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  “Excuse me, sir,” Dexter interrupted, “but I fail to see what’s in this for Mr. Campbell.”

  “Vice Chairman Dexter,” Teddy said, “we haven’t quite worked out those details in writing yet, but we will very soon.”

  Dexter sat back and spread his arms wide. “Very soon? But you expect us to grant your variance now, and then when ‘very soon’ turns into a month or two or three and Mr. Campbell shows up later telling us he hasn’t withdrawn a thing, his lawsuit will just be our problem, right?”

  “No, sir, we fully intend-”

  “Well, I think it will be our problem, Mr. Boynton, I think it will be.”

  A lengthy discussion followed. I kept looking for Soupy. Why wasn’t he here? Had he changed his mind and accepted that settlement I’d seen when I sneaked into his office? If he had, why didn’t Boynton just spell it out?

  Kepsel finally rapped his gavel. “I would dearly love to get this business behind us, Ted,” he said. “But I do wish Mr. Campbell was here. We’d all like to hear a little more about this settlement. I know you’d like to see a vote, but I’m afraid it might not come out how you’d like just yet. How soon do you think you can have an agreement all wrapped up?”

  “Twenty-four hours, Mr. Chairman. But I don’t see why-”

  “That’d be fine, Ted,” Kepsel said. “You wrap that up and we’ll reconvene the board tomorrow for a vote.”

  “Mr. Chairman,” Teddy said. He wrung his hands together behind his back. “The board asked for an additional commitment to the environment. We have provided that. You asked us to consider the future of the Starvation Lake Marina. We did. We’re prepared to move forward and, frankly, we’re at a loss to understand why we would be delayed by, of all things, the very sort of irresponsible behavior that has created the need for a new marina.”

  Dexter spoke again. “If we gave you the variance this minute, how long would it be before the first shovel went into the ground?”

  Maybe it was because of what I’d heard from Francis, but I thought Teddy hesitated before he said, “We can’t do a thing until we have the variance, Mr. Vice Chairman. But when we do, I can assure you we’ll move forward expeditiously.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dexter said. “And where’s Francis today, Mr. Boynton?”

  The muscle along Teddy’s right jawbone twitched. Fleming jumped up and said, “Mr. Dufresne had another pressing matter to attend to but sent his best wishes that the board would act in our favor.”

  Dexter smiled. “But you don’t have that in writing, do you, Mr. Fleming?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How’s the theater renovation going in Sandy Cove, Mr. Fleming?”

  “On schedule and under budget, sir.”

  “All of us in Starvation are so delighted to hear that.”

  “Look,” Teddy said, “we appreciate the board’s patience.” The tone of his voice suggested otherwise. “But, frankly, if we can’t get the support of the very people who stand to benefit from this, then, unfortunately, and with all due respect, we’ve run out of time, and we’ll say, Thank you, no hard feelings.” He picked up his briefcase. “Let me state this as clearly as I can. If we don’t have a green light by close of business Wednesday, we’ll cancel the Pines at Starvation Lake and move on.”

  He and Fleming started for the door. Everyone turned to watch them go.

  “Hold on, Ted,” Kepsel said. They ignored him.

  “We will not be bullied, Mr. Boynton,” Dexter shouted as they went through the door.

  Soupy’s absence clearly had thrown Boynton. Maybe Soupy was still drunk. Or was drunk again. Or maybe this had something to do with his outburst at my apartment the night before. I hurried out into the corridor. “Teddy!” I shouted after them. They were almost to the double doors that led out to the parking lot when one of the doors swung open and in stepped Joanie, backpack slung over her shoulder.

  “It’s already over?” she said.

  Teddy stopped, briefly unsure of himself, and turned toward me.

  “Hey,” I said. “You’re just going to walk away? That’s it?”

  “After six months of this crap?” Boynton said. “Now maybe they’ll focus.”

  “Focus on what?” Joanie said.

  “Could you give us some details of your agreement with Soupy?” I said.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Teddy said. “He’s your butt buddy.”

  Fleming interjected, “As Mr. Boynton said, the deal has yet to be finalized, although we are confident it will be.”

  “What is the deal, Ted?”

  “What deal?” Joanie said.

  Boynton clapped a hand on Fleming’s shoulder. “We’re done here.” They turned for the outer doors.

  “You were expecting Soupy, weren’t you, Ted?” I said. It made Boynton stop. He wheeled around to face me again.

  “Know what?” he said. “Better tell your buddy not to show up tonight, either, because he won’t have the zoning board to protect his ass out on the ice.”

  “Please,” Fleming said, tugging at Teddy’s elbow.

  The door swung closed. Joanie looked bewildered. “What was that all about?”

  “We need to talk,” I said. “Follow me.”

  “Look,” she said as I ushered her into a classroom and shut the door. “They were lying about our story. I couldn’t just sit there and-”

  “I don’t care about the press conference,” I said. One wall of the room was covered with pencil drawings of historical figures: Lincoln, Napoleon, Kennedy. A history class? Art? I stood near the teacher’s desk.

  “Sit,” I told Joanie. She sat on a student’s desk facing me. “Let’s talk about that document you took off my desk.”

  “What document?”

  “You know. The thick one about Soupy Campbell and his legal problems.”

  “Oh.” She looked a little sheepish. “I thought it might be good background if I had to cover the zoning board.”

  “Did you show it to anybody? Or tell anyone about it?”

  “No-well, nobody who didn’t already know.”

  “Like who?”

  She let her backpack drop to the floor. “Boynton.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Yeah. Saturday night. Remember when my beeper went off?”

  “Why did you have to tell Boynton about a document he already knew about?”

  “I didn’t.” She chewed her lower lip. “I wanted to talk about Blackburn, he wanted to talk about Campbell. I thought I’d get him going on one and he’d talk about the other.”

  “But he didn’t tell you a thing, did he?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’ll bet you told him a few things, though, huh?”

  She shrugged, looking even more uncomfortable. “I just said I was working on this feature on Blackburn. I told him-he asked me what I knew about Blackburn. He said he’d never really gotten to know the guy because he was from out of state, and he wished he had, because he was such a great coach, yadda yadda.”

  “And?”

  “And-and that Canada thing came up.”

  “Canada thing?” I thought of Soupy crying on my landing.

  “You know, how Blackburn missed that year?”

  “You told Boynton?”

  “No-I mean-I just told him what I knew.”

  “What?” I said. “What the hell did you know? You didn’t say a word to me.”

  “No, I did not,” she said. “Because I didn’t have it nailed. You told me not to bring you stuff unless it was nailed.”

  “OK, I’m an asshole. Tell me now, please.”

  She sat on the teacher’s desk. “It’s not-I don’t have it quite right yet-but something screwy went on up there. I told you I talked to this lady in Canada. St. Albert, actually, Alberta. Blackburn’s last team before here.”

  “Yes.”

  “She works at the newspaper there, in the library. She was the one who sent me to that local guy who’s like the hockey historia
n, and he told me Blackburn ‘skedaddled,’ remember? And then he hung up? That made me suspicious, of course, so I called that woman back, pretending I wanted some clips. She said she didn’t want to talk, but I could tell she did, so I got her to let me call her at home. It took a little bit to get her going, but she had-has-this nephew, her sister’s kid, who supposedly was a big star player for Blackburn. Everyone was saying he was going to play in the pros. Then one day, he just up and quit. No more hockey.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She got kind of upset and got off the phone.”

  “Was the kid not getting enough ice time?”

  “No, no, he was a star. He was the top scorer like two or three years in a row. Blackburn supposedly worshipped him. Called him-what was it? — ‘Tiger.’”

  That’s what Blackburn had called Boynton. Soupy was Swanny and Teddy was Tiger. I was just Gus.

  “At first the kid told his parents he was just sick of all the pressure. I guess these kids played like a hundred games a year. His dad was ticked off, but his mom didn’t buy it. She thought maybe he was into drugs or something. So she goes snooping around in his room and finds this diary.”

  “Boys don’t keep diaries.”

  “My brother did. I once made the mistake of reading it.”

  “OK. What was in the kid’s diary?”

  Joanie shook her head. “She just basically broke down at that point, just started to cry. She said she didn’t want to go through it again. I said, ‘Excuse me, go through what again?’ and she just cried harder. So I tried to steer away from the diary and back to Blackburn and then she got pretty angry.”

  “At you?”

  “No. Wait a sec.” She bent down and rummaged in her backpack, producing a notebook. She flipped through the pages. “Here,” she said. “She told me, ‘Everyone said that man resigned. He didn’t resign. My brother-in-law rode him out of here on a rail. But first, of course, he had to win that last blessed championship. We had to win, at all costs, we had to win.’”

  “‘Rode him out on a rail?’”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I just know his team won the championship and then he was out of there for some reason.”

  “Did you talk to the nephew?”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  “So we don’t really know what happened.”

  “Maybe, but the same thing happened in Victoria.”

  “To Blackburn? That was before St. Albert, right?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know, I thought I’d just try another place. I made a bunch of calls. The funny thing was, it’s been like thirty years, but just about everybody remembers the guy. Most of them didn’t want to talk. But what I could piece together was that he had a pretty decent team but he did something to make the parents mad and as soon as the season was over, he just slipped away and took a year off. That’s the gap in his resume. Then he got hired in St. Albert.”

  I stared at the floor, a dull linoleum checkerboard of beige and green. Who was this man? Coaches lost jobs all the time, of course, especially in the cutthroat Canadian junior leagues. But not after they won championships.

  “This must be weird for you,” Joanie said.

  “It’s fine.”

  “Well, it’s all off the record anyway, for now at least.”

  “How much of this did you tell Boynton?”

  Now she cast her eyes down. “Not much. I was just trying stuff out on him to see what he knew. I don’t think he knew anything about the Canada stuff, at least not specifically. But he knew something.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I could just tell. When I said Blackburn might have gotten into trouble in Canada, he just seemed to understand. Then he kept asking if we were doing a story.”

  “Did you tell Soupy Campbell?”

  “Nope. Couldn’t find him.”

  The picture was beginning to come slowly clear, like my truck windshield on a frosty morning. Soupy and Teddy were fighting over the marina settlement. Soupy told him to go to hell at the bar Saturday night. But Teddy had just been talking to Darlene, and then he talked to Joanie, whose address and phone number he had on that bar napkin. He then collected something from Joanie that he used to put the screws to Soupy. I had no idea what, but it had something to do with Coach’s past, and it was enough to drag Soupy up my stairs to cry at my feet on Sunday night. There was also a bullet hole in Blackburn’s snowmobile, Leo Redpath fleeing town, and the cops hauling a computer out of Leo’s house.

  Actually, the windshield wasn’t clear at all.

  “I hate to say this,” I said, “but Boynton pretty much picked your pocket.”

  Joanie sighed. “Yeah. It won’t happen again. And on the press conference-”

  “Forget it. How’d you know the cops had interviewed Leo?”

  “Oh, God. D’Alessio.”

  “Has he asked you out yet?”

  “He asked me to come watch him bowl. I was like, kill me now, but I was nice, I just told him I couldn’t do it while I was covering this story. Then he told Tawny Jane Twitchy-Butt our story was ‘premature.’”

  “Twitchy-butt?” I said.

  nineteen

  Deputy Esper, please.”

  I’d let Joanie get ahead of me and pulled up to a pay phone outside the IGA.

  “Esper,” came that voice.

  “It’s me.”

  An awkward silence followed. If she’d been home, she would’ve just hung up the phone, as she had every time I’d called her when I first came back to town. At work a hang-up might have attracted attention.

  “What?”

  “I just wanted to say thanks for giving me the heads-up the other night.”

  “I shouldn’t have.”

  “Well, thanks anyway. I wondered-”

  “Gus, this is not fair.”

  “Listen, this is work and we’re off the record, OK? I’ve just got to ask, Darl, you have to trust me, when you were talking with Boynton at Enright’s”-I felt a stab of jealousy-“he wasn’t-”

  “I’m going to hang up, Gus.”

  “It’s not what you’re thinking. He wasn’t asking you about Coach, was he?”

  “I can’t talk.”

  “Darlene, please, you’ve got to help me.”

  After our sweet tryst in the county courthouse all those years ago, we’d begun dating. Around town we became, officially, an item, and there was talk that we would marry and settle on the lake. Not surprisingly, followers of the River Rats laced this talk with sarcasm about my gaffe in the state final. There were jokes about me falling down at the altar and dropping wedding rings. As for me, I can’t honestly say that I fell in love with Darlene then because I think I’d always been in love with her, as far back as the day I rescued her bike from Jitters Creek. Whatever I felt, it wasn’t enough to keep me in Starvation. We always knew I was going to leave, but even after I accepted the job at the Times and started preparing to move, we never talked about it. The pain we’d avoided for so long finally settled upon us. My last week in town, we didn’t speak.

  Only after she married did she deign to talk with me again, but even then only in short, strained snatches, like the conversation we were now having. Most of the time, it was as if we were talking on a bad connection. Emotional static obscured our voices and blocked our ears. Darlene wavered between anger about her lousy marriage and fear that somehow the sound of my voice might lure her back to me and whatever sorrow I might inflict on her a second time. I waited apologetically for her walls of resolve to crack so that I might hear the slightest echo of her old kindness. In a way, the worst of returning to Starvation Lake was facing Darlene, whose icy distance accused me of having been a fool for ever leaving.

  She was right, of course, that it was unfair of me to call her like this. I felt I had no choice.

  “I told him no,” she said.

  “No what?”

  “No, I wasn’t going to tell him anything about your coach.”

  �
�You didn’t tell him anything?”

  She hesitated. “No, not-”

  “Come on, Darlene.”

  “I don’t have to talk to you at all.”

  “I saw you taking the stuff out of Leo’s house today.”

  The phone went silent. I waited for a dial tone. I heard Darlene sigh. “Boynton called me yesterday,” she said. “I told him to go to hell again, but he said he had information.”

  By then Boynton had spoken with Joanie. He knew a little about Canada.

  “What information?”

  “It’s pretty creepy. He was asking-hold on.” I heard her close a door. She picked up the phone again. “He wanted to know about Blackburn’s criminal history.”

  “Criminal history? Like felonies?”

  “Blackburn didn’t have a record, though.”

  “No record of what?”

  “You can’t print this, Gus.”

  “Darlene, I’m not going to print what Boynton was asking you.”

  “He-darn it, hang on.” I heard knocking on her door. She covered the phone. I waited. She came back on. “I have to go.”

  “What did he ask about?”

  Now I got the dial tone.

  My story about Boynton’s ultimatum to the zoning board went on the front page along with Joanie’s story about Dingus’s aborted press conference. Kerasopoulos read Joanie’s story before it went to print. He made us redo a few lines so it didn’t look like Dingus had walked out in a huff, even though he had. Joanie wasn’t pleased, but at least she didn’t blame me. Before I left, I made sure Tillie had put the underwater tunnel question in Sound Off. I also made arrangements for some editing help in Traverse City so I could make the trip to Detroit the next morning. I didn’t say why I had to take the day off, just that I had some personal business.

  The phone on my desk rang as I was climbing the stairs to my apartment. I let it. I wanted a nap before the game. Upstairs I packed my gear and lay back in the recliner. My eyes fell on the boxes supporting the table. The one marked “Rats” held one big part of my life, the others marked “Trucks” held another. Neither seemed to have worked out very well. I flicked off the lamp and closed my eyes. But I couldn’t sleep.