In Plain Sight (17 page)

Okay, that was settled. But I still wanted that whistle Thea had given me. Once more I tried to call Leslie. Once more she didn’t answer. Once more I went down to the dock with the binoculars. The car was still there. She surely wouldn’t allow some outside car to remain on her property this long, so it must be hers, which also meant she must be home.

Once more I drove around the lake and parked outside the gate at 2742 Vintage Road, crawled through the fence, and, keeping a wary eye out for skulkers, marched down the driveway. I couldn’t think why Leslie would object to my retrieving such a trivial item, but if she felt possessive about leftovers, who knew what attitude she might take toward a whistle in her cabinet drawer?

A running dialogue with her in my head broke off. My feet slowed, and I reluctantly acknowledged what I’d been trying to ignore from the moment I crawled through the fence.

The eeriness.

“Vibes,” my friend Magnolia would say ominously. Bad vibes.

I reminded myself, as I had last time, that the house had felt eerie the time Leslie was away overnight, and it hadn’t meant anything then. I couldn’t convince myself it didn’t mean something now. The feeling was just too … dense.

I stopped, listening for any sound that might suggest I’d blundered into a second encounter with the skulker. Rustle, snap, thunk? No. Footsteps? Breathing? Scratching an itch? No. Nothing.

A car passed by on the road, but somehow the sound only emphasized the silence on this side of the gate. As if I’d stepped into another world here. Another dimension.

Let’s get this over with.
I hurried to the door and rang the bell. I knocked. I pounded. Nothing.

Leslie, the Queen of Cool, could, of course, be doing what she did so well with ringing phones. She was probably sitting in there with her usual aloof, superior expression. Maybe she was even laughing at me. I tried to feel amused or indignant at such pettiness, but I couldn’t muster much of either.

The eerie feeling was, in fact, growing stronger by the second. The back of my neck felt as if some powerful magnet was pulling at it, raising minuscule hairs I hadn’t known existed. I wanted to turn and run, dash back to my T-bird and burn rubber screeching out of the driveway. But …

Something is not right here.

Could Leslie be inside and ill or injured? Perhaps she’d fallen down the stairs or had an accident on one of those weird exercise machines? A couple of them looked as if they’d happily chomp down on an unwary human body and turn it into a trapped pretzel.

Reluctantly, conscience not allowing me to run and escape, I warily circled the house. The ragged grass looked as if it hadn’t been tended since my employment ended, but I didn’t know if Leslie had the gardener scheduled on a regular basis or if he came only when she called. Or maybe she was between gardeners as well as housekeepers.

I walked up the broad front steps and rang the doorbell. I’d never heard it before, because no one had ever come to the door during my term of employment, and I was surprised to hear a few incongruously cheerful tinkles of “Camptown Races.” At the moment, even in broad daylight, they bore a disquieting resemblance to whistling in the dark. I peered through a window, hands cupped between face and glass so I could see inside, half afraid of what I would see. Leslie peering back at me, with a stun gun ready to blast me? Or maybe a Frankenstein-faced intruder who was hiding in there staring back at me? Or perhaps ex-husband with a bloody hatchet?

But the living room looked just as I’d left it, neat and impersonal as an expensive hotel room, and quite empty. From here I couldn’t see if Leslie’s office door was open or shut.

Turning, I could now see that the car down by the boathouse was definitely Leslie’s light blue Mercedes. Cautiously I walked over to where the straight section of driveway led downward to the water, then on to the car. It was only a few feet from the water’s edge.

I tiptoed up to the car. Why the tiptoe? It just seemed the proper way to approach. I reached for the door handle, wondering if the car was locked. But some subconscious buzzer made my hand jerk back without touching it. Instead I leaned over and peered through the window. The car keys were hanging in the ignition. A purse and the remote control for the gate lay on the passenger’s seat.

Which meant … what?

Cautiously I circled around the rear of the car and onto the boat dock. Going in front of the car would have been the shorter route, but I didn’t want to put myself between the car and the water. It was foolish, I knew. The car was obviously empty. But I couldn’t escape the feeling that it might somehow plunge forward, gleefully malevolent as some Stephen King creation, and crush me under its wheels.

The dock creaked gently under my footsteps. I paused at the boathouse door. The brass padlock and chain were still in place. I didn’t touch them, but I peered through the crack. The small boat looked the same as always, suspended above the water in its cradle.

I walked out to the end of the dock.

And then I knew why Leslie hadn’t been answering her phone or doorbell.

17

Her face wasn’t visible, but the long hair, floating like blonde seaweed in the greenish water, was unmistakable. A section of her blue velour sweatshirt was snagged on the ladder. Her arms floated out to the sides. Her body hung below, trailing down into the green depths, undulating gently in some unseen movement of the lake water.

Strangely, as I stood there frozen, the first thought that came to my mind was the memory of Leslie saying, “I don’t believe in eternity.”

Oh, Leslie …

Then a handful of tiny fish, hatchlings no more than an inch long, fluttered around her floating fingers, and suddenly the bile rose in my throat at the horror of it. This was Leslie, Leslie
dead
, and fish were nibbling at her flesh …

I stepped back, hand to my midsection, the world momentarily reeling dizzily around me as my throat worked in reverse. I clenched my fists and willed my stomach not to rebel and my knees not to collapse. Then I realized what I was doing. More important, what I wasn’t doing. I was simply standing there, helplessly clenching my hands, concentrating only on my own sick feelings. And maybe I was wrong. Maybe she wasn’t dead! Maybe, even if her face was buried in water, she was just unconscious and still living. People had been underwater for minutes and still survived …

I knelt on the dock and frantically tried to get my hands under her arms. If I could pull her up on the dock, remember those CPR lessons Thea and I had taken a half dozen years ago …

Help me, Lord!

In the water her body felt almost buoyant. It bobbed gently as I struggled to lift her, almost as if it was trying to help me. Little wavelets raised by the movement splashed against the dock. Drops of water spattered my face. One hit my lip. I quashed a half-hysterical urge to drop the body and wipe those contaminated drops away.

I got her up a few inches, one wrist draped over the dock. I still couldn’t see her face, but her fingers had an eerie, bluish look. And now, shoulders out of the water, she became sluggishly immovable, as if some malevolent force held her from below. Even straining until my muscles burned and my arms shook and my eyes lost focus, I could lift her no farther.

A dead weight.

No! She could be alive. Perhaps a state of suspended animation. Or a coma. Wasn’t that possible?

I kept one hand under her arm and tried with the other to grab her hair and lift her head. If I could just get her nose and mouth out of the water …

Her hair slipped out of my grasp. Then I realized in horror that some of it had come loose in my fingers. I shook my hand frantically, trying to get rid of it, and she slipped back in the water with a splash that spattered my face again.

Her hair, once pale gold and glossy, now dull and lank, was only inches from my face as I knelt over her to reestablish my hold. I tried not to gag again as the scent of waterlogged flesh and clothing—and some other, uglier scent of death and decay—filled my nose. Bits of greenish lake stuff clung in her hair. Some of the hair I’d pulled out floated loose in the water.

CPR couldn’t help her. I could feel the death in the body as surely as I felt the hard wooden deck under my knees. I knew it and yet I kept struggling. I had to get her out! I couldn’t just let her dangle here in the water, caught like some dead fish on a line. With tiny fish nibbling at her flesh …

The velour sweatshirt bunched up under my hands, and I tried to get a better grip on the soggy material. My hands slipped, and the body drifted sideways. Frantically I yanked it back.

Only to feel it slipping even farther out of my grasp. Somehow in trying to lift her I’d loosened the shirt from where it was snagged on the ladder, and she was floating free.

I plunged forward, desperately grabbing to keep the body from sinking or floating away. My face pitched into the water, and then I was choking and spitting and frantically scrabbling and scrambling with hands and elbows and toes to keep from plunging over the edge of the dock myself.

But as the roiled water cleared I saw the body below me, out of reach, slowly bobbing and drifting away. It moved almost leisurely, rising and falling, twisting gracefully, hair disappearing last, like some golden wraith reaching for the surface.

I stared after it for a paralyzed moment. What had I done? Then I struggled to my feet and stumbled up the driveway. Telephone. Help!

Too late for help. The knowledge clanged in my mind like a doomsday bell. But I had to get someone here—the thought of her drifting down there below the surface, at the mercy of whatever might be down there, panicked me. I ran to the double doors at the house. Locked, of course. I tried every door I could find. A couple of side doors I’d never seen used, the rear door, even the garage doors. Everything locked. Irrationally, I ran back and pounded on the rear door. Strangely, I heard the phone inside ringing. But it was as inaccessible to me as if enclosed in a steel vault. Later, I was to think,
Why didn’t I look in her purse in the car for house keys?
But that never occurred to me at this frantic moment.

I ran to the gate, then across the street. The gate-rammer’s house? It didn’t matter. Again I pounded until my fists numbed under the blows. No answer.

I ran back to the road. I flapped my arms frantically at an oncoming car. The lone woman in the car looked as if she was going to detour around me. I realized how I must look, like some dripping, deranged scarecrow.

Lord, make her stop!
I pleaded. I brushed back the wet hair plastered to my forehead.

She did stop finally, a few feet past me, two wheels on the shoulder. She didn’t open the window, just eyed me warily as I ran up.

“Do you have a cell phone?” I yelled. I pantomimed holding a phone to my ear. “Leslie Marcone is in the water. We need help!”

The window came down a few inches. “What do you mean?”

“The woman who lives here—” I motioned toward the house. “I found her at the end of the dock, in the water—”

“You mean she fell in?”

“I don’t know what happened. I tried to get her up on the dock, but I lost hold of her—”

“She’s
drowning
?”

“I don’t know. I think … I think she’s already drowned.

Please—”

“I don’t have a cell phone.” The woman hesitated a moment, then apparently decided I was more panicky than dangerous. “But you can come to the house—”

“No, I have to go back down there. Call 911.”

Logic told me I could do nothing for Leslie now. Emotion told me I couldn’t leave her alone down there.

The woman hesitated a moment, as if wondering if this was real or some ghastly joke—or even if I was quite sane.

“Please,” I said again, and she must have heard some desperation in the plea. She nodded and drove off, slowly at first, then with a squeal on pavement as she suddenly sped up.

I ran back, clambered through the fence, down the driveway. More logic told me I could do nothing to help her. But run, hurry
,
was something I
could
do.

I knelt and stared down into the water at the end of the dock when I reached it, eyes straining. Nothing. For a split second, I wondered if maybe I’d imagined all this. Maybe I’d taken a spectacular swan dive into the sea of senility.

Then I spotted a few blonde hairs floating in the water, a few blue threads clinging to the metal ladder. No, this was all too real. Leslie’s blond hair. Leslie’s blue sweatshirt.

I took a deep breath and tried to think logically while I waited for help. What had happened here? I turned to look at the car as I tried to piece things together.

She’d obviously driven the car down to the boathouse for some reason. (Why?) Then she’d walked out on the dock (why?), where she must have slipped or stumbled and tumbled into the water, and the sweatshirt had caught on the ladder as she fell.

An accident. Accidents happened all the time. Forget the unexplained whys. I remembered an elderly woman from Madison Street who’d gone on vacation with her family and drowned in a few feet of water in a creek.

But Leslie wasn’t elderly. She was in excellent physical condition and, from what Sandy had said, an excellent swimmer as well.

If she’d accidentally fallen into the water, she surely could have pulled herself out. So she must have hit her head on the dock when she fell. Knocked herself out and drowned before she regained consciousness. Yes, a logical explanation.

And why was I so frantically proposing these logical accident scenarios to myself?

I knew why. Because down beneath them, down in depths murkier than the water in which Leslie bobbed and drifted, lurked the ominous thought that this was no accident. That Leslie had been pushed into the water. Maybe knocked out by some malicious blow before she was pushed. Maybe held under to finish the job.

She had enemies, no doubt about that. She may, or may not, have been in hiding here at Little Tom Lake, but the ex-husband’s surprise visit had made plain that she was at least avoiding people from her past. And she’d made new enemies here as well.