by Alex Archer
Indeed, the gash looked like the crooked smile of some great beast. Annja shivered again, but this time with excitement. She found her way to the big boulder, switched out the tanks and hurried back to the crevasse. Curiosity tugged her down...that and the feeling that Joe had come this way before her.
Into the Snakeship’s Maw, Annja thought as she descended slowly, swinging the light below, then across, where it easily illuminated the other side of the gash, showing more of the mix of smooth and jagged rocks. An earthquake might have been responsible; in fact, that could explain why the lake swallowed the mounds she and Bobby explored yesterday. An earthquake could have caused this fissure and changed the course of a river or opened up an underground body of water that subsequently came to the surface and created the lake.
She swung the beam up, catching the lip of the crevasse above her. Because visibility was so much better, she guessed that she was about thirty or forty feet down...at least a hundred feet below the lake’s surface. Bobby Knight had made a passing comment about deep lakes in Wisconsin, the deepest being north of here and going down to three hundred and fifty. He said divers loved it. Rock Lake was supposedly eighty-seven to ninety, but that didn’t take into account this apparently unmapped trench.
She fixed her eyes on a piece of stone that reminded her of a nose. Keeping the beam on it, she went down until the “nose” disappeared in the darkness. That put her down another forty. Holding on to a ledge, she turned the flashlight down again; still, it didn’t show a bottom.
How deep?
And how much longer should she go? How many minutes of oxygen did she have left? And the deeper she went, the slower she would have to surface to avoid complications. Finding a spot to keep her eyes on, she went down what she guessed was another forty. A fish swam past her, caught in the beam of her light. It was huge...as far as freshwater lake fish went. What was it?
It was light with dark bands running down its long body. Its cheeks looked to be covered with skin rather than scales, and when it swam above her, she counted eight pores on the underside of its jaw. Its tail was pointed, and all of it was longer than five feet. It clearly didn’t mind the cold temperature. Annja was shivering, however. It wasn’t close to ice water yet, but this wasn’t something she should stay in much longer. The fish twisted back and went lower, checking her out, slowly opening and closing its jaws as if it wanted to show her its row of teeth. The thing probably dined on small loons, she thought.
She pictured its image, trying to memorize it; she’d describe it to Sully. He’d know what kind it was. A fisherman’s dream was what it really was. Imagine hooking that—it had to top fifty pounds. Perhaps this one had led to Her Imperial Snakeship lore.
When it apparently tired of her, it climbed, and she felt the water move from the force of its tail strokes.
Down again. When she finally saw a bottom to the trench, Annja guessed she’d descended a total of two hundred feet. She should go back, no bail-out tank in case she’d lost track of time. She should...but once more she recalled the nurse’s line: “I would’ve taken more risks.” There were only two directions to go in, right or left, and she chose left. There was another of the pale striped fish with teeth, this one a little more than two feet long, a mere baby compared to the giant of a few minutes ago. It didn’t like her light and so quickly swam away. The bottom of the trench was sand the color of eggshells, and there was no garbage anywhere...no car parts or street signs.
She guessed she must have traveled fifty or sixty feet before the crevasse closed in front of her and she decided to turn back. But her beam touched on something different, and so she moved closer still.
It was stone, not the rock wall of the trench, but worked stone blocks that had carvings on them. She held the light close and saw the image of a sun...a Mayan sun.
Edgar, she thought, you were not chasing a wild goose. And where she thought the crevasse ended, it didn’t. There was a gap between the worked stone and natural wall. She could squeeze inside.
But that would wait for another dive.
“I would have taken more risks.”
But Annja wasn’t going to throw her life away hoping she could hold out for enough air to explore any farther. She’d come back down later, with all three tanks full and with an underwater camera. She would prove Edgar right and get him that place in the archaeological annals he’d so wanted.
Annja breathed shallowly on her return. She came up along the wall of the trench where she’d found the building, discovered rock overhead, a ceiling of sorts, and followed it until it opened...until she crawled out of the Snakeship’s Maw. Her visibility dropped suddenly, from the thirty to forty feet she’d been enjoying to about five. Yet the water wasn’t silt filled, and there were no diatoms here. Visibility dropped even more; she couldn’t see more than an arm’s length in front of her. She refused to panic. It wasn’t the lake; it was her flashlight.
She hurried along the bottom, instinct kicking in. She found the wrecked pleasure boat and spooked the school of fish making its home inside. From here she found Bob the Boulder, where she’d left the empty tank. The light went out. Annja’s air was thin and she was seventy feet down. She’d be ascending faster than she planned. Still, she took precious time to unfasten the empty tank from the weighted bleach bottle, held her breath while she hooked the bottle to the buoy line so they could be tugged up together. Then she pulled herself along that line, taking occasional thin breaths, holding it as long as possible, moving higher.
She swore her lungs would fail her just as she broke the surface. Annja tipped her head back and took in gulp after gulp of fresh air, delighting in the feel of the sun on her face. She’d gotten so very, very cold down there.
Annja opened her mouth to ask Rembert for a hand up, but stopped herself. There was no sign of the pontoon boat anywhere.
A wave of panic washed over her.
Chapter 29
The two men—brothers—who’d been fly-fishing near the lily pads gave Annja a ride. They were calling it a day anyway, it being late in the afternoon. It had taken her that long to reach the pair—swimming to the shore, an onerous task lugging two tanks that she refused to leave behind, slogging through muck and a tangle of weeds that tried to wrap around her legs and make her a permanent part of Rock Lake.
She’d passed two cabins, but no one was home, and she was starting to think she was going to have to walk all the way back to Lakeside when she spied the fishermen. Sully had said he was taking the pontoon in the opposite direction—but that would have been too far of a swim...since she wanted to keep the tanks. To Annja the tanks were gold—her chance to go back down this very afternoon to the Snakeship’s Maw, as she was calling it.
She’d briefly considered just treading water when she discovered the pontoon gone, hoping for Sully and Rembert to come back or hoping to catch the attention of a passing boat. But once she’d opted for this route, she was committed.
Annja prided herself on being physically fit. But between the dive and the swim, and the walk along the shore to find someone willing to give her a lift, she was exhausted. Her legs felt like lead when she climbed into the back of the brothers’ pickup truck—joining a stringer of bluegill that sloshed around in a big bucket. The smell from the fish—and whatever else had been hauled in the truck—was strong, and she fought to keep down what she’d had for breakfast. The brothers dropped her near where Sully’s pontoon boat originally had been moored. The boat wasn’t there, but she hadn’t expected it to be. A woman washing out a canoe on the bank was helpful; Annja described where Sully and Rembert had been headed.
“That would be The Office,” she said. “The owner named it that about twenty years ago, called it that so when men wanted to get out of the house for a drink without getting in trouble with their wives, they could say ‘I’m going to The Office.’ It has a new owner now, but he kept
the silly name.”
The woman volunteered to give Annja a ride to The Office when she realized the Chasing History’s Monsters star was in effect stranded. Annja had left a small pack containing her motorcycle key, beach-cabin key and her wallet on the absent pontoon boat. The woman gave Annja her business card in the event she needed further help: Jenn Walker, Bankruptcy Attorney. Annja would send her something nice as a thank-you when she got back to New York.
H.I.S. was tethered to the dock beyond The Office. Annja dropped the tanks near the full one by the bench and grabbed her pack and the plastic pouch with Joe’s diving log...both of which had been left unattended. This late in the afternoon, that hazy spot between lunch and dinner, the parking lot had only two cars in it: the dented Impala she was familiar with, the other a Lakeside police car.
Rembert was at a table inside, talking to two police officers. Detective Rizzo, who was at the table behind them intently listening, politely got up when she entered and pulled out a chair for her.
Annja didn’t have to ask where Sully was. Manny laid it all out while Rembert finished with the police.
Sully was fifteen miles away in the regional medical center, probably in serious condition. He and Rembert had been coming out of The Office with sandwiches and drinks when a teenage knife-wielding girl attacked them. She got Sully in the stomach and was going after Rembert, but he’d dropped the sandwich bag and pulled out a Glock. He didn’t have to fire it—the threat sent her running. The Office bartender called for an ambulance, the local police were dispatched, and Annja had walked in just as the officers were wrapping up the report.
“A Glock?” Annja sat next to Manny, who gave her an up and down. She thought she probably looked like hell, her Bucky Badger shirt stained green from the lily pads and tall grass along the lakeshore, her hair a mess—she’d lost the tie somewhere in the lake—and her once-white tennis shoes the shade of canned mushrooms. She probably smelled like bluegills and night crawlers.
“Your friend there—” Manny nodded to Rembert “—has a real nice Glock.”
“How the—” Annja didn’t finish the question. She decided she didn’t want to know how Rembert came by a gun, at least not at this moment. He hadn’t brought it with him—he’d only brought the two carry-ons, and someone at LaGuardia would have spotted a Glock. “How...? Why...are you here, Manny? Isn’t this still out of your jurisdiction?”
“Told you I was coming to Lakeside today, to see if I could find out more about your Dr. Schwartz and and his friend. Heard the call for a knifing and—” Manny laughed and gave her a lopsided grin. “I just knew I would find you here. Bet it’s the same girl that went after you. But for the life of me, I can’t connect it to anything else.”
They sat silently while Rembert signed the report.
“Your buddy here did provide some crucial information about the murders at the hotel. All the murders. There’s been one more. A young woman from Chicago, a waitress, not an archaeologist, but she was with someone attending the conference.”
Annja sagged back against the chair, her mind suddenly as tired as her body. She wasn’t going to ask Manny to explain further. She knew all she had to do was wait for it.
The Office bartender washed glasses and hung them from hooks above the bar, clearly trying to overhear the conversations.
Rembert watched the officers leave, then he joined Annja.
“So, Mr. Hayes here...while the local police scoured the woods for the teenager...told us about a man named Aeschelman who is probably behind the killings. Fits, eh? The Mr. A. your thug mentioned in the alley. Mr. Aeschelman.” Manny gave Rembert the signature lopsided grin. “Said there’s an artifact-smuggling operation that went on at the hotel last night, that Aeschelman ran it and that some of the archaeologists were involved. But Aeschelman’s flown the coop.”
Annja’s eyes grew wide and then narrowed, as if to demand of Rembert, Why didn’t you tell me this?
“Said all of it came to a head last night and in the wee early hours of this morning,” Manny continued. “Quite a fellow, Mr. Hayes. He not only attended the auction last night but he got footage of Aeschelman and the archaeologists buying and selling things, all of it most likely illegal. Arnie wants him to come down to Central for questioning. However, we can’t force him. He hasn’t done anything wrong. Got nothing to charge him with.”
“I told you what I know,” Rembert said. “And I’ll make a copy of the video for you.” He adjusted the Glock so he could sit more comfortably. “And I’m not going to Central. I’m staying with Annja.”
“And he’s taking me in his rental to the regional medical center to—”
“—check on Sully Stever,” Manny said.
And to ask his permission to keep using his pontoon, Annja thought, realizing she had never asked Sully his last name.
If he objected, she’d find another boat to rent, but she liked the notion of the pontoon as a diving platform. Then she’d get the tanks refilled and go right back down, likely early this evening...and after getting a new battery for the flashlight.
“Meet up for dinner, Manny? Say in—” She fished in her pack for her watch. The Office had one visible, but its hands hadn’t moved since she’d gotten here, apparently permanently fixed at five. “An hour? Five o’clock?”
“Not going to be visiting with Sully Stever for long?”
“I’m sure he needs his rest,” she returned. “Better make it an hour and a half to be safe.” She picked Blue Moon, thinking about the Creole chicken.
Rembert wouldn’t talk on the way to Watertown...not about where he got the gun or how he found out about Aeschelman and the illegal auction. All he said was “You’ll see my video later. After I make my deal. I wasn’t on Doug’s clock for it. Or yours. My equipment, my time, my video.”
The nurse said Sully was drifting in and out of consciousness, but he’d been upgraded, and given how filthy Annja was, they wouldn’t let her in to see him. Rembert secured permission to use H.I.S. as long as they were in Rock Lake; Sully knew he’d be in the hospital awhile.
Annja cleaned up in a hospital restroom, bought a change of clothes at Award Winning Sports on Main and using Rembert’s iPad found a place called Under the Surface, a nearby dive shop. It cost her, all totaled, eighteen thousand, but she picked up boots, a buoyancy compensator, a wristwatch that doubled as a dive computer, two lights, a dry suit, a bail-out tank, goggles, a camera that wasn’t quite as good as what she had wanted and a semi-closed rebreather system that would let her stay down a long while. The rebreather, which had been developed and used originally by the military, was the only one the shop had, and it was responsible for the bulk of her bill. It took several minutes for the shop to determine that Annja had the funds. She could resell the stuff back to the shop before she left—but at a considerable loss. Or she could ship it to her apartment...the more likely outcome. She thought she could use the dry suit elsewhere.
“Expensive trip,” Rembert said. “So you’re going to be looking for overtime, too.”
They were a few minutes late to the restaurant, and Annja wolfed down her meal—ordering less than she would have liked, but being careful because of her upcoming dive.
“Going back on the lake,” she told Manny. “Or rather, into it.”
“For your professor friend,” the detective said.
Annja nodded, but really it was for herself now. Edgar’s obsession had somehow become hers. She had a taste of it...seeing the building deep in the Snakeship’s Maw, and she couldn’t walk away. It was far too significant of a historical find to ignore.
“You going back to Madison?”
Manny shook his head. “Still poking around here, getting everything filled in, you know. Arnie’s chasing down this whole Aeschelman thing. Gonna have to share it, but it’ll still sound good for my swan song.”
“I’ll call you,” she said, “when I come back up. See if you’re still here.” She passed him her new cell phone and he took down the phone number.
Annja grabbed the bill and dropped three fives on the table for a tip. “Any word on that girl with the knife?”
“Not a syllable.”
“It’s connected, Manny. Somehow it’s connected to all of this.”
Chapter 30
“Still not going to tell me where you got the Glock? I know you didn’t buy it. Never mind whatever the gun laws are, they’re not cheap, so you wouldn’t have sprung for it.”
Rembert didn’t reply. He sat on the lawn chair next to the tiller and looked toward the setting sun. She had to admit the sun was beautiful, coloring the water a molten orange, loons cutting low over the chop and sending out their mournful cries.
They’d dropped anchor next to the buoy Sully had put down earlier.
“Don’t leave me, Rem. If nature calls—”
He picked up the “stadium buddy” on the deck next to him and dropped it back down. She’d bought it at the sporting-goods store where she’d gotten her change of clothes.
“And if any knife-wielding girl swims out here—”
He pointed to the gun that protruded from his waistband.
“I’m going to be down awhile.” She didn’t know how long, but the rebreather was a far better option than switching out tanks. “It’ll be dark before I—”
He pointed to the pontoon’s fore and aft lights and to a battery light near the motor that he could use for reading, all part of Sully’s H.I.S. setup.
“I hope you don’t get too—”
He flapped the Western paperback and gestured to a small radio.
“Look, if you don’t want to be here, you shouldn’t have said that you’d—” She’d been talking to him while she put on the equipment.
“No, Annja, I don’t want to be here. You know I don’t want to be here. It is dangerous being anywhere around you. Me and Sully were across the whole lake and it was still dangerous. Sully got knifed. She was waving the damn thing at me, too. No, I don’t want to be here, but I’m here. It’s my best option right now, all right. That lesser of two evils. And no, I’m not going to talk about the gun—ever—or the auction or Aeschelman, who by the way is not a nice man. Not right now anyway. So go down looking for your friend Edgar’s pyramid or Sully’s Snakeship or whatever else you’re after. And then when you’re done with all of this...” He flapped the paperback again. “Then we can go home. I can sell my video, and I can go to work for another station and never ever film another episode of Chasing History’s Monsters again or catch another equally lame assignment from Doug. So when you come back to this crazy town to finish up the Her Imperial Snakeship segment, you can bring some other idiot with you.”