“We had an argument,” Bob said.
“Okay.”
“We were hiking through there, and I’d been talking to him about his proposal, this stupid fishing resort, told him it was all wrong, that it would ruin the area, that he should forget about it, that bringing in hundreds of fishermen would clean this lake out of fish in a couple of years. Told him he was out of his fucking mind.”
“How did he like that?”
“He didn’t like it much. He said he had powerful lawyers, that they’d find a way to get the council to approve it. That Mayor Holland would have to agree or she’d have to spend millions to fight it.”
“Not good,” I said.
“We kept walking, arguing, and we got to the top of this ridge, the cliff, and he told me to come look, that this was part of the property he was going to develop, and that down at the bottom of the ridge, he was going to take down all those trees, mow everything down, and put in some huge whale for kids to play in.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And then he said I shouldn’t even worry about the fish being depleted, that he’d stock the lake, maybe bring in fish from other places. Starts talking about bringing in swordfish, for Christ’s sake. Those aren’t freshwater fish, I told him. You can’t put goddamn swordfish in a lake with muskie and pickerel. I asked him if he was out of his fucking mind, even suggesting something that stupid.”
“That’s pretty crazy,” I said.
Bob’s cheeks got red. “I swear to you! He was going to destroy this lake, that’s what he was going to do. This is God’s country, Zachary. Look around.” Bob’s eyes got misty. “This is paradise.”
It was hard for me, just yet, after the kind of night I’d put in, to think of this as paradise, but Bob was right. If there was a more beautiful part of the world, I hadn’t seen it yet.
“So,” Bob said, “I guess I said something I shouldn’t have.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“I called him a fucking idiot. Plain as that. I said, ‘Leonard, you are a complete, total fucking idiot.’ ”
“How’d he take that?”
“He hit me. Well, shoved me, I guess. Told me I was a stupid old coot, standing in the way of progress. So, I don’t know, I guess I shoved him back.”
“And over?”
Bob nodded slowly, once.
“Leonard went off the edge, tumbled. Rolled down, ass over teakettle. Around the second time he rolled over, I swear, I thought I heard something snap. His neck, I guess.” Bob paused, breathed in. “He rolled to the bottom, and I called down to him. Jesus, I musta called down to him ten times. But he didn’t answer. So, I found a way down, the same way we all found our way down later, to check on him.”
“And he was dead,” I said.
Bob looked out over the water, looking for something that wasn’t there. Some sort of salvation, maybe.
“No,” Bob said.
Maybe my mouth dropped open, I’m not sure, but it wasn’t the answer I was expecting.
“He was alive?” I asked.
“I guess, just barely. He was breathing, but he was twisted up something awful. He managed, sort of whispered, something about not being able to feel anything. At all.”
A slight breeze caught the bow of the boat and gently turned us. I felt cold.
“What happened then, Bob?”
“I”-and the words were catching in his throat-“I, I started thinking about what had happened to him. How he’d probably busted his spine, done something horrible, how he’d never walk again, and I thought of my wife, how her life dragged on, how Leonard didn’t deserve something like that.”
“Is that really all you were thinking?” I asked.
Bob was quiet for a moment. “I suppose I was thinking a few other things, too.” He paused. “About what was going to happen. About how, once I got help, and we got Leonard to a hospital, and he told the police what had happened, that I had pushed him over the edge, that even if I didn’t get convicted of anything, even if I could somehow convince them that Leonard slipped, that his lawyers, these goddamn lawyers of his, they’d find a way to ruin me. To destroy me.”
“Probably,” I said.
“And so, I put my…I put my hand over his mouth, and I pinched his nose, and I pressed really hard, and he couldn’t do anything, he couldn’t move his arms, he couldn’t twist away or anything. It took, I don’t know, a minute or so, maybe more. I think I kept my hand there a lot longer than I needed to. I was scared, that maybe I wouldn’t have done it for long enough.”
Now neither of us spoke for a minute.
“That’s cold, Bob,” I said, finally. “Getting into a shoving match, accidentally knocking Leonard over the cliff, I could see that. But the finishing him off, the smothering him, I have to be honest. That surprises me.”
Bob kept looking away. “Me too.” He paused. “I’m not proud of what I did.”
“So what happened then?”
“Once I knew, knew that he was dead, I tried to think of what to do. And I thought about the bear that, supposedly, was roaming the woods. I thought up a story, about how we’d run into it, made a run for it and got split up. When I got back up top, I really did run, deliberately tripped, let myself get pretty scraped up, to make the story as believable as possible.”
“You had us all fooled, Bob,” I said. “You did a darn good job of that.”
“I was already scared about what really did happen. But I just pretended it was something else that scared me.”
I shook my head sadly, turned the reel a couple of cranks.
“Zachary, are you taping this?” Bob asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“No, Bob,” I said. “I’m not wired, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just wanted to know what happened.”
Bob, one hand still holding his fishing pole, opened his tackle box and reached inside with his right hand. When it came back out, it was holding a gun. His Smith & Wesson pistol.
He pointed it in my direction.
“Oh, come on, Bob,” I said. “You’re not going to kill me.”
He swallowed. “I don’t know as you leave me much choice, Zack. I’d hate to do it. I like you. You’re a good kid. And I think the world of your father.”
I said, “There’s not just that. A guy falls and breaks his neck, you can call that an accident and get away with it. But you shoot a guy, how you going to explain that?”
“I don’t know,” Bob said. “I guess I could say you drowned, fell overboard. Weigh your body down, let it sink to the bottom. I could tip the boat over, there could be an accident.”
“They’d find my body, Bob. This isn’t that big a lake. And even Dr. Heath could probably find a bullet hole. And the other thing is, I don’t think you’re a bad person. I admit, what you did, smothering Leonard, I’m a bit taken aback by that, but you were a desperate man in a desperate circumstance. It was wrong, but I know how you must have been thinking at the time. And I know how badly you must feel about it now.”
He still had the gun pointed at me. “I do,” he said.
I said, “Honestly, Bob, I don’t know what to do. I could tell them what I know, but I don’t think you’d ever spend a day in jail. You could deny telling me this story. You could stick with your original version. Maybe there really is a bear out there with a clipped ear. How would they prove there isn’t? There are no witnesses. And it’s only my word about what Timmy Wickens said, and he’s dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t even file charges. They’d realize, from the get-go, that they’d never get a conviction.”
“So then what’s the point of telling them?” he asked, resting the arm that was holding the gun on his knee, but still keeping me in his sights.
“Because that’s what you did,” I said.
“So you’re going to tell them.”
I sighed. It should have been an easy question. I knew Bob Spooner had killed a man. But it had started out as an accident. I knew Bob Spooner was basically a good person. A good man on the verge of being what’s known as an “old man.” I am not what you’d call a moral absolutist. There are a lot of shades in my world.