Snapper (15 page)

Standing back up, he cocked the barrels into position. Now where the hell had that damned bastard gone?

Standing in a canoe is never a good idea, especially after drinking. But Jack stood there anyway, scanning the water, his head straining from side to side.

“C’mon out, you stinking son of a bitch!” said Jack. “Show your damn face so I can blast it to kingdom come!”

Grundel had been pissed on once before. It had been a long, long time ago. He hadn’t liked it then and he didn’t like it now. He eyed the curved red underbelly of the canoe rocking above him.

How should he do this? Of course, ramming the canoe would do the job quite nicely. But then another idea came to Grundel– something a bit more theatrical.

Grundel could see the man in the boat silhouetted against the moon. He was standing up, looking over the starboard side.

Grundel swam under the boat and surfaced on the port side. He reached up, first with his right claw and then with his left, and grabbed hold of the gunwale. As he pulled himself up, the canoe tipped violently. Jack Sully cursed and spun around. As he started to fall, his gun went off. For a millisecond, his eyes met Grundel’s. Then Jack felt his flesh being flayed off his body as he slid across the snapper’s hard, horny shell.

The cold water sobered Jack in an instant. Still, staying afloat wasn’t easy while holding a shotgun in one hand. With his other hand, Jack tried grabbing the overturned canoe, but his hand kept slipping. Meanwhile, Grundel circled slowly in the depths below. He was in no rush. His prey wasn’t going anywhere. Grundel looked up. There was the man, a fat man, treading water to stay afloat. Then with a powerful stroke of his webbed claws, Grundel shot upwards.

The great snapper closed his eyes and spread his jaw as wide as it would open. He struck Jack squarely between the legs with the impact of a wrecker’s ball.

*

The phone at his bedside woke Chief Rudolph.

“Chief, sorry to wake you,” said deputy Rhodes. “But some woman just called the station. She says she was out jogging and saw a red canoe floating upside down in the lake.”

“Damn fool!” muttered Chief Rudolph. “I warned him.”

Now, an hour later, Rudolph and Rhodes were towing the canoe back to the town dock. Their boat was the only motorboat allowed on the lake. For years the town had rejected appeals to permit water skiing. If people wanted to jet ski or water ski, let them go to Lake Hopatcong or Lake Mohawk. But not here. Turtleback Lake was special.

When they reached the dock, Marc Bozian was waiting at the end of it.

“Any sign of a body?” he called out, before deputy Rhodes could even secure their boat to the pier.

Chief Rudolph was in no mood for the reporter.

“Do you think we’d have left a body out there if we’d found one?” he snapped.

“Well, do you at least know whose canoe it is?”

“Sure we know,” barked the Chief. “It’s Jack Sully’s. I watched him paddle off in it yesterday. I warned the damn fool not to go out there.”

“Shouldn’t you have stopped him, Chief?” said Bozian. “Surely you recognized the potential danger. Surely you had the authority to order him back to shore.”

“Enough of the ‘surely’ crap,” snapped the Chief.

The kid and his damn articles were already a stone in his shoe. Now the kid was giving him the goddamn fifth degree.

Still, Rudolph couldn’t resist answering.

“Sure, I could have ‘ordered’ him back. Him and the fifty other men who went out with him. I had the authority. I just didn’t have the manpower. Sometimes the law simply can’t protect people from themselves.”

“Are you suggesting that this was Jack Sully’s fault?” asked Marc.

“His fault?” Chief Rudolph actually paused to reflect. “Maybe it wasn’t exactly his fault. Maybe it was just his fate. What happened to him didn’t have to happen, but he made damn sure that it did.”

Bozian looked down. From up on the dock, he could see into the bottom of the police boat. Empty beer cans were rolling from side to side as the boat rocked.

“Where’d all the beer cans come from, Chief?”

“They were floating in the water.”

“So you think alcohol was a factor?”

“It usually is, son.”

Bozian looked again at the cans that had now congregated near the stern of Chief Rudolph’s boat. He did a quick count. There were twenty.

“Chief, am I safe in assuming that you’re looking for more than one body?” ventured Bozian.

“Why do you think?” asked the Chief.

“Surely one man didn’t drink all those beers,” said Marc.

“Hey – I think I told you to cut out that ‘surely’ business earlier. And clearly you didn’t know Jack Sully.”

Jack Sully drank like a fish, thought Chief Rudolph. And now he’s with them.

Suddenly Rudolph turned to Rhodes.

“Jeez, Donny, I completely forgot. You better get over to Sully’s house and check in on his daughter. God knows what the poor kid must be thinking.”

“What should I tell her, Chief?”

“Tell her that her Daddy’s been in a boating accident.”

“She’s gonna want to know more than that, Chief,” said deputy Rhodes.

“We all want to know more than that,” said Chief Rudolph. “But for now, that’s all we really do know.”

* * * *

The Jensens’ weren’t the only family that had decided not to renew their brokerage agreement with Clayton Realty.

The Meelers’, The Moshers’, and The Burts’ all had done the same. They all were stuck with homes they couldn’t sell. Each family had dropped its asking price by thousands. But it wasn’t enough. There were no buyers. None.

Except, maybe, one.

Deena Goode had been wistfully looking at real estate ads ever since the start of the school year. The commute from her apartment in Edgewater was over an hour each way and the miles were adding up quickly on her Volvo. Also, gas wasn’t cheap. It would make sense to move closer, and it would be even nicer if she could find a house in Turtleback Lake. But Deena didn’t have much in savings. Even with her new principal’s salary, she thought it would take a couple years before she could afford a home in Turtleback Lake.

Then everything changed.

Prices in Turtleback Lake were in a free fall. No one wanted to buy a home in a town that had a giant snapper on the loose. But Deena was looking beyond the crisis. Somehow, somebody was going to remedy the situation. And as soon as that happened, prices would bounce right back up. Deena intended to get in while the getting in was good.

She’d been watching prices drop in the local paper. She also checked out the listings in the window of Clayton Realty – after Judd Clayton had gone home for the night. She had her eye on one particular listing: the Burts’ bungalow.

Then one evening the Burts’ bungalow was gone from the window of Clayton Realty. Hardly believing her eyes, Deena drove past the house and saw it was true. The FOR SALE sign in front of the bungalow was gone.

“Dammit!” she muttered.

Deena could have kicked herself. She’d waited too long. The house was off the market.

Deena was beside herself. She should’ve acted. She should’ve made an offer. And she would have – if the Burts’ home hadn’t been listed with Clayton Realty. Because it was, she would have had to deal with Judd. And that would have been awfully awkward – for both of them. She knew Judd was angry. First she had given him the cold shoulder in the summer and then there’d been that unfortunate scene in front of the school council. Plus she sort of owed him for giving her the inside track on the principal job. Looking back, she guessed she could have handled the whole situation a lot better.

Now a golden opportunity had slipped through her fingers. The Burts’ house – a lovely two-bedroom bungalow on the lake’s western shore – would have been perfect for her. Not too big, not too small – with a wooden deck that looked out over the water. And best of all, it was just a short walk through the woods to the Andersen cabin.

Deena thought back to what August had said to her that night in the summer, after the two of them had gone through two bottles of wine. She remembered his exact words. He had told her that something was
“pulling him back to the lake.”

Could he have meant her?

And then, when she had asked August about extending her lease beyond September, he had declined. Was it because he secretly intended to be in it himself?

* * * *

There are bobbers. And then there are sinkers.

Jack Sully was a bobber. Given a choice, Jack definitely would have chosen to be a sinker. That way the damn town would’ve had to do for him what they should’ve done for his daughter: dredge the lake.

How Jack’s body got all the way from the middle of the lake to the grassy shallows in its northeast corner was a matter for speculation. Thermal currents were one theory. Breezes were another. Both were wrong.

The truth was, Jack – or the little that was left of him – had been dragged across the lake by Grundel.

Connie Konsulis had spotted the body from the deck of her house when she got home from her early morning jog. When deputy Rhodes and Chief Rudolph arrived at her door, she led them out onto the deck so they could see for themselves.

“How do we get down there?” asked Chief Rudolph, looking at the steep drop down to the water.

“Follow me,” she told him.

Rhodes and Rudolph followed Connie down the twisting, rocky path that plunged from her deck down to the lakeshore. Chief Rudolph stumbled twice. He should’ve kept his eyes on where his feet were going, but instead he kept sneaking peeks at Connie’s sparkly pink running shorts. They weren’t just short, pink, and sparkly; they were also clingy.

“All right, Donny,” said the Chief when they reached the shoreline. “Wade out there and see what we’ve got.”

Rhodes slipped off his shoes and socks and bunched up his trouser legs as far as they’d go. Then he waded through the willowy wisps of tall grass that grew up from the silty bottom. Twenty yards from shore, he came upon Jack’s body, bobbing face down in the middle of the watery lawn.

“Jeez, Chief!” cried deputy Rhodes.

All that was left of Jack Sully’s body was his torso. His four limbs were gone.

Chief Rudolph turned to Connie.

“You stay here,” he told her.

Then he bent over to remove his shoes and socks, hiked up his pants, and waded out to join Rhodes.

“Flip him over, Donny.”

“Can’t you?”

“Oh for chrissakes, Donny!”

Chief Rudolph reached down, grabbed a wet handful of what remained of Jack Sully’s shirt, and rolled him over.

“Awww-christ!”

Both men had to look away.

All the parts that had once been between Jack’s two legs were gone. Intestines and god-only-knew-what other entrails were dangling out of the gaping gash.

Chief Rudolph looked toward shore.

“Do you have some kind of tarp or blanket we could use?” he called to Connie. “Something you won’t need back.”

“I’ll go get one,” she called.

Connie turned and started climbing back up the hill. Chief Rudolph watched her in her clingy pink shorts. He regretted his eyes weren’t better.

* * * *

JJ was racing up the B-wing stairwell, taking two steps at a time, when Dr. Goode’s voice came crackling through the school’s public address system. She was summoning someone to her office, but JJ couldn’t make out the name.

“Maybe they’ve found whoever painted Turtleback Rock,” he thought.

JJ emerged from the stairwell, turned right and bumped face first into someone coming down the hall. Binders, books and papers flew everywhere. Both students gasped.

It took a moment for JJ to realize whom he’d crashed into.

It was Mary.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” said Mary. “How about you?”

“I’m okay, too,” said JJ.

They both looked down at the floor. Papers were strewn everywhere.

“We better clean this up,” said Mary with a laugh.

“Right,” said JJ, kneeling down beside her.

JJ started collecting papers. On one sheet were Mary’s English class notes on
Ethan Frome
. The margins of the page were filled with doodles – flowers, curlicues, and hearts. Inside one of the hearts, with an arrow through it, was the number 24.

Mary reached over.

“Thanks,” she said, blushing. “That one’s mine.”

When they finally finished gathering together the last of the scattered papers and books, they stood and faced each other.

“Well, you better hurry,” said Mary.

“You too,” said JJ. “You don’t want to miss your next period.”

“I sure don’t,” said Mary, winking at JJ. “But don’t you worry. I’ve only got study hall next. But you better hurry. Dr. Goode is waiting for you.”

“Dr. Goode?” said JJ. “Waiting for me?”

“Didn’t you hear the page?” asked Mary.