The responsibility of maintaining the property had been daunting at first, but I’d managed all right. I still had to call someone to come remove that dock. It was sunken down on one side, useless. I’d managed to drag it out of the water by tying the metal steps to the rear bumper of my car with twine, but the thing had flipped and the soft old wood had cracked in places. I’d covered it with a tarp but the snow made it worse, all warped and splintered. I had no use for the dock anyway. Usually I waded into the water and got into the rowboat that way.
Charlie lapped at his bowl of water. I heated leftover coffee from the fridge in a pot on the stove. “We’ve had quite a morning, haven’t we?” I said. “A little horror story. Gets the blood flowing, right?” Charlie, hearing my enthusiasm, trotted up to me, his nails scratching the wooden floor. I knelt down to him, and he reared up on his haunches and put his front paws on my shoulders. “Oh, you want to dance?” I held his paws in my hands, the pads soft and pink, and steered him to and fro around the kitchen. It wasn’t his favorite thing, but he was a good sport. When I let go of his paws, he butted his head against my thighs, a kind of punctuation, and went back to his bowl of water. I got my coffee and a bagel from the fridge and went to sit in the breakfast nook, where I could look out at the water. I kept a pad of paper and a pen there to plan out each day.
The bagels I had every morning for breakfast were from the supermarket and came precut in a package of half a dozen. They weren’t particularly healthy—bleached flour, full of preservatives—nor were they very tasty. They were chewy and dry, and sweet in a way bagels ought not be. But I liked them anyway. I hadn’t bought myself a toaster. It seemed like an unnecessary luxury when I had a perfectly good oven. But who wants to heat an entire oven just to warm a bad bagel? It didn’t matter. I ate them cold, one every morning, Tuesday through Sunday. Monday mornings, when I’d run out of bagels, I drove into Bethsmane and got a donut and coffee at the bakery and did my shopping for the week at the supermarket. I used the occasion to mosey around town, acting busy, though I had no real purpose. That was how life seemed to be—finding things to do to pass the time. The less I’d looked at the clock, the better I knew I’d enjoyed my day. Sometimes I stopped at the Bethsmane library, the post office, the hardware store. Other than those Monday morning escapades, I rarely went to town. Each day was like the day before, apart from the dwindling number of bagels, and the varying weather. I liked the storms that whisked in and out in the spring. The year before, I’d spent many rainy days indoors, mesmerized by the turbulence in the lake, the splatter of water flung on the roof and at the windows. Those days, my list of things to do was short: Read, Nap, Eat. The pad of paper I used to plan my days was legal size, the pages much longer than the paper Blake had used to write the note. But never mind that, I told myself. Each day I wrote out what I’d do, and each day I usually abandoned my plan halfway through.
Walk.
Breakfast.
Garden.
Lunch.
Boat.
Hammock.
Wine.
Puzzle.
Bath.
Dinner.
Read.
Bed.
I had no television to distract me. Watching television had always made me antsy. Walter said it put me in a mood. He was right. I could never focus and enjoy things because I always felt I had a better idea than what I saw on the screen, and I’d busy my mind with that, and become excited and have to get up and walk around. I felt I was wasting my life away sitting and staring at the lesser version onscreen. Reading was different, of course. I liked books. Books were quiet. They wouldn’t scream in my face or get offended if I gave up on them. If I didn’t like what I read, I could throw the book across the room. I could burn it in my fireplace. I could rip out the pages and use them to blow my nose, or in the bathroom. I never did any of that, of course—most of the books I read came from the library. When I didn’t like something, I just shut the book and put it on the table by the door, spine facing the wall so that I wouldn’t have to look at it again. There was great satisfaction in shoving a bad book through the return slot and hearing it splat against the other books in the bin on the other side of the librarian’s desk. “You can just hand that to me,” the librarian said. Oh no, I liked to shove it through. It made me feel powerful.
“Oh, forgive me, I didn’t see you there,” I’d whisper.
That old library in Bethsmane was a small brick building with all the newest books in spinning racks like you’d have found at a Woolworth’s. There was a very nice reading room that looked out onto a clearing. Some congressman who had grown up in the town had donated a large sum, a plaque proclaimed. On one side of the reading room there was a large desk with a row of fancy computers. Usually there were young people using them. The big leather armchairs were often empty. The people in the area weren’t too keen on reading. The way I chose books was usually by their covers and titles. If a book was named something that sounded too general, too wide open, I figured it was a book written in generalities, and so I’d find it boring, and I’d expect my mind would wander off too much. The worst books were those that offered banal instructions on how to improve oneself. I looked at them sometimes, just to laugh at the silliness. “Eat this and feel happy.” That was the usual gist. Sometimes I looked for books I’d heard being reviewed on public radio. It was hard to separate the opinions of the reviewer from my own. And in that, it was easier to enjoy a book, feeling that I’d already made up my mind to like it. I didn’t have to debate with myself so much, even if the book wasn’t all that interesting.
As I ate my cold bagel and drank my coffee that morning at my table by the lakeside windows of my cabin, I wrote out my plan for the day. It was the same plan as for all the preceding days. Every day I rewrote it, after scratching out the identical plan I’d written the day before. Yesterdays were all failures. I didn’t want to be taunted by the evidence. I forged ahead. There was work to be done in the garden. I had seeds ready to plant: carrots, turnips, dill, and cabbage on one side; sunflowers and forget-me-nots on the other. It wouldn’t be the prettiest garden, but only I had to look at it. It was an experiment for me, and something to keep me grounded as the summer started. I’d owned that land for a year, and only now had I really started to get my hands into it. It made me feel happy and useful. There was plenty more digging to do, more weeds to pull, fertilizer to spread, and I could set the radio on the window ledge of the den and listen while I worked and while Charlie frolicked through the pines or splashed in the lake. With this plan set in my mind, I finished my coffee, put my dishes in the sink, and laced my boots back up. There, on the table by the door, was the mail, and the note from Blake I’d found in the birch woods. Her name was Magda. I opened the den window and turned the radio up. Here is her dead body.
“Charlie,” I said, “let’s get some air.”