by Alex Archer
It was in some respects a perfect place, this lake and town, Annja thought. Peaceful, a terrific spot to vacation or set down some roots. She saw Sully’s expression, eyes lit with the pleasure of being in this place at this time. If only she could be here for another reason. Maybe Annja would come back here—or rather to a place like it—to unwind and to absorb something so very far removed from the violence and tragedy that had been dogging her since she’d inherited Joan’s sword.
Rembert had been saying something, but she’d missed it entirely, listening instead to the purr of the Yamaha motor and the slosh of the water against the pontoon’s barrels.
“Annja, I said how many bedrooms does your beach cottage have?”
She blinked. “Two, why?”
“Good, ’cause I checked out of the hotel this morning, and my bag is in the trunk of my rental. I’ll crash with you tonight.”
She didn’t bother hiding her surprise. “Tonight? Rem, we’re going to be done here after you shoot this.” She noticed that he was doing just that, getting video of Sully happily steering the pontoon, then panning to catch the fly fishermen and the lilies before turning the camera off. “You can get a flight back to New York out of Milwaukee if you don’t want to bother with Madison’s airport, and—”
“I’ll go back when you go back,” he said flatly. “Open-ended ticket. Doug always gets me one. I’ll just stick close and film you doing whatever. Do you have a problem with that?”
She started to stay something.
“Already called Doug. He doesn’t have a problem with it.”
“Fine,” Annja said, gripping the pontoon’s railing. Why was Rembert suddenly affixing himself to her like a shadow? Was it just for the money? Or was it something else? “All right, Rem. Just don’t get in my way.”
Sully had emptied his first thermos when the old railroad bridge came into sight, the one Bobby Wolfe had mentioned that the Glacial Drumlin State Trail ran across. In the distance, she saw the tall reeds. Sully cut the engine, took a drink from the second thermos and tried to add more whiskey to it. But the flask was empty. He cursed, stood and stretched. He tossed the anchor line over, then picked up a second, a buoy line, and set it over the side for good measure. “Okay, Miss Creed. Those diving logs you picked through say Joe was working this area, right?”
“Yes.” She and Sully had consulted the logs, and Sully deciphered most of Joe’s handwriting. “We have to be close.”
“Joe always kept good records,” Sully said, “of everything. When we were kids, he kept a diary, even listing all the TV shows we liked and how many cans we shot with our new BB guns.”
Annja looked through two pages in the logs again; on one of them Joe had mentioned finding the gold pieces, a silvery bracelet and an opening on the side of a pyramid. A note in the margin said he might come back to go inside if he got his courage up. “Willies,” he’d written.
There’d been no opening on either of the two mounds she’d explored with Bobby. She remembered that Bobby had told her his first dive for Edgar was in this area. Edgar must have gotten the notion to look here based on talking to Joe. But Bobby or Edgar hadn’t been privy to these dive logs and so were probably looking blindly. It was a big, deep lake, after all.
There were three oxygen tanks in the center of the pontoon boat, each with about a half hour’s worth of air. There was no accompanying bail-out tank, and Annja did not have a waterproof watch, so she would have to rely on her instinct of time passing. She strapped on the tank and checked the gauge and mouthpiece. She’d checked both out earlier—she’d be diving alone and so was being extra careful. With no suit or neoprene boots, she’d have to be satisfied with her outfit and tennis shoes. She might get chilly, but she was made of stern stuff.
Sully had given her an extra boat anchor, which was a bleach bottle filled with concrete. She hooked it to one of the tanks and would take it down with her. Annja knew she wouldn’t want to come up after just a half hour and so would switch out her tanks at the bottom. Then she’d hook the cement-filled bottle to the buoy rope so both could be pulled up, leaving nothing behind but bubbles, she thought.
“I’ll be gone an hour,” she announced.
“I brought a paperback,” Rembert said. She’d seen him buy it in the dollar store, a Western.
“We’ll be back in a half hour or so,” Sully said, leaving the buoy rope but starting to pull up the anchor.
“What?” Rembert and Annja said simultaneously.
Sully gestured to the port side. “There’s a little tavern over there with a dock. I didn’t bring me a coffee can to piss in and I’ve gotta go bad. I could just hang—”
“No, you don’t,” Annja warned.
“I know. I know. I respect the lake...even though fish pee in it.” Sully grinned. “So I’m gonna take me over there to the tavern and get us a couple of sandwiches.”
It wasn’t to use the tavern’s restroom, Annja realized; it was to refill his whiskey flask. Sully had a serious drinking problem.
“I’m hungry.” Rembert brightened at the prospect of sandwiches. “You want us to bring you back something, Annja?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Something filling.”
“She eats a lot,” Rembert told Sully.
Sully let out a wolf whistle. “Not too much, she doesn’t. Not with that body.”
“Don’t let him drink too much, Rem. I need you guys back here. Him reasonably sober.” Annja dropped over the side, the weighted second tank helping to propel her to the bottom. She listened to the pontoon boat motor start again, the sound musical and disturbing as it cut through the water.
She was actually glad that they’d left. For a while it would be only her, the fish and whatever mysteries Rock Lake was trying to hold on to.
Chapter 28
The soreness in her leg all but vanished as she dropped deeper and put on Joe’s high-powered waterproof flashlight. Sully hadn’t yet managed to sell it.
It was seventy feet deep here, according to the laminated map Bobby Wolfe had let her keep and the length of marked rope that had played out when Sully dropped the buoy. One of the grease-pencil circles, indicating where Bobby first dived for Edgar, was in the vicinity of this spot but about sixty yards closer to the railroad bridge.
Again Annja felt as if she’d slipped into an alien realm, a delightful, magical one filled with varieties of fish she couldn’t put names to. She was more familiar with ocean species, which were more colorful, but she recognized a bass and a trio of sunfish. At the edge of her beam, a big turtle swam lazily toward the surface. She estimated her vision, with the beam, was about fifteen feet. Much better than her dive yesterday.
The water at the surface had been pleasant, probably in the mid-seventies. Now down about twenty feet—she could tell by the mark on the buoy line—it was getting cooler. A wet suit would have helped. After Annja had become a certified diver, she’d taken an advanced program for deep diving and cold temperatures. She well knew what she was doing and recognized that she was taking a few risks—no suit, no dive buddy, no bail-out tank. Some stupid risks.
But she remembered something a nurse once told her. The nurse had worked in a senior citizens center, where she often heard people say they wished they’d taken more risks.
Annja brought that conversation to mind whenever she was going beyond the realm of common sense.
Visibility improved after another twenty feet. The plant growth was sparse here, not thick like the reeds toward the railroad bridge or the colorful lily pads along the shore. The fish were numerous, however; a small school of minnows shot out of the murk straight at her, looking like pieces of quicksilver in the beam of her light. A second later she saw what had spooked them, a large thick-bellied fish, much bigger than she’d seen yesterday. Not a bass. A walleye? It stopped its pursuit of a meal to regard her. Annja held to the rope and stopped her descent, enjoying the moment. Its gills worked slowly and it turned ever so slightly, its eye holding hers.
A handsome creature, she thought, hoping no one would hook this one; it must have some age to it. After a few more moments, it swam away, and she continued her course.
At sixty feet, Annja directed her light straight below and saw the reason for the lack of vegetation. The lake bed about a dozen feet below was a mix of sand and mostly small rocks, helping visibility but cutting the silt and providing nothing for the plants to root in. Near the buoy rope was a massive boulder, at least five feet high and twice that across. It was covered with zebra mussels and moss. Annja’s feet touched gently on the floor and she rested the extra tank next to the rock, not touching it, finding the mussel and moss patterns artful. Leave nothing but bubbles.
She guessed she’d spent five to ten minutes coming down, as she’d allowed herself to be distracted by the big fish. No more diversions, she admonished. She didn’t have enough tanks to allow for that. Using the boulder as a marker, she glided to the south and intended to go for about ten minutes before spiraling back and switching out tanks.
Annja clamped her teeth tight to the mouthpiece. It was cold here, maybe fifty degrees. A dry suit would perhaps be even more appropriate. But she was healthy, and she would not be down a terribly long while. What would it be like diving this lake in the winter, when visibility was at its best? she wondered, shivering.
She slipped past a field of rocks that ranged from the size of a football to a beach ball. None were worked, like the ones near the mounds, and she saw no signs of them serving as tools. They were just...rocks. Farther and she found a car bumper encrusted with various growths, a mud puppy stretched out on it. Farther still and she came across an old wooden boat, a ten to twelve footer that had sunk maybe four or five decades ago, judging by the degree of decay; it had the look of being from the 1960s, when all-wood boats were popular and appreciated. The depth and the cold were helping to keep it from disintegrating. Annja moved slowly around it, seeing a split in the hull and noting that a school of small perch were making a home of the center section. The boat had probably lost an argument with another boat. Its motor had gone down with it, the propeller bent from hitting the rocks at the bottom, zebra mussels covering most of it. She smiled; Sully would say Her Imperial Snakeship had pulled it down.
Another several yards and she swung to her left, what would be east if she’d managed to keep her bearings. She was starting her circle back to the boulder where the other tank was. More rocks, a traffic sign of some sort that an unthinking person had tossed in—a stop sign by the shape of it. She drifted past it and went another few yards when she nearly floated over a rent in the lake bed. She stopped and planted her feet, carefully knelt and aimed the light down. It was a crevasse, one that she was positive wasn’t marked on the laminated map. Visibility was good here, and she was seeing thirty to forty feet with the light. But she couldn’t see the bottom of the crevasse. The sides were a mix of smooth and jagged rocks, and the gap was only about ten feet across at its widest point and about twice that in length—easy to miss by anyone trying to map the lake even with equipment. She remembered the notes in Joe’s dive book about “Bob the Boulder,” which she took to be the very big rock, about the wrecked water-ski boat, followed by “Her Snakeship’s Maw.” She’d thought the last comment was a joke in reference to Sully’s obsession. But now she thought it was in reference to this rent in the bottom of the lake.
Indeed, the gash looked like the crooked smile of some great beast. Annja shivered again, but this time with excitement. She found her way to the big boulder, switched out the tanks and hurried back to the crevasse. Curiosity tugged her down...that and the feeling that Joe had come this way before her.
Into the Snakeship’s Maw, Annja thought as she descended slowly, swinging the light below, then across, where it easily illuminated the other side of the gash, showing more of the mix of smooth and jagged rocks. An earthquake might have been responsible; in fact, that could explain why the lake swallowed the mounds she and Bobby explored yesterday. An earthquake could have caused this fissure and changed the course of a river or opened up an underground body of water that subsequently came to the surface and created the lake.
She swung the beam up, catching the lip of the crevasse above her. Because visibility was so much better, she guessed that she was about thirty or forty feet down...at least a hundred feet below the lake’s surface. Bobby Knight had made a passing comment about deep lakes in Wisconsin, the deepest being north of here and going down to three hundred and fifty. He said divers loved it. Rock Lake was supposedly eighty-seven to ninety, but that didn’t take into account this apparently unmapped trench.
She fixed her eyes on a piece of stone that reminded her of a nose. Keeping the beam on it, she went down until the “nose” disappeared in the darkness. That put her down another forty. Holding on to a ledge, she turned the flashlight down again; still, it didn’t show a bottom.
How deep?
And how much longer should she go? How many minutes of oxygen did she have left? And the deeper she went, the slower she would have to surface to avoid complications. Finding a spot to keep her eyes on, she went down what she guessed was another forty. A fish swam past her, caught in the beam of her light. It was huge...as far as freshwater lake fish went. What was it?
It was light with dark bands running down its long body. Its cheeks looked to be covered with skin rather than scales, and when it swam above her, she counted eight pores on the underside of its jaw. Its tail was pointed, and all of it was longer than five feet. It clearly didn’t mind the cold temperature. Annja was shivering, however. It wasn’t close to ice water yet, but this wasn’t something she should stay in much longer. The fish twisted back and went lower, checking her out, slowly opening and closing its jaws as if it wanted to show her its row of teeth. The thing probably dined on small loons, she thought.
She pictured its image, trying to memorize it; she’d describe it to Sully. He’d know what kind it was. A fisherman’s dream was what it really was. Imagine hooking that—it had to top fifty pounds. Perhaps this one had led to Her Imperial Snakeship lore.
When it apparently tired of her, it climbed, and she felt the water move from the force of its tail strokes.
Down again. When she finally saw a bottom to the trench, Annja guessed she’d descended a total of two hundred feet. She should go back, no bail-out tank in case she’d lost track of time. She should...but once more she recalled the nurse’s line: “I would’ve taken more risks.” There were only two directions to go in, right or left, and she chose left. There was another of the pale striped fish with teeth, this one a little more than two feet long, a mere baby compared to the giant of a few minutes ago. It didn’t like her light and so quickly swam away. The bottom of the trench was sand the color of eggshells, and there was no garbage anywhere...no car parts or street signs.
She guessed she must have traveled fifty or sixty feet before the crevasse closed in front of her and she decided to turn back. But her beam touched on something different, and so she moved closer still.
It was stone, not the rock wall of the trench, but worked stone blocks that had carvings on them. She held the light close and saw the image of a sun...a Mayan sun.
Edgar, she thought, you were not chasing a wild goose. And where she thought the crevasse ended, it didn’t. There was a gap between the worked stone and natural wall. She could squeeze inside.
But that would wait for another dive.
“I would have taken more risks.”
But Annja wasn’t going to throw her life away hoping she could hold out for enough air to explore any farther. She’d come back down later, with all three tanks full and with an underwater camera. She would prove Edgar right and get him that place in the archaeological annals he’d so wanted.
Annja breathed shallowly on her return. She came up along the wall of the trench where she’d found the building, discovered rock overhead, a ceiling of sorts, and followed it until it opened...until she crawled out of the Snakeship’s Maw.
Her visibility dropped suddenly, from the thirty to forty feet she’d been enjoying to about five. Yet the water wasn’t silt filled, and there were no diatoms here. Visibility dropped even more; she couldn’t see more than an arm’s length in front of her. She refused to panic. It wasn’t the lake; it was her flashlight.
She hurried along the bottom, instinct kicking in. She found the wrecked pleasure boat and spooked the school of fish making its home inside. From here she found Bob the Boulder, where she’d left the empty tank. The light went out. Annja’s air was thin and she was seventy feet down. She’d be ascending faster than she planned. Still, she took precious time to unfasten the empty tank from the weighted bleach bottle, held her breath while she hooked the bottle to the buoy line so they could be tugged up together. Then she pulled herself along that line, taking occasional thin breaths, holding it as long as possible, moving higher.
She swore her lungs would fail her just as she broke the surface. Annja tipped her head back and took in gulp after gulp of fresh air, delighting in the feel of the sun on her face. She’d gotten so very, very cold down there.
Annja opened her mouth to ask Rembert for a hand up, but stopped herself. There was no sign of the pontoon boat anywhere.
A wave of panic washed over her.
Chapter 29
The two men—brothers—who’d been fly-fishing near the lily pads gave Annja a ride. They were calling it a day anyway, it being late in the afternoon. It had taken her that long to reach the pair—swimming to the shore, an onerous task lugging two tanks that she refused to leave behind, slogging through muck and a tangle of weeds that tried to wrap around her legs and make her a permanent part of Rock Lake.
