by Mary Logue
The car was about thirty yards off shore. When Claire got about ten yards away from the hole, she heard Scott shout behind her. She turned her head and lifted up her ear flaps to hear what he was saying.
“Get down, now. All the way down. Then inch forward.”
She understood why she needed to prostrate herself on the ice, but she felt very vulnerable doing so; the ice gave way, she would be in the water headfirst. But the ice seemed quite stable beneath her. She slid herself forward with her feet, pushing off with her toes.
When she got within five yards of the car, she could see something in the interior, some large shape. She pushed herself a little closer and, for the first time, felt the ice shudder beneath her. It had to have weakened where the car had gone through.
She heard a siren coming down the road and guessed it was the fire department. Thank God. Those guys knew what to do; ice rescue was one of their specialties.
Claire pulled out the flashlight and shone it into the car. She stared and saw what she had feared to see: a white hand reaching up to the ceiling of the car, floating in cold water, and a white oval underneath it that might be a face staring up at the air.
She couldn’t resist. She pushed herself forward another inch. It was an inch too much. The ice cracked beneath her, and the suck of the coldest water she had ever felt pulled her down.
She held her breath and felt the water engulf her face and the top of her body. She thrashed around and tried to grab onto something with her hands, but there was nothing there but cold water. Her bottom half was still on the ice. She tried to stroke with her arms, pushing down in the water, to raise her head up out of it.
At the instant when she didn’t think she could hold her breath for a second longer, she felt a jerk around her waist. Then, like a fish, she was pulled back up onto the ice, and like that same creature, she turned over on her back and tried to catch her breath, mouth open, stars in her eyes.
Stephanie walked into the bar and saw that Lee was in her favorite booth. She waved and walked over.
“What happened to you?” Lee asked, looking at her face.
“Oh, nothing. Just fell down. Slippery ice.”
“Man, you must have fell right on your face. Yow.”
“I’m pretty clumsy.” Stephanie looked around the bar. “Have you seen Buck?”
“He was in earlier, but then he left. Haven’t seen him since. You supposed to meet him?”
Then Stephanie saw the little dog sitting at the end of the bar. “Nothing definite. What’s Snooper doing here?”
“Huh. Now that’s odd. Buck takes him everyplace. Wonder if he just forgot him. Maybe that means he’ll be back.
“He’d never leave Snooper.”
Stephanie walked over and picked up the dog, who immediately washed her face with its soft tongue. She had never had a dog in her life, and they usually scared her, but Snooper was different. He seemed to understand what you said to him as he stared up with his deep brown eyes.
“Where’s Buck?” she asked him, and he stopped licking when he heard the name and looked at her.
“Buck?” she repeated.
The dog squirmed in her arms. When she set him down, he ran to the door of the bar, so she followed him. He scratched at the door, and she let him out, but once out in the parking lot, he ran around and then peed on a rock at the edge of the parking lot.
She said, “Buck,” again, and he sat down and stared at her.
Stephanie reached down and picked the little dog up again, rocking him in her arms. “I don’t have a good feeling.”
The pager went off just as he was standing on top of his barn, trying to do a pirouette. Clay Burnes slapped his hand down hard on the bedside table, hoping to find the pager before it sang again. On his second thwap, he found it, as his wife turned over and groaned.
“Don’t wake up,” he mumbled to her. “It’s for me.”
She pulled the covers over her head, knowing what would come next.
Clay launched himself out of bed to make the call. He went into his office and hit the button set to dial the sheriff’s department.
“Yeah, Burnes here.”
He was told he was the third EMT to call in, and when he heard where the ambulance was going, he told Lorraine he would meet it at the scene. He only lived a mile from the lake.
Clay wanted a cup of coffee bad, but knew he had no time to do anything but throw on clothes and go. He tried to be out the door within minutes of receiving a call. His best time was under a minute. He looked at his watch: 12:15. He had been asleep for less than two hours.
He pulled on the jeans and sweatshirt that he kept at the ready in a pile next to his bed. He patted the top of his wife’s head. She didn’t even stir.
In his kitchen, he grabbed a Coke out of the fridge. Car keys in hand, he went out the back door and climbed into his Ford pickup.
He was on the road before he thought about peeing. Damn. It would have to wait. All the dispatcher had told him was the place and that a car had gone through the ice, possibility of someone inside.
There wasn’t a vehicle on the road as he wended his way down off the bluff. Good thing he could drive these roads in his sleep.
As he came down Highway 35, he could see the lights of the fire engine and various sheriff’s department cars lined up at the lakeshore. He was glad to see that the fire chief was there already. They were the ones with the ice rescue training; they had done a course out on the Chippewa River a year ago. EMTs were always told to stay on shore, to stay out of the burning house. They were never to put their lives in danger, because then they wouldn’t be there to aid the survivors.
The ambulance pulled in right behind him. Ladders were being laid down out onto the ice as Clay walked down to the shore. Deputy Steve Murphy was talking to the fire chief, and Clay heard him say that Watkins was the incident commander. The woman deputy must have been first on the scene. She was walking around with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and he wondered if she had gone into the water. She wasn’t afraid to go out on the line, you had to give her that.
Clay liked her. She took charge, which some people had a hard time doing. He had worked with her on a car accident, and she had kept things running very smoothly. His wife had wanted to know all about the new woman deputy when he came home after the accident. He had ended up describing her as “intense, but calm.”
“Anyone out there?” he asked as he walked up to Watkins.
“Yeah, but I think he’s a goner.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve been here five minutes already. God knows how long he was under before I got here. We’ll just have to wait and see when the fire chief can get him out.”
Clay stood and looked out at the back of the car sticking out of the water. Suddenly he felt like ice water had been poured down his body. “Whose car is that?” he shouted.
“I don’t know,” Watkins said.
“I think I know.”
She looked at him, waiting.
“It’s my nephew’s. His name is Buck Owens.” Clay hated the words coming out of his mouth.
“I’m so sorry.” Claire took a step toward him, but then stopped and pulled her blanket tighter around herself.
Clay looked out at the car sticking out of the ice. “I don’t get it. He would never do something so dumb as driving out on the ice. What am I going to tell my sister? That was her only kid. She loved him like he was a saint. He wasn’t that bright, but he was a hell of a nice kid.”
Dr. Lord drove up in his rust-fringed old Volvo station wagon. He had a tweed cap pulled over his bald head and a down vest worn over a flannel shirt. Stepping out of his car, he appeared to be moving rather slowly. Maybe his arthritis was acting up again. He didn’t mention it often, but Claire knew it affected his hands sometimes while he was working.
She was surprised how glad she was to see him. As if he were a dear old friend at a party full of people she didn’t know, she ran up to him and said, “Thanks for coming down at
this time of night.”
“Indeed,” he said, smiling. Then he stared at Claire, wrapped in the white flannel blanket that the ambulance crew had given her to dry off with. “This the new style?” he asked.
“I went for a swim.”
He shook his head, looking her up and down. “I’d advise against it this late in the year.”
“Advice taken, but it’s a little late,” Claire said as she brought Dr. Lord over to where the body was laid out by the firemen. “I’m glad you could come out. I wanted you to see the body before it was moved again.”
“We oldsters don’t sleep that well. A little break in the middle of the night is not unusual. What happened?”
Claire walked him up to the covered body of Buck Owens as they talked. She explained what she knew. “Car went part of the way under the ice. His head was tied to the headrest, so he was under water. He was probably dead before I even arrived on the scene. But only minutes. They did try to resuscitate him, but it did no good.”
Claire reached down and pulled the sheet back. Dr. Lord slowly lowered himself down on his knees beside the wet and sprawling body and put on a pair of latex gloves. Deftly he checked over the body, looking into the eyes, the mouth, the ears, taking the temperature by putting a thermometer far into Buck’s mouth, even though he told her it wouldn’t be very accurate.
“I’m sure the water brought his temperature down fast. I know it did mine.”
“This kind of ice water can lower the temperature quickly. I have some charts back at the office that will tell me how quickly.”
“He’s carrying a little extra weight. Would have kept him warm a little longer.”
“Yes. He looks like a strong young guy,” Dr. Lord commented.
Claire filled him in on what she knew of the man. “Buck Owens. Twenty-five years old.”
“This is where he was tied?” Dr. Lord pointed to the ligature marks circling Buck’s thick neck.
“Yes—as I mentioned, when I found him, he was tied to the headrest in his car with a red rag. The rag had been wrapped several times around his neck. So when the car went into the lake, he couldn’t get out of it.”
“I’d say he put up one hell of a fight to get free, pardon my French. Somebody pretty big must have done this.”
“Or he was taken completely by surprise.”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you think he was dead when he went in the lake?”
Dr. Lord gently moved the head back and forth, staring at the marks on the neck. Then he reached up for a hand from Claire. She pulled him up, and he patted her hand in thanks. “Claire, Claire, a little patience.”
“We’re about to take some photos.”
“Yes, let’s do that and then move this body out of here. I have seen enough. His extremities are beginning to freeze. None of us need to be working out in this frigid weather.”
“Cold as a morgue.”
“A comment like that from you?” He smiled at her. “What time might I expect to see you tomorrow?”
“When would be convenient?”
“Late afternoon would be perfect. Come a little early, and you can watch me at work.” He waved and walked away. The proper gentleman, Claire thought, no matter how dirty his hands might be.
The first time she had come to watch him do an autopsy, he had been a little put out, never having had to perform for the sheriff’s office before. But now she felt that he looked forward to her company. He was the only medical examiner she had known who seemed to still regard the body he was dissecting as a human being. He treated them gently, almost reverently. But then, unlike the medical examiners in the Twin Cities, he maybe only got one or two bodies a month to examine.
The tow truck was pulling the car out of the water behind them. Claire turned and watched. The truck started right on the edge of the frozen lake and chugged slowly down the dirt road, pulling the car out of the lake like an icebreaker.
“Just take it into Durand for tonight,” Claire had told the tow company. The crime bureau could send someone out in the morning. And she had a present for the lab. She felt it in her pocket: the glasses that had been on Buck’s face, sealed into a plastic bag. Maybe they would get lucky and pull a print from something in the car or even from the glasses.
Scott came walking up. “I went and checked out the bar. There were a couple of drunks helping the owner close. The owner said that Buck had been in there tonight. Didn’t stay long. Owner thought some guy he didn’t know had come in, but couldn’t remember much about him except that he was big. Said he thought it was funny when Buck left his dog.”
“Dog?”
“Yeah, I guess Buck owned some kind of little dog, and they always let him bring it into the bar. When Buck left, he didn’t take the dog with him.”
“Strange. He must have thought he was going to return. Where is the dog now?”
“The bartender said his girlfriend took it home.”
“Oh, and who is that?”
“All he knew about her was that her first name was Stephanie. He said they had come into the bar together a few times.”
Claire stopped when she heard the name. Stephanie Klaus? What might this mean? “Did he describe her?”
Scott looked back over his notes. “Didn’t say much. Not a very talkative guy for a bartender. Said she was a young blond.”
Being blond didn’t narrow the field very much in Wisconsin. “So Stephanie and Buck came in the bar together?”
“He didn’t think so. The way he remembered it was that Buck came in and left, and then Stephanie showed up. Said she seemed a little upset over finding out that the dog had been left there all alone. Said she just took the dog and left herself. This was right when they got the news about the car going in the lake.”
“This bartender sounds like one sharp guy.”
“Just doing his job.”
There was an easy way of finding out if this Stephanie was the Stephanie with the bruises. Go over to her house and see if she had the dog.
5
RICH woke up and turned over and looked at the glowing dial of the clock next to the bed. Three-twenty. Claire was almost three hours late getting home from work. Not good—it could only mean trouble. Usually the night shifts were very quiet, and she often got to leave early. She had surprised him on more than one occasion as he slept in the recliner chair in front of the TV.
He flopped over and tried to go back to sleep. He counted sheep, then switched to pheasants, then turned on his back and counted his breaths. When he got to two hundred, he decided to get up.
He could always call the station. They would be able to tell him where she was, what was going on, but he would feel like a worrywart if he did that. Claire had warned him about what her life was like. She had told him that it was a lot more normal now that she was working for a sheriff’s department, but she said that her hours were erratic and her time was not always her own.
“We might plan to do something, and I’ll end up having to cancel. Or you’ll want to go to a movie, and I’ll have to catch up on some work. Or you’ll want to tell me about your day, and then I’ll need to tell you about mine, and it won’t always be fun listening.”
Rich felt that in the beginning Claire had almost tried to scare him off. He knew a lot of that had been about her own fears—learning to trust someone again, learning that not everyone you loved would die on you—but some of it had been about her own indecision about being in a full-blown relationship.
He was beyond ready to be with someone. He had waited a long time to find a woman like Claire, almost giving up hope that he ever would. It scared him that he felt as if he would do almost anything to keep her.
Turning on the light next to the bed, he watched the shadows gather in the corners of the room. Slowly, trying to make no noise, he swung his legs out of bed. He had left an old flannel bathrobe at Claire’s, and he pulled it on and tied it around his waist. He walked softly out of the room and down the hallway, not wantin
g to wake up Meg. He had found her to be a light sleeper.
Down in the kitchen, he filled the teakettle with water and then pulled open a drawer next to the stove. Postum with a little warm milk. That should send him back to sleep. He lifted the top off the cookie jar. Two Oreos left in the bottom. Perfect. He made his hot drink and brought his snack out to the full-season porch, where the TV sat perched on top of an orange crate.
Claire had splurged this fall and bought a satellite dish, which he had installed. Satellite was the only way they could get decent TV reception down in the river valley. Since then he had become slightly addicted to the Weather Channel.
He sat down in the recliner and set his hot drink on the window ledge next to him, the two cookies piled up next to his cup.
His mom would meet Claire in a few days. He wondered how that would go. His mother had not cared for his first wife; she called her a little tart, in no nice sense of the word. He hadn’t felt like explaining to his mother that he liked the slightly overt sense of sexuality that Tina had displayed. And unfortunately his mother had been right in the end; maybe Tina had been a little bit too much of a hot tamale for him.
Claire, too, could be quite sexual, but it was more controlled. And this sense of restraint in her was all the more appealing to Rich. When he touched her and got her warmed up, he felt as if he was seeing a part of her that few men had ever seen. He felt very lucky.
But he wondered if his mother would pick up on that. She had a kind of radar for a willing woman.
The other thing he worried about was how strong both of the women in his life were. They were independent, opinionated, mouthy women. They might really hit it off, or they might not. Thanksgiving would tell.
Rich sipped his drink, ate one of the cookies, and then turned on the Weather Channel. Blue-and-pink pulses of light moved across the United States. A perky blond woman said that skies would clear overnight in Florida. Hurricane season was well over. He had enjoyed watching those storms move across the Caribbean, so far away.