Double Hook

The shop was called The Lure, which I always thought was a pun that thought too much of itself. I pushed through the door at nine on Thursday morning, forty-five years old, three years divorced, and ready to win a fishing tournament if it killed me.

"Registration for the Lake Rotorangi classic?" the kid behind the counter asked.

"That's me. Kate Landry."

"Lawyer Kate Landry?" said a voice I would have known anywhere, and I turned and there he was, leaning on the bait fridge like he owned it.

"Cooper Newman." I said his name the way you'd say something you stepped in. "What are you doing here? I thought your kind fished with accountants."

"I fish alone," he said. "It's why I win."

He was fifty-two, a registrar at the university, and my professional rival going back eleven years. We had lost count of the cases we'd ended up on opposite sides of. Three years ago I got divorced, and he had the bad manners to be in the same courtroom when it went through.

"You're entering," I said.

"I'm entering. And I'm going to beat you."

"You've never beaten me at anything."

"There's a first time for everything, Kate."

I signed the form. The prize was a hand-built canoe and a year's supply of tackle, which around here made you royalty. Cooper watched me sign it the way a cat watches a bird walk toward it on purpose.

"What boat are you in?" he asked.

"Renting old man Te Ao's tinny."

"Te Ao's tinny leaks."

"It leaks less than your personality."

The kid behind the counter snorted and tried to turn it into a cough. Cooper grinned. I hated that he was grinning, and I hated slightly more that the grin still worked on me after all these years. Not enough to matter, of course. Just enough to be annoying.

I wandered the aisles while he finished his registration, mostly to avoid standing next to him. That was when I saw the pattern on the endcap. A knitting pattern, printed on card, a lure-colored fisherman's sweater with a little trout worked into the chest. My friend Olga had been asking me to pick her one up for months. She collected the damn things.

"Twenty dollars for a knitting pattern," I said to the kid.

"Ridiculous, right? But tourists buy them."

"Tourists buy everything." I took one. It went in my basket with the hooks and the spare spool.

I forgot I had it. That's the part I have to be honest about, and by honest I mean the part where I admit what happened next was mostly my fault. Cooper came over to compare spinners, leaned his basket next to mine while he talked, and kept talking, because that's what he does. He talked about drag settings and water temperature and the approximate weight of his ego, and I let him, because arguing with Cooper Newman at nine in the morning is honestly one of my small pleasures.

"The eastern shallows will produce," he was saying. "Everyone fishes the drop-off. Everyone. I fish the shallows at dawn."

"Everyone who knows anything fishes the drop-off."

"Which is why the shallows are empty, Kate. Think."

"I don't need to think. I need to outfish you, which takes no thought at all."

He laughed at that, and picked up his basket, and I went to pay, and neither of us looked in the baskets, because why would we. I paid for my hooks. He paid for his lures. He walked out first, smirking at me over his shoulder as a man leaving a courtroom he'd just won would.

It was back at the cabin, unpacking, that I found the pattern missing and a moment later found his shopping list, because he'd left it in the bottom of my basket, the absolute menace, and under it, folded, was my knitting pattern.

He had taken it. He had actually taken it.

I sat on the cabin bed and laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. Because I know Cooper Newman, and Cooper Newman does not knit, and Cooper Newman does not know a purl stitch from a hole in a boat, and Cooper Newman had looked at a card with a trout on it and a list of needle sizes and concluded, with total confidence, that it was some kind of fishing strategy guide that Kate Landry wanted badly enough to buy, and he had stolen it.

He was going to read that thing for an hour. He was going to hold it up to the light. He was going to take notes.

I got my phone out and then I put it down. No. You don't spoil a gift like this. You let it play out. I finished unpacking, poured a modest glass of the wine I'd promised myself I wouldn't open before noon, and settled in to wait for the knock I knew was coming.

It came at four. Three quick raps, then a pause, then two more, like the knocker was losing his nerve.

I opened the door. Cooper stood on the step with the pattern in his hand and a face suggesting he'd been robbed and couldn't report it.

"Kate."

"Cooper."

"I believe you have something of mine."

"Do I?"

"There was a mix-up at the shop. Baskets. You have my list and I have..." He held up the card. "This."

"What is it?" I asked, sweet as syrup.

"You know what it is."

"I genuinely don't, Cooper. What did you get there?"

He looked at the card. He looked at me. His jaw worked like a bait pump. "It's a document," he said. "Regarding the tournament."

"It's a document regarding the tournament."

"Fine. It's a knitting pattern. Are you happy?"

"Immensely. You stole a knitting pattern."

"I did not steal it. There was a basket situation."

"You put your basket down next to mine and monologued at me for twenty minutes about the eastern shallows, and while I was trapped you took my property."

"I didn't know it was your property! Who buys a knitting pattern at a bait shop?"

"Olga. Olga buys knitting patterns at bait shops. She's my friend, she lives in Hamilton, she collects them, and I promised her one, and now the pattern has spent the afternoon in the possession of a man who apparently thought it contained my secret spots."

"It could have!" he said. "It had numbers on it!"

"Needle sizes, Cooper. Four millimeter needles. Does that sound like water depth to you?"

"I assumed metric depth," he said with dignity. "In feet."

"In feet," I repeated. "Metric depth. In feet."

"Can I have my list back."

"You can trade. The list for the pattern."

"Kate."

"Those are the terms. I'm a lawyer, you know how I work."

He handed over the pattern like it was radioactive and I handed over his list, and he stood on the step a moment longer, and something shifted in his face, the smirk going somewhere softer before he caught it and stuffed it back.

"You're staying at the Te Ao cabins?" he asked.

"Number six."

"I'm in four. So we're neighbors."

"Heaven help this town."

"Dinner tonight?" he said, and then, faster, before I could answer, "Not a date. Truce dinner. Tournament rules say competitors can't badmouth each other at the weigh-in and I intend to badmouth you and I need you calm."

"You need me calm so I'll be easy to beat."

"I need you calm so the badmouthing lands properly."

I thought about it. I had nowhere to be. The whole reason I'd driven three hours to a lake town was that my ex-husband was getting married tomorrow to a woman who was, and I want to stress this is public record, his former paralegal, and I had decided that outfishing Cooper Newman was a healthier way to spend the weekend than reading the wedding registry online.

"Seven o'clock," I said. "The pub. You're buying, as a forfeit for theft."

"Attempted theft of a trout sweater."

"Forfeit stands."

He went down the steps and turned around at the bottom, and I swear to you the man saluted with the knitting pattern, and I closed the door and leaned against it and caught myself grinning like an idiot, and told myself it was only because he'd made a fool of himself and I'd enjoyed it.

That was mostly the reason. Mostly.

The trouble started at seven the next morning. I came out of cabin number six with my cooler and my lucky hat and went around to old man Te Ao's tinny, which was staked down behind the cabins, and found the paddle rack empty.

Well. Not empty. Empty of my paddle. There were three other paddles hanging there like nothing had happened. Mine, the one with the tape grip and the hairline crack I knew by feel, was gone.

"You have got to be kidding me," I said, to the rack, to the lake, to the universe in general.

I marched to cabin four and knocked. It took him a while. When he opened the door he was wearing a hat with lures stuck in the band and holding a coffee, and he looked so pleased with himself that I nearly forgot my opening statement.

"Where's my paddle, Cooper?"

"Good morning to you too."

"My paddle. Green shaft, tape grip, cracked near the blade. It was on that rack last night. Now it's gone and you're standing there grinning like the cat that got the cream and the canary."

"I'm grinning because it's a beautiful morning and I'm going to destroy you on the water today. I don't have your paddle."

"Where were you at six?"

"In here. Eating breakfast. Reading the entry rules, which, incidentally, you should try sometime."

"Cooper." I stepped closer. "I watched you steal a knitting pattern with my own eyes. You have form. You are a documented thief of small rectangular items."

"A knitting pattern is not a paddle. Physically, logistically, in every way."

"You could have taken it to sabotage me. Stash it, paddle out to the middle of the lake, drop it overboard."

He put his coffee down on the rail. "Kate. Look at me. I want to beat you at fishing. I have wanted to beat you at fishing for eleven years, since the Whitford matter. I want it clean. I want you there, at full strength, with your little tape-grip paddle, and I want to cross the line first anyway. Sabotage is for men who aren't sure they'll win. I am extremely sure."

"You're also extremely annoying."

"That too. Check with Te Ao. Maybe he moved it. Maybe one of the other anglers took it by mistake, they all look alike, wooden handle, plastic blade."

I checked with Te Ao. Te Ao had not moved it. He scratched his head and said some people were careless and offered me a spare paddle that weighed about as much as a bus seat. I took it, because what else was I going to do, and I fished the morning session with it, badly, and I was still grumbling about it at the old boathouse where they did the weigh-in, when Pedro the organizer climbed onto a crate and tapped his megaphone.

"Right, listen up. We've got a situation and I'm going to make it fun instead of a problem, because that's the kind of man I am."

A few people clapped. Pedro beamed.

"Official standings from this morning's weigh-in are tied. Dead tied. Kate Landry, Cooper Newman, same combined weight to the gram. Now, the prize is one canoe and one year of tackle, and I am not buying two of anything, so here's what we're doing. This afternoon, tiebreaker heat. Two-person canoe race, marked course, big lake, first around the buoy and back."

Someone near me groaned. I felt it in my soul.

"But here's the fun part," Pedro went on. "You don't pick your partner. I pick your partner. And I've drawn the two leaders together, because that's what the hat said and I'm not arguing with a hat. Kate Landry and Cooper Newman. One canoe. Whichever of you crosses first takes the prize, and your partner eats the loss. Any questions?"

"Yes," I called out. "Can I withdraw?"

"You can, and you forfeit."

"That's not a question, that's entrapment."

Cooper was already standing next to me, because of course he was, and he was wearing the grin again. "Well," he said. "Looks like it's you and me in a boat."

"One canoe. Two competitors. That's the worst rule ever written."

"It's beautifully written. Whoever wins takes the whole prize and the loser rows them to victory. Do you know what that means?"

"It means one of us is doing all the work for the other one's trophy."

"It means," he said, "we're going to have to trust each other. Just a little."

I looked at him. He looked at me. Neither of us trusted the other as far as we could spit, which is exactly why Pedro had drawn those names out of a hat, I'd have bet the farm on it.

The canoe was one of the club's old fiberglass doubles, a beast, wide as a barge. We got it down the ramp at half two, and the whole town seemed to have turned out on the shore to watch, which meant Olga was there, and Olga was filming the start on her phone for the group chat, and I made very sure to smile for the camera like someone who was not planning a