Chapter 23 #2
He could see that knowledge in my eyes, and he shrank back from it.
He was just a village cop, after all, unfamiliar with a willingness to do true violence.
Perhaps he’d thought I would forgive him, that I would understand he was only doing his job, but he saw now there would be no understanding, no forgiveness, no return to a comfortable acquaintance when this all blew over.
“What’s going on?” came Broder’s voice, and I saw Perry mulling over his words. She pushed me, he wanted to say, and it would’ve sounded like an impotent whine to his own ears.
“Nothing,” he said instead, and started back up the porch steps again. It was then that the four who’d been inside emerged.
“There’s nothing in there,” one of them said. “Just a mess.”
If nothing else, the spell on the cellar door had done its work.
“It’s a big property,” Broder said easily. “Lots of places that need searching yet.”
One of the four-wheelers returned, bumping over the ruts left in the yard by the DEC trucks. “We found the pond,” the cop said. “Pretty far back, and pretty big. Can’t tell how deep it is.”
“We’ll need the diving stuff,” Broder said gleefully. “Make the call. Why don’t we take a walk out there, Tess?”
It wasn’t a request, but I had no more intention of letting him traipse around the sanctuary unwatched than he had of letting me out of his sight. The other cop offered the four-wheeler to him; Broder swung on and looked at me expectantly. I laughed.
“Keep dreaming.”
I turned and headed toward the meadow without waiting for an answer.
After a minute, the four-wheeler revved up behind me, close enough to make my eye twitch; I half expected him to run me down but was unwilling to give him the satisfaction of flinching.
The vehicle stopped just short of me, and it settled into a little putter at my heels the rest of the way.
The banks of the pond were swarming with cops. Somehow it looked even larger than usual—a gaping, patient maw just waiting for the right time to close.
“How often you use that boat?” Broder asked.
“Don’t use it. Been here as long as I can remember.”
“You don’t use the pond for anything? No fishing?”
“Don’t stock it. The only thing you’d catch in there are frogs and snappers.”
“Watch out for snapping turtles, boys!” Broder called, and a few of the cops pushing through the edges of the cattails beat a hasty retreat.
From beyond the pond I heard the other four-wheelers buzzing through the trees, and there was a clatter of rising wings and rasping calls.
Dozens of crows passed over us, heading west and crying a warning.
The trees stirred with their passing although there was no wind, and somewhere in the woods, an engine cut short.
We all heard it. Broder turned to scan the forest, the hand on his belt sliding a few inches toward his gun. “You got any friends out here, Tess?”
“Not unless you count the trees,” I said. “I’m guessing you don’t.”
Next came a loud snap, sharp as a whip, and someone shouted, “Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
Every cop’s head turned that time, and Broder shouted, “That you, Sid?”
There was no answer, but a few seconds later, another officer came crashing through the brush on foot, pants covered in muck to the knee. He was pale as milk above his too-tight collar, long scratches standing out alarmingly across his cheeks.
“I hate this fucking place,” he spit. “I just lost the four-wheeler.”
“What do you mean, you lost it?”
“It’s like a bog back there, all thorns and prickers and mud. Didn’t realize it until it was too late. Whole thing sank, nearly pulled me in with it.”
Broder swung around to me accusatorily, then realized whatever he wanted to say would sound insane. Instead, he crooked his head and barked into his radio.
“Where are we on that diving equipment?”
“On our way.”
After a moment, we heard another vehicle approaching.
The branches and briars were animate now, a constant movement in the darkness of the trees, and as the van made its way through, the crackle of branches was interrupted by the shriek of wood scraping metal and glass.
The other officers were starting to break through the trees too, most of them on foot, as if the sanctuary were herding them all here.
They’d already begun to shout and snap at each other, unnerved by the forest and the things they didn’t want to believe they’d seen.
Only two of the wetsuits survived the short walk between the van and the pond; the third was torn open from hip to knee on a pricker cane. “I ought to come in here with a machete!” Broder snarled to no one in particular.
As the divers descended into the pond, a cloud went over the sun. The water suddenly lost all reflective quality, and the divers paused, staring into a motionless black void. One reached back to tug on their retrieval ropes. “You sure these are secure?”
“They are,” Broder barked. “Let’s get to it.”
They bobbed out into the pond, diving for minutes at a time and resurfacing a few feet from where they went under. Broder paced a track behind me, his radio occasionally letting out a hiss of static, while I silently watched the faint ripples from the divers.
Any moment could be the end.
Every time they resurfaced, I braced myself for a shout. With every bubble that rose to the surface, I expected the orange inflatable marker they took down with them. But it never came.
Barely thirty minutes had passed when they surfaced and struck back toward the shore. Broder muttered under his breath and went to the water’s edge as if he would head them off. “Out of air already?”
“No,” one of them panted, pushing up his goggles, “but it’s like snorkeling in an oil pan. We can’t see shit. Haven’t even found the bottom.”
“It’s a pond!” Broder protested. “How deep can it be?”
“I don’t know. I dropped a measure to find out and it just kept going—must be an underground current or something.”
Broder whirled on me and advanced. “How deep is the fucking pond?”
“How the hell would I know—”
“How deep is—”
There was a splash and a cry from behind him. One of the divers had slipped in the shallows. He raised his arm out of the water and red poured from his forearm, a deep, vertical gash like a suicide wound. In the hood of his wet suit, his face went gray.
“Oh, fuck,” he said. “I think that’s pretty deep.”
The other diver caught him under the armpits and heaved him to his feet. “Help him!” he shouted in exasperation at the rest of the officers, who were standing on the shore like cats afraid to get their feet wet. They stretched out their arms for him, only a few venturing even ankle-deep.
“He needs to get to a hospital,” one said.
“Then somebody take him!” Broder roared. “And nobody else leaves. I’m calling in a dredge.”
He stormed over to the van and made a series of irate calls. I was too far away to hear the replies, but he clearly didn’t get the answer he wanted. After a few minutes he emerged again, face flushed as he fought for calm.
“I will have that dredge tomorrow,” he said, pointing a finger in my face. “So don’t you think about going anywhere.”
I could have fainted with relief. One more day felt like a lifetime, more than enough to figure something out—to move the body, or call a lawyer and get the search warrant revoked somehow, or plant evidence that pointed them in a different direction. I could find a way.
The cops retreated slowly, picking their way around the edges of the pond, driving the remaining vehicles back toward the meadow in cautious fits and starts.
Broder remained behind me, a sweating, heaving mass just beyond my peripheral vision, as the others disappeared into the trees one by one.
I turned on an angle, making sure to keep the forest at my back rather than the pond.
Broder stared at me silently for a long time, as if he’d never quite seen me before. There was genuine curiosity rather than bluster and impatience in his gaze, and that made my skin crawl with a warning.
“You know, Tess, I really didn’t think you had anything to do with it,” he said.
“It’s no secret that I don’t like you any more than you like me, but murder?
I would’ve said, ‘Nah, not her. Not with her little bleeding heart for the animals.’ When Shim brought me that little piece of plastic he found here, I was sure it was just some bit of trash.
Even when the DNA came back, I thought there must be some good explanation, because what would Tess Wynne have against Pastor Zeke?
Sure, he wants to build a church up here, but a good offer to buy the land isn’t anything to get mad about, right? ”
Dread crashed over me in a hot, sick wave. The bulrushes and ferns swooped and blurred in my vision, and I fought to stay steady on my feet, to keep my face from showing what I felt.
“So I got curious, and I thought I’d take a look, maybe see exactly where the property lines are. I did a little digging in the records department, and I had to dig a lot further back than I expected, but—well, you can probably guess where I’m going with this, right?”
He waited for a long time. Maybe he expected me to offer a reason, an explanation, a lie, but my mind was blank. His hand stayed perched on his holster the entire time he stood there.
“It doesn’t matter what we find in that pond tomorrow; I know you did it, and I know why you did it, and it’s not going to work.
I’ve already told the judge, and I’m going to tell that boy and his mother that they’re owed this land.
You killed that man for nothing, and even if it doesn’t weigh on your conscience, I’ll be damned if I let you get away with it. ”