Bentley unhackled.
Rich could see the dog out of the corner of his eye. Easing his weight down on the broom handle, he gently went down on his haunches to the floor, still humming.
Bentley took a step towards Rich. Then he lifted his head and sniffed.
As easily as he could Rich held out a hand in Bentley’s direction.
Bentley took another step, lowering his head as he came.
A few steps later and Bentley was sniffing Rich’s hand. After another few moments, Rich set the broom down, turned his hand up and rubbed the underside of Bentley’s jaw. The beast leaned into his hand.
“You hungry, boy?” Rich said in a low, clear voice.
The tail thumped.
Raising himself up while continuing to pet the dog, Rich stayed relaxed. He was pretty sure Bentley was won over, but didn’t want to startle him “Let’s go get something to eat, Bentley.”
At the word, “eat,” the dog’s big dark ears pricked up.
“Eat, Bentley,” Rich said, and slapped his other hand against his pant leg.
The dog moved in closer and wagged his tail harder.
“Where’s your food?” Rich asked and the dog barked an answer.
Chet had told him it was in the big galvanized steel garbage can, mouse-proofed. Rich saw the can in the corner of the barn
and the empty bowl next to it. There was a light switch right behind the can on a support beam.
As he took a step toward the can, Bentley swirled around him in happiness, a different dog.
Still being cautious to make no sudden moves, Rich turned on the light. He slowly lifted the top off the garbage can, found an old measuring cup half buried in the chow and filled the bowl with food.
Bentley dove into it when Rich set the bowl on the barn floor.
Hopefully, he wouldn’t need to feed him again. Hopefully, Chet would be home before evening.
T
he Army Corps of Engineers maps were spread out all over the conference table. Amy was staring at them as if she could see the way the current would flow, the speed of the water, the underwater sandbars, and low-ebb pools that would influence how a body might move downstream. In fact, all she really hoped to see were the places where someone could easily dump a body.
What the medical examiner had told her was that the body could have been in the water anywhere from three to seven days. What the man from the AC of E told her was that a piece of wood would drift down the river at a speed of three miles a day. But the problem was that this body had been tied to some kind of weight and they had no way of knowing how long it had stayed tethered: In other words, the body might have been in the water for seven days, but only floating free for two.
Amy guessed that the body had been dumped in Lake Pepin and probably not further up the river. Looking back upstream to the curves of the Mississippi and the St. Croix rivers as they flowed into Lake Pepin, she just didn’t see any way that a body
wouldn’t get caught up on something before it entered the relatively open and free-flowing body of the lake.
As Amy perused the series of charts that showed the lake, the mid-channel sailing line, various buoys and landings, she noticed that the top of Lake Pepin was at mile-marker 786 and it ended at 765. The guide said that the mile-markers were measured from the Ohio River northward. An odd way to do it, she thought. She would have numbered from the source up by Lake Itasca, but she wasn’t an engineer.
So the lake was twenty-one miles long just as she had always been told. The Point No Point buoy was about at mile-marker 779, so that meant there were only seven miles above it where the body might have been dumped.
But it hadn’t really been dumped. It had been deposited relatively carefully. Probably using a boat. How else would they get it out far enough to make sure it wouldn’t show up if the water level sank? That meant that the body could have been carried by boat really from any place on the river. Certainly didn’t narrow things down. Amy looked up at the dotted acoustic-tile ceiling in the conference room, not sure that the maps were helping at all.
Just then Jeremy walked in. “Finding any good clues on the ceiling?”
Amy was very happy when Jeremy had joined the sheriff’s department a few months ago. His arrival made her no longer the youngest or newest kid on the block. Tall and lanky, wide-apart blue eyes with a sprinkle of blackheads along the lines of his nose, Jeremy looked like he was sixteen and not quite grown into his body, but he claimed to be all of twenty.
Only twenty-three herself, Amy wanted to separate herself from him so the two of them weren’t lumped together as the youngsters. She had mixed feelings about showing him the ropes.
“You heard about our floater?”
Jeremy nodded, then said, “I heard Bill found it.”
“With Claire,” Amy corrected, then continued. “Whatever. I’m trying to figure out where it might have gone in the water.”
His face lit up as he thought about what she had told him. “You mean, where it was dumped?”
“Well, that’s what I was just wondering. I wouldn’t say it was really dumped. That makes the action sound careless. Whoever put it in the river, and you’d think it would have to be more than one person because that guy was heavy, didn’t want it found. They tied something to his ankle, like a concrete block or a stone. Something heavy. So they probably used a boat to get it out into deeper water.”
“It was found by Maiden Rock?”
“Yes, just south of the park. I’m wondering if it’s worth taking a look around at that wooden pier in the park and asking around the town. You never know what people see sometimes.”
“That sounds smart.”
“Yeah, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the body was put into the water quite close to where it was found.”
“How so?”
“Well, it was discovered late afternoon by some fishermen. You didn’t see the body, but by the time it was found it was bloated into a big and white object, like a buoy. Fairly easy to
spot from a distance away. It’s hard for me to imagine that it could float down the river for very long, especially on a high-traffic day like yesterday, without someone seeing it.”
“Is this, like, your case?”
“It doesn’t really work that way around here, Jeremy. We’re a team. Claire’s the head investigator, but we all help out. Everyone except her has a rotation and we do what we can while we’re on duty.”
“You going to check it out?”
Amy wondered what she might find down at the Maiden Rock Park. You just never knew what someone might have left lying around as they struggled to get a body into a boat.
* * *
Meg watched Curt walk up the driveway with her usual excitement, and an odd longing—or maybe it was yearning—that hit her below the belly button. They had decided he should park in town and walk the six blocks to Rich’s house. They weren’t taking any chances; they didn’t want anyone to notice his car. That way if Claire or Rich came home early, he could slip out her bedroom window, climb down the oak tree that rubbed against the house, and disappear into the woods behind the farm, circling around until he got back to his car. No adult the wiser.
Claire and Rich had been pretty clear with her. No boys in the house when they were gone. But where were she and Curt supposed to hang out? At the grocery store in Pepin? The library, and get shushed by the librarian who knew them and watched them like a kindly hawk? Certainly not at school. They sometimes
sat at the coffee shop, but that got expensive, and after an hour or so, they started to get dirty looks from the owner.
They could always head for the backcountry, and often they did, but parking on farm roads got a little old too. Once Mr. Swenson blocked them in with his tractor. They hadn’t noticed him at first, too busy seeing how long they could kiss without breathing, and then there he was at the window, asking them what they were doing. A rhetorical question, but for some reason one that Curt felt obliged to try to answer. “A kind of contest,” he started while Meg pinched his underarm to quiet him. She had smiled and said, “We got lost.” Keep it simple. She had learned this lesson from her mom, who told her that one of the mistakes criminals frequently make was they complicated matters and got caught in their own lies.
Meg ran down the stairs and let Curt in, even though the door wasn’t locked and he could have let himself in.
“Something to drink?” she asked. It was another beastly hot day. All she was wearing was a tank top and the shortest shorts she owned. In this kind of humid weather, she didn’t like the feel of anything on her skin.
Curt was wearing a holey t-shirt and baggy jeans. He held up his hand as if waiting to have something placed in it. “I’ll have a martini.”
“Right. Like you could even drink one if I made it for you.”
“Right. Like you could even make one.”
“We’ve got the bartending book. But I’m not sure we have all the ingredients.” Meg laughed, imagined the two of them drinking martinis together. She had had a sip of one once. The drink had tasted like gasoline.
Curt put his palm on her back, right between her shoulder blades. She loved him touching her. He didn’t do it much in public, which made it that more special when he reached out and put a hand on her in a quiet moment, especially when they weren’t just all over each other.
“A big glass of water would be fine,” he said.
“With ice?”
“Yes, please and a slice of lemon if you’ve got it.” He had pushed his voice up into a falsetto, pretending he was a socialite of some sort.
One thing Meg had noticed about Curt was that when he was nervous, he started to play act he was someone else. She found it hysterical, but also saw that it was his way of keeping himself at a distance. Sometimes she played along, sometimes she just let him go off on his own.
“Coming right up.” But before she could step into the kitchen he had slid his hand down her spine and pulled her close to him.
They kissed and she could taste the sweetness of toothpaste on his tongue and salt on his lips: an interesting combination, like a Salted Nut Roll.
“How far are we going to go today?” he asked.
“Just to the brink.”
* * *
Once she got back to the sheriff’s department from lunch with the pregnancy test in her purse, Claire could think of nothing else. It was going to be a long afternoon if she had to wait until she got home
to take it. Also, she hadn’t called Rich yet about Chet. She so hated to tell him what had happened to his good friend. She was afraid that he would blame her and, worse, she was afraid, that in this instance, he might be absolutely right.
Claire was trying to learn to not put things off. Otherwise they just became this huge glob of worry and weight on her shoulders and she walked around feeling them pressing her down all day long.
So she decided to get at least one thing over with and held the pregnancy test next to her uniform. First, she went to the bathroom and locked the door. Impatient as she was when she tore the package open, she forced herself to read all the directions. Lord knows she didn’t want to do anything wrong and get a false reading. Just as she was about to sit down on the toilet, someone knocked on the door.
“Someone’s in here,” Claire said and then realized how stupid that sounded. “It’s me, Claire. I’ll be out in a minute.”
She pulled out the dipstick or whatever it was called and as quickly as possible did the required maneuvers, letting a full stream hit the white stick.
She didn’t want whichever woman was standing outside the door to see what she was doing. But there sat the box and she didn’t want to shove the wet stick into her pocket—that might ruin the process. First she stuffed the box into the bottom of the wastebasket, then washed her hands and put several wet paper towels over it to completely cover it. She was still left with the moist stick. She carefully covered it with another paper towel and opened the door, acting as though she was still drying her hands.
Crystal, the new secretary, was waiting outside. “Hey, Claire, how’s it going today? Hot as all get out, huh?”
Just what she didn’t need. A conversation about the weather. “Yeah, sure is. It’s all yours,” she said and walked away.
When Claire sat down at her desk, still carefully holding the paper towel, she saw the sheriff headed her way. Muttering swear words under her breath, she pulled open her top drawer and put the paper towel and the stick inside.
“Claire, how’d it go at the hospital?” the sheriff asked.
For the oddest moment, she thought he was asking her about the results of her pregnancy test. She shook her head as if to chase those thoughts away and launched into her report about Chet. “They said they’d call as soon as they did an evaluation. I didn’t get to talk to him—he was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake him—but the nurse said he’s pretty with it.”
“No chance of him trying something again, in the hospital, is there?”
“I don’t think so. I made it clear that he needed to be watched. They’ve got him sedated and his room is right across the hall from the nurses’ station. So they’re keeping a pretty good eye on him. After the tests, sounds like they might even let him go tomorrow.”
“That’d be good. We need to talk to him. I think we should line up a psychiatrist to have on hand for that conversation. We need to do everything right this time.”
Claire could hear him trying not to blame her for what happened to Chet. “Yes, sir. We will.”
Her phone rang and the sheriff walked off as she answered it. “Watkins.”
“Hey,” Rich said.
For a moment, Claire thought of opening the drawer and reading the information on the stick while she was talking to him. Then she knew that might not be a good idea. One piece of bad news at a time. But would a pregnancy be bad news for Rich? He had said that Meg was enough kid for him, but she had always wondered.
“How’s your day?” she asked, stalling.
“Not too bad. I went over to Chet’s and fed the dog. Bentley wasn’t too friendly but we managed to work it out.”
“Bentley?”
“The dog. How’s Chet?”
“Well, I’ve been meaning to call you. Pretty busy here today. Chet—” Claire didn’t know how to tell Rich that Chet had tried to kill himself. She didn’t want to say it. She’d gloss over it and explain it more completely when she got home that night. “Chet didn’t do so well last night. He freaked out. Just too much for him. So he’s in the hospital now, under sedation.”