“Nonsense. Let me make you up something. You can take it out with you, if you want.” She was already heading over to the kitchen counter. “How about peanut butter and toast? Or a fried egg sandwich? That would only take a moment.”
Dad said, “Do you really have time, Lana?” To me, he said, “Lana runs the café in town.”
“This’ll only take a sec,” she said. “I’ve got the girls trained to open up, I don’t have to be there first thing. So how about a fried egg sandwich?”
“A fried egg sandwich would be great,” I said. She had a small frying pan out before I could finish the sentence, and now was in the fridge getting out a carton of eggs.
“That’s something, the two of you running into each other, years after you left the neighborhood,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” Lana Gantry said, putting two slices of bread into the toaster. “By the way, I think you’ve met my nephew, Orville?”
I blinked. “The chief? Of police?”
“I know he was out here, what with that horrible business of the man who was killed by the bear. What a terrible, terrible thing that was.”
“Yes, we met,” I said. And he pulled a gun on me, I could have added. And he seems like a bit of a twit, I might have mentioned.
“I’m so proud of him. He’s turned into quite a young man himself,” she said. I nodded, not sure what I could possibly add to that. My toast popped and Lana buttered the slices, then slid a fried egg onto one of them. “Salt and pepper?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, still processing so much information being delivered in such a short time.
“I didn’t cut it so the yolk wouldn’t run all over the place,” she said, handing me my breakfast in a sandwich bag.
Lana gave Dad a light kiss on the lips, which embarrassed him. “Gotta run,” she said. “Come in for a piece of pie if you get a chance.” She smiled at me, grabbed a set of keys on the kitchen counter, and was out the door.
“She seems nice,” I said. “I hope you kids are using protection.”
Dad scowled. “I think Lana gave you that sandwich to go.”
I smiled. “Okay, I’m off. When I get back, you can start showing me what needs to be done around here.” He was still scowling as I slipped out the door and ran over to the dock, where Bob Spooner was sitting patiently in his boat.
“Ready?” he said.
I stepped carefully into the boat, putting my foot toward the center so as not to tip it.
“Meet Lana?” Bob asked, grinning. “I just saw her car take off for town.”
I nodded. “I kind of walked in on her in the bathroom. I could have used a heads-up on that one.” I was thinking as Bob unhooked the boat from the dock and, with an oar, pushed us a boat length out, where it was deep enough for him to lower the outboard motor. “Is that where Dad was night before last, when we thought he was under that tarp?”
“Think so,” Bob said. “I figured Orville would have thought of that, or called, or something, but I guess he didn’t.”
“Would Orville know a clue if it bit him in the ass?”
Bob shook his head, said nothing, and dropped the motor into the water. He primed the squeeze bulb on the gas tank, then yanked the cord—just once—to bring the motor to life.
We didn’t do much talking as we headed out into the lake. We were the only noisy thing out there, and I didn’t want to make it worse by shouting over the motor. It had been a few years since I’d been out here, and I’d forgotten how beautiful it was. It wasn’t a huge lake; about two miles across and six or seven miles long, surrounded by forest. There were cottages here and there, a trailer park at the south end, but it wasn’t an overdeveloped lake. You could still come up here and feel you were getting away from it all.
Bob turned back on the throttle as we approached the shore a mile or so north of Denny’s Cabins. We were maybe fifty yards away from an awe-inspiring stand of pine trees. He pointed, raising his voice slightly over the outboard. “Must be over here somewhere.”
“What?” I said, leaning toward him from my perch on the middle seat.
“Leonard’s resort,” he said, shaking his head.
“That guy’s something else,” I said. “Do you think he was actually taking a piss while he sat there and told us about it?”
Bob shrugged. “Won’t be long before I’m wearing those goddamn diapers myself. Just got to make sure I don’t buy his brand.”
He killed the motor and released two fishing poles from brackets built into the side of the boat, handed one to me. “This is one of the best places to fish in the whole lake. There’s weed beds run through here, great feeding area. Every time I come out, I usually troll through here once, or drift and cast.”
“I can’t believe any local government would okay a guy’s plan to build a resort that huge on a lake that has so little development on it already. They must have to go through some sort of environmental study to build something like that. Surely the local council wouldn’t let it go ahead.”
“You really think that? That it would never be approved?”