Read Starvation Lake for Free Online

I turned on the stove and tore the bologna into ragged strips in the pan. The meat sizzled into crisp curls. I dumped ketchup all over it, turned the heat down, and laid two slices of white bread on a paper plate.
    Out the window, I stared at Soupy’s truck, still parked in front of Enright’s. I hit the play button on my answering machine. My mother reminded me about coming for Sunday dinner. Somebody hung up. Then a reedy voice filled my breadbox of a kitchen.
    “Gus,” it said. “I wish you’d return my calls. Tuesday’s the drop dead.”
    “Then I’ll call you Tuesday,” I told the machine.
    The voice was the Detroit lawyer I had had to hire in my final days at the
Detroit Times.
I turned the stove off and scooped the crispy bologna onto the bread.
    “Jesus,” I said.
    My best reporter—my only real reporter—was angry with me. Teddy Boynton was trying to blackmail me. My old coach had resurfaced. And now it looked like I would finally have to deal with the mess I had made in Detroit. I sat down in the recliner to eat. But I wasn’t hungry anymore.
     
     
       The sandwich spent the afternoon in the newsroom fridge, while I edited stories and wrote headlines for Saturday’s
Pilot.
The school board was seeking a special tax to pay for a swimming pool. A cellular phone company cut the ribbon on a store in the mini-mall. A frustrated mother called the sheriff’s department for help putting her eleven-year-old son to bed. And the River Rats were headed downstate for the first round of the state hockey playoffs. I spent most of an hour translating Tillie Spaulding’s Monica feature into readable newspaper patter. She couldn’t write, but she surely could find the strange.
    She dug up eighty-three-year-old Gloria Lowinski, a nurse who thought President Clinton and his wife should try tantric sex, and a CPA named Barton Lewienski, who insisted Republicans had paid the intern to seduce Clinton. There was a French poodle named Monica and a cashier at a burger joint called the White House who said, “Monica who?”
    I held my nose and sent the thing to the printing plant.
    Joanie didn’t turn in her story about the snowmobile until 5:12, eighteen minutes before deadline. It began:
     
Pine County sheriff’s deputies think a snowmobile that washed up on Walleye Lake may have belonged to John D. “Jack” Blackburn, the legendary youth hockey coach who died in a snowmobile accident ten years ago.
     
    Reading the rest, I saw no more evidence to support that assertion than Joanie had let on outside Audrey’s. Nor did she attempt to explain how the snowmobile, if it was Coach Blackburn’s, had surfaced on Walleye Lake after sinking in Starvation. She was sitting at her desk, marking up a notebook with a red pen. She hadn’t said a word to me all afternoon.
    “Joanie,” I said. “You haven’t nailed this snowmobile thing.”
    “Fix it then.”
    “Too late,” I said, annoyed. “Corporate’ll raise hell if we keep the plant overtime. I’m spiking it.” Just as I turned back to my computer, I heard a metallic
thwup
against the wall facing me. Two feet over my head, a wet brown stain seeped down the wall. A Diet Coke can hissed on the floor beneath.
    “Jesus,” I said, wheeling around to face her.
    She was standing now. “Jerk,” she said. “I could’ve worked on Bigfoot, but I spent the day chasing your stupid snowmobile, and now you kill that story, too? You’re so full of crap.”
    She had a point. And I could handle her calling me a jerk, but in my short career as an editor I’d never had a reporter throw something at me. I had no idea what to do. But I wasn’t about to fire her when the suits weren’t about to let me replace her. So I just said, “Calm down, Joanie.”
    “Don’t tell me to calm down. Don’t tell me anything.”
    Tillie appeared in the doorway in her fur coat with the little mink claws dangling from the shoulders. “What’s going on back here?”
    I looked at