Every summer night between midnight and 1 AM the chorus began like clockwork. In the bullrushes at the east end of the lake, they lived, they waited, then they sang. For hours it went on. The deep baritone bellowing. Ah-oom, ah-oom, ah-oom, gulp. So loud it could be heard clear across the lake. Ah-oom, ah-oom, ah-oom. One would lead, then a second would join in, then all of them, in perfect synchronicity. It would continue until the wee hours of the night, then it would end, not gradually, not drifting off. Abruptly. As if a conductor brought his arms to a crescendo, then dropped them to a sudden stop. Fingers pointing, arms frozen, the orchestra goes silent. And not another sound, until the next night.
Hidden deep in the hills of Huron County is a small lake with three names, most recently, Paradise Lake. Surrounded by a dozen cottages, acres and acres of deep woods, countless swamps, streams and ponds; Paradise Lake is an oasis, a world unto itself.
Lying between the farmland of Southern Ontario and the massive Great Lake Huron, Paradise is about a half mile long and so narrow that a sharply struck three-wood could cross it; as could a half competent swimmer. The lake separates the bare, hilly lands of the south, which butt up against farm country, from the dense forest of the north which entwines itself right up to the shoreline.
Every time a new group of people settled at the lake it got a new name. The three names; Fairy Lake, from the original settlers to Huron County; Purvis Lake, from the first family to build a home on the shore over one hundred years ago; and Paradise Lake, from the people that purchased the lake and surrounding property from the Purvis’ and still occupy the land today; add to its mystique.
The vast surrounding wilderness is a playground for children and young teens testing the limits of their newfound freedom; the freedom that comes with leaving the nest for the first time.
Kairo Williams and Jasper Davis were two of those young teens. In the early 1980s they were both new teenagers and they both had a summer home on the lake. Kairo on the south side where the trees are somewhat sparse – his home backs onto an abandoned railway line. Jasper on the north where the dense forest presses relentlessly against the shore and continues northward for a mile or more until it hits the first road.
Local legend has it that decades ago, Paradise Lake, or Purvis as it would have been known at the time, was the scene of a mysterious death. A mystery that to this day has not been fully solved. Purvis Lake swallowed a man one night, and has never released the evidence. The cause of death has never been confirmed. For 31 years it had been assumed to be suicide, then in 1982 a discovery was made that pointed the finger of the law at murder.
Somewhere at the bottom of the lake, the legend goes, deep in the muck, lurks the man’s skeleton, the flesh long ago picked from the bones by fish and turtles. Perhaps there is a chain linking his leg to a cinder block. His body has never been seen, but it must be there.
The lake is known, at its deepest point, to be sixty feet of murky, dark water. The bottom completely covered in thick seaweed and soft, water infused mud. Northern pike, smallmouth bass and countless sunfish swim amok in the small lake, a fisherman’s paradise. A body dumped into this abyss would surely sink deep to the bottom where it would forever be entombed in muck and seaweed.
Late one night in the summer of 1951, Charles Goodman, a businessman who lived in the nearby town of Lucknow – a mile to the west, left his house for the last time. He was never seen again; not dead or alive. For more than 30 years there has been no trace of him, not a shred of evidence, not a footprint, not a note, not a rumour, not a whisper. He had very few friends, he wasn’t well liked, he had no known relatives. Somehow, that night, he ended up in a boat in the middle of the lake, the boat tipped over and he sunk to the bottom, where he was discreetly wiped from the face of the Earth. Erased from time. Whether he couldn’t swim or if his leg was attached to a concrete block, no one knows. No trace was found. None, at least, until the summer of 1982.
Mr. Goodman ran a successful furniture business in town and was infamous for being a miser and a penny pincher. The legend says if you really wanted to find his body in the lake, simply row out to the middle and hold a dollar bill overboard. Eventually, he would reach up and grab it.
But who would go so far as to kill Mr. Goodman? Why would he agree to a midnight boat ride? And how did the murderer do this without leaving a trace? It seems the killer accomplished the perfect murder, if there was a killer at all. At least it seemed so until early one morning in the summer of 1982 when it was discovered that the murderer made one critical mistake. One clue was left behind. It lay in the weeds, unseen for three decades, and it still lies there, today.
Or maybe it wasn’t a mistake. Maybe, the murderer wanted it to look like a suicide.
Every morning in the summer of 1982, Kairo and Jasper would wake up with the sun, bound out of bed and one of them would make the half-hour hike partway around the lake to the cottage of the other.
On a memorable day one of those mornings, Kairo made his way to Jasper’s deep in the forest on the north side of the lake. Jasper’s cottage was the oldest building on the lake, a small wooden cabin with three tiny bedrooms and one bathroom barely big enough to turn around in. The main room of the cabin was the central living room with plenty of seating around the perimeter, broad windows, allowing plenty of light in, and a large cast iron stove capable of heating the entire cabin on the coldest winter day despite no insulation and paper-thin walls.
With his parents still waking up and taking their first sips of coffee, Jasper threw on his clothes and burst through the door to meet Kairo on the west side of the cabin.
A waft of fresh coffee followed Jasper out the door arousing Kairo’s senses. “Hey,” said Jasper.
“Hey.”
“The bullfrogs were real loud last night. Wanna go hunt some?” asked Jasper.
The east end of the lake, starting just a hundred yards or so from Jasper’s cottage, was a frog haven with lily-pads everywhere and bullrushes following the perimeter of the lake. There must have been thousands of bullfrogs living there. Every night in the summer, these frogs would sing a chorus to their creator. All night long the deep bass song bellowed from these amphibians that could fit perfectly on a human palm.
You couldn’t walk through the bullrushes without getting two soakers, and you couldn’t take your shoes off for fear of a snake bite, so they didn’t even try to keep their shoes dry. Away they went searching for frogs, occasionally catching one, staring into its glassy eyes, pulling its legs to their full length and then returning it to the water.
On this morning the boys wandered further than they ever had before, clear around the bend halfway to the other side of the lake. At times they sank past their ankles, the lake bed was so soft it could barely support their weight. Suddenly Jasper, unwittingly, stepped onto a spot that held his weight, which surprised him – after countless steps sinking into the muck it was a relief to be supported. From his new vantage point, he now appeared to be six inches taller than Kairo, to which Kairo noticed and joined him. It was a good place to kick the muck off their shoes.
“What are we standing on?” inquired Kairo. Whatever it was, the bullrushes grew out of it and the water lapped over it, a few inches deep.
“It sounds hollow, like it’s wooden or something.” Their sudden curiousity led them to investigate further. They walked the perimeter of what now appeared to be a small platform of some sort. Bending down, and pulling back the vegetation, Kairo noticed it was made of several long boards fastened together.
“Over here,” said Jasper, “the end is pointed like the front of a boat.”
“Cool,” said Kairo, “I think it is a boat. The floor of a boat.”
The boys had quickly identified exactly what it was they were standing on. The sides and bottom of the boat had long ago disintegrated and all that remained was the solid wooden floor which had been sitting in, and preserved by, the shallow water for three decades.
Jasper and Kairo spent a few minutes on the floor, then lost interest and went back to searching for frogs. It wasn’t until hours later when Jasper mentioned their discovery to his parents over dinner that Jennifer Davis, Jasper’s mother, clued in to the potential of their find. Jennifer, having been a regular visitor and then owner of the cottage for many years, linked the boat floor to the mysterious disappearance of the businessman from Lucknow in the 1950s.
The next day Jennifer called the OPP and a few days after that the police came out to visit the location. They trudged in their waders back to the site and took a few photos, poked around, and left. If they thought anything of it, they never said. They went on their way without saying much. Days later they made an announcement in the papers.
Up until this time, Charles Goodman had been considered a missing person, presumed to have committed suicide, but now, 31 years after his mysterious disappearance he was officially declared a victim of foul play, or murder.
The locals knew he was in the lake all along. They didn’t need to see the boat remnants. Goodman was an avid fisherman and visited the lake regularly. When he went missing without a trace, there was no other logical explanation. He never went anywhere except to his home, to his work, or fishing in Purvis Lake. The only plausible story was that he drowned in the lake while fishing alone. Nobody saw it happen, nobody heard a thing, the lake was uninhabited in the 50s except by the Purvis’, he must have staged his own death, purposely covering his tracks. His death was a reflection of his life – secret, solitary, silent.
Needless to say, he wasn’t missed. The police did their standard investigation, but when they found no evidence, they declared it a missing person, probable suicide. There wasn’t a relative or a friend to press the police to do more. The explanation provided, albeit incomplete, was accepted. Charles Goodman had taken his own life, and left not a footprint behind.
It wasn’t until Jasper and Kairo found the boat floor that anyone seriously considered the word murder, because after he disappeared in ‘51, Goodman’s boat was found in his driveway on its trailer, attached to his truck. Therefore, the boat found by the boys, must have belonged to someone else. The condition of the wooden floor was consistent with the expected condition of wood that had been under water for 30 years.
Still, the possibility remained that Goodman stole a boat, borrowed a boat or owned a second boat that he left at the lake for fishing. But no boat was reported stolen in 1951, if he borrowed a boat, someone would have reported this after his disappearance. And how did he get to the lake, a mile from his home, in the middle of the night? Why would he walk and leave his truck in the driveway?
Or, more plausibly, was he driven there by the murderer?
The case of Charles Goodman had been considered closed until the summer of 1982. But now, thanks to Kairo and Jasper’s find, murder had to be seriously considered.
The police began conducting interviews of everyone that knew Mr. Goodman. Most of them were in their seventies or eighties now. Some of the people they would have liked to have spoken to had already passed on.
From the interviews, the police learned that Mr. Goodman was in debt for large sums of money. Enough money to seriously damage a business relationship. This was the only motive they could find, so they followed this lead and located the four people left alive that he was in debt to. All four of them were eventually cleared for reasons the police never disclosed.
However, there was a fifth creditor that had passed on. His name was Douglas Chamberlain, he was also a businessman from Lucknow in the 40s and 50s and Mr. Goodman owed him almost a million dollars at the time of his disappearance. It was also significant that Mr. Chamberlain was an avid fisherman who owned multiple small boats. Many of his boats matched the remains of the boat found by the boys. It appeared, though it was never stated, that Mr. Chamberlain had been a suspect all along.
Eventually it was determined, through analysis of the scant evidence, that Douglas Chamberlain was the suspected killer of Charles Goodman, however, with Mr. Chamberlain being dead, the investigation was dropped.
The next day the newspapers declared, ‘Cold Case Murder Solved After 31 Years.’ The town of Lucknow and all of Huron County, although shaken by the thought of a murder in their midst, moved on quickly. After all, it was 31 years ago.
Jasper and Kairo went about their summer intrigued by the excitement, and also proud of their role in the conclusion.
“You know what I want to do one day when we get older?” asked Jasper to Kairo late one night as they lay on the dock staring up at the stars, listening to the crickets chirping.
“What?” said Kairo.
“I want to take SCUBA diving lessons.”
“OK.”
“And then I want to go down and search for that man’s body at the bottom of the lake.”
With that, Kairo and Jasper went silent.
But the crickets didn’t, they kept on chirping until…
Gulp. Ah-oom. Ah-oom. Ah-oom.
The chorus began again. At the east end of the lake, in the bullrushes, where the bullfrogs lived.
Almost as if they were singing to the ghosts of the lake.
BT
