It made a huge splash that went over both of us. It fell straight and true through the water and crashed on the edge of the submerged planking. The ripples widened swiftly and the water boiled. There was a dim sound of boards breaking underwater. Waves rippled off into the distance and the water down there under our eyes began to clear. An old rotten plank suddenly popped up above the surface and sank back with a flat slap and floated off.
The depths cleared still more. In them something moved. It rose slowly, a long, dark, twisted something that rolled as it came up. It broke surface. I saw wool, sodden black now — a sweater, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes, and something that bulged shapeless and swollen over the edges of the shoes. I saw a wave of blond hair straighten out in the water and lie still for an instant.
The thing rolled then and an arm flapped in the water and the hand at the end of the arm was no decent human hand. The face came rolling up. A swollen, pulpy, gray-white mass of bloated flesh, without features, without eyes, without mouth. A thing that had once been a face. Haines looked down at it. Green stones showed below the neck that belonged to the face. Haines’ right hand took hold of the railing and his knuckles went as white as snow under the hard brown skin.
«Beryl!» His voice seemed to come to me from a long way off, over a hill, through a thick growth of trees.
FOUR
THE LADY IN THE LAKE
A large white card in the window, printed in heavy block capitals, said: KEEP TINCHFLELD CONSTABLE. Behind the window was a narrow counter with piles of dusty folders on it. The door was glass and lettered in black paint: Chief of Police. Fire Chief. Town Constable. Chamber of Commerce. Enter.
I entered and was in what was nothing but a small one-room pineboard shack with a potbellied stove in the corner, a littered rolltop desk, two hard chairs, and the counter. On the wall hung a large blueprint map of the district, a calendar, a thermometer. Beside the desk telephone numbers had been written laboriously on the wood in large deeply bitten figures.
A man sat tilted back at the desk in an antique swivel chair, with a flat-brimmed Stetson on the back of his head and a huge spittoon beside his right foot. His large hairless hands were clasped comfortably on his stomach. He wore a pair of brown pants held by suspenders, a faded and much washed tan shirt buttoned tight to his fat neck, no tie. What I could see of his hair was mousy-brown except the temples, which were snow-white. On his left breast there was a star. He sat more on his left hip than his right, because he wore a leather hip holster with a big black gun in it down inside his hip pocket.
I leaned on the counter and looked at him. He had large ears and friendly gray eyes and he looked as if a child could pick his pocket.
«Are you Mr. Tinchfleld?»
«Yep. What law we got to have, I’m it — come election anyways. There’s a couple good boys running against me and they might up and whip me.» He sighed.
«Does your jurisdiction extend to Little Fawn Lake?»
«What was that, son?»
«Little Fawn Lake, back in the mountains. You cover that?»
«Yep. Guess I do. I’m deppity sheriff. Wasn’t no more room on the door.» He eyed the door, without displeasure. «I’m all them things there. Melton’s place, eh? Something botherin’ there, son?»
«There’s a dead woman in the lake.»
«Well, I swan.» He unclasped his hands and scratched his ear and stood up heavily. Standing up he was a big, powerful man. His fat was just cheerfulness. «Dead, you said? Who is it?»
«Bill Haines’ wife, Beryl. Looks like suicide. She’s been in the water a long time, Sheriff. Not nice to look at. She left him ten days ago, he said. I guess that’s when she did it.»
Tinchfleld bent over the spittoon and discharged a tangled mass of brown fiber into it. It fell with a soft plop. He worked his lips and wiped them with the back of his hand.
«Who are you, son?»
«My name is John Dalmas. I came up from Los Angeles with a note to Haines from Mr. Melton — to look at the property. Haines and I were walking around the lake and we went out on the little pier the movie people built there once. We saw something down in the water underneath. Haines threw a large rock in and the body came up. It’s not nice to look at, Sheriff.»
«Haines up there?»
«Yeah. I came down because he’s pretty badly shaken.»
«Ain’t surprised at that, son.» Tinchfleld opened a drawer in his desk and took out a full pint of whisky. He slipped it inside his shirt and buttoned the shirt again. «We’ll get Doc Menzies,» he said. «And Paul Loomis.» He moved calmly around the end of the counter. The situation seemed to bother him slightly less than a fly.
We went out. Before going out he adjusted a clock card hanging inside the glass to read — Back at 6 p.m. He locked the door and got into a car that had a siren on it, two red spotlights, two amber foglights, a red-and-white fire plate, and various legends on the side which I didn’t bother to read.
«You wait here, son. I’ll be back in a frog squawk.»
He swirled the car around in the street and went off down the road towards the lake and pulled up at a frame building opposite the stage depot. He went into this and came out with a tall, thin man. The car came slowly swirling back and I fell in behind it. We went through the village, dodging girls in shorts and men in trunks, shorts and pants, most of them naked and brown from the waist up. Tinchfield stood on his horn, but didn’t use his siren. That would have started a mob of cars after him. We went up a dusty hill and stopped at a cabin. Tinchfleld honked his horn and yelled. A man in blue overalls opened the door.
«Get in, Paul.»
The man in overalls nodded and ducked back into the cabin and came out with a dirty lion hunter’s hat on his head. We went back to the highway and along to the branch road and so over to the gate on the private road. The man in overalls got out and opened it and closed it after our cars had gone through.
When we came to the lake, smoke was no longer rising from the small cabin. We got out.
Doc Menzies was an angular yellow-faced man with bug eyes and nicotine-stained fingers. The man in blue overalls and the lion hunter’s hat was about thirty, dark, swarthy, lithe, and looked underfed.
We went to the edge of the lake and looked towards the pier. Bill Haines was sitting on the floor of the pier, stark naked, with his head in his hands. There was something beside him on the pier.
«We can ride a ways more,» Tinchfleld said. We got back into the cars and went on, stopped again, and all trooped down to the pier.
The thing that had been a woman lay on its face on the pier with a rope under the arms. Haines’ clothes lay to one side. His artificial leg, gleaming with leather and metal, lay beside them. Without a word spoken Tinchfleld slipped the bottle of whisky out of his shirt and uncorked it and handed it to Haines.
«Drink hearty, Bill,» he said casually. There was a sickening, horrible smell on the air. Haines didn’t seem to notice it, nor Tinchfleld and Menzies. Loomis got a blanket from the car and threw it over the body, then he and I backed away from it.
Haines drank from the bottle and looked up with dead eyes. He held the bottle down between his bare knee and his stump and began to talk. He spoke in a dead voice, without looking at anybody or anything. He spoke slowly and told everything he had told me. He said that after I went he had got the rope and stripped and gone into the water and got the thing out. When he had finished he stared at the wooden plank and became as motionless as a statue.