What I really wanted to do was go home and soak in a hot bath and drink some brandy while steaming out the head cold that was already mounting a cavalry charge.
Tjaden wouldn’t go to the canoe. I had to do it.
This time, I got a good look at the girl. She wasn’t at all familiar. She was probably Ruthie’s age. She had on a winter coat but it was open. I had an irrational thought, about how cold she must be. I wanted to put my blanket on her. Then I remembered that she was dead.
I moved closer. In the moonlight, the blood that soaked her tan skirt looked black. There was blood all over her hands and legs. Her white blouse was clean, as was her face. I wondered what could have caused this much blood.
I walked back up and grabbed the stern of the canoe and dragged it across the ice. I pulled it up on the snowy shore.
“God Almighty,” Tjaden said. “Look at that blood.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“You see any bullet holes or cuts or anything?”
“Nope.”
“Me either,” he said.
Then he got pious on me. “The way girls run around today, just like our pastor says, you dress like a whore, people are just naturally going to think you are a whore.”
“She isn’t dressed like a whore.”
“If she’d stayed home and done her schoolwork at night, she wouldn’t be in this canoe right now.”
“What if she died during the day?”
He shook his head. “She didn’t die during the day.”
“How do you know?”
“I can just tell is all.”
Who needs scientific detection when you’ve got Tjaden around?
I heard voices.
To my right, coming down the hill from the gravel road that fronted this section of timber, I could see more flashlights bobbing in the gloom.
“Looks like Cliff,” Tjaden said.
“Thank God,” I said. “We’re all saved.”
“He’s a lot better lawman than you give him credit for, McCain.”
“That wouldn’t be hard, since I don’t give him any credit at all.”
It was Cliffie all right, gunbelt slung low, cigarette dangling from his mouth. He still wasn’t wearing a jacket. My hero.
“What happened to McCain?” he asked Tjaden.
“Fell in the river.”
Cliffie smiled at me. “Too bad he didn’t drown.”
I wondered if Tjaden would do one of his har-de-har-har routines.
Two other people came up behind Cliffie. One was Paddy, Sr., from the bar and the other was Jim Truman, the handyman.
Paddy didn’t bother with amenities. He went right over to the canoe and looked down at the girl. He looked over at me. “This looks like somethin’ that coon friend of yours might’ve done.”
“We don’t even know that it was foul play yet,” I said.
“All that blood and it’s not foul play?”
Paddy said. “You’re some goddamned lawyer, you are.”
“Any of you ever see her before?” Cliffie said, playing his flashlight on her face.
Everybody took a turn gawking at her.
Each shook his head.
“Still think you should look up Darin,” Paddy said. “You know how them bucks like white gals.”
Jim Truman came up and said, “Paddy, I sure don’t know why you’re always on that colored boy’s case. When he’s sober and all, you couldn’t ask for a nicer young boy.”
Paddy looked disgusted. “You plannin’ to go down to Memphis and help out the jigs, are you, Jim?”
Way back before the Civil War, some Iowa farmers used to shoot any slave hunters they’d find. They figured anybody who’d profit on runaway slaves deserved to be shot.
Cliffie smirked. “I’ll bet ole Jim here’s got a taste for dark meat.” Then he looked over and saw Mary coming back our way.
“I’ll get an ambulance out here. Get her over to the doc’s for an autopsy.”
I sneezed.
“Aw,” Cliffie said, “the counselor’s getting a cold.”
“C’mon,” Mary said, sliding her arm around my blanket-covered body. “I’ll walk you up to the road and then I’ll go get your car.”
“I’ll stay warmer if I walk, too,” I said.
So we started to leave.
“That’s three bodies you’ve been involved with today, McCain,” Cliffie yelled after us. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say our counselor has turned mass murderer.”
The walk back was even colder than I’d expected. When we got to the rink, a lot of people came over and asked us about the rumors of a dead girl found in a canoe. It was like a press conference. I was freezing. Mary kept trying to drag me away, telling everything about how cold I was. But they had just one more question. And then one more. And so on.
She drove to my place. We turned the heater up so far it sounded like a B-52 engine.
She knew just what to do. While I got out of my wet clothes, she was in the bathroom running hot water into the tub. I grabbed a bottle of brandy from the cabinet, a couple of glasses from the kitchen and the portable radio from my bedside.
She said, “Get in. I’ll pull up a chair out there and we can talk through the door.” She smiled. “That way you can remain modest and virginal.”
It worked out well, actually, the water steaming hot and all. I think I invented a few new swear words in that moment of torture when flesh first met water. But I gradually got used to it. I started sipping brandy and then I started feeling warm.
What we talked about was the Knolls and what it was like growing up there and how, for all the poverty and occasional violence, we’d actually had some pretty good times. She made me remember people and moments that came back to me vivid as snapshots. She even brought back certain smells and sounds. She didn’t talk about us, not about a romantic us anyway, and I appreciated that because every few minutes Pamela would come into my head. I’d see her or hear her and then Mary wouldn’t be there anymore, it would be Pamela.
I stayed in the tub an hour. I had to keep replenishing the hot water supply. I’d get it just hot enough that I could break a sweat.
Then Mary said, “Well, I’d better get going. It’s almost nine o’clock. Wes’s meeting’ll be breaking up pretty soon.”
She stood on the other side of the half-opened door. I got a brief glimpse of her beret. “Thanks for taking care of me,”
I said.
“My pleasure.”
We didn’t say anything, which was, in its own way, terrible.
“Well,” she said.
“Thanks again.”
“Sure.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by tomorrow for lunch.”
“Great. Maybe I’ll see you then.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Well,” she said.
“Well, good night.”
“‘ationight.”
I listened to her going down the back stairs.
I don’t know if footsteps can actually sound sad but hers seemed to. And I, of course, felt like shit. Wes was a pompous ass and what was I doing letting her marry somebody like him?
Why the hell did I have to be so hung up on Pamela? I could picture Mary walking home alone, in and out of those pools of light cast by streetlights, pausing on corners like a good little girl to look both ways even though there wasn’t any traffic, fetching in her beret and with those earnest brown eyes of hers. She’d walk the two blocks home from here and then a girlfriend would drive her out to get her car at the rink in the morning before work.
I stayed in the tub another half hour. My thoughts drifted to two subjects, the cleatlike soles on the bottoms of Robert Frazier’s shoes, and the fact that Susan Whitney had been killed by a. 32. Judge Whitney wanted me to prove that her nephew wasn’t a murderer-a wife beater, a gambler, a drunk and a bully, yes, but not, God forbid, a murderer.
I watched twenty minutes of Jack Paar and then went to bed. I tried to read but I kept dozing off, the paperback falling on my chest.
Finally, I clipped the light off and gave in to sleep.
I don’t wake up easily. You wouldn’t want me as your first line of defense. About the time the Russian Army was marching down Main Street, my eyelids would slowly be opening.