started back out on the pier with it. It must have weighed a hundred pounds. His neck muscles stood out like ropes under canvas under his taut brown skin. His teeth were clamped tight and his breath hissed between them.
He reached the end of the pier and steadied himself and lifted the rock high. He held it a moment poised, his eyes staring down now, measuring. His mouth made a vague distressful sound and his body lurched forward hard against the quivering rail and the heavy stone smashed down into the water.
The splash it made went over both of us. The rock fell straight and true and struck on the edge of the submerged planking, almost exactly where we had seen the thing wave in and out.
For a moment the water was a confused boiling, then the ripples widened off into the distance, coming smaller and smaller with a trace of froth at the middle, and there was a dim sound as of wood breaking under water, a sound that seemed to come to us a long time after it should have been audible. An ancient rotted plank popped suddenly through the surface, struck out a full foot of its jagged end, and fell back with a flat slap and floated off.
The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. It broke surface casually, lightly, without haste. I saw wool, sodden and black, a leather jerkin blacker than ink, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes and something that bulged nastily between the shoes and the cuffs of the slacks. I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out in the water and hold still for a brief instant as if with a calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again.
The thing rolled over once more and an arm flapped up barely above the skin of the water and the arm ended in a bloated hand that was the hand of a freak. Then the face came. A swollen pulpy gray white mass without features, without eyes, without mouth. A blotch of gray dough, a nightmare with human hair on it.
A heavy necklace of green stone showed on what had been a neck, half imbedded, large rough green stones with something that glittered joining them together.
Bill Chess held the handrail and his knuckles were polished bones.
“Muriel!” his voice said croakingly. “Sweet Christ, it’s Muriel!”
His voice seemed to come to me from a long way off, over a hill, through a thick silent growth of trees.
7
Behind the window of the board shack one end of a counter was piled with dusty folders. The glass upper half of the door was lettered in flaked black paint.
I went in. There was a pot-bellied stove in the corner and a roll top desk in the other corner behind the counter. There was a large blue print map of the district on the wall and beside that a board with four hooks on it, one of which supported a frayed and much mended mackinaw. On the counter beside the dusty folders lay the usual sprung pen, exhausted blotter and smeared bottle of gummy ink. The end wall beside the desk was covered with telephone numbers written in hard-bitten figures that would last as long as the wood and looked as if they had been written by a child.
A man sat at the desk in a wooden armchair whose legs were anchored to flat boards, fore and aft, like skis. A spittoon big enough to coil a hose in was leaning against the man’s right leg. He had a sweat-stained Stetson on the back of his head and his large hairless hands were clasped comfortably over his stomach, above the waistband of a pair of khaki pants that had been scrubbed thin years ago. His shirt matched the pants except that it was even more faded. It was buttoned tight to the man’s thick neck and undecorated by a tie. His hair was mousy brown except at the temples, where it was the color of old snow. He sat more on his left hip than on his right, because there was a hip holster down inside his right hip pocket, and a half-foot of forty-five gun reared up and bored into his solid back. The star on his left breast had a bent point.
He had large ears and friendly eyes and his jaws munched slowly and he looked as dangerous as a squirrel and much less nervous. I liked everything about him. I leaned on the counter and looked at him and he looked at me and nodded and loosed half a pint of tobacco juice down his right leg into the spittoon. It made a nasty sound of something falling into water.
I lit a cigarette and looked around for an ash tray.
“Try the floor, son,” the large friendly man said.
“Are you Sheriff Patton?”
“Constable and deputy sheriff. What law we got to have around here I’m it. Come election anyways. There’s a couple of good boys running against me this time and I might get whupped. Job pays eighty a month, cabin, firewood and electricity. That ain’t hay in these little old mountains.”
“Nobody’s going to whip you,” I said. “You’re going to get a lot of publicity.”
“That so?” he asked indifferently and ruined the spittoon again.
“That is, if your jurisdiction extends over to Little Fawn Lake.”
“Kingsley’s place. Sure. Something bothering you over there, son?”
“There’s a dead woman in the lake.”
That shook him to the core. He unclasped his hands and scratched one ear. He got to his feet by grasping the arms of his chair and deftly kicking it back from under him. Standing up he was a big man and hard. The fat was just cheerfulness.
“Anybody I know?” he enquired uneasily.
“Muriel Chess. I guess you know her. Bill Chess’s wife.”
“Yep, I know Bill Chess.” His voice hardened a little.
“Looks like suicide. She left a note which sounded as if she was just going away. But it could be a suicide note just as well. She’s not nice to look at. Been in the water a long time, about a month, judging by the circumstances.”
He scratched his other ear. “What circumstances would that be?” His eyes were searching my face now, slowly
