“Nice and friendly.”
“Oh yeah?”
“A couple in this huge house over there tried to invite me in for drinks.”
“That was nice, but they didn’t succeed?”
“I told them I was on duty.”
“You might have missed an opportunity to find out something really important.”
“About what? You want me to go back?”
Winter shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“There was something else. But it’s probably my imagination. Might have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick, so to speak,” Halders said.
“Yeah?”
“Nothing. Otherwise, going door-to-door around here has produced about as little as you might expect. No one’s seen or heard anything.”
“The kennel guy heard and saw something,” Winter said.
“He’s a nutcase.”
“They’re sometimes the ones that prove the most helpful.”
They both heard the sound of an outboard from the lake. A plastic boat with a ten-horsepower motor came from the north and steered in toward the inlet fifty yards from where they were standing. The motor cut out and the boat glided into shore, outside the cordon.
They could see two boys climb out, and Halders headed over to them along the path. He returned five minutes later with the two of them, who looked to be in their lower teens. They were carrying at least two fishing poles each, as if they refused to leave anything behind in the boat. Winter had heard Halders ask them why they’d left their boat there. They had said that it was their spot. Their usual spot.
“There wasn’t a boat there early yesterday morning,” Winter said.
“No, it was gone,” one of the boys said and both looked down at the ground.
“What did you just say?” Halders said, and the boys seemed to tremble inside their life vests.
“When was the boat missing?” asked Winter and discreetly gestured to Halders to back off.
“This morning,” said the one that was doing the talking.
“You came here this morning and noticed that the boat was missing?”
“Yes.”
“When was that?”
“Eigh-quarter past eight, around there.”
Winter eyed his watch. That was exactly four hours ago.
“What did you do then?” Halders asked.
The boys looked at each other.
“We went looking for the boat, of course.”
“With all your gear?”
“What?”
“All your goddamn fishing gear,” Halders said. “Did you lug all that stuff around with you when you went out looking for your boat?”
“We left it here,” the talkative one said softly.
“Where did you find the boat?” Winter asked.
“On the other side,” the boy said, and gestured toward the water through the branches.
“So it was just lying there?” Halders said. “With the motor and everything.”
“No. We always take the motor with us.”
“How about the oars? Do you take those with you too?”
One of the boys, the one who hadn’t yet spoken, started to giggle nervously and fell silent after two seconds.
“So someone could have rowed the boat?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you have a lock on it?”
“It’s busted,” said the boy who had giggled. He had regained his ability to speak.
“Busted,” Halders repeated. “Does that happen often?”
“It hasn’t happened to us before. But others,” the boy said, and made a gesture that included all the other boat owners around the Big and Little Delsjo lakes.
“What did you do when you found the boat?” Winter asked.
“We rowed back here and put the motor on, and then we went out fishing.”
“You didn’t notice anything strange or out of place in the boat when you found it?” Halders asked.
“No. Like what?” the boy said, but Winter could see what he was thinking.
“Anything that didn’t belong there,” Halders said.
“Not that we could see.”
“Nothing lying around, no leaves or anything?”
“We probably didn’t check that carefully. But the boat’s right over there,” the boy said, and nodded toward the path and the boat beyond.
“I’m sure you understand that we have to borrow your boat for a while and examine it,” Winter said, and thought of all the time that had passed.
“No problem,” the boy said enthusiastically, as if he were on the verge a great adventure.
They walked back to the boat. The bottom of the plastic skiff was covered in four inches of water.
“Have you bailed out any water since you found it?” Halders asked.
“No.”
“Good. Where are the fish, by the way?”
The boys looked at each other again and then at Halders.
“We threw them back ’cause we felt sorry for them this time.”
“Good.” Sports fishermen lie in a thousand different ways, Halders thought. Even the young ones are damn inventive. He bent forward and peered along the inside of the gunwale.
“What’s that under the oarlock?” he said, and pointed. “Come closer so you can see. There. The left one, four inches above the water.”
The boys looked, but neither of them said anything.
“It’s not something you recognize?” Halders asked.
“It looks like some kind of sign,” one of the boys said, acknowledging the little red spot of paint on the boat’s dirty yellow interior. “Or something. But it wasn’t there before.”
16
She wasn’t cold anymore because she had been given two blankets and warm water that they had made sweet. After she drank the sugar water she must have fallen asleep, and when she woke up it was as if she didn’t know if she had been asleep. It was so strange, but it was also good because she wasn’t scared when she was sleeping. You couldn’t be scared because you weren’t there.
Now she was there again and she heard a noise from up on the roof. She would have liked to scream out “I want my mommy!” But she didn’t dare. Maybe the man would come with more sugar water, and then she’d sleep again.
Nobody had hit her again. She didn’t think about that at all. Now she thought about the summer and that it was warm under your feet when you walked on the street or in the sand. They had walked in the sand when they
