Dead Creek (9 page)

Lew
got to the body first, jumping nimbly over ruts and loose brush in the barely visible ruts of the road, the beam from her flashlight bouncing off the trees. Osborne was surprised to see how gracefully she moved in spite of her stocky build.

“We got ‘im!” she shouted. She bent over with her flashlight and ran the beam slowly, carefully, over Ray Pradt’s entire six feet six inches. “He’s alive and his color’s not bad—but he’s out cold.” Stumbling, Osborne nearly squashed the stuffed trout hat. He stooped to pick it up. As he did, he looked up. The headlights beaming across the chest of the still figure lying in the road seemed to outline each detail with extreme clarity. It took only a few seconds for eyes long trained to avoid a patient’s gag reflex to note the slight movement in the man’s chest. “He’s breathing!” Donna and Osborne ran up behind Lew and looked down. His eyes half-open, Ray appeared to be staring at his boots from where he lay flat on his back, arms to his sides and legs straight ahead almost as if someone had carefully laid him out.

“Ray? Ray? It’s me, Donna.” Donna dropped to her knees and leaned to grab for Ray’s shoulders.

“Uh-oh, don’t do that,” said Lew, catching her arms gently but firmly. “We don’t want to move him. I’ll call for an ambulance.”

Lew ran back to the cruiser and quickly radioed in the emergency. Then she turned off the headlights. “Don’t panic. I’ve got a road lamp in the trunk,” she shouted. “I’ll set that up so we don’t run down the battery on this tank of mine.”

Tucking the bulky stand under her arm, she started back to the group, but as she hurried, she tripped. Recovering, she stopped and retraced her steps. Something caught her attention, and she pushed the beam of her flashlight slowly along the ground until she was back to the ruts around Ray.

“Hold on, folks,” she said, her voice very firm and low. “Stay right where you are—both of you.” Again, she moved the beam slowly around Ray’s body. Now she knelt close to him and turned the light off for a moment, leaving all four of them in the dark. Osborne watched the outline of her form as she dropped her head down toward Ray’s and gently patted her hand in the dirt around his head and shoulders. Finally she stood up and flicked the flashlight back on.

“Look.” She spoke very softly as she moved the beam along the ruts in the road beside Ray’s body. “See all these muddy clots? But it’s been dry all week, hasn’t it? Where’s this mud come from? And here, right on the edge of this clump, you can see ridges from a tennis shoe or a running shoe.” Osborne peered into the circle of light. She was right: fresh mud and a large shoe print. No doubt about it.

“But Ray is wearing hiking boots with much deeper treads,” said Lew. “Now look down the road just a little way—see how these ruts are broken down? I think his body was dragged along the road here where it’s dry by one party and then,” Lew swung the light beam, “from the brush over there, it looks like we get this other set of footprints.”

“You’ve lost me,” said Donna from where she sat on the ground beside Ray.

“Two things happened here,” said Lew. “First, someone or some people dumped Ray. Second, someone else came walking by with very soggy shoes, walked around our injured friend here, and left in that direction. They haven’t been gone long, either.” She rubbed some of the wet mud between her fingers. “A couple hours maybe? Maybe minutes. Certainly long enough to get to a phone and call for help. Very curious.”

The three of them stood over Ray Pradt. The dark silence of the heavy woods seemed to close in around them, and Osborne found himself trembling slightly in the dark.

“What’s that?” asked Donna, twisting suddenly at a nearby rustling in the forest.

“A deer, maybe a bear,” said Osborne.

“I don’t need a bear,” said Donna.

“Don’t worry, they’re more afraid of us than we are of them,” reassured Lew, setting up the road lamp and turning it on. The warm glow made it seem safer.

But not for Osborne. Rational or not, night in the deep woods always made him uneasy. His friends ribbed him because he was always the first one into the deer shack from his stand during hunting season. One night as they sat around a fire pit roasting marshmallows, he’d scared the living daylights out of his children saying, “The forest is full of secrets, dark, black secrets, more secrets than the ocean.” Mary Lee had been furious because both girls had to sleep with the lights on for weeks after that. Tonight he admitted that he believed those words of his.
Oh, come on, enough of that.
Osborne made himself shake off a vague feeling of dread.

To curb his unreasonable fear, he knelt and gently palpated Ray’s extremities, then moved on to his neck and chest. The medical skills trained into him during the war many years ago came back as easily as if he’d just read the textbook. “He’s got a big lump on the back of his head behind his left ear,” said Osborne, trying to sound casual. As he looked Ray over under the shadowy light of the road lamp, Lew walked back to her car to check on the status of the ambulance.

Osborne continued, “Otherwise, he doesn’t appear to have a mark on him. I think he’s got a concussion due to someone clocking him from behind, that’s what I think.”

Donna leaned over, this time gently touching Ray’s body as if to reassure herself it was alive and warm. She glanced around suddenly. “Where’s his hat? Oh, here it is. He’d die if he lost his trout hat.” Osborne saw her take a firm grip on the hat and clutch it to her breast.

“Hey,” called Lew from where she was sprawled half in and half out of the cruiser. “It’ll be about twenty minutes before the paramedics get here.” She came running back. “Here, I found a blanket shoved back in a corner of the trunk.” Donna spread it carefully over Ray, tucking it in around the edges. Lew walked back down the road a short way, trying to push flares into the semi-frozen ground. She succeeded with one and returned.

“No change,” said Osborne, standing up. He picked up Lew’s flashlight and stood over Ray’s still form, leaning over to study the ground around him, working hard to take his mind off his worry over Ray and the bears while they waited. There was nothing more he could do.

“Jeez, Lew, where’d you get that eye for tracking? There’s not
that
much mud here, much less enough to see those little ridges from shoes. Hell, I can barely make out these clumps, and I know they’re here.”

“Comes from tying on too many size twenty-six

Midges, Doc,” said Lew, resting against a convenient tree.

“You know, Lew, if you hadn’t stopped me, I’d be tromping all over this, this evidence here.”

“Well,” said Lew, “you didn’t, so don’t worry about it.”

“I am worried. Not about the road here—but my eyesight. How the heck
do
you tie on those tiny trout flies? I’m going to have to invest in some kind of magnifying lens.”

“Yep,” said Lew, “maybe some clip-ons. You can wear ‘em on your fishing hat.”

Osborne thought that over. Then he inhaled deeply; the crisp night air felt good in his lungs. In all his years as as a dentist in good standing with his peers, as a man who tried to be a good father and a caring husband, as a somewhat lonely widower and grandfather, he’d never felt so alive as he did right now.

“Excuse me a minute, folks,” said Osborne, looking down at his watch. A sudden call of nature overwhelmed his fear of bears. “Before that ambulance gets here, I need to see a man about a horse.”

He shifted the beam of the extra-heavy-duty flashlight that Lew had handed him and started down the narrow road. Branches hit him from both sides as he followed the outlines of ruts along the seldom-traveled trail. Bear or no bear, he really had to pee.

About twenty yards from where Ray lay in the road, he figured he’d reached a polite distance where he couldn’t be heard. He stepped into the brush about three feet, not too far, and unzipped. As he stood there, he mulled over the second set of footprints around Ray’s body. They puzzled him. In Loon Lake, if a hunter or a fisherman comes across an injured person, he tries to get help. It’s an unwritten code of honor in the Northwoods. You could find your worst enemy having shot himself in the foot, and you’d still help him out. So just exactly who would look at Ray lying unconscious and leave?

He was just zipping up when he heard a sound in the brush off to his right. Osborne froze. He knew instinctively it was the soft inhale of something breathing. Swiftly he finished hooking his belt, then slowly, slowly reached for the flashlight, which he had set on the ground behind him. Light would startle the beast long enough for him to escape. He whipped the beam toward the sound.

Not ten feet away but nearly hidden behind thick brush and looking down at him was a human face hanging like a bulb from black branches. The flashlight beam hit at a strange angle, flattening the eyes into slits of glittering light, flattening the nose against the face so it looked like a fleshy knob. Tiny black holes marked the nostrils and a larger black hole the slightly open, downturned mouth. The last thing he noticed in the split second that he had the thing in focus were the bald spots on top of the bulbous head: a mushroom with hair.

He was so stunned, he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t move. He could tell time was passing from the heartbeats in his ears, but he only heard three before the ambulance siren wailed toward them. His eyes must have shifted to the right, and in that instant the thing vanished without even a rustle of a branch, not that Osborne could have heard anything over the pounding in his ears. Osborne didn’t try to follow with the flashlight; he was stumbling backward as fast as he could.

Lew and Osborne and two other deputies who had responded to her call tramped through the area long after the paramedics had loaded Ray quickly into the ambulance and sped off to the Loon Lake Hospital. They found Ray’s pickup about fifty yards down the road but no sign of Osborne’s vision in the woods, although they did discover a good-sized stream and many muddy footprints about fifteen feet beyond where the figure had been standing.

Osborne figured the creature might have had a canoe tucked away or just waded out of the area.

“We can check this out better tomorrow in the daylight, can’t we?” asked Osborne after an hour of fruitless searching. Lew didn’t argue.

“And what did it look like again?” she asked him for the umpteenth time.

“Just … a round, globular face, a big head with a worried expression on it,” he found himself saying finally.

“Oh, now,
that’s
interesting,” said Lew. “Not threatening but worried. What about frightened?”

“Both … maybe.”

“I should’ve known better,” she said during the drive back. “I felt like someone was watching from the moment we got there, but I thought I was just being too much of an alarmist. The guys at the station kid me because I follow my hunches so often. I’m not saying I have ESP, but I have feelings. I have feelings, and I ought to pay more attention to them, damn it.”

Osborne said nothing. A residual feeling of dread, generated by the image of the fat head with its slitty eyes, made him feel exhausted.

“I’m too old for this,” he said as Lew parked in the hospital lot. “It’s—it’s just so creepy how close that thing was to me. I might’ve touched it, for God’s sake.” He noticed as he got out of the car that the wind was blowing colder. The forecast was for zero to ten degrees that night, even though May was just around the corner. The wind chill would push it close to ten below zero.

“Thank God we found him,” he said to Lew as they hurried toward the brightly lit entrance. “Another twelve hours in this cold, and he might not have made it.”

“I’m sure that was the plan,” said Lew. “I’m reporting it as attempted murder.”

“His
vital signs are fine,” said the emergency room physician, a tall, lean young man who looked to Osborne to be all of age twelve. “I checked him over, and that lump is the worst. A few minor abrasions. He needs to lie on that ice bag for another twenty minutes or so, then you folks can take him home.”

It was late, but they all hoped for some answers. Lew leaned against the wall on one side of the bed, Osborne and Donna had taken chairs on the other. Everyone was staring at Ray, who had come out of his coma about two minutes after the ambulance crew managed to dump him onto the gurney.

The doctor leaned over the patient. “Ray, you’re gonna feel like you’ve got the worst migraine in the world….”

As he spoke, Ray pulled the sheet that covered him up over his head, “Ohhh,” he groaned, “light hurts.
Sound
hurts.”

“You never know with these concussions,” the doctor said, looking at the three visitors. “Some folks are out for days. Ray’s doin’ great. He may have some short-term memory loss, and that headache’ll be with him for a day or more.”

“Is it okay if I ask him a few questions?” asked Lew. “I can wait, but the sooner I can get some direction here—”

“No problem,” said the doctor, “just be aware the man doesn’t feel so hot.”

“Doc?” Ray muttered from under the sheet. “Can you make me a deal on a hundred thousand aspirin? I’ll show you and your better half the best bluegill fishin’ in the county.”

“Sure thing, Ray, you take what you need and don’t worry about it.” The doctor patted him on the shoulder and left.

“Ray?” Lew was insistent, “I hate to do this but—”

“I know, I know,” Ray groaned and threw the sheet back, “I really do not know
what
you’re talking about.”

“I’ll get back to it. Can you tell me what happened out there—from the beginning?”

“I … don’t know….”

It was clear to Osborne Ray
was
trying to think back. “Where were you going?” “I … I can’t remember….”

He looked so frustrated, Osborne thought he might burst into tears.

“Ray, what’s the last thing you do remember?” asked the exasperated Lew.

There was a long, long pause. “Ordering a waffle with maple syrup at the Sportsman’s Bar down in the hollow … with a side of link sausage and some of that homemade toast they always got in the back … then … here, I remember coming here to the hospital and the sound of the siren as we were coming into town.”

“Okay, Ray, we found you north of Shepard Lake. Does that jog your memory?”

“Nope. Lousy fishin’ up there. That’s Dead Creek. Why would I want to go up there?”

“Ray,” Osborne decided to interrupt, “you told me you were going to see old Herman the German. He said you were by his place earlier today.”

“I was? Yeah … okay, I vaguely remember….” Ray pulled the sheet down from his face. Donna helped him adjust his pillow and ice bag so he could sit up against the back of the bed. He blinked, then rubbed his eyes with both hands and kept his hands held tightly over his eyes. “Please, the room spins if I don’t do this, I’m sorry….”

“You don’t remember anything later? You don’t remember driving or walking down that road?” asked Lew. “Ray, if I tell you there was someone watching us, watching you, not helping you but hiding back in those woods, do you have any idea who that might be?”

“Ohh … you mean that woman?” Ray’s response was almost automatic.

Lew’s eyes darted to Osborne’s. He shook his head. The thing he saw in the beam from the flashlight—a woman? He couldn’t believe it.

“A woman?” asked Lew, surprise in her voice.

“Well, yeah … I mean, I dunno.” Ray was clearly struggling to remember something. “Y’know you asked me that question and I said that and now I don’t know why really. I don’t
really
remember anyone. I don’t remember a face, y’know? But I remember
something
about a woman.”

“Ray. Did you spend the day with another woman? This is not the time to be coy because Donna’s here. It’s way too late for that.” Lew’s voice was insistent.

“No,” said Ray so emphatically he winced. “Donna’s my main heifer.” Donna slapped him lightly on the hip. “Ouch!”

“He’s feeling better,” warned Donna. “A lousy joke is a good sign. Ray, shut up and be serious.”

Osborne noted for the umpteenth time that rough edges aside, Donna had just the right spirit to go up against Ray and his kidding. He could see she looked relieved for the first time that night. She was right: for Ray to kid at inappropriate times was normal behavior for the guy.

“Okay,” Lew pressed. “We still have a woman in the picture, however. You don’t know what she looked like, but was she blond? Dark? Short? Tall? Fat? How did she smell?”

Ray kept his eyes closed and dropped the smart-aleck tone. “I don’t know, Lew. I don’t remember a thing except the sense of something female being around me … but I’m trying.” He paused for a long time, the muscles in his face tensed. No one spoke, waiting. “It’s like I remember being close to a woman. Not sexually. This sounds crazy, I know, but the most acute sense I have right now is that I’ve been with my mother very, very recently. That …” He paused and his voice lowered to barely audible. “… she held me.”

“Your mother’s dead, isn’t she, Ray?” said Osborne softly.

“Fifteen years.”

The room was quiet. A cool chill crept up Osborne’s spine.

“Maybe he had one of those near-death things,” said Donna.

“Okay,” said Lew, “anything else?”

“It’s so weird you ask how she smelled … because I can tell you exactly how she smelled.”

“Okay,” said Lew. “Shoot.” She didn’t look surprised as she scribbled notes.

“Like garden soil … she smelled like rich, black, garden dirt,” said Ray. “You know what I mean?”

“I do,” Lew reached over and patted his hand. “That’s good, Ray. That’s enough. You keep thinking about that. Anything else you remember, please write it down. I’ll give you a call in the morning, and we’ll go back over this.”

She heaved a sigh and flipped her notebook closed. “Now it’s time for everyone to get some sleep.”

“What day is it?” Suddenly Ray dropped his hands from his eyes and sat up straight. “Did I miss Sunday?” he demanded. His eyes were bloodshot, and he still looked pretty pale.

“No, no.” Osborne patted him back onto the pillow gently. Donna moved quickly behind him to adjust the ice pack. She stood at head of the cot and began to massage Ray’s shoulders while Osborne spoke. “It’s Saturday night a little after midnight. Take it easy. I fed your dogs this afternoon so they’re fine—”

“And I’ll take you to my place tonight, Ray, so you can sleep in tomorrow,” said Donna. “Doctor Osborne’ll take care of the dogs. You just relax.”

“Boulder—ouch—Junction,” said Ray wincing, closing his eyes to cut out the light.

“What about Boulder Junction?” Lew, who had been about to leave the room, stopped and turned. She flipped open the notebook she’d closed a moment earlier.

Once again she had that no-nonsense attitude, and Osborne found her compelling to watch. The alert dark eyes against her lightly tanned, roundish features made her look much younger than her fifty-plus years—that and a body that was well-toned and trim, even if it wasn’t a petite size. The woman had a presence and an authority that continued to impress him.

“Tomorrow’s the Spring Muskie Festival and the finals of the North American Loon-Calling Contest,” said Ray, his voice quite serious. “I’m a finalist for the fifth year in a row. Last year I came in second. This is my year to win. I’ve been practicing for weeks. I
can not
miss it.”

“Think again,” chimed in Donna. “Nature has its way of telling you to take it easy, honey.”

“Nothing natural about it, Donna.” Ray’s tone was grim for the first time since he’d come to. “Natural is not getting hammered from behind by someone you can’t see. Hey, maybe that’s
it,
Chief Ferris.” He raised his eyes to Lew’s. “That Canadian goombah that beat me last year hired a hit man. See, he
knows
I’m going to clobber him tomorrow.”

Ray threw back the sheet covering him and sat up on the gurney. “I’ll feel better if I’m on my feet. I’m going to Boulder, folks.”

Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and let loose with the strange, fluttering wail. “There … that wasn’t so bad.” But the rush of blood from his head took its toll, and Ray flopped back on the narrow bed, throwing the sheet back over his head. “Oh God, it hurts, it hurts, what did I do to deserve this?” he wailed.

A nurse poked her head in through the curtain and motioned to Lew, who followed her out of the room.

Donna threw her hands up in despair and looked at Osborne. “Doc, you tell him he’s crazy. He’s gonna break a blood vessel or something.”

“Ray, you probably ought to take a day in bed, watch some TV—”

“Forget it, everyone. Forget it. I’m going. Doc, if you want to help me out, you’re welcome to come. You, too, Donna.”

“I can’t,” said Donna, “you know tomorrow I leave for Chicago to visit my daughter for a week.”

“I forgot,” said Ray. He looked beseechingly at Osborne. Osborne knew well Ray’s maniacal drive to win this contest. He’d talked of little else for weeks now.

“All right, I will,” said Osborne, “on the condition you let me drive.”

“It’s a deal,” said Ray and heaved a sigh mixed with pain and relief.

Osborne didn’t mind making the ninety-minute drive north at all. It had been years since he’d been to the Muskie Festival. Not since his kids had grown up. He vividly remembered the huge bed of red-hot coals always carefully tended by a team from the local Lions Club. Dozens of fresh muskies, caught during the first week of the season, then donated and flown in from around the state, would be wrapped in aluminum foil and steamed in butter and juices over the coals. By ten in the morning, each silver log would be unwrapped, and slabs of the flaky white fish dished up with little pots of butter. Not even a fresh Maine lobster could rival Osborne’s adoration of that steamed muskie. If that was the price for driving Ray to his crazy contest, he’d pay it—easily.

“We need to be on the road by seven, though,” he said to Ray, “so the sooner we get you into bed, the better.”

Lew rushed back into the room.

“We got an ID on one of the bodies,” she said. “That partial plate belongs to the owner of a small insurance company in Des Moines, Iowa. Family didn’t report him missing because they thought he was on a fishing trip, even though he’s been out of touch for three weeks—”

“Oh my golly, I completely forgot! Ray,” interrupted Osborne, “my charts! I’ve got a record of doing that gold inlay on a ten-year-old who went to Camp Deerhorn one of the summers, I think, that your brother-in-law worked there. It’s too late to call him tonight, but first thing tomorrow, we got to get in touch. He might remember this kid. He was from Kansas City.”

“Hold on. Before you call anyone, guys,” said Lew. “I’ve got a problem. Sloan caught the flu from Pecore, and he’s flat on his back. That leaves me very short-handed.

“Also, the Wausau boys had some more interesting news. Seems the victims were frozen
before
they died. I mean, Wausau’s pretty excited. These are the juiciest remains they’ve ever seen. Perfectly preserved. The medical examiner thinks he may have ‘em talking by noon tomorrow. But only the one ID so far. Shanley contacted them, and he’s running tests first thing in the morning.”

Lew paused, and her eyes darkened as she stood with her hands jammed into her jacket pockets. “Given that I have other problems to deal with here in Loon Lake, I am hoping that both of you—Dr. Osborne and Ray—wouldn’t mind continuing as deputies for another twenty-four hours, and perhaps you’ll find some time to go back up to Dead Creek—”

“You asking the victim to check out the scene of the crime?” asked Ray.

“Kinda like that,” said Lew with another wave of her hand and sheepish grimace. “Frankly, you’re the best one to do it, which you know. But I have to be there, too. So what if you two do your Muskie Festival in the morning, win that trophy, and we’ll celebrate over a late breakfast? Then let’s try to set up a conference call with Shanley, and after that, if you’re feeling okay, let’s head for the woods together. But only if you’re feeling up to it, Ray….”

“We’ll do it.”

“Doc?”

“Fine with me,” said Osborne, “though I may pass on the pancakes if that muskie is as good as it used to be. Why don’t we meet you at Susan’s Café in Saint Germain around twelveish? They serve late on Sundays.”

“Good,” said Lew. “I’m taking off.”

She left the cubicle, and Osborne followed her out so Ray could sit up and get dressed to leave the hospital.

“Call us in the morning if you change your mind and want to watch the contest,” said Osborne.

“If I change my mind, I’ll come by,” said Lew. “You boys have that damn party line out there, and I don’t like letting your forty-seven best friends know what I’m doing. That’s a hint, by the way.”

“I know, I know. But we’re stuck with that party line, Lew, until three lovely old ladies depart this Earth. They love it, and the phone company won’t route new line without one hundred percent participation from all residents currently getting service. Believe me, I’ve called a thousand times to change the damn service.”

Suddenly, the curtain was flung back and a half-dressed Ray, still pulling his jeans up over his shirt, confronted Osborne and Lew. He appeared to have forgotten his headache. “Hey, you guys, I just remembered something. Where’s my boat? Did you leave my boat back there?”

Twenty minutes later, the boat was still the only detail Ray seemed to remember. As Osborne turned down the lake road, Ray raised his head from where he’d been resting it against the seat. He’d decided it would be better to sleep at his own place instead of Donna’s in order to get a good start in the morning.

“Nothing like goin’ home some nights. You know, we lucked out, you and me. First Lake is the best lake in the Loon Lake Chain, doncha think?” The painkillers were making him drowsy and not a little happy.