by Jeramy Gates
“You’re right!” I said. “You’ve got good eyes, for an old fart.”
“Uh-huh. And I can walk in a straight line, too. Even at my age.” He snorted at his own cleverness, poking fun at my gimp leg. I ignored him. I pulled a hard reverse stroke on the right oar, bringing it about so that we could glide in towards the dock without getting caught under the bushes.
“Wait!” Diekmann said. “Hold it right here!”
I pushed back on the oars, trying to slow our movement. Diekmann moved to the side of the bench, and turned the sonar so I could see the screen. “Right there,” he said, pointing at a reddish blob outlined in yellow. “It’s right under the bow.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the right size. I don’t know what else would be down there the size of a Chevy. Look at the shape.” I leaned closer, holding the oars up out of the water.
“It does seem rectangular,” I said. “Solid, too. Could just be what’s left of the old dock.”
“Judging from the condition of those old posts, and the growth of those bushes, I’d say that dock has been underwater a long time. I seriously doubt it would be down there in one piece.”
I stared at the blob of color, wondering if we’d really found it. It almost seemed too easy. That is, aside from the cold, the rain, and my throbbing leg. On second thought, it wasn’t that easy at all. And we still weren’t sure we’d found it.
“Could be anything,” I grumbled. “An old boat, watering tank, maybe even a pump of some kind.”
“We won’t know until we get down there.”
“I’m not diving down there,” I said.
“No need. Tomorrow morning, I’ll find out who the new owner is and ask permission to bring a dive team.”
“What if he says no?”
“I’ll call the judge and get a warrant. I can do that, you know.”
I leaned over the edge of the boat, pushing the oar straight down into the water as far as I could reach. The handle disappeared. I continued, pressing my arm into the waves all the way past my elbow. The cold water lapped at the hull as I stretched my arm ever deeper into the chilly depths.
I couldn’t help wondering what sort of creatures might live in there. Nothing dangerous, I told myself. Then again, even if there wasn’t anything dangerous in there, the whole reason I was there was to find a dead girl’s car. That was creepy enough in itself.
I was in almost up to the shoulder, barely hanging onto the end of the handle, when I felt the oar hit a smooth hard surface. Diekmann heard the sound and raised his eyebrows.
“That sounded like metal,” he said.
“Maybe.”
A current under the water twisted the oar in my fingertips, and it slid out of my grip. It came up floating next to us. I lunged for it and caught it just before it drifted out of reach. The boat rocked precariously, and Diekmann grabbed at the gunwales, steadying himself.
“Dammit, boy!” he said. “I’m too old for a midnight dunking.”
“Don’t kid yourself; this lake’s no colder than the rain.”
“All the same, I think I’ll stay up here, if you don’t mind.”
I ignored him. I pushed the oar down into the water again, feeling around, searching the depths for that mysterious surface. Once again, I found a smooth, hard plane about twelve feet below the waves. When the oar made contact, I moved it back and forth to verify that the object was indeed flat, and as large as it seemed. It was.
It could only have been the roof of Becky’s car. I couldn’t think of anything else that size or shape that might be down there. I lifted the oar out of the water. I stared at Diekmann, ignoring the rain beating down on my head and the cold water soaking up my sleeve and around my collar.
“We found it.” I said, hardly believing my own words.
Diekmann smiled. “Congratulations. Now let’s get out of here before we get hypothermia or worse yet, capsize this tug and end up down there with it. I’ll call in a dive team in the morning.”
“What about the sale?” I said. “Are we going to need a warrant?”
“Probably.”
I rowed us back to shore, and Diekmann helped me pull the rowboat up onto the embankment. We didn’t bother trying to reload it onto the Suburban. We could do that in the morning. We’d both had our fill of the rain for one night, and I was on the verge of hypothermia for the second time in a single day. We climbed into the Suburban, cranked up the heater, and headed for home.
The ladies had already gone to bed when the sheriff and I got back to the farm. Not surprising, since it was almost three a.m. Diekmann took pity on me and went home to sleep in his own bed. I had a feeling he wanted to go shower and get some dry clothes anyway.
I found Tanja fast asleep in the guest room upstairs. I stripped my wet clothes off and left them hanging in the bathroom. I was about to crawl into bed with her, when I noticed a slip of paper on the floor. It appeared to have fallen out of her jeans, which she had hung over the back of a chair by the window. Thinking it might be important, I scooped it up. I was just going to toss it on the chair, but something about it caught my attention. It didn’t appear like just any piece of paper. It had the look and feel of a check, folded in half.
Without a second thought, I opened it up. To my surprise, I found out that was exactly what it was. A check for twenty-five hundred dollars, signed by my grandmother and made out to Tanja and me. Instantly, my head was swimming. I tried to summon up some reason that my grandmother would be giving us money. To start a trust fund for the baby, or perhaps she wanted to buy a share of our business. I came up with half a dozen hair-brained ideas, trying to consider anything but the obvious, which was that Tanja had borrowed money to pay our bills.
That idea made me sick to my stomach. It wasn’t just that she’d done it behind my back. That was bad enough. There was also the fact that she’d been hiding money problems from me. I had known our savings was nearly tapped out for a while, but for some reason it never occurred to me that it might be gone. I couldn’t accept that. Not this close; not when we finally had a case to work on and a chance to put our business on the map. I couldn’t accept the idea that we might be losing it all, so close to breaking free.
I found myself lying awake in bed for hours, staring up at the ceiling, trying to think about something else. It wasn’t easy. Sooner or later, my mind always came back around to that check, and every time I started to think about it, I started to get angry. I wanted to blame Tanja at first. After that, the two of them for being so secretive about it. In the end, it all came around to me.
I always let Tanja handle the bills. I’m no good with numbers. Doing all those calculations is incredibly frustrating for me, so I hand that part of our responsibilities over to my wife. It seems fair enough. After all, she’s not the one crawling under the car on a rainy Saturday morning to change the oil, right? A relationship is about sharing responsibilities.
No matter how I argued it out in my head, in the end I knew it was at least as much my fault as hers. I was the one who’d bought the house. Heck, I was the one who’d run out and traded in the old Jeep for a Suburban the same weekend I found out Tanja was pregnant. At the time, it had seemed like a good idea. The Chevy was a year-old loaner car, very gently used with low mileage and all the options. I got it for a steal. But even though the payments were low, they were still there, sucking the money out of our savings month after month.
Of course, I had expected to have a better income eventually. Who doesn’t? The problem was that I hadn’t counted on the depth of the economic recession, or the devastating effect it would have on the California economy. I had no idea at the time how long it would be before we found work. I certainly never would have guessed that we’d end up starting our own business.
All of that was my fault, too. I was the one who’d insisted Tanja leave the FBI to find something safer, even though I was still unemployed at the time. I’d spent money as if I had it, which is about the dumbest thing
a person can do, whether he actually has it or not. I was so angry and frustrated with myself that I wanted to think about anything else, just so I could get to sleep. This brought me back around to Diekmann and Grandma, and left me wrestling with a completely different set of emotions.
Ten years. It had been ten long years since Grandpa died, and I had no right feeling as if Grandma should hide herself away from the world and wait for death. Logically speaking, I knew that. But it was this feeling deep inside that was bothering me. The feeling that something might happen to her the way it had to my parents.
That was silly, of course. I knew my parents had chosen to abandon me, and that Grandma would never do that, but I still had some bizarre subconscious fear about the whole thing. I felt like Grandma moving on with her life would mean the end of our relationship. It was a stupid, childish thing, but I was worried that with a new romance in her life, Grandma wouldn’t be there for me anymore. That I’d be alone, just like I had been as a child.
I just needed to suck it up. Diekmann was a good man. He’d been like an uncle to me for as long as I could remember. The problem was that every time I thought of him with Grandma, I also thought of him laughing and talking with Grandpa, because that was how it had always been. Only it wasn’t that way anymore. Grandpa was gone, and now two lonely, aging people had found a chance to be happy together. I had no right to put myself into the middle of it.
This of course left me feeling stupid and angry all over again.
At some point, I finally drifted off to sleep. Tanja woke me at seven thirty, and it seemed like I’d been out for about an hour. I rolled over to go back to sleep, but Tanja said: “The Sheriff called. He said a diving crew will meet us in an hour.” My eyes snapped open.
“I’ll get dressed!”
It didn’t matter how tired I was, there was no way I was going to miss the removal of that car. I threw on my damp clothes and shoveled down a plate of breakfast. I apologized to Tanja and Grandma for coming in so late the night before, because I didn’t have the courage to apologize for what I should have. At that point, neither one of them even knew I’d seen the check. I decided that conversation was best saved for later, when we had more time.
Within the hour, Tanja and I were back at the reservoir. Diekmann was already there with a handful of deputies and a tow truck. The dive team had just finished dragging a cable down to the car. I grabbed my cane, which we had picked up from home on the way through town, and limped over to see him with Tanja at my side.
“I see the new owner didn’t give you any trouble,” I said as we greeted him.
“No. He’s not even here. His agent contacted him back in New York to get permission for the search.”
“New York?” said Tanja.
“Half the land around here is owned by people from other states,” Diekmann explained. “Having a vineyard in Sequoia is like having a beach house in Malibu, or a ranch in Montana. It’s a trinket; a status symbol.”
“But this isn’t a vineyard,” she said.
“Not yet,” said Diekmann. “But the permits are already on file. By the end of the year, this’ll be a ten thousand case winery. The vines will be in the ground before spring. They might even get their first harvest within two years.”
As we spoke, a news van drove up the hill and parked at the southern end of the lake. Two workers began setting up equipment outside the van while a reporter hurried over in our direction, followed closely by a cameraman. The reporter was a young blonde woman, very attractive and very overdressed for the tromp along the muddy banks of a reservoir. She smiled as she joined us.
“Hello, sheriff. Nice to see you again.”
“Morning, Mary. It didn’t take you long to get out here.”
“No thanks to you. We had to hear about it on the scanner. Do you mind if we do an interview?”
“Let’s wait and see how it goes,” Diekmann said. “Right now, we’re not even sure if this is the right car… Mary, meet Joe and Tanja Shepherd. They’re the investigators who cracked the case.”
Mary shook hands with us. “Do you work for the sheriff’s department?”
Tanja explained the situation, and told her that we were private detectives.
“You’re a married couple, and you’re private investigators?” she said. “Fascinating! Do you think we could arrange a televised interview for one of our programs? I do a weekly spotlight on local businesses. It might give you some great publicity.”
Tanja glanced at me, and I shrugged. I’m no fan of being in the limelight, but I was willing to do just about anything to give our business a jumpstart. Anything short of standing on the corner, dancing with a sign. There are some things a man just won’t do. Not many things, but some.
“Sure, why not?” Tanja said.
“Great, here’s my card.”
Mary turned her attention back to Diekmann. “Sheriff, can I do a live spot right here, while they pull the car out?”
“It’s a free country. But I’ll warn you; this is going to be a muddy mess in a few minutes.”
“I’ll take my chances,” she said with a grin.
We stood back a few yards. Mary positioned herself between the lake and the camera, and began to talk. “Hi, I’m Mary Sinclair of Channel 7 News…”
The tow truck driver activated the controls on the back of his truck and flipped a switch. There was a whining sound as the winch drum began to roll. The steel cable went taught and the water along the shore began churning with bubbles.
Mary finished her introduction and stood back, allowing the cameraman a clear shot as the bumper of the car came into view. Within a few seconds, the tail end of the car appeared. I knew at first sight that it was our ’69 Camaro.
“That’s it,” I said, glancing at Diekmann. He nodded quietly.
Slowly but surely, the windows crested the waterline, and a minute later the hood appeared. The once bright red Camaro was now green with moss, and rusted halfway to nothing. A flood of water came pouring out of the fenders and rocker panels as the car slowly moved up the embankment. The windows were a haze of mud and slime, and plants were growing on the roof and hood. The tires refused to roll, but the power of the tow truck’s winch would not be denied.
The truck driver disarmed the winch, allowing the car to rest as the water gushed out. Mary and the cameraman went to high ground. I waited for the tsunami to subside and then hurried down to the vehicle, carefully placing my weight on my cane as I slogged through the mud.
I pulled the passenger door open and a wave of muddy water spilled out over my pant legs. I peered inside, doubtful that any evidence would have survived all those years underwater. I pulled my head out and gave the sheriff a dark look.
“You’d better come see this,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Sheriff, there’s another body in here.”
Chapter 7
Tanja
Men. Who do they think they are? They don’t have to deal with hormones or periods, they can’t even imagine what it’s like to carry a baby inside them for nine months. They rarely cook, clean, or do any laundry or really anything useful at all. Except for changing the oil. They sure let us hear about that. Then they hand us the checkbook and tell us to make it all work. As if the ability to use a calculator somehow turns a woman into a financial wizard. Like we should be able to solve all of the world’s financial problems by waving a magic wand.
When it doesn’t work out, whose fault is it? You guessed it: It’s the woman’s fault! But I’m getting ahead of myself…
When I got up that morning, I had no idea that Joe had seen the check from his grandmother. I hadn’t been hiding it from him. In fact, I’d planned to tell him about it as soon as we got home, but things kind of snowballed. Grandma asked me to help her make some biscuits and gravy (Joe’s favorite), which I did. As soon as that was done, Sheriff Diekmann called and told us all about their adventure at the reservoir. I put him on speaker so Grandma could listen. By th
e time the conversation was over, we were both cheering over the good news. The case was closed, or at least close to it.
By then, I’d completely forgotten about the check. My mind was on other things. I got Joe out of bed, we had a quick breakfast, and we headed back to the reservoir. The rest, as you know, is history. We found Becky’s car, but that’s not all we found. The second body inside the car was male. It was impossible to determine much more than that right away.
The coroner -a balding man in his forties with thick glasses, named Henry Halverson- made an examination of the victim and the vehicle’s interior. He didn’t bother looking for fingerprints or blood splotches, because five years underwater would have washed away or corroded any evidence of that nature. Instead, he focused on trying to find hairs and fibers, or other evidence that may have survived the years of submersion.
He carefully analyzed and documented various articles of clothing, jewelry, and whatever else he found on the corpse. The condition of the body made the task difficult; it was little more than a skeleton draped in tattered shreds of cloth. One thing he noticed right away was that one of the ribs had been broken.
“This was most likely a fresh injury,” Henry said. “Most people don’t go walking around with a broken rib.”
“There must have been a struggle,” Joe said.
“Possibly, or it could have happened when the vehicle crashed off the dock. I suspect something else, though.” He held up the broken piece of rib, and pointed to the break at the end. “Note the shape of the fracture, and the superior positioning? This indentation and splintering indicates that something struck the bone sharply. This was not a large, blunt object.”
“A knife?” said Joe.
“Possibly. I need to examine the bone under a microscope. The skeleton has been degrading in the water for years, so the bone is smoother than it used to be. I might be able to tell more after my examination.”