Dead Insider Read Free Page B

along?”
    As they stepped outside the trailer, Ray waved in the direction of his pickup. “I’ll drive, Doc. Climb in.”
    “Thanks, but not this morning,” said Osborne, clamping his khaki fishing hat on his head and adjusting the brim to keep the rain out of his eyes. “I’ll get my car. Meet you up on the road and follow you over to Kaye’s. Have to run by the grocery store later.” With a wave, he hurried up the dirt drive to a gap between the pines where he could cut over onto his own property. The grocery store might not happen that morning, but it was a good excuse. Osborne knew better than to chance disaster riding with Ray. The passenger side door on the old blue pickup was jammed shut, which left you with two options: haul yourself through the window, or climb over the gearshift from the driver’s seat. Osborne preferred holding on to what remained of his manhood, even if it cost him extra gas.

Chapter Three
    Sheets of rain slammed the windshield of Osborne’s Subaru. Twice he had to slow to a near stop in order to see the road.
Brother, what a day
. He’d better tell Ray to forget the walleyes. On the other hand, Ray Pradt was one of the few men he knew who
preferred
fishing in the rain: wind, rain, and ice fishing were his drugs of choice. Go figure.
    Osborne felt his shoulders tense as he hovered over the steering wheel, peering through the downpour in hopes he could recognize the rock pillars guarding the entrance to the Ericsson estate. Just when he thought he had missed the driveway, he spotted Ray’s taillights and turned left to follow the pickup. Though it had been years since he had driven Rolf Ericsson Drive, he remembered that final evening too well: it had been one of the interminable dinner parties that Mary Lee had loved—and he hated. The senior Ericssons were still alive at the time, and had invited fifty of their closest friends to celebrate Eve Ericsson’s sixty-fifth birthday. Both Senator Ericsson and Eve have been dead a good decade or more, now. Even Mary Lee has been gone nearly three years.
    While he never would have wished his late wife dead, her untimely departure from this world had allowed more sunshine into his life than he ever expected, including
no more dinner parties
. At least, not those formal, alcohol-infused events studded with the brittle preening of people he had no need to know. The blacktopped road wound down and down through an old-growth forest so ancient and with a canopy of branches so dense that not a single green plant, not even a fern, marred the rust-brown forest floor. Hemlocks at least two hundred years old loomed overhead, their trunks black in the rain. Jagged stumps split by lightning sprang from the shadows like misshapen monsters. In his youth Osborne had avoided woods like these, convinced they were haunted.
    Perhaps he had been right. Land like this was a relic of another time and place. Everyone who grew up in Loon Lake knew the history: the first generation Ericssons were lumber barons wealthy enough to be among the few able to protect their property from the clear-cutting that savaged the forests of northern Wisconsin in the 1800s.
    Osborne wondered if Jane Ericsson, the fourth generation and only child of the senator and Eve, valued the old-growth timber like she should. One of the few forests of its kind in Wisconsin, it might be modest in size, but it was a priceless gift. He hoped that she had taken steps to preserve it. After all, she was in her late forties, unmarried and without children of her own. When she was gone, who would inherit these glorious woods? A developer? That would be a crime.
    He slowed to a stop behind Ray, who had jumped from his truck to move a fallen branch blocking the road. Osborne waited to see if extra hands were needed, but his neighbor tossed the branch out of the way as if it were a toothpick—when you’re thirty-two years old, you can do that.
    Falling limbs had to be a constant hazard on the private