Dead Man's Wake: A Novel by Paul Doiron

Author:Paul Doiron [Doiron, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Traditional, Thrillers, Crime
ISBN: 9781250864390
Google: K_CLEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0B9KW6R4K
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2023-06-27T05:00:00+00:00

34

The next two houses had clearly been vacated and locked down for the winter. Both had chains up across their driveways, and one had anti-theft shutters rolled down over the windows. It seemed like overkill to me unless the cottage contained a collection of priceless Ming vases, which raised the inevitable question: Who furnishes their Maine lake house with Chinese urns?

Charley and I hadn’t spoken since we’d returned to the road, but we’d both been mulling over our interview with Shawna Miskin, and now I said, “I’m thinking of something else I should have asked.”

“Just one thing?”

He didn’t mean it as a dig, and I didn’t take it as one.

“Joey Randazza owns an auto repair shop in Oakland. What are the odds he’s the one who towed her car?”

“That’s easy enough to check. But I would let the woman be for a while.”

“It seems potentially important, though. It would connect Randazza and the lake. If he came to her house, he might have seen something on the island and—”

Charley rested a gnarled hand on my shoulder. “The inside of your head is worse than a bat cave with all the thoughts you’ve got fluttering around.”

“One less bat screeching in my ear would be nice.”

We’d now reached my stepparents’ house. Inside the great room, we found Ora reading aloud to Jubilee. She was a frequent speaker at the Unitarian Universalist church in Eastport and knew how to project her voice when called upon. But she sounded raspy now.

“‘Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fadeproof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post cards that showed things looking a little better than they looked.’”

“That’s beautiful,” Jubilee said. “Who wrote that?”

“E. B. White,” Ora said, removing her reading glasses. “It’s an essay he wrote about a visit he made with his son to a sporting camp on Great Pond.”

“Mosher Camps,” I said.

I knew “Once More to the Lake.” I had read the essay first in a college writing class at Colby but had returned to it again in recent years. The reason I’d reread it was the same reason I chose not to disclose E. B. White’s real subject now. For all the melody in the sentences Ora had read, “Once More” was a doleful essay about the wheel of time.

“Where’s Stacey?”

“Down at the dock on her phone,” said Jubilee.

“How are you doing, Boss?” Charley asked. Concern darkened his face.

“I’m just having another of my spells.” Ora turned her tired eyes to mine.

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