In Plain Sight (18 page)

Another thought hit me. The skulker. Had I barely missed encountering a murderer the last time I was here? Had I scared him off, but he’d come back and killed Leslie later? Or had he already killed her, and I arrived just as he was escaping?

Surely not. Surely Leslie’s body couldn’t have been down here in the water, snagged on the ladder, since then!
You’ve
got to stop reading those murder mysteries, stop letting imagination
take you on a rocket ride.
Sgt. Yates would say this. This surely had to be exactly what it looked like—an accident. Ghastly, yes. But an accident, nothing more. To think otherwise was morbid imagination.

I hadn’t looked at my watch when I asked the woman out on the road to call 911, so I had no idea how much time was passing as I leaned against the boathouse for support. It felt like hours before I heard sirens in the distance, though logic, which I kept trying to summon, told me no more than ten minutes had elapsed.

The thought occurred to me as a siren wailed up to the gate that Sgt. Yates was not going to be pleased. Hadn’t he warned me: no dead bodies?

And I definitely had a dead body for him.

18

Two uniformed officers were the first authorities on the scene. Sgt. Yates was not one of them. But he wouldn’t be, I reminded myself. Because this was an accident, and he was in the Major Crimes Unit. The two men came running down the driveway, one of them yelling when he spotted me, “We got an emergency call. A woman drowning—”

I pointed to the end of the dock, and they ran by me. I followed, putting one foot carefully ahead of the other because I felt as if I might all too easily wobble over the edge of the dock myself. I pointed again. We all stared into the greenish depths.

It was a pleasant morning. Unseasonably warm. Almost hot. Calm and peaceful. Sunlight shafted into the water, highlighting specks like watery dust motes. The ladder, I now saw, ended three feet below the surface. It looked deceptively inviting.
C’mon in, have a swim.

Yeah. Just you, me, and a dead body.

“You’re sure?” The officer sounded doubtful.

“I’m sure. I saw her.”

“You saw her fall in?”

“No, but I saw her drift away just a few minutes ago—”

He didn’t give me a chance to finish before he jerked his head at the other officer and barked, “Get on the radio. We may need a diver.”

This all seemed vaguely unreal, as if I were an actress in some bizarre play, and none of the parts were very well rehearsed.

“I don’t think you need to—”

Another siren wailed to a stop at the gate, and the first officer turned to me. “How do we get the gate open? We’re going to need equipment down here.”

I started to answer that they’d have to get inside the house, where the gate controls were located, but now I finally remembered what I’d seen in the Mercedes. I pointed to the car. “Remote control for the gate. On the front seat.”

The other officer headed for the car.

“Hey, wait!” I yelled. “You can’t—”

Too late. He’d already grabbed the handle and yanked the door open, no doubt obliterating any fingerprints that might be there.
No matter
, I reminded myself.
This is only an accident.

The first officer was stripping off his uniform. His shoes clunked to the deck, blue shirt flung atop them, belt with holstered gun, cell phone, and other police gear strapped to it placed more carefully atop the other items.

I admired his willingness to plunge instantly into the depths in a rescue attempt, and I was disturbed about Leslie being down there somewhere. But the sad fact was that this heroic gesture wasn’t exactly necessary. “I don’t think there’s any big rush—”

“You said she’s only been underwater a few minutes. We might be able to save her.” He yanked a wallet out of his pants pocket and dropped it on the pile.

“That’s right. But you didn’t give me a chance to finish. She was already dead when she drifted away. Her body was caught on the ladder. I was trying to get her up on the dock, but she … got away from me.” I ended on a lame note. Spoken aloud, my contribution to this situation sounded both careless and incompetent. “I tried to hold on to her, but she just … slipped away.” It didn’t sound any better on second telling.

The young officer stood there barechested and barefooted, a fine male specimen who looked as if he was ready to toss me over the edge. “She was already dead? Are you sure?”

“I think she’d been dead for … some time. Although I’m no expert,” I added hastily.

“Why didn’t you tell us this to begin with?”

“You didn’t give me a chance.”

He started putting his clothes back on. “Okay, how long had she been in the water before she, as you put it, ‘got away’ from you?”

“I don’t know. Although I think it could have been … a while. I came to retrieve something I’d left in the house—”

“Retrieve?”

“I was Ms. Marcone’s housekeeper up until a few days ago. I’d left a personal item in a kitchen drawer and wanted to get it back. No one answered my ring or knock. I was curious about her car being parked down here. So I came down to the dock and … there she was.”

“In the water?”

“Caught on the ladder.” I showed him where her velour sweatshirt had snagged. I pointed out the blonde hairs and blue threads caught on the ladder and other hairs still floating on the water.

“So you don’t know what happened?”

“No. I suppose she must have stumbled or slipped or something, hit her head and drowned.”

“You saw a head injury?”

“No. But something like that must have happened. She was a good swimmer … she could swim across the lake and back … so she wouldn’t have drowned just falling in the water.”

He gave me an up-and-down inspection, as if I’d only now registered as something more than an anonymous blip on his radar. “And you are … ?”

I gave him my name and pointed to the house across the lake. “I live over there—”

I didn’t have time to explain further. With the gate apparently open now, the police car, which I saw was from the county sheriff’s office, roared down the driveway, brakes screeching when it stopped behind the Mercedes. Behind it lumbered a red fire truck, then another car marked with the sheriff’s emblem. The officer I’d talked to was still barefoot but tucking in his shirttail as he trotted over to meet them.

“Don’t go away,” he turned and called back to me. It sounded as much warning as command.

A few minutes later another car with a fire department emblem arrived. Two men slid out. One dragged out scuba gear—black rubber suit and yellow oxygen tanks—and put it on. He plunged off the end of the dock. By this time a small crowd had gathered, arriving from wherever it is crowds emerge from in catastrophes. A boat was stopped about a hundred feet offshore, sun glinting on binoculars as the occupants watched the activities.

A newly arrived officer herded me, along with everyone else, off the dock and away from the car. A few minutes later the diver surfaced about thirty feet from the dock. Something bobbed beside him. He dragged it with him back to the dock.

There, two officers took the body from him and laid it on the dock, water sloshing across the wooden boards. More water sloshed when the diver came up the ladder and stood on the dock, peering down at Leslie’s body. A murmur like a passing wave rolled through the crowd.

An officer knelt by the body and pressed fingers to her throat. It was a formality only. I don’t think anyone expected anything but his negative shake of head as he stood up.

In life Leslie had always appeared so lean and toned and healthy, like a racehorse ready to run. Regal and a bit disdainful of more ordinary human beings. Not stunningly beautiful but definitely attractive. Now, even from a distance, her body looked … odd. Bloated. It was probably fortunate, I realized with a sick churn of stomach, that I hadn’t gotten a look at her face when I tried to lift her head. I knew she’d have hated having all those officers gathered around staring down on her now.

There seemed to be some sort of conference taking place among those officers. One of them was on a cell phone. I wondered if a coroner or medical examiner had to come before the body could be removed from the dock. That usually happened in the murder mysteries I read.

But this wasn’t a murder, I reminded myself. Just a terrible, tragic accident. Why did my thoughts keep slipping in that other direction? Although another part of my mind instantly countered,
Why cling so stubbornly to the accident
theory?

I knew the answer to that. Because, even though I knew it happened over and over in this imperfect world, I didn’t want to think about one person being capable of deliberately snuffing out another’s life. It was too … horrific.

My stomach was feeling ever more unreliable, and there was a peculiar ringing in my ears. I approached the officer assigned to crowd control. I leaned across the imaginary line created by his outstretched arms.

“Please, may I go home now? I’m not feeling too well.”

The officer’s impatient glance flicked in my direction but didn’t focus on me, a situation with which I am not unfamiliar, given my general tendency to fade into woodwork, landscape, or crowd. “Sure, no one needs to stick around.

Stay back, everyone stay back.”

“I was the one who found the body,” I said. “The other officer told me not to leave.”

That finally brought a direct focus on me. “I’ll check.”

He motioned the first officer on the scene over for a conference. A few minutes later, after taking down my name, address, and phone number, plus a warning that they’d want to talk to me again, they let me go.

My feet had at some time gotten wet, and my shoes squished as I plodded up the driveway.

From across the lake, after changing my clothes and shoes, I watched the activity through binoculars. As a number of other people were doing, I realized.

The fire truck was gone now, and another vehicle had arrived. People, apparently people official enough to be allowed on the dock, milled around. The thought occurred to me that they could very well be destroying evidence. A man in dark clothing knelt over the body. Medical examiner?

Eventually two men put the body in a bag and carried it on a stretcher to a van. The vehicle drove away. The crowd shuffled around for a few minutes, then, reluctantly it seemed to me, started to disperse.

Where were they taking her? Who would look after the arrangements? Who would mourn?

The whole situation suddenly seemed unbearably sad. Leslie, from all I’d seen, was so alone in the world. Alone, unloved …

And still, lurking in the dark basement of my mind, there was the ugly thought that perhaps she’d been even less than unloved and uncared for than I realized; perhaps someone had hated her. Hated her enough to kill her.

I’d forgotten lunch, I realized when the place across the lake finally appeared deserted by late afternoon, but I definitely had no desire to eat. I wondered if anyone had collected those blonde hairs and blue threads on the ladder. My whistle seemed unimportant now. I mentally apologized to Thea as I decided I’d just let it go.

Sandy had an after-school meeting. I automatically put three plates on the table when I saw Skye’s red car with both girls in it pull into the yard. I wondered if news of the accident had reached the school yet. Apparently not, because Sandy and Skye were giggling and chattering about some guy at school who’d caused an uproar when he showed up with a reverse mohawk—shaved strip on top his head, long frizzed strands on the sides. I was thinking I should tell them about Leslie when Skye suddenly looked at the clock, grabbed the remote, and turned on the TV. She always liked to watch her father on the local news.

Leslie wasn’t the top story. That went to a car accident on the other side of Fayetteville that had killed three people. But she was in second place.

“The body of a woman was discovered in Little Tom Lake in the elite Vintage Estates area near Woodston about 10:30 this morning. The identity of the body has not yet been released pending notification of next of kin, but out-side sources say it is that of the owner of the property on which the body was found. Details of the drowning are still sketchy, but we’ll keep you up-to-date as further information is released.”