Flat Lake in Winter by Joseph T. Klempner Read Free Book Online Page B

eye” stuff made pretty good sense. So when Doyle had said, “ This could be the real thing,” he meant that here was a case that was going to start out death, and probably stay death.
    Even as he copied down the phone number, Fielder knew he wanted no part of this one.
    IT HAD TAKEN FIELDER almost a year to build the cabin. Along the way, he’d made every mistake known to carpentry, and even come up with a few innovations of his own. He’d poured the slab in the rain, so that when it had finally set it was uniformly pockmarked. He’d hung the front door upside down and the picture window inside out. He’d cut his knee, hammered both thumbs, broken a toe dropping a log on it, and fallen from the roof, luckily landing in a snowdrift. But by the time he was finished, he could cut a log with one pass of a chainsaw, drive home a ten-penny nail in three swings, and snap a pretty mean chalk line.
    And he had his cabin.
    True, it was more or less equal parts log and caulking, but it kept out most of the rain and even some of the wind. It had wide-board pine floors, electric lights, and real plumbing. Heat came from a wood-burning stove, which worked with its doors open when atmosphere was called for, or closed when efficiency was needed. Atmosphere tended to end, and efficiency began, around early September.
    The checks from the two murder cases finally came in, and Fielder paid off the lumberyard. His apology for the delay was met with an unconcerned shrug and the observation, “Figgered you couldn’t git too far with all them logs in that little wind-up car of yours.” The next summer, he took his remaining $600, rented a backhoe, and dredged out his swamp. If it didn’t look much like a crystal-clear pond quite yet, at least it was a start.
    Down to pocket change and faced with the necessity of earning some real money, Fielder turned to legal writing. He took on a handful of appeals, drafting briefs for defendants seeking to overturn their convictions. The same Assigned Counsel Plan that had paid him to go to court for $40 an hour and prepare motions for $25, now paid him $40 to sit at his computer and compose legal arguments. For once, being far from the city proved to be no drawback, particularly when it came time to visit the inmates, who were experiencing their own version of being upstate - in places with names like Dannemora, Malone, Lyon Mountain, and Comstock. He also wrote short stories, even managing to sell one to a regional literary magazine, St. Lawrence Currents , for $75. Talk about real money.
    Of course, there were certain drawbacks. Slow to make friends under the best of circumstances, Fielder now found himself moving dangerously close to full hermit status. He’d occasionally force himself to drive into town on the thinnest of pretexts, in search of a two-day-old local newspaper or an extra bag of sugar. At such times, he suspected that what he was really doing was checking to make sure that the town - Big Moose, population 75 - was still there, and that he hadn’t missed some cataclysmic event that had plunged the rest of the world into nuclear winter while he slept. A few minutes at the general store were generally all it took for reassurance. Somebody’d be complaining about the rising price of kerosene, or debating the merits of sandworms versus hellgrammites, or ordering new sap buckets in time for syrup season. A glance at the headline of the Adirondack Advertiser, the regional newspaper/ realty lister/ pennysaver, would serve to bring him up on the important news: Locally, there’d been a drunk driving arrest on County Road 19, while, on the international scene, the bass were taking No. 2 Lazy Ike lures up in Little Bog Lake. He’d given up trying to find the New York Times except on Sundays, when desperation would take over and compel him to make the sixty-mile drive down to Utica.
    FIELDER DIALED THE NUMBER Doyle had left. He was fully prepared to turn Doyle down on this one. Not that he