Chapter 17

ROMAN

He lay on the brown chenille spread that covered the double bed in Room 416 and tried to concentrate on the cartoon that was playing on television. It was not easy because every minute or so the picture would roll. It was just enough to be annoying, but not enough to make him get up and go turn off the set.

So far the visit to his old hometown had been every bit as deadly as Roman had thought it would be. The streets were empty; the bar downstairs was like a morgue. The geek at the registration desk didn't know anything about any high school reunion, and didn't care. As long as he was here Roman would stay the night, but if somebody didn't tell him what was going on by tomorrow morning he'd haul ass.

Roman poured a healthy shot from the bottle of Jack Daniel's into the water tumbler that had come encased in its little plastic envelope on the glass-topped bureau. He swallowed the whiskey and stared at the animated antics of some insufferably cute little blue creatures called Smurfs.

"Ought to club the little fuckers to death," Roman muttered. "Make a nice blue coat for somebody."

He got up and went over to switch through the channels. News on two of them. He didn't need other people's bad news. Continuing around the dial: Little House on the Prairie, Love Boat, an old movie with Bette Davis, a Chinese cooking show. He clicked all the way around to one of the news shows from Milwaukee and went back to the bed. At least it was better than Bette Davis.

He drank the neat Tennessee mash whiskey and yawned through the report of some ongoing hearings in Congress. There was a commercial for a tire dealer, then a sleek broad with good knockers came on with the local news. They flashed on a film of a body being pulled from Lake Michigan, and the whiskey turned sour in Roman's throat.

* * *

The television screen and the hotel room faded and vanished. Roman was back in the outboard on Wolf Lake in the gray morning after the last Halloween Ball.

He thought he was going to chuck his cookies when the thing in the water rolled slowly over and the dead white face of Frazier Nunley looked up at them. But with Alec already trying dryly to puke over the side, and Lindy just this side of hysteria, he held it in.

"It's Frazier," Lindy said unnecessarily.

Alec got control of his stomach and moved up with the others. "Is he dead?"

"Hell yes, he's dead," Roman snapped. "What do you think?"

"What are we going to do?"

"We've got to get help," Lindy said.

"It's too late to help him," Roman said. "What we've got to do is get out of here."

Lindy turned to face him. "You mean, just... leave him like that?"

Roman gave her a narrow-eyed glare. "What do you want to do, take him with us?"

Lindy bit her lip, looked back at the floating corpse, and shook her head.

Roman moved back to the stern. "If we all play dumb they can never connect us with this. As far as anybody knows he just went out in the boat himself for some asshole reason and fell overboard."

"That's crazy," Alec said. "Do you think anybody will believe that?"

"They'll have to unless they can prove something else happened. We'll be okay as long as we keep our stories straight and simple. We went to the party, never saw Frazier, don't know anything about him. That's it."

"What if he told someone where he was going last night?" Lindy said, "And who he was meeting?"

"I made him promise to keep it secret," Alec said. "And he was impressed enough to do it."

"We better hope he was," Roman said. He reached for the clutch lever to engage the outboard motor.

"Wait a minute," Alec said.

Roman and Lindy looked at him, startled by the urgency in his voice.

"His hands are tied."

"Oh, shit," Roman said.

He killed the motor and used one of the oars to move the boat back close to the slowly drifting body. With Alec holding on to him, he leaned over and wrestled the corpse around in the water until the hands, still loosely bound with plastic clothesline, were exposed. He would never forget the cold rubbery feel of the dead boy's flesh. A couple of tugs undid the knots.

Roman unwound the white plastic clothesline and carried it with him back to the stern. He said, "It wasn't even tied good. He should've been able to get out of that."

"Let's make sure we get rid of the rope," Alec said. "We can't leave anything around to prove it wasn't an accident."

"I don't like this," Lindy said.

"Jesus, who does?" Alec said in a tone he had never before used with either of them.

"Can we please get out of here?" Lindy asked.

"Yeah, right."

There was a chilling minute when the motor died and refused to restart immediately, but finally Roman got it going and steered the boat back toward the deserted dock.

* * *

The telephone on the little table next to the bed shrilled in his ear, snapping Roman upright and bringing him abruptly back to the here and now.

"Yes?"

For a long ten seconds the only sound in the earpiece was a crackling hiss. Then a whispery voice spoke to him in a cramped monotone.

"Hello, Tarzan."

Roman's muscles tensed. The telephone felt like some cold, unfamiliar object in his hand.

"Welcome home."

"Who is this?" he got out finally.

"Remember the clown?"

There was a click on the other end and the hollow buzz of a dead line.

After a minute during which he sat frozen on the bed, Roman hung up the phone.

ALEC

The Wolf River library, a wooden frame structure not much bigger than a 7-Eleven store, had no facilities for microfilm. However, they retained, bound in heavy fiberboard covers, copies of the Wolf River Chronicle from its start as a single-sheet biweekly in 1889 to its final issue in 1971 when television and regional editions of the Milwaukee Journal finally put it out of business for good.

Alec asked for the volume containing issues from the fall of 1966, and waited while the pleasant, middle-aged librarian went into a storage room in the back and brought it out for him.

He leafed through the yellowing pages to the end of October, skipping past the abbreviated wire service accounts of world affairs: Indira Gandhi becomes prime minister of India. Pope Paul IV meets with Gromyko. Albert Speer released from prison in Germany. President Johnson tours the Far East. Israel and Jordan fight a battle over something or other.

The theory held by Alec's father as editor was that national and international news was important to the Chronicle only insofar as it affected Wolf River citizens. More extensive coverage was given to the fire that seriously damaged Swanke's Feed and Garden Supply Store, and the local sixth-grader who finished second in the All-Wisconsin spelling bee, and the efforts to unionize the workers at the glove factory.

When he found the headline, it hit Alec like a cold towel slapped across his eyes:

LAKE TRAGEDY
LOCAL BOY DROWNS

The story detailed the discovery by a fisherman from Tigerton of Nunley Frazier's body late in the day, after he had been reported missing by his parents. Local authorities (that meant Police Chief Art Mischock, a bear of a man whose habitual scowl masked a shrewd mind) would not speculate on why the boy had gone boating alone at night. No explanation was offered for his peculiar costume.

The following day the front page carried an interview with Frazier's parents, who denied any possibility that their son might have committed suicide. In their grief, they were also angry. They wanted answers to such questions as: Where were the clothes he left home in? Who provided the boat that was still anchored a hundred yards offshore when Alec's body was found? What had happened to his glasses? Who else was on the lake that night?

An editorial written by Alec's father called for a vigorous investigation by Chief Mischock, including calling in the State Police for help if necessary. Alec remembered the tortured, sleepless night he had spent that night.

Two days later the only mention of Frazier Nunley was an announcement of the funeral. It referred to the boy's death as a "tragic accident."

Alec closed the volume of old newspapers. He sat silently for several minutes at the table, inhaling the varnish and dust smells of the library, thinking about what writing that single paragraph twenty years ago had cost his father.

Alec was in the Chronicle office that day working with his mother when Judge Grant came in along with Chief Mischock and Elmer Swanke, head of the local merchants' association. They asked to see Alec's father in private. Trudy McDowell showed the men into her husband's office. There they had stayed for an hour with the door closed. An hour during which Alec suffered as he never had before.

Trudy and Phelan McDowell came out of that meeting pale and shaken. They avoided looking at Alec, and never mentioned to him what went on behind the closed door. Their relationship changed from that day on. His father became silent and withdrawn. His mother cried sometimes alone in the bedroom. They no longer asked Alec to help out at the paper. And after the funeral notice, the Chronicle never ran another story about Frazier Nunley.

Gossip and rumors, however, persisted. They ranged from a bizarre theory that Frazier was murdered by dope dealers from Chicago, to a guess that was frighteningly close to the truth; that he had been pushed into the water by partying classmates who subsequently fled.

High school parties were canceled for the rest of the year. The Saturday afternoon cruising ritual was abandoned. Kids who had been best friends looked at each other with suspicion. It was possible to trace the beginning of Wolf River's decline as a town to the October night Frazier Nunley died.

Alec's parents hung on at the Chronicle while the paper declined into little more than an announcement sheet for rummage sales and farm auctions. In 1971, a month before the Chronicle shut down forever, Phelan McDowell put the barrel of a deer rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Alec came home for the funeral, then returned to the University of Missouri to get his degree in, ironically, journalism.

His mother left Wolf River a few months later and moved to Arizona. There she worked on a tiny desert weekly until she died.

Alec carried the volume of newspapers back to the librarians desk and left the building to return to the inn.

The desk clerk greeted him. "Looks like you people are going to have a pretty small party."

"What people?" Alec asked.

"You class-of-whatever-it-was reunion types. Only three of you checked in so far."

"Three?" For a moment Alec's field of vision darkened at the edges. He took hold of the edge of the registration counter for support.

"That's it." The clerked turned to the key slots and produced Alec's along with an envelope with his name on it. "You got a message."

Alec walked numbly to the elevator, got into the musty car, and punched 4. While the car creaked and rattled its way up, he tore open the envelope and read:

Hello, Monkey.
Welcome home.
Remember the clown?

The walls of the elevator car seemed to crush in on him like a coffin, and for a moment Alec could not get his breath. Then it jerked to a stop, the sliding doors clanked open, and he stumbled out into the hallway.