Dead Creek (2 page)

“Yep,”
said Ray, nodding in sympathy from his bar stool. “With Lew out East still, you got ol’ cement-face to deal with, huh? What’s he—acting chief until she’s back?”

“Unfortunately,” said Osborne, grimacing.

The natives of Loon Lake had a standing joke. John Sloan, Lew’s predecessor, who’d arrested many of them in their wild and woolly teen years, had never, ever been known to crack a smile. Not in the forty-five years that most had known him. A forced “heh, heh” might escape through stiffly spaced lips from time to time, but even that was just enough to fuel roaring guffaws. It had reached a point that all the regulars at McDonald’s, an informal men’s club of early risers that included Pradt and Osborne, made up what sounded like a good old Indian moniker, “the man with no laugh,” to kid Sloan—behind his back, of course.

“So what …” said Ray, reaching for a toothpick from a small glass sitting on the bar, “… the doggone heck … is up, Doc?”

Osborne crossed his arms on the bar and looked at Ray. His hands had calmed down since he made the phone call. Ray’s perspective on the nightmare was going to be interesting and one Osborne was anxious to hear.

Until two years ago, Osborne had viewed his neighbor through the eyes of his late wife and Mary Lee and had no use for the man. The very mention of his name would prompt one of her rare expressions of profanity as in, “That son of a bitch!”

The two first clashed when Ray, in Mary Lee’s opinion, “stole” the lakefront acreage next door to their new house. An exceptional parcel of land with the best view on the Loon Lake chain, the lot was one that Mary Lee had coveted to buffer their own property, which she liked to call “our lake estate.”

Ray turned that dream into a nightmare. Alerted to the land’s sudden availability through his own secret grapevine, he made an immediate bid at the asking price, paying cash for the total before anyone in Loon Lake even knew it was for sale.

“Paul!” Mary Lee had gone ballistic when she heard the news, shrilling, “I will not live next door to a grave digger! You better do something about this.”

If Osborne thought that was rough, the morning Mary Lee discovered Ray had positioned his beat-up mobile home in full view of her living room window was worse.

“My vista!” she had shrieked. Osborne had never seen his wife in such a frenzy. He stood by in silence as she rampaged up and down the rutted drive that led to Ray’s trailer, shouting for their new neighbor to move his “goddamn trash heap” before she called the cops. Ray didn’t move a thing, not even when Mary Lee got John Sloan, police chief at the time, to drive out and view the situation.

Hands in the air as if to duck her anger, Sloan told her, as had her husband, there was nothing anyone could do. The transaction was legal, money had changed hands, and Ray could park whatever and wherever he wanted on his own property.

So Mary Lee made it her mission to torture Ray. Almost daily she could be seen running toward his minnowing truck, a battered blue pickup with the door dented in on the driver’s side, as it slowed to make the turn into his drive, waving an angry hand and snapping at him about this and that.

Osborne didn’t appreciate the view of Ray’s trailer either, especially after the money Mary Lee had insisted on sinking into the new house with its expensive landscaping. But, unlike Mary Lee, he wasn’t scornful of Ray, he just wondered about the man. He knew Ray’s family, and they weren’t bad people. The father was a family physician in Rhinelander. Ray’s older sister was one of Chicago’s top litigators, and his younger brother a hand surgeon over at the Mayo Clinic. His mother was a founding member of the Rhinelander Garden Club, an invitation-only clique that Mary Lee had hungered to join.

Initially, Ray appeared to be like any other bright middle-class kid with athletic talent. In high school he was a star basketball player, and Osborne, like the other parents, expected to see him hit the fast track: an athletic scholarship to Marquette University likely to be followed by a little pro or semipro ball and on to a career in insurance or banking, maybe stocks and bonds. But life yanked early at Ray. When a tournament game blew both his knees out, he lost the college scholarship. Though his father could certainly afford to send him anywhere he wanted to go, Ray decided against college.

Choosing the water and the woods over books, he spent his first year out of high school bushwhacking his way through the swamps and forests, living off the land. Before he turned twenty, he had become one of the North-woods’ most sought-after fishing and hunting guides. When the brutal winters would force his wealthy clientele from Chicago, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee to flee south or west, Ray would augment his income by shoveling snow and digging graves.

To Osborne and his other buddies at McDonald’s, Ray might live from dollar to dollar, but he seemed a happy man. A fellow whose early-morning grin signaled the fish were biting. An optimist who took his coffee black and had a storehouse of bad jokes: “So what’s the epitaph for old man Spencer, that crazy Packer fan? G-o-o Deep!”

But Mary Lee was uncompromising. Vistas, not fish, counted in her world. The day came when her unreasonable, unrelenting crabbing at Ray—even though she took care to avoid another shouting match—forced Osborne to betray her.

One balmy summer night, while she was out with her bridge group, Osborne ambled down the rutted, leaf-strewn drive with a six-pack of Leinenkugel in hand. Joining Ray where he sat on the wooden bench that anchored the end of his new dock, the two men had gazed west, drinking the beers and talking weed beds and muskie lures while the sun set in glorious streaks of violet and bronze. The next morning, a string of fresh bluegills, cleaned and ready for the frying pan, appeared on Osborne’s back porch and, later that same day, the offending trailer was moved a critical twenty feet.

Mary Lee still ranted, of course. Osborne knew better than to tell his wife to shut up. He did, however, give her a dim eye. She got the message and toned it down, but she never gave up, muttering a never-ending list of complaints against the bearded, classless interloper. These she was wise enough to voice in the confines of her own home.

Several months later, as the first blizzard of the season raged through the Northwoods, Mary Lee’s lingering bronchitis turned deadly, her fever ratcheting up to 104, and her breath rasping in her chest. The windchill was 50 degrees below zero with blowing snow four to five feet deep in drifts across their driveway. Desperate to get his wife to the hospital, Osborne phoned his neighbor, the only man with a snowplow along Loon Lake Road. Within minutes, Ray had mounted the plow on the front of his pickup and was pushing through the bitter blackness for a woman who had done her best to make his life miserable.

“If you go off the road, Doc, you’ll need help,” was all he said when he insisted on accompanying Osborne to the hospital. He stayed the long two hours that the trauma team worked on Mary Lee, and he was there when the young surgeon emerged to tell Osborne he lost her on the table. Ray waited as he signed a few papers, then drove Osborne in silence to his daughter’s home. On the way, Osborne tried to apologize for Mary Lee, but Ray stopped him short. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to hear it. Doesn’t matter, Doc; never did.”

He also had the good sense to wait a few months before he gave Osborne his suggestion for Mary Lee’s headstone: “I told you I was sick.”

And so it was that seduced by bluegills and Ray’s unfailing good nature, Osborne found himself looking forward to their daily chats. Soon they were fishing together: an odd couple.

Ray was the opposite of the reserved, soft-spoken dentist who was old enough to be his father. A natural-born storyteller whose greatest pleasure was holding court among friends and strangers, Ray loved people. He loved commiserating in taverns, on boat landings, in bait shops, or in diners, sharing tales of the big buck that got away, the deceased farmer who was so large he had to be buried in a septic tank—“They just don’t make grave liners that big”—and other variations on the grim and hilarious lives lived deep in the backwoods. He amazed Osborne with his ability to turn any story into an epic filled with the humor of human error. But even as he was famous for telling a good story, he was equally famed for his inability to end it. Almost always his audience had to scream for the punchline. Still, they loved him.

Osborne observed early in their friendship that he wasn’t the only one to appreciate Ray. The man seemed to know everyone in a fifty-mile radius of Loon Lake: male, female, young, old, well-heeled, or homeless. He knew them and vice versa: everyone waved back at Ray.

Right now, he was the one man Osborne was happy to have on the chair next to him. He could pull answers from places where few thought to go.

“You eyeing the Wild Turkey?” asked Ray after Osborne unloaded his tale. With the thumb and index finger of his right hand, he pulled at his beard absentmindedly, thinking over Osborne’s story. The two men stared at the rows of bottles that ran along the wall at the back of the darkening bar.

“No,” said Osborne. “I’m checking out the Bushmills. Care to join me?”

“Wouldn’t blame you if you did.” Ray’s voice stayed even. Osborne swung his stool slightly to glance at Ray. The two men had shared more than a few hours in the room at the top of the stairs behind the door with the AA coffeepot on its window. Ray had his own demons, and Mary Lee’s death had been a little unsettling for Osborne. However irritating she might have been, the woman had filled his life to the edges and left a huge hole when she died. But he was dry eighteen months now.

Just as he decided to go for a ginger ale, the door to the bar swung open.

“Well, folks,” he heard Ray say just a little too loudly, “he-e-re’s Johnnie!”

“Dr. Osborne.” John Sloan nodded at Osborne with the special deference he granted to all professional men, important men like himself.

Ray he acknowledged with a lesser tilt of his head as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his navy blue down parka.

“Did Lucy tell you I’m standing in for Chief Ferris till she’s gets back Sunday night?”

“She did,” said Osborne. “Sorry about this.”

“You’re sorry? I’ve got a bigger problem. Pecore is sicker ‘n a dog.”

“You gotta be kiddin',” said Ray, swinging around on his bar stool, “you got murder and the coroner’s got the flu? Doncha think he can drag himself outta bed for this one? From what Doc’s told me, we’re not lookin’ at dead crayfish here.”

“Well, he can’t,” said Sloan, as he stood a little sheepishly in front of the two men. It was clear he’d already tried, threats and all.

“He’s that sick,” said Osborne.

“He’s hugging the throne.”

“That may not be all bad, John,” said Ray dryly. “At least his dogs won’t be licking up your evidence.” Osborne took note of an authoritative tone in Ray’s voice. It surprised him. Sloan looked a little taken aback, too.

On the other hand, Pecore was not exactly respected in town. A pathologist of questionable skill, he had irritated the townspeople when they discovered he let his two golden retreivers roam unrestricted in his lab. Truth was, the dogs probably minded their own business, but Loon Lake residents were appalled. Since county law dictated that every death in the community had to be run by Pecore, many families had taken to accompanying the bodies of loved ones through the entire process just to be sure the canines didn’t lick Grandma.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Sloan. “I put a call in to Wausau, but none of the state men can get up here until tomorrow morning, if then. They’re all strung out over a designer drug bust outside of Stevens Point. They got paperwork up the wazoo to do for the feds yesterday.”

“Gosh, John,” said Osborne, “how long can you put off any investigation?”

“Well … not too long, y’know. But I do not want to touch or move anything wthout being able to photograph and ID the bodies at the site.”

“John, my call went in on this damned party line,” said Osborne. “I hate to say it, but you’re gonna have every goombah with a boat that floats over there eyeballing that situation very shortly.”

The chief just raised his hands and shook his head in complete frustration. “I know, I know. I’ve got two men and a boat with me….”

“I’ve got my thirty-five-millimeter in my truck,” said Ray, who also made a few bucks on the side selling wildlife photos to local calendar printers. “You’re welcome to use it, or I’ll shoot some for you.”

“That’s a thought,” said Osborne to Sloan.

“Yeah, that’s possible. The boat’s got a nice wide deck and plenty of floods on board to make it easy to light the scene. Hell, Pecore just uses his twenty-year-old Polaroid. They sure can’t hold me responsible for doing the damn IDs underwater now, can they? I mean, if we get a quick-and-dirty check and shoot those bodies down to Wausau first thing in the morning. That should work, don’t ya think?”

Sloan looked away from the two men for a moment, then he said, “Yeah, let’s do it. Just you make sure I get all the negatives. I don’t need official records being shown around to all your drinking buddies, Pradt.”

“C’mon, I can make ten bucks apiece on those mothers,” Ray teased Sloan but quickly stopped when he saw the man start to glower. “Of course not. I’ll give you the camera and let you take the film out yourself.”

“Oh shit,” said Sloan. “That’s a problem. How’m I gonna get the photos processed? The photo shop’s closed. I suppose I could take the film over to the newspaper, but then I’ll have the paper all over me to give them some photos, and that’s the last thing I need.”

Right then, Osborne could see that John Sloan had never handled a case like this, and he was afraid he was going to screw it up. Retiring just about a year ago after thirty-five years on the force, Sloan had taken pride in the smooth running of his small department that serviced a town of less than three thousand people. Now he was considering a run for mayor. He didn’t need to look like an idiot when the high-tech cops from the big city came in to review his police work.