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Gibson House Press - Peter Robertson

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131 pages

English

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Description

Two friends grew up together in Scotland. One goes missing in Northern Michigan and the other has time on his hands. The hunt for the lost man begins as a mystery and evolves into an act of redemption.

Tom is a wealthy Chicago businessman with too much time on his hands, a man who “displayed impeccable manners and looked earnestly concerned when he had to,” one who “had taken no chances.” Keith is close to homeless and adrift somewhere in northern Michigan. They were friends once, two decades ago, in a working-class Scottish town brought vividly to life in a series of evocative flashbacks.

Now the search to find one brings life-affirming purpose to the other, and Tom will stop at nothing to find his friend and discover the truth behind his disappearance.

An intuition of impending danger proves to be frighteningly accurate as a small lakeside town grudgingly reveals its dark underbelly, in this debut crime novel that Booklist calls “taut . . . captivating . . . skillfully written, and . . . deeply satisfying.”

Sujets

Amateur Sleuth

Literary

Literature

Detective

Mystery

Fiction

Informations

Publié par	Gibson House Press
Date de parution	04 juin 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780985515829
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

PERMAFROST
A MYSTERY
Peter Robertson

ALSO BY PETER ROBERTSON
Mission
Colorblind

GIBSON HOUSE PRESS
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422
GibsonHousePress.com
© 2012 Peter Robertson
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9855158-2-9 (ePub)
Cover design: Christian Fuenfhausen

DEDICATION
for my family

ONE
I sat in my car and read about Keith Pringle in a Chicago newspaper article. His name shimmered above the page, like heat above asphalt, and I shivered, with what was the only premonition I had ever had in my life.
He was already dead, my premonition told me.
* * *
It was a warm and hazy summer morning, already close to eighty degrees with matching humidity, and not yet seven, by the digital clock on the sleek wood dashboard of a black Mercedes SL600 convertible, or the thin gold Raymond Weil wristwatch beneath the lightly starched white cuff of the cotton oxford shirt I had bought one lunchtime on an impulse from Neiman Marcus.
The cellular phone was silent. The roof of the car was down in an attempt to capture the best part of the day. In the trunk the CD-changer located the fourth disc in sequence, and Rickie Lee Jones sang “Rebel Rebel,” by David Bowie, a song from my youth, with which I would have liked to identify.
What had the day promised before I read the newspaper? I can no longer remember. I am wealthy, I suppose I should mention, by any conventional standards. I am white and male and European-born and not yet old, and all I possess has come remarkably easily, without stress or undue compromise, and is therefore largely worthless, to my selfish eyes.
A large white car, perhaps a late-model Chevrolet, the kind of car favored by older male drivers in passable off-the-rack suits, had abandoned the road and stood, still hissing in some annoyance, on the parched and ill-tended grass on the shoulder. The car was empty and a bright red tow truck blocked two lanes of traffic in an effort to get at it.
Horns naturally honked, and the heat, and the promise of still more heat, made the good people angry and impatient. I just sat and waited and after a while unfolded my newspaper and skipped impatiently past the front page to the meatier sections inside.
I had no pressing engagements, and I don’t have a boss with a scowling eye fixed permanently on a time clock or an evaluation slip.
I do find that people often mistake my complacency for contentment.
The article in question concerned the numerous hazards befalling European tourists in large American cities. I scrolled down through the fatal signs, the easy-to-identify rental cars and the shoddy maps, the dark streets on the wrong side of town. It appeared that virtually every state had at least one harrowing tale to tell.
Near the bottom of the page, Michigan’s roll call of death was the smallest. Yes, an official agreed, they had their tourists, and yes, one was possibly missing. He was a British man, a Mr. Keith Pringle, who had been vacationing in the northern part of the state, where the population was sparse, but where tourism was quietly encouraged. Mr. Pringle was believed to be visiting a close relative, the article stated, but he was now also believed to be missing for close to two months. I noted that everything was only believed at this early stage. The British Consulate was naturally concerned, if essentially noncommittal, but the skilled woman journalist was able to hint darkly that this was indeed another hapless innocent, fallen to a rampant new crime wave.
The title of the article was “Innocents Abroad.”
* * *
Keith’s name came at me from the page like a freak wave from a still sea, because he and I had been friends as teenagers. No, the term friends is perhaps too presumptive, and too intimate. We had known of each other, and we had met occasionally.
But he was preserved in a piece of memory I keep, and tend, if seldom access, from a hometown I have never managed to bring into any kind of emotional focus, but which is a memory, or catalog of memories, that, at times, resonates with more intensity than the present day.
* * *
Now I was far from home. As was Keith Pringle. He was believed to be missing, whereas my position in the world is well documented.
I fed my premonition. It remained intact and had even blossomed some. I now knew for certain that Keith lay dead only six hours from me, from my expensive car, and my listless and shiny life.
But the six hours translated into thousands of miles, and almost twenty years distance, and a gently growing alienation, from the small and timid place where we had both started out.
But the distance wasn’t that important, because I was going to find him.

TWO
It was hard to spot where one city ended and the other began, but somewhere in the crisscrossing suburban transition, the small Scottish town where Keith Pringle and I lived struggled to exist.
I grew up there, through my youth and the sullen years after my father, who I barely knew, died. Later, I still languished there, deep in an uncertain eternity of high school, handicapped by shyness and the chronic fear of physical contact with either sex, for whatever reason.
I lived there until I went to college at eighteen and blossomed into a demon lover and rugged sportsman who, in truth, existed only in my lurid imagination.
Our town had one bank and four pubs, it had council houses that looked in essence as pretty and as cared for as anything bought and paid for, or at least cheerfully brokered by the ever-willing building societies.
A betting shop owned by a minor sporting hero of a few years past was the older male’s social focus in a high street that was a little too narrow for two lanes of traffic, while the co-op claimed the bulk of the elderly female allegiance. The four pubs duked it out for the loyalties of the rest of the adults.
* * *
The town school was too small for the town children, so that some were farmed out to zealously progressive comprehensives in the two cities, and the rest were housed and educated in prefab huts intended for temporary use, but which were still standing and functional four years ago, when my wife and I took a more or less pointless emotional detour on a rare trip home to visit my mother.
* * *
It was one of my few whimsical moments. It was one of my wife’s few indulgences.
I remember stopping the car, getting out, expecting the warm jolt, some pleasing form of spiritual connection, the headlong thrust into reminiscence and reverie. But the huts all looked just as they had. There was no halo of nostalgia. They were just prefab huts.Old. And quite ugly.
My wife has less soul than I, I suspect, and was clearly uninterested, pausing politely, a slightly pained look on her smooth, sculptured face, reminding me that my mother was expecting us for dinner, and that she dealt badly with even a marginal disruption to her routine.
I got back into the rented car and we drove away slowly, moving like a lost tourist between the parked cars on the high street, which had never been widened, and never would now, because of the new bypass that catapulted the commuter traffic from city to city, without pausing to acknowledge our little town as it squatted, sulking, in the shadows of the concrete that stretched heavenward.
At a zebra crossing a lady guard with a huge orange lollipop of a sign took three children across the street quickly. One was crying. Two were laughing. An old man in a cloth cap and a Harris tweed jacket shiny at the elbows left the betting shop smiling like a fiend, and with a flourish entered the public bar door of the closest pub. Ill-gotten gains. He clearly felt flush, and would soon feel all the flusher.
Once the children had crossed, and left the sanctuary of the guard’s domain, the crying one lashed out at one of the others and produced tears on a smudged cheek with his little hard fist. Now two cried, and the smiling boy was left out.
Why are children so relentlessly, callously horrible? Is it simply safety in numbers?
When I was fifteen I met Keith Pringle at a bad and otherwise uneventful party, where he chased after stupid, undeserving love, and got his nose bloodied for his trouble.
I don’t now recall the name of the person who gave the party. It’s very possible I never knew it. Doubtless a friend of a friend of a friend. Or else word of the event spread, and beer-fuelled teenage radar picked up the signal. You know how it is.
But I do recall the music, and the dark living room stripped of furniture by wise parents, the smell of cigarettes and spilt beer on carpets, and Brut aftershave applied a little too liberally.
Three delirious boys swayed like waves in the ocean in the center of the room, their arms spread across each other’s shoulders like a Russian folk dance, drinking their warm beer from cans that never emptied.
They were loud, and they were drunk, or else they were pretending to be.
The song was “Jet” by Paul McCartney & Wings, and the year was perhaps 1974. I wore a navy brushed denim jacket and gray loon pants with a flare that fully covered my scuffed suede shoes, and I wore a leather thong around my neck and another around one wrist, and if it’d been a decade earlier I’d have been a real honest-to-God hippie. If my mother had let me grow my hair as long as I wanted.
Were there other people sitting on the floor in the corner of the room? In a just world there would be a lonely, pretty girl who was interesting once you got her to start talking and who would want to slow dance, and put her head on your shoulder when you took a chance and pulled her that little