Ben parked his SUV and climbed out. “What’s up?”
One of the men turned, but Ben could see it, too, the mud-covered roof of a van. It had drifted against a fallen tree, trapped in the waving limbs. Only the roof stuck out; water swirled past it almost to the tops of the windows. “Someone’s car got washed away? Hello, Abe.”
“Ben. Good to see you again.” The stocky fellow snickered and added, “In a non-competitive environment.” They shook. Abe Higgins. Seeing him took Ben way back.
One of the others asked, “You two know each other?”
“Casually,” Ben explained. “Players on rival football teams. I quarterbacked the victorious Pineville Eleven, and he scored the only touchdown for the Fillmore Eagles.”
The former tight end grunted. “Crooked refs, or we woulda won. I called the highway patrol. We’ll need a tow truck to winch it out.”
“Or something bigger. If it’s full of water it’ll weigh a ton. Anyone been out to see if someone is in it?”
“Not yet. We just spotted it half an hour or so ago. Probably been in the water since the storm, think? Maybe came downriver before the water rose too high to let it go under the bridge.”
“Hm.” Ben shook his head. “The patrol office hasn’t received any reports of someone going off the bridge.” But then, we are now on a need-to-know basis. We might not have needed that tidbit of information.
“Think the river current could have moved it clear down from Baker’s Ford?”
“Floods do strange things.”
A state trooper stopped on the other side of the river and got out. Ben knew him. He flipped his radio to local. “Hey, Leroy? I’m surprised you’re still here.”
Leroy Larrimer radioed back, “So am I, but there’s still a lot to do here. Another week at least, the boss says. Your tow truck is on the way.”
“We’re glad to have you.” Ben meant it, too. He turned to Abe. “We should go out there. If there’s anyone in it, we’ll need to call in forensics.”
Warren nodded. “I’m way ahead of you, hotshot. Called a fishing buddy; he’s bringing his inflatable. Uses it for walleye fishing. Billy can catch walleyes like you wouldn’t believe. You want fresh walleye, just ask Billy; he’ll get you some in no time, in season or out of season.” He stared at the roiling brown water awhile. “Never seen the river this high or for this long.”
“Me neither.” Why did that submerged van hold such fascination for him? Ben was not sure, but he couldn’t pull himself away. Crazy. Or God speaking?
Behind them, a dark red pickup left the road and came lurching over to the riverbank. The bulging sides of an inflatable boat stuck out of the bed. The driver got out. Were he from the Deep South he would be the perfect Good Ole Boy, complete in overalls. He grinned hello to Abe, grasped his boat by a built-in loop in the bow, and hauled it out. It plopped to the ground with a bouncy fwupp, and he dragged it down to the water. He returned to the truck bed and lifted out a small electric fishing motor.
From across the river, Leroy radioed, “Hey, James. You know this river?”
Ben thumbed his radio. “I was born and grew up here. This was our playground.”
“So did I,” said Abe. He looked at Ben. “Wanna go out with us?”
“In a word, yes.” Ben whipped out his cell and pushed the speed dial for the office. When Jenny answered, he told her what he was doing and where.
She responded, “A drowned vehicle. We haven’t had any missing persons calls. If there’s someone in it…” Her voice trailed off.
“I’m going out with some others in a Zodiac, so I’ll let you know. It’s closer to the other bank than to our side, hung up in a sifter. Highway patrol is there.”
“Be careful!”
He was going to say, Yes, Mother, but he didn’t. With the river running this fast and high, there was in fact a strong element of danger.
Billy mounted his little trolling motor, and Abe and Ben climbed in. They each took an oar, Abe on the right (starboard, Ben knew, but no one used port and starboard around here) and Ben on the left. The puny electric motor screamed, maxed out, but it could not keep the inflatable going in the right direction. Grimly, Billy turned and headed upstream, hugging shore on this side. “You guys steer.”
He sure knew his boat. He kept going against the current, close to shore, for what Ben would have thought was way too far a distance upstream. Then he headed out toward the middle. The motor howled, trying unsuccessfully to make way upstream. The best it could do was slow their downstream slide. As the inflatable strained to go forward and instead drifted back, Ben and Abe dipped their oars, twisting them, plunging them, sculling, keeping the front end headed upstream, edging the boat closer to the other shore. Ben was sweating profusely and his shoulders ached. If they missed the van they’d have to do this all over again, and he—
“Got it!” Abe yelled triumphantly. He was leaning over the side, gripping the van’s roof. “The driver’s-side window’s wide open. Slipperier’n snot! Gimme your anchor, Billy!”
He hooked the anchor into the steering wheel, and the inflatable and van were firmly attached to each other. “Now what?” He looked at Ben.
“Sit and breathe awhile. That was some heavy lifting.”
Two highway patrol cars were parked on the bank now, and Ben could hear the tow truck coming. Billy cut his motor and handed Abe a big sponge. Warren began wiping mud off the driver’s side of the windshield.
Ben grabbed onto the van’s door frame, fighting to keep the Zodiac steady. “See anything?”
Abe shook his head. “Not yet. Billy? Got a flashlight? Too dark to see in there. Once we get it closer to shore and get a door open, we can drain out some water.”
“Hey! Can one of you hook the winch on?” Larrimer called.
“Not without getting real wet and muddy,” Billy grumbled. “Be nice if they’d call for a diver. Prob’ly didn’t.”
Ben felt an urgency that matched his fascination. What was going on here? He yelled, “Gimme the winch!”
Larrimer paid out twenty feet of cable, arched back, and tossed with all his might. The winch hook thunked on the van roof and Warren grabbed it. He passed it to Ben.
Ben wrapped the other end of Billy’s anchor line firmly around his wrist, a casual and probably useless safety gesture, and slid into the muddy, clammy water. The current pulled on him, but he worked his way forward. Why was he doing this? Wait for a diver, stupid. He couldn’t wait. He managed to hook into the front bumper. The truck winch groaned, made all the weird, grinding noises winches make, but it drew the van a third out.
Ben waved stop! He repositioned the hook around the axle and sloshed up onto the bank. Larrimer reached out a hand and pulled him to standing. Together they watched the mud-coated van rise by jerks out of the river, an inert, slimy, unthinking monster.
“We’ve not had any missing persons reported.” Ben watched the monster come to a soggy halt, dragging Billy and his boat along with it. “You?”
Leroy shook his head. “None here. You border patrol guys would be seeing more unidentified persons than the rest of us.”
“True, we do, but they usually don’t come floating down the river to us.”
“Gift-wrapped in mud.” Leroy scowled. “I got a bad feeling about this.”
“Sure hope there ain’t anybody in there.” Billy stared rapt at the van.
The ugly-sweet smell of putrefaction dashed Billy’s hopes, his and everyone else’s. Abe the former football player managed to wrench a back door open. He leaped aside as water cascaded out, then Larrimer looked inside.
Pale and shaken, he stepped in beside Ben. “Three bloated bodies. Nothing worse than dead bodies soaked in water for days. Nothing. I’ll call in forensics.” But the other patrolman was already on the radio to his headquarters.
Ben walked over and used Billy’s sponge to clear off the license plate. “Want to run it or shall I?”
“I can do it.”
Ther
e was nothing in the whole wide world that Ben wanted to do less, but he crossed to the open door to look more closely, and in the process learned that he could be soaked to his armpits in muddy water and his flashlight still worked. Larrimer peeked over his shoulder.
He turned away before he lost his stomach.
Larrimer mused, “Two Asian women in the backseat still have their seat belts on. Looks like the third tried to climb over the seat back into the backseat. Why would she do that? No driver.” He scowled at Ben. “Speculations?”
Ben’s head was as upset as his stomach. But the picture became clear. “Remember the pictures of that Sendai tsunami, and the cars floating?”
“Can’t forget it.” Larrimer took on an aha! look. “They floated slanting, nose down; the motor weighed the nose down. This van was carried away in the flood. It floated for a short time but slanting down in front. She was climbing into the backseat because water was filling up the front. So she must have been the driver.”
“I doubt it. If she rolled down the window, she’d escape that way. I vote for a snakehead and his load.”
Leroy wagged his head slowly. “The driver rolls down the window and gets out before it sinks, leaving the women behind. No, Ben! Can anyone be that callous?”
But Ben was overcome with a dozen emotions at once. The timing was about right. The van floated down from the direction where he found Dawn. And yes, a man who would force a woman to abandon her tiny baby would be that callous.
Was one of those bloated, rotting women Dawn’s mother?
Chapter Seventeen
Ben watched Esther lay aside her pen. She was signing printouts, stacks of them.
She asked, “So, why call a town meeting right now?”
“Because everyone is passing the buck. The city fathers turned the hospital needs over to the county and the county said gee, sorry, they already have a regional hospital so it is not their problem.” Ever since he heard the news, Ben felt like shaking a few people. He, they, everyone understood that the storm had cost the town far more than was budgeted for the year for cleanup. More than for three years. If it weren’t for the National Guard shouldering much of the work, and border patrol taking some of it, they’d be so far in debt they’d never crawl out. The county and state both promised to assist with the cleanup, and FEMA would come in eventually.
But when? Ben thought of the help Minot had received for all their flooding. Slow response and basically inadequate. Repairs would take who knew how long, and winter was already breathing down their necks. There was an urgency here that most places wouldn’t have.
Esther heaved another sigh, her third since they’d started talking. “Bill Aptos certainly lit a short fuse when he made his threat at Chief’s funeral.”
Ben nodded. “True.”
“Is this meeting sanctioned, or is it closed?”
“I talked to Lars over at the bank and he assured me that it’s sanctioned and open. It’s a meeting to get ready for the town meeting. You want to go with me?”
“Yeah, about like I want a hole drilled into my head.”
Ben knew that feeling. “Sorry, can’t help you there, but you understand our medical needs far more than I do. Besides, this is a planning session. Mr. Aptos suggested we do it this way so there can be no one screaming about being railroaded.”
“Someone will scream no matter what, you know that.” She stacked the papers, rapped them on edge to line them up, and laid them in her wire inbox. “Do you realize how many planning meetings I’ve been to in the last few years?” A sigh again. “Yes, I’ll go.”
“Good, let’s go get hamburgers and eat on our way.”
“We could walk.”
“No idea how long this meeting will take.”
“Who’s going to be chairing this planning meeting for the future planning meeting?”
“I guess Lars will. He’s the mayor, after all.”
Esther shucked off her lab coat and tossed it in the hamper, then pulled her purse from the drawer she kept it locked in. “Let’s go. Your truck or my car?”
“Let’s drop your car off at your house so it’s not left in the parking lot. Someone might think you were here alone.”
She wagged her head. “That druggie jerk sure set us all on edge.”
“And yet, people still leave their doors unlocked.” He stepped aside to let her to go ahead of him and held the door for her. He glanced around the lighted parking lot as Esther locked up. The debris had been cleared off, and if it weren’t for the broken-off tree stumps you wouldn’t have known all they’d been through. “Have you heard anything yet on the DNA samples?”
“No. Three weeks minimum.”
He opened the driver’s door on her mini and waited for her to get in. “Meet you in front of your house.” Here they’d been talking like easy friends when all he wanted to know was what she was going to do about social services and Dawn.
So ask her. Why was it so hard to obey that suggestion? He had no answers. He climbed into his own rig. Just spit it out.
“So, the drive-in or the café?” he asked a couple of minutes later as she buckled the seat belt on his truck’s passenger side and he eased back onto Main Street.
“Café, or do we have time for a sit-down?”
Ben checked the clock on the dash. “Half an hour. We can tell them to put a rush on it. However, at the drive-in, no one will stop by to comment or ask questions.”
“Oh, never thought of that. The drive-in.”
“Good.” After they had their order, Ben drove to city hall and parked toward the back of the lot so they could eat in peace.
Ask her. No, I don’t want to destroy this meal. Or mess with my mind for the meeting. With that decided, Ben took a drink of his chocolate milk shake. No one made shakes as good as drive-ins did, and especially this particular one.
He wallowed a fry around in ketchup and popped it in his mouth. “You thought about getting an artist’s rendering of the finished hospital made?”
She frowned. “How can we do that before the plans are drawn up?”
“I’m thinking if there was something concrete to show people, they would begin to believe it really might happen. People buy what they see, not what they hear about. That’s why physical evidence weighs so heavily in court. Wouldn’t even have to be the actual one, but something they could see. I was thinking of having the drafting class and art department at the high school do this for us.”
“What a great idea.” She laid her hamburger down and reached for her drink. “We could come up with a rough draft. I’ve got pictures I’ve been collecting.”
“I’ll call and set up a meeting with the teacher.” He watched as a couple of cars parked near the brick building. Mr. Aptos had a briefcase with him, probably all the paperwork Esther had already given him. Her years of collecting. He glanced over to see Esther with her eyes closed, head against the seat back. “Tired?”
“Yeah, you gotta admit life around here hasn’t been exactly normal. Did you read today’s paper?”
“Not yet.” The Pineville News came out on a weekly basis, except for the storm week as it was being referred to. Printing a paper was impossible with no power, so they were trying to make up for missing the news now with a special storm edition. He’d glanced at it, but somehow the day had disappeared with half of what he’d planned still undone.
He made sure all the wrappings were in the bag and grabbed his jacket. “You ready?”
“What are my choices?”
“You don’t have to go to the meeting.”
“That would surely be a stupid move on my part.” She grabbed her coat and reached for the door handle.
“Wait, I’ll get that.” He was surprised she waited as he opened the door for her. “I have a feeling we might have some surprises tonight.”
“I really don’t need any shocks, so I’ll pray for good surprises.”
He ushered her inside. They could hear the rumble of conversation as they near
ed the meeting room. Someone laughed; that was a good sign. About fifteen people sat around the tables set up in a U configuration. Coffee aroma rose from the shiny pot on the table by the wall as they entered, with the ubiquitous plate of cookies and bars. There would never be a meeting in Pineville without the requisite sustenance.
While greetings flew back and forth, Ben poured himself a cup of coffee and snagged his favorite bar with coconut, nuts, and chocolate chips. He nodded to Gertie Larson, who always made these just for him, and mouthed his thanks.
“You two sit up here.” Lars, longtime mayor of Pineville, pointed to two chairs.
“Looks like that’s the hot seat,” Ben answered. “Good evening, Lars.”
“Not tonight. No hot seats at this meeting. Besides, you two have gone way beyond your duty the last weeks. You’re heroes in my book.”
Esther took one chair and looked up with a grin. “Shouldn’t that be hero and heroine?”
As the chuckle flitted around the tables, Ben nodded with a smile. “Just doing our jobs.” He glanced around the table at those gathered and settled into a folding chair.
“Know of anyone else who was figuring on coming? Then let’s get started.” Hizzonor Mayor Benson, Lars to everyone in town, looked around, then continued. “You all know we are here to get the general town meeting planned for next week. Since we are on such a tight time frame, first off I think we need to talk about publicity. How will we notify the people around here, especially since the paper just came out today, Monday?”
“I’ll print up posters and get them up around town.”
“Word of mouth travels faster here than the Internet. If we all make ten phone calls, and ask others to do the same…”
“You’ll head that up?”
A nod from a faded redhead brought out answering nods.
“I’ll post it on Twitter and Facebook.”
“Rushing it like this might be a bad idea.”
“Need to strike while the iron is hot. People forget too dang fast. Besides, we’ve a ninety-day deadline, remember?”
Wake the Dawn Page 17