“How did you know it was a body if you dropped the rod right away?”
“I saw it.”
“Tell me what you saw,” Hazel said.
Barlow looked to Wingate again, and received his silent reassurance to go on. “I seen a person’s rear, okay? She was bent double, like she was touching her toes, and her… ass was coming up out of the water.”
“How did you know it was a woman?”
“Geez,” said Barlow, shaking her head. “I know what a woman looks like.”
“What happened to your customers?”
“They got in their cars and left.”
“You have contact information for them?”
“We’ve got the numbers in our log at the shack.”
“Okay,” said Hazel. “So you called us, but when the cops showed up, you were back on the lake.”
“Season’s just opened,” said Barlow unhappily. “I got bills piled up from winter. Gannon doesn’t freeze anymore, you know, I lose all my ice-fishing gigs and I’m drydocked for five months. I can’t turn down customers when I get them.”
“You’ve got quite a constitution. You find a body in the lake, you’re almost sick to your stomach, but ninety minutes later, you’re back on the water.”
“I didn’t go anywhere near that place, trust me,” said Barlow, splaying her hands as if to fend something off. “I just left that thing where it was. I don’t want anything to do with it. The whole thing is way too eerie.”
“Eerie,” said Wingate, “why is it eerie?”
Barlow tilted her head at them. “Don’t you read the paper?”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Hazel.
She told Wingate to go get Monday’s and Thursday’s Records. He brought them in, and they opened them to the two story instalments, spreading the papers out over the table in an empty interview room. Hazel hadn’t read past the first paragraph of the first chapter. Now the two of them leaned over the papers, Hazel supported on her cane, and hurriedly read through both. “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” by Colin Eldwin, began:
The biggest muskie ever landed on Bass Lake was a forty-pounder with a face like an old lady’s. Dale Jorgenson and his son Gus headed out early on that Sunday morning with a mind to breaking the record, but when they tossed their lines into those murky waters, with the two flies they’d tied themselves that morning beside their campfire, they had no idea what strange catch waited for them at the bottom of that lake.
Dale stood at the stern, smoking a thick hand-rolled, and smiling at his son. What a big kid that one’s turning into, he thought. Dale owned the town’s best landscaping company, but he was going to retire one day, and then it would all belong to Gus. If Gus would take it. Dale had to be careful when talking to his kid about the future. The siren call of the big city could be audible even out here.
Dale threw open the lid of the cooler. “Time for a beer, I’d say.”
“A bit early for a brew, isn’t it?” Gus said, laughing.
Dale cracked two big cold ones and tossed one of them to his son. “The fish’ll know if you’re not drinking, kid.”
The two men tipped their cans back into their throats and drank thirstily. Gus finished his in one long gulp. If Dale ever wanted proof that he really was Gus’s dad, he’d need no more than the sudsy smile on that kid’s face to have it.
“Well, if it’s the writer’s body down there, there might be just cause,” said Wingate. “So this is him?” he said, indicating the picture of the man in the parking lot. “He looks like a piece of work.”
“Who the hell fishes muskie with a fly? Who is this idiot?” said Hazel. They read on. At the end of the first section, which had been printed in Monday’s paper, Gus’d had a heavy bite, but when he tried to reel the fish in, his line snapped. The chapter ended with father and son staring at each other in wonderment, and Dale saying: “The fish of our lives is down there, Gus, waiting for us to catch it!”
In the second instalment, the two determined fishermen had rerigged with heavier line and this time, when Gus felt his rod bend against the force of something big, he and his father reeled it in together. The story ended with a shocker.
The big fish – and goddamn if it wasn’t going to be at least a fifty-pounder – had given up the fight. Dale held the net at the ready and said to Gus, “Easy, there, easy, he’ll wake up when he realizes what’s happening.”
It was murky in the water, and father and son looked over into it, anticipating the lunker of all time. But then they saw it, and what they saw stopped them cold.
“Oh god -” said Gus.
The hook was in a torso. A human body. Dale was speechless.
The terrifying vision hung in the water like it was floating in mid-air. Gus saw the body had no head.
“Great,” said Wingate. “I guess we better call the Marine Unit?”
She looked at her watch. It was already seven-thirty. “It’s going to be too dark to look tonight. Get someone up here for first thing and send Barlow home. Tell her we’ll see her in the morning. And hope to hell this thing doesn’t wash up somewhere before we find it.”
4
Charter Anglers operated out of a shack on the shore of Gannon Lake. A couple of white wooden hulls with peeling paint lay on their sides in front of the shop, and below it, at the bottom of a short slope, was the Charter Angler dock with its sign on a post at the end of it. They had a single pontoon boat tied up, big enough for five adults. It was rigged for a trip, with three rods leaning against the back railing. “I thought they were expecting us,” said Hazel.
“I’ll go see what’s happening,” said Wingate. They parked the car on the grass halfway between the dock and the shack. Wingate knocked on the door and went in. A moment later, he was leading a man toward the car.
“This is Calvin Jellinek,” Wingate said, leaning in the driver’s side window. “He says Ms. Barlow called about an hour ago and is feeling too nauseous to come in.”
“You’re going to fuck up my ten a.m., aren’t you?” Jellinek said. The muscles on his arms stood out like cables. He was a strong-looking, squat man with a face ravaged by acne scars.
“Your partner was supposed to take us out.”
“She was, eh? Why do I think that honour’s going to fall to me?”
“Do you know where Ms. Barlow found the… um?”
“I know this lake,” he said. “I can take you anywhere. But why don’t you folks come back at noon? It’s the Saturday of the long weekend. I have customers. Look -” He waved behind Wingate, and Wingate turned to see a woman and two little boys coming down toward them. The boys were wearing one-piece, full-body swimsuits that looked like diving costumes. Overtop of these suits they wore enormous, blocky red life-jackets. “They drove up from Mayfair. It wouldn’t be right -”
“What we’re here for is a little more urgent than catching bass, I think.”
The woman and her kids were standing slightly behind him. The boys were excited. One of them said, “Can I kill them?”
“Be quiet, Tom. You can see Mr. Jellinek is busy.”
Jellinek leaned forward with a pleading look on his face. It was a mean look. “Come on, Officer. Three hours. It means a hundred and fifty in my pocket, and whatever it is you’re looking for, it’ll be there at lunchtime.” He turned to his customers. “You folks just head on down to the dock. I’ll be two minutes.”
“You’re going to have to cancel this expedition, Mr. Jellinek,” said Wingate. “I’m sorry. We’ve got a marine unit coming up from Mayfair – they’re going to be here in about an hour.”
“You going to reimburse me for my lost income?”
“I’m sure these folks’ll make it up to you. Those boys aren’t going to let their mother off the hook.” He immediately regretted his choice of words, thinking of what was lying out there in ten metres of water. “This is more important.”