The Northwoods Chronicles (14 page)

Within a month of catching that golden-eyed
fish, his father had died, and with the small inheritance his
mother passed on to him, he bought a rundown storefront on County
Road B and opened his tackle shop. Within the year, he’d found a
naked and chilled-to-blue Sadie Katherine laughing on the dock. He
pulled a blanket from his truck, wrapped her up and took her home
for some hot tea, and for the next thirty years they walked side by
side through life. She never exactly told him her history, and he’d
never exactly asked, but she knew how to guide for fish as if she
knew the way fish thought. Uncanny. With her as his partner, his
life was in order.

Over the years, he heard legends of an albino
strain of pike in the lake, but he never told anybody that he’d
caught one. He assumed that eventually all the Indians would spear
them out; surely the albino held a tribal significance.

And now he’d caught another one.

Doc looked at the fish in the water and didn’t
want to touch it. He never regretted his life as a husband and
homeowner, with a dog and a tackle shop. The finances had been a
struggle for years and years, but now that the house and inventory
were paid for, there was a little more money, a little more time, a
little more leisure. He’d had a succession of good dogs, and he’d
had one spectacular woman. He’d had a good life.

Of course, he’d wondered about his choice over
the years. He wondered if the choice had really been put to him or
if he’d had some kind of a brain fugue that morning on the lake. He
and Recon John had spent hundreds of hours discussing fate and the
illusion of control that folks thought they had over their lives.
But in the final analysis, when Doc went to bed every night, he
believed he had made a choice, that somehow the fates had allowed
him the opportunity, and that he had done the right thing.

And now here was the fish again. Was he ripe for
another decision? Or was it just his lucky day?

He lifted up on the line. The fish wasn’t
tightly caught.

He reached down with his pliers, hoping to grab
the hook and twist it out of the fish’s mouth without having to
touch it. But just as he got there, the fish thrashed and swung
away from him. On reflex, he grabbed it.

And he saw two paths.

One was a long life of fishing and living at the
lake. He saw himself old and bent, thin and coughing, taking his
boat out every morning, worrying about surviving every winter. He
relied on the kindness of friends and strangers to see to his
needs, and every morning that he woke up, he wondered why.

The other was an instant of terror and regret,
and a life well-lived came to a brutally quick termination. Perhaps
soon.

Which would it be, Doc?

He brought the golden-eyed fish up to eye level,
and plucked out the hook. He didn’t want the responsibility again.
He’d lived with it once, he didn’t want the burden of it a second
time.

“You decide,” he said, and tossed the fish back
into the lake.

Then he sat down, poured himself a cup of
coffee, and wondered if there would have been some kind of relief
in making the decision himself. Some kind of soul settlement in
knowing.

Cane wandered back from the bow and rested his
big head on Doc’s knee. Doc scratched the dog’s scalp and sipped
his coffee. “I think something big just happened here, boy,” he
said. “Or maybe not.”

He sat for a while longer, trying to decide
which he would have chosen if he had. He couldn’t see that one way
would be better or worse than another. But for the moment, he’d
lost his taste for the walleye chase.

“Time to go to work,” he said to the dog, who
hopped back up into the passenger seat. Doc threw the dregs of his
coffee over the side, started the motor and headed back across the
lake to embrace his fate.

Howard Leppens raised
the crowbar over his head and with a whack so violent it made
Louise sick to her stomach, he buried the claw end in the kitchen
wall, then tugged, putting his considerable weight behind it. The
ancient plaster and lath exploded outward, sending white shrapnel
zinging across the room.

Louise left her husband to do the demolition
work and went for a walk. She’d pick out the new cabinets,
appliances and wallpaper later. She was happy the remodeling
project was finally under way, but not so happy about doing dishes
in the bathroom for the next three weeks. Oh well. A new kitchen
would be worth the inconvenience.

She took the cell phone along to tell her best
friend Julia that the work had begun in earnest. The whole kitchen
remodel had been Julia’s idea. She was the realtor who sold them
the house and she was Louise’s new best friend.

A half hour later, she walked back through the
front door to find Howard’s sweat-soaked back to the door. He stood
staring at the exposed studs in the wall where the refrigerator
used to stand in front of that ugly wallpaper. Plaster dust hung in
the air and coated Howard, and rubble was thick on the ancient
linoleum.

“Look,” Howard said, leaning on the crowbar.
Louise looked. Written on a two-by-four in white chalk, big as
life, was the name Pursley. She caught her breath. “What does that
mean?”

“Means he built this house is what it means,”
Howard said. “They wrote his name on the shipment of lumber.”

“That doesn’t have to mean
Lawrence
Pursley,” Louise said. “There could have been other Pursleys.”

Howard threw down the crowbar and left the room.
Louise began sweeping up, taking sidelong glances at the evil name
inscribed within the walls of her home. Soon, she heard the shower.
She was afraid this would put Howard off so much he’d want to sell
the house. If they did that, he’d want to move back to Boston, and
she wouldn’t be able to stand that. No, now that Kevin was grown,
they had their final, permanent retirement home in White Pines
Junction. And it was paid for, thanks to their son Kevin’s good
fortune, and no thanks to Howard. So what if their dream house was
built by the notorious Lawrence Pursley. That was not her fault and
she would not be punished because of it. This was her new home. She
had new friends. She had a new life. She would not go back to
Boston. Kevin had settled here, and she would never leave Julia,
the best friend she’d ever had.

~~~

Howard tossed and turned in his sleep all night,
and he rolled around so violently and sighed so loudly that he made
sure Louise didn’t get any sleep either. At the crack of dawn, he
was up and into his work clothes. Louise, bleary-eyed, got up after
him and went down to plug in the coffee pot that was currently on
the screened front porch. She’d had Howard put the storm windows on
before he started ripping the kitchen apart, but the November cold
was not to be kept out. When she got back inside, Howard was in the
kitchen again, staring at the name on the stud.

“Just paint over it,” Louise said.

“We’re moving,” he said, then put on his work
boots. “I’m going to get breakfast at Margie’s.”

She watched him slam out the porch screen door,
get into his truck and drive down the lane.
We are not
moving,
she said to herself, and poured herself a cup of
coffee. Then she went to the kitchen and looked at that name again.
Pursley. “We are not moving,” she told it. Damn Howard and his
righteous indignation based on nothing religious or moral that
she’d ever seen. Howard had no particular moral code that he lived
by, at least nothing he had ever exhibited to her in all their
years of marriage. Howard was the first to grab a great deal, no
matter who he screwed, and he justified it in a million different
ways.

Howard. A master of justification, that’s what
he was. And now he was trying to justify going back to Boston.
Well, Louise would not leave Kevin here by himself, and she would
not be bullied by her husband and his meaningless
pseudo-ethics.

An hour later, Louise had drained the pot of
coffee and still Howard hadn’t come home. He was probably gambling
at one of those Indian casinos. Gambling away money they didn’t
have. She picked up the crowbar and started prying plaster. They
had to fix the kitchen anyway. Howard would change his mind about
moving, once the new kitchen was in.

Demolition was kind of fun, she discovered,
especially when the big hunks came loose and she could see real
progress. She felt a kind of freedom in forcing the
destruction.

Instead of plaster behind the pantry, the wall
was plywood. Louise stuck the crowbar in the edge and pushed with
all her overly caffeinated strength. The board splintered. She
pried up the nails all the way around, and when it came free, she
looked with amazement at what lay inside the wall. On a shelf was a
small caliber pistol, a half-full bottle of whiskey, a carved
wooden heart, two sealed envelopes, and three bullets lined up in a
row. Two of the bullets were whole, and one was just an empty
casing. Written on one sealed envelope was one word:
Marcy.
And on the other:
Louise.

~~~

When Howard returned home, he found Louise
sweat-soaked and covered with plaster dust, crowbar in her hand.
One whole wall of the kitchen lay open to the studs. Where
Pursley’s name had been was now a white streak of paint, and, on
the stud next to it, she had painted LEPPENS.

“Good work,” he said, then pointed at their name
on the stud. “But we’re going back to Boston.”

Louise took another whack at the plaster and let
her anger vent there instead of where she really wanted to put
it.

“I’m not going to live in a house built by a
murderer,” he said.

She turned to face him. “You’ve
been
living in it.”

“But it’s different, now that I know.”

Louise remembered Howard’s obsession with the
Pursley case. Lawrence Pursley had been charged with the murder of
his wife, but no murder weapon had ever been found and, in fact, no
body. No body, no crime, the jury effectively said, and let him go
free. Howard had raged. Louise had privately cheered. She was
always one for the underdog, and there was no evidence at all that
Lawrence Pursley had murdered his wife. She wanted to see the
evidence before convicting him, rock hard evidence, not mere
circumstantial, innuendo-based rumor. Some knee-jerk jerks she knew
were satisfied with that, but not Louise. She figured if you were
going to put someone away for life, you better have solid
evidence.

“You’re just looking for a reason to go back to
Boston, because you miss your bookie,” she said, “and this isn’t a
good enough reason. Pursley was never convicted of her murder.”

“He bragged about it,” Howard said. “He was
evil. I remember the case. It happened while we were in
school.”

“I remember. So?”

“So he slept in our
bedroom,
Louise. She
may be buried under the floorboards up there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, and took
another whack at the wall.

“Regardless,” he said, and put a hand on her
shoulder. “The movers are coming tomorrow. I found a contractor to
finish the kitchen and called Julia to list the house. We’re
leaving.”

“I’m not,” she said, and buried the crowbar once
again in fresh plaster.

~~~

In the morning, Louise dismissed the movers when
they showed up. She called Julia and told her that she and Howard
had had a big fight. She’d taken him to the bus station that
morning, and put him on the bus back to Boston. He’d get himself
another car when he got there—she needed to keep the one they
had—and that they had agreed to a trial separation before making
any real decisions.

Julia sounded very practiced in her words of
comfort. Realtors had seen other marriages go belly up over a
remodeling project.

Two days later when the contractor arrived,
there was a fresh piece of plywood on the wall where the new pantry
would go. Louise had learned a few skills—the art of saw, hammer
and nail being among them.

She had learned those skills by following the
very specific instructions Lawrence Pursley had left in his letter
to her. He must have been evil, Louise decided, or at least
psychic. He knew her by name, and he knew the problem she was up
against. After reading the letter at least a dozen times, she
decided he was right. She’d tried it her way, and she’d tried it
Howard’s way. Neither of those had worked. Maybe she should try it
Lawrence Pursley’s way.

The evening of her discovery in the wall, she
had showered, powdered and perfumed, took Howard to the screen
porch, sat in his lap, gave him the carved heart to soften him up
and a glass of the drugged whiskey to make him woozy. When the time
was just perfect, she shot him in the head with one of Pursley’s
two remaining bullets. Then she dragged him to the basement and
laid him to rest alongside Pursley’s former wife, or what was left
of her, inside the wooden casing of the old sump pump. It was a
nice fit. Louise took off his clothes, opened him up, and emptied a
bag of quickset cement on him. Then she re-nailed the old boards
back into place. The cement would draw out his moisture and harden
in place. He’d become a desiccated, petrified statue in no time,
just like his very unattractive roommate. Ugh. No wonder Lawrence
had murdered her.

Then, on the shelf inside the kitchen wall, she
placed two empty bullet casings, one whole bullet, the whiskey
bottle, the carved heart, the gun and the remaining envelope. She
nailed the plywood down good.

The relief she felt was beyond amazing. She felt
young, invincible, and completely at ease. She wondered why she
hadn’t thought of that simple solution to all her problems before.
She was going to have an amazingly simple life from now on, a life
without Howard and his debts. It would be a few years before she
could file for Howard’s life insurance, but all good things come to
those who wait.