Pouncing On Murder

Chapter 21

The water was more than cold. And it was more than water, it was a physical presence that wanted to crush me with its power. I couldn’t even think that I was wet, couldn’t remember to swim, could barely remember not to open my mouth.

But I wanted to. I wanted to shriek at the top of my lungs, announcing to anyone and everyone within a mile radius that I was in water that was too cold for human survival. How fish managed to live in this environment, I did not know, and I made a personal vow to brush up on my basic biology when I got back to the library.

If I ever did.

I tried to swim underwater, out and away from Duvall, but the fleece sweatshirt that had been keeping my upper half warm was now saturated and making every move of my arms sluggish. My legs, clad in jeans, weren’t doing much better, and my feet, which I assumed were still at the end of my legs, wore running shoes that weren’t doing anything to help my speed in the water.

I gave one last underwater stroke and let myself rise to the surface, hoping I was out of reach of Duvall and his rock. My head popped up into the air, and although I tried to stay quiet and hidden, my breaths were loud, panting, and full of a kind of pain that I’d never before experienced.

Cold. I was so cold. Twenty seconds ago, I’d been comfortably warm. Now I was so cold it felt as if the top of my head were about to blow off. There was no way this water was thirty-nine degrees. I was surprised it wasn’t still ice. Panting, I let my feet drift down, trying to see if I could touch bottom.

“How’s that water?” Duvall asked cheerfully. “By the way, it’s plenty deep out there. My boat has a deep draft, so the dock is extra long. Off where you just dove, it’s probably six feet deep. You’re what, not even five feet tall?” He chuckled. “Way over your head.”

I was, too, five feet tall. No more, but certainly no less, and I added the error, intentional or not, to Duvall’s growing list of crimes.

“Now, I might not have had time to give you a nice smack on the head with my rock,” Duvall said, “but you know what? All I have to do is wait. You can’t swim any faster than I can walk, so there’s no way you’ll be able to get to shore without me getting there first. And you’d never make it to the other side of the lake. It’s too far. So I can wait. Twenty minutes isn’t all that long.”

I heard a creak and knew he’d sat back down on the bench.

“Probably less than twenty, really,” he said. “You’re so small that the cold will get to you faster.” He laughed. “You shouldn’t have had so much coffee when you were a kid. Stunts your growth, you know.”

Making fun of short people was beyond the pale and this, too, went on his list.

I was treading water, a silent endeavor, but my short puffy breaths had to be giving away my location. My one chance, which had been diving away from Duvall before he could crack my head open, wasn’t turning out to be much of an opportunity. Not exactly out of the frying pan and into the fire—a fire would be welcome at this point—but the analogy was close.

There had to be a way out of this, but I couldn’t think what. My hands were already numb, so even if my cell phone was operable underwater, I doubted my fingers would be able to do anything more than point, quaking with cold, in the general direction of the screen.

I scanned the shoreline, looking for something, anything, that might help. Of course, since it was almost full dark, I couldn’t see what was ten feet away from me. Clouds had drifted across the face of the moon, and what little light it had been giving out was now gone.

“Getting cold?” Duvall called out.

Come on in and find out, I muttered, but only in my head, because I was starting to get an idea in my cold-fuddled and shivering brain. Though it might not turn out to be a very good idea, I had to do something, and do it fast, because I could already feel the early effects of hypothermia slicking away my strength.

I sucked in a long, shallow breath and sank below the water’s surface. Once again, my head felt as if it were going to explode, but I told myself to quit being such a sissy and get on with it. Because if I was completely submerged, Duvall wouldn’t be able to see me and wouldn’t be able to hear me. All I had to do was swim far enough away that, when I got to shore, he wouldn’t notice when I inched out of the water.

My arms pulled, my legs kicked. The darkness was an almost palpable thing, threatening me, jeering at me, taunting me. I longed to open my eyes, but if I did I’d lose my contact lenses, and anyway, opening my eyes wouldn’t help me see.

Because it was dark.

The blackness of a northern night was something I hadn’t understood before moving here permanently. In cities, there is no real dark. Streetlights, the lights on buildings, lights on signs, lights on buildings, there is light all the time. Up here, though, there was nothing except nature. Even in summer, when the county’s population tripled, you could still see the wide dusty white of the Milky Way, strewing its stars in a path across the sky.

Arms pulled, legs kicked.

My lungs burned, yearning to breathe.

Pull. Kick. Pull. Kick.

Pull . . .

Then, when I couldn’t go any farther, I let myself rise to the surface. I wanted, oh how I wanted, to noisily gulp in air, but I forced myself to take it in slowly. Silently. I kept my mouth wide-open for fear of Duvall hearing my teeth chatter together, and felt for the lake’s floor with my feet.

“Where are you?” he asked sharply.

His voice was off to my right, closer than I’d hoped, but far enough away that I felt a little bit safer.

“Come on,” he said, “I know you’re out there. What game are you playing?”

Survival.

My stretching toes brushed the bottom of the lake, bumpy from the small rocks that had been deposited long ago by a passing glacier. So the water here was a little taller than I was. I sucked in a long, quiet breath, aimed myself, and went deep.

Kick. Pull. Kick. Pull.

I was taking a steep angle toward shore, trying to travel as far along the lake’s edge as I could while still getting into shallow water. If either my engineer father or engineer brother had been handy, he could easily have figured out my rate of travel and the maximum time I could swim between breaths, and plotted the best possible course for me to take.

Kick. Pull. Kick.

Of course, neither one was around, and to be honest, I would have preferred a law enforcement officer to either of my closest male relatives. I loved them dearly, but I wasn’t sure how either one would perform in this kind of situation.

Pull. Kick.

Then again, who was I to talk? I wasn’t performing very well myself. My lungs were, again, burning with the urge for air, but I wanted to get farther away, way farther away.

Carefully, slowly, I rose, breaking the smooth surface so quietly that the only thing that made any noise was my hair, dripping water off its curly ends.

“Hey!” Duvall called.

I froze, and never had the phrase seemed so appropriate. Reaching down, I could tell that my fingers were brushing rocks, but there was no sensation of feeling. Same with my toes—though I could feel them smacking something, it was a feeling of numbing dullness.

How long had I been in the water now? Five minutes? Six?

“You’ve been in there ten minutes,” Duvall said. “Bet you’re losing feeling in your toes, huh? And your fingers, that’s probably long gone. Fingers are the first to go.”

And he’d know this how, exactly? Somehow I was sure he hadn’t researched the topic properly. At most he’d used the computer and the top return on his search engine. Certainly he hadn’t looked up any scientific journals. That was what a librarian would have done—librarians do it correctly.

With the useless appendages I used to call my toes, I pushed myself forward.

“Twelve minutes,” he called. “You know what I’m going to do when I get to twenty? I’m going to walk up to the cottage and make myself a hot toddy. Steaming hot. It’ll practically scald me when I take the first sip, but there’s nothing like a hot toddy when you take a chill.”

Since I didn’t care much for strong spirits, this particular taunt didn’t bother me a bit. Now, if he’d mentioned hot chocolate, that would have been different.

I was walking myself along the lake floor with my hands now. I could stand and be thigh-deep in water, but I’d make too much noise climbing out. I had to get as shallow as I could before attempting my final escape.

“Sixteen minutes,” Duvall said. “Bet you’re cold as the dickens now, aren’t you?” His voice sounded different. I slowed almost to a stop, then realized he was talking in the opposite direction. It was pitch-dark and he couldn’t possibly see me. As long as I got out of the water and stayed out of his grasp, I’d be safe.

But now my body had started to shiver. These weren’t the normal shivers that everyone gets on occasion, the shivers from eating ice cream too fast or the shivers from sitting in a cold car before it got warm. No, these were the shivers that meant Minnie’s impending doom. Large, quaking things that rippled the water out from around me. Huge teeth-chattering shivers I couldn’t control.

I had to get out of that water.

Moving faster than I dared, but not as fast as I would have liked, I forced my lumpy hands to propel me onward and upward. One step, two, three . . .

“And bingo, here we are at twenty minutes!” Duvall shouted jovially. “Ready to come in?”

Absolutely.

It was dark and I couldn’t see diddly and Duvall was still too close, but I had to get to shore. Maybe Duvall’s twenty minutes was a figment of his manipulative tendencies and maybe it wasn’t; either way my body was starting to shut down.

I inched toward shore.

“Where the hell are you?” Duvall called.

Way over here, I was tempted to call, just to hear his reaction, but even if I could have safely done so, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get out the words. My face was so cold that I wasn’t sure my mouth would work well enough to speak intelligibly.

“Bet she already drowned,” he muttered.

Not a chance, buster.

“Well,” he said. The bench creaked under his weight and I pictured him standing. “There’s only one thing left to do, then. What do you think about that, you mangy little ball of fur?”

My feet were set wide, since I was trying to get as much stability as possible, and I stood slowly, slowly, easing myself up out of the water, inching up, letting the water slick away, trying to keep it from dripping, keeping my movements silent and hidden and invisible.

The dock creaked under Duvall’s weight. I pictured him walking up the length of it, climbing the stairs to the cottage, and the door slamming shut behind him.

And as soon as that door shut, I’d tiptoe to the dock, get Eddie, and sneak away into the dark. We’d get into my car, drive away fast, crank up the heat as far as it would go, and zoom to the sheriff’s department, where, with luck, the cell phone’s audio recordings I’d made while I talked to Duvall would be recoverable.

“Come here,” Duvall said. “I know you’re up there. Get down already.”

“Mrrrr-rrrr.”

I stopped dead.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” Duvall crooned. “Don’t you want to take a bath? A cold bath, but you won’t notice that after a few minutes. Here, kitty, kitty.”

All the cold I’d been feeling was pushed aside by sheer fury, and the fuzziness my brain had been sinking into sharpened into hard thought. Still moving slowly, still moving silently, I changed my plan. Instead of moving away from Duvall, as soon as I got out of the water, I would head straight toward him.

“Why are you being like this, cat?” Duvall asked. There was a metallic clang. He was climbing onto the boat lift, trying to get at Eddie.

Urgency shouted inside me, yelling at me to move, screaming at me to run. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I couldn’t let Duvall know I was still alive and kicking, not out there in that frigid water, succumbing to the effects of hypothermia.

I inched into shallower and shallower water, hoping the clouds would stay in front of the moon long enough for me to get to land. My feet, numb now, rolled left and right as they stepped on rocks. I wondered how many times someone could sprain an ankle, then decided that was something I didn’t need to know.

“Get down here!” Duvall yelled.

“Mrrr!” Eddie yelled back.

If my face had been working properly, I might have smiled.

“Same to you,” Duvall said. “Tell you what. You stay right there and I’ll come and get you. I can’t have you being around here when her body is found. You’re too noticeable. But if you drown, too, well, who’s to say what really happened?”

I was out of the water now and on the lake’s rocky shoreline. Fast as I could make my body move, I clambered up the stubby bluff and onto . . . someone’s front yard, probably, but there was still no light to see by. Running in the dark would send me straight into a tree, a fire pit, or a fence, so I had to creep along, waving my hands in front of me.

From the dock, I heard Duvall, still trying to entice Eddie into his reach. “Come here, you flea-ridden mouse brain. You’re useless and pointless and the world will be better off without you, so come here and—ouch!”

This time I did smile. Eddie had given him full warning; I’d heard both his growl and the hiss that always came right before a paw swipe, claws extended.

“I’ll get you for that,” Duvall said in a low voice, “you crappy little cat. More trouble than you’re worth. And . . . ah. Gotcha.”

Trees and fire pits and fences didn’t matter any more. I jumped into a trot, then a run. I had to get to Eddie before . . . before anything happened. The heavy weight of my wet clothes dragged at me, trying to sap my speed, sucking at my strength, but that couldn’t matter now.

“Stop wriggling,” Duvall said, accompanied by metallic creaks as he climbed off the boat lift. “This won’t take long. Soon you’ll be together with your mistress and won’t that be nice for both of you?”

I was running full force, arms pumping, legs pistoning.

“That’s a good kitty,” Duvall said almost jovially as the dock creaked underneath him. “We’re almost there.”

The thick clouds that had been in front of the moon blew past, and the lakeshore was gently illuminated. It should have been a scene of great beauty, but all I could see was a great hulk of man on the end of a dock, about to toss my cat out into deep and frigid water.

“Leave him alone!” I shouted, and ran toward the steps to the dock.

Duvall whirled and cursed.

Suddenly bright lights glared all around us. “Mr. Duvall,” blared a voice through a bullhorn, “this is the police. Please put your hands up.”

But Duvall didn’t. I could tell that he was intent on sending my cat into the water and nothing anyone said was going to stop him. He turned around and I could see that he held a spitting and struggling Eddie with one outstretched hand.

I hurtled down the steps and reached the dock.

“Mr. Duvall,” the bullhorn said. “Put your hands up.”

Mr. Duvall did not. He kept walking, out to the very end of his dock.

I pounded down the wooden slats. “Put him down!”

“I’ll put him down all right,” Duvall said. “Right in the—”

“MRR!” Eddie flung himself around and latched his claws straight into the back of Duvall’s hand.

“Ah!” Duvall yelled and dropped Eddie. “You miserable cat, I’ll—”

But that was all he got out before I caromed into him with all my weight. Shoulder first, head down, elbow tight to my body, I thumped him and I thumped him good.

Duvall, still yelling, flailed about with his arms, trying to recover, but I’d caught him off guard and off balance and he fell into the water with a great splash.

I scooped Eddie off the dock and snuggled him close. “Are you all right, pal? He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

Feet hurried toward me. I turned and saw multiple officers rushing toward me. Sheriff Kit Richardson led the way, followed by Detective Inwood, followed by Ash, followed by two other deputies.

The sheriff stood at the dock’s end, flashlight in hand, and took in the situation. “Wolverson, make sure he gets out of there fast. That water’s cold.” She glanced at me. “Ms. Hamilton, you need a hospital. No arguments. Your lips and fingers are blue. A deputy will take you. Now.”

The command was sharp and crisp and I did not dare disobey. But . . .

Sheriff Richardson smiled. “If he’ll let me,” she said, “I’ll take care of Eddie until you get home. From what I can tell, he’s the hero of the hour.”

“What d-do you s-say, Ed-die?” I asked through chattering teeth as a deputy put an emergency blanket around my shoulders.

“Mrr,” he said, and bumped my chin with the top of his head.