Loved. To hear that chills me. Not in the sense that it was wrong. I am too long in this vocation to ignore the realities of the world, regardless of what interpretations man has made of God’s word. What sends the shiver up my spine is that, taking what Chris is expressing to heart, Michelle Hammond lost a loved one the same night I did, and yet in my interactions with her she has hidden any hint of that, completely and expertly.
“All right, let’s play it your way,” I suggest. “Michelle Hammond isn’t responsible. Who is? Who paid to have my sister killed?”
She has no answer to that. “I don’t know.”
“It comes back to her,” I tell Chris. “All roads lead to her. She wasn’t with her husband, who she’s sworn she would protect. She’s having a fling, affair, whatever with Katie. And she realizes she’s taken it too far. Who does she choose? Some college student whose affection can be nurtured by anonymous love notes, or the husband whose coattails she’s going to ride to the heights of—”
I never finish what I am saying. The lights go out with a loud POP and a flash from outside. We are left with the soft glow of my laptop illuminating the room with dim blueness.
“That didn’t sound good.” I instinctively look up. The snow could have snapped a tree limb onto the power lines.
Chris rises as I do. I slip into my coat and boots and go to the kitchen, opening what my mother had always called the ‘utility’ drawer, populated with screwdrivers, pliers, candles, and a flashlight. The latter rests among the other items. I pick it up and turn it on, the bulb glowing weakly for a second before fading to nothingness. The batteries are shot.
“I might have a flashlight in my trunk,” Chris says, and reaches for her purse on the counter. Hand almost to it when a window at the back of the house shatters, something crashing through it and landing hard within.
Chris lets out a fast, startled scream. I instinctively step in front of her, leaning to see down the dark hallway toward the bedrooms.
“What was that?”
“Another branch snapping…” I suggest, but without conviction. I ease down the hallway, past photos arranged meticulously on the wood walls, and peer around the corner into what was my parents’ room. A chill rush of air washes past me as I can just make out in the weak, storm-filtered moonlight, a jagged rock on the floor, shards of glass scattered about.
Behind I feel Chris grab my sweatshirt as she looks past and sees what I have. “Michael…”
It is just a few seconds that I stand there, fixed on the rock-turned-projectile first, then out the broken window, darkness beyond curtains billowing in the invading gusts. Just enough time for a few breaths, and for my patience to evaporate.
I turn and push past Chris, moving fast for the front door.
“Michael!”
I look fast back to her. “Stay inside. Lock the door.”
Before she can protest or agree I am outside and down the steps. My boots settle deep into the freshly fallen snow, wind whipped flakes scraping my face as I race around the house, high stepping through mounting drifts, stumbling once before finally reaching the electric panel. It has been pried open, the metal end of a hoe wedged against the breakers, shorting them, the box and all within charred and still sparking. I look a few feet away to the outside of my parents’ bedroom. The shattered window, crusted with ice, hangs like a scar on the house.
I turn and survey the landscape beyond. The woods stretch out toward the road and the lake. On the ground I scan for a sign of whoever did this, a set of deep impressions prominent, but already being erased by the relentless blizzard. They tread off not toward the road, where I expect, but past Chris’ car and into the woods stepping down toward the lake.
Whoever left the tracks has a head start on me. Catching anyone in this blinding weather will be next to impossible. But I recall something, from just after our arrival—the headlights. They swept the water from the far side of Arrow Lake. Only now am I asking myself the obvious question—to whom did that car belong? It is inconceivable that Chris and I are even here, braving the storm. Is it likely that another person or family has decided to visit their summer house in the midst of an off season blizzard?
No.
The answer fires me, and I charge off not following the tracks, but down to the lake directly, turning right and skirting the shore, pushing myself, heart thudding as I run a hundred yards, then two, falling and recovering again and again. But I keep going, faster, reaching the far bend in the lake just as a figure emerges from the trees.
I can make out nothing about them. No feature or face, deep hood obscuring all. They pause briefly and turn my way, seeing me, then take off again. Struggling through the piling drifts, wind whipping them into knee-high icy dunes. It could be that the person I chase is tiring after their slog through the woods, or it could be that I am simply driven by a deeper desire, but whatever the cause they begin to slow. I close the distance. Hearing their labored breathing as I near. Finally reach them and shove them from behind.
The figure tumbles to the snowy ground, slipping on a steep patch of shore and sliding a few feet into the lake, skim ice cracking, the water swallowing them briefly before they bob to the surface, gasping and flailing. I kneel fast and reach toward them, snagging a hand first, then the hood of their coat, and haul them from the freezing water. If they are not hypothermic already they soon will be, but I don’t care. I drag them away from the shore and leave them on a flat patch of snow beneath a stand of trees. With force I plant myself on their chest and rip the hood away to see who it is that has stalked me. Threatened me, and those I care for. When I finally see their face I do not understand.
It is Neil Benz. Son of Dave Benz, who investigated my sister’s murder. The connections are impossible to ignore, but equally impossible to reconcile with this moment, and all that have come to pass in the previous two weeks.
“What the hell is going on, Neil?!” I scream at him above the wind, bunching his soaked coat in my fists, shaking him as if to free some answer I know he holds. “Why are you doing this?!”
He tries to pull at my arms, his hands trembling, shivers racking the whole of his body. “Please, God, I’m freezing.”
“I’ll throw you back in the damn water, Neil, unless you tell me why you’re doing this!”
His eyes are wide with terror. They glance fast toward the water before settling on me again. When he doesn’t respond I begin to drag him back down the shore.
“No! Please! All right!”
I shove him hard down, feeling that part of me which pummeled James Estcek rise again. None of my true self wants to hurt Neil Benz. But all of what this ordeal has changed me to will, in a heartbeat, do just that. “Why are you doing this?”
“I have to.” His voice chatters through every word. “He said I had to.”
“Who?”
“My dad.”
The wind roars. Trees bend toward the lake, shedding accumulated snow in a secondary shower of white that swirls across the water like a ghostly cyclone.
“Why?” I demand.
Neil fights the frigid spasms of his body and stares at me. “Because of your sister. Your sister. He said some guys got popped for killing her, but they got cut loose because someone…someone…”
I drop to me knees again and grab him. “Someone what?!”
“He said he had to protect someone.”
“Who?!”
“I don’t know, God, please, I’m gonna freeze to death!”
I jerk his body that much closer to the lake, the drop into the water only inches away.
“A woman! A woman! He said ‘she’. He said ‘she’ had to be protected.”
My hands still. Move him not an inch more.
“I swear, that’s all I know. I was just supposed to scare you. He gave me the key to your parents’ house, and a lockset master for that girl’s apartment…”
I let go of Neil and lift myself from the snowy earth, standing over him as he convulses.
“I’m sorry,” he pleads. “He said I had to do it. I had to. He said you had to stop.”
For a moment I think as the world howls around me. Neil has turned his head away from me and weeps dryly. Has he done this solely because it was requested? Or within is there some part willing to do anything to attain approval of a father to whom the expression is alien? It matters, I suppose, to Neil. But it does not to me. Not now. I nudge him with my boot and he looks up, meeting my gaze, the connection seeming to frighten him.
I reach into my pocket and fish out what cash I have, a hundred and change. “You’re going to take this and go to some motel. You don’t go home. Do you understand?”
He nods, fast and frantic.
I crouch now, close to him, wanting him to
feel
precisely how serious I am. “And you say nothing, to anyone, about this. Are we clear on that?”
He shivers through another nod. “We are.”
“If you do…”
“I won’t! I won’t!” His assurance is half plea, half sob. “He’ll kill me if he finds out I screwed up.”
I doubt the severity of the reaction he presupposes of his father, but he does not. His silence is certain.
I pull him up to his feet and shove the cash into his hand. He eyes it briefly, then gets moving along the shore, chilled legs tripping him up again and again until he regains his footing and disappears into the white night.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Kingpin
Rounds of resin striking hard wood, spinning down alleys of thin strip maple transitioning to pine, smashing pins of turned rock maple, armatures of dulled aluminum sweeping what falls. The sounds are universal, pronounced on league nights, embellished by cheered strikes and gutter ball groans.
Mihisen Lanes is as I remember it from childhood, on trips with my father and sister, the trio of us venturing to a place, and partaking of a pastime, that my mother regarded as hardly above pitching horseshoes behind a doublewide. That she despised bowling and cheered the Bears like a maniac both puzzled and warmed me, a mercurial suburban refinement which she never forced upon us, or my father, allowing our outings to places such as this.
And without fail we would not be alone hurling balls down the lane, bumpers raised when we were very young to eliminate the sting of constant gutter balls. With Dave Benz and his sons we would gather. Our fathers would share a beer, my father one and Dave two or three, watching as their children jumped for joy at every pin toppled. The oldest of the three it was my place, so I thought, to help Katie when she struggled with the heavy ball. But true to her nature she would have none of it, and wrangled the ball to the line herself, eschewing the kiddy ramp offered her. She would roll the ball and stomp her feet in frustration when it did not bring down every pin. Nothing but a strike would satisfy her.
She was tenacious and imperfect and wonderful.
But it is not memory that has drawn me here. I have not come to wander through a space which will allow recollections to rise freely. My reason for driving from the lake through a swirling whiteout, with Chris at my side now as I scan the lanes from near the long glass trophy case, is singular. One man.
Dave Benz.
This is his second home, my father would say, though it seemed more like his first when his wife, Esther, passed away shortly before Katie’s murder, struck down by breast cancer. He is impossible to miss, stout and commanding, settled in with a trio of men his age on lane twenty. I make no move toward him, or to draw his attention. I simply watch him in silence, Chris’s gaze shifting between me and the object of my attention.
Neil has heeded my warning, it appears. Dave Benz seems unaware that I might be seeking him out. Were it not for Chris, who’d insisted we wait out the worst of the storm through the night and most of the next day, I would have confronted my father’s old partner in the dark hours of the morning.
Instead I am here, past seven on Sunday night, eyeing the man who knows, who has to know, the who, what, and why of my sister’s murder.
I turn to Chris. For some reason, despite the intensity of this moment, the sight of her brings a smile to me. Never have I known what it is like to have someone by my side in the way that she is. We have not even danced around the subject of what is happening between us, for reasons obvious and not, be it the plain ‘wrongness’ of what that might be or some personal resistance unique to either of us. For now it is a muted subject. One we can avoid addressing, but not feeling.
“I want you to wait here.”
Her head tips a bit, unsure. The last time I asked this of her I pursued Neil Benz along the lake, which she reminded me later as I related the episode that I could have just as easily fallen into. She would not have been there to save me.
But here she is, though the likelihood of needing rescue is minimal. The calm about me must reassure her, as she nods and I move down to the lanes. There should be anger right now, toward the man a few paces distant, but I cannot summon more than the will to go face to face with him and ask what must be asked.
“Dave,” I say when I reach the bullpen around lane twenty. His three friends look before he does. It is an odd reaction, no different than a poker tell. There is no expectation on his part that my voice should be one he hears at this place and time. He straightens from where he is hunched over the ball return and turns toward me.
“Mike.” Though he is surprised, he feigns its imposter cousin. It is more a desire that I not be here. “How are you? What are you doing here in the old stomping grounds?”
“I need to talk to you, Dave.” My tone is as far from
Mr. Benz
’ing him as conceivable. An edge to it not present when I stopped by the barber shop to say much the same thing.
“About what?” He approaches me, his friends exchanging looks, clued in to the oddness of our nascent interlude. “Come on and join us. Hurl a few balls. It’ll be like—”
“Old times?” I finish for him. “Like when Katie was alive? Like those old times?”
The faux pleasantry about him evaporates like smoke in the breeze, which is all it was to begin with. “Why don’t you head out, Mike? Let my friends and me finish our game.”