by John Lutz
Wintone sat rolling a pencil nimbly between his thick fingers. “If she’s not, Mr. Peterson, it won’t be due to a scarcity of people lookin’.”
Peterson nodded, as if to demonstrate that he had no complaint about how the search was being conducted. “She has to be found, Sheriff. I couldn’t bear to know … to keep thinking about her … still out there. If you’re not a married man, maybe you can’t understand …”
“I understand, Mr. Peterson.”
“This has become an ordeal.” Peterson moved to the side with a puppetlike gracelessness, as if suddenly weary of standing, and sat in one of the cushioned hickory chairs. “I sent Melanie back to Saint Louis, to stay with her grandparents for a while.”
“Seems best.”
“It was the press,” Peterson said. “They even badgered her. You wouldn’t believe the questions they asked her, a ten-year-old girl who’d just lost her mother.”
“I know how they can be,” Wintone said.
“There’s one named McKenna, from Saint Louis. I think because we’re from the same city he feels he has some kind of claim on me. He’s relentless.”
“That seems to be the biggest part of bein’ a newspaperman. I know Mr. McKenna.”
“Then maybe you could suggest to him that he be a little less persistent. It doesn’t matter so much for myself, and I know that in his mind he’s only doing his job. But some of the questions he put to Melanie upset her. She’s been having nightmares as it is, crying half the night. Doctor Amis said it would be a good idea to get her away from here; that’s why I sent her back to Saint Louis.”
“I’ll talk to McKenna, but I can tell you it’ll help no more’n water on a grease fire. He’s of a breed.”
“I’d leave here myself but for Cheryl,” Peterson said. “I can’t go until she’s found.”
Wintone nodded, understanding.
“I’ve rented a cabin at Higgins’ Motel, and I intend staying here as long as I have to. I plan to isolate myself from the press as much as I can, so you’ll be able to find me at the cabin almost anytime, in case there are any developments.” Peterson stood up from the chair, supporting himself on the high wood back.
“Mr. Peterson,” Wintone said, leaning back in his swivel chair, “I don’t want to make noises like the press, but are you sure about what you saw on the lake that day?”
Peterson smiled a humorless, tired smile.
“Not now,” he said, “but I was sure when I saw it.”
TWENTY-FIVE
THE NEXT DAY BROUGHT a cooling wind carrying flecks of rain. Low gray clouds scudded in reaching forms across an even grayer sky that was lighted from time to time by silent lightning.
Returning from a late breakfast, Wintone glanced up at a sky pregnant with dark promise as he faced into the wind to cross the street. It seemed a cleansing wind, though it raised high clouds of dust which he hoped would be drummed back to earth by the rain. The material of Wintone’s tan uniform pressed cool and pleasant against the front of his body, and he was sure that today, any second, it would rain the hard, proper rain that was needed.
“Gonna come a’shower!” Rufe Davis shouted from where he was hurrying to move his outside display of merchandise into his store.
Wintone waved to him and smiled agreement. It was good to think of the rain falling in a steady tattoo on the thirsted crops, pattering and working its way down into the dark, rich earth, striking the top green leaves of the trees thick on the hills, and eventually trickling down through the drought-parched woods. The lake’s wide surface would shimmer innocently in windblown patterns of falling rain. Wintone hoped that some senseless passions would be cooled—perhaps Colver’s drab dustiness would be washed away, taking with it the ominous mood that pervaded the area.
The blare of a horn startled Wintone as Craig Holt’s Jeep passed him, then pulled to the curb in front of him. As Wintone moved toward the Jeep he could see the rhythmic vibrations of the idling engine run through the taut canvas top.
“We’ll get rain if it doesn’t blow over,” Holt said when Wintone was beside the driver’s side of the Jeep. “Anything new on the Peterson woman?”
“Somebody found a torn blue blouse half a mile south of Lynn Cove. Peterson said his wife was wearin’ a blue blouse an’ white slacks when she was pulled from the boat.”
Holt leaned forward, interested, and peered harder at Wintone. “Has Peterson identified the blouse?”
“Hasn’t seen it. I was gonna drive out an’ show it to him this mornin’.”
“Get in if you want—I’ll be glad to drive you.”
Wintone saw no reason not to accept the offer. He walked around to the other side of the Jeep and climbed in. Holt worked the gears, let out the clutch and the Jeep shot forward.
Holt drove fast, with seeming expertise. They stopped by the sheriff’s office to get the tattered blue blouse, then rattled out of Colver, bouncing over the lake road toward Higgins’ Motel. Wintone kept waiting for raindrops to speck the windshield, but the glass remained clear. The woods seemed very dark and still in the close morning air. To his right Wintone occasionally glimpsed the green-gray expanse of the lake, motionless and leadlike, through the trees.
“Sarah still talks highly of you,” Holt said suddenly.
Wintone didn’t know what to say to that, said nothing.
“Highly and often,” Holt got his pipe from his pocket and clenched it in his teeth, made no attempt to light it.
“No doin’ of mine,” Wintone said.
“Oh, I suppose not.”
Wintone was beginning to feel an unreasonable dislike for Holt, which he tried to ignore. He reached around to the rear of the Jeep and got the torn blue blouse, still damp with lake water. Two of the white oval buttons were missing, there was a rip from just below the rear of the collar to the hemmed blouse tail, and one of the short sleeves was half-torn from the shoulder seam. The label was simply lettered STYLE SHOPPE, and there were no other markings. The blouse showed no signs of blood, but after all this time the lake water might have taken care of that. If Peterson identified the blouse, there would be lab tests.
“You’ll have to admit it now, Sheriff,” Holt said, glancing for a moment from road to blouse.
Wintone turned to look at him. “Admit what?”
“That there’s something out there in the lake, something unique and deadly.”
“I wouldn’t state that as fact without hard evidence,” Wintone said. “I’m surprised that you would.”
“Hard evidence? … I’ll have to say there’s an absence of that, but circumstantial evidence, the three deaths, the unidentified track, the eyewitness accounts—circumstantial evidence couldn’t be stronger. And this is a region where such a thing is possible, maybe one of only a few such regions in the country. We are surrounded by a deceptively beautiful primal wilderness, something you might take for granted. Superstition is a way of life here. These people forecast the weather by interpreting the chirping of crickets or the lay of an animal’s coat. They watch for a death when a hen flies in the house through an open window. They witch for water with dousing rods made from cherry boughs.”
“Superstitious, maybe,” Wintone said, “but we’re practical folk as well. If a man believes he can witch for water it’s ’cause he’s seen it done. I’ll believe in Bonegrinder when I see him.”
“You’ve seen what he’s done,” Holt said around his pipe stem.
“I’ve seen what somethin’s done.”
Holt chuckled and shook his head, as if amused and exasperated by Wintone’s inability to grasp the truth.
“The most superstitious man I ever met,” Wintone said, “was a stock market speculator from New York City. He never bought a stock when the barometer was falling, but he’d probably laugh at the idea of witchin’ for water.”
“Point taken,” Holt said, bouncing in his seat and gripping the wheel with both hands for a particularly rough stretch of road. “Whether he has substance or not, Bonegrinder is re
al in the minds of a lot of people. For my purpose, in a sense it doesn’t actually matter if he doesn’t exist.”
“In a sense.”
“I’ve been out in a boat with my depth sounder,” Holt said. “The lake bottom around here is unusual, irregular and pitted with narrow, deep holes.”
“This is cave country,” Wintone said. “There’s caves here that’s never been discovered. It don’t surprise me that the lake bottom’s like you say.”
“Tell me, Sheriff, why would it surprise you if something alive and unusual existed in the lake?”
The directness of the question threw Wintone. “I suppose ’cause nothin’ existed there before.”
Holt chuckled and shook his head again, removed his pipe from his mouth and held it by the stem against the steering wheel. “Four hundred years ago people thought they knew all there was to know. Then somebody discovered that the earth revolved around the sun. It took a long time for people to believe him, but all that time the earth kept revolving around the sun.”
The Jeep took a banked curve and began to climb, the road stretching narrow and dusty ahead like a tenuous intrusion into brooding green density. Wintone thought about the shadowed depths of the lake, and the depths beyond.
“Meanin’ somethin’ might have been in this part of the lake for years.”
“And years and years. This is wild, almost virgin country, Sheriff.”
“To outsiders,” Wintone said. “I was raised here an’ my father an’ his before him, an’ on back farther’n I know. I don’t say there is or isn’t somethin’ in the lake; I will say a lot goes on in these parts nobody’s ever understood, an’ maybe never will.”
Holt again clamped his pipe stem between his teeth and drove silently, as if considering Wintone’s words.
When they reached Higgins’ Motel, Holt made a sharp turn onto the gravel parking area and braked the Jeep in front of Peterson’s cabin. Wintone folded the blouse in some semblance of neatness, got out of the Jeep and walked to the door with Holt.
They didn’t have to knock; Peterson had seen them drive up. He swung back the door as they approached, invited them inside.
Peterson looked tired, anxious. He was in his stockinged feet, wearing dark slacks and a striped green shirt that were as wrinkled as the blouse Wintone held. The cabin’s window air conditioner was off and the one screened window was open to the breeze, making the inside of the cabin naturally airy and comfortable.
Wintone introduced Holt to Peterson, but Holt smiled and said they’d already met when he’d interviewed Peterson just after the tragedy. Peterson kept his eyes trained on Wintone.
“You’ve found something?” he asked.
“Only this,” Wintone said, holding out the tattered blouse. “It was found on the bank not far from where you’d been fishin’. Can you identify it as your wife’s?”
Peterson shook his head. “The color’s too light … unless the sun faded it.” He held the blouse up, shook his head no again, more firmly. “It’s not Cheryl’s. It’s too small, and the collar’s not the same.” He wadded the blouse in his hand and hefted the damp mass casually before handing it back to Wintone, as if the blouse had suddenly lost some power it had held over him.
Wintone wasn’t greatly disappointed. The blouse might have drifted for some distance before reaching the bank. He glanced around the cabin. “The press bothered you much here?”
“Not lately,” Peterson said. “They’ve wrung me dry and they know it.” He looked with a trace of embarrassment at Holt. “Mr. Holt here was one of the few exceptions who was considerate.”
“I’m not exactly press,” Holt said smoothly but too quickly. He seemed to have been miffed. “I hope my academic and government affiliations place me at a loftier level.”
“Speakin’ of press,” Wintone said to Peterson, “I never got a chance to talk to McKenna for you.”
Peterson waved a hand limply. “No difference. McKenna really was no worse than the rest of them…. I was just more upset than usual that day.”
“Understandable,” Holt said, as if realizing his previous pettiness and trying to temper it with simple concern.
Wintone moved to the door, and Holt followed as if reluctant to leave.
“Is there anything at all I can do to help in the search?” Peterson asked Wintone.
“’Fraid not, Mr. Peterson, unless you remember somethin’ else that might be useful. One more searcher more or less out there wouldn’t make much difference.”
“And the press would descend on you again,” Holt said sympathetically.
Peterson pressed his palms to his face and slid them downward in a slow wiping motion, as if seeking to change his identity. “You’re right,” he said, breathing out loudly. “I just wish something would happen.”
“Some advice,” Wintone said to him softly. “Somethin’ might never happen … you best allow for that.”
Peterson started to answer, swallowed and nodded instead as he let Wintone and Holt out. He shut the door after them quickly, as if the visit had been an ordeal to end with the click of the latch.
As he walked across the gravel back to Holt’s Jeep, Wintone was dismayed to notice that the sun was out bright and hot, and the clouds that had promised rain were broken and blown from the area.
Holt squinted up at the marbled blue sky. “Not today,” he said philosophically. “But without any rain, I’ll be able to get some work done.”
He reached into his pocket for his key ring, then pulled himself up into the Jeep for the drive back to Colver.
Another week passed, and still Cheryl Peterson’s body hadn’t been recovered. The search continued but on a much reduced scale. And those doing the searching were seeking Bonegrinder for Howe’s reward as much as they were searching for Cheryl Peterson.
But for a brief late-night shower, the drought held, and the Colver area was caught in a lethargy of fear and dust. If no rain fell, profits did.
“There’s talk goin’ around,” old Bonifield said to Wintone one night in Mully’s, “that somethin’s gotta be done about Bonegrinder.”
Wintone regarded his beer. “The talk say what?”
“It says who,” Bonifield snapped back. “Looks to most folks around here like you’re the one to figure out the what an’ how of it.”
“Maybe,” Wintone told him. “I’m open for suggestions— you got any?”
“Ain’t my job,” Bonifield said, wiping beer from his gray-grizzled chin. “I just thought you oughta know there’s talk goin’ around.”
“I can figure the roots of that talk.”
Frank Turper leaned over the bar so he could see around Bonifield. “The roots of the thing is you’re sheriff an’ have a responsibility to do somethin’.”
“I ain’t one fer repeatin’ it,” Bonifield said, “but there’s some sayin’ you’re afraid.”
“Some ain’t sayin’ it to me.”
“Myself,” Bonifield said, “I figure you just don’t know which way to step.”
“I know where I’d like to step.”
Mully moved down the other side of the bar toward Wintone. “Don’t get het up, Billy.”
“It ain’t like we don’t know you got your own problems,” Turper said. “Maybe that’s what’s makin’ you indecisive.”
“What’s makin’ me indecisive,” Wintone said, “is I don’t know what to decide. An’ I can’t think of anybody who does know.”
“You’re missin’ the point,” Frank Turper said. “Somebody’s gotta decide, Billy! You’re sheriff. That somebody’s you.”
“Another point,” old Bonifield said, “is if you don’t do nothin’ as sheriff, Mayor Boemer is forced to act.”
“He’s been actin’ for years,” Wintone said, taking a long pull of his beer. “An’ what you just said is surely the official line of bullshit.”
“Could be,” Bonifield said. “Ain’t none of my business.”
Wintone finished his beer in a hurry and le
ft Mully’s. As he walked the dark street toward his office, he looked up at the star-scattered sky, losing some of his anger in the vastness.
He knew that Baily Howe and Mayor Boemer were behind the talk of fear and indecision, trying to lay the groundwork for his dismissal. Boemer would have feared to take any such action alone. With Wintone out of office the frenzied and dangerous search for Bonegrinder could resume, and the newspaper and TV people could be told anything.
“Makin’ your evenin’ rounds, Billy?”
Sarah’s voice.
He turned and she was at the corner behind him, walking toward him. She was wearing denim slacks and a short-sleeved pullover blouse, dark blue or black; Wintone couldn’t tell which in the dimness.
“Late to be walkin’, Sarah. How come you’re not with Craig Holt?”
She smiled. “Didn’t know there was a law said I had to be.”
“If there was, I wouldn’t enforce it.” He was unaccountably self-conscious, embarrassed by their clumsy fencing, as if they were teen-agers again. They were bound by time, special to each other despite themselves.
“Where were you headed?” Sarah asked.
“Back to the office to bed down.” The night brought the lightly perfumed scent of her to Wintone like an offering. He wondered how long it had been since he’d been near her when she was wearing anything but her white nurse’s uniform. “Got a few reports to write up,” he said. “Ain’t no nine-to-five to this job.” He stood watching her in the darkness. Her eyes picked up the starlight, gave off a pale and gentle luminosity. He couldn’t make out the expression on her face, though, and he couldn’t read her eyes. Maybe, he figured, that was just as well.
“Why don’t you ask me, Billy?”
“Ask you what, Sarah?” Immediately he wished he hadn’t spoken the words, forcing her to tell him, as if to bolster his manhood.
Her voice was guileless, without urgency. “To spend the night with you … to heal you where you hurt … where you won’t heal yourself …”
Wintone’s big hands were clenched into fists, whitened at the knuckles.
“Etty wouldn’t have wanted you an’ her both to die …”