Dead Creek

by Victoria Houston

  “As I understand it, John,” continued Osborne, “over a period of years, some industrial chemicals dumped into the water up here have broken down into alkyl phenols, which are now known to have a direct effect on reproductive hormones and reproductive function. Dr. Shanley and his colleagues are particularly concerned with the chemicals leaching from our watershed. They have kept the study pretty quiet so as not to alarm anyone until they know the scope of the problem.”

  “I do hope I’m wrong,” said Ray. “Can you imagine what will happen to my guiding if walleye guys think eating fish will stunt their sex lives?”

  “Well, y’know … all this reminds me of the DDT scare at Dead Creek back in the fifties,” said Sloan, “but I thought they cleaned that up years ago.”

  “Dead Creek is on my list,” said Ray. “I haven’t been in yet this spring. Shanley sampled up there last summer and found evidence of the stuff in the water, diluted but present. Remember the paper mill north of Dead Creek that closed down years ago? Well, they made food wrappings and used a process that generates exactly these alcohols—”

  “Alkyl phenols,” corrected Osborne. “You need to put

  John in touch with Rick Shanley, Ray. He can explain it much better than we can.”

  Sloan’s expression relaxed. Osborne’s suggestion put him back in charge.

  “Fine with me,” said Ray. “I’m really not supposed to be talking about this, anyway.”

  “So they got other people up here with hormones like this guy?” Sloan, not quite ready to drop the subject, pointed to the fourth body.

  “Not that I know of, John. And I don’t even know if this guy has a problem. It just looks kinda different to me, and my job is to flag anything unusual. All I know for sure is Shanley’s team has found very high estrogen levels in hawks and eagles and mink that appear to be male. The reverse, too. Females to the naked eye that register a high testosterone level. They all have one thing in common: they eat fish.”

  “Jeez, Ray, I’m a fish-eater,” said Roger in a snide tone, rolling a toothpick in his teeth as he spoke, “does this mean I have to worry about menopause?”

  “Well, Rog, I don’t know,” said Ray. “You tell me. If you eat as much fish as an eagle does—maybe.”

  The expression on the deputy’s face changed. Osborne could see him mentally calculating his Friday night fish fries and Wednesday perch lunches. He didn’t look happy.

  Ray turned to Sloan. “All kidding aside, this is serious. I should phone Shanley about this tonight.”

  “You hold your horses,” said Sloan. “I want to know exactly what I got here. Right now what I’m thinking is that this victim could be someone who lives around Dead Creek. If so, that’s my district, and I need to contact the family first. Then we worry about the other.”

  “No one lives around Dead Creek,” said Ray. “You know that. No one.”

  “They used to,” said Osborne softly. “I remember folks were living up there back around the time I opened my practice. This could be someone who lived in that area years back … grew up there.” As he reached to gather up his soiled instruments, Osborne noticed his hands were shaking.

  “Hell—let the state boys figure it out,” said Sloan. “Let Lew handle this. She’s due back tomorrow late. Let’s just wrap up and get out of here.” The former police chief was a man who liked things in straight lines, and he was more than ready to hand this convoluted mess over to someone else.

  “You look a little stunned, Doc,” said Ray as the two deputies moved away to follow Sloan’s orders. Osborne, still on his knees, had leaned back against a boat seat, his arms limp, his gloved hands still holding his instruments.

  “I’m just … I’m racking my brain. That body is male all right, but every characteristic of the skull is female. Now, if your theory holds, Ray, and this individual has a high female hormone level … and if there’s a good chance this is a person from around here, which is likely because I know I did the gold work, then you better get the news to Shanley as soon as possible. A health hazard like this puts all of us at risk.”

  “Doc, how can you be so sure you did the dental work on this corpse?” asked Sloan. “I mean, how do you tell one inlay from another for God’s sake?”

  “Gold is a very soft metal,” said Osborne. “You rarely see it anymore because insurance companies refuse to pay for it. But it takes the natural contours of teeth so easily, it responds so well to your sculpting of it that in old days you measured the worth of a dentist by his skill in working with gold. You leave your mark in gold as distinctively as a fingerprint. My gold work is—well, I know my work.”

  What he chose not to tell Sloan was how he had prided himself on inlays whose edges could slip so smoothly into the soft slopes of healthy enamel that not even the most sensitive tongue could tell where the tooth ended and the gold began. He always regretted the escalating cost that eventually rendered gold inlays obsolete because the human mouth that carried gold looked better and the inlays lasted a lifetime. When they were given a chance, that is.

  five

  The last point of all the inward gifts that doth belong to an angler is memory….

  The Art of Angling (1577)

  “If they had to cut the ice to drop that crate in … let’s see if we can figure out just when….” Ray’s voice was low as if not to crowd the long, narrow room.

  Sloan and Osborne moved forward to examine the photo he had pulled out of the developer. Sure enough, the picture showed the crate sitting in a pocket, an outline so crisply delineated in the thinning layer of subsurface ice that it had to have been man-made. Light and shadow captured on paper what the floodlights had flattened and disguised in the water.

  “When the boys were winching it up, I noticed it sat deeper than the ice pack by a good six inches … so I’d bet they dropped it in there after the spring thaws had started, like within the last four weeks or so,” said Ray.

  “They didn’t have to cut through more than two feet of ice before they could slip that baby right in, then figure it would stay anchored forever. Unless you really know your way around here, you’d never expect anybody to go fishing back in there, y’know? Looks too shallow. Takes somebody like me or the Doc who’ve walked it to risk it.”

  Sloan nodded. Sounded right to him. “I wonder where they got the tools.”

  “C’mon. Anybody who ice fishes can do that!” snorted Ray. “All you need is a chain saw or one of those old-fashioned ice saws. ‘Course then we’re probably talking locals.”

  “Something else here,” said Osborne, who had been studying the photos Ray had pulled out earlier, the head shots of the bodies. “Notice how three of the men have light beard growth, but one doesn’t….”

  “Which one is that?” Sloan crowded up behind Osborne.

  “Guess.”

  “Ah,” said Sloan, “I should’ve known, huh?”

  “John, if I were you, I’d have the lab X-ray the pelvis of that body, too,” said Osborne. “A female pelvis is distinctly different from a male’s.”

  “Quiz time,” chimed in Ray. “What else distinguishes our fair male?”

  Sloan and Osborne looked over all the photos hanging from the racks over their head. Osborne couldn’t see anything unusual.

  “Doc, you disappoint me,” said Ray. “Think coarse and curly.”

  Osborne saw it immediately, surprised he had missed it earlier: the photos of all the victims showed varying amounts of coarse body hair, visible on the arms in two cases, at the neck on another, on all with the exception of one.

  “Ah,” he said, “John, the Wausau boys can do a much better job once the bodies are properly laid out, so be sure to ask them to check for axillary hair on the chest, back, abdomen, and thighs. Right, Ray? Hair growth is definitely hormone-related.”

  “I think the lack of a five o’clock shadow is pretty darn significant,” said Ray. “Oops! There’s my timer.”

  Ray handed a wet photo over to Sloan and rushed fro
m the small bathroom with its converted shower and tub stall back to the kitchen. A large black iron frying pan held two cut-up chickens slowly braising in a full cup of butter over a low gas flame. He lifted the lid and gently turned the pieces, nestling each one gently down between the others, taking great care not to dislodge any of the crispy batter—the same care he had taken when moving his strips of film from tank to tank.

  “My grandfather’s recipe. You won’t believe how exceptional this is,” he volunteered to Roger, who stood over in a corner of the living room, a cold beer in his hand, as he examined Ray’s antique jukebox packed with old forty-fives. Ray poked at a drumstick with a fork. “I’ll give it about ten more minutes.” Then he checked the onion-fried potatoes warming in the oven and nodded approvingly at the tossed salad sitting in a large bowl on the kitchen table.

  “Like that salad okay?” asked Roger, pride obvious in his voice. He had chopped and tossed while Ray, Sloan, and Osborne were crowded into the bathroom. The younger deputy had been drafted to drive the corpses to the morgue, but he was due back for his beer and fried chicken any moment.

  Back in the bathroom, Sloan was taking a good look around while Ray was out of the room. “I’m amazed at how he got these tanks into a shower stall,” he said to Osborne, who was still examining the photos Ray had strung on the lines crisscrossing over the cabinets and floor. “How the heck did he do that?” Sloan knelt to peer behind the shallow tubs that Ray had cantilevered up the walls of the shower. “Boy, did he jerry-rig this plumbing. I wonder if it’s to code?”

  “Ray’s got that knack for how things work,” said Osborne.

  He couldn’t help adding dryly, “He’s a real whiz at storm sewers.” Then he shut up, realizing he could get his buddy in trouble. No doubt Sloan had not forgotten the confrontation between Mary Lee and Ray over the location of the trailer.

  Immediately following that episode, Mary Lee had been apoplectic after she stumbled over a length of flexible pipe early one morning and discovered Ray was emptying his sewage not into a septic tank, but near their property line, right alongside her rose garden. Osborne, aware of a few violations of his own, had refused to let her report it. To this day, he wasn’t sure what Ray was doing—nor did he care. Fact was, the roses flourished.

  No siree, Osborne thought to himself, the last thing Ray needs is a five-thousand-dollar fine for violation of shoreline water treatment regulations.

  “What d’ya mean?” said Sloan suspiciously. He stood up, unwinding his tall body carefully and brushing grit off the knees of his dark blue pants.

  “Oh, you know—roto-rooting miles of pipe, that kind of thing—and leaky faucets, Ray’s great on leaky faucets.” Osborne talked fast to cover himself.

  “He can be a real pain in the butt sometimes,” said Sloan. “I don’t want to tell you how many rainbows he’s poached off Dick Svenson’s private pond over the last fifteen years. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Ray Pradt has gotten away with a hell of a lot over the years. Don’t need to see that razzbonya turn into a hero.”

  “He’s a good neighbor,” said Osborne, wondering why Sloan was so down on Ray. Was he jealous? Jealous of a man who lived a life money couldn’t buy? Osborne let a stern note creep into his voice so he could end the conversation with his opinion overriding Sloan’s: “I like the guy.”

  He was getting more than a little irritated with the pompous cop. After all, Ray was covering a lot of ground that would make Sloan look very good. Plus his hospitality for dinner was a not-to-be-underestimated bonus.

  Once they’d moved the corpses from the boat to the police van, Ray had volunteered to process the film immediately since they were only a mile down the road from the neighboring lake where his and Osborne’s homes were located. No, indeed, Osborne just didn’t think it was necessary for Sloan to float any more negative remarks.

  With the heavenly smell of buttery chicken wafting into the small room, Sloan seemed to get the message.

  “Y’know, he’s done a nice job on this trailer, hasn’t he,” Sloan said as if to make amends. He laid down the last photo and walked with Osborne back toward the kitchen. Ray’s mobile home might look tacky from the outside, but inside it was spacious and quite clean. The living room held a plump, oversized dark blue corduroy sofa and matching recliner against cream walls with curtains to match. One corner held the jukebox, Ray’s pride and joy; the other an antique wooden phone booth with a working rotary phone. A round oak table in the kitchen had been set for five with simple white china, cloth napkins, and stainless steel flatware. His two yellow Labs were calm, well-behaved, friendly dogs and currently sound asleep by the big-screen TV.

  “Good-lookin’ animals,” said Sloan. “Ducks or grouse?”

  “Both. Ruff and Ready got the softest mouths in the county,” said Ray. “They can scoop a mallard without moving a feather.”

  “What happened?” said Sloan, looking over the dog with the bandaged leg.

  “Coon,” said Ray. “Nasty sucker, too. Poor Ready, hard to keep that bandage on ‘im.”

  Osborne clapped his friend on the shoulder as he walked past him toward the table. “Ray, whaddya think?”

  “I’ve been standing here mulling over some of those shots I got of that one body…. Thanks for giving me the go-ahead, John—I just put the call in to Rick Shanley. I’m sure he’ll ask if he can have copies,” Ray said as he started to heap the chicken pieces high on a platter.

  “Tell him to call me at the station,” said Sloan as he and Roger pulled out their chairs to sit down. “I’ll see after I talk to him.” Sloan pulled the platter toward himself and lifted off a golden, crisp breast. Just then the door opened and the younger deputy walked in.

  “Hey, smells great!” he said to the group as he followed Ray’s finger, which pointed to an empty chair. “Bridget said the switchboard’s swamped with calls. You boys are lucky to be hiding out here. Better enjoy it while you can. Oh, and Lew called. She’s gonna call back later.”

  “Get those bodies checked in okay?” asked Sloan.

  “Yes, sir. Our friends are resting in peace at Saint Mary’s.” The local hospital morgue served the purpose for the police as well.

  “Do we need anything else?” Ray ran a critical eye over the table, then sat down and dove in with both hands like everyone else. The room was cozy and bright and filled with the sound of men happily chewing away. No one spoke, they were famished.

  “Whoa! Wait … a … minute. I know where I saw a crate like that before,” Ray’s voice rose in excitement, and he set his chicken down on his plate. He rested his elbows on the edge of the table and held his greasy fingers carefully in front of him.

  “I was at my sister’s for Christmas two years ago. She and her husband live in Lake Forest outside Chicago, and they got a delivery of some art they’d bought in Japan. Two wooden boxes with matting all around and stuffed into a black wire crate very similar to this one. I remember now.” He nodded his head. “Because I almost asked her for it. It was beautiful. Real tight weave, hand-soldered, copper wire at the corners. A little tighter weave and it would’ve made a great crayfish trap, a huge crayfish trap.”

  He looked from face to face as if expecting someone to pick up that piece of information and run with it, but all he got was the sound of more chewing.

  “Well, I don’t think they flew these boys in from Japan,” said Roger finally, reaching for his beer can with greasy fingers, “and I wouldn’t hang those buggers on no wall of mine.” No one reacted to this comment either. Sloan and Osborne just kept working on their respective pieces of chicken.

  “Did you keep any records from your practice?” Sloan asked Osborne after a couple minutes had passed.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Osborne, picking over his last set of bones and tidily wiping off his fingers. “I’m not sure. Mary Lee was such a nut on throwing things away. I know I moved my files out to the lake house when I closed the office, but I don’t remember seeing th
em anywhere in the last few years.”

  Osborne remembered well his wife’s frustration when he’d arrived home in a truck with two tall oak file cabinets packed with expandable charts, bitewings, and full-mouth X rays. The young dentist buying his practice took over all the charts of active patients, of course, but Osborne just couldn’t throw out forty years of life’s work. Once he had overcome his youthful urge to devote his life to the piano and sculpture, he’d come round to taking pride in his profession. When he retired, he genuinely missed the dentistry that had been his compromise in order to make a living. Mary Lee just saw it all as a big mess, however. And who knows what she’d done to it when he wasn’t looking. His youngest daughter still hadn’t forgiven her mother for throwing out her baseball cards when she went off to college.

  “Jeez, Ray, I didn’t know you were a Susie Home-maker.” Sloan reached for a piece of the apple pie that Ray had just pulled from the refrigerator and set with plates and forks in the center of the table.

  “One of Joanne’s,” said Ray quietly, referring to the premier pie maker of the North woods. “Taught her sixteen-year-old son how to fish for muskie in exchange for a pie a week for a year.”

  “You lucky son of a bitch.” Roger reached for his piece.

  “I remember when you were sixteen …” Sloan started, pointing his fork at Ray. Suddenly he stopped, cautioned by a serious glare from Osborne. “Doc,” Sloan changed the subject between bites of pie, “if you have those records, would they show what you think you saw tonight?”

  “I’ll have a diagram of the work done, I’ll know the lab that did it, the dates, everything,” said Osborne, laying his fork down and addressing the group, ”if I can find the files. That’s a big if.