Shellane reached for her hand. She looked startled when he touched her wrist, but let him pull her down onto her knees. “If that’s how it is,” he said, “you should leave him.”
The boat that had been racing around at the far end of the lake swung close in along the shore, the sound of its engine carving a gash in the stillness. The driver and the woman with him waved. Neither Shellane nor Grace responded.
“He doesn’t deserve you,” Shellane said.
“You don’t know me…and you don’t know him.”
“Twenty-five years ago I used to be him.”
“I doubt that. Avery’s one of a kind.”
“No he’s not. I had a girlfriend…a lot like you. Sweet, pretty. She loved me, but I couldn’t get it together. I was too damn lazy. I thought because I was smart, the world was going to fall at my feet. Eventually she left me. But before that happened, I did my best to make her feel as bad about herself as I felt about myself.”
She was silent a few beats. “Did you ever get it together?”
“I got by, but I never did what I wanted.”
“What was that?”
“It’s a bit of a coincidence, actually. I wanted to be a musician. I wrote songs…or tried to. Screwed around in a garage band. But I settled for the next best thing.”
She looked at him expectantly.
“Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime,” he said.
They sat without speaking for a minute. Shellane told himself it was time to pull back. The pause was an opportunity to quit this foolishness. But instead he said, “Have dinner with me tonight. We can drive into Marquette.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? He’ll be playing tonight.”
“He plays every night.”
“Then why not have dinner? You afraid someone will see us?”
She gave no reply, and he said, “Come over to the cabin, then. I’ll cook up some steaks.”
“I might have to eat at home.” She flattened her palms against her thighs. “I could come over after…maybe.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I don’t want you to think…that…”
“I promise not to think.”
That brought a wan smile. “We can just talk, if that’s all right.”
“Talk would be good.”
She appeared to be growing uncomfortable and, watching her hands wrestle with one another, her eyes darting toward the lake, he timed her and said to himself, the instant before she spoke the same words, I should go.
Late that afternoon it seemed deep November arrived at the lake in all its dank and gray displeasure, a cold wind pushing in a pewter overcast and spatterings of rain. As the dusk turned to dark, a fog rolled in, ghost-dressing the trees in whitish rags that clung to the boughs like relics of an ancient festival. Shellane, who had gone for a walk just as the fog began to accumulate, was forced to grope his way along, guided by the muffled slap of the waves. He had brought a flashlight, but all the beam illuminated was churning walls of fog. He must have been within a hundred yards of the cabin when he realized he could no longer hear the water. He kept going in what he assumed to be the direction of the shoreline, but after ten minutes, he was still on solid ground. He must have gotten turned around, he thought. He shined the flashlight ahead. A momentary thinning of the mist, and he made out a building. If anyone was at home, he could ask directions. The visibility was so poor, he couldn’t see much until he was right up next to the wall. The boards were knotty and badly carpentered, set at irregular slants and coated with pitch. He ran his right hand against one and picked up a splinter.
“Shit!” He examined his palm. Blood welled from a gouge, and a toothpick-sized sliver of wood was visible beneath the skin. He shook his hand to ease the hurt and happened to glance upward. Protruding from the wall some twenty feet overhead was a huge black fist, perfectly articulated and twice the circumference of an oil drum. From its clenched fingers hung a shred of rotting rope.
Shellane’s heart seemed itself to close into a fist. Swirling fog hid the thing from view, but he could have sworn it was not affixed to the wall, but rather emerged from it, the boards flowing out into the shape, as if the building were angry and had extruded this symptom of its mood.
He heard movement behind him and spun about, caught his heel and fell. Knocked loose on impact, the flashlight rolled away, becoming a mound of yellowish radiance off in the fog. Panicked, he scrambled up, breathing hard. He could no longer see much of the building, just the partial outline of a roof.
A guttural noise; pounding footsteps.
“Hey!” Shellane called.
More footsteps, and another voice, maybe the same one.
“Quit screwing around!” he shouted. The hairs on his neck prickled. Who the fuck would own such a place? Some pissant Goths. Rich kids who’d never gotten over The Cure. Movement on his right. Something heavy and ungainly.
Fuck directions, he told himself.
He started away from the building, walking fast, holding his arms out like Frankenstein’s monster to ward off obstructions. Less than ten seconds later, he hit a drop-off and staggered into cold ankle-deep water. He overbalanced and toppled onto his side, raising a splash. He pushed up from the silty bottom, found his way to shore, and stood shivering. Listening for voices. The only sound was that of the water dripping from his clothes onto the sand. He felt foolish at having been spooked by, probably, a bunch of twits who wore eyeliner and drank wine out of silver cups and thought they were unique.
That fist, though. What a freakshow!
If things were different, he thought, he’d give them a lesson in reality. Blow a couple of nine-millimeter holes in their point of view. But his annoyance faded quickly, and after squeezing and shaking the excess water from his clothes, he trudged off along the shore.
He doubted that Grace would show that evening, and truth be told, he wasn’t sure he wanted her to. His experience in the fog had rekindled his caution, and he thought it might be best for them both if she blew him off. He could be no help to her, and she would only endanger him. At nine o’clock he switched on the laptop and called up his crime file. Seeing Marty Gerbasi in Detroit had made him realize it was time to add a more personal reminiscence. He’d been having a beer in the Antrim back in Southie, the winter of ’83, when Marty had come in with Donnie Doyle, a pale twist of a kid with peroxided hair and a rabbity look who occasionally hooked on with a crew as a driver. Stupid as a stopped clock. They’d sat down next to Shellane and all three of them had tried to drink the bar out of Bushmills. Marty was buying, playing the grand fellow, laughing at Donnie’s stories, most of them lies about his gambling prowess, and winking broadly at Shellane as if to say he knew the kid was bullshit. Around 1 AM they staggered out of the bar—at least Donnie had staggered. Marty and Shellane had handled their liquor. No one ever saw Donnie Doyle after that night, and Shellane understood that having Marty buy you drinks was not a good thing. Like so many of Shellane’s associates, he lacked the necessary inch of conscience to qualify as human. Over the years, Shellane’s recognition that he was involved with a company of affable sociopaths had grown more poignant, eventually causing him to rethink his future, to realize that sooner or later Marty would offer to buy him drinks. He never found out what Donnie Doyle had done to deserve his night out with good ol’ Roy Shellane and the guinea angel of death, but he figured it was nothing more than some unfortunate behavior, maybe a tendency toward loquaciousness or…
A knock on the door. Ignoring his determination that he was better off without her, he jumped up to let Grace in. The plaid jacket and jeans again. Ponytail.