the red canoe on her shoulders. She decided she was angry, numb, and determined to get home in that order. No one had the right, she decided, to do that to her.
By the time she was crossing Sparkler Lake, she decided she’d brought most of it on herself: Paul hadn’t asked for company. But the anger remained.
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The World and Afterwords
What did you expect?
Rivers of time still sweep people away, unforgiving and unforgiven and the wind still blows in the pines where Tom started to make a cabin. You can deal with that any way you want: for many people, each autumn is a tragedy beyond imagining. For others, it’s just leaves falling, steadily, on the portage trails.
The moon shone down on Peter Finer, onetime reporter and future biographer, as he sat all night by the lake, his back against his canoe. Whether he was now the centre of a tragedy or just another clown under the big tent is up to you to decide. In his narration, he merely says, “I spent the night on the island. In the morning I returned to Long Lake, leaving Paul in the water and Paul’s canoe on the rocky island.”
Sometimes you can find answers in the moonlight; sometimes you can’t.
In the night, under the lake, the large burbot edged in towards shore and discovered Paul on the bottom. Carefully, it circled the body, tasting the water. Eventually the barbells on its chin touched Paul’s nose. Then the fish felt the man’s face with the leading edges of his fins, which were covered with taste buds. However, there was, the fish sensed, nothing he could get out of a dead writer, and he moved in towards the shore.
Kimberley showed up at the OPP office in the morning, and was still there when Peter’s car drove in. Between them, they eventually convinced a very irritated officialdom that they’d done nothing to mislead anybody. A helicopter carrying a couple of divers landed on Pine Lake the following day, and hauled the corpse, in a dark plastic bag, off for autopsy. They also took Paul’s canoe; it was sold at the next spring’s police auction to a couple of duck hunters.
Tom got his stomach pumped and within a few days was well enough to be institutionalized. Once back on his medications, he was released into the world. After a few days on the streets of Toronto, he began skipping his medications because they made him stupid and shaky. He talked to everyone about the joys of being in the woods, but, a couple of years afterwards, was still talking about it.
Paul Gottsen’s sister inherited the cottage site, along with all his known writings and royalties for them, not that that amounted to much for a year or two, after which all his works went into reprint. The cottage site was bought by a couple with three young children; they put up a rather large place a bit further from the water. The Wounded Woodpecker still shows up at the feeder.
The first step in Gottsen’s rehabilitation was the publication, six months after his death, of Peter Finer’s biography, Dark Waters: A Life of Paul Gottsen. The biography sold a small but respectable number of copies before Dark Lake appeared.
It was two days after getting home that Kimberley unzipped her sleeping bag and threw it over a line to air out. A bright red USB drive and a piece of paper fell out. The paper held a signed, handwritten note, “I Paul Gottsen assign the novel Pine Lake and all associated rights to Kimberley Molley to do with as she wishes.”
It took Kimberley a month before she even checked the drive, and found the entire draft of Dark Lake on it. It took another six months before she placed a call to the publisher of Gottsen’s last three novels. The publisher brought Dark Lake out by surprise, two months after Finer’s biography hit the shelves. Despite the discrepancies between his narrative and the one Kimberley told the media, sales of the biography increased dramatically, especially with the run of very positive reviews for the book.
Kimberley eventually decided to keep her baby, dropping out of university. She had no talent for writing adult novels, but with a bit of pull at the publisher’s, got started in a career writing teen fiction. That, and royalties from Dark Lake, made her enough money to keep going and to home-school her daughter, whom she named Paula.
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