Rube started to whine, unknowingly, a soft whimper that sounded angry with the gentler sounds of the sea. He’d seen death before, but all of it in hospitals, where the smell and sights were antiseptic. Everything controlled, everything nasty beneath sheets. Her body lay tangled in the kelp, but it was bloated, the flesh too pale to be real and alive, the look from her eyes changing in the twinkling morning light, a look that filled him with sorrow, then shock as he saw the gaping hole between her breasts. Rube heard it then, the sound he made, a sound he remembered until the last: piteous and sorrowful and low and moaning — a sound like a worshipper at the wailing wall, a sound almost prehuman, a whimper of such mixed emotions that he felt lust and hate and fear all wrapped up into one. Rube shut his mouth and the sound died.
The dog whined again.
Rube opened his mouth to shush the dog but once again heard the moan start from his own mouth. He clamped his teeth together, reopening the cut on his lip. “I shoulda gone to Florida,” he said to the dog.
The dog hung his head but stopped whimpering.
Her dress was in tatters, little left... no blood though, just the ugly gaping wound. Rube felt the strangest compulsion to reach out and touch—
Those peripheral senses again, intruding. Rube heard the crunch of big tires on sand, and he smelled something not of the sea, or of death, but of machinery. He jerked his head up.
The Jeep was almost touching him, a big chrome bumper near his face. Rube could smell the hot radiator and see the specks of rust on the front fenders.
He heard the door shut. Heard the crunch of sand beneath hard soles.
“Don’t move, mister.”
Somewhere close there was a crackling sound of voices, and Rube realized it was from a radio transmitter. But he couldn’t focus on what the voices said. He was too busy looking down the barrel of the gun.
Waves crashed behind him. The air smelled of salt and... bloat? No. The body didn’t have an odor. The kelp did. It smelled of decay, as if the ocean were dying.
Rube found his voice while he stared down the bore of the gun. “We found her in the surf. Well... he did, actually.”
“Figures,” said the man holding the gun. “Old Buddy’s always into something he shouldn’t be.”
Rube shook and sweated in the warming sun. “You have to point that thing at me?”
The sheriff’s face creased, almost a grin. “I guess not.”
The sheriff knelt down beside Rube.
“Jesus,” he said, looking at the wound. “Woulda killed two her size.”
The sheriff’s office was a corner of an already small building on Main Street, and it smelled bad. Rube was tired by now; they’d stood around for an hour waiting for the forensics team before the sheriff would leave the scene.
“Have a seat,” the sheriff said as they entered the room. Rube saw that the paint was new, some neutral pastel between beige and cream in color. A painting of an old windmill hung crookedly behind the steel desk and leather executive chair. A wooden-backed straight chair stood in front of the desk. There was no carpeting, just a hard-textured floor, as if thinly veiled, wood-covered concrete.
Rube sat. The paint stank and Rube’s legs ached. Jesus Jehoshaphat, what a mess. He wanted to slip off his shoes. He’d put them back on at the beach, but they were wet inside. They squished slightly when he wiggled his toes.
“Damned painters,” the sheriff muttered. He filled the leather chair arm to arm. He sniffed. “Makes my nose run.” His face was wide and almost chinless, the lines smoothed out with flesh, but there was a hint of hollowness beneath the deep-set brown eyes. The plaque on his desk said SHERIFF JOHN BOGGERT. Nothing more.
“You wanna go over it one more time, Mr...?”
“Rubekowski,” Rube said. “And no, I don’t. I told you how I found her twice, and that’s all there is. My story won’t change with a third telling.”
Sheriff Boggert muttered something about tourists, how they were more trouble than—
“I live here,” Rube said. “I’m not a damned tourist. And I’ve told you all I know. Book me or let me go.”
Sheriff John glared at Rube with his haunted eyes. “Oh now, don’t get excited and swallow your gum. This is just procedure until I get the coroner’s report.”
Rube stood. “Which is it to be?”
“You live here, huh? Funny, I don’t remember seeing you around town.”
“Just moved,” Rube said. “A week ago.”
“Current address?”
“Three fifty East Main, that old house back by the creek.”
The sheriff scribbled on a pad. “Yeah, the old Huffinton place. You renting or buying?”
“Renting. For now. Why?”
“Just curious.”
They stared at each other after that, in the ensuing silence. Finally the sheriff sighed, then stood. Rube held his stare.
“Go on home. But I’ll be in touch.”
Rube nodded and stood himself. He backed out the door.
And that’s that, he thought. He threaded his way through the tourists with a sense of anger. He’d only done his civic duty. Why was Boggert so nasty?
But then Rube thought of the woman in the kelp, the big dog gnawing possessively on her hand. God, she was so cold. She radiated cold. Colder than the sea had been when his bare feet hit it early that morning.
The thought cooled some of Rube’s anger, but the images playing in the minefields of his brain made him wobble a bit and he strayed into a fat lady with a big sack and almost tipped her over. He caught himself and bowed and made apologies — though she glared at him in anger, beady little tourist eyes like two stones fitted in a bowl of fat — and Rube wobbled on over to a bench in the plaza off the street and let his head down on his arms.
He wondered, as he buried his head, where the big old dog, Buddy, had gone?
Rube would have been all right if it weren’t for the other memory. He shook off most of the day’s effects, made a light supper of tuna on French bread, with a nice salad; he cleaned the apartment — it was a house, not an apartment, but he couldn’t shake his East Coast mentality. The place had one bedroom and a living room-kitchenette, with the inevitable sliding doors that led to the little deck looking out upon nothing. Actually there was a view back there, a wispy tree that loomed high over the garden plot and cut the afternoon sunlight to a drizzle. Beyond there was a hill that towered and cut the morning sunlight, but that was okay. Rube could live with a few shadows.
But then he’d lain down to rest and he’d almost dozed off when that old memory kicked in to reveal a scene he thought lost forever.
His only other visit to an ocean marched like a slideshow past his inner eyes. Only this was the Atlantic, a long time ago. He’d just received his first promotion from Mercer Chemical, a boost up from common chemist to research supervisor, and the boss had taken a group of them out on his fishing boat. The day was blustery and bright, the ocean a cruel, hard-edged blue with waves that frothed and leaped against the boat. The other supervisors were old hands, playing with their fishing tackle, but Rube just held to the rail and stared out at the sea. In front of the bow something long and sleek and beautiful leaped and swam, and Rube was hypnotized by the sight. He turned to ask his boss about this beautiful thing, but his boss was leaning next to the rail, an ugly harpoon in his big hands, yelling at the mate, “Close on it! Starboard now, quickly!” and his big arm moved and the harpoon flew and the blue-grey skin of the dolphin erupted with a flash bright as a red flower. Bright as the red carnations Eleshia had grown in their garden before the cancer took her. The harpoon ripped the dolphin’s flesh as the cancer had ripped Eleshia’s. Only there was something more terrible about the harpoon wound. Something more insidious and needless because it was wielded by a man who didn’t need to kill. The cancer had been mindless...