Reprisal by Mitchell Smith Page A

her purse on the kitchen table, and went down the hall to the entryway to check the phone. Its message light was blinking. Rebecca, probably.
    Joanna pushed the play button and heard a voice she slowly recognized. Mrs.
    Thurman, the president's secretary at White River. Very brisk old lady, and not friendly.
    Mrs. Thurman spoke for quite a while, almost ran out the tape. ... The president wanted to get in touch and was very, very sorry. The state police had been unable to contact her at her home in White River, and then her father's attorney, Ms. Dufour from upstate, had called. Terrible accident ...
    woodstove door left open. Mrs. Thurman was anxious for Joanna to get back to her at the president's office, so they'd know she'd gotten the message.

    Joanna put the phone down with the oddest sense of satisfaction. She felt almost pleased. ... Besides that strange feeling of completion, she felt nothing at all. Felt no surprise, no sorrow, no sense of loss. Nothing more seemed to have been taken from her--as if she were an inner-city storekeeper who'd been robbed in such swift succession that the second theft didn't matter.
    She walked back to the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator to take out the peanut butter, whole wheat bread, and jar of blackberry jam. She put those on the counter by the stove, then opened the refrigerator again to get the milk.
    Barkley's sold only whole milk.
    She took a knife from the counter drawer and began making her sandwich. Peanut butter first, on the left-hand slice. Jam would be on the other slice--and not too heavy on the jam, or it would sugar over the taste of the peanut butter.
    ... She supposed she would have to consider her father not only dead, but burned to death--as Frank was not only dead, but drowned.
    It seemed to Joanna, relaxed in emptiness, that there must be a fact, a truth hiding, that explained it all. And to discover that truth? To explore these odd coincidences--Frank's improbable blunders at sea, her cautious father's carelessness with his woodstove--to search beneath, to map that dark labyrinth
    ... who better?

Chapter Five
    The Lake Chaumette Fire Department-volunteer--had sent its captain, Milt Duffield, out to meet Joanna at the cabin site. The fire captain, large and lumpy in slacks, jacket, shirt and tie, andwitha baby's chubby earnest face, had been waiting when Joanna pulled into the cabin clearing after half a day's traveling up from the island.
    The sun threw long shadows while they walked around a very large square shallow pit filled with charred planks, chunks of debris, and fragments floating on black water. A bitter smell drifted up ... wafting on the lake breeze.
    "We pumped from the lake," the fireman said when Joanna asked about the water.
    "But way too late. It was goin' too good for us to do anything about it, except keep it from startin' up the woods."
    "You didn't find my father. ..."
    "Found his bones," the fireman said. "Some of his bones."
    It seemed to Joanna that Captain Duffield --volunteer or not--must have dealt with relatives of the dead before. He was calmly matter-of-fact, no comments or posturing about loss.
    "And it was the woodstove?" The early evening was growing darker, with clouds reaching west, in from the sea.
    "Yes, Mrs. Reed; it was. I knew your dad, just to see him at the store, and he was gettin' pretty old to be out here alone. Tendency is to get forgetful, careless, that age."
    "My father was a very careful man."
    "Guess not enough," Captain Duffield said, "to be out here by his lonesome."

    Joanna was walking around the fire pit again, looking down into the dark water as if something of her father might still be under it. "This is the way he wanted to live."
    "Oh, sure. We got a bunch of old folks out here."
    "And it was just an accident? Absolutely just an accident. ..."
    "Didn' say that. We don't say accident till the insurance guys say accident--but the police were out here last night, an' Ted Lujack from Beaconsfield FD