The Dead Caller from Chicago by Jack Fredrickson

empty gin bottle on a heaving lake. I could see nothing, but I felt it all, the pounding rain and the spraying lake, beating in sideways, frigid and wet and clamping onto my bones as thick as dissolving wool. No one made a sound, except one or two of the young workers, who were crying. And Arnie, whistling, still lubricated from lunch.
    The small granite cliffs of Eustace Island rose up suddenly in the boat’s spotlight, not fifty feet ahead. Pine made no move to cut back the engine. He kept right on whistling, perhaps because he couldn’t see the rock for his lunch. I scuttled back out of the shelter into the full force of the rain, certain we were going to crash into the shore. By now the spotlight had swept away from the dock and onto ground that was more granite than green.
    A dock appeared in the sleet, a barely visible spindly contraption that looked to have been built of scrap lumber by mumblers with dull hatchets. One hard bump would surely splinter it into kindling. Only thirty feet separated us now.
    Yet Pine whistled on, at least for another few seconds, until at last he spun the wheel sharply to cut the boat’s trajectory. Only then did he turn the spotlight toward the dock.
    The boat barely grazed the thin posts as the lake heaved us up three feet higher than the dock. Two of the young men, no doubt veterans of earlier passages, jumped off with ropes. Faster than snake handlers, they looped the ropes around the spindly posts and pulled the pitching boat close to the dock, leaving slack for the roiling water. Jumping off would only be possible on the rise, and even then, mistiming it by even one second would mean tumbling into the lake and getting crushed between the hull and the rocks.
    The other young workers had done it before. One by one, agile as cats on a fence, they jumped perfectly off the bucking boat.
    Then there was only me, alone with the whistling, insane Arnie Pine. He’d turned his head to look at me, impatient, I supposed, for the two of us to be off. I took my hand off the scarred top rail. The boat rose. I jumped and fell more than landed on the slick dock. Strong hands seized my arms and legs before I could slide off and pulled me up. I staggered, steadying, and lunged to grab one of the spindly posts.
    Two of the workers tossed the ropes back onto the Rabbit, and Arnie gunned the boat around. I heard him whistling, above the diesels and the shriek of the wind, as he disappeared into the darkness.
    The young men started up the hill, single file, their heads bowed against the storm raging down on them. Lightning flashed, and a monstrous shape of peeling gray wood and dangling shutters appeared at the top of the hill. It was the old hotel, converted now to cheap rental rooms for young men who could find no better work.
    I shivered in the rain, waiting, for I’d seen no houses. Another bolt of lightning tore through the sky, and in its brief glare I saw a string of cottages strung loosely along the bluff to my left. All looked to be perched on rock; no trees or lawns had found foothold around them. All were as dark as the old hotel. I wondered if I was alone on the island, except for the seasonals, trudging up the hill.
    The granite was slick. I slipped and fell twice, hurrying up to the first cottage. Plywood, secured by wing nuts, covered the front windows. The house was still closed for the winter. I knocked anyway. There was no answer.
    The second cottage was not boarded up, but no one responded there, either. An elderly man answered at the third place. I started to ask if he knew a Mrs. Wilson. He slammed the door. I would have, too, if a drenched stranger had come out of such a storm to bang on my door.
    The windows of the fourth cottage were boarded over, like the first. I barely heard my fist on the door, for the rage of the water below.
    No one answered. By now, my shivers had turned to shakes. I was soaked clear through, frozen colder than anything I’d felt on the