Possession (16 page)

"Look honey," she pointed. "See how tame they are." He wasn't looking. He was turned away from her, staring at the next dock where a sheriffs launch idled, spitting gray-brown smoke under the gap-planked pier. Everything in him seemed to pull away from her and he didn't notice when she released his arm. She watched him without hope, almost expecting him to walk away and start a conversation with the Chelan county deputies in the boat.

They moved into the seating area—green vinyl upholstered chairs, nine abreast, railed with white iron lattice

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work. She hesitated and Danny pulled her toward a window seat.

"You want a beer?"

"No. Not yet."

"I need one. How about coffee?"

"Sure. Great."

She looked up at his face bending over her, caught in bas relief by a shaft of sunlight. She could see a puffiness under his eyes, the creases in front of his ears, and a kind of fullness in his cheeks she had never noticed. With a jolt she realized she had not seen him close up in daylight for a long time, and now she saw that her husband was growing older. Not really old—not like the men she'd been watching in the line—but older. He wasn't the Danny she'd married; that one had slipped away without her knowing it. He bent his head, and she saw the sheen of his scalp through the hair at his temples. She reached out to touch his arm.

"Danny?"

"Yeah?"

"I love you."

He looked around, embarrassed, and grinned finally. "Me too."

The good moment stayed in the air even after he moved up the aisle. It was going to be O.K. They had come close to the edge of something, but they hadn't fallen over and they weren't going to now. He had come with her along the dark roads of morning, without sleep after his night's work, and they were on their way to a better place. A second chance.

The Lady of the Lake pulled out sluggishly at first, turning to port, past her sister ships, and then more smoothly as she eased past the

"76" pump. Even after a hundred years of civilization, the town of Chelan here at the lake's edge looked tentative, threatened by the sere brown hills that lowered over it, muting the bright colors of houses with the sheer depth and breadth of brown, brown, brown. Close by the water, the land came alive in the rich green swaths of orchard after orchard.

Danny looked back at Joanne from his position on the

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deck. She was playing with a kid in the seat in front of her, hiding her eyes with her fingers and then flashing peek-a-boo. The kid was laughing and jumping up and down. She should have her own; he owed her that much because she'd never broken even one promise to him. She didn't flirt, she didn't chippy, and she tried so damn hard. He moved forward to the prow of the boat, edging past the tall man who stared up at the hills through binoculars and who grunted at his "Excuse me." The hills seemed greener now, but the water was slate blue and smooth, deeper as they plowed ahead. A transport that looked like a weathered wood catamaran headed toward them, its deck full of cars and an antique pickup. The boatman tooted and waved as the Lady sluiced by.

Danny thought about Sam—Sam who had pushed him into this trip by an invitation for a tour of his pit of a trailer. Sam had wiped out all of his own illusions; he had shown him what happened to cops who fucked their badges and lost their wives. The man didn't have anything. Heroes weren't supposed to evaporate like that—they weren't supposed to make you bleed for them. If Sam had lost it all along the way, where the hell was he going? Well, Sam had made his point, made it in spades, convinced him to go into Doc's office and try for half an hour to ejaculate into a glass beaker. He'd finally managed, handed the damned jar to Doc, and escaped. He still felt like a fool about it. And worse about seeing Sam's loneliness.

Danny couldn't shake his vague depression, and something more menacing that came with it, something that should not be part of the bright morning. The mountains ahead of them fell one upon the other, triangle against triangle, and their ridges were sharp and cruel. There was no end to it; when he expected to see the lake's furthest shore ahead, there were only more of the steel blue triangles, as if the boat they rode on was chugging steadily toward the end of the world.

He walked back to where Joanne sat, pretending that he had not left her alone for half an hour. He touched her hair and she leaned toward him, smiling too intensely.

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"Hey babe, come on out on the deck with me. We're coming into Manson."

She shivered. "What an ugly name for such a pretty little town."

"How much farther?" he asked. "I thought you said it was just a little boat ride, and we're already in the middle of nowhere."

She looked at her watch. "A long ways. Three hours and fifteen minutes. I told you it was the end of the world."

He had thought it, and she had said it now. Probably that's where it had come from in the first place. They were committed to the water that stretched ahead, gliding past the looming, blank-faced rock walls.

There were no more clusters of houses, only a few cottages and trailers along the lake edges. The water was olive green and opaque and the fir trees had relinquished the hills to hardier pines. The landscape was crumpled and humbled by the grinding glaciers that had formed it, and it still bled streams of rock slides, boulders big enough to crush a man. Even the last telephone lines warned of danger; the black wires across the channel were strung with orange balls to alert seaplane pilots.

Danny had not slept for almost twenty-four hours and the fatigue made his eyes grainy, filled his muscles with lead. He should have slept a day before they started out; the effort of being cheerful and interested fatigued him more. He longed to lean against Joanne's shoulder and let his eyelids drop. Instead, he bought two beers and a mammoth homemade ham sandwich from the pleasant woman in the snack bar and carried them back to where Joanne sat.

The P.A. system buzzed, and the young pilot's voice boomed out, saving them from the effort of conversation.

"Welcome aboard The Lady of the Lake. Lake Chelan is fifty-two miles long, the deepest lake in the continental United States, formed by glaciers many, many centuries ago. This canyon was created millions of years ago when the Cascade Mountains were formed, and the lake dropped. River gravel and sand has been analyzed and confirmed

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seven to eight thousand feet above the present lake. The towns of Chelan and Manson rest on a natural earth plug."

"Fascinating," Danny muttered, and Joanne poked him. "Sorry."

"Indian tribes wintered over at Bitter Creek at Stehekin almost two hundred years ago; they called the lake 'bubbling water.' With the arrival of the white settlers, the Indians were moved to the Columbia Reservation. Prospectors moved in in the late 1800s—but Holden's copper claim was the biggest. The mine was closed in 1957; four to five hundred people live in the Lutheran camp there now. Some of you folks will be getting off at Holden Village for your retreat. The camp will have a jitney there waiting for you.

"When the white man arrived here, the lake level was 1,070 feet above sea level. It was raised 21 feet in 1927, for the power plant, and the Chelan Power Station and dam was the first in the state of Washington. Forty-eight streams and one river flow into Lake Chelan at all times, and there is one million, two hundred thousand acre feet of water outflow a year. This is a cold lake, ladies and gentlemen, and a clean lake; you can see thirty feet down. Below thirty feet, bodies will not rise to the surface. Otherwise they float after three or four weeks."

"That's cheery, too," Danny commented. "At least you know you won't rot if you fall in."

She turned toward the window, wondering why Danny's response to the mention of death was always sarcastic, and then knowing—as she always knew—that it frightened him.

". . . copper, lead, zinc, gold." The speaker continued. "M.E. Fields, the postmaster of Stehekin, built the Fields Hotel where the Stehekin River ran off the lake in the late 1800s and worked a package deal with the Great Northern Railroad to have The Belle of Chelan, The Clipper, and The Stehekin bring wealthy tourists in. M.E. put in crystal chandeliers, velvet drapes, grand piano, all as grand as Chicago and San Francisco—and all brought in by barge and boat. The hotel was covered over by the lake in 1927."

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Joanne shivered. Despite the scenery, nothing of human endeavor and enterprise seemed to have lasted here: the Indians uprooted from their bubbling water, the mines deserted, and the hotel covered over. She wondered if it still existed under the lake's surface, with only ghosts playing its grand pianos for the silly girls coaxed into the wilderness by rich old men who promised them lobster and champagne and nights of dancing, and then wanted payment. She told herself she read too much fiction.

The big boat nudged the decrepit dock at Holden's Camp and the Lutherans on board debarked, decimating the passenger list. And then the mountains closed in tighter. The water was deep aqua and viscous, and the sun disappeared into the rock.

Danny looked at the lake and wished they had gone to Tahoe or Vegas.

The mountains came straight down into the water with no handholds out of peril. A drowning man, his blood chilling with hypothermia in the icy lake, would have as much chance of crawling out as someone in a glass-walled pit. The rock face went up and up and disappeared into storm clouds thousands and thousands of feet above. He thought he could see a harbor in the distance and checked his watch. Less than an hour to go and all signs negative. He cursed Sam silently, closed his eyes, and fell asleep immediately.

Up on top of the boat, the red-headed man with the binoculars smiled as he focused on the moving white form high above the water and watched a mountain goat tread a clearly impossible path.

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Danny woke—minutes, hours, days later?—his face pressed against Joanne's bare arm, his mouth dry and bitter tasting. Her flesh was tender now, accepting him, cradling him as she held one of his hands in hers. They would make

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it up—they always did. He sat up, wiping his mouth and stretching in the same movement, bringing one hand down to caress her neck.

"We here?"

She smiled at him, but her eyes were hidden from him behind her sunglasses.

"We're docking now. There's the lodge."

He had expected a village, a colorful settlement cut deeply into the mountains at the lake's end, but the wilderness had given only grudgingly of itself, allowing perhaps three hundred feet from the shore to the firs and pines that loomed over the half-dozen structures. A foothold, but nothing more. The building directly in front of them was long and rectangular, its southern wing two-stories, and topped with a corrugated metal roof. In front of the lodge, a planked deck guarded with a fence made of staggered one-by-sixes was dotted with picnic tables.

He was disappointed; he'd pictured a rustic log cabin lodge, and he saw buildings that reminded him of a smalltown motel built in the 1950s. There was a broad apron of concrete at dockside that appeared to be the dead end of a road that snaked along the woods to the north to accommodate, presumably, the motley vehicles parked in front of the lodge: old cars—fifties cars to match the architectural style of the lodge—and Forest Service pickups and vans, motorcycles, bicycles. The whole settlement seemed to be temporary, nothing more than a slight irritant on the flank of the mountains, the forest so dense that it looked like a gently undulating black-green sea.

He did not want to go into that maze of trees and trails and climb straight up toward the dead blue sky. He knew it was too late to change his mind. They had come too far. Danny envied the tourists who would eat their lunches on the deck, buy souvenirs, and be back in their own beds by nightfall.

His legs still heavy from sleep that was not really sleep, he moved to the open hold door and retrieved their backpacks. 1 19

The crowd milled with subdued expectancy, the bulk of them city people who seemed awed by the mountains, a few of them obviously skilled hikers who grabbed their gear and moved to wait in line for the vans that would carry them uptrail to begin their ascents. The boatmen finished unloading suitcases and packs and turned to crates of liquor, meat, produce, and clean laundry for the lodge.

Danny, seeing Joanne walk confidently toward a white Samoyed standing in the back of a Forest Service pickup, started to shout, "No!" but relaxed when the dog allowed itself to be hugged and nuzzled. She trusted too much. Damn. One day she was going to get bitten; she assumed the whole damn world would respond to love and kindness.

"Danny! Come over here and meet this fellow. Isn't he neat?"

He reached out his hand to the dog, who reared back, distrusting some scent on it, and then yelped.

The ranger grinned at him.

"He likes ladies best—and kids—but he's not too sure about men."

Danny held out his hand. "Danny Lindstrom, deputy from down in Natchitat. You guys the law around here?"

The ranger shrugged. "What there is of it. We don't have the kind of problems you guys do. Keep track of the hikers and make sure they come back or make it over the top to the North Cascades Highway. Not much crime up here—too hard to get out."

"That figures. No place to run, I guess."

The ranger laughed. "Oh, we had one poor slob—robbed the post office over in Malott and headed over here. He liked to starved to death, finally killed him a deer, but he practically threw himself into our arms when we found him wandering around in circles."

Danny smiled absently, staring beyond the buildings at the blue-gray mountains. "What if somebody gets hurt?" he asked, turning back to the ranger. "How in hell do you get somebody out in an emergency?"

"Ernie Gibson can get up here from Chelan in his float

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plane in twenty minutes if he pushes, and there's a landing strip toward High Bridge for a regular plane to take off in a pinch. We've been lucky though—haven't had anything we couldn't handle. The Chelan county boys have their launch docked down lake, and they can run the lake a lot faster than the Lady. You on vacation?"