The Great Escape

The ferry bumped against the dock. She headed below to get her rental car. She had friends all over the country—all over the world—who would have given her a place to stay. Yet here she was, getting ready to disembark on an island in the Great Lakes on the strength of nothing more than a farewell kiss and a resident ferry pass. She pulled the ignition key from her backpack and told herself she had nothing better to do with her time, which wasn’t quite true. She had amends to make, a life to rebuild, but since she didn’t know how to do either, here she was.

The harbor was filled with charter fishing boats, modest pleasure craft, and an ancient tug anchored near a small barge. She drove down the ramp into a gravel parking lot bordered by a sign reading MUNICIPAL DOCKS. The two-lane main street—optimistically named Beachcomber Boulevard—held an assortment of stores, some weather-beaten, others spruced up with bright colors and kitschy window displays to attract the tourists—Jerry’s Trading Post, McKinley’s Market, some restaurants, a couple of fudge shops, a bank, and a fire station. Sandwich boards propped along the road advertised the services of fishing guides, and Jake’s Dive Shop invited visitors to “Explore Nearby Shipwrecks.”

Now that she was here, she had no idea where to go. She pulled into a parking lot next to a bar named The Sandpiper. Once she got inside, it wasn’t hard to pick out the locals from the sunburned tourists, who had the glazed look of people who’d squeezed too much into one day. While they clustered around the small wooden tables, the locals sat at the bar.

She approached the bartender, who eyed her suspiciously. “We card here.”

If she hadn’t lost her sense of humor, she’d have laughed. “Then how about a Sprite?”

When he brought her drink, she said, “I’m supposed to be staying at this guy’s place, but I lost his address. You know a dude named Panda?”

The locals looked up from their drinks.

“I might,” the bartender said. “How do you know him?”

“He … did some work for this friend of mine.”

“What kind of work?”

That was when she discovered Viper had no manners. “You know him or not?”

The bartender shrugged. “Seen him around sometimes.” He went off to help another customer.

Fortunately a couple of seniors seated at the other end of the bar were more garrulous. “He showed up here a couple of years ago and bought the old Remington place out on Goose Cove,” one said. “He’s not on the island. I know for a fact he didn’t come by plane, and if he’d been on the ferry or a charter, one of us would of heard about it.”

Finally a piece of luck. Maybe she could get her questions answered without having to see him again.

The old man rested his forearm on the bar. “He don’t talk much. Kind of standoffish. Never heard what he does for a living.”

“Yeah, that’s the way he is,” Viper said. “Is Goose Cove far from here?”

“Island’s only ten miles long,” his pal replied. “Nothing’s too far from here, although some places are harder to get to than others.”

Their directions involved a confusing number of turns, as well as locating a boat shed, a dead tree, and a boulder somebody named Spike had spray-painted with a peace sign. Fifteen minutes after she left the bar, she was hopelessly lost. She drove aimlessly for a while and eventually managed to get back to the main road, where she stopped at a bait shop that was closing up for the night and got another set of directions, almost equally confusing.

It was getting dark by the time she spotted the battered mailbox with the name REMINGTON faintly visible on the driftwood sign above it. She turned off the road into the potholed drive and parked in front of a double set of garage doors.

The big, rambling beach house had started life as a Dutch Colonial, but over the years, it had been haphazardly expanded with a porch here, a bay there, another porch, a short wing. Its weathered shingles were the color of old driftwood, and twin chimneys poked from its jumbled roofs. She couldn’t believe it belonged to Panda. This was a house designed for families—a place for sunburned kids to chase their cousins up from the beach, for moms to trade family gossip while their husbands fired up the charcoal grill, where grandparents stole naps on a shady porch and dogs lazed in the sun. Panda belonged in a run-down fishing cabin, not at a place like this. But the address checked out, and the men had been clear about the name Remington.

An unimpressive front door stood to the right of a two-car garage. On the landing, a chipped clay flowerpot held some dead soil and a faded American flag from a long-forgotten Fourth of July. The door was locked. She followed an overgrown path around the side toward the water, where she discovered the heart of the house—a sprawling screen porch, an open deck, and rows of windows facing a sheltered cove with Lake Michigan just beyond.