Nine Red Pins

You kill the headlights.

You don't decide to. Your hand just does it, because the man said to in a voice that has clearly said it before, to other people, on other roads.

The dark is total. The fog presses against the windshield like a face.

"Sweetheart." Closer. Right at the guardrail. "You're scaring me. Come here."

"Stay in the car," the stranger says.

You don't stay in the car. You get out with your hand on your service weapon and your heart slamming, and you stand beside him at the edge of the road, and you look.

There's nothing there. Reeds. Black water. Fog moving in slow coils over the stones.

Then the reeds part, in a line, as if something is walking through them toward you. No splashing. No footsteps. Just the stalks bending and straightening, bending and straightening.

The stranger lifts the shotgun.

"Mom," you whisper, and hate yourself for it.

The reeds stop.

For a long moment nothing moves. Then the line of bending stalks turns, slowly, and goes back the way it came. You hear a sound like someone sighing underwater. The fog thins, and thins, and lifts off the road all at once like a sheet pulled off furniture.

The lake is flat and black and empty under a sliver of moon.

The man lowers the gun.

"Okay," he says, mostly to himself. "Okay."

"Put it on the ground." Your voice comes out steady. Detroit is good for something. "Slowly. Then your hands on the hood."

He looks at you for the first time.

You've arrested handsome men before. Pretty boys from Grosse Pointe with their daddies' lawyers on speed dial. This is not that. This is the kind of face that stops conversations: a hard jaw under a few days of dark-blond stubble, a mouth that looks like it has forgotten how to smile and might remember if provoked, hair that needs cutting curling damp at his collar. The scar splits his left eyebrow, pale and old. His eyes are gray-green in the dome light, tired and very sharp.

He sets the shotgun down on the asphalt without argument and puts his hands on your hood.

"Yes, ma'am."

His name is Caleb Underhill. He's thirty-four, from Duluth, and his license is valid. His truck is an old green pickup parked in a turnout fifty yards back, and when you shine your flashlight into the camper shell, you stop breathing for a second.

Fifty-pound bags of rock salt. A bundle of rusted iron rebar. Boxes of shotgun shells with handwritten labels: IRON. IRON. SALT. Road flares. Coils of rope. A crate of things you can't identify wrapped in oilcloth. Notebooks, dozens of them, held together with rubber bands.

"You want to explain this?"

"Hunting," he says.

"Hunting what?"

He looks at the lake.

Taped to the inside of the camper window is a laminated map of Ninebark Lake. Somebody has drawn on it in marker: a circle at the bell buoy at the north end, arrows along the shore, and nine red pushpins stuck into the eastern bank, scattered between the boat launch and the old cannery.

"What are the pins?"

"Where they went in." He says it quietly. "As close as I can figure."

"Who?"

"Nine people," Caleb Underhill says. "In nine years. One every October, on the Hunter's Moon. Your boss didn't mention that, did he?"

Your mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

Headlights swing onto Shore Road behind you. A second cruiser, light bar dark, pulls in nose to nose with yours. Hagedorn climbs out in a hunting jacket over pajama pants, thermos in hand, as if he's been awake and waiting.

"Well, now, Ava," he says. "Arlene said you radioed a stop."

You didn't. You never touched the radio.

Hagedorn looks at Caleb, and something passes over his big, friendly face, there and gone. Then the smile is back.

"Underhill. I thought I told you a long time ago this county didn't suit you."

"It doesn't," Caleb says. "I came anyway."

"He's got an arsenal in there, Sheriff," you say. "Salt and iron and a map of the lake with—"

"I know what he's got." Hagedorn sips his coffee. "He's a sad case, kiddo. Had a family tragedy a while back and he's been chasing ghost stories up and down the Great Lakes ever since. Sells 'em on the internet, I hear." He turns to Caleb. "You're done. You got till noon tomorrow to be out of my county. After noon, I find you, you're in my cell. You remember my cell."

Caleb's jaw goes tight. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't look away from Hagedorn either.

"Cut him loose, Ava," Hagedorn says. "Go home. Get some sleep. Hell of a first night."

"Sheriff, there was something in the reeds. I heard..." You stop. I heard my dead mother. You hear how it sounds.

"Fog plays tricks on this lake." Hagedorn's voice is gentle. "Loons. Wind on the water. Sounds like people. Scared me half to death the first time too." He winks. "Noon, Underhill."

He drives off.

You stand on the road with the stranger and the silence.

"He knew you were here," you say slowly. "He knew before I called anything in."

"Yeah."

"How?"

Caleb picks up his shotgun, breaks it open, takes out the shells and holds them out to you on his palm like an offering. You don't take them.

"Keep the gun," you hear yourself say. "You're cut loose."

"Thank you, Deputy." He means it. He walks toward his truck, then stops.

"Salt your windowsills tonight," he says without turning around. "Every one. Even the bathroom. And the doorframes. A solid line. Don't leave a gap."

"Why?"

"Because it keeps them out." He opens the driver's door. The dome light catches his profile again, and you understand suddenly that he is not afraid of you or Hagedorn or anything that drives a car. He is afraid of the lake.

"And if your mother calls you from the water again," he says, "remember she's dead."

The door shuts. The truck pulls away.

You stand alone on Shore Road with your pulse in your ears.

You never told him she was dead.