Skeleton Lake by Mike Doogan

Author:Mike Doogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

nineteen

Time is the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked.

—NOËL COWARD

APRIL 2007

“You’ll ruin your eyes, reading in this light,” Cee Cee said.

Kane looked up from the accounts of their interviews with the members of the drug unit. The interviews were models of proper police procedure: logical, straightforward, precise. One question followed another in perfect order; each answer was just what it needed to be and no more. The teachers at the police academy could use these interviews as perfect examples of how to ask questions. And, of course, they had not yielded one iota of information useful to the investigation.

“What’s all the paperwork?” Cee Cee asked, gesturing to the forms and reports spread across the table.

“An old case,” Kane said. “My first as an investigator. A murder. Unsolved.”

“You don’t give up on things easily, do you, Nikky?” Cee Cee asked.

The sun had moved, leaving him with dim, diffuse light striped with the shadows of the barren limbs of birch trees that lined the big yard.

Cee Cee sat in the chair across from Kane. She set down the garbage bag she was carrying and crossed one leg over the other. She was wearing khaki pants, a bright red Hawaiian shirt covered with parrots, and leather sandals.

“Is that nail polish you’ve got on your toenails?” Kane asked. “What kind of nun are you?”

Cee Cee laughed.

“Sister Mary Magdalene asked me a question much like that just this morning,” she replied. “ ‘One who is more like her mother every day,’ I told her.”

Cee Cee sat looking out the window for a while.

“This was always my least favorite time of the year,” she said. “Winter goes on for so long, and it’s like you’re hanging on by your fingernails for spring to arrive. That’s why I’m wearing these clothes, to cheer myself up.”

She’s got a point, Kane thought. Let her get to it.

“You know, Nikky, the experts say that the darkness can cause real psychological problems for people,” Cee Cee said. “ ‘Seasonal affective disorder,’ they call it. Have you ever thought that you might be happier if you lived someplace that had more light? Less cold? More warmth?”

Kane laughed.

“Like the Big Rock Candy Mountains, Ceese?” he asked. “Where the hens lay soft-boiled eggs?”

Cee Cee smiled.

“I take it you’re not likely to be moving south soon, then?” she asked.

“No, I’m not,” Kane said. “I’ll be sixty years old soon enough. A little old to be making a new life, aren’t I?”

Cee Cee shrugged,

“Only if you think you are, Nikky,” she said.

Kane set the reports down on the table.

“You were going to tell me about our parents,” he said. “Have you been avoiding me?”

Cee Cee nodded.

“I have,” she said. “I’m not certain how to talk about this.”

Kane smiled at that.

“Why not just try English?” he said.

Cee Cee blew air through her lips. Kane remembered the manner-ism from his youth. It meant she was exasperated, and she’d done it often.

At least she did when I was around, he thought. Was I the cause of her exasperation?

“It’s not that simple, Nikky,” she said.

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