Once Upon a River Page 0,31

be stuck, so they needed to keep their supplies of food, bait, and ammo laid in, and the prospect of winter preparation seemed to please him. After he disappeared upstream, Margo found a piece of a rope that was too short to use for much of anything, so she unraveled it and then set about braiding the sections to create a rifle sling.

That evening, Brian visited Carpinski and got a report on Margo’s mother. After a few months of living with Carpinski, Luanne had apparently gone off with a truck driver. Carpinski provided an address in Florida, but the first letter Margo wrote came back the next week to Brian’s post office box with a note handwritten across it, No longer at this address. Brian said he would keep asking around, would talk to Carpinski again to see if he remembered anything else. According to Brian, the man was still pretty broken up about Luanne more than a year after she had left.

Brian was a storyteller, recounting his own tales and others he had collected, and in the evenings he often told about growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in logging camps, about damming creeks to catch fish, about dipping smelt, about men who were killed by walking too close to the edge of the road when a wagon full of logs was passing. There was a long, complicated story about killing and eating rattlesnake in Idaho. He told her about two men who went out in a boat with one of their wives and came back without her, neither of them realizing she was missing, so relieved had they been by the quiet. She’d shown up hours later, having walked from the other side of the lake, mad as hell. He told a story about a Michigan Department of Natural Resources official going out with his friend fishing in the middle of a big lake. The DNR man watched his friend light a quarter stick of dynamite and toss it into the water. After the blast, twenty fish floated up dead, and the man collected them. When he lit another stick of dynamite, the DNR man said, “You know I’m going to have to arrest you for this.” So the guy handed the DNR man the lit dynamite and said, “Well, are you going to talk or fish?”

The nearest neighbor downstream on Brian’s side of the river was a half mile through wild woods. And it was a lonesome sort of relief not seeing the Murray farm across the way as she had her whole life. Upstream on the other side was a plain white clapboard house, apparently unoccupied during the winter months. A few hundred yards downstream, separated from the white house by an empty lot tangled with small trees and brambles, was a tidy yellow house, in which there lived a man who drove a green Jeep, a woman who wore a slim-fitting white winter jacket, and a big loopy dog, maybe a yellow Lab–Irish setter mix. The house was built way back from the river, but the dog hung around at the river’s edge and gazed into the water. Margo had never had her own dog—the no-pets policy had been a rare point of agreement between her parents—but she had spent so much of her youth with the Murray dogs that she had come to see dogs as her natural companions.

It was after the new year when Margo came up with the idea to write to the occupant of her mother’s old address in Florida, asking him or her for information about Luanne. Brian said she should offer a fifty-dollar reward—he would pay for it, he said. The reply came to Brian’s PO box. The address the man provided was not in Florida, but in Michigan, Lake Lynne, a town west of Murrayville and north of Kalamazoo. Margo worked for days to write the simplest note she could, giving no details about her life, telling her mother that she was doing fine and would like to visit her. Brian mailed it to the new address.

Over the course of the next few months, Margo was grateful that nobody came around looking for her. If the police or the Murrays were searching at all, they weren’t looking very hard. She’d seen a sheriff’s boat traveling upstream a few times, but the craft had always sped toward Heart of Pines and then back downstream a while later. Nobody ever came to the cabin to inquire about a