Page 107 of Guess Again

Lake Morikawa, Wisconsin Monday, July 13, 2026

HIS HAIR WAS LONG AND WILD, AND A THICK BEARD HE TAMED ONCE a month covered his face.

Dark bags drooped under his eyes from a year without a decent night’s sleep.

Every time he closed his eyes, Francis Bernard found him.

In the worst of Ethan’s nightmares, his father was there, too, holding the knife he had used to carve up women during the summer of 1993.

When the sleep deprivation became too much, and his life began to spiral, Ethan put in for a leave of absence at the hospital and disappeared.

The governor had made good on his promise to erase Ethan’s student loan debt, and when he found himself free and clear of that burden, he decided the only place he might be able to heal was up north.

So he climbed into his Husky and took off for the backwoods of Lake Morikawa.

It had not been lost on Ethan that both the passenger seat on the way, and the dock when he arrived, were empty.

It had been the first time he could remember landing his Husky without Kai waiting for him on the pier.

He had arrived over Memorial Day weekend and spent the summer running a medical clinic for the Chippewa people.

He spent his days seeing patients in the morning, fishing away the afternoons, and drinking too much in the evenings.

“It’s infected,”

Ethan said as he stared into a Chippewa member’s mouth and rooted around with a dental pick.

He wore a head-mounted light and a surgical mask as he performed his exam.

“I can drain the abscess for you today and get you on antibiotics, but you’re going to have to see a dentist soon.”

“Do what you can, Doc,”

the man said.

“I’ll see the dentist next week.”

“Tomorrow,”

Ethan said.

“Or you’ll lose the tooth.”

The man nodded and opened his mouth as Ethan went to work.

He saw ten more patients that morning and treated a host of ailments that included a man on the verge of a diabetic coma, an ulcer on a woman’s heel, and a nasty hemorrhagic conjunctivitis.

He finished charting, made calls to referring physicians in Ashland, and spoke personally to the dentist about the abscess he was sending over.

He closed the clinic, promised to be back Wednesday morning, and climbed into his Bronco for the ride home.

His cabin had been gutted and remodeled since the previous summer.

He’d hired a contractor out of Superior, Wisconsin to do the work and trusted that it had been done well, never making the trip up from Cherryview to check the progress.

The first time he walked into the cabin over Memorial Day weekend, Ethan looked around and approved of the retooling.

He was aware, however, that the esthetics could be changed in a single season, but the memories of what had transpired there would take much longer to fade.

Lingering paint fumes remained from the remodel, and he smelled them every time he returned to the cabin.

He opened the windows and welcomed in the hot, humid summer air.

One of the perks of the rehab was the addition of central air-conditioning.

Ethan planned to set the thermostat to frigid that night.

Perhaps it was the secret to a good night’s sleep. With a lake breeze flowing through the cabin and carrying away the smell of paint and turpentine, he grabbed his Loomis spinning rod from the wall rack and headed down to his boat. He pulled the ripcord on the 50hp Mercury engine and took off across Lake Morikawa.

He killed off the afternoon hours, dropping two sixteen-inch walleye into the live well for dinner.

He spent an hour hunting northern pike, finally tying into a forty-incher that he took on a Johnson Silver Minnow.

Ethan brought the big fish to the side of the boat, netted it, and measured its length.

Then, he carefully released it back into the water to fight another day.

When the thrill of the catch was over, he packed up his gear and sat on the casting deck to take in the beauty of the lake.

Lodgepole pines filled his vision in every direction.

An eagle cut through the air and skimmed along the surface of the water until it plucked a fish from the lake and flew back to its nest.

A loon let out a long tremolo from the middle of the lake before disappearing under the surface.

He remembered his many hours on the water with Kai, and missed his friend.

As usual, Lake Morikawa worked its magic.

For a couple of hours Ethan had forgotten about the pictures of Francis Bernard and his father posing with Maddie and the women they killed during the summer of 1993.

The audio and video recordings, however, were harder to forget.

Ethan didn’t have the stomach to watch all the videos.

But he had watched enough to know that Francis and his father had documented each of their victims, including Maddie.

For a couple of months after he’d visited the storage unit, all he did was obsess over the videocassettes.

Eventually, he stopped watching them. Eventually, he stopped listening to the hours of audio that Francis had recorded of himself and Ethan’s father discussing their next victim and obsessing over Maddie Jacobson.

But there was one item Francis had left in the storage unit that Ethan could not disengage from.

Francis had written Ethan a final letter, and with it was an audio recording of Francis’s final interaction with Ethan’s father.

Ethan had become unhealthily fixated with it.

He yanked the ripcord on the Mercury outboard, clicked the motor into gear, and started the trip back to his cabin.

It was time to start his nightly routine of drinking too much beer and listening to the audio recording of his father’s last words.