Thread and Buried (25 page)

48

I
NEVER REALLY BELIEVED THAT THE ENTIRE
life of a drowning person could pass before her eyes as she sank into the water. How would there be enough time?

But I also wouldn’t have believed what I saw. Not my past, but a future, a future that might never exist. Me cuddling babies that belonged to Haylee and Ben . . . Clay at my shoulder . . .

I had instinctively filled my lungs before I hit the water, but I wasn’t going to be able to hold my breath much longer. My lungs burned.

Clay,
I thought,
Clay.

Which way was up? I held as still as possible in hopes that my air-filled lungs would raise my head close to the surface and then I could flutter my hands and lift my face out of the water for another breath.

A lessening of the inky darkness penetrated my eyelids. A breeze whispered across the top of my head. I opened my eyes. My nose cleared the water. My mouth did, too. Bitsy was still screaming. I let out my breath and gulped in another. Something splashed nearby. Another wave washed over my head.

This time, I was able to see the bright moon and keep track of which way was up. I surfaced long enough for another gasp of breath.

A motorboat roared. Away from me. Tom and Bitsy must have been leaving.

Another wave knocked me under, but I let my natural buoyancy carry me up again. Why wasn’t the fishnet dragging me under? The floats attached to it were designed to keep the edges up, but the rest of the net would sink, allowing fish into the net. The whole net was bunched up, though, so the floats were keeping the net from plummeting. It and my trapped feet stayed just underneath the water.

Near me, a reedy voice gasped. “Help!”

Bitsy?

Instinctively, I kicked my feet. The water was so cold that my ankle had stopped hurting.

Hypothermia would be next.

I could breathe between waves, but if I became too cold for my organs to function, I would never know Haylee and Ben’s babies.

I heard wild splashing and another small, hopeless call for help. It had to be Bitsy.

I treaded water with only my arms and hands again, and the movement seemed to warm me up a little, but the sluglike fishnet kept me from turning quickly toward Bitsy. In a trough between waves, I called to her, “Tread water!”

“I don’t know how!” Another splash and a burble. “I can’t swim!”

At least I had a good excuse for not having worn a life jacket. Bitsy and Tom hadn’t bothered with them.

Where were Haylee and Ben? Where was Clay?

And . . . what had happened to the fishnet?

It was no longer stuck on my feet. My normal swimming reflexes had caused me to kick, and what had been impossible on land had happened easily in the water.

I had kicked myself free.

I could tread water. If I watched for incoming waves, I could keep my head above water. I could float. I could swim back to the wharf. I shook water from my face. It wasn’t far, wasn’t far, wasn’t far. I’d live to see Clay again.

“Help!”

I could save myself, but if I didn’t at least try to rescue Bitsy, who had told Tom not to throw me into the water, I would never be able to live with my conscience, would never be able to look Haylee and Ben’s mythical babies in the eye . . .

“Relax!” I shouted to Bitsy. “Lie on your back with your arms straight out like a cross.”

“I can’t!” The woman would drown in panic before she drowned in water.

Finally, I saw her, only one wave away from me. She was still wearing Tom’s sweater, which was soaking up water like a sponge. “Kick off your shoes,” I yelled, “and take off that sweater and let it go.”

I’d heard that people who were drowning would fight with potential rescuers until they both drowned. Sure enough, as soon as I swam close, Bitsy grabbed for me. I ducked out of her reach, treading water backward toward shore. She lunged toward me again. She’d obeyed me and removed the sweater.

I shouted at her, “You’re swimming! Do that again, and keep your head above water.”

I backed away from her.

“I can’t!” With her awkward attempts to reach me, she kept moving forward.

“You can!” She was on her stomach. “Straighten your knees, point your toes, and kick your feet. Do the doggie paddle with your hands and keep your chin up.”

I demonstrated, always leading her toward the calmer water of the harbor.

Bitsy might have been cantankerous, but her desire for self-preservation was strong. That night, in the cold, wavy waters of Lake Erie, I gave Bitsy Ingalls her first swimming lesson.

It was the first swimming lesson I’d ever taught, also. Almost drowning was causing clichés to pass before my eyes. Now it was the one about necessity being the mother of invention.

And inventing a mother. As Bitsy and I neared the wharf, I admitted to myself that Haylee’s future children existed only in my imagination. I would have to try not to plague my best friend with the insistence that she had to have children because I’d
seen
them during my near-death experience.

I didn’t have to warn Bitsy to be quiet. Both of us needed all of our strength just to stay afloat in that cold water. And she probably knew as well as I did that if Tom discovered that we’d survived, he’d do everything he could to finish the job he’d started out there in the wave-torn lake.

We were almost back at the wharf when I had second thoughts about returning to it. For one thing, unless I’d gotten turned around out there, Tom had sped his boat toward the wharf. For another, the wall between the wharf and the water was made of steel. The wind was still coming from the land, so waves weren’t exactly slamming into the wall, but they could scrape a person against it. Crawling out onto a beach would have to be easier than scaling rusty, algae-coated steel.

However, I wasn’t sure I had the energy to turn around, tackle the deeper water again, and swim to a beach. Bitsy was probably more exhausted than I was.

I’d hoped I was wrong about where Tom had piloted his boat after he pushed me out of it, but I wasn’t. His boat was again in his boathouse.

Bitsy must have seen it, too. She flinched. I led her, still practicing her doggie paddle, underneath the pier jutting out from the wharf until we were close to Tom’s market. Both of us grabbed for posts. They were slimy. I let the next wave carry me upward where I could grab a less slippery section of the post.

Bright light filtered down between planks. I’d seen headlights when we were out in the lake. Had that vehicle stayed, or was Tom in his truck, about to go home and pretend he knew nothing about Bitsy’s and my disappearance?

There was no way I was showing myself until I was certain I was safe from him.

That smoke detector was still bleating. I almost considered swimming back into deep water.

Something sharp banged into my elbow. A scrap of plywood swayed back and forth under the pier. I shoved it toward Bitsy, and both of us rested our forearms on it. But my teeth were chattering loudly enough to alert Tom, if he were still nearby, to our hiding place. And hypothermia had to be threatening Bitsy, also. With her hair pasted to her head, her mascara streaked, and her eyes wide with fear and anger, she resembled a sea monster. I probably did, too.

“Where’s Willow?” Haylee shouted.

“How would I know?” Tom answered.

“She was in your shack with her feet tangled in a fishnet, and now she’s not there.” Haylee was
very
angry.

“I was out fishing. I just got back. I haven’t been inside. Maybe she’s still there. And I have to ask you what you think you were doing inside my fish market after I closed it.”

He sounded very threatening. Was she confronting him by herself?

Leaving Bitsy and the plywood behind, I glided toward where I might get a better look at the situation, but for my own safety, I stayed hidden underneath the pier.

The night was bright with lights—including reassuringly red and white strobing ones—and noisy with voices, everyone yelling at once.

Despite Haylee’s and the cruiser’s presence, though, I felt vulnerable. If Tom saw or heard me, he could throw a stone that would accomplish what his fishnet had failed to do.

I swam back to Bitsy. She clung to the piece of wood, but her eyes seemed to roll back in her head. I touched her shoulder and murmured, “Is there a ladder so we can get out of the water?”

She nodded and pointed at a narrow channel underneath the catwalk leading to the back entrance of Tom’s boathouse.

Great, the last place I wanted to go. Together, we kicked our improvised raft to a ladder dangling off the catwalk I’d navigated with Haylee approximately a lifetime ago. At least I wouldn’t have to go into that dreadful boathouse again. We’d be able to skirt around it.

First, though, we had to climb the ladder. Bitsy trembled so violently that I didn’t think she could pull herself out of the water, but she managed, with me right behind her.

My legs felt too heavy to move, but my ankle supported me, barely. Sure I was about to slip back down into that black, licking, lapping water, I heaved myself up onto the narrow catwalk and sidled along it. Splinters tore at the soles of my feet. My sandals were somewhere in Lake Erie, maybe in a jumble of fishnet.

Bitsy seemed to have lost her fear. Although her feet were bare also, she dashed down the lined-up planks. She caterwauled like a fishwife, “Tom Umshaw, you promised me money and you promised me jewels, and all you did was throw me into the lake so I’d drown.”

“Bitsy!” I heard him run toward her. “She fell out of the boat. I was coming to get help when you all started yapping about Willow, and I didn’t get to tell you I needed someone to go out on the water and help me find Bitsy.”

“Don’t you touch me!” she screamed. “He pushed me out of the boat. He knew I couldn’t swim.”

Beep.

Hanging on to the handrail, keeping my weight mostly off an ankle that began throbbing again in warmish air, I crept closer.

“Then how’d you get here?” Tom had to be sarcastic.

“That’s a very serious allegation, Bitsy.” I’d never been happier to hear Vicki Smallwood at her sternest.

“She’s wrong,” Tom said. “She was falling overboard. I went to grab her, but couldn’t save her. I musta touched her, so she says I pushed her. Don’t charge her for false accusations, Chief. She’s not herself.”

“After all I did for you,” Bitsy screamed. “You told me to get someone to help me pick fights at that sidewalk sale so everyone would be distracted while you set something up, but you didn’t tell me what it was until just now, out there, when you told us it was so you could steal things that would make it look like those store owners killed and buried Neil. Get your hands off me! You promised me jewels, but you didn’t bother digging them up until someone else got there first.”

“Where’s
Willow
?” Haylee managed to outshout Bitsy. “Did he push her overboard, too? When her feet were stuck in a fishnet?”

“Yep.” Bitsy was at her shrillest. “And he wanted me to help him. But I refused. That’s why he pushed me.”

“And Willow is out in the water?” Clay’s voice this time, full of pain, and very little hope. “Fred and Ben, let’s get three of Ben’s boats and go out and search for her.”

Men ran.

Bitsy faltered, “No, no, she’s not out there.”

The men continued running, farther and farther away.

It was time—past time—for me to make my entrance.

49

T
HE PROBLEM WAS THAT PLANNING TO make
an entrance and actually doing it were two different things. Bitsy had been able to screech. My voice didn’t work at all.

Not only that, I could almost stagger, and I resembled a drowned rat, besides.

I wasn’t going to let that bother me. Clay was nearby, and about to rush off and board a boat on a futile mission, and I wanted to be in his arms.

“I’m here,” I croaked.

I might as well not have said anything. No one responded, and I could no longer hear the men running away.

I limped out from behind the corner of the building and stopped at the sight in front of me. The parking lot’s one streetlight cast a dim yellow funnel over Vicki’s cruiser and an unmarked state police car. Both flashed their rooftop lights. Because my eyelashes were wet, everything shimmered with haloes.

Ben, Clay, and Fred were racing away from the wharf and toward the dock where Ben moored his boats.

Vicki held Tom in the glare of her flashlight, and in the glare of her eyes, in front of his fish market. Vicki’s right hand hovered over a holster hanging from her belt.

Detective Gartener’s back was to me, but he was facing Tom, and obviously ready to leap if Tom so much as twitched.

After Haylee had left me in the fish shack, she’d not only rounded up Ben, Clay, Fred, and the police, but she’d apparently also called her mothers and Gord as well.

Haylee, Opal, and Edna stood in a semicircle around Bitsy, who was lying, shuddering and sobbing, on the broken asphalt of the parking area. Gord knelt beside Bitsy with his hand around her wrist. Someone had covered her with a large sweatshirt. Crouching, Naomi patted Bitsy’s shoulder.

Edna looked down at the top of Gord’s head, but Haylee and Opal scowled, watching Tom, and obviously ready to support Vicki and Detective Gartener if they needed it.

I pointed at Bitsy. “She tried to save me,” I rasped.

With a strangled cry of relief, Haylee leaped over Bitsy, bounded to me, and hugged me. “Clay!” she shouted, nearly rupturing my eardrum. “Willow’s here!”

Vicki took out a whistle and nearly ruptured my other eardrum.

Tom simply stared at me with his mouth hanging open.

My voice came back. I pointed a shaking finger at him. “You must have mended your nets with the thread you shoplifted from Haylee at the sidewalk sale. You didn’t read the fine print. It was water soluble.”

He folded his arms over his chest, but he still looked like he’d seen a ghost. Two ghosts—mine and Bitsy’s. He answered me, though. “I used thread that I bought from you. Monofilament, you said. Invisible.”

I shook my head and pointed at my feet. “After the net was in the water for a while, the thread you used dissolved, or I’d still be out there.”

Clay, Fred, and Ben must not have heard Vicki’s whistle. They were beyond the marina, and still running. Vicki sprinted to her cruiser and started its siren.

That brought the men to a halt that was almost comical. Vicki blew her whistle again, three sharp blasts, and they all pelted back toward us.

With Haylee supporting me, I staggered toward Clay. He put on a burst of speed, and after what felt like a couple of agonizingly long minutes, he caught me to him and held me close. He didn’t say a thing, and neither did I, not even when he took off his jacket and draped it around my shoulders. He pulled me close again.

The smoke detector inside Tom’s fish shack was becoming frantic.

Leaving Vicki to cover Tom, Detective Gartener strode to me and asked quietly in his deep warm voice, “What happened tonight, Willow?”

“My feet were stuck in a fishnet.” Gartener raised his eyebrows, but I didn’t take time to explain how I’d gotten into that predicament. “Tom said he’d help me remove it. He put me into his boat, drove the boat out into the lake, and dumped me overboard. Bitsy tried to stop him, and she ended up in the water, too. And you heard him—he knew she wasn’t a swimmer. And he as much as told us that he killed both Snoozy and Neil.”

Gartener watched me steadily. I took a deep breath and filled the silence he created. “I’d found an empty packet of rat poison under a box of Haylee’s water-soluble thread in his shack and had already guessed he could have used the poison on Neil, but I didn’t want to believe it.” I patted the front pocket of my sopping cutoffs, and babbled on as if I had to spew everything out before something worse happened. “The packet fell out of my pocket, and he must have seen it and figured out I could have suspected he’d poisoned Neil with it, and he decided he had to do away with me. And I think Bitsy also figured out that Tom murdered Neil and Snoozy. She’s been enjoying the cash from Snoozy’s haul and planned to enjoy the jewels, too, only Tom hid them underneath Blueberry Cottage, and ice or floods must have moved them.” I was out of breath.

Gartener touched my shoulder. “Thanks, Willow. I’ll get your full statement in a while. Would you like to sit in one of the cruisers in the meantime?”

I shook my head. If my car keys hadn’t been in my bag inside Tom’s shack, I could have sat in my own car. Either way, I didn’t want to move. Leaning against Clay took the pressure off my ankle.

Gartener spoke directly to Clay. “Warm her with your body until we get more help for her, okay?”

Clay crowded closer. “No problem.”

Detective Gartener marched to Tom and told him he’d have to take him in for questioning. Tom protested, but allowed Detective Gartener to lead him to the back door of Vicki’s cruiser. Gartener opened the door, and jumped back as if startled.

Still all in black, Zara erupted from the backseat and yelled, “Ben!”

He strode toward her.

Detective Gartener helped Tom into the cruiser and shut the door.

Zara ran to Ben. They met underneath the light fixture.

Zara walked two long fingers up Ben’s bare forearm. “Do you have any idea how cramped it is in the backseat of one of those things?”

Ben edged away until her hand dropped from his arm. “What were you doing in there? And where’s my truck?”

Haylee must not have tattled on her cousin.

Zara unpinned her stark hairdo, shook her head, and ran her fingers through her hair as it cascaded around her shoulders. “A misunderstanding about one of my art installations.”

Vicki stopped in the process of opening her trunk. “She vandalized my cruiser.”

Zara shrugged. “It was only a yarnbomb. No big deal. It was art. And besides, that was days ago.”

Vicki snorted. “
Art
. If your
art
had delayed me in a life-or-death situation, you’d have gotten worse than a fine and a reprimand.”

Zara shot back, “
And
an hour of being cramped in the back of a police cruiser for no good reason.”

Vicki opened her trunk and gave a nice imitation of Zara’s usually careless shrug. “Yeah, well, a civilian’s in our cruiser and we get called to an emergency, the civilian has to go sit in the back until the situation is resolved. It’s for your own safety.”

“You could have let me out. I’d have driven Ben’s truck back.” She turned to Ben. “Sorry. Your truck is up on Shore Road, but it’s close to the lodge. I’ll walk there with you and you can drive us both back.”

Despite trembling like I was about to freeze, I had to admire her persistence.

“You still have the keys, don’t you?” he asked.

She patted the kangaroo pocket of the black sweater she’d knit from the same kind of bulky yarn she’d used in her art installation. “Yep.”

He held out his hand. “I’ll take them.”

She hesitated, pouted, then fished the keys from her pocket and dropped them into his hand.

Leaving Zara standing under that one light, Ben walked away from her and returned to the group surrounding Bitsy, Clay, and me. He stopped right next to Haylee.

Zara wandered off and sat on one of the boulders edging the parking lot. With her knees together, her shins angled out, her elbows on her knees, and her chin in her hands, she made the complete picture of an abandoned waif.

Fred also joined the group supporting Bitsy. Gartener looked him up and down. “Fred Zongassi, do you understand how close
you
came to being the one sitting in the back of a police cruiser? Why did you wait an entire hour before reporting those bones you found? Don’t you know how that made you look?”

Fred bowed his head. “I recognized that belt buckle and guessed whose bones they might be, and I had a lot of thinking to do. I knew someone was sure to remember that I’d fought with Snoozy before I left town, and if those bones were his, I could land in a whole heap of trouble. Finally, I decided to own up to uncovering those bones in the hopes that no one would remember the fight, but someone did.”

Vicki pawed around among things in her trunk. “Everyone in the village over the age of forty remembered that!”

Gartener asked Fred, “What did you fight about?”

“Not really a fight—despite the way the rumor grew, I didn’t touch him. More like an argument. I’d found him digging a hole out in the woods, damaging a lot of tree roots in the process, and asked him why, since I was the gardener. He fired me on the spot, and I was fed up with him anyway—he was nasty and didn’t know the first thing about landscaping or gardening, and he always ordered me to do idiotic things like dig out shrubs that only needed pruning. It nearly killed me to destroy those plants. So I yelled at him and told him exactly what I thought of him, and he yelled back, and finally, I just left him there in the woods. I was so mad I didn’t care who all had heard the things I said to him.” He shrugged in the dim light. “You know, I wanted nothing to do with Elderberry Bay after that, so I never even heard that he and the contents of that safe went missing. I guess he was digging a hole to put the treasure in, but he ended up in the hole himself.”

“I guess so,” Detective Gartener agreed. “What made you come back to Elderberry Bay?”

“A place like this just stays on inside you, and I couldn’t help it. I had to return to this shore I loved. And then I dug up that skeleton and Snoozy’s belt buckle. It was a shock, I can tell you, especially when I realized the bones were in or near the hole I’d argued with Snoozy about.” He rubbed his hand over his chin, which had developed a two
A.M
. shadow. “Sometimes, it takes a while to figure out what the right thing to do is.”

Vicki snorted and pulled two foil packages out of her trunk. Striding toward the rest of us, she opened one package with her teeth and tossed the other one to Clay. “Survival blankets.” She nodded at me. “Put it around her and keep hugging her.”

Gord and Edna wrapped Bitsy in one of the blankets while Clay and Haylee wrapped me in the other. It was supposed to trap my body heat, but I wasn’t certain that I owned any. My shivering was so violent that my teeth didn’t chatter. They clashed.

But I could still hear that smoke detector. If someone didn’t fix the thing soon, I would. I didn’t need Vicki or Detective Gartener to tell me that Tom’s fish shack was now a crime scene, and none of us were going to be allowed inside to fiddle with a smoke detector. Or retrieve my bag, wallet, phone, keys . . .

Burrowing into Clay’s warmth, I asked Fred, “Did you ever sneak up on Snoozy Gallagher and take his picture?”

Fred squinted as if confused. “Not sure. Maybe. If I did, it was a long time ago.”

“Neil was in it,” I suggested, “with Tom, Yolanda, and Bitsy. They were teenagers. Neil, Tom, and Yolanda looked like they were shouting at Snoozy.”

“That does sound familiar.” Fred nodded slowly. “All four of those kids worked for Snoozy, and they wanted more pay. From Snoozy Gallagher, of all people. What I earned barely covered the rent for my room in the staff cottage. But I threw out nearly everything to do with that job when I was packing to go. Who needed to be reminded of a nasty boss? I tossed out that photo, too, so how would you know about it?”

I managed through my shivers, “Your nasty boss retrieved it from your wastebasket and kept it. Ben has the photo now.”

Fred nodded toward Ben. “You’re welcome to it. I still don’t want it.”

Light jounced down the hill toward us, and Max’s BMW drove slowly into the parking lot. He parked beyond the cruisers and climbed out. A tall, lean, middle-aged blonde unfolded herself from his passenger seat and stood stock-still, looking at the rest of us.

I gaped at her, then quickly checked the faces around me. Opal was not beside Max’s car.

Opal was next to Naomi.

Opal’s mouth was open, and she was staring toward the woman I’d mistaken for Opal.