“Check it out,” Zack said. “We’re not the last ones at closing time.”
The two other girls were exchanging embarrassed looks while giving John dirty glances. They dug into their bags and pulled on more substantial tops and jeans.
Zack pointed to the cabin cruiser, still tied up by the railroad bridge. On closer inspection, it was an older boat.
“Rinker Fiesta 330,” Zack said. “Let’s have a little fun. Bet you somebody’s fucking in there. Probably one of our dads cheating…”
“Don’t,” John said.
“We wouldn’t want sex happening on a public waterway,” Zack said augustly.
Heather laughed. She said, “Do it.”
He aimed the spotlight and shot its powerful beam into the cabin. All John could think of was the memory of Heather’s back and pelvis moving against Zack, how her head went up and down on his lap as if she couldn’t get enough, stopping only long enough to pull her hair over one shoulder. And the sight of Zack’s cock out of his pants…
Jennifer let out a gasp.
John saw it. Bright slices of red were painted against the glass of the oval-shaped portholes. He could swear it wasn’t there when they went upriver.
“That looks like blood,” Jennifer whispered.
“We should get out of here.” Heather pulled herself away from Zack and slumped in the seat beside him.
Zack played the light all across the boat. The decks were empty.
“I mean it, we should go.” Heather put on her bra under her blouse.
Zack stayed, holding the craft with the engines. They idled loudly, echoing off the trees and levees. Anyone inside couldn’t help but hear them.
He yelled across. “Hey! Ahoy! Need help?”
The cabin cruiser rocked gently at its mooring.
“Why don’t you check it out, Borders? You should know this kind of shit, being a cop’s son and all.”
John stared at the dark boat, now no more than ten feet away.
“Stay here, John.” Heather looked at him, a blurry expression in her eyes.
“Come alongside,” John said, standing.
“John!”
He ignored her and as the two craft gently bumped together he stepped across onto the stern of the other boat. “Got a flashlight?”
Zack tossed him one, a heavy two-cell with a metal case, and he miraculously caught it.
The boats were now side-by-side, but somehow Zack’s glistening Sea Ray seemed impossibly distant. The other boat was shrouded. John could not see the faces of his companions onboard the Sea Ray. The deck beneath his feet felt slick and breakable.
“Anybody here?” he called, trying to keep the fear out of his voice.
He ran the flashlight beam forward, past a bench, sink, and the driver’s seat. The helm. He didn’t know many nautical terms, despite his sailing trips from Boston. Here nothing looked amiss. The seats were pearl colored and clean, and there was no evidence of any partying, no beer cans, nothing.
Ahead was the rectangular entrance to the cabin. It was totally black. The flashlight didn’t cut through the gloom at all. John felt his stomach tighten. It was only a few steps but they looked dangerous and the cabin far off. His interior voice was telling him not to go in there, to return to the Sea Ray and leave.
He thought again of Heather, willed his feet forward, and ducked inside the cabin, taking the single step down.
“Anybody…”
The blood lay everywhere in the confined space, an area as tight as a funeral vault. A large amount pooled on the floor, soaking into the carpet, nearly reaching his shoes. More was flung in great spurts against the walls and portholes. He thought of photos he had seen in school, of Jackson Pollack painting.
The flashlight exaggerated the color of the blood and its freshness, sluiced along cushions and dripping from a bench. Everywhere, that is, except on the face of the woman who lay on the bench staring at him with empty eyes. She had short wheat-colored hair and a face that maintained its attractiveness despite what had happened here. Her legs were parted wide. A stab of recognition hit him and he had a moment’s desire to venture deeper into the cabin, but no, he stopped.
He wanted out with sudden panic. He ran a hand nervously through his hair and backed out quickly, the skin on the rear of his neck prickly. Then, again with unaccustomed grace, he hopped back across to Zack’s boat. Zack was in the rear, again working on the knots that secured the Zodiac. He was teasing the girls. “You take the little boat out for a love cruise…?
“No,” a pouty response came.
“She’s dead in there…” John tried to speak calmly, still supremely aware of Heather’s presence. “We’ve got to call the police.”
Zack walked back to the helm, speaking over the exclamations of the girls.
“What do you mean, dead?”
“Dead, asshole,” John shouted. “Murdered. It’s a fucking Freddy Kruger house in that cabin.”
Zack opened his mouth and nothing came out.
He gunned the engine and they leapt out of the water. John fell painfully to the deck, but scrambled up again. He pushed his way forward, the images he had seen burned in his brain, grabbing Zack’s shoulder. The other man pulled away roughly and steered to the middle of the channel.
“We have to go back!”
“Back off, dawg, it’s my boat.”
“She’s dead back there.”
“Then there’s nothing we can do.”
John fought for the wheel, unsuccessfully.
“Go back!”
“Are you crazy?” Zack shouted. “I’ve got a boat of ecstasy and drunk underage girls. No fucking way.”
It was no use. The bright lights of downtown Cincinnati were in their faces and reflecting off Zack’s sleek, shaved head, as if they had suddenly emerged from the past into the present.
Zack steered over to the Serpentine Wall and cut the engines, jumping out to tie up. He leaped back in and took the cell phone from John, rage in his bright blue eyes.
“Don’t you get it, cop’s son? We’ll be the first goddamned suspects.”
Monday
Chapter Three
With an hour to spare before her meeting started, Cheryl Beth locked her car and began her walk across campus. It was the loveliest day she had seen this year, as mother nature felt the intoxicating sense of her power to give rebirth. A rainstorm had come through in the early morning and now the day was sunny and warm. She gloried in the bright green of the Ohio buckeyes, the sweetgums with their star-shaped leaves, the dense beech trees. A woodpecker was working on an oak, a scarlet crown on his head. Her mother had taught her to identify trees when she was a little girl. She had given her that, at least.
The morning fast-walks were important, Cheryl Beth knew. After she had turned forty, she could no longer keep weight off effortlessly. She was still an attractive woman, with light brown hair worn in a long shag cut and large brown eyes in a face that still held the too-young look that had often caused her to be underestimated. She smiled easily and men still noticed her. But she was trying to be healthier. Too many years as a nurse had taught her the senseless, incomprehensible ways our bodies could go wrong; no need to help the process along.
Her surroundings made such worries seem impossible. The surreal beauty of Miami University never failed to move her. It was like a college setting out of a novel, with stately brick buildings, a lush, precisely maintained campus, and the quaint town of Oxford. The sense of safety was overwhelming. What a change from the grittiness of the old hospital in Cincinnati. She started through the dogwood grove that would take her to the Formal Gardens. It was one of her favorite spots.
This was the first time in her career when she wasn’t practicing as an RN on a hospital staff. It felt strange to go to work as a teacher of nursing, not to be in scrubs but dressed up. She had worn scrubs for more than twenty years, working in the hardest jobs at the hospital that handled the toughest cases. She was known as the best pain management nurse in three states and wouldn’t dispute it. But she needed this break. She was a natural teacher, and the clinical part of the job still gave her hospital time.