In Plain Sight

by Lorena McCourtney

  Strangely, as I stood there frozen, the first thought that came to my mind was the memory of Leslie saying, “I don’t believe in eternity.”

  Oh, Leslie …

  Then a handful of tiny fish, hatchlings no more than an inch long, fluttered around her floating fingers, and suddenly the bile rose in my throat at the horror of it. This was Leslie, Leslie dead, and fish were nibbling at her flesh …

  I stepped back, hand to my midsection, the world momentarily reeling dizzily around me as my throat worked in reverse. I clenched my fists and willed my stomach not to rebel and my knees not to collapse. Then I realized what I was doing. More important, what I wasn’t doing. I was simply standing there, helplessly clenching my hands, concentrating only on my own sick feelings. And maybe I was wrong. Maybe she wasn’t dead! Maybe, even if her face was buried in water, she was just unconscious and still living. People had been underwater for minutes and still survived …

  I knelt on the dock and frantically tried to get my hands under her arms. If I could pull her up on the dock, remember those CPR lessons Thea and I had taken a half dozen years ago …

  Help me, Lord!

  In the water her body felt almost buoyant. It bobbed gently as I struggled to lift her, almost as if it was trying to help me. Little wavelets raised by the movement splashed against the dock. Drops of water spattered my face. One hit my lip. I quashed a half-hysterical urge to drop the body and wipe those contaminated drops away.

  I got her up a few inches, one wrist draped over the dock. I still couldn’t see her face, but her fingers had an eerie, bluish look. And now, shoulders out of the water, she became sluggishly immovable, as if some malevolent force held her from below. Even straining until my muscles burned and my arms shook and my eyes lost focus, I could lift her no farther.

  A dead weight.

  No! She could be alive. Perhaps a state of suspended animation. Or a coma. Wasn’t that possible?

  I kept one hand under her arm and tried with the other to grab her hair and lift her head. If I could just get her nose and mouth out of the water …

  Her hair slipped out of my grasp. Then I realized in horror that some of it had come loose in my fingers. I shook my hand frantically, trying to get rid of it, and she slipped back in the water with a splash that spattered my face again.

  Her hair, once pale gold and glossy, now dull and lank, was only inches from my face as I knelt over her to reestablish my hold. I tried not to gag again as the scent of waterlogged flesh and clothing—and some other, uglier scent of death and decay—filled my nose. Bits of greenish lake stuff clung in her hair. Some of the hair I’d pulled out floated loose in the water.

  CPR couldn’t help her. I could feel the death in the body as surely as I felt the hard wooden deck under my knees. I knew it and yet I kept struggling. I had to get her out! I couldn’t just let her dangle here in the water, caught like some dead fish on a line. With tiny fish nibbling at her flesh …

  The velour sweatshirt bunched up under my hands, and I tried to get a better grip on the soggy material. My hands slipped, and the body drifted sideways. Frantically I yanked it back.

  Only to feel it slipping even farther out of my grasp. Somehow in trying to lift her I’d loosened the shirt from where it was snagged on the ladder, and she was floating free.

  I plunged forward, desperately grabbing to keep the body from sinking or floating away. My face pitched into the water, and then I was choking and spitting and frantically scrabbling and scrambling with hands and elbows and toes to keep from plunging over the edge of the dock myself.

  But as the roiled water cleared I saw the body below me, out of reach, slowly bobbing and drifting away. It moved almost leisurely, rising and falling, twisting gracefully, hair disappearing last, like some golden wraith reaching for the surface.

  I stared after it for a paralyzed moment. What had I done? Then I struggled to my feet and stumbled up the driveway. Telephone. Help!

  Too late for help. The knowledge clanged in my mind like a doomsday bell. But I had to get someone here—the thought of her drifting down there below the surface, at the mercy of whatever might be down there, panicked me. I ran to the double doors at the house. Locked, of course. I tried every door I could find. A couple of side doors I’d never seen used, the rear door, even the garage doors. Everything locked. Irrationally, I ran back and pounded on the rear door. Strangely, I heard the phone inside ringing. But it was as inaccessible to me as if enclosed in a steel vault. Later, I was to think, Why didn’t I look in her purse in the car for house keys? But that never occurred to me at this frantic moment.

  I ran to the gate, then across the street. The gate-rammer’s house? It didn’t matter. Again I pounded until my fists numbed under the blows. No answer.

  I ran back to the road. I flapped my arms frantically at an oncoming car. The lone woman in the car looked as if she was going to detour around me. I realized how I must look, like some dripping, deranged scarecrow.

  Lord, make her stop! I pleaded. I brushed back the wet hair plastered to my forehead.

  She did stop finally, a few feet past me, two wheels on the shoulder. She didn’t open the window, just eyed me warily as I ran up.

  “Do you have a cell phone?” I yelled. I pantomimed holding a phone to my ear. “Leslie Marcone is in the water. We need help!”

  The window came down a few inches. “What do you mean?”

  “The woman who lives here—” I motioned toward the house. “I found her at the end of the dock, in the water—”

  “You mean she fell in?”

  “I don’t know what happened. I tried to get her up on the dock, but I lost hold of her—”

  “She’s drowning?”

  “I don’t know. I think … I think she’s already drowned.

  Please—”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.” The woman hesitated a moment, then apparently decided I was more panicky than dangerous. “But you can come to the house—”

  “No, I have to go back down there. Call 911.”

  Logic told me I could do nothing for Leslie now. Emotion told me I couldn’t leave her alone down there.

  The woman hesitated a moment, as if wondering if this was real or some ghastly joke—or even if I was quite sane.

  “Please,” I said again, and she must have heard some desperation in the plea. She nodded and drove off, slowly at first, then with a squeal on pavement as she suddenly sped up.

  I ran back, clambered through the fence, down the driveway. More logic told me I could do nothing to help her. But run, hurry, was something I could do.

  I knelt and stared down into the water at the end of the dock when I reached it, eyes straining. Nothing. For a split second, I wondered if maybe I’d imagined all this. Maybe I’d taken a spectacular swan dive into the sea of senility.

  Then I spotted a few blonde hairs floating in the water, a few blue threads clinging to the metal ladder. No, this was all too real. Leslie’s blond hair. Leslie’s blue sweatshirt.

  I took a deep breath and tried to think logically while I waited for help. What had happened here? I turned to look at the car as I tried to piece things together.

  She’d obviously driven the car down to the boathouse for some reason. (Why?) Then she’d walked out on the dock (why?), where she must have slipped or stumbled and tumbled into the water, and the sweatshirt had caught on the ladder as she fell.

  An accident. Accidents happened all the time. Forget the unexplained whys. I remembered an elderly woman from Madison Street who’d gone on vacation with her family and drowned in a few feet of water in a creek.

  But Leslie wasn’t elderly. She was in excellent physical condition and, from what Sandy had said, an excellent swimmer as well.

  If she’d accidentally fallen into the water, she surely could have pulled herself out. So she must have hit her head on the dock when she fell. Knocked herself out and drowned before she regained consciousness. Yes, a logical explanation.

&nbs
p; And why was I so frantically proposing these logical accident scenarios to myself?

  I knew why. Because down beneath them, down in depths murkier than the water in which Leslie bobbed and drifted, lurked the ominous thought that this was no accident. That Leslie had been pushed into the water. Maybe knocked out by some malicious blow before she was pushed. Maybe held under to finish the job.

  She had enemies, no doubt about that. She may, or may not, have been in hiding here at Little Tom Lake, but the ex-husband’s surprise visit had made plain that she was at least avoiding people from her past. And she’d made new enemies here as well.

  Another thought hit me. The skulker. Had I barely missed encountering a murderer the last time I was here? Had I scared him off, but he’d come back and killed Leslie later? Or had he already killed her, and I arrived just as he was escaping?

  Surely not. Surely Leslie’s body couldn’t have been down here in the water, snagged on the ladder, since then! You’ve got to stop reading those murder mysteries, stop letting imagination take you on a rocket ride. Sgt. Yates would say this. This surely had to be exactly what it looked like—an accident. Ghastly, yes. But an accident, nothing more. To think otherwise was morbid imagination.

  I hadn’t looked at my watch when I asked the woman out on the road to call 911, so I had no idea how much time was passing as I leaned against the boathouse for support. It felt like hours before I heard sirens in the distance, though logic, which I kept trying to summon, told me no more than ten minutes had elapsed.

  The thought occurred to me as a siren wailed up to the gate that Sgt. Yates was not going to be pleased. Hadn’t he warned me: no dead bodies?

  And I definitely had a dead body for him.

  18

  Two uniformed officers were the first authorities on the scene. Sgt. Yates was not one of them. But he wouldn’t be, I reminded myself. Because this was an accident, and he was in the Major Crimes Unit. The two men came running down the driveway, one of them yelling when he spotted me, “We got an emergency call. A woman drowning—”

  I pointed to the end of the dock, and they ran by me. I followed, putting one foot carefully ahead of the other because I felt as if I might all too easily wobble over the edge of the dock myself. I pointed again. We all stared into the greenish depths.

  It was a pleasant morning. Unseasonably warm. Almost hot. Calm and peaceful. Sunlight shafted into the water, highlighting specks like watery dust motes. The ladder, I now saw, ended three feet below the surface. It looked deceptively inviting. C’mon in, have a swim.

  Yeah. Just you, me, and a dead body.

  “You’re sure?” The officer sounded doubtful.

  “I’m sure. I saw her.”

  “You saw her fall in?”

  “No, but I saw her drift away just a few minutes ago—”

  He didn’t give me a chance to finish before he jerked his head at the other officer and barked, “Get on the radio. We may need a diver.”

  This all seemed vaguely unreal, as if I were an actress in some bizarre play, and none of the parts were very well rehearsed.

  “I don’t think you need to—”

  Another siren wailed to a stop at the gate, and the first officer turned to me. “How do we get the gate open? We’re going to need equipment down here.”

  I started to answer that they’d have to get inside the house, where the gate controls were located, but now I finally remembered what I’d seen in the Mercedes. I pointed to the car. “Remote control for the gate. On the front seat.”

  The other officer headed for the car.

  “Hey, wait!” I yelled. “You can’t—”

  Too late. He’d already grabbed the handle and yanked the door open, no doubt obliterating any fingerprints that might be there. No matter, I reminded myself. This is only an accident.

  The first officer was stripping off his uniform. His shoes clunked to the deck, blue shirt flung atop them, belt with holstered gun, cell phone, and other police gear strapped to it placed more carefully atop the other items.

  I admired his willingness to plunge instantly into the depths in a rescue attempt, and I was disturbed about Leslie being down there somewhere. But the sad fact was that this heroic gesture wasn’t exactly necessary. “I don’t think there’s any big rush—”

  “You said she’s only been underwater a few minutes. We might be able to save her.” He yanked a wallet out of his pants pocket and dropped it on the pile.

  “That’s right. But you didn’t give me a chance to finish. She was already dead when she drifted away. Her body was caught on the ladder. I was trying to get her up on the dock, but she … got away from me.” I ended on a lame note. Spoken aloud, my contribution to this situation sounded both careless and incompetent. “I tried to hold on to her, but she just … slipped away.” It didn’t sound any better on second telling.

  The young officer stood there barechested and barefooted, a fine male specimen who looked as if he was ready to toss me over the edge. “She was already dead? Are you sure?”

  “I think she’d been dead for … some time. Although I’m no expert,” I added hastily.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this to begin with?”

  “You didn’t give me a chance.”

  He started putting his clothes back on. “Okay, how long had she been in the water before she, as you put it, ‘got away’ from you?”

  “I don’t know. Although I think it could have been … a while. I came to retrieve something I’d left in the house—”

  “Retrieve?”

  “I was Ms. Marcone’s housekeeper up until a few days ago. I’d left a personal item in a kitchen drawer and wanted to get it back. No one answered my ring or knock. I was curious about her car being parked down here. So I came down to the dock and … there she was.”

  “In the water?”

  “Caught on the ladder.” I showed him where her velour sweatshirt had snagged. I pointed out the blonde hairs and blue threads caught on the ladder and other hairs still floating on the water.

  “So you don’t know what happened?”

  “No. I suppose she must have stumbled or slipped or something, hit her head and drowned.”

  “You saw a head injury?”

  “No. But something like that must have happened. She was a good swimmer … she could swim across the lake and back … so she wouldn’t have drowned just falling in the water.”

  He gave me an up-and-down inspection, as if I’d only now registered as something more than an anonymous blip on his radar. “And you are … ?”

  I gave him my name and pointed to the house across the lake. “I live over there—”

  I didn’t have time to explain further. With the gate apparently open now, the police car, which I saw was from the county sheriff’s office, roared down the driveway, brakes screeching when it stopped behind the Mercedes. Behind it lumbered a red fire truck, then another car marked with the sheriff’s emblem. The officer I’d talked to was still barefoot but tucking in his shirttail as he trotted over to meet them.

  “Don’t go away,” he turned and called back to me. It sounded as much warning as command.

  A few minutes later another car with a fire department emblem arrived. Two men slid out. One dragged out scuba gear—black rubber suit and yellow oxygen tanks—and put it on. He plunged off the end of the dock. By this time a small crowd had gathered, arriving from wherever it is crowds emerge from in catastrophes. A boat was stopped about a hundred feet offshore, sun glinting on binoculars as the occupants watched the activities.

  A newly arrived officer herded me, along with everyone else, off the dock and away from the car. A few minutes later the diver surfaced about thirty feet from the dock. Something bobbed beside him. He dragged it with him back to the dock.

  There, two officers took the body from him and laid it on the dock, water sloshing across the wooden boards. More water sloshed when the diver came up the ladder and stood on the dock, peering down at Leslie’s body.
A murmur like a passing wave rolled through the crowd.

  An officer knelt by the body and pressed fingers to her throat. It was a formality only. I don’t think anyone expected anything but his negative shake of head as he stood up.

  In life Leslie had always appeared so lean and toned and healthy, like a racehorse ready to run. Regal and a bit disdainful of more ordinary human beings. Not stunningly beautiful but definitely attractive. Now, even from a distance, her body looked … odd. Bloated. It was probably fortunate, I realized with a sick churn of stomach, that I hadn’t gotten a look at her face when I tried to lift her head. I knew she’d have hated having all those officers gathered around staring down on her now.

  There seemed to be some sort of conference taking place among those officers. One of them was on a cell phone. I wondered if a coroner or medical examiner had to come before the body could be removed from the dock. That usually happened in the murder mysteries I read.

  But this wasn’t a murder, I reminded myself. Just a terrible, tragic accident. Why did my thoughts keep slipping in that other direction? Although another part of my mind instantly countered, Why cling so stubbornly to the accident theory?

  I knew the answer to that. Because, even though I knew it happened over and over in this imperfect world, I didn’t want to think about one person being capable of deliberately snuffing out another’s life. It was too … horrific.

  My stomach was feeling ever more unreliable, and there was a peculiar ringing in my ears. I approached the officer assigned to crowd control. I leaned across the imaginary line created by his outstretched arms.

  “Please, may I go home now? I’m not feeling too well.”

  The officer’s impatient glance flicked in my direction but didn’t focus on me, a situation with which I am not unfamiliar, given my general tendency to fade into woodwork, landscape, or crowd. “Sure, no one needs to stick around.