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The birds would get it, and they made such a ruckus over the snakeskin early the next morning that Ketchum was tempted to fire off his 12-gauge again, this time to drive the seagulls and the crows off the roof of the log cabin. But he restrained himself, knowing Charlotte would hear the shot; Ketchum went outside and threw rocks at the birds instead. He watched a gull fly off with the remains of the snakeskin. (“Nothing wasted,” as the logger later described the event to Da
That day, the Mounties came by in their boat to inquire about the gunshot the day before. Had anyone heard it? Someone on Barclay Island said that they thought they’d heard a shot on Turner Island. “I heard it, too,” Ketchum spoke up, getting the two young Mounties’ attention. Ketchum even recalled the time of day, with impressive accuracy, but he said that the shooting definitely came from the mainland. “Sounded like a twelve-gauge to me,” the veteran woodsman said, “but gunfire can be both magnified and distorted over water.” The two Mounties nodded at such a sage assessment; the beautiful but unsuspecting Charlotte nodded, too.
Then Joe had died, and Da
There was something about Pointe au Baril Station that stayed with Da
Yet it wasn’t Georgian Bay in the summer that Da
And how could Da
Charlotte knew it, too-even before he found the courage to tell her. “I won’t hold you to your promise,” she told him, “even if it means that I might have to move on.”
“You should move on, Charlotte,” he told her. “I just can’t.”
She’d married someone else soon after. A nice guy-Da
Charlotte had kept her island in Georgian Bay, but she’d moved away from Toronto and was living in Los Angeles now. She came back to Toronto every September for the film festival, and that time of year-early fall-always seemed to Da
Charlotte Turner had been very pregnant-she was about to have her first child-when she won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for East of Bangor, at the Academy Awards in March 2000. Da
It was just bad luck. “Bad timing, huh?” Ketchum had said. (If Joe had died three months later, it’s likely Da
JOE AND THE GIRL HAD TAKEN some of the same courses in Boulder-she was a senior at the university, too-and their trip to Winter Park together might have been a belated birthday present that Joe decided to give himself. According to their mutual friends, Joe and the girl had been sleeping together for only a short time. It was the girl’s first trip alone with Joe to the ski house in Winter Park, though both Da
It was a big house, after all, and-as Charlotte had said, because she was closer in age to Joe and his pals than Da
Yet, even with such a mob of them, and amid all the taking turns in the showers-it had surprised Da
She was pretty and petite, almost elfin, and naturally Joe had made a point of telling his father and grandfather that he’d first met Meg in a life-drawing class, where she’d been the model.
“One look at the girl doesn’t suffice-it isn’t nearly enough,” the cook would tell Ketchum, shortly after that Christmas.
It wasn’t just because she was an exhibitionist, though Meg clearly was that; as had been the case with Katie, Da
“What a distraction that girl is,” Da
“She’s trouble,” the cook replied.
The two older men were making their way along the upstairs hall of that Winter Park house. The wing where the guest bedrooms were was a curious L-shaped addition off that hall-so architecturally strange that you couldn’t pass the junction without at least glancing at the guest-wing hallway, and that was why Da
Meg and another girl were emerging from one of the guest bedrooms, both of them wrapped in towels. Their hair was wet-they must have come directly from a shower-and they ran awkwardly in their tightly wrapped towels to the door of a different guest bedroom, the other girl disappearing into the room before Meg, who was left alone in the guest-wing hallway, just as Joe came around the corner of the L. It all happened so suddenly that Joe never saw his father or grandfather, and neither did Meg. She saw only Joe, and he clearly saw her, and before she slipped inside the guest room and closed the door-to more shrieks of laughter, from within the room-Meg had opened her towel to Joe.
“She shook her little titties at him!” as the cook would later describe the episode to Ketchum.
“A distraction, indeed,” was all Da