“Nobody has a key to that office but me, Carol,” Wayne said, and I heard him twice, once in the cold phone against my ear and once, thinly, through the open door of the office thirty feet away. The dispatch radio sputtered with static. Then the door of the office swung inward, and my second husband stepped out onto the packed snow in his good coat, with the telephone still at his ear and a smile on his face that I had loved for a year. “I came back from Bemidji early,” he said gently. “I wanted to surprise you. What have you got there, honey? What did you find?”
Kyle moved first. My son is thirty years old, six foot two, a deckhand on a lake boat in the summers, and he stepped in front of me without a word. I felt his arm come back and press against my chest. I should have been afraid. What I felt was a strange, cold clearness, like the air over the north bay on a January morning. I closed my glove around the tackle tin and the photograph and put them in the pocket of my coat. “The hubcap bin,” I said. “Rick wanted me to look in the hubcap bin. I thought he might have left me something.”
Wayne looked at the bin, half dug out of the drift, and at the hubcaps scattered around it like dropped plates. For a second, only a second, the smile slid. I saw the face of a man calculating a sum. Then it came back. “Rick left a lot of junk out here,” he said. “Why do you two not come inside and get warm? I will make coffee.” It was the voice he used when he plowed my driveway. It was the voice he had used at the funeral, holding both my hands. I had never once heard how well he spoke it.
A tip up spool hid the one sentence a tow man could trust to his wife.
“I will pass on the coffee,” Kyle said. “I think we will wait here for Deputy Sorensen.” Wayne stopped. Last night, after the note, while I stood at the stove with my hands shaking, my son had taken a photograph of it and sent it to the one law officer in Cass County he trusted, a young deputy he had gone to school with. She had texted back at six that morning. On my way. Do not go in alone. We had come out here already knowing what we might find, and I think that, in some small way, Rick had known too.
“Carol.” Wayne dropped the phone to his side. His voice changed. It lost the honey and came out flat and tired, like a man setting down a heavy bag. “Whatever Rick wrote, he was a jealous man at the end. He thought everyone was against him.” I looked at him for a long time. Then I took the little brass key out of the tackle tin and held it up in the winter sun. “Rick did not think that about you,” I said. “He wrote that you knew where the calls were coming from. I would like to know what that means.” He did not answer. He glanced, just once, at the old gun safe through the office window.
That was all I needed. Kyle and I went to the safe together, with Wayne following us across the snow, protesting, his voice rising. The brass key turned as smoothly as if it had been oiled yesterday. Inside were the original dispatch ledgers of Rick for his last six months, a small digital recorder, and a manila envelope marked with a date. I took out the recorder and pressed play. A mans voice, calm and low, came out of the tiny speaker. Tow needed, north bay, pickup through the ice. It was Wayne. It was unmistakably Wayne, on a second phone, calling his own dispatch line.
He had been doing it for months, the envelope showed. Eleven calls to places where no vehicle waited. Each one sent Rick to a remote road or lakeshore, long after dark, and each one gave Wayne an hour to break into the cars Rick had towed that week and sell their parts through a dealer in Brainerd. On a night in January, Rick had checked the north bay himself, in daylight, and found only open water. When he realized who had made the call, he wrote it all down. Wayne, learning that Rick knew, made the last call on a thin spot he had picked with great care.
Wayne ran. Not far. He got as far as the gate, where the county squad car with the lights flashing turned in off the highway and slid to a stop across the road. Deputy Annika Sorensen stepped out with her hand on her belt and asked him, quite politely, to get down on the ground. He did. I will never forget how small he looked, a gray haired man in a good coat lying in the snow next to the rusted wrecks of other peoples cars. Kyle put his arm around my shoulders and held on, and neither of us said a thing.
The trial lasted four days. The recording was played in open court, and the ledgers of Rick were read into the record, line by line. The jury needed less than three hours. Wayne was convicted of murder in the second degree, along with fraud and theft, and sentenced to life. My marriage was annulled within the month. I cried, but not for him. I cried because I understood, finally, that the man who sat across the kitchen table from me last winter had been a stranger the whole time, and that Rick had been telling me so from the bottom of a frozen lake.
Kyle runs the yard now, under the old name, Lindgren Towing. He drills a test hole every fifty feet, as his father did, and he laughs at the men who do not. In February, he set the oak tip up over the same hole off the north bay, with fresh line on the spool, and I stood on the ice beside him in my heavy boots, wrapped in the old parka of Rick. When the little orange flag jumped, Kyle whooped out loud. I put my hand on the cold wood of the tip up and thought of the pencil in my husbands fingers. He had always known where the thin ice was.