The Taking of Libbie, SD (Mac McKenzie #7)

“I laughed when he told me that. It sounded like something he might have joked about when we were first married. He was perfectly serious.”

Mrs. Miller shook her head at the thought of it. We drove in silence until she told me to take a left at White Buffalo Road. I slowed the car and turned.

“How well did you know the Imposter?” I said as we accelerated.

“Well enough to know that he was a phony,” she said. “I recognized it the evening he came to dinner; knew before we finished the chicken. I’m from the Cities. I grew up in Edina.”

“Cake eater,” I said, which was the standard insult for residents of the moneyed suburb.

“Breakfast of champions,” she said, which was the standard reply.

“Yeah, you’re an Edina girl.”

“Only Rush wasn’t a St. Paul guy. He knew all the names, yet none of the locations and none of the slang. He didn’t know Dinkytown was practically on the campus of the University of Minnesota. He didn’t know where Uptown was, or Seven Corners.”

“Why didn’t you speak up? Why didn’t you tell your husband?”

“I don’t like my husband very much these days. It gives me pleasure to listen to him explain how his mistakes were not mistakes; the way his voice gets serious and he says, ‘I will not be provoked.’ Hysterical.”

“Why don’t you leave him?”

“Why bother when he’ll be leaving me soon?”

“You mean dying.”

“Yes, I mean dying. None of us live forever.”

“When he’s gone, I take it you’ll inherit all he’s built.”

“Saranne will inherit. Excuse me—Sara Anne. I hope she will be generous with her mother. If not, I will gain a two-million-dollar life insurance settlement and my freedom.”

“Nothing if you leave him?”

“According to our prenup, if I leave him I’ll get twenty-five thousand dollars for every year that we were married for the first ten, forty thousand for the second ten, and seventy-five after that. That’s a small percentage of our net worth and barely covers my mental anguish. Dewey inserted a clause stating that the contract will be nullified in case of immorality.” Michelle took her time sounding out the word. “Im-mo-ral-i-ty. I presume that means adultery, and lately I’ve been watching Dewey very closely. Unfortunately, he will not be provoked.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You’re a stranger. It is much easier to confide secrets to a stranger. As judgmental as you might prove to be, you will soon be gone and your opinions will not trouble me.”

“I might have a big mouth,” I said. “I might blab your secrets all over town before I go.”

“I hardly think so. Except when it comes to my husband, I am a fairly astute judge of character. You will keep my secrets. Not out of any sense of loyalty to me, certainly. Yet you seem to care about my daughter. You will keep my secrets to protect her.”

Not if we find Rushmore McKenzie’s dead body, my inner voice said. I’ll scream that from the rooftops.

“We’ll see,” I said aloud.

I have no idea who first decided that “10,000 Lakes” should be printed on Minnesota’s license plates. Yet whoever it was got it wrong. There are actually 11,842 lakes in Minnesota that measure ten acres or better and another couple of thousand that just miss the cut. Lake Mataya was smaller than all of them. It wasn’t even a lake. More like a giant puddle after a hard rain. I was sure I could wade across it without getting wet above the knees.

I first glimpsed Lake Mataya when we pulled into the gravel parking lot off of the county road. I thought I was seeing just a small bay and the trees that surrounded it hid the rest of the lake. No, that was all there was. Grass and weeds receded at the water’s edge; there was no beach. The wooden planks of a T-style dock squeaked as we walked across them. I counted six signs posted on the dock. no diving, they each said. Seemed like sound advice to me.

“Pathetic, isn’t it?” Mrs. Miller said. “In Minnesota, they’d bulldoze this place out of principle. Here it’s practically a tourist attraction.”

“How’s the fishing?” I said.

Mrs. Miller thought that was an awfully funny question. When she stopped laughing I said, “Where did you kill the Imposter?”

“This way.”

Mrs. Miller did not hesitate at all as she led me off the dock. We followed a worn path halfway around the lake. “Here’s the place,” she said when we reached a narrow trail that left the path and disappeared into a stand of ponderosa pine, American elm, box elder, green ash, and willow trees. There was a clearing among the trees where someone had built a bench using the trunk of a cottonwood tree. People had come to the clearing often, leaving behind empty beer cans, food wrappers, and cigarette butts. What grasses and shrubs there were had been trampled into submission, and in most places the ground was hard-packed dirt. The clearing was invisible from both the lake and the parking lot.

As good a place for an ambush as any, my inner voice told me.

“This is where you killed him?” I said aloud.