SPILLED MILK
SPILLED MILK
SPILLED MILK
Mark and Matthew were almost to the truck, running flat out, legs and arms and hearts pumping hard. They dropped like stones a few yards shy of the truck, and for one terrifying instant, saw horror in each other's eyes.
On the other side of the pasture, the cows in Harold Wittig's prime herd of Holsteins began to sink to their knees.
Haifa mile downwind in Four Corners, the screeching noise had split the quiet morning like a thousand fingernails scraping down a blackboard. The puppy wailed and batted at his ears; Grandpa Dale and Tommy both covered theirs with their hands. For a second, Dale wondered if those Swenson boys had taken out Harold's old John Deere and tipped it over in the road again, but he dismissed the possibility almost as soon as he thought of it. The horrible noise was going on much too long for that, spearing into his brain, making his eyes hurt.
The curious and the worried had already started to come out of Hazel's by the time the awful noise had stopped, all of them looking up the road toward the Wittig farm, shading their eyes in the bright light of morning. The pastor and his wife were the worried ones, thinking of their sons working up there. The sudden silence was almost more upsetting than the sounds of the crash had been, and they both moved quickly toward where they had parked the big Chevy in front of the cafe. The others were wandering right into the middle of the road, as if that would help them figure out what had happened over a hill and out of sight.
Inside the cafe, Hazel was waiting impatiently for the donuts she'd just put in the fryer to finish so she could follow her customers outside and investigate for herself. Excitement of any kind was a rare thing in Four Corners, and not to be missed. When she finally lifted the basket and hooked it on the edge of the fryer-another perfect batch- she had only enough time to glance out the window and marvel at the sight of her customers prayerfully sinking to their knees, some of
them right in the middle of the road, before her candy-red mouth sagged open and her throat started to close.
When Dale saw the first person go down just a few yards away, he scooped up Tommy in one arm and the pup in the other and tried to race away, but already his heart was pounding too slow for that. He never felt the pup slip from his grasp and tumble to the asphalt, but he never let go of Tommy, not even when he finally fell.
R ICKY SCHWANN was freezing his ass off. Damned water in this quarry never warmed up, no matter how hot the summer. It was great when you needed to quick-chill a case of brews, but it really sucked when you were two hundred pounds of muscle in a pair of swimming trunks and had to dive in after it. Ricky had worked hard his senior year at Paper Valley High to get down to five percent body fat, but now he was wishing he'd porked down a few more Big Macs, just for the insulation.
Ten feet down into the black water, his lungs were already starting to burn and his eyes hurt from the cold. He squeezed them shut. The water was so black that you couldn't see more than a few inches anyway. He yanked hard again on the rope that tethered the case of beer he was after, but it wouldn't budge. He was going to have to go all the way down. Five, ten more feet, he figured.
He went hand over hand down the rope until he felt it veer sideways, snagged on whatever it was that was holding it down. He jerked on the rope and felt it loosen, then opened his eyes in time to see another pair of eyes floating toward him. They were blue, just like his, but wide and empty.
"WHAT'D I TELL YOU?" Deputy Bonar Carlson was leaning forward in the passenger seat of the patrol car, jabbing a chubby finger at the windshield. "Look at the top of those Norways. Yellowing already, and August is still a youngster."
Sheriff Michael Halloran kept his eyes on the twisting strip of tar so he wouldn't run into one of the Norway pines that Bonar wanted him to look at. The forest moved in on everything man-made when you got this far north in Wisconsin, and roads were no exception. He felt like he was driving through a tunnel. "We are not having a drought," he said. "You're doing that Chicken Little thing again."
"It's going to be a bad one. Maybe as bad as 'eighty-seven."
"That's such a load of crap. We nearly drowned in June. Broke every record in the book for rainfall."
Bonar snorted and flopped back, sticking a thumb under the seat belt to ease the pressure on his considerable, cherished stomach. "That was then, this is now. Just wait until we get to the lime quarry. I'll bet the water is at least a foot low, maybe two."
"No way." Halloran eased the car around an unbanked turn, watching sunlight dapple the road ahead like a strobe. He'd known since the fifth grade that only a fool questioned anything Bonar stated as fact, but he just couldn't help himself. One of these days, he was going to prove him wrong about something. The law of averages was on his side. "Did I miss the turn? Feels like we've been driving for hours."
"Fifty-seven minutes from the office to the lime quarry, and that's if you don't run into a deer or a bear. How long since you've been up there?"
Halloran thought about it for a minute, and then got sad. "Senior-class party."
Bonar sighed. "Yeah. Gives me the creeps every time I pass the place. Haven't dipped a toe in that water since."
The old lime quarry they were heading for hugged the northern county line, about as far from human habitation as you could get in this part of the state, making it an ideal party site for every teenage bash since the quarry and kiln had closed in the '40s. Fifty feet down from ground level, the lime had petered out and buried springs had bubbled up, filling the ugly machine-made hole with icy water. Halloran had always liked thinking about that-man working decades to make a piece of earth ugly, nature covering the scars in a blink, if you just left her alone to do her job.
But the water and the isolation made the place a magnet for kids and kegs, and every now and then something bad would happen. Like at the senior-class party nearly twenty years ago, when Howie Dexheimer dove into that cold black water and disappeared, as if the quarry had swallowed him whole. Every diver in the county had worked the deep water for weeks but never found the body. As far as anyone knew, Howie Dexheimer was still down there.
"You think it's him?" Bonar interrupted Halloran's thoughts as if he'd been following them.
"Lord, I hope not. I sure don't want to see Howie after twenty years in the water."
When Bonar was thinking hard, his whole face screwed up. "Might not be so bad. Water's too damn cold for anything to live in, including most bacteria. The body could be almost perfectly preserved if the alkaline content isn't too high."
Halloran winced. The idea of a perfectly preserved Howie was almost worse.
Fifteen minutes later, he found the two-lane dirt track that made a hole in the woods. Deputy Walter Simons was blocking the access with his legs spread and his arms crossed over his chest, a banty rooster with an Elvis haircut trying to look like Colossus.
Halloran pulled up alongside him and opened his window. "Tell me something I don't know, Simons."
Simons swatted ineffectually at a congregation of deerflies buzzing around his head. "Goddamn deerflies bite like a son of a bitch, did you know that?"
"I did."
"Well, it isn't poor old Howie Dexheimer, anyway. I caught a glimpse just when they were pulling him out, and Howie never had hair that long."
"Hair grows after death," Bonar told him.
"Go on."
"So some people say."
"Does it tie itself up in a pony tail with a rubber band?"
"Hardly ever."
"Well, there you go. Besides, Doc Hanson says this was an older guy, mid-twenties at least, and not in the water that long. No ID, no nothin'. Naked as a jaybird. You want to send Cleaton back out here with the squad? Another ten minutes out in these bugs and I'm going to be a pint low."