The Trouble Up North

by Travis Mulhauser

Genres: Suspense; Family Life

Synopsis

An atmospheric, haunting novel about a family of bootleggers, their troubled history, and the land that binds them.

The Sawbrooks have lived on prime real estate on the lakes of Michigan since before there was prime real estate. A family of smugglers and bootleggers, every man, woman, and child in each generation has been taught to navigate the nooks and crannies of the rivers and highways that flow in and out of Canada. The hidden routes are the family's legacy.

But today, the Sawbrooks are deeply fractured, and the money that's sustained the family is running out. Edward, the Sawbrook patriarch, is dying from cancer, and his wife, Rhoda, is bitterly disappointed in her three adult children. The eldest daughter, Lucy, is now a park ranger, working to federally protect the land against her mother’s will; the middle son, Buckner, hasn’t been the same since he came back from the army suffering from alcoholism; and the youngest daughter, Jewell, is wasting her potential as a card player and bartender.

When Jewell is asked to commit a crime for a major insurance payout, she agrees, eager for the cash, but too late, she realizes that that the boat she torched wasn't empty...

Together, the Sawbrooks will have to contend with the old, familial ways and the new, shifting world, and face each other—and their pain-filled past—to smuggle one more thing through and out of their land to safety.

Release date: March 11, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

Northern Michigan.

Sometime in the middle aughts.

The morning of the fire I was sitting on the porch with my husband, Edward. The sky was just beginning to blue above the trees, and the air was cool and snapped with pine. It was the sort of moment I did not want to ruin with business, but to talk about anything else would have been a lie.

“Jewell is going to set Van Hargraves’s boat on fire,” I said. “Tonight.”

Edward looked off the porch. There was still mist above the grass in the field, and through the mist was the bend of our dirt road and the vervain along the shoulder. I waited a beat, but he did not respond.

“Van pitched her on it. It’s an insurance play. I don’t think she was going to tell me, but I found her in the shed last night, wrapping rags around the end of a broom handle for a torch.”

“Good Lord,” he said.

“I know.”

“She better get paid up front.”

“He gave her a thousand down. Nine more when the deed is done.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we need the money.” I paused. “And that I couldn’t talk her out of it if I tried.”

“All you Sawbrooks,” he said. “You start out assuming nobody will ever change their mind and avoid all sorts of hassle.”

“I do see that as an advantage of our hereditary stubbornness,” I noted. “But in this instance, I also know that I’m right.”

“You’ve never been wrong in your life,” he said, and smiled.

It was a joke, and I was glad for it. He had color in his cheeks and seemed contented. He was having a good morning, which is a relative term.

Some days he can walk to the porch and other days he needs the chair. Some days he needs the oxygen with the chair, and some days he doesn’t need either. That morning he was in the wheelchair, without the tank, and I was sitting beside him. We both had coffee. He sipped from his and then went on.

“Is she working with Van outside of this?”

“He’s a drunk and she’s tending bar, so in that way there is a professional relationship, I guess.”

“No more games, though?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe Van is allowed to host social functions anymore. I heard Franklin put his foot down on that front.”

My daughter plays poker and plays it fairly well. Van used to run games in his garage, and he’d give Jewell a seat at the table for a small cut of her winnings. Those games were for his buddies from Harbor North, the resort where wealthy Detroiters and Chicagoans spent their summers blocking everybody else’s view of Lake Michigan with their beachfront homes and condos.

Van is a resorter himself, but he lives in the newer construction along the Crow River. Harbor North wasn’t happy with just the coastline, of course. They had to move inland, too, and connected their two sprawling locations with a brand-new bike path.

The path is plenty pretty. Even I can admit that. There is a tall canopy of shade trees and tasteful cuts in the foliage where you can catch a gentle bend of river, but none of that changes the fact that it shouldn’t be there in the first place.

“I’m not sure this boat thing is the best idea,” said Edward. “Matter of fact, I’m sure it’s a terrible idea, but I am glad you told me.”

“Of course.”

I said it matter of fact, but I’d debated the matter plenty. The last thing Edward needed was something else to worry over, but it was also a boat fire on the Crow River. If Jewell did it right, and she would, he’d see it from the very porch where we were sitting.

“I’m going to walk the bike path this morning,” I said. “Make sure there’s no sight lines we don’t know about.”

“Shit,” he said. “You really must be worried.”

I avoid that path like poison, on principle and because there is not a more insufferable population on this earth than cyclists. I wish I could say it’s all tourists, but there’s plenty of locals zipping around that thing, too—all of them in their too-tight shorts and space helmets. They do group rides and then drink beer after, standing at the bar in their Lycra suits with their privates all bundled up like cinnamon buns and we’re all supposed to just sit there and take it.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Is she going up the resort side?”

“No, no. She’s going up the east bank. I just want to make sure there’s no gaps in the trees from the other side.”

“She’s going to wait until dark, isn’t she?”

I told him she was.

“She’ll be fine, then,” he said. “You’re just being one of those helicopter parents.”

“I’m sixty years old,” I said. “And she’s a full-grown woman.”

He wagged his finger in my direction. “That’s what makes it funny.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re getting a kick out of it.”

“I get my kicks where I can,” he said. “It’s my one defining truth.”

I worked my rocking chair slow. I could hear the floorboards sighing and there was birdsong in the trees.

Edward used to ride his chair like a mechanical bull and it drove me crazy. Now he sat silent and hunched slightly forward, and the quiet he left was so much worse.

“You look good today,” I said.

It was a note to myself, more than anything. I was trying to stay positive.

“I’m dying of lung cancer,” he said. “I’m shriveled up to nothing and look like a goddamn Muppet.”

“You do not look like a Muppet.”

“I’m one of those old-men Muppets. Up in the balcony.”

“You look great and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

“You look great,” he said. “Better than the day we married.”

“Now who’s lying?”

“I’m dead serious. But I’m also going blind, so that may be a factor.”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

He took a gummy from his shirt pocket and popped it in his mouth. I try not to count, but it was the second one I’d seen him take that morning, which meant he was likely on number four.

“What about Luce?” he asked.

Lucy is our oldest, and the park ranger at Crooked Tree. It’s a small park, but it sits across the river from the resort on the north end.

“What about her?”

“Does she know about all this?”

“Hell no,” I said. “Absolutely not.”

“Is she working tonight?”

I told him she wasn’t. “She’s downtown tonight, with her fancy friends.”

Edward tilted his head, which is something he does when he’s seriously considering—like his thoughts are too heavy to hold up straight. Like his spine may give out from the sheer weight of his deliberations.

“She’ll figure it out,” he said. “She’s too smart.”

“Well, I can’t worry about what Lucy knows and what she doesn’t. Not anymore.”

“You worry about her constantly. I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with that.”

“I worry about her some, but it’s not in the way I used to. I used to worry like a mother does, now I worry what she’s going to do to hurt us next.”

Edward doesn’t like when I talk about Lucy as an enemy, but I don’t have time to pretend or pretty things up. The fact is, she sold us out.

I carved up three chunks of our land to give to the kids eighteen months earlier, strictly for tax purposes, and before the ink was dry on Lucy’s deal, she had it moved into a trust with her conservation group. They gave her cash for the land and signed some papers that she claims protect that acreage from development or bank seizure.

I don’t believe that for a second, and even if I did, it wouldn’t change the fact that the first thing Lucy’s group did was put in a “nature trail” along the river where we used to have pines. It’s not as bad as the bike path, but that doesn’t make it good. Now anybody in the world can park their car and stroll through what used to be our forest just as pretty as they please, and we get about half a dozen strays a week—all because Lucy went off to college, got some big ideas, and sold our land to the hippies. She might as well have shot me through the heart with a deer rifle.

She is not welcome on our property any longer, though I know for a fact that Edward sneaks her over to watch Tigers games.

Lucy is a bitter disappointment to me, but she is not alone. Buckner, our boy, is also banned from the property, though unlike Lucy, he does not sneak over to check on his daddy. Buckner is too selfish to do anything but think about Buckner because Buckner is a drunk.

He claims to be sober now, but I know how that ends. My sister was cursed with the same affliction, and I spent years trying and failing to help her. Wanda was my older sister and she put a pistol barrel in her mouth when she was twenty-two years old and pulled the trigger. I’ll never forget the sound of that shot and how it rose from the pines and broke the stillness on a quiet morning. I’ll never forget how the moment I heard it, I knew exactly what it meant.

I’ve tried to warn Lucy and Jewell both to be careful with their hearts, but Buckner’s got them thinking he’s some sort of triumph of the human spirit because he’s managed to not get drunk for a little while.

Matter of fact, I heard Lucy was having a celebration for him in town. They were going to sit around and sing his praises and I wasn’t invited because I am not considered part of Buckner’s support group. That’s a funny one, being that I raised the boy, but Lucy has read all the books and she knows best.

“Can I say one more thing?” said Edward.

“Could I stop you if I tried?”

“I don’t want you anywhere near that fire.”

“I won’t be.”

“I mean, at all.”

“All I’m doing is helping her get rigged up and making sure the plan is solid.”

“Aiding and abetting.” He sighed.

“It’s the least I can do.”

He settled back into his chair. Took one of his thin, raspy breaths. He was worried about Jewell, but there was something else eating at him, too. Something besides the cancer.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I mean, everything is wrong, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Say it, then.”

“I was just sitting here thinking about rich people, I guess. How nothing ever touches them. They set their own boats on fire and it only makes them richer.”

Van Hargraves was rich—there was no doubting that. He lived in a big, sprawling three-story on the outer edge of the resort and liked to call himself a summer resident. It’s a contradiction in terms, if you ask me. I’ve never believed a person can have more than one home.

They try to, of course. They have second homes and third ones too and that’s a big part of what’s wrong with this world—the idea that more than one place can belong to a person without that person having to belong to any one place in return.

People say we cling to our land, but I like to think it grabs onto us a little bit, too. I like to think we protect each other.

The Crow is sourced out of Long Lake and runs southeast into town where it empties into Lake Michigan, and that was where the resort built first.

They cleared out the cement plant and put up summer mansions and condos and then added a golf course and a marina and erected tall black gates around all of it.

People said the economy was shifting. They said there was nothing to be done and that it was out of our hands, and then they all stood there on the beach and cheered when the wrecking ball swung and took half the jobs in Cutler County with it.

I’ll admit the plant was an eyesore out there on the bay, but it was the last thing in this county that made something and sold something other than itself and I miss its long shadows on the water. I miss its air of defiance.

The casinos followed shortly, and after the casinos came the resort’s expansion to the river in the form of a second golf course and a ski lodge. Then the tagalong condos and the sort of retail that nobody who actually lives here can afford.

They bought out the entire western bank, and most people sold fast and moved gladly. I don’t blame them. It was more money than they’d ever seen, so of course they lunged at the bait and took it.

Or maybe it wasn’t bait at all. Maybe it was exactly what they wanted, and they are living happier lives now in the suburbs and cities and far-flung towns where I occasionally hear reports of their lives through Edward and his Facebook account. Just the other day he told me the Hendersons, who lived on the river for thirty years, are in Tempe, Arizona, in the middle of a goddamn desert. I can’t imagine.

The resort started building, and anybody who didn’t sell was dug out with rising property tax. Meanwhile, they buried the eastern bank in so much sediment that some of those lots actually devalued. Connie Becker, Jewell’s best friend, was trapped down there with her mother and three baby girls because their piece of the Crow had turned into swamp.

There was some good that came with it, I guess. Money for builders and tradesmen. The county coffers got stocked and they actually did some good with it, too. I couldn’t believe it, but they fixed a few roads and maybe I could have learned to live with it all if they hadn’t trained their sights on us directly. But they did. Of course they did.

My family has been on this river for close to two centuries and holds over five thousand acres of land. We’re the one thing standing between the resort, a new exit off Highway 31, and miles of uninterrupted development.

The property taxes hurt, but when Edward got sick, things went sideways in a hurry, and to pay for treatments I had to take a bank loan he begged me not to get. He said he was ready to go.

“You’re going to lose the land and I’m going to die anyway,” he said.

“You’re going to live,” I said. “And we’re not going anywhere.”

I know there’s times that Edward resents me for keeping him alive, but it’s not half as much as I would have resented him for dying.



Jewell met Van a few summers earlier, when she became a sort of celebrity guest at his well-heeled poker games. Van didn’t play himself. He said cards got in the way of his drinking, but he loved the chatter and the action, and every Tuesday night in the summer he’d have as many as three tables humming in his garage. Jewell heard about the games at the casino, showed up uninvited, and cleared twenty-five hundred in her first sit.

She figured that would be the end of it. You didn’t get let back into games you gutted, but with Van it was just the opposite. He said he wanted 5 percent of whatever she cleared and that he’d stake her buy-in anytime she wanted.

She thought it was going to be some sort of hustle, and short-lived once word spread, but there were no secrets or setups in Van’s garage.

If anything, her reputation brought more fish to the table. These were men who were more than willing to lose money if it meant they got to sit with a player of her caliber and take some stories back to their golf buddies.

The stories were provided by Jewell herself. She supposed it was a shtick, for lack of a better word, but she picked it up from the poker room at the casino and the fact was, it worked. Resorters loved local flavor and mystique so much they’d let themselves be charmed right off the table and barely feel bitter about it.

Mostly, she told family yarns. The Sawbrooks had bootlegged through Prohibition and those stories were always a hit, particularly once she name-dropped Al Capone, who may or may not have stayed some nights on the Sawbrook property when things got too hot in Chicago. Then she’d hit them with Kern, the long-ago great-uncle who’d fought for the Union and received the high honor of serving as Abraham Lincoln’s body man after the war.

The interesting part was that Kern had been discharged shortly before Lincoln’s death. He’d had a dream foretelling the assassination and began to unnerve the president and his staff by suggesting Lincoln go underground to live out his second term in a bunker.

“Kern knew that hit was coming,” she’d say, then lean in to rake a pile of chips in her direction. “They had an article about it in the Detroit Free Press. Google that shit. The media got all caught up in the dream and the supernatural element of it, but Kern’s basic point was this—have you met these Confederate assholes? Of course they’re going to try and kill the president.”

She’d wear a Detroit Tigers hat low over her eyes, her dark hair in braids or falling free over her shoulders. A tank top, blue jeans, and high-top Chucks. Pretty, but distinctly proletariat.

Van went so far as to claim that Jewell was personally responsible for the area’s new, emerging tourist market—mushroom hunters. These were people who would spend entire weeks scouring the woods for a skillet full of wild mushrooms, and they came from as far away as New York and California and Texas and Italy and Spain. Van said he and Franklin had actually met a couple who’d come all the way from Moscow.

“Not Moscow, Idaho,” he’d said. “We mailed them a Christmas card and addressed it, literally, to Russia.”

One night Jewell had been talking about the chanterelle toast her grandmother used to make and apparently there was some food writer from New York at the table. He went out and found some for himself, did a write-up in one of the fancy magazines, and six months later the woods were filled with foraging tourists in floppy hats.

Van’s games were a gravy train and she would have ridden it forever, but his husband forbade them after one of Van’s stints in rehab and he never got them back off the ground.

He never stopped drinking, either. Jewell knew because she bartended at the Sailor’s Knot and that was where Van spent most of his evenings. In addition to a few of his days.

The Knot was a burger-and-beer joint on the waterfront. It sat between the public beach and the gated edge of the resort and was the one place in town where the two populations regularly mixed—tasty burgers and a good beer list being generally unifying factors.

The night he pitched her on the boat scheme, Van was hunched in his usual spot beside the chalkboard where the daily specials were announced in vibrant pastels. She had a full bar and patio, but he kept pestering her to step outside.

“Step outside for what?”

“It’s about business.”

“A game?”

“Not that kind of business. This is far more lucrative.”

She nodded to the door.

“Give me five minutes,” she said. “But whatever it is, I’m probably not interested.”

Jewell was interested, though. Not in whatever business Van was hinting at, but in the prospect that she might get him to host a game in exchange. She’d just returned from Vegas where she’d gone belly-up in the Under 30 Elite and she was desperate to get her bankroll right.

The U30 was a hold ’em event with five million in prizes on a twenty-thousand-dollar stake, but it was also a stepping-stone. The tournament was only open to younger players, and past winners had ridden victories straight onto magazine covers and sponsorships. She’d gone to the desert convinced she was going to solve the family’s financial issues in one fell swoop but didn’t make it out of the first round. She barely lasted two hour. . .