Hunter's Moon Page 18

  When the walk-through was finished, they went outside to the porch and D’Agostino asked, “Well, what do you think?”

  She put on a skeptical expression and answered, “So, Jake, tell me what you’re not telling me.”

  He answered with a puzzled squint.

  “A place this size for so little—there’s got to be a hitch.”

  D’Agostino smirked—a good-natured smirk—and said this was the first time he’d heard a buyer complain that the price was too low.

  “Converting it would cost me,” she said to explain herself. “I wouldn’t want to sink money into it and then find out I’ve got to spend a fortune repairing the roof or whatever.”

  He threw out his arms, as if to show how open and aboveboard he was being with her. Sure, the place needed a little TLC—it had been vacant for a year, and a rooming house for a decade before that, but the infrastructure was sound. If Lisa needed to know why it was on the market for half its worth, it was because the owner was anxious to get it off her hands. She lived in Chicago; she was seventy years old—the granddaughter of the man who’d built the house back in 1910.

  “There’d be a full inspection before closing,” he added. “And if it turns up something that needs fixing, it would be her responsibility to fix it.”

  Lisa tried to think of something to say, a few words to make her sound canny and savvy, but nothing came to her.

  He took advantage of her silence to apply a little sales pressure.

  “Y’know, the fact that it was a rooming house would lower your conversion costs. Lower, I mean, than if it was still a single family home.”

  “I know that. It’s why I asked to see it.”

  “Sure. This town’s never had a B-and-B, but I’d bet the right person could make a go of one. We’re a resort town now, sort of. Beaches in the summer, and the national lakeshore right nearby. Snowmobilers in the winter, leaf peepers—we get a lot of them in the fall. And then there’s the outdoorsy types—hikers, hunters, fishermen.”

  “You don’t need to sell me,” she said, with some impatience.

  “So, you’re ready to make an offer?”

  “I need to sell our place—I mean my place—first. Down in Manitou Falls. There’s a sale pending, but you never know. The realtor there told me things can fall through right up to the last minute.”

  “Right he is, and—”

  “She,” Lisa said.

  “Right she is and right you are. You never know.” D’Agostino’s face brightened. “Just to be clear, are you saying that you’ll accept the offer, contingent on the sale of your house?”

  “Yes.”

  That word, like the “yes” she’d spoken to Bill when he’d proposed to her, produced an anxious thrill, a happy terror. She was about to change her whole life, leave a career that paid well, that provided status, a sense of self-worth, and some excitement—she had been doing marketing and PR for the Northern Suns for over ten years; leave a midsize town with direct air connections to Chicago and Detroit for a small town, a very small town, with no connections to anywhere; leave a house where she’d been happy once but that now held only the memory of happiness. She would be leaving all that for the uncertainties of striking out on her own, in a place where she knew no one.

  * * *

  The accident, as she still preferred to think of it, occurred in mid-October 2004, on the last day of Bill’s annual hunting trip with Tom Muhlen and Paul Egremont, his oldest friends, buddies since high school, football teammates.

  He’d taken out two term life-insurance policies the previous May, one naming Lisa as beneficiary, the other his daughters. The policies contained the standard clauses allowing the insurance company to deny claims if the insured committed suicide. Given Bill’s history of treatment for alcoholism and depression, the company conducted an investigation. A detective interviewed Tom and Paul, who had been with Bill and swore his death had been accidental: he’d been carrying some sort of obsolete shotgun that lacked a standard safety; he stepped into a hole, or tripped, or something, and the gun discharged right into his chest. The same account they’d given Lisa. They were very convincing. They convinced her. They convinced the investigator, and in a few weeks, she became a rich widow.

  Later, after she’d recovered sufficient presence of mind to think things through, she wondered if she’d been convinced because she wanted to be. Bill had been in a bad way earlier in the year, worried, gloomy, incommunicative, sleepless. Too proud to admit that there was anything the matter with him—psychologically, that is—he’d stopped taking his Zoloft. Lisa began to spike his morning orange juice with the drug, and his mood ticked upward. He was cheerful the whole time between May and October, made love to her again—he hadn’t touched her for weeks—talked about taking a vacation in the Caribbean. This dramatic change, she believed then, had been the happy effect of the Zoloft. But might it have been something else? Might it have been that he’d made a decision, after the insurance policies were approved? She’d read somewhere that depressives sometimes rose out of their melancholy once they’d resolved to end their pain by the appalling act of ending their lives. Yet it seemed far-fetched that Bill had been putting on an act, sustaining it for five months, all the while conspiring with himself, plotting his own death.

  One day, her casino job took her down to Lansing to observe the legislature debate a gambling issue. The trip gave her a chance to talk to Tom and Paul—Tom was the Ingham County prosecutor, Paul a professor at Michigan State. She invited them to dinner at the State Room, where she asked them to go through the whole thing again. She listened for inconsistencies, hoping not to hear any. Tom was as persuasive as he’d been the first time. He was a courtroom lawyer; persuasion was in his DNA. Paul, the academic, left virtually all the talking to him. The little Paul had to say was evasive. He couldn’t maintain eye contact with her when she asked, “And you heard Bill say before … before it happened, you heard him say he’d had the best time of his life?”

  Paul sighed and answered, “Lisa, let it go. Why are you—”

  “Best day,” Tom interrupted, force in his voice, as if he were raising an objection at a trial. “Just to be accurate, he said it was the best day in his life.”

  The thought leapt into her mind fully formed, like a revelation. Because he knew it would be the last one. There was no way to prove it, yet she was sure it was true. The man she’d loved and lived with for almost eight years had deceived her, had taken himself from her thinking that a hefty insurance settlement would somehow ease the hurt. Rage combined with her sorrow to create an entirely distinct emotional compound, a kind of acid that ate at her heart. She might be at work, or grocery shopping, or washing dishes, and it would bubble up in her breast. She would start to cry and, in the middle of her sobbing, suddenly feel like kicking something or someone. Once, while cooking dinner, she flung a kitchen knife at the photograph that hung above the fireplace, the one showing him in his Navy flight suit with the medals from Desert Storm.

  * * *

  A few months after she closes on the Victorian, after obtaining the required permits and licenses, after depleting three-fourths of the settlement money on decorating the rooms, updating the kitchen, buying bed linens, mattresses, and china, after taking out ads in travel magazines, setting up a website, hiring a housekeeper, and giving the North Coast Inn a shakedown cruise by inviting her brother, sister-in-law, and parents to stay for a long weekend, Lisa opens her doors for business, on time for the summer tourist season. It is a success. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, she is fully booked for every weekend but three; weekdays, at least one of the five rooms is occupied. She nets enough to hire a college girl as an assistant for the summer, and she enjoys meeting guests who come from all over, some from as far away as the East Coast and, on a couple of occasions, adventurous travelers from Europe. The B&B is written up in a magazine, Michigan Highways, a copy of which she sends to her mother, who had been opposed to Lisa’s venture from the beginning. �
�You should invest that insurance money in something sensible, Lisa Mae.” Gladys Williams always invoked the middle name when chiding her daughter. “You’re quitting a good job, a darn fine job, to be an innkeeper in the middle of nowhere.” “Innkeeper”—the word summoned images of a crabbed old man in a roadside dump.

  Business falls off sharply after Labor Day—drops to zero, as a matter of fact. For a while, Lisa keeps occupied with finding handymen to make minor repairs, with household tasks like scrubbing scuff marks off baseboards, but when all that has been taken care of, she has nothing to do but check her email and voicemail for reservation requests. She has made friends—Lisa makes friends easily—but most are shallow acquaintanceships. The one exception is Aileen Earhart. Like Lisa, Aileen grew up on a farm and is tall, dark-haired, and sturdily built. Intelligent and witty, she is also madly energetic, owner of the Bayview Diner with her husband, Alex, as well as a published author of young-adult books. Awake before dawn, she writes for a couple of hours while she bakes muffins and scones for sale, then is off to the diner, where she waits tables and works the register while Alex cooks. At night, she retires to her room and writes for another hour or two before, finally, going to bed.

  Aileen assures Lisa that things will pick up later, when snow begins to fall, drawing snowmobilers and cross-country skiers. Right now it’s hunting season, and hunters tend to prefer motels or to hole up in their backwoods camps. Lisa envies her friend’s enterprise and criticizes herself. There must be something you can do to bring people in. Entrepreneurs are expected to grow whatever business they’re in. That phrase—“grow the business”—is a bit laughable, as if a restaurant or a factory or a B&B were a vegetable garden.

  Loneliness grips her, especially at night, after she locks up the inn and retires to the cottage out back, which she’s converted into an apartment for herself. Bill’s ghost, banished during the busy summer, returns from exile to resume his haunting. He comes in, dragging the chains of anger and sorrow. Desire, too. He was a handsome man, the best-looking man she’d ever seen, six feet three, with platinum hair and translucent blue eyes.

  * * *

  A guest arrives early in October, a tall man (though not as tall as Bill), thin but not skinny—thin in the way a whip is thin. He’s a walk-in. The first thing he asks, even before inquiring if she has a vacancy, is if her establishment is pet-friendly. Two rooms are, she answers, number one downstairs and number four up. What kind of pet does he have? A dog, a German shorthair that doesn’t shed much.

  “You’re here for the bird hunting?”

  He seems impressed that she knows a shorthair is a hunting dog. “Yup. Every fall for the last, oh, it’s got to be ten years now,” the man volunteers. “I usually stay at the Lakeview”—waving in the general direction of the rental cabins that occupy a hill overlooking Vieux Desert—“but I saw your sign and thought I’d try something different. So is one of those rooms available?”

  He speaks in a newscaster’s voice, sonorous and authoritative. His looks are likewise authoritative, even a bit grave, his face gaunt and craggy—“Lincolnesque” would be the word—his hair thick and straight, the lead-gray color of Lake Superior on a cloudy day.

  “You can have either one,” Lisa replies brightly. “The downstairs is bigger, but upstairs is less expensive. Either way, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

  The man cants his head slightly to one side and offers a small smile. “I’m sure I won’t be,” he says, his eyes—they’re a frosty blue—finding hers. “Eeney, meeney, miney, mo—I’ll take downstairs.”

  They move from the front hall into the tiny office—before renovations it had been a storage room—where Lisa sits at her desk and he presents his credit card without asking what the rate will be. She states it—one hundred ten a night plus a twenty-five-dollar pet fee.

  “Not a problem, not a problem,” he declares, as if she’d thought it might be. She scans the card, an American Express Corporate Platinum, and notices his unusual name: Gaetan Clyne.

  “I’ll be here the week,” he says. “Maybe longer. I’ll let you know ahead of time if it is.”

  She escorts him outside to show him where to park—on the gravel strip behind the backyard—and returns to the office, excitedly doing arithmetic in her head. Seven times one thirty-five equals … nine forty-five.

  Clyne comes back inside, a cased gun and a duffel slung over his shoulders, a dog bed tucked under one arm, his free hand holding the German shorthair by its leash.

  “My gosh, let me help you,” Lisa says.

  Taking the bed, she leads him to the room, which had been the master bedroom when the house was occupied by its original owners. The furnishings and decor lean toward Early American simplicity, a kind of Shaker look, rather than the luxurious. She’s done all five rooms along the same lines—no canopied four-posters or faux-antique dressers or toilets with wall-mounted wooden tanks and brass pull chains, as she’d seen in B&B trade magazines that made a fetish of nostalgia.

  “Perfect,” Clyne pronounces, propping the gun in a corner. He shrugs the duffel off his shoulder and jerks the leash, as if the dog were a puppet on a string. “This is Klaus. Klaus, say hello to our host, Ms.…” He questions her with a glance.

  “Lisa. Lisa Williams.”

  “Klaus, say hi to Ms. Williams.”

  Klaus nuzzles Lisa’s crotch. She steps back, gently pushing his nose aside.

  Clyne apologizes and says, “He gets a little too friendly sometimes.”

  “That’s okay. I’m used to dogs. My husband is a bird hunter. He had English pointers.”

  “Good breed. Terrific at field trials. A little too rangy for me. What does your husband have now?”

  Lisa flushes, realizing that she’d referred to Bill in the present tense. Lowering her gaze, she shakes her head emphatically to discourage further inquiries. She doesn’t want to tell this stranger that she sold her husband’s last dog, Rory, because her husband was dead.

  “I lock up after seven,” she says as she gives Clyne two keys, one for the front door, one for his room. “You can let yourself in. If anything comes up, I’m in the cottage in the back.” She pauses, smooths the front of her trousers with her hands. An awkward feeling that she cannot account for creeps into her. “All right, then. That’s settled. What time would you like breakfast? It’s between seven and ten.”

  “Good thing I’m not hunting ducks. I’d have to be out of here by four. I’d starve. How about eight?”

  Another smile, broader than the one earlier, multiplies the fissures in his face. They make him look older than his age, which she guesses to be mid to late forties. Lisa returns the smile and goes into the kitchen to consult a cookbook, Best Recipes from American Country Inns. She thumbs through the index, looking for something special. Here it is—Puffed Apple Pancakes. She intends to make Clyne’s stay memorable. A five-star customer review for this time of year on the website could be exactly what she needs to avoid seasonal lulls in the future.

  * * *

  Awake at six, washed up and dressed half an hour later, she steps out of the cottage into the sharp morning air, pausing to admire the red-orange brushstrokes streaking the eastern sky. “Morning nautical twilight.” Bill had familiarized her with the term the first time they’d watched dawn break from the deck of their new house on Lake Michigan. He’d been a sailor well before joining the Navy, crewing on his father’s sloop in the Mackinaw Race. MNT, he’d explained, occurred when the sun’s center was six to twelve degrees below the horizon, making it light enough to see the horizon, dark enough to see the brighter stars, allowing mariners to use their sextants to fix the stars in relation to the horizon and thus to navigate at sea. She recalls that lecture almost word for word—he loved to lecture about sailing and guns and gundogs and the techniques of landing fighter planes on carrier decks. He has invaded her thoughts once again.

  In the kitchen, where pots and pans hang from hooks, like ornaments, she fires up the oven,
then makes coffee, which she places on a sideboard in the dining room.

  Returning to the kitchen, she whips up the pancake batter, pours it into a cast-iron skillet, lays apple slices on top, and slides the skillet into the oven. It’s done twenty minutes later, and it looks pretty close to the one in the cookbook photograph, the apples nicely browned, the batter risen so that it resembles a pie. After sprinkling on some powdered sugar and cinnamon, she takes a picture of the creation with her phone and posts the photo on her website. She tries to come up with a clever caption but draws a blank.

  She hears Clyne’s door open and close, his feet clomping on the pine-board floors as he enters the dining room. Shit. She forgot to set the table. Her breath catches for a sliver of a moment when she sees him at the sideboard, pouring a mug of coffee, his back to her. The rangy, athletic frame, the hunting clothes—tan brush pants, khaki shirt with blaze-orange patches on the sleeves—it’s Bill she sees in that instant. The image, a near hallucination, dissolves, and Lisa composes herself.