by John Lutz
Melanie was in the bow, slumped forward so she could drag her hand through the cool water. Cheryl sat in the middle of the boat, facing backward, toward Peterson. She was smiling. The breeze carried cool flecks of water against Peterson’s face as the flat bow struck the low waves, and everything seemed fine.
When they had traveled south for about twenty minutes, Peterson cut back on the throttle and steered in closer to the bank. The trees grew down to the water here, some of their trunks partly submerged and moss-coated. Thick growths of tall reeds covered much of the lake in near the bank, and green algae lay thick on the calm surface. The forest had a dense, almost tropical look, deeply shadowed, as if the darkest of nights lay just inside the line of trees.
Peterson steered out farther onto the lake, cutting the motor. The boat drifted in abrupt silence as he opened his large and many-compartmented tackle box and sorted through his array of equipment. He baited both Cheryl’s and Melanie’s hooks, then his own, and he cautioned against dropping anything or striking any part of the metal boat body, thereby drawing attention to their presence as the vibrations traveled down and out through the lake water.
They sat quietly then and fished. Peterson reached into the portable cooler, drew out a cold can of beer and sat sipping it as he felt the rising heat of the sun reflect off the metal boat. Occasionally he passed the cold can to Cheryl, who didn’t divert her eyes from the water as she sipped. She’d always been patient in her fishing.
An hour passed. Cheryl and Melanie had gotten a few nibbles, but only Peterson had caught anything, a small rainbow-hued sunfish worthy only of being tossed back into the lake. Melanie was beginning to squirm on the metal bench seat as she became bored. Just when she suggested finding another spot, her bright red-and-white cork bobbed violently—but she didn’t notice.
Peterson and Cheryl agreed to Melanie’s idea, and the three of them drew in their lines. Their movements caused the boat to rock and the sun-heated aluminum to creak.
After handing his half-full beer can to Cheryl, Peterson adjusted the throttle and yanked the starter cord on the outboard motor.
The motor coughed twice, didn’t start,
Peterson tried again, yanking the cord harder, with the same result. He unscrewed the gas cap, saw that the tank was almost full. Bracing his left foot against the boat’s stern, he yanked with all his strength on the starter cord and the motor sputtered its way to life.
The stern dropped as he steered in a semicircle to head farther south, keeping roughly the same distance from the bank. Peterson accepted the cold beer can from Cheryl and sipped on it, spilling some of the beer down his shirt front as the boat dipped and bucked on the lake surface. The cool liquid and the breeze of motion made Peterson realize how warm the sun had become; soon it would be too hot to fish from the metal boat.
Then he saw what he’d been looking for. A thick finger of land, overgrown with trees, extended about a hundred yards out from the bank. He pointed the raised bow of the boat toward the jutting land and yelled to Melanie over the snarl of the motor.
“We’ll let you out there for about an hour—see if you can show us up and catch more fish.”
She blinked behind her thick glasses and grinned acceptance of the challenge.
Peterson worked the boat in close to the bank, then tested the depth of the water with an oar. Carrying her fishing rod and the can of bait, Melanie waded to shore, glancing back as she leaned into water well above her knees.
“Be careful,” Cheryl called to her. “Fish right here and don’t stray!”
Melanie nodded and waved to them with the bait can as Peterson turned the bow back out toward the lake.
Peterson knew this might be his last opportunity to talk calmly and rationally with Cheryl, without interruption. When he got well off the bank he cut the motor, letting the boat bob in the warm silence. Cheryl knew what he wanted, didn’t bother to put her line in the water.
As they talked the boat drifted, beyond the point of ground jutting into the lake, out of sight beyond the deep-shadowed line of trees that seemed to lean into each other as if whispering green secrets. Peterson and Cheryl were heedless of where they were as they leaned like the trees toward one another.
Above the line of trees a large, solitary crow rose in the thick air, flapping its black wings awkwardly as if sending dark signals.
TWENTY-FOUR
“ANOTHER’N!” OLD BONIFIELD SHOUTED to Wintone.
Bonifield was trailing Frank Turper as they crossed the street to intercept Wintone, Turper with his head bowed and a sad, thoughtful cast to his small, dark eyes. Wintone stood with his arms crossed, waiting for the two men and feeling the dread settle into him, hoping he’d misunderstood what Bonifield had shouted.
They were both out of breath when they reached Wintone. Turper had been almost running ahead of Bonifield. There was dark spittle on Bonifield’s unshaven chin.
“You wasn’t in your office,” Turper said, breathing deeply and standing hands-on-hips. “Got a phone call sayin’ to find you, tell you there’s been another Bonegrinder killin’ …”
“Out past Lynn Cove,” Bonifield added. Muscles danced along his lean jaw as he worked his tobacco. “You best hurry.”
“Who did the phoning?” Wintone asked Turper.
“Somebody from the boat dock, didn’t leave no name. Just said nobody answered the phone in the sheriff’s office an’ to find you an’ send you. Said Bonegrinder had killed another.”
Across the street stood two men watching the obviously excited conversation. Wintone recognized the paunchy form and lumpy features of McKenna, the reporter from the Globe Dispatch. It came as no surprise to Wintone when he saw McKenna and the other man step into the street and walk toward them.
“That all the man on the phone said?” Wintone asked. “Nothin’ else?”
Turper shook his head quickly. “Nothin’ else.”
Bonifield spat. “You best hurry.”
“Hurry is what I’ll do,” Wintone said, starting to jog back to where the patrol car was parked. When he’d gone a few steps he stopped and turned. “See if you can keep this quiet for a while …”
But old Bonifield was already running with his quick-limping gait toward McKenna and the other man, who was wearing a brown business suit and carrying a camera.
As he drove over the lake road, Wintone kept a close watch on his rear-view mirror. Occasionally, through the plume of dust behind the patrol car, he glimpsed the grill and hood of a big light blue or gray car following him closely. The car followed him beyond Lynn Cove. Then Wintone ignored it, concentrating completely on the road ahead.
A sun-darkened man in a sleeveless white T-shirt was waiting for him on the road shoulder, waving his arms and moving out toward the center of the road. Wintone braked the patrol car beside him, rolling down the window while the car was still rocking in the dust that drifted to catch up with it.
“’Round that bend, Sheriff,” the man said, “then you’ll have to walk.”
Wintone drove forward a hundred feet and took the bend in the road slowly, stopping among several parked cars. He noticed the Greers’ white Volkswagen, one of its doors hanging open like a mouth gaped in surprise. As Wintone got out of the patrol car, he saw the big blue-gray car, a late-model Oldsmobile, parked behind him. McKenna was behind the steering wheel, and beside him in the front seat were the brown-suited man and Bonifield.
“I’m the one that phoned,” the man in the sleeveless T-shirt said. “Down this way, Sheriff.” Without looking back he moved off through high weeds toward the lake.
There were over a dozen people gathered on the bank, most of them wearing that expression common to scenes of violent death, a combination of pity, revulsion and fear. But Wintone saw no body. A green metal Jon boat was grounded at an angle in the shallows off the bank, a rope dangling from its flat bow.
Then Wintone saw the man standing off to the side. The others stole quick glances at him, as if they were emba
rrassed by his presence. He was leaning against a thick tree trunk, his arms thrown about his head to hide his face. There was mud on his shoes and pants legs, and he was wet but for splotches of dryness from the sun. The disheveled, dark hair that showed on the back of his head was wet, individual droplets glistening with jewel brightness.
“He’s the one you want to talk to, Sheriff.” Alan Greer had spoken. He was standing to Wintone’s left with his camera in his hand, the empty leather case slung about his neck.
Wintone nodded and walked over to the man beneath the tree, placed a hand on his shoulder and felt spasms of weeping play beneath his fingertips. The man’s back expanded as he breathed in to gain control of himself and stood up straight with his arms limp at his sides.
“Melanie?” he said, his eyes darting.
Wintone withdrew his hand and stepped back.
“She’s okay,” someone said from the group of people that had moved with Wintone toward the man. “She’s over here.”
Turning, Wintone saw an older woman comforting a girl of about ten who appeared to be in shock.
“Best if you went and phoned Doc Amis,” Wintone said to the man in the sleeveless white T-shirt. Then he turned to the man who’d been supporting himself against the tree, a medium-height, regular-featured man in his late thirties, eyes red-swollen and moist in his fleshed-out but still handsome face. “Melanie your daughter?” Wintone asked.
The man nodded.
“She’ll be taken care of,” Wintone said. “What’s your name?”
“Peterson … Bill Peterson.”
“What happened, Mr. Peterson?”
The man’s eyes widened but seemed to focus on nothing. “My wife … it killed Cheryl …”
“What killed her, Mr. Peterson?”
“Bonegrinder, is what.” Old Bonifield spoke out from where he was standing next to McKenna.
“Work hard at bein’ quiet,” Wintone advised him.
“We were out there, in the boat,” Peterson said, pointing toward a distant part of the lake.
“The three of you?”
Peterson shook his head. “Just Cheryl and I; thank God we’d let Melanie out on the bank to fish. We were just drifting, talking, when we heard a sound, like someone swishing their arm through the water … Then something surfaced next to the boat, on Cheryl’s side …”
“Somethin’ like what?”
Pressing his right fist into his thigh, Peterson seemed to seek adequate words, find none. He spoke anyway, haltingly, in a hoarse whisper. “It was dark-colored … with a long neck, but thick … more like a lizard than a man … but somehow like a man only bigger. Cheryl screamed and hit at it with an oar, and something like a clawed flipper came up out of the water and slashed her arm and shoulder. Then she was gone … just gone without another sound over the side of the boat … and the lake was quiet again …”
“What did you do then?” Wintone asked.
“I called for her, waited for her to surface. But she never did. I started the boat’s motor and got out of there. I should have dived in after her … I should have done that.”
“No, Mr. Peterson, not many would’ve.”
The older woman was slowly walking the young girl up the rise away from the bank, to wait for Doc Amis by the road. Wintone watched them till they disappeared among the trees, then he turned and looked out at the lake, at the fraction of it that was its surface. Almost touchable silver ripples of sunlight glimmered there as if projected from below. These things couldn’t happen, didn’t happen. Yet people were dead and an explanation of sorts was demanded.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” a sobbing Peterson said helplessly. “We hadn’t been getting along … we were going to separate. Then this morning we decided to try to make things work out. It’s as if certain things aren’t meant to be …” He began to beat at the unyielding tree trunk with the flat of his hand, his eyes clenched shut. Wintone caught his right arm on the backswing, held it near the shoulder. Another man stepped forward and gently took Peterson’s other arm and they moved him away from the tree, held him until his body stopped quaking and he was breathing evenly. His strength had left him.
“C’mon away from here an’ we’ll talk,” Wintone told him.
“Mr. Peterson,” McKenna said, “who saw Bonegrinder first, you or your wife?”
Peterson appeared surprised, a man roused from a dream. “Why, both of us at the same time, I guess …”
The man in the brown suit had been taking photographs; he was turning a knob on his camera while staring at Peterson. The camera made a soft, ratchety sound.
“Did either of you say anything when you saw it?” McKenna asked.
“She screamed,” Peterson said. “Cheryl screamed. But it made noise when it broke the water and we both saw it.”
“Enough now,” Wintone said. He gripped Peterson’s elbow and guided him away from the bank.
“Mr. Peterson!” McKenna said again, but Peterson didn’t answer.
Wintone had Doc Amis drive Melanie into Colver, so Peterson could be questioned in the patrol car without the girl being present. As Wintone pulled out onto the road and accelerated, he passed Holt’s canvas-topped Jeep going the other way, saw Sarah sitting in the passenger’s seat. No doubt Holt would fall in behind the other cars trailing the patrol car back to town.
Wintone didn’t press Peterson during the drive into Colver; there was little point. Peterson repeated exactly the short and incredible horror story he’d told at the lake. Then he sat with his head bowed, his body limp, and seemed to lapse into a sad withdrawal where he could be alone with his grief. His damp and muddy clothes gave off the sharp scent of the lake.
After parking the patrol car behind Doc Amis’s, Wintone led Peterson in through a rear door. A minute later Sarah came in the front way, looked at Wintone briefly, then went to tend to the girl. The sheriff left Peterson with Doc Amis, after making sure the grieving widower knew Wintone wanted to talk with him later.
“What now, Sheriff?” old Bonifield asked, as Wintone was trudging back to the patrol car.
Wintone didn’t answer, but caught himself wondering if there was some way he could arrest Bonifield.
“Mr. Bonifield asked a fair enough question,” McKenna said, leaning against the sun-warmed dusty fender of the patrol car.
Wintone knew the reporter was right. He stood and backhanded the perspiration from his forehead and eyebrows. “Now we search for the body,” he said. “And I examine the boat.”
There was no shortage of body-searchers, but Wintone was left alone with the metal Jon boat. He worked his legs into his black rubber wading boots, then moved slowly through the still water to where he could grasp the half-inch rope that lay snaked from the boat’s bow.
Empty, the light, flat-bottomed boat drew very little water, and Wintone towed it up onto the sloping bank easily, feeling the metal bottom skim soft submerged mud. Stenciled in black on the side of the boat was the name of a rental dock located farther north on the lake.
The boat’s metal was almost too hot to touch from time spent in the sun. There was a large, light gray tackle box beneath the middle bench seat, one oar lying in the inch or so of water that sloshed in the bottom, two fishing poles and a fiberglass rod and reel, its line baited with a yellow-feathered lure. In the stern of the boat was a Styrofoam cooler containing a few unopened cans of beer resting in the still-cool water of melted ice.
Wintone examined the painted surface of the boat. There were the usual nicks and scratches, but none of them appeared fresh. The inside of the large tackle box revealed only the wide assortment of lures and fishing equipment that might be the property of any avid fisherman.
After carrying the contents of the boat to the patrol car, Wintone loaded them into the trunk to be returned to Bill Peterson. Then he walked back down to the lake, stood away from the bank so he could be in the shade, and looked across the blue-green water to where Peterson had said the thing had surfaced and att
acked.
There were three boats out there now, moving in slow circles and dragging the depths with grappling hooks. They weren’t being too methodical, but Wintone didn’t know if the men in the boats were afraid or overeager. Even from this distance he could see the rifles in their arms, the tenseness of their bodies. As if to mock their search for Cheryl Peterson’s remains, a light, directionless breeze played over the lake, momentarily rippling the bright water as if to reveal the darkness below.
Winton turned away from the lake and walked through ankle-clutching weeds to the patrol car. After returning to Colver and phoning the rental dock to tell them where they could recover their boat, Wintone joined the search for Cheryl Peterson’s body.
She hadn’t been found when darkness fell, nor had she when darkness fell the next night. Wintone suspected then that the body wouldn’t turn up for some time, if at all. Either it was still on the dark lake bottom or had drifted to some reed-grown or brush-secluded spot near the bank. The less responsible newspapers were discussing the obvious, more gruesome possibilities. Wintone wondered if Mayor Boemer and some of the others regretted now all the publicity they’d sought for Colver.
Peterson had become the focal point of the press. He was cooperative at first, repeating his brief story so they could embellish it and speculate on it. But as the endless stream of questions became more personal and probing, the strain on Peterson began to show. Wintone heard that there had been arguments and antagonism, and that now Peterson was trying to avoid the press.
At the end of the week, when he came out of the afternoon heat into Wintone’s office, the strain of his predicament seemed to have drawn Peterson’s face thinner, etching deep lines about the corners of his mouth. He tried a smile as he nodded hello to Wintone, then moved halfway between the door and the sheriff’s desk. His hands were unsteady and he slipped them into his pants pockets with exaggerated casualness.
“Do you think she’ll ever be found, Sheriff?” he asked.
