Trudy switched off the flashlight. Eggers just stared into the fire — the flames were low and clear as they wagged and popped above the coals. It was hard to believe he had made it from one spark, tindered from a stick and bow. There was nothing I could do about their disappointment.
“Trudy,” I said, “let’s have that camera.”
She pulled it from a bag in the snow and handed it to me. I didn’t even look at Eggers. I set the ball back, surrounded it with the contents of my pockets — change, nail clippers, as well as my watch — to provide scale, and then burned off all the Polaroids, getting the ball in situ from all angles. The bones were an important find, but all I wanted was a look inside that sphere. “I better get this back to campus,” I told them, hefting the ball again. “I’m going to be up all night.”
“Wait, Dr. Hannah,” Trudy said. She touched me on the shoulder. “There’s one more thing,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“I need your help.”
Eggers pointed to a dark patch in the snow.
“I think it has to do with that big set of chains,” he said.
“The thing is,” Trudy said, “I have to get rid of that car. That cop said some detectives are coming tomorrow. I don’t have time to fix it. I don’t have anyplace to hide it.”
“Sinking it in the lake was my idea,” Eggers added. “That water’s a hundred enos deep.”
Trudy opened her mouth to make a plea, but already I knew I would fall for it. She could play up the mentor thing, or speculate on the many ways that car could jeopardize Keno. I nodded, and the next thing I knew, I was following her across the snow, carrying a petrified mudball that might or might not contain a human head. Within minutes, Trudy was wrapping a chain around the rear axle of my Corvette and securing it with a grappling hook, the kind you’d use to scale the walls of a bank. And then, like a dream, I was easing my car forward to take up the slack. I felt the tug of the GTO behind me, and I pulled away from Eggers and his fire, pale against the casino’s dazzle. Trudy ran the GTO without lights. Tractionless, it was a black ghost behind me, sleek and flat in the rearview mirror, floating side to side in the lane.
When I turned left onto the river road, Trudy swung wide behind me, the haunch of her GTO busting a snowdrift high into the air, sending her shooting out of my mirror, into the other lane. Without a transmission, Trudy could only steer with the handbrake, and, trying to compensate, she pressed the brakes hard, making it seem as if my front tires were about to wheelie off the ground. When I hit the brakes, the chain went slack between us, sparking along the pavement like the Fourth of July.
Heading toward Lewis and Clark Lake, I saw, every so often, the signal beacon of the Parkton air-traffic control tower. Alternating white and green, the beam seemed to sweep in vain. What was that lamp seeking with such seriousness, such ceaseless vigor? Of course the airport made me think of Julie, doing an about-face in the terminal, showing me her back. Oddly, though, my mind landed on that aluminum crate of little dogs. I pictured it still out there, forgotten on the pink runway, the airport grown dark and empty, no signs of life but the white breath of dogs through the vent holes.
I eased off the gas as we neared the marina. We passed the old fish hatchery, its abandoned cement ponds lurking like pitfalls under snow, and then coasted along a field of empty boat trailers that looked in the moonlight like the graveyard of elephants they were always searching for in those old Africa movies. The chains rattled the ground as we passed Mr. Chippy’s Fish Ship, and the boat ramp’s speed bumps nearly tore the rear end out.
The ice, when we put our wheels to it, was so white in the moonlight that it seemed like morning. Empty warming huts glowed blue-brown, and a layer of hoarfrost gave the lake ice a ruddy, purpled-over look. As we drove on the ice, everything changed. The GTO in my rearview mirror somehow coasted faster than I could drive. It kept closing on me, and the only way to avoid getting bumped was to speed up. I didn’t know which direction to head, the lake was so vast. But each time I sped up, that black car closed, the slack chains playing hell with the GTO’s undercarriage. Soon we were moving nearly fifty miles an hour, and when I sped up again, it only drew Trudy closer. To avoid the impact, I turned my wheel slightly to the left. When her car floated past me, I knew we were in trouble.
Slowly, my car began to turn. Suddenly I was traveling at highway speeds — backward — as we began spinning in tandem, slowly rotating counterclockwise like a giant bola, which is the weapon ancient humans used to eradicate the large, flightless birds of Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand, and Madagascar in the mid-to-late Pleistocene. In great revolutions, our cars swooshed round each other. Tufts of loose snow fleeced my windows, while the tires kicked up fits of ice that riddled the fenders and hood.
When we came to a stop, I was half in the passenger’s seat, sharing it with Keno’s mudball. I sat there a minute, the windshield a cataract of frost and snow, waiting to see if I would barf. I pushed off the passenger seat and leaned back, putting both hands on the wheel.
I looked in the mirror. The rear window was clear enough so I could see Trudy in the moonlight, examining the interior of her car one last time. She had a glove in her teeth, held by a fingertip. She flipped down the visor to remove her registration, then policed all the personal possessions from the glove box. She popped the trunk and got out.
Trudy startled me by knocking on the window, which was so sheeted with ice I needed two hands to roll it down. She leaned her head in. “This’ll go pretty fast.”
I got out and watched Trudy slide under the ’Vette.
“You got some rust under here,” she said after she’d crammed her head and shoulder under the rear end. “You really should invest in some fresh undercoating.”
I heard some clanking around under there, the rattle of links running over the axle, and then the hollow clunk of the big hook hitting the ice.
“Shouldn’t we unhook the other end of the chain?” I asked.
“I don’t need that chain anymore,” she said from under the chassis. “Do you?”
“No,” I told her. “No, I guess not.”
She wasn’t even greasy when she slid out. She walked to the open trunk of the GTO, where she pulled out a chain saw. She tugged its starter cord once or twice in the cold, adjusted the choke, then tugged some more. Blue smoke puffed as the saw tried to start, filling the air with the smell of unburned two-cycle oil.
Almost instinctively, I began backing up.
Right then, the saw caught, and Trudy opened the throttle, racing the little motor till the smoke blew out. Then she put the saw to ice. Where was my inhaler? I patted my pockets.
The saw, when Trudy sank it, drew from the ice a jet of material that kicked high and low, depending on how she rocked the blade — a curtain of water ran from the bar when she plunged deep, and a sleet of ice chips kicked when she got the saw to bite. I scanned the horizon, taking in the slate-white lake, limned with an intangible shore that could be dark green or purple, depending on how you squinted. The noise from the saw was like radiation in the cold; it penetrated all things, fled all directions, and there was no echo.
I wrung my hands as the saw raced and stalled in the thick ice. The teeth bucked and dug while Trudy cut her way around the passenger side of the GTO. She worked the blade into a turn when she reached the trunk, and I was ready to leap into my two-seater and speed away from this dark business. The whole scene was straight out of the old whaling days, a scrimshaw tableau where a figure traversed the white expanses of whale belly sinking a blade into an up well of fluid that wallered his boots and oilskins.