Leave No Trace Read online

  “For Christ sake, Butch. He can’t lick you to death,” Dad said, picking up his beer for another swig.

  “Come here, Jasper.” I called the dog to me and patted his neck before telling him to go lie down.

  “How many times do I have to come here before he leaves me alone?” Butch Nelson crossed his menacing, tattoo covered arms, the tough guy pose at odds with the boyish rose of his perpetually wind-burned cheeks. As the first mate on my dad’s salvage tug, he wasn’t easily disturbed, but he’d been attacked by a stray when he was a kid and refused to see the point of any canine life since. He sat back down, careful to face the kitchen door where the dog waited with hopeful eyes.

  “Jasper became anxiously-attached as a puppy. He has confidence issues.” Dropping my backpack near the table, I glanced at the depth map covering the spot where I’d planned to write up my incident report with a ramen noodle and Oreo cookie dinner and the house to myself. Today was obviously not the day for plans. “What are you guys up to? I thought you were heading to Thunder Bay.”

  “Grant money came through.” Butch grinned.

  “You got it?”

  Dad glanced up from the table, nodding, and I adjusted the hoodie to make sure it covered my neck. A hint of a smile passed over his face, but the logistics of the trip were already crowding it out. He was planning, navigating, submerged in the details.

  “So which ship is it? The Madeira? The Vienna? The Fitzgerald?”

  “The Bannockburn.”

  Our eyes met before he turned back to the map, leaving a sudden silence in his wake.

  The Bannockburn. The ghost ship. I moved to the kitchen on autopilot and started looking through the cupboards, not sure at all if I had the stomach to eat.

  My dad had spent most of his life on the water. His boat provided tugging and towing services in the summer and icebreaking in the winter, plowing the way for the thousand-foot lakers that lumbered in and out of the Duluth and Superior harbors, which—contrary to Minnesota’s seemingly landlocked geography—was the largest freshwater port in the world. No matter how many ships he guided to safety, though, it was what lay underneath the surface that called to him. No one knew exactly how many ships Superior had taken. Most of the official crashes had been documented in the last hundred years, but add in the unregistered boats, the rum-runners during Prohibition, and all the countless vessels sailing before modern navigation or lighthouses and you might as well be looking at something the size of a mass grave and guessing how many bodies it could hold. Dad was just a kid when his father explained to him about the cold temperature of Superior, how the icy water pulled bodies down and kept them there, and he’d been fascinated by the cemetery at the bottom of the lake ever since. Salvage work came rarely because there wasn’t any money in it, so Dad and Butch recently started applying for grants based on the historical and cultural value of the lost ships. Someone must have agreed, giving them a chance to steal back what Superior had swallowed.

  They began murmuring, drawing routes and pointing out hazards while I found a brick of ramen noodles and popped it in the microwave. I watched the bowl spin until Dad’s voice cut through my reverie. He’d gotten up for another beer and caught a glimpse of my neck.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  I tugged the zipper on the hoodie higher, trying to cover as much skin as possible. If it looked half as bad as it felt, my neck must have been one solid bruise. “It’s nothing.”

  “Maya.” A two-syllable warning that wasn’t going to tolerate any bullshit.

  I sighed. “A patient tried to escape tonight. I was in his way.”

  “He strangled you?” Butch craned his head to try to see the evidence.

  Refusing to make eye contact with either of them, I relayed the fight briefly in the most generic terms possible.

  Butch started to ask another question, but I waved him off, telling him I couldn’t discuss a patient’s case. Dad’s eyes shifted from my neck to the depth map, and he took a long drink.

  “We’re not going anywhere. We’ll shelve the trip until spring.” He cut off Butch’s objections. “It’ll give us more time to plan.”

  “Dad, no.”

  Ignoring the beep of the microwave, I followed him and planted my hands on the table when he would have folded up the map. “You’re going.”

  “Look at your neck, Maya. That’s unacceptable. I’m going to talk to Dr. Mehta—”

  “No, you’re not. I’m twenty-three years old and this is what I do. I got the job done tonight, and I’m going back to work tomorrow, and the day after that. Dr. Mehta knows what I’m capable of.”

  “She’s—”

  “We talked about this when I agreed to stay here,” I reminded him.

  My fingers spread over the shoals and dug into the dark basins. All their notes and arcs of possible routes had turned the lake into a biology class dissection of something still alive. “Dad, it’s the Bannockburn. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the Bannockburn.”

  He drew back. We hadn’t talked about her in years and even then it had been about endings, not beginnings. His hand dropped to the western edge of the lake and brushed over the cliffs and towering pine forests where he’d met my mother.

  She’d told me the story, one of the few she shared. A geology student at UMD, she’d been studying how ice formed in the cracks of the North Shore’s basalt face and caused rock slides over time. It was why the world’s largest lake was getting even larger; it ate the land around it. She needed to document the cliffs from the water and hired Brian Stark, a young salvage tug captain, to pilot her along the shore. He asked her out every time they sailed, as determined as the lake breaking against the rocks, but she didn’t agree until he told her the story of the Bannockburn.

  In 1902, a young crew set out on Lake Superior in the S.S. Bannockburn with 85,000 bushels of wheat in her hold. They didn’t know the gales were coming, or maybe they did, but they didn’t know enough to be afraid. Every November the lake turned gray, the water churned and raged against the coming winter, and hurricane-force winds whipped the waves into forty-foot crests. The lake became hungry.

  The Bannockburn was downbound that day and spotted by two other ships also fighting their way through the storm. Then she vanished. A single life jacket printed with the boat’s name washed up onshore three weeks later. A few other clues surfaced, fragments here and there, but the lake didn’t give up any secrets. Countless ships had disappeared on Superior, but the Bannockburn was the only one sighted after she was lost. Tales of glimpsing the Bannockburn’s profile on the horizon of the water spread through the Great Lakes. It sailed as a ghost ship on the waves, warning other boats of impending danger before disappearing into the wind.

  Something about that had appealed to my mother, something my dad couldn’t have predicted at the time, but it got him a date and—a few years later—a marriage and baby, too. My earliest memories were on Dad’s tugboat, squealing at the empty horizon and claiming I’d seen a phantom ship as we sped into the endless blue. The Bannockburn was one of the great mysteries of Superior, and now Dad and Butch were going to chase it down.

  “Don’t worry about me.” Ignoring the discomfort in my throat, I smiled at Butch. “I’ll have Jasper for company.”

  Butch gave the dog a dirty look and grunted.

  “And I still have the bathroom to finish. I was thinking about new hardware, because I don’t like how—”

  “Maya,” Dad scanned me up and down, still searching for hidden wounds. “Someone just tried to kill you.”

  “He wasn’t trying to kill me.” And then, before I could stop it. “Trust me, I know the difference.”

  Pain glanced over Dad’s face and suddenly neither of us knew what to say. There were too many ghosts in the room, and none of them had sunk with the Bannockburn. After a minute I mumbled goodnight, slung the backpack over my shoulder, and left the kitchen, forgetting my noodles in the microwave until I found them the next mor
ning, a cold, tightly coiled lump that had lost any chance for salvage.

  Jasper followed me into the bathroom, where I splashed water on my face and avoided looking at the angry, red line bisecting my neck, instead staring glassy-eyed at the handles of the knotty pine cabinet I’d installed last year. Nickel. Maybe brushed nickel. My throat ached and my head began to pound, but it wasn’t until Jasper nudged me that I flipped the light off and crawled under my duvet.

  He curled up at my feet, facing the door and the voices that drifted down the hallway, while I booted up the computer and began outlining my incident report. Hours later, long after Butch’s truck had fired up in the driveway and Dad shuffled off to bed, after even Jasper’s vigilance had faded to huffs and doggie snores, I was still awake with the ghosts.

  3

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, after helping Dad load the pickup and promising to text every day and use the radio to hail him for emergencies, I clocked in at Congdon and went to make my rounds. I always walked the wards before my sessions; it let everyone know I was there and that today was a speech therapy day. Nobody liked surprises in a psychiatric facility.

  During my rounds, I stopped and chatted with any patients open to it. Some saw my bright maroon hair coming and hit the decks. Others seemed starved for attention and followed me from one end of their ward to the other. Today’s hot topic was the angry red bruise circling my neck. Eliza, a teenage cutter with some cleft palate issues, kept trying to touch the mark like it was a holy relic.

  “Did it hurt?” she whispered.

  “It sucked, Eliza. I don’t recommend it.”

  She just stared at my throat.

  “Are you working on your presentation for later?” Eliza was part of my advanced group being prepped for discharge. I’d assigned them all the task of speaking about their stay at Congdon, what had brought them here, and what they’d learned about themselves. There was no time requirement, no formal structure or underlying assessment, but it was probably the most important speech they’d ever have to make. If they could articulate their thoughts, find words big enough, true enough, they might find a way to own their stories.

  “I’ve thought about it. I didn’t write anything down yet like you asked us to.” She dropped her head on the s’s, forcing the words out past the slight nasal emission.

  “No problem, you’ve still got a few hours. Grab your journal and see what happens.”

  She glanced back up and met my eyes this time, hesitantly making that connection. It had taken months for her to become confident enough to do that. I acknowledged her progress with a smile and pointed to her room. “Go.”

  “I was about to say the same thing to you,” said a voice behind me.

  Swiveling, I found Dr. Mehta arching a perfectly plucked eyebrow.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Working. Am I supposed to be at a meeting?” I panicked, pulling my phone out to double-check the schedule.

  “I assumed you’d be taking some sick time, not submitting incident reports at three in the morning and preparing for your sessions the next day like nothing happened. Come on.”

  She nodded toward the exit and we headed to the opposite side of the building, where the medical ward and the administrative offices were located.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Wary of the direction we were taking, I shrugged. “Fine.”

  “I’ll be sure to note your expressiveness in my comments. Speech therapist ironically unable to communicate in more than monosyllables.”

  We both laughed and then she got serious again.

  “I’m terribly sorry about what happened.”

  “Really, I’m fine. I don’t need rest or medical attention. And hey, you said you were looking for any response, right? So that assignment should be listed with full credit in my next review.”

  “The assignment isn’t over yet.”

  “What?” I stopped walking and Dr. Mehta paused a few paces ahead of me, waiting for me to catch up, until it became obvious I wasn’t going to move. Finally, she gave in and turned around.

  “He’s still unresponsive. Every staff psychologist has attempted communication this morning and they get nothing. You’re the only person in this building he’s had any reaction to.”

  “So, I get to be his personal punching bag?”

  “In the version I heard, he was your punching bag the last time you two met.”

  “That’s not the point. I didn’t think you promoted me to the position of brawler.”

  Dr. Mehta paced back in her tirelessly calm way. “You said you didn’t need any rest. Now was that true or are you trying to overcompensate for a self-perceived but nonexistent weakness?”

  Sometimes it was irritating having a psychiatrist for a boss. I shook my head, trapped. “I’m good.”

  Dr. Mehta smiled and swept an arm toward the medical ward doors in front of us. “Let’s do a little experiment, shall we? He’s fully restrained.”

  I took a deep breath to center myself and followed Dr. Mehta into the ward and all the way down the corridor to a private, high security room with an orderly posted outside.

  Straps held Lucas to a hospital bed in the center of the room and handcuffs encased his wrists and ankles. He faced away from the door. There were no pictures in the room, no color, and no windows, just the smell of antiseptic and the sound of another patient moaning down the hallway. I drew closer to the bed where his leg was elevated in a sling. An ice pack covered most of his thigh, but the rest of his leg was exposed, revealing a network of scars.

  “Hello again, Lucas.” Dr. Mehta crossed the room to stand in his line of sight. “I’ve brought another visitor, this time an old friend of yours.”

  There was no movement from the patient, so I walked around and stood next to Dr. Mehta. From this angle I could see his face and was surprised by a fresh cut along the outside of his temple. Had he hit his head, too? Without thinking, I took a step closer. His eyes flickered up to mine and held.

  No one in the room spoke. We stared at each other, unblinking, without expression. This look was nothing like the connection Eliza made with me earlier and a moment passed in which I had the unreasonable feeling that Lucas Blackthorn knew me, that he could’ve found my neck among hundreds of exposed throats. I lifted my chin, refusing to look away. Finally, he dropped his eyes and a flush of something crossed his features.

  He opened his mouth experimentally and then spoke in a low, hoarse voice clearly unused to dialogue.

  “Does your neck hurt?”

  “Yes.” I set my jaw.

  He considered me, as if memorizing the exact shade of red on my skin before making his next effort at speech. “Sorry.”

  I nodded toward the cut on his face. “What happened to your head?”

  He didn’t answer and eventually Dr. Mehta spoke up.

  “Lucas resisted his transfer to the medical ward and unfortunately hit his head on a door.” Then she drew closer to the foot of the bed, glancing at the web of scars on his calf. There were long, paper-thin marks and fat, blunt scrapes in all stages of healing, the darker browns layered over faded patches like new saplings taking over an old growth forest. “The injuries to your legs, Lucas, remain a mystery.”

  “That’s an easy one.” I lifted the blanket up, revealing identical markings along the inside of his other leg, and met Lucas’s stare. “You’ve been climbing trees. Right?”

  He nodded almost imperceptibly, his eyes locked on mine, but when Dr. Mehta donned her glasses and moved in for a closer look, he kicked his good leg and lashed a foot at her face. The handcuffs cracked against the bed rail as she jerked back and I threw an arm in front of her, moving us both out of his range. Murmuring an apology, Dr. Mehta led me back into the corridor and shut the door.

  “Are you all right?”

  She clasped her hands under her chin and beamed. “Did you hear that? Two separate exchanges and he even initiated the first on his own. He
’s verbal and quite responsive when he chooses to be.”

  “Yeah, hurray. Did you just get kicked in the face?”

  “I’m fine.” She waved, already marching toward the ward entrance. “If he remains this lucid, we might even be able to facilitate some interviews with the Ely police.”

  My stomach clenched. “That’s great. I’m glad I could help.”

  “You understand this is your primary case now.”

  “What? No.” It came out louder than I intended and I lowered my voice, checking to see if anyone was in earshot. “You were there. You heard him. Perfect enunciation. Appropriate grammar, inflection, and word choice. He doesn’t need speech therapy. He needs behavioral therapy.”

  It was absurd to diagnose that after maybe six words, tops, but she didn’t even argue the point. “And you don’t think you have a unique vantage point to help him?”

  “I’m not a psychologist.”

  “Indeed, because you majored in speech pathology, focusing your attention on the outward projection of constructed, premeditated messages. One might wonder if you intentionally avoided the messy inner realities of psychology.”

  “Don’t shrink me right now, doc.”

  “Impossible at any time.” Her eyes still gleamed with the victory of Lucas’s breakthrough.

  “I’m not qualified for this. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll assist you at every stage.”

  “And my rotation is full. I’m busy helping Greta work on her r’s so someday she can pronounce her own name. And Big George, with his—”

  “You were also a patient here once, Maya.”

  Her simple statement, voiced intentionally low so only I could hear it, killed the rest of the excuses in my throat.

  In the four years I’d worked at Congdon, she’d never once brought up that fact. She’d treated me like any other employee, worse even—assigning me to the most aggressive patients, the foulest messes, the hardest shifts—and I’d always been grateful for that veneer of indifference. Now the reminder lay like an exposed nerve between us. We faced each other silently, boss and employee, doctor and patient. For a second, I forgot which one I was supposed to be.