Stalked (16 page)

“How do you cut through the ice?” she asked.

“Gas auger,” Josh said. He pointed at a machine that looked like an outboard motor with two feet of black screw attached, its blades pocked with rust.

“This is like a horror movie,” she said. “You’re not going to cut me up, are you?”

“No!”

Sherry laughed. “It was a joke. Besides, in those movies, the girl has to get naked before she gets killed, and I am
not
getting naked in this place.” Josh looked disappointed, and she added with a wink, “Okay, maybe a little naked.”

The heater beat back the cold in the fish house. Sherry watched as Josh prepared the hook end of a fishing line and unwound the line deep into the cut-out section of ice. He propped the rod on an upside-down chair and reached into his pocket for a small bell, which he tied to the line with thread.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“If a fish takes the bait, the line jerks and rings the bell.” He tapped it with his hand, and the bell went
ding, ding
.

“Cute.”

Josh unzipped his backpack and pulled out an iPod and a set of portable speakers. He put on an album by the Black Eyed Peas, and Sherry began rolling her body to Fergie’s funky beat. Josh’s face lit up in a sly grin, and he reached back into the pack and came out with two frosty cans of Miller Lite.

“Let the party begin,” he said.

Sherry took an open can from Josh and drank down a long swallow that she thought would freeze in her throat. Holding the can with two fingers, she danced, swiveling her hips lazily and slithering her arms and fingers up and down her body. The more she danced and drank, the warmer she felt, and the more handsome Josh got.

She crooked her finger, beckoning him to the sofa. They sat down, and his hands prowled over her back. He kissed her clumsily; his tongue felt like a wet slug exploring the roof of her mouth. She felt him tentatively cup one of her breasts, and when she didn’t protest, he grabbed it as if he were diving for a fumble. A low moan purred from his throat.

She pulled away and rolled her shirt up an inch at a time, revealing her flat tummy and then her pear-shaped breasts. She left the shirt propped on top of her cleavage. His eyes were so wide she thought she could see around them into his brain. She turned her attention to his belt buckle, which she undid, and then unzipped him, exposing the white fabric of his underwear. She reached inside and pulled him out.

His eyes were closed. He was on the moon.

Ding, ding
.

The fishing line fluttered. The rod rocked in the chair and tumbled to the ice.

“Shit, hang on,” Josh told her, swinging his legs off the sofa.

“You have
got
to be kidding,” Sherry said.

“Help me,” he said, jerking on the line, his jeans around his ankles, his shaft still ready for action.

Sherry sighed. “That’s what I was trying to do.” She added, “Don’t let your thingy get sliced off, okay?”

He battled the fish for several minutes, until it was close to the surface.

“Take the pole,” he said. “Keep it pointed up.”

“That’s what I was—oh, never mind.” She took the fishing rod and held it while Josh grabbed a pair of gloves and reached down into the hole.

“Reel in some more line,” he told her.

“What am I, Supergirl? This thing is heavy.”

She cranked the reel, and the line wound in slowly. It felt as if she were pulling up a boat anchor on the other end.

“Almost got it,” he said.

Suddenly, Josh yelped. He unleashed a girlish scream and fell back on his ass. His erection deflated. With his hands on the ice, he scrabbled away from the hole. “Shit!”

Something black bobbed out of the ice like a gopher in a carnival whack-a-mole game. Sherry cranked the reel and inched closer, repelled but curious. When she saw it, she screamed, too.

Matted black hair danced up and down at her feet. The smell, released out of the water, was rank; she covered her face. Invisible gases fouled the air. She watched through slitted fingers and saw a human head now, snow-white and hideously swollen, peeking above the ice. More of the body was trapped below. Mud and weeds clung to its skin. Its eyes were open but cloudy, like marbles. Its mouth was slightly open, and the splashing and sucking of the water made it sound as if it were talking. As if it were alive when it was obviously dead. The head said over and over, “Let me out, let me out, let me out, let me out.”

Helen Danning could see her reflection in the window of the gift shop, and every few seconds, her face lit up like the glow of a wild fire as northbound traffic off the highway shot their twin beams through the glass. To Helen, the car lights were like the white tunnels of searchlights, wending back and forth across a field, hunting for her. When a car slowed and pulled off the road, she flinched. The headlights grew huge in the window as the car parked outside the shop, and Helen pushed her chair back and got up, leaving a half-drunk chai tea and her white Mac laptop open on the cast-iron table. She backed up between the oak shelves, which were stocked with Yankee candles and potpourri.

The shop door opened, and Helen felt as if the night were spilling inside. A burst of chill made her shiver. She glanced at the corridor leading to Evelyn’s stockroom, where a back door butted up to frozen cornfields. Irrationally, she wanted to run, but she saw that the people coming into the shop were harmless. A man in a Minnesota State Fair sweatshirt ordered two coffees from Evelyn at the counter, while his wife browsed the sale-priced Christmas ornaments. Helen ducked her head and kept her face hidden.

She waited until their car was back on the highway before she sat down at the table again. When she took a sip of her sweet tea, her fingers were trembling. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and continued the methodical work on her laptop, opening each of the entries in her blog and erasing them. Her slim finger hovered over the Delete key as she reread a posting about the show
Miss Saigon
. She had seen the show dozens of times, as she had seen most musicals that came through the Ordway Center in Saint Paul. As an usher, she saw the performances night after night, and she could spot the nuances in every actor, song, costume, and set. She lived the shows almost as if they were more real than her own life. Some people became obsessed with soap operas, but Helen’s obsession was
Phantom, Les Miz, Rent
, and all the other touring shows that ran over and over on the stage. Her blog was her outlet to pour out her thoughts about the characters.

She called her blog “The Lady in Me.” She had come across a Shania Twain CD called
The Woman in Me
years earlier and bought it because she liked the title. The phrase became a kind of anthem to her. It summed up what she had lost in college and what she had been searching for her whole life. She even had the initials TLIM tattooed on her ankle, like a secret message she carried with her.

She didn’t realize back then that she was making a mistake, that someone who wanted to find her could figure out who she was and where she worked by carefully reading the posts to her blog. She had just never dreamed that anyone would want to find her.

Helen looked up as the piano music playing overhead stopped. The gift shop went silent.

“Time to run, honeybun,” Evelyn called. She was closing up the shop, cleaning out the coffeepot, toting up the register. Evelyn always seemed to do five things at once. She didn’t walk. She bustled.

Helen shut down her laptop and waited. Evelyn was right. It was time to run, and that was what Helen was doing. Running.

With a flounce, Evelyn sat down in the chair opposite Helen. She had poured herself the dregs of the coffee. She took a sip and pushed her unruly, squirrel-colored curls out of her face. Under the table, she kicked off her Birkenstocks and wiggled her toes.

“How about we go home and feed Edgar?” Evelyn asked.

“Sure.”

“You know, you’re like my cat,” she said, noticing Helen’s nervous green eyes. “She’s more scared of birds than the birds are of her.”

“Every time someone comes in, I think it’s going to be him,” Helen told her.

“I understand.”

“I promise I won’t be in your hair too much longer.”

Evelyn shrugged. “Stay as long as you like. We don’t do it often enough, honeybun. What’s it been? A couple years? The last few days have been like college, ordering pizza and chugging down cheap wine. Makes me forget all this gray hair.”

In addition to running the gift shop, Evelyn was a painter, poet, and gardener, who lived alone in an old house on five acres near the Mississippi in rural Little Falls. They had been best friends since their days as roommates at the U of M. Several times, Evelyn had invited Helen to join her in the small central Minnesota town, but Helen was scared of open places, nervous about emptiness. She liked the anonymity of the city, where she could lose herself in crowds and live silently in the midst of the noise.

“You think I’m overreacting, don’t you?” Helen asked.

Evelyn retrieved a bowl of wasabi soy nuts from the shop counter and placed it between them on the table. She took a green nut and crunched it in her mouth. “Yeah. I guess I do. But so what? You met this guy, not me.”

“His name was Eric.”

“Okay, Eric.”

“He tracked me down, and a couple of days later, he was murdered.”

“It could be a coincidence.”

Helen shook her head. “He knew what happened to me.”

“So?”

“So Eric was going to confront the bastard. I told you that.”

Evelyn looked at her skeptically. “The papers said Eric’s wife was the one who killed him.”

“Well, I think they’re wrong.”

Evelyn sighed. “If you’re so sure, honeybun, why not go to the police?”

Helen stuck out her tongue. “The police are no help. You remember last time?”

“They treated you badly.”

“They told me it was
my
fault,” Helen said. “I don’t need to go through that again. They’d just dredge up what happened and in the end, they wouldn’t do a thing. They’d say I was crazy or out for revenge.”

Helen stared out the window at the highway. Evelyn reached out and covered Helen’s hand. “Do you really think you’re in danger?”

“I do.”

“Then you need to tell someone,” Evelyn insisted. “What if this guy is stalking someone else? Do you want another woman to go through what you did?”

“No.”

“Okay then. You might be the only one who can stop this creep.”

“I need time,” Helen told her.

Evelyn smiled and stood up. “You got it, honeybun. Come on, let’s go home and light a fire and crack open some Yellow Tail. The main thing is to stop worrying. No one’s going to find you. You’re safe here.”

Is it Tanjy’s body?“ Stride asked.

Abel Teitscher nodded. His eyebrows and mustache were painted white by the snow that blew off the lake in sheets. “She’s a frozen fish stick.”

“Cause of death?”

“Someone caved in the back of her skull.”

Stride swore and headed for the cluster of police gathered near the fish house. It was like a Gypsy city on the lake, a ragtag assortment of plywood boxes, tents, aluminum fish houses, campers, and pickup trucks. Tire and snowmobile tracks created a maze through the snow. There was litter everywhere, discarded boxes, beer bottles, tattered gloves, fish heads, and half-smoked cigars. The lake itself was huge, with spiderlike tentacles reaching around forested peninsulas, and he could see only a small slice of it from where he was. It was called Hell’s Lake because of its reputation for hot spots, areas like eggshell where the ice never froze solid because of the strong current running underneath. Or maybe because lava bubbled up directly from hell and heated the water. It was a dangerous place, easy to get lost in when the mists came, easy to stray from the dense sections of ice to the fragile shelves laced with cracks. A few people went under every season; most were never rescued.

The wind across the ice was ferocious. With no trees to slow it down, it rocketed across the lake like a skate sail. Tanjy’s body lay forlornly on a strip of plastic on the ice outside the fish house. Her skin’s pigment had leached away. Either her killer or the current of the lake water had stripped her naked. He felt a stab of regret. Tanjy had spent her life obsessed with rape; now, like this, she really had been violated.

Stride returned to Teitscher. “You should have called me on this immediately.”

Teitscher’s wrinkled, weatherworn face didn’t move. “We agreed I was taking over the investigation.”

“You are, but I want to be in the loop.”

“To me that means copying you on my paperwork,” Teitscher snapped. “It doesn’t mean having you second-guess me at the scene. I don’t want you here, Lieutenant. Right now, I don’t know which side you’re on.”