Starvation Lake (11 page)

I had a notebook out but hadn’t opened it yet. “The snowmobile at Walleye,” I said. “Did it really belong to Coach?”

Dingus smiled. His head gave a barely discernible shake.

“No?” I said.

“Can’t help you.”

“Come on.”

“No comment. You know what you know.”

Nobody loved the cat-and-mouse more than small-town cops. It made the tedium of their jobs more bearable. Still, Dingus’s “no comment” was confirmation enough for me. “So how the heck does the sled wind up in Walleye?” I said. “And please don’t tell me the tunnels.”

He sat back and placed his hands flat on his head. “Strange things happen, Gus,” he said. “Remember Felix?”

Everyone in town knew the story. Felix, a golden retriever, dove into an ice-fishing hole on Starvation just as his master, Fritz Hornbeck, was hauling up a perch. Felix was going after the fish, but he missed and disappeared beneath the ice. Hornbeck, who was into his second bottle of blueberry schnapps, assumed the dog had drowned. But an hour later, Felix emerged from another ice-fishing hole in a shanty half a mile away, shaking off lake water in front of Elvis Bontrager. It was the talk of Starvation for weeks.

“That’s your comment?” I said. “‘Strange things happen’?”

“No. No comment at all.”

“Come on, Dingus.” Joanie was going to raise hell with me for interfering with her story. It’d be worse if I had nothing to show for it.

Deputy Frank D’Alessio walked into the office and, without noticing me, handed Dingus a steaming mug and a thin file folder. “Forensics, chief,” the deputy said. Dingus shot him a look, and D’Alessio turned and saw me.

“Ah, jeez,” he said. “Gus.”

“Frankie,” I said. “Forensics?”

He glanced nervously at Dingus, then started for the door. “You’re playing tonight, right?” He meant our playoff game. “See you out there.”

I smiled at Dingus. “Forensics on a snowmobile?”

Dingus shrugged. “Routine stuff,” he said. “And that’s off the record.” He stood up from his chair, closed his office door, and sat down again. The name of the woman in the photograph came to me: Barbara Lampley. Dingus actually displayed a picture of his ex-wife. What man did that?

“Off the record, Dingus? Give me a break. Has the
Pilot
ever burned you?”

He folded his meaty hands on his desk. “Not yet,” he said. “I’d really like to help you, Gus, but fact is, I have an ongoing investigation here.”

“Ongoing or reopened?”

“No comment.”

That gave me an idea.

“Can I get a copy of the original police report from 1988?” I said.

“Tell you what,” he said. He pushed back from the desk, pulled a drawer out, plucked a sheet of paper from inside, and handed it to me. “Fill her out and we’ll get back to you.”

The sheet was a form for requesting records under a state public-disclosure law. “Dingus, I can’t wait for this,” I said.

“Well, I’m afraid somebody else has asked for the same report, and I asked them for the same thing.”

“Joanie?”

“No, not the redhead.”

“Who then?”

He shook his head. “That’s all.”

I couldn’t imagine who else would be interested in that report.

“Are you going to drag Walleye?”

“Sure,” Dingus said. “With an icebreaker.”

This wasn’t like Dingus. He usually gave it up once he saw you were serious. Did he have more at stake here than I knew? I recalled watching him from the woods on the night the cowl washed up, how he knelt in the shadows on the beach. I didn’t remember him being a close friend of Coach, but then I wasn’t around Starvation for years.

“Hey,” I said. “Isn’t that Barbara Lampley? Your ex?”

“What of it?”

“You’re a better man than me, Sheriff.”

“OK,” he said, pushing away from his desk. “We’re done here.”

“No, tell you what, Dingus, I’ll take your advice.”

Remembering Barbara reminded me that Dingus had been a deputy once—maybe during the original investigation. I slapped the information sheet down on his desk and scribbled my name, the
Pilot
address, and my request for the 1988 file on Coach’s accident. I handed it to Dingus. He stared at it for a long moment, then looked up at me, holding my gaze as if he were sizing me up. We really didn’t know each other very well. I guessed that was going to change. “All right,” he said. “We’ll process it within the required ten days.”

   Glassy cobwebs arched over the stairway down from the
Pilot
newsroom. I flicked a switch and gray light filled the basement, a dank concrete vault the size of a one-car garage. Along three walls stood wooden racks holding black binders of
Pilot
s dating to the 1970s, dates etched in gold lettering on their sides. The one I wanted was marked “March 1–March 15, 1988.”

I hefted the binder from the rack and set it on a slab of Masonite laid across two file cabinets beneath the stairway. Pink Post-its jutted from the edges of the binder—Joanie’s doing. I flipped to the newspaper marked by the first Post-it, Monday, March 14, 1988. Coach’s death covered the front page. The headline bannered across the top read, “Blackburn Dies in Snowmobile Mishap.” Beneath it a photograph showed cops standing around a patch on the frozen lake, the headlights of their snowmobiles and ambulances illuminating the early morning gloom.

There was a story recounting the reactions of local people, a story about other recent snowmobiling accidents, and a story about Blackburn’s coaching career headlined, “Proud Coach Put Starvation Hockey on the Map.” That story wrapped around the same smiling mug shot of Coach that hung on the wall at Enright’s. Another picture showed Make-Believe Gardens, Blackburn’s billets fuzzy in the background.

The main story began, “Legendary hockey coach John D. ‘Jack’ Blackburn disappeared on Starvation Lake early yesterday in what appears to have been a drowning in a snowmobile-related incident.” Police offered scant details, the story said. There were unhelpful quotes from a few lakeshore residents and a brief, unrevealing interview with the sole eyewitness, Leo Redpath. I pulled out another binder and skimmed the next several papers. Photos showed that police encircled the accident scene with yellow tape at a fifty-yard radius. Townspeople in long coats and wool hats gathered along the perimeter to watch cops in scuba gear drop into the jagged hole in the ice. Some left flowers. The bouquets froze and wind scattered the petals so that flecks of scarlet and gold and violet speckled the hard gray lake. The cops kept the tape in place for three days. By then the sheriff’s department was talking a bit more freely and the
Pilot
had pieced together a version of what had happened.

   As they often did on Sunday nights in winter, Coach and Leo had gone riding on the trails that wound through the woods north of the lake. They stopped at their usual places, the Hide-A-Way, Dingman’s, the Just One More Saloon. A bit before midnight, they parked their snowmobiles in a clearing a mile from Starvation’s western shore, built a bonfire, and shared a bottle.

Coach wanted to do some “skimming.” I’d done it a few times with Soupy and other friends, mostly in high school, always when we were drunk. We’d take our snowmobiles and find patches of open water on Starvation or Walleye or one of the other area lakes, and we’d hammer the throttles until we were moving fast enough to skim across the water to solid ice. It was kind of like jumping barrels on a motorcycle, only dumber, because it was usually dark and, as I said, we were drunk. Pine County outlawed skimming after two kids drowned on Little Twin Lake one night in 1982.

Everyone knew Coach loved to skim as much as he loved to dodge the cops who tried to catch him at it. “I’m going to die with my helmet on,” he liked to say, and Leo would invariably respond, “You just might get your wish.” Leo, who had never learned to swim, wanted nothing to do with skimming. Coach taunted him, but Leo would say, “I have no desire to spend my retirement years at the bottom of a lake.” He didn’t even like to watch. When Coach went looking for open water, Leo waited onshore, nipping at a bottle. On this March night, though, Leo relented. Why wasn’t entirely clear, at least from the
Pilot.
The police quoted Leo as saying he’d simply had too much to drink, and, in fact, he never took another drink after that night. Later, when people asked him what had happened, he usually begged off by saying he was afraid that dredging it from his memory would send him back to the bottle.

Coach led Leo onto the lake beneath a moonless sky. Out past Pelly’s Point, half a mile from shore, Coach and Leo stopped before a large pool of standing water shaped like a pear. Leo told police he lined his sled up facing the narrow end, and Coach steered himself into position to cross the wider stretch, spanning about twenty-five yards.

Half an hour later, just past 1:30 a.m., Leo banged at the door of my mother’s house on the southwestern bank. She called the police.

Leo had chickened out.

He told the cops that, just before his snowmobile reached the water’s edge, he had cut the throttle. Coach did not stop, of course. As always, Leo tried not to watch, but he turned to see after hearing Coach’s snowmobile whine and splash and go silent. He saw Coach’s helmeted head bobbing up and down in the water, heard his gurgling cries for help. “I didn’t know what to do,” the
Pilot
quoted Leo as saying. The rope they carried for such emergencies was stowed in Coach’s snowmobile. The
Pilot
said Leo lay down on his stomach and edged close enough to the water to dampen the shoulders of his parka.

Divers found no body or snowmobile. Police said they thought the sled had sunk into the deep silt at the bottom of the lake and Coach’s body had drifted away. They planned to dredge after the spring thaw. I pulled out another binder and looked for stories on the dredging. It never happened. The town council decided it would be futile and expensive, the
Pilot
said. Nor did the council desire to prolong the town’s mourning. The sheriff then, Jerry Spardell, said he had no good answer for what happened to Coach except that perhaps he and his machine had been sucked into one of those underwater tunnels. Reading it, I shook my head in disbelief.

A cold sun shined on Jack Blackburn’s funeral procession. Townspeople in River Rats caps, hats, and jackets lined Main Street as fifty snowmobiles draped in bedsheets dyed black crawled past, trailing plumes of exhaust and an empty hearse. A blown-up photograph atop the hearse showed Coach standing on a rink in his blue-and-gold sweatsuit, hockey stick in his hands, whistle dangling. I watched with Soupy from the storage room over Enright’s. Now and then I cried. Soupy, who did not cry, laid a hand on the back of my neck and said nothing. Coach had taught me how to play goalie and how to love hockey and how to win. But that wasn’t why I cried. I cried for the years in which Coach and I had barely talked since the day we lost that last game, since I’d left Starvation Lake. I cried because Coach had never taught me how to lose.

   I closed the binder and stood there, my eyes fixed on the dates etched on its side, thinking. Why would Leo change his mind about skimming? He’d doubtless resisted plenty of other times when he’d had a lot to drink. Why hadn’t anyone onshore heard Coach’s cries for help? How could the city
not
dredge the lake, the expense be damned? And what about my mother, a witness once removed? She hadn’t been quoted in the
Pilot,
not even declining to comment.

What troubled me most was that I hadn’t pondered these questions before, or allowed myself to. Why was it that only ten years later I’d begun to feel that Leo’s story seemed unlikely? Why only now was I wondering what my mother knew that she’d never told? At the time, perhaps, I was too distraught to think about it. And then I ran back to Detroit and tried to forget, while my mother and everyone else who knew how I felt was telling me to let it go, move on with my life. So I did. Now it was catching up with me, a nightmare that had been hiding all those years in the shadowy corners of my mind, unseen and unacknowledged.

As I slipped the binder back into its rack, I heard a creak in the floor above me. Shit, I thought.

   Joanie was waiting at the top of the stairs. “Jerk,” she said.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Got a hockey game to get to.”

She stepped in front of me. “What were you doing going to see Dingus? Checking up on me?”

“I wasn’t checking—”

“You have no right.”

“It’s my job—”

“Bullcrap! Editors don’t go around checking up on reporters behind their backs. Editors aren’t supposed to be sniveling little chickens.”

Some bosses might have fired her then and there. I told myself to calm down and walked past her into the newsroom and sat down on her desk. Of course I couldn’t fire her, and not just because we were short-staffed. She had to help me figure out what had happened to Coach.

“Take it easy,” I said. “You were right.”

“Darn right I was right.”

“No, I mean about the whole thing. It is a hell of a story.”

“So what were you doing at the sheriff’s department?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t checking up on you, I swear. I think maybe I was checking up on me.”

“What the heck does that mean, Gus?”

I got up and walked to my desk. My keyboard was buried in a pile of typed articles that had been dropped off by old-lady freelancers, who attended school board and parks commission meetings and babbled on in their stories about what the mayor was wearing and who led the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance. I spent my days rewriting that garbage into slightly better garbage that filled space between ads for pizza joints and lumber yards.

“Look at all this shit,” I said. I turned to face her. “Look, I’m not trying to steal your story, OK? Christ, we work for the same paper. Like it or not, I’m your boss, all right? And I…well, I wasn’t
there
when all this happened, but I knew—actually I didn’t know what I knew, then or now—oh hell, never mind. Bottom line, Dingus didn’t give me squat. I filled out a request for the eighty-eight police report and he sent me home.”