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THIRTEEN
I can’t quite fathom what I’m seeing. I actually have two kayaks, both single-person, plus a canoe, and looking around, I’m not sure what’s what. The boathouse is littered with pieces of fiberglass. Chunks of it.Twistedchunks.
“I… I don’t understand,” I say. “What would do this besides a bomb?”
Kit bends to examine a scrap of wreckage. It takes a moment to recognize what it is—part of a kayak seat, melted.
“Can any bomb do this without damaging the shed?” I say.
He picks up a shard and turns it over in his hands. He’s not giving an answer because there isn’t one.
Kit straightens and raises the lantern to look around.
“One door,” I say. “I boarded up the windows, and they’re still boarded.” I stomp the ground, dirt flying up. “There’s no floor, but unless someone dug their way in…?”
They didn’t. We can both see that. I’m looking around when I notice something overhead.
I take the lantern and lift it. My paddleboard sits in its spot in the rafters.
“Tell me that’s not damaged,” I say.
He walks to the front of the board and reaches up, then shimmies it down and out the door. I follow him as he sets the paddleboard onto the ground. It’s in pristine shape. Not a scratch that I didn’t put there myself by scraping against rocks.
I run back in. The paddles for the canoe and kayak are among the twisted pieces, along with tufts of stuffing and scraps of fabric from the life vests. I use another paddle for the board, though, and it’s still in the rafters. I yank it down and carry it outside.
Kit looks from me to the board.
Say something, damn it. Say what you want to say, what you’re holding back because you need to be “nice.” I’m the former wife you walked out on during a pandemic, and now you’re treading eggshells to be nice to me. Just say it, damn it. State the fucking obvious.
“Well?” I snap, when I can’t hold back any longer. “Say it.”
“I don’t need to. You already know it.”
The wind falls from my sails. Did I want him to say the words, as if he thought I was too dense to figure it out? Give me a reason to take offense?
“Fucking useless,” I mutter.
His head shoots up, genuine shock on his face.
“Not you,” I say. “The board. It’s useless.”
I drop the paddle onto it, and I don’t even get a satisfying clank, the aluminum falling with a dull thump on the fiberglass.
“There’s no way in hell we can get to shore on that.” I glance up at him. “Right?”
“Right.”
I slump. Did I want him to say I could do it? Not to overestimate my ability but tell me I’m exaggerating the danger.
Sure, you can do it, Laney. It’s only five miles.
Five miles across the open water of Lake Superior, which might as well be the ocean.
I walk down to the water. While I did pick this spot to hide my private boathouse, it’s also near the perfect launch spot for the smallerwatercraft, in the shallow side of a cove. The main boathouse is on the other side of that cove, on deeper water better suited for the motorized boat. Here, though, once you get past that treacherous stretch of rock, there’s a strip of actual beach.
I take off my shoes at the rock edge and walk onto the water-smoothed pebbles and tiny rocks that approximate something like sand. There’s no tide on the Great Lakes, and the wind dictates how far the water reaches. Today, it comes all the way to the edge, and I’m sloshing in it as I walk along that beach strip, looking across the seemingly endless water.
The last time Kit and I were here, we sat on this beach gazing out over the water as I told him the plot for my second novel. With anyone else, that might have been a quiet, thoughtful conversation. That wasn’t us. It was me waving my arms and gesticulating wildly while Kit scratched a stick in the sand, mapping out my scenes and brainstorming ideas for the plot holes.
