The Last Guests

Chapter 1: The Last Ferry

The ferryman told Jennifer Hayes that the lake would freeze before morning, and he said it the way other men talk about a bill coming due.

"Tonight?" She pulled her collar up against the wind that came through the wheelhouse door. "It's forty degrees."

"It's forty now." Norman Bass kept one thick hand on the wheel of the *Wabana Belle* and did not look at her. He was past sixty, broad through the chest, with a short gray beard and a face the weather had worked over for a long time. "Wind's backing around to the north. Cold front coming down out of Canada. This time of year, a front like that can skin the whole lake over in one night. I've seen it twice."

"And then what happens?"

"Then nobody goes anywhere." He finally glanced at her. His eyes were pale and tired. "You picked a good weekend, if you wanted quiet."

Jennifer looked out through the spray-streaked window. Lake Wabana lay flat and gray under a low sky. Ahead, maybe a mile off, Lantry Island rose out of the water, a long dark ridge of spruce and granite with a big roofline showing through the trees. Above the roof, on the highest point of the island, stood a thin steel tower with a little cabin perched on top.

"Fire tower," Norman said, seeing where she was looking. "Forest service put it up in the thirties. Nobody's used it in forty years, except kids looking for somewhere to be alone. And folks wanting a phone signal. It's the only place on the island you'll get one."

"Good," Jennifer said, and she meant it.

Quiet was what she had come for. Quiet and sleep, and three days in a place where nobody knew her name or had read it in the newspaper.

Six weeks ago she had been an emergency room nurse at Duluth Memorial with eleven years on the job and a reputation for staying calm when things went bad. Now she was a nurse on administrative leave, which meant the hospital paid her to sit in her apartment and replay a single night until she knew every minute of it by heart. A sixty-one-year-old man named Gene Sorensen had walked in at 2:10 in the morning with a pain between his shoulder blades. He had died in a hallway bed at 4:48. In between, Jennifer had worked a cardiac arrest, two car-crash patients, and a teenager with a broken jaw, on a shift that was missing three nurses.

She had promised herself she would not think about Gene Sorensen this weekend. She had already thought about him twice since leaving the mainland dock.

She stepped out of the wheelhouse onto the open deck.

The *Wabana Belle* was an old wooden ferry, forty feet long, painted white a long time ago. The other passengers had crowded under the canvas awning at the stern to stay out of the wind. There were only five of them. The hotel's last weekend of the season had never been busy, the woman at the booking desk had told Jennifer over the phone, and this year it was the last weekend ever.

The two closest to her were newlyweds. Jennifer would have known it even without the way the young woman kept touching the ring on her left hand. She was in her late twenties, with dark curly hair stuffed under a red knit hat, and she had her phone up, filming the island as it came closer.

"Adam, look. Look at that. It's like a postcard."

"It's great, Nat," said the young man beside her. He was tall and thin, with a kind face and a beard he hadn't quite grown into. His own phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He jumped as if it had bitten him, pulled it out, looked at the screen, and turned it face down against his leg.

"Who keeps calling you?"

"Nobody. Work."

"It's Friday. You teach algebra."

"Parents," he said. "Parent emails. I'll turn it off." He held down the button until the screen went black, then smiled at her. It was not a very good smile.

Jennifer looked away. For eleven years she had watched people in the worst hours of their lives, and she had gotten good at reading them whether she wanted to or not. It was a habit, like checking the exits when she walked into a room. Right now the habit told her the young man was frightened of something, and that it was none of her business.

On the bench along the rail sat a small, white-haired woman in a battered green parka, drinking coffee out of a thermos lid and reading a paperback. She looked about seventy. The parka was old enough to have a history of its own, the fabric gone soft and faded, with a round cloth patch on the shoulder showing a cartoon walleye and the words MESABI RANGE ICE FISHING DERBY 1987.

"You'll want to sit down," the woman said without looking up. "Norman takes the last stretch fast. He likes to show off."

"I heard that, Maxine," Norman called from the wheelhouse.

"You were meant to." The woman glanced up and smiled. Her eyes were bright blue in a face lined like a walnut shell. "Maxine Goodwin. I've ridden this boat every November for thirty years. He's been driving it for twenty, and he still hasn't learned to be pleasant."

"Jennifer." She sat. "Thirty years. You must love it out there."

"I do. Robert and I came the first time for our tenth anniversary and never stopped." Maxine screwed the lid back onto her thermos. "It's a good old building. They don't make them anymore. And after Sunday, they won't have this one either."

"I heard it was sold."

"To a company from Minneapolis that builds condominiums with names like Whispering Pines." Maxine's mouth went thin. "Kathleen held out as long as she could. You can't blame her. You can't blame anybody for anything anymore. That's the modern world."

The last two passengers stood apart at the very stern, as if the rest of the boat had nothing to do with them. The man was in his late forties, handsome in a groomed, expensive way, in a long camel-colored coat and leather gloves. The woman was a few years younger, blond, in a cream wool coat that would not survive one afternoon of real Minnesota weather. She wore sunglasses though there was no sun. Four large suitcases sat at their feet, and Jennifer counted them twice without meaning to. Four bags for two nights.

The man caught her looking and gave her the smile of someone used to being looked at.

"Drew Cameron," he said, lifting a gloved hand. "My wife, Melanie. We're from the Cities."

"Jennifer."

"Are you a regular too, Jennifer?"

"First time."

"Us too. Mel found the place. She wanted somewhere off the grid." He laughed. "Well. She found it."

Melanie Cameron did not laugh. She turned her face toward the island and kept it there.

---

The *Wabana Belle* came in under the island's lee, where the wind dropped and the water went still and black. A long wooden dock ran out from a rocky beach below the hotel. A few hundred yards west along the shore, past a short spur of rock and birch, stood a big gray boathouse with a sagging roof and a wide covered slip on the water side, big enough to swallow the ferry whole. A path ran along the shore between the two, and a steep set of wooden stairs climbed from the beach up a bank to the lawn.

Above the lawn stood the hotel.

The Lantry Island Hotel was three stories of dark logs and fieldstone, with green shutters and a long porch that wrapped around the front. Smoke rose from two of its chimneys. The west side looked lived in, with lamps glowing in the windows. The east wing had plywood over every ground-floor window and dark glass above.

Norman brought the boat alongside the dock with a hard bump that made the young bride shriek and laugh. A young man in a canvas work jacket caught the bow line and tied it off in two quick turns. He was about twenty-four, lanky, with a mop of sandy hair and a wide, easy grin.

"Welcome to Lantry Island," he said. "Closing weekend. Last one ever. Watch your step, the dock's slick. I'm Ryan. I'll get your bags."

Up on the lawn, a man in a black jacket was crouched behind a tripod, shooting the front of the hotel with a big camera. He straightened as they came up the stairs, and Jennifer saw that he was in his thirties, with short dark hair and a quiet, watchful face. He gave a small nod and went back to his camera.

"That's Sean," Ryan said, hauling two of the Camerons' suitcases at once. "He's taking pictures for the sale. So the new owners can see what they bought before they knock it down."

"Ryan." The voice came from the porch. A woman stood at the top of the steps, tall and straight-backed, in a long gray cardigan, her silver hair pulled into a knot. She was in her middle sixties, with Ryan's long jaw and none of his grin. "Nobody is knocking anything down until the papers are signed. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Kathleen Hammond. My family has run this hotel since 1946, and I'm very glad you're here for the end of it."

She said it without a trace of self-pity, and Jennifer liked her at once.

Norman had come up the stairs behind them with a canvas bag over one shoulder. Kathleen saw it and frowned.

"Norman. You're not going back across?"

"Not tonight."

"You haven't stayed one night on this island in twenty years."

"Weather's coming." He shrugged. "I'd rather be stuck here under a roof than stuck out there on the water. Put me anywhere. I don't need much."

Kathleen studied him for a moment. Then she nodded. "Room 108. Ryan will show you after you put the boat away."

Jennifer had stopped halfway up the stairs to catch her breath, and from where she stood she could see back down to the dock. Drew Cameron was the last one off the boat. Norman had gone back down to the *Belle* to cast off, and for a moment the two men stood close together by the bow. Cameron took a white envelope from inside his coat and held it out. Norman put it into his jacket without looking at it.

*A tip*, Jennifer thought. Rich men tipped. That was all it was.

Then Cameron came up the stairs, smiling at everyone, and Norman took the ferry slowly along the shore toward the boathouse and disappeared into the dark mouth of the slip.

---

Her room was on the second floor at the end of a long hallway with creaking floorboards and a runner the color of old wine. It was small and warm, with a brass bed, a patchwork quilt, and a radiator that knocked like someone wanting to come in. The window looked down over the lawn to the lake and the dock. If she pressed her cheek to the cold glass, she could see the gray roof of the boathouse off to the right.

Maxine Goodwin had the room next door. Jennifer met her in the hallway, the old woman unlocking her door with a real brass key on a wooden tag that said 214.

"Thirty years in this room," Maxine said. "Robert liked the view. You can see every boat that comes and goes."

"Is your husband coming up later?"

Maxine was quiet for a moment, her hand on the knob. "No," she said. "He passed in the spring."

"I'm so sorry."

"So am I, dear." Maxine opened her door. "Dinner's at seven. Kathleen does walleye on the last night. Don't be late, or Norman will eat yours."

Jennifer lay down on the brass bed in her clothes. She meant to rest her eyes for ten minutes. When she opened them again the window had gone dark, and the wind had changed. It was coming hard out of the north now, and something small and sharp was ticking against the glass.