Swamp Monster, Page 2

  “Who knows? He’s mine now,” Terry said.

  Commodore pushed off. Terry and Steve followed, rounding a bend to see the last of the kayaks turning into 666. The apocalyptically named dog leg—which terminated at Metropolitan Sewer District culvert number 666—was a popular rest spot and the location where Commodore’s second in command lectured about Mill Creek history to paddlers.

  Steve rested his paddle across the gunwales and swiped a sweaty hand across a sweatier brow. “Ready for a break?”

  “I could recite Dick’s talk in my sleep. Push on.”

  “You just want to find any junk before everyone else.”

  “I’m looking for Smaug’s lair. The storm may have uncovered it.”

  “Your dragon swam upstream?”

  “It happens.”

  “If I don’t get a break, you’re buying when we get to Boswell’s. Or we can trade places.”

  “Sure, whatever.”

  Terry avoided Dick Brewer’s lectures because neither Dick nor Commodore appreciated his frequent interruptions and corrections. That, and he enjoyed having this part of Mill Creek to himself.

  Creosote-soaked pilings introduced the final stretch to the barrier dam and the Ohio River. Giant truck tires and shopping carts marred the view, impossible to remove after decades mired in mud.

  Decommissioned bridges and unidentifiable concrete structures lifted his geek heart. Here he was Samwise, encountering ancient ruins as the Fellowship of the Ring floated down the Great River Anduin.

  As they rounded the next bend, a dozen heron rose from the trees. Terry followed their flight into the sliver of sky above the gully.

  Steve’s voice intruded. “Will you look at that.”

  A fallen cottonwood spanned the channel. Debris piled on the partially submerged crown, narrowing the waterway to a dangerous degree. The resulting funnel forced a waterway carrying several times its usual volume to more than double its already accelerated speed.

  Millions of gallons passed under the trunk with less than three feet of clearance. Hit the trunk, and it would knock your head off.

  Terry stilled his paddle. The current tugged, insistent, dragging the canoe downstream.

  “Make for the bank.”

  “Left or right?”

  Slower water on the crown side. Easier portage around the roots. Roots it was.

  “Left.”

  They fought to the quieter water along the bank. Terry steered the canoe between rocks, lodging the aluminum craft in the soft bank.

  “This is a fine mess,” Steve snarked. “We’ll be lucky to get around.”

  Terry ignored Steve’s grumbling and calculated. The ground was a mire that could suck your boots off. Beyond the crater, a thirty-foot mudslide exposed railroad tracks at the top of the bank. Sun shone through the ties, casting long, striped shadows down the bank.

  He and Steve might safely portage around the tree, but every person who followed increased the risk of further collapse, sending tons of earth on their heads. Half of the paddlers on today’s trip were first timers, not prepared for a touchy situation.

  Terry’s stomach growled. He could forget lunch at Boswell’s. He wondered how long they would be stuck, how they would get everyone out.

  Behind him, Steve’s grumbling continued unabated. “You know my back. I get the front end.”

  Steve’s back injury only appeared when convenient, but Terry didn’t argue. They wouldn’t move the canoe any time soon. “We need to check this out before the others get here.”

  “I’ll do it. I need to stretch my legs.”

  Terry waited in the boat, rummaging his bag for an abused power bar while Steve slogged around the enormous fan of exposed roots.

  “Holy moly. You’re gonna want to see this.”

  Terry’s irritation vanished. “Treasure?”

  “A find, for sure.”

  Terry hauled himself up the bank, rounding the rim of the muddy crater until he stood beside Steve. He scanned the wall of muck and twining roots and shook his head. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Step back and shade your eyes.”

  An image emerged from the depths of the tangle, dark, incomprehensible shapes taking form. Bits of corroded brass in a fan-like pattern, then a spray of the studs—that’s what they were—leading downward. He was looking at a jumpsuit nested in and pierced by roots: tiny, organic filaments, meandering tendrils, ancient, fat, snakes.

  The jumpsuit might have been black, though who could say? He followed a pant leg downward. Bell bottoms? Hard to tell. He scanned the morass for the other leg and found a shoe. Above the shoe a bone floated, suspended in the roots and stained brown from decades in the earth.

  His eyes shot up. A foot above his head, a mottled skull presided over all, tucked between the remains of a collar that must have reached the man’s ears when he still had them. Centipedes, beetles, and a variety of unidentifiable insects swarmed the figure, giving it the gruesome appearance of movement and life.

  Terry turned away, gagging as he pulled a sweat-soaked bandana from around his neck. He mopped his face with the damp cloth.

  “Please don’t say it.”

  “Looks like Elvis got back to his roots.”

  Lia stepped away from her easel, needing to see the canvas from normal viewing distance. The single iris bloom lacked the depth she wanted. Too blue.

  She looked at the clock. An hour until she and Peter left for the latest Avengers film. Plenty of time to glaze the petals and clean up.

  In the corner, Chewy curled in the center of Honey’s bed. It was three sizes bigger than he needed and the stuffing leaked from a tear in the side. Chewy had a newer, nicer studio bed, but he preferred this one. She couldn’t bring herself to throw it out.

  “I know, little man. I miss her too.”

  Chewy sighed. In the apartment overhead, Peter’s phone rang.

  She turned her attention back to the painting, loading her brush with acra violet, stroking it along the foreground petal. The canvas would be ready for another layer by Tuesday, Monday if she was lucky. Ten days till her showing with David’s new client. Fingers crossed the iris would be finished in time.

  She loved her new studio. Northern light filled the octagon sun porch at the rear of the Victorian she’d recently bought. The spacious backyard would soon be a riot of color. By July she’d be harvesting her own heirloom tomatoes. I can have gazpacho every day if I want.

  Home ownership was an unexpected pleasure after a lifetime of apartment living. Right now she was in the honeymoon phase, with property taxes, repairs, and lawn maintenance yet to materialize. She wondered how long it would take to adjust to the realities that came with taking on the huge Victorian and decided denial was a wonderful thing.

  Feet clomped down the back stairs, followed by the murmur of Peter’s voice on the phone. Lia gave the painting a critical look. Too red. Peter would call the color something like “cherry after a bar fight.” She dragged a rag across the surface to pick up the excess paint.

  Chewy whuffed.

  Viola padded in, a panting, black chow-lab shadow with a blacker temperament. Peter followed, all long legs on a runner’s build, phone to ear as he shoved dirt-brown hair out of the midnight blue eyes that kept his face from being ordinary. His face tensed, like Viola spotting a nemesis cat.

  She could forget the movies.

  She cocked an eyebrow. He held up a finger. Long pause. Peter’s eyebrows slowly raised until they disappeared under his hair.

  “We’re on our way. Don’t let anyone near it.... No photos. I don’t want to see this on Facebook.… I’ll call you back as soon as I know.”

  He pocketed the phone and ran a hand through his hair again, a sign he was sorting through his thoughts.

  “What happened?” Lia asked.

  “Terry and Steve found a skeleton dressed like an Elvis impersonator on Mill Creek.”

  “Oh?”

  “I called it in. They want me to handle th
e scene.”

  “That’s Homicide. Why tag you?”

  “Homicide is jammed up and I’m the nearest warm body. I’m hoping you’ll come with me.”

  “Me?”

  He flashed her a look, half exasperation, half begging.

  “They’re your friends. I need you to keep an eye on Terry. You know how he is.”

  Terry’s itch for detectival pursuits—born when Lia’s ex-boyfriend turned up dead at the dog park—manifested as an unwholesome marriage between a kid in a candy store and a bull in a china shop.

  “They’re your friends, too.”

  “More like inconvenient in-laws. We could be gone a long time. Will you take the dogs to Alma’s?” Alma, their septuagenarian neighbor, was Peter’s surrogate grandmother and nanny to Viola and Chewy.

  “It’ll be a wrench, but I’m willing to give Chris Hemsworth a pass. This time.”

  Peter gave her a solid hug and kissed her forehead. “Not what we planned, but at least we’ll spend part of the afternoon together. Get your creek clothes on. We’re meeting Cynth at the launch site in twenty minutes.”

  Lia watched Peter’s retreating back. She grumbled to Chewy, “Everything I own is creek clothes.”

  An eight-foot chain-link fence surrounded the city garage in Millvale where Terry’s group launched their float trips. Lia drove through the gate, the tires of Peter’s Blazer biting gravel as she headed for a huddle of vehicles at the far end of the otherwise empty lot. Beyond the vans and SUVs, the overfull creek lapped at the ground.

  Cynth McFadden stood up in the back of her Ford Ranger as they approached, waving them over. Her creek clothes consisted of neat khaki shorts, a royal blue golf shirt, and a matching ball cap with “POLICE” embroidered on the front, her long, wheat-colored braid threaded through the hole in the back. At her feet, a trio of kayaks jutted out the tailgate.

  Peter ended the phone call he’d been on since they left home. “Water’s too high. They never should have gone out in this.”

  “At least we won’t have to climb down the bank. The entire lot must have been under water last week. I wonder what they did with the trucks.”

  “Garbage trucks have tall wheels. They can handle a foot of water.”

  As Peter and Lia exited the Blazer, Cynth grabbed one end of a kayak. “You sure have interesting friends.”

  Peter took the other end. “Consider them job security.”

  “Lucky you.”

  The detectives worked in perfect, wordless tandem, sliding boats onto the grass. It was intimidating, the way Peter and his fellow officers intuited need and responded, operating from a kind of hive mind Peter said you developed after you breeched a dozen or so drug houses together. Lia grabbed the double-ended paddles from the bed of the truck and wondered if she and Peter would ever have that near-telepathic rapport.

  Kayaks sorted, Cynth pulled a day pack from the cab and tossed it on the grass. “What’s the plan?”

  Peter grabbed a duffel filled with granola bars they’d picked up along the way and dropped it next to the largest kayak. “The site is approximately two miles downstream—”

  “We couldn’t put in closer?”

  “All fenced industrial property. It’ll take more time to find a place to put in than it would to just go. Amanda and Junior are on their way. They’ll take one of the club canoes.” Peter jerked his chin at a pair of giant aluminum canoes upside down on the grass. “Not an ideal way to carry out remains, but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances.”

  “What’s my role?”

  “We have three dozen people trapped by a downed tree.”

  “Crowd management, then. Do you need me to take statements?”

  “The organizer has contact information for everyone. The detective assigned to this can interview anyone he wants later. No need to make work for ourselves when someone else will just want to redo it.”

  Peter pulled two life vests from the back of his Blazer, handing one to Lia. “You’re in the blue kayak. Let’s get moving.”

  Fast, muddy water carried Lia downstream with little effort on her part. Peter and Cynth paddled ahead, strategizing and considering potential scenarios. Their voices mixed with the splashing of paddles as Lia’s muscles warmed to the exercise. She relaxed despite their grim destination, taking in the unexpected wilderness and allowing her mind to wander.

  Wooded banks grew higher as they paddled south, climbing thirty feet or more. Drowned trees rose eerily out of the water, a layer of mud marking the flood level, bits of trash caught in lower limbs. Above the flood line, the pale green of young leaves dusted the sinuous tracery of branches.

  Lia made a career of painting flowers. Flowers made people happy, and she enjoyed the interplay of shapes and colors. But her first love was trees.

  Trees were strong and soulful. She felt them in her core, especially in winter and early spring when they were bare of foliage, naked and yearning.

  Each tree had its own internal logic expressed in replicating patterns. DNA she supposed, though she preferred to think of it as a defining quality, or even personality: crooked branches with the frayed ends of neural pathways; flowing like tears; stiffly straight and pointed; Machiavellian tangles; sweeping up and inward like hands cupped in prayer.

  The way a twig joined a branch and the direction it grew mimicked branch to bough and bough to trunk, until you had thousands of tiny terminations reaching into the future, every one of them expressions of the same idea. And hidden in the earth, a structure equal in size to the crown, boring through obstacles as if seeking the past.

  There had to be something profound buried in these thoughts, but her musings always stopped before she was forced to consider her own past and the bits of it she carried forward. She found the hypnotic rhythms of trees soothing. That was all.

  Startled flocks of long-legged waterfowl flew up, delighting her. Wooded banks gave way to a section of creek that had been paved from the bed to the top of the bank, forming a giant concrete channel. Lia looked up into the sky, feeling like a leaf drifting in the bottom of a storm ditch.

  The trees returned, punctuated by industrial concrete structures: small, blocky buildings and platforms accessible by intriguing steel rungs, something you’d see in dystopian films—The Hunger Games or Logan’s Run. Lia filed the images away, determined to return for plein air painting.

  Peter’s voice floated across the water. “We’re here.”

  Lia pulled her eyes from an intriguing arrangement of creosote-soaked pilings lining the shore. Canoes and kayaks dotted the water ahead, spilling around a bend where the creek narrowed between high banks.

  They rounded the curve to find the giant tree interfering with everyone’s Saturday plans. Upended roots and a mudslide blocked the left bank, the slope a gaping, open wound. The trunk spanned the creek, crown dragging in the water and filling the right bank of the gully to the rim, branches choking with flood debris.

  Cheers and applause rose. Lia imagined the boaters were bored, cranky, and ready to leave. Peter and Cynth stopped paddling, waving at the crowd while waiting for her to catch up.

  Cynth said, “Quite the party.”

  “Party’s over now,” Peter said. “Or it will be.”

  “What next?” Cynth asked.

  Peter jerked his chin at the shore. Terry and Steve manned an aluminum monstrosity with an inverted mannequin leg mounted on the prow. A tall, skinny man with a halo of white hair worthy of Einstein floated in a matching canoe fronted by a bedraggled teddy bear and bearing the name Mud Turtle. Beside him, an aquatic version of the Marlboro Man had deer antlers strapped to his boat.

  “The guys with Terry must be in charge. I’m hoping they have a plan to get these folks out of here without destroying the scene. Lia’s job is to distract Terry.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Lia said.

  “Fun for everyone,” Cynth said.

  Peter handed Lia the snack-filled duffel bag. “Can you pass these out?”
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  Lia took the bag, heading for the nearest canoe. Paddlers flocked to her granola bars like ducks to bread crusts. A young guy asked if the bars were paleo. Lia offered him a bar and said, “Air is paleo.” He shrugged and grinned, then took the bar.

  After a brief bank-side conference, Einstein paddled to the middle of the creek, gesturing for the group to gather. His high voice rang loud and clear over the water.

  “Thank you for your patience. Now that Detectives Dourson and McFadden are here, we can finish our float. Due to the unusual circumstances, we need to forgo our usual foray through the dam.”

  The crowd booed.

  Einstein continued, “We will still hold the initiation ceremony for new paddlers. Boswell’s is expecting us.”

  A voice from the crowd: “How are we getting out of here?”

  “We’re shooting the sluice. Neither bank is passable, and paddling upstream in this current is a no go. Unless you want to hike out and find your own way back to your cars, the only way out is through. There’s enough clearance if you sit in the bottom of your canoe and keep your paddles inside. I’ll direct you in. Dick—”

  Einstein nodded at the man Lia dubbed Cowboy, whose canoe had edged next to her kayak while Einstein talked. Dick held up a hand and waved. He was sandy haired, with a healthy mustache. Chiseled bones preserved a face ravaged by sun and time. Late forties, early fifties? A tarnished medallion and the absence of a toothpick in his mouth saved him from being a cliché.

  Dick caught her looking at him. He tipped his battered straw cowboy hat and winked.

  Einstein, oblivious to Dick’s flirting, nodded at a twenty-something man in vibrant sport gear. “—and Paul will be on the far side to catch you. If we have problems, we’ll reassess.” He pointed at a spot along the right-hand bank. “Line up over there. We’ll send you through one at a time.”

  The crowd muttered, grumbling mixed with sharp sounds of agitation. No one volunteered to hike out.

  Lia turned to Dick. “Why the fuss? The creek can’t be that deep.”