Chapter 6 2025
The body floats a few feet from the ice-rimmed shore. But the sheriff doubts that’s where it started. His guess is, it floated with the prevailing current through the breaks in the ice until it bumped up against the ice block near the shore and petered out of steam.
It’s late March, and the thirty-year-old reverend was reported missing three days after Thanksgiving.
Which means it’s likely his body remained frozen beneath the surface all that time.
Only a single hand is visible, but the sheriff has no doubt it’s him.
The cuff of the wool coat and the black Gore-Tex glove are exactly as the reverend’s wife, Heddy, described them in the missing person’s report.
The herringbone of the coat is distinct, a sharp zigzag of black and gray.
“Hell of a place to die,” Frank, his deputy, says.
The sheriff doesn’t respond, though he was thinking the same thing. Since they got the call, his heart has thrummed in a low distinct rhythm in premonition of what’s to come.
The legend of Black Hollow Pond goes back as far as anyone can remember, and the reverend’s body surfacing here is going to stoke a firestorm of speculation through Moosewood and possibly beyond.
Likely invented by the Chippewa, who loved to tell stories, the story goes that a shadowy creature lurks beneath the pond’s surface, a she-serpent who lures people into the water and pulls them to their death to rob them of their souls.
It’s a myth with no basis except the ample anecdotal evidence of the past two hundred years.
In the sheriff’s lifetime there have been three .
. . now four . . . deaths. One man fell through the ice when the sheriff was a boy.
Stupidly he’d been trying to ice fish in March.
One died snorkeling a few years later. Possibly while looking for the serpent, he got caught in a tangle of pond grass beneath the surface and couldn’t get himself free.
And a year ago, a junior from the adjacent boarding school took a lethal dose of opioids, then wandered into the water to surrender himself to the serpent.
His suicide note said that his soul was evil and that he did not deserve a place in God’s divine realm.
And now, the reverend.
The sheriff can see the headlines now: “Beloved Man of God Loses His Soul to the Serpent of Black Hollow Pond.”
“It would seem all his praying didn’t do him much good,” Frank says with a chuckle.
The sheriff doesn’t laugh along, death too close to his own life at the moment to find any humor in it.
He knows better than most that what you do in life has little to do with when your number is called.
He served two tours and saw the best of men cut down and the worst of men survive.
No, in his experience, nothing but luck protects you from the reaper.
Not love or money or faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds, not bad ones either.
He looks at the protruding hand and frozen clawlike fingers and knows, regardless of what caused the reverend’s untimely death, all the prayers in the world wouldn’t have saved him.
“It sort of looks like he’s waving for help.” Frank contorts his skinny body into the position of the corpse, one hand tugging toward the ground and the other waving at the sky. “Help, God, help! I’m one of your faithful flock. Save me!”
With that, the sheriff does chuckle. Frank’s twenty-three and a goofball, and humor goes a long way in cutting through the tensest moments of the job.
“Call the ME and get someone down here,” the sheriff says. “I’m going to talk to the woman who called it in.”
He leaves Frank to trudge up the bank toward a young couple waiting on the path. Several winter-famished cottontails startle and dart into the saw grass.
The couple stands silent, the woman holding the leash of a young golden retriever, and the man pointing his phone at the sheriff, recording his every move.
“Thanks for waiting,” the sheriff says.
The dog jumps and yips in greeting, and the sheriff lets the dog sniff him, then squats and scruffs the dog’s neck.
“Ruby, down,” the woman says.
“It’s okay,” the sheriff says, giving the dog another rub, which causes a distinct pang of longing for Maggie, his faithful companion of fifteen years, gone now almost a year.
Straightening, he takes his notebook and pen from his jacket pocket.
“Does he need to be here?” the woman asks and thumbs her hand at the man, who still annoyingly points his phone at the sheriff. “I’m the one who found the body. Me and Ruby.” She nods to the dog, and the sheriff realizes she and the man aren’t the happy couple he presumed.
He works to keep the glee from his voice as he turns to the man and says, “Nope. No reason for you to stay.” He looks directly into the lens of the phone and gives what his wife, Grace, calls his “campaign grin,” the aw-shucks one he reserves for people he particularly can’t stand.
“But I want to see him get pulled out.” The man pouts.
The woman sighs irritably.
“Out of respect for the deceased, we’re clearing the area before we do that,” the sheriff lies.
They don’t have the manpower to clear anything, and when the ME arrives, he and Frank will likely be hip deep in the icy water, pulling the body to shore and too busy to worry about lookie-loos or amateur paparazzi.
“Fine. Whatever,” the man says.
He steps forward as if to give the woman a kiss, but she rears back.
“Whatever,” the man says again and walks off.
“Boyfriend?” the sheriff asks with an eyebrow lift.
“Bumble fail,” she answers. “I think I’m figuring out why they call it Bumble. Ninety-nine percent of the time it turns out to be a mistake.”
The sheriff laughs. He likes the woman. She has what Grace calls moxie.
Bumble, Hinge, Grindr—the sheriff doesn’t understand dating these days.
How can you possibly know if you have chemistry with someone by looking at a picture on a screen?
He and Grace met at a Superbowl party. She was rooting for the Packers because she’d grown up in Wisconsin, and he was rooting for the Broncos for no reason other than he had a vintage orange-and-blue Hawaiian shirt he’d wanted to wear.
The first moment she laughed, an unrestrained rumble that ended in a bright guffaw, he was smitten, and by halftime, he was head over heels in love.
It took Grace two years to catch up, but eventually she did, and three months ago, they celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary.
He still has the shirt, and he wears it every Superbowl.
Grace rolls her eyes each time he comes prancing out of the bedroom in it, but the next day she washes it by hand and hangs it carefully on the shower rod to dry, preserving it hopefully forever.
How do you possibly find that on a computer?
The young woman doesn’t have much to add to what she reported on the phone. Ruby started barking, and she went down and saw the hand sticking up from the water.
Ruby sits up straighter at the mention of her name. A good dog. And he feels another pang for Maggie. Grace has talked about getting a puppy, but he’s not ready. Maggie was special—one of a kind, smart, and devoted—and you can’t simply go out and expect to replace that.
He thanks the woman, gives her his card, and asks her to call if she thinks of anything else. She offers a wave, and she and Ruby continue down the path.
Overhead, hawks wheel and several ravens squawk and heckle, famished from their recent migration home. It’s fortunate the body was discovered so soon after the thaw. A few hours more, and the birds would have made a feast of the hand and whatever else they could get their greedy beaks on.
Frank is bent over a patch of snow, retching up his insides. And the lab techs, two young men who look identical, except one has a beard and the other is clean shaven, are both ghostly pale, and their jaws are locked tight. One bows his head, and his lips move silently as if reciting a prayer.
The sheriff agrees it’s a gruesome sight.
Five months in a pond is a long time, and the soft parts of the reverend’s face are gone—his lips, cheeks, nostrils, eyelids, and tongue—along with most of his innards.
The scavengers, likely mostly carp and turtles, made a feast of him and nibbled away everything they could chew.
His preacher’s shirt is ravaged, and his stomach is a cavernous hole surrounded by dark-brown ribs.
His heavy wool coat, which lies open around him, appears to have spared his arms, and the rigid plastic preacher collar preserved part of his neck.
While the sheriff waits for the men to recompose themselves, he looks out at the water.
The day is eerily silent, the cloudless sky above reflecting off the nearly still surface.
Though labeled a pond, Black Hollow is more like a lake.
It spans at least a half mile across and wraps in a crescent shape that’s at least twice that in length.
Beyond the far shore, he can just make out the brick wall of Gaines Academy, a prestigious private school for the country’s wealthiest kids.
The reverend worked at the school, and the sheriff wonders if there might be a connection.
The last time the reverend was seen was after he’d delivered the Sunday sermon at the school’s chapel.
His wife, Heddy, had driven their truck back to their home, and the reverend was supposed to walk back later that day.
When he didn’t show up for dinner and she couldn’t get a hold of him on his phone, she got worried.
A blizzard had blown in, making the school’s road undrivable, so she called the director and asked if she could go to the chapel and check on him.
When the director reported no sign of him, Heddy called the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff was there when the call came in.
It had been a slow night. Not much typically happened in Moosewood on Sunday evenings but especially not on a blizzardy Sunday evening the weekend after Thanksgiving.
He should have already gone home, but he couldn’t face the lonely house in those early days after Grace’s diagnosis.
She was at the Mayo Clinic, undergoing chemo. Her sister and mother were with her, and she didn’t want him there. She needed to fight with everything she had, and that meant not worrying about him.
She was right, of course. He was a wreck and wouldn’t have been able to disguise it.
Her diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, AML.
It took him a day to memorize the name but only minutes on the internet to find himself spiraling down a rabbit hole of despair.
AML is a blood cancer that affects the bone marrow, and the five-year survival rate is 29 percent.
The call from Heddy was a welcome distraction. He told Tricia, the receptionist, he’d handle it himself.
He climbed into “the Beast,” the station’s four-by-four Bronco, and drove to the school’s chapel.
What he found when he got there was nothing—no tracks or footprints or signs of foul play.
The reverend’s briefcase and laptop sat on his desk as if he’d planned to return, and the sheriff’s first thought was that he’d left before the storm and had gone somewhere he didn’t want Heddy to know about.
It was likely he’d planned on coming back, but the storm had stopped him.
He drove away not overly concerned, certain the reverend would return that night or the following morning with his tail between his legs and some explaining to do to his wife.
But the next day, he didn’t return. Or the day after that.
On the third day, the storm past, the sheriff and Frank returned to the school to conduct a more thorough search. They walked the grounds and scoured each building.
“Is it possible,” he asked Heddy that afternoon, “that he simply left, of his own free will? It happens. A man gets stressed and walks out on his life.”
Heddy shook her head adamantly. She was a striking young woman, porcelain pretty as Grace would say, like one of those delicate, expensive dolls little girls collect, who had grown into a real-life woman with gleaming blond hair and large sea-blue eyes.
“He wouldn’t do that. He’d never leave his mom.”
The sheriff remembers thinking it interesting that she didn’t say he’d never have left her.
He looks again at the reverend’s ravaged body and blows out a hard breath. It turns out she was right. The reverend was here the whole time, only a stone’s throw from the chapel and from where Heddy had last seen him.
The question that niggles is how he ended up here.
Why would he come to the pond during the worst storm of the year?
And how did he get here? The brick wall that protects the school is ten feet high and unscalable.
Heddy had their truck. And the walk from the school along the roads is several miles, a daunting trek to make in a blizzard.
And while the sheriff doesn’t believe a mythical serpent had anything to do with the good reverend’s death, he agrees something or someone lured him here.
His job now is to figure out who or what that was.