by John Lutz
Within ten minutes he was out on the lake, the boat’s motor smoothly chugging, pushing him before a gentle wake toward the spot where Cheryl Peterson had died.
The lake was calm today, murky and green beneath the late afternoon sky. Water slapped lightly at the upraised, flat bow of the boat as Wintone sat in the stern and held his course by his distance from the shoreline. He had changed to swimming trunks and a white T-shirt, and the sun felt warm on his bare legs, glanced off the water to pain his eyes.
When Wintone reached the spot on the lake that Peterson had pointed out the day before, he cut the motor and dropped his makeshift anchor. He noted by the length of played-out rope that the lake’s depth here was a good twenty feet. That would make his task all the harder, but still worth a try.
Wintone double-checked the diving equipment as he’d been instructed, then strapped the twin oxygen tanks onto his back. He fitted the rubber flippers to his feet, clipped the battery-operated waterproof lamp to his belt and clamped the air-hose mouthpiece between his teeth. When he was ready he turned his body and clumsily tipped himself backward over the side of the small boat, fearing for a moment that it might capsize as he sank into the cool, sun-shot water.
Surfacing, he held onto the side of the boat with one hand, sloshed a bit of water on the inside of his face mask, and put it on more firmly. Then he released his grip on the boat.
Beneath the surface it was dimmer than Wintone had imagined, and he moved through layers of coolness as he propelled himself downward with the flippers. He unclipped the underwater lamp from his belt and turned it on, aiming its beam downward, and found that he was almost on the lake bottom. He saw smooth mud, gently waving weeds, and on the fringes of the lamp’s beam an occasional gliding form. Wintone was surprised at the ease with which he could control his angled body with the flippers. His legs moving in a gentle, almost subconscious rhythm, he began to probe the cool and silent lake bottom with the beam of light. He swam surrounded by gloom, trying not to think of anything beyond the small area of illumination before him.
Wintone located his stone anchor with its almost vertical rope, and he used that as a reference point so he wouldn’t be circling to search the same area. A rusted tin can lay half-submerged in the mud within the beam of light. When Wintone picked it up, it decomposed in his hand to drift in bits back to the bottom. He continued to search, for what he wasn’t exactly sure.
He searched until darkness above him turned the surrounding water to black ink, then he surfaced. Feeling oddly out of his element in the air, he hauled himself awkwardly back into the boat.
That night Wintone rested poorly, shifting his weight constantly on the narrow cot. He never quite woke nor slept, and his mind wavered in that twilight, indefinable world between the two states. Around him towered darkness, and half-dreams—half-recollections of shadowy, gliding forms, some of them poignantly familiar, grotesquely human-shaped, impossible to see clearly. Occasionally he’d imagine he was drowning, and his breathing would take on a wheezing, almost panicky note, his chest heaving as if straining for air.
The next day he returned to the same spot on the lake and resumed his search, dropping from the building heat of morning into the coolness of dark water. The angle of the sun, Wintone discovered, had something to do with the amount of light in deep water, and his search was conducted in a gloom not so thick as the evening before. He was aware of more movement around him, at the edges of his vision, and this gave him even more of an uneasy feeling than he’d experienced yesterday. He tried to concentrate on his search, eyes fixed on the lake bottom as he swam in slow, deliberate patterns.
Something to his left, barely outside the beam of light, caught his attention, and he twisted his body and worked the flippers to propel himself toward the spot. Amid thick growth, slimy to the touch, was something that didn’t belong. Wintone reached into the depths of the gently waving growth and pressed his fingertips to a firm smoothness like cool flesh.
He drew back his hand instinctively, then reached in again and pulled free a leather boot. The boot’s condition made it obvious to Wintone that it had been in the lake for a long time. He released his grip on it and continued his systematic searching, ignoring everything else around him.
Wintone searched until noon, then he sat discouraged in the shade on the bank and ate the bacon sandwich that he’d packed. He rested awhile, sipping iced tea from his steel thermos bottle and gazing out at the lake. His oxygen tanks held only enough air for another twenty minutes submerged, and he decided to use those twenty minutes to search before giving up.
When Wintone was rested, he rose, capped the empty thermos bottle and returned to the boat.
Down again, into dimness and coolness, familiar in the pits of his subconscious. What had Holt said? “Our own primal past come to claim us.”
The gloom about Wintone darkened, as if above in the other world a cloud had intersected the sun.
Within five minutes on the lake bottom, Wintone found what he’d been seeking. He surfaced with it, placed it in a plastic bag, then struggled out of his diving gear and headed the boat toward the bank where the patrol car and trailer were parked.
On the drive back to Colver, he felt an excitement, an anticipation, that surprised him.
THIRTY-TWO
CRAIG HOLT WAS WAITING for Wintone in front of the office.
“I’d like to see whatever photographs Alan Greer’s camera contained,” he said to the sheriff. “I’ve checked with the State Police and know you had them developed.”
Wintone was still wearing his swimming trunks beneath his tan uniform pants, and his entire body itched either from too much sun or from something in the lake water. He wanted very much to get rid of Holt so he could shower and change clothes.
“You’re talkin’ like I don’t want you to see ’em,” he said to Holt, crossing to the file cabinets.
Holt reached for his pipe and drew it slowly from his shirt pocket, as if he needed a prop for security. “I thought you might let personal matters interfere with your job. I mean, Sarah and me … the fight.” His fingertips rose to dance tentatively over his still-damaged face.
“I told you once before,” Wintone said, “anything between you an’ Sarah’s no business of mine.” Wintone meant it now. He had no choice but to mean it. He removed the photographs from the file folder and laid them on the desk in front of Holt.
Before looking at any of the photographs, Holt counted them by their upper right corners. “Eleven photos? Is that all there was?”
“I returned some to Mrs. Greer. They were personal.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“They had nothin’ to do with Bonegrinder. If you want to see ’em, she took ’em home with her to Kansas City.”
“What about the negatives?”
“Gave her those too.”
Holt shook his head, then sighed to express tolerance for Wintone’s incompetence.
Piss on him, Wintone thought. “Unless there’s proof some crime’s been committed,” Wintone told him,” she could have demanded all her husband’s effects.”
Holt ignored him, stood examining the photographs one by one.
“The only one that’ll interest you is the last one,” Wintone said. “But you won’t be able to tell much from it.”
Holt took his time leafing to the last photo, but when he reached it his body was still and his long neck craned with concentration. “He actually photographed it …”
“Some part of it.”
“There doesn’t appear to be any fur,” Holt said, still staring at the photograph. “And the flesh appears dark, though that could be in the light or the development of the picture.”
“Kelly Greer described what she saw as bein’ dark,” Wintone reminded him.
“It’s strangely textured.” Holt was still studying the photograph. “Not scaly by any means, yet not exactly smooth.” He raised his eyebrows and looked at Wintone without raising his head. “
May I have this photograph?”
“I’ll have another one developed an’ you can have it,” Wintone told him.
Holt continued to stare at him for a moment, then the thick eyebrows dropped to conceal the eyes. “Good enough.” He placed the photographs on the desk.
Wintone picked up the photos by their edges, put them in their thick file folder and returned the folder to its steel drawer. When he turned, he saw that Holt was nervously tapping the shallow bowl of his unlit pipe in his palm, making a sound like dripping water tattooing something hollow.
“I’m glad you feel the way you do, Sheriff,” Holt said. He placed the pipe stem in his mouth, as if he could speak more comfortably that way. “And I shouldn’t have said what I did the other night. I was … well, drunk.”
Wintone didn’t feel like arguing with him and stood silent.
Holt extended his right hand. “No need for hard feelings on the part of either of us. There are winners and losers.”
“There are those in everything,” Wintone said, putting out his own right hand. Why shouldn’t he shake hands with Holt?
Holt seemed satisfied that he’d successfully manipulated Wintone and left. Wintone was glad the patrol car and boat were parked out of sight behind the building, and that he’d driven them there the back way, out of Holt’s vision. The last thing he wanted right now was Holt’s interference.
After locking the office door Wintone took his shower, carefully rinsing every trace of soap from his body. He applied nothing scented to himself, and when he dressed he put on a dark tan long-sleeved uniform shirt despite the heat. Then he went into the office and unlocked the gun cabinet.
Wintone had a theory now about Bonegrinder. “When everything likely’s been ruled out,” he recalled someone saying, “whatever’s left has to be true even if it’s unlikely.”
Unless it’s something else unlikely, Wintone cautioned himself. He got down his twelve-gauge Ithaca shotgun and loaded it with deadly deer slugs, solid projectiles fired by overcharged shells. Whatever else he needed and could supply himself with was in the trunk of the car.
Wintone left by the back door, unhitched the boat trailer and rolled it into the shed. He jiggled the padlock on the shed’s double doors to make sure it was locked. Then he got in the car and drove toward Helen Borne’s farm.
He stayed at the Borne farm only a few minutes, then drove through fast-lengthening shadows toward Big Water Lake. Through the trees along the lake road, he could glimpse the fire of the low sun on the water, and beyond that the red sky making its promise for tomorrow. The temperature was still in the eighties, and in the failing light there seemed to be a dusty haze hanging in the air.
It was just after sundown when Wintone parked the patrol car at the top of the rise, near the point on the bank where the Larsen boy’s death had occurred. From the car’s trunk Wintone got a large, wrinkled paper sack and a battered Coleman two-mantle gas lantern. One arm beneath the heavy sack, he hooked a finger through the wire handle of the lantern, slung his shotgun beneath his free arm and walked through the slope of trees down to the bank.
Within minutes the lake was almost completely dark, quiet under a half-moon. Wintone struck a match and held the flame to the mantles of the gas lantern until it spread its yellow glow. Black water lapping at the bank and the crickets’ endless scream: those were the only sounds.
Wintone set the lantern on a stump, carried something down to the mud bank outside the yellow glow of light and returned. His skin felt prickly with the heat, and he drew his damp shirt sleeve across his even damper forehead. Huge shadowed night moths were circling the lantern. Wintone leaned down, brushing some of the flitting forms aside, and twisted the lantern’s valve to off. In the closing darkness the scream of the crickets seemed almost enough to deafen. Wintone gripped his shotgun, checking by feel to make sure the safety was off, and crouched by the stump.
For over an hour Wintone hardly moved, staring out at the lake. Beyond the black and reeded water near the bank hung the yellow moon and a wisp or two of cloud. By day at this point he might have been able to see the distant opposite bank of the big lake, hazy tree-grown hills and stands of cedar. Now there was only blackness under the moon.
Wintone had an older jug of Claude Borne’s cider at his side, the hard cider. From time to time he sipped on it as the night gradually grew cooler, his right forefinger hooked through the jug’s glass loop. The cider helped him to be patient. This might be the first of many long and lonely nights at the water’s edge.
Wintone’s blood drew into him.
The crickets had suddenly stopped, at once. Now the only sound was the lapping of lake water at the bank.
As Wintone crouched listening, the time between the gentle lapping sounds became briefer and the lapping itself seemed to grow louder and to reach farther up onto the bank. From off the dark water came a drawn-out moaning sound, like wind through the low strings of a bow fiddle.
Wintone’s cramped legs began to tremble and he had to stand up for fear they’d give out. He felt suddenly exposed as if, even in the darkness, by standing he’d revealed himself.
The eerie moaning came again, closer, and Wintone’s fingers edged along cool steel to double-check the safety on his shotgun. Something dark, something huge, was moving just off the bank.
Wintone took slow and careful aim and fired.
Black water exploded with the blast of the shotgun, and the thing stood up against the night sky. Moonlight glistened off its sleek, shining body and off ivory fanglike teeth, and it moved toward Wintone as if the shot had only got its attention.
Wintone backed a step, heard the lantern clatter to the ground behind him. The glistening thing was moving fast toward him now, over nine feet tall and lurching with a grotesque, desperate waddle, as if unused to moving on land.
The shotgun in Wintone’s hands weighed a hundred pounds as he strained to raise it to his shoulder.
The gun held six more rounds, and Wintone used them all in as many seconds.
While the sound of the shotgun still throbbed in the air, the dark thing lurched to the side with surprising agility, crashed into the black woods.
Wintone stood trembling, not knowing if what he’d seen was real or illusion. He took a step forward, stopped, stared into the dark woods. What he’d shot was real, all right. And it had to be what he’d hoped.
He leaned down, still staring at the silent woods where the thing had disappeared, and picked up the cider jug by feel, took a long pull on it. His hands were calm enough now to reload the shotgun. He worked the shells in quickly, glancing around him, his senses alert. Then he relit the gas lantern and set out to examine Bonegrinder’s trail.
Wintone was reassured when he saw bright splatters of blood on the wet, bent grass. He stooped low, touched his fingertip to the scarlet wetness as if to confirm that the blood was genuine. His heart was still pounding, causing his extended arm that held the lantern to move slightly with each beat. He entered the woods.
A trail of blood and bent and broken tree limbs lay plain before Wintone. He knew that at such close range most of his shots must have struck. Bonegrinder had to die soon.
As Wintone moved head-down and cautiously through the woods, the splatters of blood became larger, merged into a glistening scarlet trail. The fear slipped from Wintone then, to be replaced by a hunter’s eagerness, a hunter’s lust. Energy surged into his body, and he lunged swiftly and noisily through the thick, wooded underbrush.
The bloody trail ended at a dark finger of lake water, narrow and overgrown with algae and reeds. His feet set wide, Wintone stood panting, peering out past the wavering edges of the lantern’s glow. The black-green water seemed disturbed, but in the darkness Wintone couldn’t see if the thick reeds had been parted or bent to reveal recent passage. There was no sound in the woods here, only a stillness as solid as the tree trunks.
Holding gun and lantern high, Wintone waded into the cool water.
Quickly the w
ater was well above his waist, and he was entangled in the tall reeds that not only hindered his movements but obstructed his vision. He parted the reeds before him with the long shotgun barrel as he waded. What felt like a large insect crawled across the back of his neck, and unseen things plopped into dark water to avoid him. He lost his sense of direction and was soon wading in a pattern determined by the ease with which he could move through shallower water.
Eventually the water was below his waist, then to his knees, and the growth of reeds became sparse, then disappeared. He was on the opposite bank.
Holding the lantern low, Wintone walked in a crouch, skirting the marshy line of the bank, ignoring the vines that tried to snake his ankles, the whiplike branches that brushed his face and upper body. The cold lake water had apparently stemmed Bonegrinder’s bleeding, at least temporarily. Or perhaps Wintone had lost the trail in the shallows. He could find no trace of blood on the bank, no sign of Bonegrinder’s exit from the water.
Wintone turned suddenly toward the tall reeds, toward the dark width of water he would again have to cross. Shadows and silence there.
Slowly, involuntarily, he moved backward with uncoordinated steps, up away from the bank.
Then, on the rough bark at the base of a tree, he saw a small drop of scarlet. He went to it and examined it, touched it and found that it was half-dried blood. With a whispering rush of air, he let out the breath he’d been holding.
Eagerly Wintone searched the woods in the area of the blood, but he found no other sign, no second marking of blood to establish direction. He extended his search to include a wider area, but without result.
For now, he would have to give up.
Turning away from the woods, Wintone walked along the bank until he reached a spot where the passage across looked easiest. His shadow trailing him like a wake, he held the lantern before him and entered the dark, still water.
