Riverwatcher Page 21

  “I heard about her,” Fitzgerald said.

  “She and her father left this morning for Ohio. Their week’s up. Kit won’t admit it, but he’s got a crush on Gwendolyn. It seems they had a spat—something to do with his failure to keep some sort of planned rendezvous the other night. Anyway, she was upset with him. Kit apologized, and she came around to the extent of telling him she might think about Central Michigan as a college. But Kit claims that’s just talk. He says her father will make her go to some school out east, that she probably won’t even come back to the lodge again.” Jan stopped. “Remember how gloomy the world could appear when you were Kit’s age?”

  “Just barely,” Fitzgerald said.

  Jan reached for her coffee, then left the mug resting on the counter. She was talking herself rather than letting Fitzgerald—and she didn’t need to be talking about gloom. He knew all there was to know about that. She waited, looking across at him at the tying bench, studying him. He was looking back, but she could tell he wasn’t seeing her. He wasn’t paying attention. One of his hands idly twirled the arm of the tying vise.

  “You okay?” Jan asked him.

  *  *  *

  CROSSING THE STREET from the Six-Grain Bakery, Verlyn saw the Grand Cherokee parked behind his Land Rover, Fitzgerald sitting there, arm angled from the open window. He came over to him, stood beside the vehicle’s door. “Killing time?”

  It was a dumb thing to say, considering, but Fitzgerald didn’t seem to notice. “Until the news conference,” he said.

  Verlyn dipped his head in the direction of the bakery. “Going in?”

  “I was. Thought I’d pass the time with Bonnie, then changed my mind. Saw the Rover, so—”

  “You did right. You go in there, they’ll swarm all over you. You’ll never get to Bonnie.”

  Fitzgerald was looking at him, smiling faintly. “You did?”

  “Bonnie and I go way back,” Verlyn said. “Way back.” He went around to the other side of the vehicle, opened the passenger door, got in beside Fitzgerald. “She was the first girl I ever went around with in Ossning.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Fitzgerald said.

  “You weren’t here then. We were in school together, Bonnie a year behind me. We had serious hots for each other. Talked about getting married, all that stuff. Instead I hooked up with Mercy.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Mercy had some sense, Bonnie didn’t have any. Back then I didn’t have any either, but I knew that much. Bonnie hooked up with the big jock in my class, Ernie Sheets. Her first husband. Slick Sheets, we used to call him. He works out at Weyerhaeuser now. Damned bait fisherman.”

  “I don’t know him,” Fitzgerald said.

  “I’ve been coming in mornings, talking with her. Puttin’ a little thrill in her life.” Verlyn grinned across the seat. “That’s bull. Bonnie’s had too many thrills. I’ve just been thinking about when we were in school, both kids, seeing what she remembers.” Verlyn paused, rubbed his stubble of beard. “Bonnie says I’m gettin’ like all the old farts, digging up the past. That’s not the whole reason. You know what is? Little girl’s been staying at the lodge with her old man, taking some instruction from Calvin and Kit. She looks enough like Bonnie, that age, to be her own kid. That’s what got me coming in, the girl a copy of Bonnie, bringin’ to my mind our old stuff together. But I know—I got to get myself back in the real world. I’ve got Jan now, and that’s pretty lucky for an old fart.”

  Verlyn stopped, looking at Fitzgerald, realizing he wasn’t listening. Why would he? Other things were on his mind. “You got some time before the news conference,” he reminded him.

  Fitzgerald nodded.

  Verlyn kept looking at him, trying to read his face. “You gonna be okay?” he asked finally.

  *  *  *

  WHEN FITZGERALD CAME through the door, Elsie told him everyone was in the conference room, Mercy included. Then she told him there had been phone calls for him—three calls, to be exact—from someone at the Detroit Free Press named Harkness. He had been calling for Fitzgerald all over town.

  Fitzgerald turned back to the door. “I’ll call on my cell phone.”

  “No you won’t,” Elsie said, and aimed a finger at the phone on her desk. “Right here.”

  “It should be on my nickel.”

  “Call,” Elsie insisted.

  Fitzgerald nodded toward the sheriff’s door before he picked up the phone. “Boss still breathing fire?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “I deserve it.”

  Elsie leaned across her desk, whispered, “You just take care of yourself, that’s all.”

  *  *  *

  “I KNOW WHAT happened,” Hoke Harkness said when he answered. “We got a wire story, couple grafs. Bad time, huh?”

  “Bad enough.”

  “I figured you wouldn’t write anything. You feel like talking to a rewrite man, I’m wondering? Feed him some inside stuff.”

  “I don’t think so,” Fitzgerald said.

  “Your deal with the local sheriff?” When Fitzgerald didn’t answer, Harkness said, “We could send a reporter up there.”

  “You could.”

  “But I think we’ll go with the wire story. Maybe all it’s worth, north woods stuff like that.”

  “Your decision.”

  “Right.” Then Harkness said, “Hang in there, boy.”

  *  *  *

  STROUD ASKED FITZGERALD to sit beside Mercy at the folding table, the three of them facing the media contingent. Mercy thought it wasn’t right, Fitzgerald having to squint into the light of the television camera after what he had been through, but he said it was the best way, sitting up front, to respond to questions.

  Gus Thayer sat directly before them, crew cut bristling under fluorescent light. Beside him the rail-thin blonde from WGTU in Traverse City kept glancing at her watch. On the other side the summer intern for the Traverse City Record-Eagle scratched his beard, with his other hand doodled in a spiral notebook.

  “All right,” Stroud began, “I’m going to give you a brief statement. Then you ask your questions. Yesterday morning Mr. Alec Proffit, Norwich, Vermont, died from self-inflicted shotgun wounds in Rainbow Run campground at approximately eleven twenty. An emergency vehicle arrived from Ossning shortly thereafter, but nothing could be done for him. The Tamarack County medical examiner, Slocum Byrd, has officially ruled Proffit’s death a suicide.

  “Prior to his death, Proffit confessed in the hearing of two witnesses that he was responsible for the murder of Mr. Charlie Orr. We have sworn statements to that effect from both witnesses, Mr. Donal Fitzgerald and Mr. Burt Berry. Proffit was a writer of magazine articles under the pen name Will Woodsman and a writer of novels under the name Peter Allston. It seems that Orr discovered Proffit was taking material for his Will Woodsman articles from an early nineteenth-century outdoor writer by the name of Frank Forester. Orr wrote to Proffit, demonstrating the plagiarism, which was the reason Proffit came here from Vermont. He killed Orr to try to cover up the plagiarism. Then he killed himself, using the same shotgun with which he killed Orr. The county attorney will make the final determination, but at the moment we believe that Proffit’s suicide closes the murder case. The parks department in Lansing will be issuing a statement, but as far as my office is concerned, Rainbow Run is fully operational as a state forest campground.”

  When Stroud said the floor was open for questions, the television camera swung at once to Fitzgerald. “Would you explain,” the TV reporter asked, “why you went to the campground to see Alec Proffit? Did you know then he was the murderer?”

  “I believed so,” Fitzgerald said. “Everything pointed his way.”

  “Because you learned—learned, too—that he was plagiarizing the work of another writer?”

  “I guessed he was. Charlie Orr had two books of Proffit’s—Will Woodsman’s—and a book of Frank Forester in his tent at the time he was killed. They were
library books. I learned about them when Charlie’s wife said she was returning the books to the Ossning library. Proffit claimed Charlie had written him about poaching on the river—that’s what made the connection for me. Charlie had written him about poaching, but poaching of words, not fish.”

  The intern with the Record-Eagle raised a hand, asked, “Proffit killed Orr because he found him out. Why didn’t he try to kill you?”

  “All I know is what he said, which is that he anticipated someone else would learn about the plagiarism. Others would discover it. Killing Charlie, he said, had been a mistake. He didn’t want to kill anyone else.”

  “Except himself.”

  “Yes.”

  “You risked your neck,” the intern went on, “out there alone. You couldn’t know for sure Proffit wouldn’t kill you.”

  “I didn’t go alone. The campground host, Burt Berry, was back in the pines with a handgun. In case anything went wrong.”

  “How come he isn’t here?” Gus Thayer asked.

  “I’ll answer that,” Mercy said. “Mr. Berry hasn’t been feeling well since—since what happened. I advised him to rest for the time being.”

  “It did go wrong,” the TV reporter said, “at the campground. Proffit killed himself.”

  “Yes,” Fitzgerald said.

  “Would you describe the manner in which he did so?”

  “I’ll handle that,” Stroud broke in. “Proffit put his mouth over the muzzle of a double-barrel .16 gauge shotgun, pulled the trigger.”

  “He could do that,” the intern asked, “reaching down?”

  “He did it.”

  Silence held in the conference room until the young woman asked Fitzgerald, “In retrospect, do you wish you had contacted the sheriff’s department before you went to the campground?”

  “I’ll answer that one, too,” Stroud said. “He should have. He knows that. We’ve talked about it. He shouldn’t have gone out there with just the campground host. It was a mistake, and he knows it.”

  “Hold on,” Gus Thayer said. “In town they’re sayin’ Fitzgerald’s the one solved Charlie’s murder.”

  “In town,” Stroud said stiffly. “Not in this office.”

  “He didn’t go out there,” Gus pushed on, “confront Proffit about the library books, nothing would have happened. Proffit might have flown the coop. He might have hustled back to Vermont, and you wouldn’t have known a thing. Fitzgerald got him to confess.”

  “And could have got himself killed in the process.”

  “That’s what they’re sayin’ in town.”

  “I heard people calling him a hero,” the intern joined in. “He risked his neck figuring out the murder.”

  The TV reporter glanced at her watch, said, “I understand there is a reward, Sheriff Stroud, for information about the murderer of Charlie Orr. Could you tell us who will receive it?”

  “Fitzgerald,” Gus Thayer said.

  “Who else?” the intern said.

  Stroud looked directly into the light of the television camera, announced sourly, “It’s my decision, and I haven’t decided.”

  29

  “LET’S AGREE ON this,” Mercy said to him in the parking area of the city-county building. They had gotten in the Cherokee, and Fitzgerald was about to start the engine. “We’re not going to say another word about risking your life in the campground. You shouldn’t have gone out there with just Burt as a backup. It was entirely stupid, but it’s over and done with. Period. The end.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Next thing to settle is where to have lunch. Your choice.”

  “Anywhere with you,” Fitzgerald said, “that’s alone.”

  “Really? We could go to the hotel, though everyone would want to talk with you.”

  “Really.”

  “Then let’s grab sandwiches and stuff at Glen’s, have a picnic. There’s a place I’d like to go.”

  “Where?”

  “Rainbow Run.”

  *  *  *

  FROM GLEN’S SUPERMARKET Fitzgerald took the South Downriver Road, turned in at the campground, slowed as they neared Burt and Billie’s fifth-wheeler at the entrance to the first loop road. “Don’t stop,” Mercy said. “I’ll wave in case they’re looking.”

  “What you said about Burt at the news conference,” Fitzgerald asked. “It’s true?”

  “He cared for Billie after Charlie’s death, now she’s doing the same for him. He’s pretty broken up. He thinks he should have done something different. Maybe tried to hit Proffit.”

  Fitzgerald said, “Coming out of the woods, he fired a shot in the air, trying to draw Proffit’s attention. Trying anything. He didn’t know what was going on, Proffit bending over the shotgun that way.”

  “How could he?”

  “I could have told him. Warned him it might happen.”

  “Shooting at Proffit wouldn’t have helped. I told Burt that last night when I came out to see him. He couldn’t have stopped somebody hell bent on killing himself. Besides, he probably couldn’t have hit him with a handgun.”

  “They’ll stay on here, Burt and Billie?”

  “We’ll talk together later. But I’m thinking it might be good for them to leave for the rest of the summer. I can work out something—a temporary host couple. Next season it might be best to transfer to another campground, if they still want to serve as hosts. I can find a place for them nearly as nice.”

  “I hope you do. They’ve been through a lot.”

  “Billie can’t get over the look of Charlie’s tent, shot through the way it was. Burt can’t get over Proffit. You know, how he looked afterward.”

  “It was a God-awful mess.”

  “And we’re not going to talk about it.”

  *  *  *

  ON THE SECOND loop road, Mercy told Fitzgerald to park outside campsite forty-three. From there, avoiding having to drive past Charlie Orr’s campsite or Alec Proffit’s, they could follow a pine-chip path through the jack pines in the direction of the high banks along the river.

  They walked single file, silent, Fitzgerald carrying the plastic sack from Glen’s. When the path turned, close now to the river, they could see patches of water below the pine and spruce. In a small open meadow Mercy stopped, pointed to a downed log. They could sit in the clearing among wild blueberry and seedling pines, prop their backs against the log, have their picnic.

  “Charlie probably camped about here when he first came to the river. Before the campground was redesigned. You can still see where the old campfires were. Over there, the old steps, he’d have gone down that way to fish.”

  “Nice spot,” Fitzgerald said.

  “That day I went to see Proffit, I came out here afterward. I could really feel Charlie’s presence.”

  Fitzgerald handed Mercy a sandwich and a can of beer, opened a bag of potato chips. “That’s why we’re here now?”

  “In part.”

  “The other?”

  “Tell me honestly how you feel.”

  “Not the way everyone seems to think. It’s not because of how Proffit died, in front of me that way. Mostly I feel guilty.”

  “But why?”

  “Did Stroud tell you what Proffit was writing in his spiral notebook?”

  Mercy shook her head.

  “A debate, I suppose you’d call it. Pros and cons of killing himself. What first put it in his mind is what Hoke Harkness told me about what happened to Henry William Herbert. One night, after a dinner party with friends, he’d shot himself with a pistol. His young wife had left him, and he was despondent, though no one thought he was suicidal. Proffit was suicidal for another reason—the plagiarizing he’d done from Herbert’s Frank Forester work.

  “In the notebook he put down a lot of reasons for not killing himself: He was still fairly young and healthy, he had money, friends, position. All the usual reasons. But he kept coming back to one thing. It wasn’t just that he’d plagiarized but what he’d plagiarized—the wo
rk of a man who pioneered a code of ethical conduct in hunting and fishing. From Frank Forester came the idea of outdoor sportsmanship in the country, and that was what Proffit couldn’t write off in his notebook. He’d become an important voice in environmental ethics by poaching words from the man who gave birth to such views. It was the hypocrisy of what he’d done that he couldn’t get around.”

  Mercy said, “That day I came out here he was writing in a notebook.”

  “He was trying to write his way out of killing himself. Killing Charlie was another way. But he couldn’t rid the world of people who’d learn about his plagiarism. The way Charlie’s light stayed on after the shooting—that told him so. There would be someone else discovering the plagiarism. And he couldn’t rid himself of his sense of hypocrisy. That was the main thing, an inability to escape himself.”

  “Okay,” Mercy said, “I see that. But why should you feel guilty?”

  “When Hoke Harkness told me about Herbert’s suicide, I guessed that’s what Proffit had in mind. Deep down, maybe I guessed that was why he’d come out to Michigan in the first place. To kill himself. But when I came to the campground, it wasn’t to stop him. I wasn’t thinking about that. I wanted to learn if he’d killed Charlie. If he killed himself first, we would never know for certain. We’d have the gun to run tests on. But we wouldn’t have an admission of guilt. I was thinking about Charlie, not Proffit.”

  “So that’s why you were in a hurry. It wasn’t because you thought Proffit might run off. But you were right. You did learn what happened to Charlie.”

  “And in the process pushed Proffit over the edge.”

  “You said yourself he was bent on killing himself.”

  “I think so. But he was still writing in the notebook, still debating with himself when I showed up.”

  *  *  *

  WHEN THEY FINISHED eating, Mercy leaned back against the log, said, “One thing I don’t understand. Proffit said Charlie wrote to him about poaching on the river. But he didn’t. He wrote about Proffit’s plagiarism. Yet Charlie was concerned about poaching. He’d complained to me about it. How could Proffit make up a story that was so plausible?”