June Bug (5 page)

He peeked his head through the archway that led to the little resort store. “We do have Coca-Cola. Or do you want to buy some pot?”

I grabbed Jed’s hand and pulled him back into the porch. “Forget it. I gotta get out of here. Which BC do I get?”

“That black one in back is mine.” He pulled out one of the rickety chairs and dragged the buoyancy compensator vest down, tossing it over to me. Its hoses and gauges slapped around like octopus tentacles.

“This one is wet, Jed. I thought you three hadn’t been diving for a while.”

Jed put his hands up in a “Who can remember everything?” way and hunted around for the rest of the gear. He ferreted out a wetsuit, compass, diving knife, fins, mask, and snorkel for me, as well as a dive flag and an inner tube to strap the flag to so that all boats would know there was a diver down. Outside, Jed filled two air tanks and helped me carry them to my car. I was careful not to be caught ogling Johnny. Again.

Once my Toyota was loaded, I avoided Jed’s farewell hug for fear that I would get sticky pheromones all over him. I couldn’t resist asking one last question, though: “Is it expensive to get Johnny out to help landscape?”

Jed scratched his curly hair. “Not for us. He’s doing it in trade for some work my dad did for Johnny’s mom. If you want, I’ll ask Johnny how much he charges.”

“No!” I said, a little too loudly. Was it bad that, for a moment, I had seriously considered hiring a hot garden man to ogle from the comfort of my back porch? Probably, if only because I was broke. One more reason to find the fake diamond, I guess. I hopped in my Toyota and was off. With one hand on the wheel, I scratched at a nagging itch on my head, and my fingernails caught on a bump. Shit. It was a wood tick, and it was stuck. It must have snuck into my bed while I was sleeping.

I ripped it off of my head, hanging on tight while running it through the length of my hair so I wouldn’t lose it before I pulled it free. It squirmed between my thumb and forefinger, a white piece of my scalp stuck in its mouth and its tiny brown legs moving rhythmically. In lieu of a lighter to fry it, I punctured it with my thumbnail, leaving a half-moon shape on its tiny dark belly. I flicked it out the window as I pulled into my driveway. This was as close to hunting as I’d ever get.

I had decided to drive down to Sunny’s little beach on the thick part of the road leading to Shangri-La. The spot was more grass than sand, but the lake was clear and hard-bottomed on this side, and it was quiet when the resort wasn’t hopping. Today, the lake was peppered with boats, even more than on a usual Sunday, and I could see that the public lake-access parking lot was nearly full. I parked next to Sunny’s beach, noting that most of the boats were concentrated on the east side of the lake, opposite Shangri-La. I wondered if they had found something.

The wetsuit and dive knife were easy to slip on, and a couple tugs set the facemask at the right pressure. The BC was old but functional, and I had it attached to the tank in under four minutes. I dragged the whole unit to the water so I could use the buoyancy of the vest to help ease the heavy tank onto my back. Soon, I was underwater, breathing in the silence of it.

Except for the Darth Vader sound of air leaving your mouthpiece, there is no perfect peace in this world like scuba diving. It has the safety and warmth of a womb once your wetsuit gets filled and warmed with your body temperature and you reach neutral buoyancy. Despite the weight of the tank, the sensory deprivation of diving elicits a rare sense of absolute freedom. I did a few horizontal twirls underwater, as I always do at the beginning of a dive. I actually had only been diving twenty or so times in my life, and only once in the ocean.

My father had learned how to dive in the service and taught me and my mom how when I was ten. We were at Daytona Beach, and it was winter, even in Florida. Dad talked a local dive shop into renting their gear, even though Mom and I weren’t certified, with the promise that we would stay close to shore. There was no coral right off the beach and so nothing to see other than shady ocean. Still, the attention from my dad felt good, even if we were shivering together in slate-gray, fish-free water. A couple years later, he sprang for me to get certified, and we dived some of the lakes around Paynesville. I think diving was a way we could hang out together without having to talk, and I liked that Dad couldn’t drink when we were doing it. Diving was something I still enjoyed but couldn’t really afford.

This time was a freebie, though, and I was going to take pleasure in it. I tried to sneak up on a few perch, but they muddied the water and darted away like mercury. My hands were glove-free because I liked to play them through the scratchy weeds and loose silt on the bottom. I was careful not to get tangled in the line to my inner tube, to which was attached the red-and-white flag marking my dive. With all the boats on the lake today, I was going to stay close to the tube. I didn’t need an Evinrude outboard all up in my grill. Once I felt acclimated to my environment, I settled in for some serious jewel hunting.

I found my bearings with my compass. I knew I was going to swim generally southeast, which would land me in front of the Shangri-La main lodge. I swam steadily, using my feet to power me, my hands streamlined at my side. I skimmed just above the weeds, glancing occasionally at the treasure troves of Hamm’s cans and cut anchors that sprouted like anemones here and there.

For the most part, Whiskey Lake is a pristine, spring-fed lake with fifteen-foot-plus visibility on a good day, but even the cleanest lake has the remnants of fishers past. Actually, Whiskey Lake is what the locals call it. According to the DNR, who stock it annually with walleye fingerlings and yearlings, the real name of this body of water is Charter Lake. The lake itself is small, with a surface area of only 189 acres and a maximum depth of 46 feet. I had never dived in this lake before, but as a rule, I never went deeper than 30 feet when diving. It got too cold for me lower than that, though the bass, sunnies, and crappies that swarmed in the water without the DNR’s help didn’t seem to mind.

After ten minutes, I popped up to get my bearings. I was approximately forty feet from the Shangri-La beach, directly in front. Good. Surprisingly, there didn’t seem to be any divers in the immediate vicinity, though I counted seven boats dotting the far side of the small lake and I could see a group of divers ready to set off from the public access on the south side. I could hear their diving flag slapping at the wind.

I let myself slowly back down and continued to search around. It’s hard to distinguish one chunk of lake bottom from another, but I thought I could get a feel for the area so I would know if anything had been changed or added. The
Star Tribune
box wouldn’t be planted until tomorrow sometime, according to the article, and I wanted to get the lay of the land before then. A pile of white caught my eyes, and I kicked my way down. I checked my depth gauge. I was twenty-three feet below the surface and had over half my air left.

I scared up the bottom of the lake trying to draw close to the heap of white, and I had my face almost in the bones before I realized what they were. My throat constricted, and I took an involuntary breath through my nose, forcing the airless mask tighter to my face and giving me a temporary feeling of suffocation. I pulled back and put my hand on the dive knife strapped to my thigh, cursing the lack of peripheral vision afforded me by my dive mask. I tried to look around, but I felt like there was an enemy just out of eyesight. My agitated water stroking was making the atmosphere even murkier, and I forced myself to calm down. I could be on the surface in half a second by inflating my buoyancy compensator, and the pile of bones wasn’t going to hurt me.

I floated back down a few feet and peered at the water burial, letting the silt and my pulse settle. I took my hand off my knife when I realized I was staring at a moose skeleton, all the parts laid cleanly on the floor of the lake as if the animal had drifted to the bottom in a last graceful ballet move to decompose peacefully. It looked like the whole set was complete and museum-ready. I was surprised. The bones had to have fallen recently, in the past winter or so, to be so clean and together, but I didn’t think there had been moose in this area for years.

I filed the skeleton in my head as a good landmark for later and turned to swim back toward the beach I had set off from. The water was still slightly cloudy from my little fit by the bones, and I made haste to reach a clearer section. It took only five strong kicks through the shadowy water until I was on top of the human body clad in the shark-gray wetsuit, my tank tangled in the same rope that made and marked his grave

I fought the twisted rope like a hooked walleye, and the more I struggled to break free, the more I brought myself closer to the body jerking on one end of it like a rigid marionette. In one of my panicked gyrations, my eyes flashed onto the source of my present problem: a good-sized white rock at the bottom of the lake, a yellow polypropylene rope tied securely around it and leading to the sunken body and back around the oxygen tank on my back. But quickly that, too, was lost in the murk I was creating.

I couldn’t fight the terror of drowning made real by the dead person who was almost on top of me now. My heart paused in my chest and built enough force to pound out my eardrums when it started again. I wrenched wildly to free myself, and the heavy, wet arm of the tangled body struck my head in a disjointed, dead swing and knocked my facemask off. I blinked once myopically, and only the rush of cold at my eyes let me know they were open. The water was as black and final as grave dirt, and I sucked in a nose full of it as a fear reflex. I was now completely blind, dancing with a corpse twenty-five feet underwater, and drowning.

When I got scuba certified, my instructor had spent half a day teaching us what to do if we lost our masks underwater. He hadn’t covered what to do if we were also tangled in a rope tied to a rock and hooked to a dead body, but the principle was the same: stay calm and get to the surface. As I screamed for air and my lungs burned with water, I forced my raging fear instincts down and let the haunted corpse float right behind my unprotected neck. This allowed me to grab my BC vest buckles in a last-ditch effort to release myself and reach the surface. I wasn’t deep enough to worry about the bends, even if I had been thinking that clearly. For now, my brain was waging a primitive battle between getting far, far away from the human carcass and getting to life-giving air.

I unclasped the first vest buckle as white bursts of light flashed behind my eyes, and I had the second one undone as everything began to go gray and my lungs blazed with the shapeless, crushing weight of inhaled lake water. I had been breathing liquid for several excruciating seconds, and my lungs were as full as a cement truck. My cold fingers struggled with the last black clasp, finally freeing it, and I kicked toward what I hoped was the surface. I felt myself blacking out even as I thrust forward, and I realized I no longer knew which way was up. I was disoriented from the underwater fight with the rope and body, and I had no air bubbles in my lungs to release and guide me, even if I could see.

I prayed that I was swimming toward the human world. If my head hit the soft bottom of the lake or just plowed through more water, I was dead. I had only a pinpoint of light left in my brain, and I wondered idly if my dad was waiting for me now. He’d been dead for over ten years, and I didn’t know if I was ready to reconcile with him yet. With a few exceptions, he’d been a pretty selfish man when I knew him.

The one person I really wanted to see now was my mom. I had always loved her, but I had never trusted her, because she wasted so much time with my dad. I figured a smart woman would have gotten out early. His death pushed us even further apart. She certainly hadn’t killed him, but she had kept herself and me strapped to the kamikaze plane that was his life. I wished more than anything to be able to go for a walk with her right now, smelling the perfume of summer flowers, feeling the breeze in the sweaty hairs stuck to my neck, and hearing gravel crunch under my feet. Instead, my world narrowed like that of a carnival goldfish in a sealed bag of water. The tiny circle of light in my brain grew brighter, and I remembered that my eyes were closed.

I opened them and saw a mirage of the sun reflected through a watery mirror, and I could almost feel its heat on my face. I reached out, and my hand brushed against something warm and soft. I grasped at it desperately, hungry to hold something solid. My hand slid off once, and I dug my nails in and pulled myself up.

I was welcomed by the glory of the warm sun on my water-soaked head as I clutched at my inner tube and surfaced weakly. I hung onto the side and vomited lake water and gasped for air, grateful for the providence that had brought me up near my life preserver. My whole body was trembling, but my mind was rejoicing. I was alive. I began to ineffectually kick for the shore. I wanted to get as far away from that dead body and its soggy grave as I could, and quickly. That could have been me. I had a feeling my exploratory diving days would be over for a while. Unless I knew exactly where that
Star Tribune
box was and dead bodies weren’t, I wasn’t going back in.

My childish kicks were bringing me away from the little stretch of beach I had started out on and closer to the public access, and soon the diving crew I had spotted earlier was beside me in their pontoon. I was dragged aboard, and I poured out my story between heaves. The dive crew untied their anchor, secured it to my inner tube as a marker, and took me ashore. They offered me an oversized Smurfs beach towel and a canteen of stale drinking water and told me they were from the Twin Cities, in Battle Lake to find the planted diamond. They had been scoping out the area when they saw me pop to the surface and start puking.

As their lukewarm water scraped down my raw throat and I absorbed the hot sun of an early June afternoon, my stomach growled, reminding me I hadn’t eaten anything all day. In hindsight, that was good. I didn’t want to feed the fishes, either with my body or its contents. It wasn’t long before the Battle Lake police were on the scene, and the county water patrol arrived shortly thereafter.

It was time to tell my tale again, this time to thirty-eight-year-old Battle Lake Police Chief Gary Wohnt. Chief Wohnt had been on the Battle Lake force of two for over a year, and I had first met him when I’d discovered Jeff’s body in the library in May. I had a paranoid feeling that he was going to blame me for this corpse.

There was no love lost between the Chief and me. He was thick-necked and bossy, given to bouts of adult acne, and had perpetually shiny lips. As a pure bonus, he had dark, inscrutable eyes and one of those ominously quiet personalities that forced me to fill the silence with embarrassing small talk and unrelated confessions. Plus, he had a weird thing with Kennie Rogers. The man knew I was always watching him out of the corner of my eye, and he returned the favor.

“Ms. James.” His Frank “Ponch” Poncherello sunglasses made him appear impenetrable as he stood in front of me, one of his hips cocked higher than the other, his meaty hands hanging loose at his sides.

“Chief Wohnt.” I was sitting on the open rear of a diver’s Mitsubishi pickup, the Smurfs towel still held tight.

“Seems you were in the wrong place at the wrong time again.”

“Seems so.” Good thing I was too exhausted to stick my tongue out at him.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened here? Don’t leave out any details, even if you think they might be irrelevant.”

He wrote down my story impassively, and there really wasn’t much to it. I was diving, I got caught in a rope tied to a rock, and there was a dead body tied to the other end of the rope, floating free about ten feet from the surface of the lake. The Chief never asked me why I was diving in the first place, and I wondered if he already knew about the diamond necklace. He seemed to have an inside track on much of the town, possibly because of the off-hours “business ventures” he was rumored to have going with Kennie. I decided if he didn’t know, I wasn’t going to tell him.

He kept writing after I finished. When he finally snapped his notebook shut, he looked at me for twenty long seconds, his expression unreadable. “You shouldn’t dive alone.”

“I know. Can I go?”

“You can go, but don’t stray too far from a phone. I might have more questions later.”

The driver of the Mitsubishi offered me a ride home, and my still-shaky legs screamed at me to take it, but I was not going to relinquish the feeling of earth under my body, even if I had to crawl home. I said I would walk. It was less than two miles, and even though I was wearing a wetsuit and swim booties, it would be a welcome trek. The divers agreed to take the rest of my equipment back to the Last Resort, including the BC once it was retrieved.

Judging from the angle of the sun, it was pushing late afternoon. It truly was a beautiful day, and I had new appreciation for the warm June air and the buzz of the leopard frogs in the sloughs I was walking by on County Road 82. The tiny shock my muscles felt with each step on the pavement was ecstasy, and I smiled at the passing cars. I was alive, and I was on land.

My heartbeat revved up a little, and I actually whistled until it became too painful for my vomit-seared throat. I had shoved thoughts of my mother back into the detention room in my head that I saved for my family, and I was living life. Thirty minutes later, turning down my half-mile driveway, I contemplated the wisdom of a nap. I was mentally and physically bone-tired. I didn’t want to close my eyes quite yet, though. I had looked at the inside of my eyelids enough for one day.

I found my feet leading me past the turn in the driveway that would have taken me to Sunny’s, and before I knew it, I was at Sunny’s little beach, where I had taken off on this dive a lifetime ago. I stripped off the wetsuit and booties, rolling my eyes at myself as I got to the dive knife strapped around my left thigh. I could have used it to cut the rope tying me to the lake bottom if I hadn’t been so panic-stricken.

I slipped the shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops that I had left on the shore over my swimsuit. Shading the sun from my eyes, I stared out at the to-do that was still happening on the lake. There were now two official-looking speedboats circling my inner tube, but I didn’t see an ambulance at the access, and there was only one police car visible. That surprised me. I had learned last month that they always call in an ambulance, even if the body is dead. There must be another tragedy tying up the county ambulance elsewhere. The body I had found certainly could wait. I looked off to my right at the oak-shaded drive that led to Shangri-La and started walking. I studied the bland rocks under my feet and considered what I would do when I reached the resort. It didn’t matter. I just wanted to keep walking.

I knew the owners, a retired married couple, Bing and Kellie Gibson. I recalled that they had bought the place three years earlier from the Woolerys. The Woolerys’ main claim to fame, besides the resort, was that their son was Chuck Woolery, one-time host of
Love Connection
. He used to visit them and eat at the local restaurants. That was juicy stuff in a small town like Battle Lake. We didn’t see a lot of stars in the North Country.

The closest I had come to someone famous was a girl in high school, Savannah, who had appeared on
Puttin’ on the Hits
the summer after our sophomore year. She mouthed and wiggled to “Shout” by Tears for Fears with the help of a cousin of hers from Saint Paul. When she was in California filming her episode, she rode on the same elevator as Telly Savalas. She hadn’t won on the show, but that double dose of fame had been heady to all of us. We went around saying his trademark “Who loves ya, baby?” for most of our junior year of high school.

I thought of this as I came upon the main lodge of Shangri-La, and I wondered what I would say to the Gibsons if they were around. They were a sweet couple and always went out of their way to talk to me whenever we’d cross paths, but we had never hung out socially. In fact, I had never even been as far as Shangri-La and had only seen it from the lake. Except for the beach, the whole place was heavily treed and private.

Once inside the trees, the setting was spectacular. The main lodge was as big as a church, but its stained wood siding and cedar shakes blended with the oaks and birch that shaded the grounds. The little island was perfectly tended, with an immaculate lawn right up to the beach, the whole length of it. I could see the four servants’ buildings that now served as cabins for any guests who chose not to stay in the bed and breakfast that was the main lodge. The matching landscaping around all four of the buildings consisted of miniature lilacs, flowering chokecherry bushes, and shade-friendly perennials like hostas, columbine, and lupine. Judging from the piles of lake toys and fishing gear outside the cabins, the place was full. I wondered what finding a dead body near the beach was going to do to business.

I heard children giggling and spotted a group of four kids, all under ten, playing on the metal swing set on the far side of the cabin. I ducked around the front of the lodge so I wouldn’t be seen. I felt like I was trespassing, but I would probably be better off acting like I belonged here. I straightened out my unconscious hunch and told myself to walk with confidence. I rubbed my hands over my face and wiggled my nose, which was turning stiff with sunburn. I belonged here. The earth was my domain.