by John Lutz
“It’s dark an’ big, movin’ some hundred feet out along the bank. I’m followin’, but the road curves an’ sometimes I lose sight through the trees. Ten twenty-three.”
Wintone was sitting at his desk attentively now, leaning forward. He knew who Molasses was: Cal Horton, a sawmill employee who drove an old tan pickup truck equipped with a CB radio. Horton was a reliable sort, a big, redheaded man, practical as he had to be with a wife and five kids.
The speaker crackled. Wintone wished he had a transmitter so he could talk to Horton, but he had only the receiver and no CB unit in the patrol car. All he could do was sit, listen and agonize.
“Breaker,” a new voice, a tenor, said. “Give us your ten twenty, Molasses.”
“I’m on the lake road a half-mile or so south of Lynn Cove, headed away from the cove.”
“Ten four, Molasses. This is Lancelot—we’ll try to join you.”
“I’m tryin’ to stay with this thing, truckin’ along on this lovin’ bumpy road …”
“Breaker, this is Rag Man—”
“Ten six, Rag Man, I’m busy right now tryin’ to keep this buckin’ truck on the road while I take a hill. I lost sight of the blasted thing … if it weren’t for the moonlight … there it is!”
Wintone stood up from the desk chair, inserted the tips of his fingers into his hip pockets and began to pace. He was glad Molasses was the type to use good sense. Horton would consider his wife and kids before rushing into anything. At least Wintone hoped he would.
“I wish to Hades I could make out what it looked like,” Horton said. “It’s too far out, but it’s movin’ in a line right along the bank. Lost it again! Damn wheel went off the road—back on now.”
“Breaker, Lancelot here. What’s your exact location now, Molasses? Ten twenty-three.”
“I ain’t sure now. I been fightin’ to keep this heap on the road an’ not lose sight—”
“Breaker, this is Rag Man. I’m on the lake road, Molasses—”
“Ten six, Rag Man. Stand by, stand by, I’m busy …”
Through the speaker Wintone could hear the roar and rattle of Horton’s ancient, laboring pickup truck.
“The road bends away from the lake here,” Horton said. “I’m gonna lose sight of the thing behind a rise … can’t see it now. I’m parkin’ where the road starts to curve away an’ I’m gonna cut through the trees on foot to get closer. Ten twenty-three.”
“Ten four, Molasses. You be careful, hear?”
Don’t leave your truck, Wintone almost said aloud. He stood over the radio, rested a hand on it. The speaker was silent but for a soft, staticky hissing, like escaping air. Wintone looked at his watch: twelve twenty-seven.
What had Horton seen? The man was far from a fool, and he’d been raised near Colver, spent his life here. He’d know anything in Big Water Lake. And he must have seen something. Again Wintone heard the words of the veteran reporter McKenna: “Something killed the boy.”
Twelve thirty-one.
“Molasses, this is Lancelot. You out there? Ten ten.”
“Lancelot, this is Rag Man. He said he was leavin’—”
“I know, I know,” Lancelot broke in with his high, tremulous voice, forgetting radio procedure.
The silent speaker hissed.
Twelve thirty-five.
Wintone walked in a circle, away from the glowing dial of the receiver, then back. He thought about getting in the patrol car, racing to the lake road. But it wouldn’t be easy to locate Horton’s truck immediately, and by the time Wintone could reach the spot he’d be too late one way or the other. Here, at least, he knew what was happening as well as anyone except Horton.
The silence from the speaker seemed to spread, seemed to displace the air in the office. Wintone stepped off another perfect circle on the hardwood floor.
“Breaker, this is Molasses,” a breathless voice said at twelve thirty-eight. “I lost sight of it, but I got a closer look. Only thing I could tell about it was that it was big—bigger’n I thought at first—an’ it was movin’ fast through the water along the bank. I couldn’t keep up through the trees an’ heavy brush, an’ it just disappeared off into the darkness.”
Wintone walked back to his desk, sat down.
He was exhausted now, but further than ever from sleep. He reached for the phone, dialed the number of Cal Horton’s home, and told a sleepy and wondering Beth Horton that he wanted to talk to her husband when he returned home. Wintone assured her that Cal wasn’t in any kind of trouble, and she agreed fuzzily to give him Wintone’s message when he returned.
Then the sheriff sat back and listened to the CB enthusiasts chatter harmlessly about Cal Horton’s adventure.
Bonegrinder had been seen. Substance was added to speculation.
Not that Cal Horton had seen much, but the press was trying mightily to make much of it.
Horton could only tell the press what he’d told Wintone: that whatever he’d spotted in the lake was very large, but that he hadn’t seen it next to anything to really compare size, and of course he’d only seen the part above water. It was black, or at least a very dark color, and it seemed to move smoothly through the water, from what Horton could make out from his bucking pickup truck or while running along the bank to keep it in sight. And he wasn’t sure, but he thought it might have made a sound, a low kind of groan like he’d never heard before. Or the sound might have been something else. Or he might have imagined that.
The press continued to hound the man, until at last he took to his house and refused to talk to anyone but friends.
Talk of Bonegrinder was everywhere now, and it was plain that the talk and publicity was the reason most of the tourists and fishermen had come to the Colver area. Mayor Boemer was capitalizing on the situation as best he could, drumming up “items of interest” to give to reporters every two or three days. Everyone said that business couldn’t be better, that they’d had to hire part-timers to help out. Every sort of outdoor and fishing equipment was sold, and what wasn’t sold was rented. Every motel for miles was filled. Campers and vans were a common sight on the roads.
And still it hadn’t rained. Wintone feared another fire, one worse than the fire that had ravaged the dry woods of the northern lake area. The woods were all the drier now, tinder awaiting the spark. And there were plenty of fools streaming into the area capable of striking that spark, plenty of people now to find themselves trapped by a fire whose fierceness they could never imagine.
Chain lightning played in the sky late that Friday, and Saturday morning a light rain fell for about fifteen minutes from scattered, flat-bottomed white clouds that disappeared by midday. Better than no rain, but not enough to be of much help to the parched ground and forest. And the gentle rain left in its wake an almost unbearable humidity coupled with the heat, so that it was almost a pleasure to see the darkened earth lighten again beneath the sun.
The night after the rain, the third death occurred.
Wintone was watching the ten o’clock news on the portable TV in his office when the telephone rang. At first he was glad for the distraction; the news was showing film clips of a three-car accident near Pineyville. Then he heard the voice on the phone and caught the subdued terror in its level tone.
“This is Seth Davis, Sheriff. They asked me to call you. We need you to come to the lake directly.”
Seth Davis was a freight hauler Wintone knew slightly. This wasn’t his usual voice.
“Whereabouts at the lake, Seth?”
“Near Lynn Cove … near where the other one happened.”
Wintone felt a coldness move into him. “What’s happened, Seth?”
“Bonegrinder again … Claude Borne this time.”
Claude Borne owned a farm just outside Colver and had a wife and two married daughters. “Is Borne dead?”
“He’s gotta be, Sheriff. You best see it … I don’t wanna tell you….”
“I’ll be there.”
Wintone hung up the phone, put on his bo
ots, strapped on his revolver. He was outside then, and as he slammed the patrol-car door he realized he’d forgotten to turn off the TV. He didn’t go back. Red lights and siren on, he was at the lake within five minutes.
Yellow light up ahead, to the right of the narrow road, toward the water. Wintone killed the siren and parked on the tilted, grassy road shoulder. He flicked off the flashing red lights atop the patrol car but left its parking lights on, then he got out of the car and jogged down toward the bank where he could see a small crowd gathered in the wavering yellow light of a gas lantern.
Borne was lying on his back on the mud bank, staring up at but not seeing the knot of people gathered around him by the pale light of the Coleman lantern. Night moths circled to add darting shadows to the scene. Wintone shoved through the curiously listless onlookers, and his stomach twisted on itself when he looked down at Borne. The old farmer was still alive, but not for long.
The upper part of Borne’s body was laid open in baconlike strips; one arm was bent beneath his back. Even the waist-high, thick rubber wading boots he had on were ripped and shredded as if by razor blades.
Wintone swallowed a metallic taste and bent over him. “What happened, Claude?”
The farmer’s sturdy, normally ruddy face was pale and vague in the yellow, flickering light. There was a film over his eyes that would never leave. “…Like they said, Sheriff, it come at me from the lake.”
“What, Claude? What came after you?”
Horror shaded the vague eyes. “Nothin’ like I ever seen, Sheriff … big, dark an’ shinylike, with somethin’ like lumps all over it … It stood right up outa the water an’ come after me while I was castin’ out toward the deep part of the lake. If’n all these people hadn’t heard me screamin’ an’ come runnin’ to scare it off I’d be dead …” Borne tried to get up, seemed puzzled that he couldn’t.
“I’m a doctor,” a short, completely bald man who had just arrived said. He wore a flowered shirt that seemed luminous as he moved forward with quick, smooth steps. There was in his attitude something that said he represented both life and death, an authority that transcended Wintone’s. “You’d better leave him alone for now, Sheriff.”
Wintone nodded and stepped back. “Anybody else see anything?” he asked the circle of silent onlookers.
“Out there,” one of the men said, pointing toward the lake. “I saw in the moonlight that the water was sort of swirling.”
The man was the only one besides Claude Borne who had actually witnessed anything. Wintone got his name and address. He was a vacationer from Kansas City.
As Wintone slipped his note pad into his shirt pocket, he noticed something dark bobbing in the water just off the bank. He walked a few steps toward the bank, squinted against the night and saw that the bobbing object was a glass jug.
Wintone stepped nearer the bobbing jug, had to put one foot in the cool water, but was able to stretch out and hook one finger about the jug’s rounded glass side and propel it toward the bank so he could retrieve it.
It was an ordinary gallon cider jug, capped and about a fourth full. Borne’s, most likely. He was reputed to brew and drink the best hard cider in the area. It would be interesting to find out how much cider was in the jug when Borne had left to go fishing.
Then Wintone felt something sticky on his hand, looked more closely at the jug and saw that it was cracked and leaking. Claude Borne might not have touched the jug before the attack, might have been stone sober.
“Doc Amis is on his way, too,” somebody said to Wintone. The sheriff put down the jug and wiped his hands on his pants legs.
By the time Doc Amis arrived, Claude Borne was dead.
THIRTEEN
THE CHANGE IN COLVER was almost immediate. There was a slowing of pace, a feeling now of diminishment rather than of growth, subtle but undeniable. Wintone could see the change in almost everyone he talked to the day after Borne’s death. The silver lining had been ripped away, leaving only the cloud.
First Cal Horton’s story, then so soon afterward the horror of Claude Borne’s death. Where before they had been merely titillated, people were now frightened deep down. They believed in Bonegrinder.
By the middle of the day after Borne’s death, half of Luke Higgins’s cabins were vacant and business throughout town had dropped off sharply. By the end of the next day, most of the paying customers remaining in the area were the staunchest of fishermen, the hard-core thrill seekers and members of the press or scientific community who were professionally interested in whatever was responsible for the attacks. Colver’s optimism had been completely edged out by a gloomy tension that seemed to charge the heated air.
Wintone knew now that Bonegrinder wouldn’t go away, that at the very least the area would have to cope with the fear, maybe for years, before a normal confidence returned. And by then the north shore would doubtless be redeveloped.
Wintone wasn’t the only one who understood this. He stayed away from Mully’s and the running discussion that no doubt raged there.
But through the shimmering heat of the afternoon they came to him, half a dozen of them. As Wintone stood at the office window and watched them angle across the baked street, he was reminded of a lynch mob. Mayor Boemer led them, three paces out in front, jaw thrust out, white hair swept back, leaning forward as if striding into a wind. His followers wore equally aggressive and determined expressions, minds made up and set like concrete. Something, a vague contempt, thinned the line of Wintone’s lips as he sat at his desk and waited for them.
Their demeanor was changed as they filed into Wintone’s office. Now they wore the expressions of reasonable men set to reason, but ready to anger if anyone was unreasonable enough to disagree with them.
Despite the heat Mayor Boemer wore a tie, but it was knotted loosely and perspiration glistened where his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. Until a month ago Wintone had never seen Mayor Boemer wear a tie.
“We’re here about this Bonegrinder thing, Billy,” the mayor said firmly. “We’ve been talkin’ over the situation an’ we don’t like it.”
“That should have been easy enough to agree on,” Wintone said, leaning back in his wood swivel chair and crossing his arms.
“Question is what to do about it,” Luke Higgins said from where he stood near the wall.
Wintone nodded. “Anybody got the answer?”
“It ain’t like we was in a position to do anything about it if we did have an answer,” old Bonifield said. His blue eyes, bright and eager, had an unfocused sheen that suggested too many beers. “Ain’t our job.”
“You got to figure somethin’, Sheriff,” Frank Turper pleaded across Wintone’s desk. “Issue some kinda statement that’ll simmer things down. The big-city papers are playin’ it up, artists’ drawin’s of what Bonegrinder might look like an’ everything.”
“They been doin’ that an’ you haven’t complained before.”
“Now it’s outa hand! This nonsense is ruinin’ the sweetest thing Colver ever had! An’ that’s what it is—nonsense!”
“Ain’t heard you been fishin’ in the lake lately,” Wintone said.
Mayor Boemer shook his head hopelessly, clearing his throat so that the gesture wouldn’t go unnoticed. “The sheriff don’t understand the political implications,” he said. “An’ we can’t blame him for that—it ain’t his job. I never figured it was when I appointed him.”
Wintone knew the mayor was reminding him that his position was an appointed job. But that appointment was for five years and had three years to run. It would be a lot more difficult for Boemer to remove Wintone than it had been to appoint him. Wintone knew he didn’t have to point that out to the mayor. He shifted in his chair and stared at Mayor Boemer, and that was all the reminding needed. Boemer seemed to back up a step without moving.
“The sheriff don’t accept blame easy,” Bonifield said, “which shouldn’t come as no surprise.”
As Wintone swiveled in his chair toward Bonifie
ld, Mayor Boemer spoke up quickly.
“What the sheriff don’t fully grasp is that this is Colver’s one chance to become an important town, a town they know about in the state capital an’ beyond. We owe it to each other to make sure that chance don’t slip away.”
“I don’t see as how I have much to say about it,” Wintone said.
“Tell the reporters Claude Borne was drunk when he died,” Luke Higgins urged. “There was a near-empty cider jug there—seen it myself. Man’ll do or see anything drunk.”
Wintone sat looking at his dead wife’s framed picture on his desk corner. A fly buzzing nearby was for a moment the loudest sound in the room.
“Weren’t none of those big tracks or anything,” Turper said. “Nothin’ really unusual.”
“The attack took place in shallow water,” Wintone said, as if talking to Etty’s photograph.
“Still an’ all, Claude was drinkin’.”
“Sheriff oughta understand that,” Bonifield said.
“The man is no fool,” Mayor Boemer said. “I didn’t appoint him ’cause he was a fool.” The mayor smiled. “No doubt he has ideas of his own, some possible course of action we haven’t considered.”
Again the buzzing fly took up the silence. Etty continued to smile from her desk-corner portrait.
Bonifield stood closest to the desk, shifting his chewing tobacco from cheek to cheek as if trying to make up his mind which side of his mouth to leave it in. He leaned forward from the waist up. “What-all you got planned, Sheriff?”
Wintone got up and left the four of them.
The blinds rattled inside as he shut the office door and felt the heat close in on him. As he was getting into the patrol car, he heard the office door open again behind him, then the mayor’s voice: “You think things over, Billy.”
Wintone pretended he hadn’t heard as he started the patrol car, gunned the engine to drown out anything else the mayor might say and headed out of town. He switched the air conditioner onto high and braced himself to wait out the heat until the car’s interior would begin to cool.
Wintone drove out to the lake road, past Lynn Cove, and where there was a clearing in the trees between road and lake he parked the patrol car and sat looking out beyond the reeds at the flat surface of water. Usually from this point Wintone would have seen several boats out on the lake, but today the stretch of bluish green water was unbroken. A large dragonfly with a blue-green body the same hue as the lake hovered above the hood of the parked patrol car, as if attracted by the rising heat of the engine. A motion of tall grass caught Wintone’s attention off to the driver’s side of the car, where the thick woods grew down to within a few feet of the road. A snake, probably. There was a wildness to this end of the huge lake that must have surprised many of the more docile campers who were used to the northern resort areas.