Purgatory Ridge

“I scared her a little.” Bridger shrugged, then smiled sheepishly. “All right, I scared her a lot. But, hey, she was trying to get away.”

“Just leave them alone.”

Bridger solemnly held up a hand. “You have my word.” He turned and started away. “I’ve got more arrangements to make for tonight. I’d best get moving.” He paused at the door. “You’re sure about all this?”

“I’m sure.”

Bridger made a gun of his thumb and forefinger and shot an imaginary round at LePere. “You’re some piece of work, you know that, Chief?” He stepped outside. A minute later, the van pulled away and headed up the narrow lane to the highway.

John LePere felt good. The hardest part was over-dealing with Bridger. He left the table and went into the kitchen. He put some bananas in a sack and filled a plastic jug with cold tap water. Outside, the air was warm and carried the smell of smoke. LePere crossed to the fish house and unlocked the door. The women looked up as he entered. The boys were asleep, chins resting on their chests.

“I thought you might be hungry, maybe could use a drink of water,” he said quietly. He put the sack on the floor. The jelly glasses were sitting on the table and he filled them. He offered a drink to Grace Fitzgerald. She nodded and he put the glass to her lips. “Your husband has the money,” he told her. A trickle ran down her chin and he wiped it away.

“I can’t imagine where he got it,” she said.

“If two million would have saved Billy, I’d have moved heaven and earth to get it.”

“Scott needs another injection,” the Fitzgerald woman said.

“I’ll get the stuff.” He looked at Jo O’Connor. “You want a drink before I go?”

“No, thanks.”

When LePere returned, Scott Fitzgerald was awake. “I’m going to cut your hands free so you can give him the shot,” LePere said to the boy’s mother. He severed the tape and pulled it off her wrists, then put the packaged syringe and the medicine into her hands. He stood back and watched. The boy took the shot without flinching. LePere reached out for the syringe so he could dispose of it.

As she put it in his hands, the Fitzgerald woman said, “If ten million could have saved Edward, I’d have given it.”

LePere was caught by surprise and it took him a moment to place the reference. “Your first husband, right? The lake got him. I read your book. He sounded like a stand-up guy.”

LePere put the syringe down a small slot in a metal box on the wall that had been a repository for old razor blades in the days when his father sometimes used the basin in the fish house to shave. “Do you remember him?” he asked her son.

“Not really,” the boy said.

“Maybe you’re lucky. It hurts a lot if you do.”

“You move on with your life, Mr. LePere,” the Fitzgerald woman said.

“Yes.” He tapped the metal box to make sure the syringe had dropped. “But you never forget, do you?” He turned and looked down at her. “I watched you a long time on the cove. You’re different from the person I thought I saw.”

“Different how?”

“Doesn’t matter. I was way off base.” He picked up the roll of duct tape. “I need to bind your hands again.”

“Do you have to?”

“It won’t be much longer. I’m sorry.” He bound her, then asked her son, “Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“How about a banana?”

“Okay.”

He cut the boy free and waited while he ate. “What about your son?” he asked the O’Connor woman.

“Mostly, he needs to sleep.”

He tossed the banana peel outside and taped the boy’s wrists again. “I’m tired. I need some sleep, too. I’ll check back in a while. The windows are open and the breeze is up. You should stay cool.”

LePere locked the fish house and drifted down to the rocks that separated the cove from the lake. He sat down, trying to take it all in, trying to memorize every detail. In another day, he would be looking at bare walls and iron bars, and he wanted to remember home. He gazed up at the great ancient lava flow called Purgatory Ridge, the dark, striated cliffs that were the backdrop for his best memories. He closed his eyes, and the silver-blue circle of water that was the cove was there, bright in his mind, and hard beside it, the little house. The popple and aspen along the shoreline were green now, but he could remember them aflame in fall, their autumn leaves scattered across the water like shavings of gold. Last, he turned and looked at the lake that had been there for a thousand lifetimes before his and would be there a thousand lifetimes after. He’d often hated the lake, blamed it for what had been taken from him. But the truth, he knew, was that the lake was simply what it was, vast and indifferent. It asked nothing and yielded to no one, and if you journeyed on its back, you accepted the risk. In its way, it mirrored life exactly.

Facing the prospect of prison, John LePere felt free and alive for the first time in more than a dozen years.