Heart of Stone (2 page)

“I'm the chief of police,” he said, almost expecting applause. “Not that I have to answer to nudists.”

Aunt Lena chuckled. “Oh, I know who you are. Max told me we had a new chief of police on the lake. So you're Tiny Terwilliger.”

“Ralph Terwilliger,” said the man as if it pleased him to say it. “Tiny is a pet name from my younger days.”

“
Homo habilis
with scabby knuckles, according to Max,” Aunt Lena said to me, cupping a hand over her mouth.

“What's that?”

“What can we do for you, Mr. Terwilliger?” she asked, ignoring his question.

“For starters,” he said, “you can stop swimming nude in the lake. And for seconds, I want to ask you ladies if you seen or heard anything out of the ordinary earlier today.”

“I saw a gull,” I said. “Just a minute ago.”

Terwilliger rolled his eyes and sighed. “Did you happen to see anything over toward Baxter's Rock or the Hebrew kee-boots?”

“
The Hebrew kee-boots?
” asked Aunt Lena. “What kind of thing is that to say?”

“The Arcadia Lodge,” he said. “The Jew Communists. You know what I mean.”

“Mr. Terwilliger, my niece and I are Jews.”

“That's real nice,” he said. “Anyways, I didn't come out here to talk religion or politics. I wanted to know if you seen or heard anything unusual in the direction of Baxter's Rock.”

“I heard those drag racers again last night,” said Aunt Lena. “Why don't you do something about them? They're a menace.”

There had been a spate of loud cars speeding through the village and surrounding areas for the past week, she'd told me that morning. It was getting on her nerves.

“We're working on that, don't worry,” he said. “I've set up a speed trap about a half mile south of here on Route Fifteen. I was there for three hours this morning watching for them. We'll catch them.”

“Please do,” she said.

“Now back to my question. Did you see or hear anything over by Baxter's Rock?”

“When?” I asked.

He consulted his wrist and, discovering he wasn't wearing a watch, asked me for the time.

I dug into my canvas bag to retrieve my watch. “Just after two,” I said.

He did some calculations in his head, then double-checked on his fingers. “Maybe about an hour and a half ago.”

“I swam a bit when I got here,” I began. “Then I ate my lunch.”

“Did you happen to see or hear anything from that direction?” he repeated, pointing to the southwest.

“I was probably dozing on the dock around half past twelve. I heard some motor boats off in the distance, but I can't say for sure which direction or when.”

Terwilliger nodded knowingly. “That makes sense,” he said but didn't explain why.

“How else may we help you?” asked Aunt Lena, clutching my towel ever more tightly to her breast.

“I noticed that the young lady had a camera,” he said, indicating me with a jab of his left forefinger.

Even from my vantage point ten feet away, I could see that the digit was missing the tip, fingernail, and distal joint, surely lopped off while disemboweling a squirrel for Sunday dinner. Or perhaps he'd lost it in a drunken game of mumblety-peg.

“How do you know I have a camera?” I asked.

He looked me up and down a second time. “I seen you taking pictures with it this morning before you came out here for your sunbathing.”

That was a lot of creepiness to process in one go. I certainly hadn't seen him, and I wanted my towel back from Aunt Lena. I had risen early on my first day on the lake to shoot some Kodachrome of the sunrise. Then I'd headed back to Cedar Haven for breakfast. I packed a basket with some lemonade and sandwiches and returned to the lake around eleven for my rendezvous with the gulls and my naked aunt. And now a horrid man named Tiny Terwilliger was polluting the air in the general vicinity. He asked if I still had the camera.

“Yes, in my bag.”

“Is photography also prohibited on Prospector Lake?” asked Aunt Lena, still in her saccharine voice.

“No, ma'am,” he said. “I don't have a camera, you see. And I don't know how to use one. At least not a fancy one like she's got. So I need the young lady to help me take some pictures over there below Baxter's Rock in the cove.”

“Pictures of what?” I asked.

The chief turned back to me. “Two dead bodies.”

CHAPTER TWO

Baxter's Rock, a flinty promontory of broken shale and slate, towered some seventy-five feet above a deep pool on the western shore of Prospector Lake. Just a third of a mile from the dock attached to Aunt Lena's property, with Arcadia Lodge, the “Hebrew kee-boots” in between, Baxter's Rock was accessible only on foot through the woods or via a long, narrow road that wound through the hills above the lake.

Arcadia Lodge was a cooperative made up of ten family cabins, grouped around a central gathering facility–cum–dining hall known as the Great Lodge. Once one of the more modest Great Adirondack Camps, the Arcadia had been bought in the early thirties by a group of New York Jewish intellectuals and artists, much to the dismay of the local gentry. The New Yorkers were immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe, chased out by pogroms, wars, and poverty. They'd brought their music and art with them from the old country, along with their radical politics. I knew all about Arcadia Lodge from the summers our family had spent on the lake with Aunt Lena and her late husband, Uncle Melvin, a thoracic surgeon who'd been on the staff of Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Over the years, he and my father, too, became friendly with the Arcadians, played chess and cards, and engaged in thoughtful political and cultural discussions with them. My brother, Elijah, and I used to play with the children who spent their summers at Arcadia Lodge.

Aunt Lena wished Chief Terwilliger and me luck, claiming that dead bodies were not to her taste. She pushed off to find Cousin Max and fill him in on the news. I stepped into my sandals, grabbed my camera kit from the canvas bag, and followed Terwilliger to the shore, grateful for the breeze that kept me upwind of him. There was nothing to be done, however, about the unrestricted view I had to endure of his rear end. Despite myself, I couldn't help watching it twitch back and forth as he waddled along the planks. He led me to a small launch waiting on the beach, surely the one I'd heard pass earlier as I dozed on the dock.

At his invitation, I climbed into the boat. Then he pushed it into the lake and jumped inside, nearly capsizing us in three feet of water. Once he'd settled into his seat astern, he lowered the outboard into the water and set about trying to start the motor. He yanked the pull cord at least ten times, nearly knocking himself out from the exertion and resulting hyperventilation, before the outboard finally coughed to life. He leaned back, satisfied with himself—red face, perspiration, and all.

Terwilliger steered us around a crag, chugging toward the narrow ingress that opened into the cove below Baxter's Rock. He lined up the bow of the boat between two outcroppings that guarded the entrance, gunned the engine to give us some forward momentum, then cut the power and lifted the outboard from the water. We glided into the cove, skimming over the sharp rocks submerged just below the surface.

“Nice bit of navigation,” I said, and he grinned.

“Lots of people break a propeller or get stuck on the rocks trying to come in here,” he said. “But I grew up on the lake. I know it pretty good.”

The cove stretched perhaps a hundred feet from the stone beach to its narrow exit into the lake. The steep walls of the cliff blocked the afternoon sun's direct rays, giving the pool of captive water a deep-black hue. We approached the beach where I could see two canvas tarpaulins spread out on the ground. I wouldn't have given a second thought to the lumps in the fabric if the chief hadn't already told me the purpose of our visit. I knew that two dead bodies lay beneath the tarps.

Below the cliffs of Baxter's Rock, a ledge of flat shale no more than twelve to fifteen feet wide formed a narrow beach of sorts. It was difficult to reach, accessible only by boat, as we had come, or by climbing over some high, sharp rocks along the shore. And, of course, there was the express route from the top of the cliff . . .

Adventurous divers had long enjoyed testing their nerve and skill by leaping into the pool of water from above. The trick was to clear the shale beach and hit the cove's deep water. In all the years I'd vacationed on Prospector Lake, I never once heard of an actual diving accident at Baxter's Rock. Still, our parents treated us children regularly to horror stories of young fools who'd misjudged the leap and plunged to their doom on the rocks below. Cousin Max, an eloquent man who never used a simple phrase when a convoluted one would do, once warned Elijah and me that two objects cannot occupy a space at the same time. He topped it off with a supplementary caution: “Gravity unleashed is a risky proposition at best.”

Working as a reporter for the
New Holland Republic
, I'd seen a few dead bodies in the previous year and a half. Still, I didn't relish the prospect of aiming my camera at a couple of corpses, especially on my summer vacation.

Tiny Terwilliger climbed out of the boat and secured it to a rock with a length of frayed rope. Then he watched closely as I scrambled from my seat onto the shore in nothing but my bathing suit. Pervert.

He told me again that he didn't own a camera, almost as if he was proud of the fact.

“Don't need one.” He smiled.

“I believe my presence here right now invalidates your assertion,” I said.

He ignored me and lifted the tarp closest to the wall to reveal the first body: a young man in hunter-green gym shorts, a white T-shirt, and a worn pair of low-top Keds, lying facedown on the rocks. His face was turned away from me, and a pool of sticky, nearly dried blood had spread in a two-foot irregular oval around his skull. His right arm was trapped beneath his body, while the left extended at a forty-five-degree angle, the elbow bent another twenty degrees as if waving good-bye. Upon impact, his legs had come to rest crossed at the ankles: an almost peaceful, somnolent pose. Holding my breath and suppressing the urge to vomit and weep, I loaded my camera with Tri-X, wound the film, and snapped several frames of the body from head to toe and back again.

“That T-shirt is from Camp Orpheus,” said Terwilliger as if to make conversation. “That's the music camp south of the village.”

“I remember their concerts from when I used to come here as a girl,” I said, stepping around the boy.

I knelt by his crushed face and gazed at him. He was good-looking, tall and wiry, black-haired, and tanned. He looked to be all of sixteen or seventeen. I bowed my head and touched his left shoulder.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Terwilliger.

“Just give me a minute,” I answered, brushing a stray lock of hair away from the boy's left eye.

Terwilliger snorted. “He'll get a funeral, miss. So for now, just take my pictures, will you?”

I pushed up off the slate, wiped my eyes, and focused my Leica on the young man's face, lifeless and dented, almost caved-in. I squeezed off ten more shots before I turned away to compose myself. After several deep breaths and a splash of cool lake water on my cheeks, I felt ready to face the next body.

The chief pulled the tarp over the boy then peeled back the second one nearer the edge of the water, exposing the other body. The first thing I noticed was that he was wearing nothing but ordinary striped men's boxer shorts. He was handsome, slim, and fair-skinned with a bad sunburn. I figured him to be in his mid-thirties, about five feet nine or ten. A gold watch was strapped to his left wrist. He was lying on his right side, no blood on the rocks, but you couldn't miss the large bluish bruise along his torso against the ground. Another bluish blotch, smaller, was visible on his left rib cage, hip, and thigh. I imagined he'd bounced or rolled after impact on the sharp rocks. His hands were clenched in a death grip, frozen as if in a last, desperate grab at fleeting life. His lips were twisted in an ironic grimace that belied the finality of his demise. Or perhaps affirmed it. What a brutal realization death must be when visited with such abruptness.

I photographed the body from all the requisite angles, shooting two more rolls of Tri-X, before I took a second look at his watch. Why was he wearing a wristwatch? I knew about waterproof timepieces, of course, but I'd never seen one with a leather strap. I knelt down and tried to turn his wrist to see the crystal. The underside of his arm was white.

“Don't go touching the body like that,” said Terwilliger. “What do you think you're doing?”

“I want to see if his watch was damaged,” I said.

“You like playing detective, do you?” he asked, but I ignored him.

Having read my share of mystery stories as a girl, I knew that the first item to check was the victim's watch. It always seemed to stop at the precise moment of death due to some incidental impact. And though this clichéd artifice often succeeds at the expense of verisimilitude, smashed crystals and frozen watch hands are hot stuff in pulp novels. In this case, however, a broken watch was to be expected, since the dead man's impact with the ground could hardly be categorized as incidental.

But the watch, a LeCoultre Réveil, was ticking away on his wrist as if nothing had happened, its second hand sweeping gracefully around the silver dial. A splendid testimonial for the durability of the product, though probably not one the LeCoultre company would have cared to use in its advertising.

It looked like an expensive model. The casing was a light-yellow gold, and the band, as I'd already noticed, was made of leather or some kind of lizard skin. I stood and reconsidered the dead man. His hair was styled if uncombed, his fingernails manicured, and his physique toned. My interest was piqued. Why no swimming trunks? Why not remove the watch? Who were these two men, and why had they fallen to their deaths together?