Free Last to Know by Elizabeth Adler

inherit it.
    It was, Mal thought, smiling back at the attractive French guy and accepting that glass of champagne, a classic situation. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was just that she was acting like a jealous bitch, which truthfully, right now was exactly what she was. And what woman wouldn’t be, who’d just been dumped, alone, in Paris, for a young and now homeless fire victim who had lost her mother in the blaze and who now Mal’s lover felt compelled to take care of.
    She sipped her champagne and, leaning closer, smiled at the French guy. “Bon jour,” she said. Adding silently c’est la vie.

 
    14
     
    Back at Evening Lake, Len Doutzer was the first person Harry questioned.
    Len was the eyes and ears of the lake. Unlike young Diz, who saw only what was going on from his tree, Len missed nothing. He lived up on a hill in a fifties A-frame painted mud-green, “to blend into the background like me,” he angrily told the curious who came panting up the slope to take a look at the view and also at the man known locally as “the janitor” because he kept his small compound under meticulously “green” conditions. No insecticides, no sprays of any kind. It was said real worms actually existed under his earth, which was the reason his vegetables grew so prolifically, especially zucchini, which once it got a grip was hard even for an experienced gardener to control. Still, its yellow blossoms looked lovely in spring, and Len’s single apple tree gave a goodly crop of crabapples, which he never seemed to mind the kids pinching, though he kept his plums for himself, swathed in netting to keep the birds off.
    Should you ask any of the locals, that is, the people who lived there year-round, of which there were not that many since Evening Lake was mainly a resort area, but should you bump into them on the High Street, or in the Red Sails Bar or Tweedies Coffee Shop, or any of the small stores or takeout places, and ask about Len, all you’d get was that he’d been there forever, kept himself to himself, and that he drove an ’80s Chevy woodie, which he maintained himself. Len was the kind of guy, they said, who could turn his hand to anything. He lived alone with not even a dog for company on the long silent winter nights. No family had ever surfaced for a visit, certainly no wife or grandkids.
    A loner, he seemed to have enough to subsist on. He owned a TV, drank the occasional beer at the Red Sails, ate pancakes at Tweedies, always wore the same faded brown cords—in winter with a gnarly gray sweater, summers with a faded T-shirt—he grew his salt-and-pepper beard bushier in winter, clipped it shorter in the warmer months. He was short and lean to the point of emaciation and his face was nut-brown and lined from exposure to all weathers, his faded eyes constantly slitted against the sun. And as far as anyone knew he’d never needed a doctor or a dentist. In fact, they said Len Doutzer needed no one but himself. He asked nothing of anyone.
    Sometimes lately, he would not be seen for weeks. Somebody might notice his car was gone, or that he wasn’t picking up his usual meager groceries, eggs and bread and such-like as well as the case of Jameson that fueled his solitary life. Occasionally someone would worry and check the A-frame, peering through the dust-encrusted windows, knocking at his door, but when there was no response and they saw the car was gone, it was assumed Len was off on his travels. Wherever those might take him.
    In fact Len Doutzer was so much part of the background, those around him barely registered his presence. His life was his own. He shared it with no one.
    Len knew everything about the lake and would tell anyone curious enough to ask about its history, about its steady evolution, from its beginnings as a little-known fishing spot, where guys like Harry’s grandfather went to be buddies and camp out and get drunk on warm beer, to its transition into a place where those same men, married now,