“Chilling,” I said. “Not stewing. And of course not. Yours is in the fridge. Yours and yours alone.”
Kathi beamed at me, her Kenny Rogers beard rippling. “Thanks, Lexy.”
I would have blown her a kiss, but I needed both hands. This seventy-two pack of Blue Moon seemed much heavier coming back up than it had when I was letting it down at tea-time. My muscles were starting to judder.
“Is it a keg?” Todd said, coming and taking hold of the rope with me.
“A box of bottles,” I said.
“It weighs more than a box of bottles.” Todd pushed his flannel sleeves up and took a better grip. “Sister Mary, get in here and pull.”
Roger fitted himself in behind Todd and put his big hands on the rope in front of mine.
“The cardboard will be waterlogged,” I said between gasps. “That’s a bit of extra weight right there.”
“No way,” Todd said, straining. “It must be stuck on something.”
“I don’t think so,” said Roger, “it’s moving. It’s just. So. Heavy. Let’s rest a moment.”
“Can we help?” said Kathi.
“Not with these babies,” said Barb, patting her Dolly falsies.
“And I don’t want to break a sweat and melt my complexion,” said Noleen.
“We’ve got it,” Todd said. “Here it comes. I can see … ”
He went silent. And he stopped pulling. I leaned over to see what the problem was, buckling my axe and dislodging it from my chest wound. Under the water, floating just deep enough to be semi-visible in the murky water was … not a box of beer bottles. Not a box of anything. It wasn’t square. It wasn’t squat. It was long and rounded and waving at one end. Literally, it was waving at one end, because it was a human arm, with a human hand wafting back and forward in the water, its chunky ring glinting.
“Happy Halloween!” Noleen shouted, looking over the side at my elbow.
“Oh!” I said, all my breath leaving me in a huge rush of relief. “Good one! Did you put that down there? It’s horribly realistic.”
Todd and Roger were heaving again, working at it like a couple of old seadogs on a pirate ship, except for the chinos and the wimple.
“Not me,” said Noleen. “And not Kathi. Barb?”
“Not my style,” said Barb. “I hate pranks, to be honest.”
“Della?” I said.
“I honour the dead today,” Della told me. “I don’t make jokes.” She gave me a sheepish smile. “I am a bad immigrant too.”
“Well, whoever it was has excelled,” I said. It was more than just the arm now; the head was coming up to the surface and the mask was horrendously real looking. The hair was a bit of a let-down—bright orange fun-fur with a tartan tammy on top—but the face was perfect. It was mottled and bloated, the eyes dull and the mouth opening to show two rows of teeth, fillings and everything, and a tongue waving in the water just like the hand had.
He was on the surface now. Todd and Roger were panting but managing to keep him steady. All those hours in the gym had made them a fine pair of physical specimens. Todd leaned even further back to take more of the strain and said, “Look and see how he’s attached, Roger. Let’s see if we can let him down really gently so he doesn’t float off downstream.”
Roger nodded. “But first,” he said. “Barb? Della? Why don’t you take Diego trick-or-treating up in The Oaks? You can borrow my car.”
“You think Barb’s neighbors will welcome Diego on their front stoops?” Della said. Barb’s house was in the ritziest bit of Cuento, and some people there can be mucho mean to little kids from down near the slough.
“No way,” said Barb. “We’ve come for a party.”
“And it’s a school night,” Della added. “We’ll stick close to home.”
“Get him out of here, Mom,” Todd hissed. “This isn’t a prank. It’s a … It’s not a prank.”
“Dios mio,” Della said, under her breath, looking over the railing at the floating shape. “Diego, papi, let’s go, go, go! Ice cream! Chocolate ice cream! Extra sprinkles! Let’s roll.”
“That’s that for Halloween then,” I said, as we watched Diego scamper down the houseboat steps on his little teddy bear paws and jump onto dry land. “It’s the day of the dead after all.”
Two
W hat do you want to do with the beer?” It was the uniformed cop I knew as Mills of God. He wasn’t the brightest candle-stub in the pumpkin, but he was basically decent in a clueless kind of way and he looked genuinely pained at the sight of the seventy-two pack disintegrating on my porch, still with a soggy rope tied round it.
“Isn’t it evidence?” I said, thinking that whether the dead guy had washed downstream or plopped in where we found him, he had ended up folded round the rope like a hairpin, hugging the beer with all four of his sodden limbs.
He was gone now, thank God. The twenty minutes he’d spent on my porch after a pair of police divers got him up had been enough to make me rethink every item in my Halloween buffet. There was nothing cute about severed fingers and skewered eyeballs, because death was no joke, and there was nothing much about infected toenails or loaded tampons to soothe our lurching stomachs either.
“Of course it’s evidence,” snapped the detective in charge. Molly “Mike” Rankinson had been no fan of mine before tonight, and Dead Beer Guy wasn’t helping. “Write a receipt and load it,” she spat at Mills of God, then she stamped off into the corridor leading to the back of the boat. “Follow me, Ms. Campbell,” she threw over her shoulder.
I followed her. She was headed into my consultation room, squelching over my pale carpet in her mud-splattered boots, and dropping down onto my plushy sofa in her slough-scummed trousers.
“Oh come on!” I said. “Can I at least put a cover under you? Jeez!”
“Business that bad?” Mike said. “Can’t afford a little dry cleaning?”
Business, as I was sure she knew very well, was far from bad. My counselling practice had started huge (more of which very soon) and was still expanding. Like one of those home-science doo-berries where you pour a cup of stuff on a heap of other stuff and it swells into a discoloured, misshapen mountain of foaming sludge the size of Texas.
“So,” Mike said, flicking open her notebook and letting the elastic go with a crack like a rifle shot. “When did you put the beer down?”
“Three o’clock,” I said. “And it hit the bottom. He wasn’t in there then.”
“Thank you, Nancy Drew.” I said nothing. “And then you were on the boat from then till you hauled him up again?”
“Yes, and there’s no way he was on the boat.”
My little floating kingdom was a quiet place to live if you didn’t count the symphony made up of the motel A/C wind section, the thumping bass from the generator, the jazzy percussion of toilet flushes, and the inevitable profanity-strewn arias that accompany family road trips on the kind of budget that leads to nights at the Last Ditch Motel.
So not that quiet, really. But I didn’t need to worry about marauders creeping up on me and me not hearing them, because I could feel them. I felt the dip and surge on deck whenever anyone stepped onto my boat. Noleen, who was solidly built and not light on her tippy-toes, caused enough backwash to spill a cup of coffee. Nor could Kathi, slight and stealthy, hope to surprise me. Even Diego, playing at spies with his midget trench coat and outsize spyglass, telegraphed his approach. And the one time a possum got cocky and reckoned my deck-edge herb garden looked snackable, he lived to regret it. I had told Mike that already. She didn’t believe me, but when she tested me—stepping on and off at both ends while I stood, sat, and lay all over the house, not looking—I passed with a perfect score.
“And you’re sure you don’t recognise him?”
I sighed.
“Sometimes the shock gets in the way and then, hours later, witne
sses think it over and realize it’s their lawn guy. Or the trainer from their gym. Or the valet from their parking garage.”
I opened my mouth to say I haven’t got a lawn and even if I did I wouldn’t have a lawn guy, and I don’t belong to a gym and even if I did I wouldn’t have a trainer, and I haven’t got a garage and even if I did I wouldn’t have a valet parker. And if I had a dog I wouldn’t have a walker, and if I had any money I wouldn’t have a financial adviser, and if I played golf I wouldn’t have a caddy, and, basically, I might be the European around here but I wasn’t the one with a bevy of minions to rival the court of the Sun King.
What I said was: “Positive. Never seen that face before in my puff.”
That face. It was still stamped on the inside of my eyelids two hours after they’d zipped him into his bin bag and taken him away. It was a nice face. More laugh lines than frown lines. Exuberant eyebrows left to go wild instead of being Quintoed till they looked like slugs instead of caterpillars. A gap between his two front teeth that probably signalled devil worship to the dentition-sticklers of these parts but which struck me as friendly.
“Poor guy,” I said. “He was probably drunk, eh? How do you drown in a slough this shallow unless you’re bladdered? And why else would you wear a Jimmy wig?”
“A what?”
“The tartan bunnet and orange rug combo. Jimmy wig. No sober person has ever worn one of those things.”
“The Tam O’Shanter, you mean? The hat?”
“Although, I suppose it’s Halloween. But he didn’t have a costume on otherwise.” He’d been wearing jeans and a blue sweatshirt with Asic trainers. Mr. Generic America.
“So this hat,” said Mike. “This ‘Jimmy wig.’ It’s significant to you?”
“It’s … ” I shrugged. “I suppose so. Football—soccer fans wear them to internationals. It’s the fan uniform. It’s like shorthand for ‘Scottish.’ He didn’t look Scottish to me, though. Too tall. Too fit. And plus the white socks, you know? If he hadn’t been wearing the old ‘See You, Jimmy,’ I’d never put him down as a compatriot.”
“He wasn’t,” said Mike. I frowned. “He wasn’t wearing the hat.” I frowned harder. “It was attached to his scalp with a staple gun.”
“Ow!” I said, helplessly wincing.
“Post-mortem.”
“Oh!” I said, my shoulders dropping again. “Hang on. What? How could someone attach it post-mortem? He, what? He drowned and someone hauled him to the surface and put a hat on him then let him sink again?”
Mike could not have looked more thrilled to deliver the next bit of news if she’d hired a pair of oiled hunks to flank her and set off confetti guns. “Oh no,” she purred. “He didn’t drown, Lexy. He didn’t fall in the slough and drown. He was shot before he hit the water.”
I gulped like a fish. I knew it even though I couldn’t see myself. I couldn’t see myself because mirrors don’t have any place in counselling consultation rooms, because if clients could see themselves ugly crying, they’d even-uglier cry.
“Why didn’t I see the bullet hole?” I asked when I finally got a lungful of air to use up on stupid questions.
“Because the gun was pressed against his belly, under his clothes,” Mike said.
“Belly?” I said. “Murder?”
“Bingo,” said Mike.
“Poor guy,” I said again. “What’s his name?” She hesitated. “I won’t tell anyone. Before you inform his family, I mean.” She hesitated some more. “But yes, you’re probably right to do it by the book.”
“I don’t need your blessing,” said Mike. She truly could wring an insult out of anything. “I’m not telling you his name because we don’t know his name. Why else would I ask if you knew him but not give you his name? He’s got no ID on him.”
“A mugging gone wrong?” I said.
“Not so many muggers these days travel with their own staple gun and novelty hat.”
“Duh,” I said. “Sorry.”
“So,” said Mike, snapping her notebook closed again. We were done, it seemed. “You moving into the motel for the night? We can put you on a thirty-minute drive-by. Or, if you’re staying here, I can get a uni to sleep over.”
“What?” I said. Thirty-minute drive-by sounded illegal. “Is ‘uni’ another word for co-ed?”
“What?” said Mike, quirking an eyebrow at me.
“Don’t quirk your eyebrow at me,” I said. “I don’t see why you need a word for a student who happens to be female anyway. Co-ed! It’s like the fifties.”
“A uniformed officer. I was trying to offer some protection,” Mike said. “For all the thanks I get.”
“Protection … for me?”
“Seemed like a good plan,” said Mike. “That guy has been dead four days at least, to my untrained but experienced eye. Then someone staples an ethnic headdress to him and winds him around the beer rope of the only member of that ethnic group in town. You think this isn’t about you, Lexy? Really?”
I felt my blood drain. Mike leapt up and cupped the back of my head gently in her hand. I thought she was going to kiss me.
“Put your head between your knees,” she said, shoving me down. “If you faint, I’ll have to bring you to the ER. And I cannot face the ER on Halloween.”
“It never even occurred to me,” I said, talking to my kneecaps. “I’m so used to seeing Jimmy wigs! They’re everywhere in the tourist-tat shops in Edinburgh. It never struck me that seeing one in Cuento was weird.”
“But you’re sure you didn’t know the guy?” said Mike. “Even though it looks way personal that he ended up right in your backyard?”
“Didn’t recognise his face, his hair, his teeth with the gap, his clothes, his ring, his—”
“What ring?”
“The ring,” I said, sitting up again. “His finger ring. A big ugly clunky thing. Middle finger of his … ” I screwed up my eyes and tried to picture it “ … right hand. You must have noticed the ring.”
“There was no ring on the body,” Mike said. “Maybe it was a bottle-cap on the slough bed? Or a reflection on the water.”
“It was a ring,” I said. “On his finger. Ask Roger and Todd. They must have seen it too. It must have dropped off as he was coming out. It’ll be on the riverbed. You could put a magnet on a bit of string and fish it back up again.”
“We’ll tell the diver to look out for a ring when he goes back down to sweep the scene in the morning,” Mike said. Then she glared at me. “Do not put a magnet on a piece of string and go fishing.” I blushed. “And what do you want to do about protection?”
“I’ll sleep here,” I said. “With a uni. Thank you. If I go to the motel, the press’ll be crawling all over this place and me not here to stop them. They have atrocious boat etiquette at the Cuento Voyager, you know. No way they’d stroll into some landlubber’s home, but I couldn’t keep them off when—well, you know. Then.”
“Oh, I know,” Mike said. “But I can’t believe you’re complaining. You should have paid them commission.”
I didn’t know where to begin to explain it to her. Anytime I’d tried to tell anyone that there’s more to business than turnover, they scoffed. I spent half an hour once telling Noleen that work wasn’t just money, that there was personal satisfaction and professional pride too, and she snorted so hard she hurt her uvula.
The thing is that, at the close of my last adventure—the one that brought me to Creek House—I had a certain amount of press attention. I’d helped to solve a murder, kind of, and I’d inherited a historic property. And then I’d been fined by the police department and the fire marshall and the zoning board for all kinds of misdemeanours and shenanigans, none of which were my fault.
So I was feeling pretty goddam hard-done-by when the Voyager reporter came sniffing round, and I’d had a small glass of sherry or two and he seemed like
a nice guy and I’d never spoken to journos in real life before, as opposed to watching Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman being them in films. Turns out they’re much more Nixon than Bernstein, the scumbags, and this one stitched me up and hung me out to dry.
The interview was finished by the time all the juicy stuff came out. At least I thought so. We were having a drink, and he was having a smoke, and we were just talking. I was talking about the long con that keeps thriving populations of therapists in business year after year and keep the self-help shelves of Barnes and Noble groaning.
“We’ve all got room for growth!” I remember saying very clearly, because most of the sounds were nice and soft. “It takes two to sink a partnership!” I slurred, much less successfully, what with all the esses. “Pile o’ shite!” I shouted. “We don’t all have room for growth. Some of us are fine as we are. It takes two to keep a marriage afloat. If one of you stops, if just one of you starts cheating or lying or gambling or throwing punches … doesn’t much matter what the other one does, does it? And it’s not innocent. Oh no! It’s not an unfortunate error, all these battalions of MFTs—or is that the ultimate street-fighting thing? No? Right. All these battalions of MFTs saying ‘work on communicating,’ ‘meet halfway,’ ‘learn to express your needs.’”
I should have shut up at that point. When I saw that the reporter was scribbling notes, I really should have buttoned it.
“It’s built-in complexity to stop it working and stop you noticing it doesn’t work. Like the tax code. See? Keeping all the CPAs off the streets? Say your scumbag of a husband is banging his ex-wife, just for instance. You can say, ‘infidelity is the effect of unhappiness; not the cause’ and ‘let’s explore where trust began to fray’ and three years later at eighty bucks an hour twice a week you can still be poring over all your needs and how to express them and whether you’ve identified the halfway meeting point and what’s getting in the way of communication, can’t you? Eh? Can’t you?”
The reporter looked up and nodded.
“Thank you,” I said. “You’re right. I agree. But if all these MFTs were to can the crap once and for all and say, ‘Ho! Shitbag! Stop banging your ex-wife.’ And then the next week say, ‘Ho! Shitbag! Banged your ex-wife again?’ it’s much more clear cut, eh no? And then the honest MFT could turn to the wife and say, ‘Lexy, pal, this one’s a dud. Just nail the coffin lid down and walk away.’”
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