Page 28

August 2017

The water was dangerously low. Still sweltering near the end of summer, with no rain in the forecast. Rob Boychuk squatted on the crumbly mud bank of Nagadon Lake, dipping a handkerchief into the milk-coffee-brown water. The sun was still strong, even in the late afternoon. He sat on a nearby boulder and placed the wet cloth on the back of his neck, enjoying the cool trickle down his back. He grabbed a water bottle from his pack and chugged two-thirds before taking a breath.

“Find anything yet?” Ritter had asked Boychuk last month.

The two officers had developed a begrudging camaraderie following the Anderson case.

Boychuk still thought Ritter was too ambitious and full of himself, but he was a solid investigator. Ritter, meanwhile, had told Boychuk he thought the provincial officer was “a country bumpkin with mad intuition.” It was a friendship, of sorts, and they checked in with each other every now and again, even offering opinions on more recent cases.

“Nothing yet. Starting to feel like I’ve created my own wild-goose chase.”

Boychuk had been hiking in and around the trails at Nagadon Lake since the beginning of the summer, using weekends to scout locations. With his oldest boy out of the house and the younger two busy with school and hockey, family demands were few for him. He’d announced his retirement date as well, moving him officially into the lame-duck phase of his career. He had two months before formal retirement, but the reality was he was no longer needed at the station, or at home for that matter. There was time for an obsession.

He was convinced Matthew Anderson had not left the area. When Ritter had asked, all Boychuk could tell him was that it was a “country bumpkin’s feeling.” He wouldn’t admit to his pending retirement, wouldn’t share the inexplicable desire at his core to close this last case so that he didn’t bookend his career with failures.

“I’m telling you, Anderson’s in the wind,” Ritter had said. “That place has been scrubbed, and now rescrubbed by you. He got out, or she buried him way down deep. We just can’t see how.”

While Boychuk couldn’t deny those possibilities, he knew that it was never that simple in the wild. The laws of nature worked differently; cause and effect could be direct, but small mistakes could have circuitous routes to grave consequences out here. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the water and woods weren’t prepared to relinquish Matthew Anderson just yet.

The trail he followed today was barely a trail, more of an indentation through the forest used by deer and bears to make their way to the water. It might have once been a hiking trail or logging path, but years of disuse had turned it into an impression. Boychuk had only found it thanks to an old map from the late 1950s at the town archives. He’d bushwhacked his way to the lake, though even he was skeptical of finding anything at this point.

It was a surprise, then, to find a small clearing with a half-moon rough-sand beach nestled against the forest. It was small, but Boychuk had spent too much time scouring the Andersons’ campsite last year not to notice the similarities: a rock face to the north and three towering blue spruces holding court over the beach. By his calculations, this half-reclaimed clearing was less than a mile along the shoreline from the last place where Matthew Anderson was seen alive.

Boychuk stood on the beach with his back to the water and tilted his head up to take in the full grandeur of the three spruces that stretched above the tree line.

“What do you think, boys? This the place?”

As if in answer, a breeze shook the trees just enough so that loose debris dropped to the beach. Boychuk lowered his head to avoid getting anything in his eyes, and that’s when he saw it: a sort-of path that squeezed itself between the rock face and the forest. On the Andersons’ campsite, a similar path had led from the half-moon beach up through the trees to the tent site and firepit. Boychuk took a chance.

He was about five hundred feet along the overgrown path when he saw it—a heap of clearly manmade black material. It did not belong to the wilderness. Boychuk approached slowly, careful not to disturb the surrounding area too much. He crouched down and felt the material. Neoprene. He pulled on it. It released easily from the accumulated forest flotsam around it. Boychuk stood with a man-size wet suit in his hand and a whole lot more questions.

It didn’t take him long to locate Matthew Anderson, or at least what remained of him. The body lay in the fetal position common to wilderness tragedies. Victims, no longer able to continue, can sometimes lie down, almost burrowing themselves in the foliage, looking for warmth or comfort. They can nestle themselves in so thoroughly that searchers have been known to walk right over them without noticing.

The body was badly decomposed and would have to be identified through forensic analysis, but Boychuk knew as well as he knew anything: Matthew Anderson had lain down here and died. Though he could hazard only a few guesses, it was unlikely he would ever know how or why Anderson had made his way to this spot or what happened in his final hours. Another lost hiker or murder victim? There would be an investigation, but he doubted it would come to any firm conclusions.

Though the sun beat down relentlessly, Boychuk stood and removed his hat. He stood over Matthew Anderson, closed his eyes, and thought of all the paths taken in life, the choices that invariably lead us forward. What choices had led Matthew to this lonely spot to die less than a mile away from his family? Were they rooted in his distant past and the choice he made all those years ago to leave another family? Were they more immediate and mundane, like a rash decision to take an early-morning paddle? Boychuk thought of Sarah Anderson and her firm resolve to carry on. In the end, that’s all anybody can really do. And though the search had taken much of his free time over the last year, Boychuk knew he, too, would carry on.

A line came to him then as if whispered in his ear. Not so surprising given his obsession with Matthew Anderson and his newfound camaraderie with Captain Ahab. He had recently heard it uttered by a character in a movie about the doomed 1840 whaling ship, the Essex , which had been the inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick .

“The devil loves unspoken secrets. Especially those that fester in a man’s soul,” he said, adding his voice to the rustle of leaves and the lap of water on the shore.