Winter Wake

by Rick Hautala

  He was talking to Bri, but his words sent a tremor of fear through Julia. As soon as he said the word water, she dredged up the image she had seen off to the side of Randy’s lobster boat. Of course, it would have been impossible for a person to be swimming in the ocean beside the boat — even if it wasn’t autumn. But she had seen something, and it certainly had looked like a person, and even if it wasn’t, that didn’t stop her mind from manufacturing an array of thoughts and images of what it might have been.

  “Guessing by how cold it is already, I’d guess we’re going to have a cold winter without much snow.” John pumped his arms to heat up his muscles.

  “How do you know that, Mr. Weatherman?” Julia laughed softly even as she was tormented by the memory of what she had seen. “It’s funny how weathermen talk about what kind of winter we’re going to have when they can’t even say what it’s going to be twelve hours from now.”

  “I’m not making any predictions here,” John said. “But maybe we should check out Larson’s Pond. I’ll bet it’s already frozen, and the ice is perfect for skating.”

  “Yeah. That’d be great,” Bri said, showing interest in the conversation for the first time since they had left the house. “Kristin mentioned that. I’d love to go skating. Maybe I can invite her.”

  “Where’s Larson’s Pond?” Julia asked.

  “Up Oak Street and then take a right onto Hook Road. It’s not far. We used to skate there all the time — hockey games and when we were a older, skating parties with our girlfriends. What do you say we check it out tomorrow?”

  “Can ask Kristin?” Bri asked, jumping up and down excitedly.

  “I don’t see why not,” Julia said, especially pleased to see Bri’s enthusiasm.

  They had walked more than a mile and were on a stretch of road where there were no more houses. Thick, dark woods lined one side of the road. On the other side was darkness and the soft rolling sound of the ocean as waves washed up against the rocks. The air was so cold it burned the insides of their noses.

  John knew it wasn’t too much further before they would be at the construction site. He stopped under the next streetlight, took out a cigarette, and lit it, drawing the smoke into his lungs. When he exhaled, he tried to keep from staring down the dark road as he thought about those bones … those damned bones that had been dug up. The woods around him seemed to get darker and draw closer.

  “I don’t know about anybody else,” he said, his teeth chattering loudly, “but I’m freezing my tail off. Let’s head back.”

  “Same way?” Julia asked, looking back the way they had come. “Didn’t I see where Hook Road comes out onto Shore Drive? Maybe we could walk home that way.”

  “We could go by the pond and check to see if it’s frozen,” Bri said.

  John took another drag on the cigarette and shook his head.

  “Not at night,” he said. “There’s aren’t any streetlights out there — not many, anyway. Besides, Hook Road winds a long way around. We’d end up walking twice as far as we would going the way we came. I wanna get home.”

  “Why’s that? Is something the matter?” Julia leaned forward and patted John’s rounded stomach. “Afraid you might wear yourself out?”

  John laughed and started bounding up and down on his toes like a prizefighter warming up.

  “I’m not afraid of a little exercise,” he said, swinging his hands back and forth and clapping his upper arms. But then, before he could say more, he started coughing. He let the cigarette drop to the street from his mouth and crushed it with his heel as he doubled over, hands on his thighs, and coughed so hard it hurt his stomach. The coughing jag lasted only a few seconds. When he was through, he looked at Julia and shook his head.

  “I want to have a slice or two of pie,” he said, his voice sounding thick with mucus.

  “And ice cream,” Bri added.

  “What say we jog back?” Julia said teasingly. She wanted to say something about how he should quit smoking, but then his coughing fit was comment enough.

  “Let’s not get too worked up here, okay?” John said. “If we go skating tomorrow, it’ll be exercise enough.”

  IV

  Julia’s left knee hit the ice first, and she had enough forward momentum to spin around in a lazy corkscrew spiral as she slowly crumpled onto the ice. Her skates — somewhere far behind her — made loud, crunching noises as the black ice rushed toward her face. The shock of her hands slamming down hard sent jolts of pain up to her shoulders. She was vaguely aware of John’s loud bray of laughter as she slid to a stop, the tip of her nose less than an inch from the ice.

  “You all right?” John shouted.

  She raised one mittened hand and waved to signal she had survived the fall. Then she started scrambling to her feet. Her skates didn’t want to stay under her, and with a swick sound, like ripping cloth, her feet shot out from under her again, and she went down flat onto the ice.

  John’s laughter was louder, and in spite of the pain in her hands, elbow, and knees, the embarrassment burning her ears was worse. She was sucking in some air to yell at him when she saw the arm reaching up out of the frozen depths of the pond.

  Instead of shouting at her husband, a strangled cry came out of her mouth.

  The arm — at least it looked like an arm — was frozen in midmotion, reaching futilely up through the five or six inches of solid ice. All Julia could see clearly was the hooked fingers and part of the forearm. The rest, from the elbow down, gradually blended into the thick, black depths of the closed-in water.

  “Jule?” John called out. “You all right?”

  She twisted around and looked at him, but her throat was constricted, and she knew that no words would come out.

  “You hurt?”

  She turned back and looked down at the ice … down at what surely looked like a hand suspended in the murky darkness. She thought that this hand reaching up toward the surface looked exactly like the hand she had seen over the side of Randy’s boat. The memory rose in her mind with an audible whoosh of blood rushing to her head

  Impossible, her mind screamed. This can’t be!

  Behind her, she heard the hissing of John’s skates as he skated over to her. With a loud scraping sound that sent a spray of ice chips flying, he skidded to a stop inches from where she lay and bent down. He rested one hand so gently on her shoulder she could barely feel it through the thick layers of coat and sweater.

  “Sorry I laughed,” he said, his voice low and kind. “It didn’t look like that bad a spill.”

  Julia sawed her teeth over her lower lip and shook her head, afraid that if she tried to speak, the only thing that would come out would be an ear-piercing scream. Her eyes were transfixed by the sight below the ice — that hand … exactly like the one she had see reaching up out of the ocean to grab the side of Randy’s boat … or her.

  “Come on,” John said, trying to hold her under the arms and help her to her feet. “We’ve been at it a while. Let’s take a break.”

  “Look,” she said, forcing out the word as she pointed down to the ice with her mittened hand. “Look … down there.”

  Confused for a moment, John shook his head as he stared down at the surface of the ice. What was he supposed to see? Blood on the ice? Whatever it was that had tripped her?

  “Let me help you up,” he said.

  But his words barely registered with Julia. She continued to stare through the ice, down at the indistinct shape that looked to be beckoning to her.

  A wave of dizziness crashed over her, and every muscle in her body felt like rotting rubber. The darkness below the ice started to spin in an inward-turning vortex that tugged her down … down.

  “You gonna get up?” John asked, more forcefully as he tried to yank her to her feet. “We’re not used to this much exercise.” He snorted with laughter. “And you thought I couldn’t handle it.”

  “No … I …”

  She tried to get up, but her legs were as useless as if the
y belonged to someone else. All feeling and control was gone.

  “Down … below the ice …”

  John eased her back down, and the solid surface — cold as it was — was comforting. She brought her face close to the ice and cupped her hands on both sides of her eyes as if she wanted to rest her head and fall asleep right there.

  John’s first panicked thought was, She banged her head … She’s got a concussion.

  He looked around for Bri, but she was down at the far end of the pond, spinning circles and figure eights with Kristin. He cupped his hands to his mouth to call for her to go get help when Julia said something. Her face was so close to the ice her words were distorted, and he didn’t quite catch what she had said.

  “Tell me where it hurts,” he said, his voice edged with fear. “Did you bang your head?”

  “No,” Julia said, her voice stronger. “Look down there for Christ’s sake!”

  She pounded the ice with her mittened hand, and John realized that she meant below the surface. Once he adjusted his focus and his eyes registered what he was looking at, his chest went suddenly cold.

  “What the fuck?”

  Julia turned and looked up at him with an expression of mounting fear. Her blue eyes bored directly into his mind, laying open every secret he ever had. He felt stripped naked, like he was standing in the face of a frigid blast of arctic wind when he saw his own reaction mirrored in his wife’s face.

  “It … it can’t be what it looks like,” he stammered, looking back down at what certainly looked to him like a human hand, frozen in the ice, reaching helplessly up to the surface.

  “What the hell else could it be?” Julia said, her voice sounding like a creaking door.

  As the initial rush of fear subsided, John sat back on his heels and, removing one glove, swiped his hand over his forehead. His fingers were like hot coals against his skin.

  “Tell me what you see,” Julia said, feeling a little more rational now that she was sharing this with someone else … now that someone had confirmed what she had seen. At least she knew she wasn’t going crazy.

  John swallowed with difficulty and, taking a deep breath, looked up at the vault of clear, blue sky before answering.

  “It certainly looks like an arm,” he said. His throat was so raw, he was surprised the words came out at all.

  Julia nodded.

  “That’s what I think, too,” she said.

  They both looked back down at the thing under the ice. John scrambled to one side, trying to catch it from a different angle, but no matter how many angles he tried, it still looked like a human arm.

  “It can’t be,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “It simply can’t be.”

  “Of course it could be,” Julia said. Every breath she took sent ripples of cold through her body. “I mean, it’s possible. Maybe someone was swimming out here last summer and drowned.” She shrugged as though that had to be the answer. “They drowned, and no one ever found the body. Just before the pond froze, the body floated up and …and —”

  “Uh — uh,” John said, shaking his head. “No one swims here. Water’s too mucky.” He pointed to the line of dead cattails along the edge of the pond. “It’s practically a swamp. No one would come swimming here.”

  “Then they fell in,” Julia said with a shrug. She was unable to stop from staring down at the frozen arm. “Maybe some kids were playing with a boat or raft, and one of them went over.”

  “The water’s not that deep. They would have sent a diving team in to find the body,” John said tightly, his gaze fastened on Julia.

  “Maybe … I dunno. Maybe someone was out here alone … or someone island killed whoever’s down there and sank the body.”

  With a sudden grunt, John stood up quickly. His skates slipped, and he had to wave his arms to catch his balance before he fell backward. His mouth opened, but he didn’t say anything. He reminded Julia of a fish that had been yanked up into the air. His hands fumbled in his coat pocket as he reached for his cigarettes and lighter. He popped a cigarette into his mouth and hurriedly lit it.

  “Maybe there’s a killer loose on the island, and he’s sinking the bodies of his victims into the pond,” Julia said. “Wasn’t there something a few years ago up in Holland, Maine, where some guy was doing that to kids?”

  John exhaled a thick stream of blue smoke as he shook his head.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’ve been reading too many mysteries. It’s probably not even an arm.”

  With the cigarette dangling from his lower lip, he dropped down onto the ice again and stared down at the thing.

  “It’s a tree branch or something, and ice is distorting it so it looks like an arm. It’s too dark, anyway. A body that’s been underwater for a long time would be puffy and white.”

  “How would we know?” Julia asked.

  “Glooscap isn’t the kind of place where —” He was interrupted by a cough that rattled in his chest. “ — where that kind of stuff happens. Come on. Let me help you up. If you stay on the ice like that, you’re going to get sick again.”

  “We have to notify the police?” Julia said. All she could think was, if that was a body down there, the authorities had to know.

  “How ‘bout we take a break,” John said. “We can check it once the sun shifts. With different lighting, we probably see it’s a waterlogged tree branch or something. I wish we could make a campfire to warm up.”

  Julia was silent as she stared out over the ice, but from the angle at which he was looking at her, John couldn’t tell if she was watching Bri and Kristin in the distance or looking at the spot where she had fallen. He could see where that was because of the skate marks on the ice.

  “If you lit a campfire these days,” Julia said, her voice soft and distant, “you’d probably get arrested.”

  John snickered.

  “Probably that same group of tree-huggers protesting the condos would take us to court for polluting.”

  He finished the cigarette and crushed it out on the side of his skate blade and — not wanting to litter — slipped the butt inside the cellophane of his cigarette package. He flopped back, stared up at the blue sky, and told himself he should feel contented, but neither he nor Julia could stop wondering what that was under the ice.

  What he was trying not to think about was how that thing that looked like an arm under the ice might be connected some way to those bones the workers had uncovered at the condo site. He hoped Julia hadn’t made the connection … and he wished to hell he hadn’t.

  They rested on the edge of the pond for a while. Then they went back out onto the ice for a few more turns. Bri and Kristin were tireless, so about an hour later, once both John and Julia was completely wrung out, they took off their skates, put their shoes back on, and started for home, telling Bri to be back before dark.

  “You want to check it once more before we leave?” Julia asked.

  John didn’t have to ask what she meant. Reluctantly, he nodded. Slipping on the smooth ice, not used to the feeling of not having skates on, they skidded back to where Julia had fallen. Both of them were tense with expectation as they neared the spot.

  “Well …?” John said, standing back as Julia bent down and peered into the frozen depths.

  She was silent for a long while other than her heavy breathing. Then, frowning, she looked up at John and shook her head.

  “I don’t see a damned thing.” Her voice was raspy. “Are you sure this is the spot?”

  John held his hands out helplessly.

  “Looks it to me. You’re the one who fell down here.”

  He leaned over and looked for himself but saw nothing.

  For the next five minutes or so, they scanned the area, searching beneath the ice, but whatever they had seen wasn’t there now.

  “So … what do we do?” Julia asked once they had given up looking. She stood up and brushed her mittens clean on her pants.

  “What do you mean?”

&
nbsp; “Do we call the cops or not?”

  John barked a short laugh and then shook his head.

  “And tell them what? That a crack under the ice looked like a person’s arm? Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing down there.”

  Julia looked from him back to the ice, and, shaking her head, let her breath out slowly.

  “I know this is the place,” she said. “But …” She rubbed her forehead with the fiat of her mitten. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Come on,” John said. “Let’s get home and heat up some cocoa.”

  He started to walk away, his feet skittering on the ice. When Julia hesitated for a moment, he turned back to her and shouted, “You coming?”

  Julia nodded but still didn’t move.

  “Hurry up,” John shouted, his voice edged with impatience. He turned and continued walking away, but a small voice in the back of his mind was whispering …

  Forget about it … if you can.

  FIFTEEN

  Nor’easter

  I

  Exactly one week after Thanksgiving, by mid afternoon on Thursday, the first real snow of the season arrived. It slammed into the rock-rimmed northeast edge of Glooscap Island like a huge, howling animal. When Bri was settling in to wash the supper dishes around six o’clock, she knew — and secretly rejoiced — that there wouldn’t be school in the morning. There couldn’t be. Not if it kept snowing like this. Outside the kitchen window, the snow was coming down so fast and thick she could barely see the streetlight down by the road.

  “‘S what the old-timers call a real ‘rafter-snapper,’’’ Frank said. He was sitting in his wheelchair by the kitchen table, making conversation with Bri while she worked. “Jus’ listen to that wind.”

  Bri stopped scrubbing one of the pots and listened.

  The blizzard whistled low and throaty as it tore under the eaves. Below that sound, she could hear a deeper, lower vibration that was a little like someone moaning. Actually, she thought, it sounded a lot like her father’s snoring.