Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley Page A

and powdered sugar. I waited in an angle-iron chair in front of his desk, my hair still damp from the quick shower I’d taken at the rink. I scanned the shelf behind his desk. There were cans of pepper spray, handcuffs, some
Field & Stream
magazines, a framed photograph of a woman whose face I recognized but whose name eluded me.
    I wanted to ask Dingus myself about the snowmobile. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t because I didn’t trust Joanie, but it was. Despite my years away, despite my desire not to be there, I still felt that I knew these people and I could get them to tell me at least a semblance of the truth. Part of me wanted to hear that it was all a mistake, that the snowmobile wasn’t Coach’s after all. Mostly I wanted to hear a good reason why the sled wound up in Walleye.
    I heard Dingus in the hallway just outside his door. “Call me when you hear something,” he said. He stepped into the office. “Where’s the redhead?” he said as he squeezed into the chair behind his little steel desk. Graying tufts of hair covered his bowling-pin forearms. He wore his cocoa uniform with a mustard tie secured by a brass clasp in the mitten shape of Michigan. “Thought she’d just about moved in here now.”
    “Thanks for helping her out, Dingus.”
    “Am I to be dealing with you now?”
    “He was my coach.”
    “Ah,” he said. He grabbed a piece of paper off a stack on his desk, peered at it, then replaced it, facedown. “How’d the Shoot-Out go?”
    “Fine.”
    “I heard there might’ve been an incident.”
    “Boys will be boys.”
    “For sure. So how can I help you?”
    Dingus had come to Starvation Lake from a tiny Upper Peninsula town populated by Finns named Heikkala and Pikkarainen, and his voice still carried the gentle lilt of their accent. He’d been sheriff for six years. People liked him. He was friendly and mostly docile. He stayed within his modest budget and didn’t try to pump up his revenue by setting traffic-ticket quotas for his deputies as so many other sheriffs did. He also rarely left his office except for lunch at Audrey’s or, lately, to go on the TV news. Perhaps because he faced reelection, Dingus had become a regular on Channel Eight, which most days was desperate for local news and happy to put him on camera, whether it was to announce a new safety-belt campaign or to show off new jackets and caps for crossing guards. Yet Dingus on TV was usually as wooden as the lectern he hauled out for press conferences. Only his singsong accent and the dancing of his handlebar mustache saved him from being a total bore.
    I had a notebook out but hadn’t opened it yet. “The snowmobile at Walleye,” I said. “Did it really belong to Coach?”
    Dingus smiled. His head gave a barely discernible shake.
    “No?” I said.
    “Can’t help you.”
    “Come on.”
    “No comment. You know what you know.”
    Nobody loved the cat-and-mouse more than small-town cops. It made the tedium of their jobs more bearable. Still, Dingus’s “no comment” was confirmation enough for me. “So how the heck does the sled wind up in Walleye?” I said. “And please don’t tell me the tunnels.”
    He sat back and placed his hands flat on his head. “Strange things happen, Gus,” he said. “Remember Felix?”
    Everyone in town knew the story. Felix, a golden retriever, dove into an ice-fishing hole on Starvation just as his master, Fritz Hornbeck, was hauling up a perch. Felix was going after the fish, but he missed and disappeared beneath the ice. Hornbeck, who was into his second bottle of blueberry schnapps, assumed the dog had drowned. But an hour later, Felix emerged from another ice-fishing hole in a shanty half a mile away, shaking off lake water in front of Elvis Bontrager. It was the talk of Starvation for weeks.
    “That’s your comment?” I said. “‘Strange things happen’?”
    “No. No comment at all.”
    “Come on, Dingus.” Joanie was going to raise hell with me for