Making fun of short people was beyond the pale and this, too, went on his list.
I was treading water, a silent endeavor, but my short puffy breaths had to be giving away my location. My one chance, which had been diving away from Duvall before he could crack my head open, wasn’t turning out to be much of an opportunity. Not exactly out of the frying pan and into the fire—a fire would be welcome at this point—but the analogy was close.
There had to be a way out of this, but I couldn’t think what. My hands were already numb, so even if my cell phone was operable underwater, I doubted my fingers would be able to do anything more than point, quaking with cold, in the general direction of the screen.
I scanned the shoreline, looking for something, anything, that might help. Of course, since it was almost full dark, I couldn’t see what was ten feet away from me. Clouds had drifted across the face of the moon, and what little light it had been giving out was now gone.
“Getting cold?” Duvall called out.
Come on in and find out, I muttered, but only in my head, because I was starting to get an idea in my cold-fuddled and shivering brain. Though it might not turn out to be a very good idea, I had to do something, and do it fast, because I could already feel the early effects of hypothermia slicking away my strength.
I sucked in a long, shallow breath and sank below the water’s surface. Once again, my head felt as if it were going to explode, but I told myself to quit being such a sissy and get on with it. Because if I was completely submerged, Duvall wouldn’t be able to see me and wouldn’t be able to hear me. All I had to do was swim far enough away that, when I got to shore, he wouldn’t notice when I inched out of the water.
My arms pulled, my legs kicked. The darkness was an almost palpable thing, threatening me, jeering at me, taunting me. I longed to open my eyes, but if I did I’d lose my contact lenses, and anyway, opening my eyes wouldn’t help me see.
Because it was dark.
The blackness of a northern night was something I hadn’t understood before moving here permanently. In cities, there is no real dark. Streetlights, the lights on buildings, lights on signs, lights on buildings, there is light all the time. Up here, though, there was nothing except nature. Even in summer, when the county’s population tripled, you could still see the wide dusty white of the Milky Way, strewing its stars in a path across the sky.
Arms pulled, legs kicked.
My lungs burned, yearning to breathe.
Pull. Kick. Pull. Kick.
Pull . . .
Then, when I couldn’t go any farther, I let myself rise to the surface. I wanted, oh how I wanted, to noisily gulp in air, but I forced myself to take it in slowly. Silently. I kept my mouth wide-open for fear of Duvall hearing my teeth chatter together, and felt for the lake’s floor with my feet.
“Where are you?” he asked sharply.
His voice was off to my right, closer than I’d hoped, but far enough away that I felt a little bit safer.
“Come on,” he said, “I know you’re out there. What game are you playing?”
Survival.
My stretching toes brushed the bottom of the lake, bumpy from the small rocks that had been deposited long ago by a passing glacier. So the water here was a little taller than I was. I sucked in a long, quiet breath, aimed myself, and went deep.
Kick. Pull. Kick. Pull.
I was taking a steep angle toward shore, trying to travel as far along the lake’s edge as I could while still getting into shallow water. If either my engineer father or engineer brother had been handy, he could easily have figured out my rate of travel and the maximum time I could swim between breaths, and plotted the best possible course for me to take.
Kick. Pull. Kick.
Of course, neither one was around, and to be honest, I would have preferred a law enforcement officer to either of my closest male relatives. I loved them dearly, but I wasn’t sure how either one would perform in this kind of situation.
Pull. Kick.
Then again, who was I to talk? I wasn’t performing very well myself. My lungs were, again, burning with the urge for air, but I wanted to get farther away, way farther away.
Carefully, slowly, I rose, breaking the smooth surface so quietly that the only thing that made any noise was my hair, dripping water off its curly ends.
“Hey!” Duvall called.
I froze, and never had the phrase seemed so appropriate. Reaching down, I could tell that my fingers were brushing rocks, but there was no sensation of feeling. Same with my toes—though I could feel them smacking something, it was a feeling of numbing dullness.
How long had I been in the water now? Five minutes? Six?
“You’ve been in there ten minutes,” Duvall said. “Bet you’re losing feeling in your toes, huh? And your fingers, that’s probably long gone. Fingers are the first to go.”
And he’d know this how, exactly? Somehow I was sure he hadn’t researched the topic properly. At most he’d used the computer and the top return on his search engine. Certainly he hadn’t looked up any scientific journals. That was what a librarian would have done—librarians do it correctly.
With the useless appendages I used to call my toes, I pushed myself forward.
“Twelve minutes,” he called. “You know what I’m going to do when I get to twenty? I’m going to walk up to the cottage and make myself a hot toddy. Steaming hot. It’ll practically scald me when I take the first sip, but there’s nothing like a hot toddy when you take a chill.”
Since I didn’t care much for strong spirits, this particular taunt didn’t bother me a bit. Now, if he’d mentioned hot chocolate, that would have been different.
I was walking myself along the lake floor with my hands now. I could stand and be thigh-deep in water, but I’d make too much noise climbing out. I had to get as shallow as I could before attempting my final escape.
“Sixteen minutes,” Duvall said. “Bet you’re cold as the dickens now, aren’t you?” His voice sounded different. I slowed almost to a stop, then realized he was talking in the opposite direction. It was pitch-dark and he couldn’t possibly see me. As long as I got out of the water and stayed out of his grasp, I’d be safe.
But now my body had started to shiver. These weren’t the normal shivers that everyone gets on occasion, the shivers from eating ice cream too fast or the shivers from sitting in a cold car before it got warm. No, these were the shivers that meant Minnie’s impending doom. Large, quaking things that rippled the water out from around me. Huge teeth-chattering shivers I couldn’t control.
I had to get out of that water.
Moving faster than I dared, but not as fast as I would have liked, I forced my lumpy hands to propel me onward and upward. One step, two, three . . .
“And bingo, here we are at twenty minutes!” Duvall shouted jovially. “Ready to come in?”
Absolutely.
It was dark and I couldn’t see diddly and Duvall was still too close, but I had to get to shore. Maybe Duvall’s twenty minutes was a figment of his manipulative tendencies and maybe it wasn’t; either way my body was starting to shut down.
I inched toward shore.
“Where the hell are you?” Duvall called.
Way over here, I was tempted to call, just to hear his reaction, but even if I could have safely done so, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get out the words. My face was so cold that I wasn’t sure my mouth would work well enough to speak intelligibly.
“Bet she already drowned,” he muttered.
Not a chance, buster.
“Well,” he said. The bench creaked under his weight and I pictured him standing. “There’s only one thing left to do, then. What do you think about that, you mangy little ball of fur?”
My feet were set wide, since I was trying to get as much stability as possible, and I stood slowly, slowly, easing myself up out of the water, inching up, letting the water slick away, trying to keep it from dripping, keeping my movements silent and hidden and invisible.