I wanted to climb on.
I wanted to lounge on that glowing white slab and bathe in the moonlight.
I swam most of the way over to it, then waded.
When I first started wading, the water came as high as my shoulders. With each step, the level lowered a little. It was waist-deep when I stepped into something soft and squishy that wrapped around my foot and tripped me. I fell headlong with a splash, and my foot pulled free.
Whatever had grabbed my foot, it wasn't like anything that I'd ever stepped on before.
I didn't know what the hell it might be.
Standing again, I turned around. Nothing to see except black water and a few shiny coins of moonlight shimmering on the surface.
I had my ideas about what had tripped me.
I needed to find out for sure.
So I took a deep breath and bent down into the water, reaching toward the bottom with both hands. At first, nothing. I walked slowly, moving my arms.
Instead of finding the thing with my hands, I bumped it with my right foot. I kept my balance, though, and didn't fall. After coming up for air, I went down again, bending and crouching, and explored it.
A naked woman.
She was split wide open from sternum to crotch.
She had a load of stones where her guts should've been.
When I figured it out, I screamed or something. I'm not sure what I did, exactly, but I took in a mouthful of lagoon. I popped up choking. I would've screamed my head off then, except that I couldn't breathe. I could only cough and gasp for air and cough some more.
When I was breathing again, I just stood there and shook.
I wanted to be miles away.
But how could I leave without knowing who it was?
I'd touched her enough to know that she was a woman, that she'd been gutted and stuffed with rocks -- probably to keep her down. I hadn't explored her well enough, however, to identify her.
So down I went again, quickly, before I had time to change my mind.
The first part I found was a shoulder. I held on to it with one hand, and explored with the other.
I started with her face, feeling it with my fingertips but trying to keep away from her eyes. I did not want to touch her eyes; they might be open -- or gone.
Her mouth was open. I fingered her lips, touched the edges of her teeth, and tried to imagine the face that went with them. Which of the women had nice, straight teeth?
In my memory, all of them.
I ran my fingers through her hair. It felt limp and slippery and very short. Kimberly had much longer hair than this, so she was ruled out (unless someone had cut it). Thelma, Connie and Billie all wore their hair very short.
I had my hopes pinned on Thelma -- though she seemed unlikely, being Wesley's ally.
After surfacing to take another breath, I went down again.
I wasn't exactly thrilled about touching the breasts of a corpse, but I figured the size of them would tell me plenty. So I took them in my hands. (My first time ever to actually handle bare breasts, and it has to be like this.) They were too large for Kimberly or Connie. Though big, they didn't feel enormous like Thelma's. They seemed to be about Billie's size.
Billie.
God, I sure didn't want it being her. But it had to be Billie. Nobody else had breasts the right size.
In a frenzy of despair, I went at the body with both hands. I felt her wide shoulders, and how her sides tapered in, then flared out at the hips. I felt the solid thickness of her thighs.
Not just the breasts had Billie's shape and size.
She felt like Billie all the way up and down.
No!
I went a little nuts and straddled her and dug into her split torso with both hands and started snatching out the rocks that someone had packed in to keep her down.
Someone?
Wesley!
Wesley-fucking-Duncan Beaverton III.
How could he do it to her! How could he kill my Billie? How could he ruin her this way?
I suddenly thought, If Billie's like this, why not the others?
Why not Kimberly and Connie? Maybe they, too, were sprawled on the bottom of the lagoon, hollowed out and stuffed with stones.
I kept digging rocks out of the woman under me.
When I ran out of breath, I flung my head up out of the water and yelled at the top of my lungs, "_Wesley! You fucking cocksucking load of shit! I'm gonna kill you! I'm gonna cut you to pieces and make you EAT 'em, you motherfucking asshole!"_
I cried while I yelled.
And I kept on yelling.
I yelled a lot of things that don't even bear repeating.
With all the yelling and crying, I wore myself out. Finally, I quit. Then I just stood in the waist-deep water, panting for air.
It took me a long while to calm down enough to let me hold my breath and go under again.
She still held plenty of ballast.
Instead of unloading the rest of it by the handful, I crouched beside her, took her by the upper arm and the back of her thigh, and lifted.
Turned her over.
Dumped her out like a canoe.
Right away, she began to rise. I kept hold of her arm, and stood up. There were soft lapping sounds when she broke the surface. I could see, just barely, the dim, pale shape of her. In a few places, the moon put white marks on the skin of her back and rump. The patches of light scooted down her body as I floated her toward shore.
I climbed onto the tilted slab of rock.
Squatting at its edge, I lifted her by the arms. I staggered backward and dragged her up with me. She made sloshy sounds like someone rising out of a bathtub.
I let go of her arms, but stayed kneeling above her head.
The moon shone down like a spotlight onto us. A white spotlight, dimmed for gloomy atmosphere.
Bright enough, though, to let me see a few things.
She'd been beaten. Her back and buttocks were stained in places with gray blotches that appeared to be bruises. They were also criss-crossed with stripes as if she'd been whipped.
She'd also been stabbed in the back many times. Each wound was a narrow slot, more than an inch long, with puffy edges. (Probably made by a blade about the width of the knives that I'd seen on Wesley's belt when he leaped across the chasm.) I had a difficult time finding all of them -- some were hidden among the lash marks. So I crawled alongside her body, searching them out, studying and counting them.
I found eighteen stab wounds in her back.
I found none in her buttocks.
But I made a startling discovery there -- something I might've noticed right away if my attention hadn't been focused so completely on her injuries.
Bruises and lash-marks aside, her buttocks were the same pale shade of gray as her lower back and her thighs.
Where was her tan line?
Billie, I knew, had stark borders between her tanned skin and the parts covered by her bikini. Where she wasn't tawny, she was as pale as milk.
With her black bikini pants gone, she would certainly look as if she'd changed into a new, white pair.
She shouldn't be all one shade, like this.
For a few moments, I knew this wasn't Billie. Then doubts came.
Not enough time had passed, since I'd seen her last, for her tan to fade so completely. But several days had gone by. If she'd spent them naked in the sun, the white of her buttocks might've darkened enough to match the rest of her.
And what about being submerged in the lagoon? Over a period of time, the water might've done something to her skin color.
She hadn't been in it very long, though.
Not very long at all.
From the start, I'd been vaguely aware that she seemed to be in decent shape for a dead person. I hadn't given the matter much thought, though, except to be thankful that she wasn't as repulsive as she might be. That is, she didn't feel slimy or stiff or rotten.
(Compared to Matt, she was a regular Sleeping Beauty.)
Suddenly, it dawned on me that she was extremely fresh.
I picked up one of her hands. Holding it close to my face, I studied the fingertips. They were pruned, all right. But not that much.