“I have to put on pants.”
“Fine, but hurry!” She traversed the main hall, flicked the switch to get the yard light back on and was reaching for the back door knob when a voice from behind jolted her.
Dani was there and was a welcome sight. “Hey Beth, is everything okay?”
“Dani. Thank God. There’s a man by the river. He may be hurt. We’ve got to check on him.”
“Cripes, you smell like a distillery. I didn’t know that you drink.”
Wyatt Stone came down the stairs holding a big flashlight. He jerked back in surprise when he saw Dani. He recovered to say, “Hello, I’m Wyatt.”
“Danielle. Hi.”
He turned to Beth. “I’m ready to go down there if you still want to.”
“Of course I still want to. He may roll into the river and drown if we don’t hurry.”
Beth opened the back door and set the lock to keep it open. Dani and Wyatt walked maddeningly slowly, but she wasn’t about to go to the river bank ahead of them. They reached the spot where she had left the unshaven fat man and Wyatt swept the area with his light. There was nothing there.
Beth looked around anxiously. “He’s gone. Oh, God, what if he rolled into the river after I hit him? It’d be like I killed him.”
“Could a thing like that happen?” Wyatt spoke anxiously, his voice up a half octave.
“Nah, of course not,” replied Dani. “Maybe you shouldn’t drink, Beth.”
“My rowboat is gone too.”
Dani took her arm. “Some kids probably stole it.” To Wyatt, “What are you still looking for?”
“Oh. Fishing gear, I guess.”
“Well, guys, there’s none of that either. Can we go back to the house?”
They helped Beth up the hill, through the back door and into the hall as Tom came in the front.
“What’s going on?”
Dani put a protective arm around her landlady. “Beth’s been nipping and she’s kind of worked up. She may be seeing things.”
“No, damn it. I may have drunk a little too much. I heard a scream at the river. I went down there and a man grabbed me in the dark and I may have hit him with my ball bat. I came to get help from Wyatt. Tom, this is Wyatt Stone, Wyatt, this is Tom Hawk.” Both men nodded.
“Dani came home and we all went back to the river, but the man was gone. So was my rowboat.”
Dani suggested, “It’s dark down there. You probably tripped over a log or something in the dark and you imagined you’d found a person.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it,” Wyatt enthused.
Beth looked at Tom for support and only got another question. “Can you describe the man who grabbed you?”
“No, not really, it’s true that it was dark. I wasn’t quite myself.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” He seemed more inclined to believe Dani than her.
She turned to Wyatt but his focus was on Tom as he stepped forward with outstretched hand. “Happy to meet you, Tom. I’m looking forward to getting to know you.”
He acted like nothing had happened at the river. It made Beth so mad.
“Nice to meet you.” Tom barely took his worried gaze off of Beth.
She could hardly look at him, seeing how he was appraising her. She had never snooped through a guest’s room before. She had never taken hard liquor two nights in a row before. She was a beer drinker; she didn’t have a problem. But she had seen a fat man at the river, damn it. It took more than a few ounces of scotch to confuse a brain so badly. Shoot, it wasn’t like she was becoming some kind of raging alcoholic.
****
Sunday breakfast was hard for Beth. Dani and Wyatt were elaborately
nice
to her, their poor, demented, body-finding landlady. Renada and Robert listened to the story and joined in the chorus of voices urging her not to embarrass herself by sharing it with anybody else. They knew the load she was under. It was no shame to trip over a log by the river and to mistake it for a man’s body. Kids must have taken the leaky boat.
She wanted to scald the lot of them with bacon grease.
Robert’s and Renada’s body language indicated an unsuccessful first date. They had arrived home the night before right after Tom. When Beth had taken some requested bath salts to Renada, she’d told Beth they had been up to Calumet to introduce her to Robert Matthews’s mother. Renada had very much liked the dark old brick mansion Mrs. Matthews stubbornly tried to maintain alone, but had liked her very little. Well, that was Robert’s problem.
What hurt most this morning was Tom’s attitude. She’d expected him to give her tale more credence. She paused to wonder if
he
had a connection to the fat man by the river. She stayed in the kitchen as long as she could, but finally, with every dish on the table, she had to sit down and join them.
“So, Danielle, you’re not a student then?” Wyatt queried.
“No. I’m more like a tourist.” He waited for her to say more. She didn’t.
He turned to Renada. “And are you enrolled at the university?”
“No. I am a visitor to this country. I had thought to stay for a while.” She inspected Robert like she might a smudge on her table napkin. “Now I am not so sure.”
“Oh. And I guess you’re not a student either, Robert?”
“No, Wyatt, I’m chief financial officer for a local entrepreneur.”
“He keeps records for a shopkeeper in the town,” grumbled Renada.
Wyatt persisted with the grilling. “So you’ve been here a while, Robert?”
“It’s been three months or so. But I only recently moved to Beth’s place after a mobile home I was using was damaged.”
The downstairs hall telephone rang and Beth went to answer it, glad of the distraction from Wyatt’s persistent inquiries. In her most professional tone she announced, “Kessler’s Inn, this is Beth.”
“Hello. May I speak to Mr. Thomas Hawk, please?”
“I can check. May I tell him who is calling?”
“Sure. This is Officer Makinen of the university police. Your place is just up the river a bit from the highway bridge, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes.”
“I see. Can you get Mr. Hawk?”
“Sure.” She went to the table and whispered to Tom to come to the phone. “It’s the campus cop.”
He put his mouth to her ear. His barely noticeable cologne was vastly superior to Robert’s olfactory blitzkrieg of the night before, she noted with satisfaction. He cursed, “Damn it. He must have learned I’m here from that housing voucher.”
She admired the view as he rose to go to the hall. Then she remembered she was pissed with him for accepting the common view that she was a delusional drunkard. Plus he had some of the cockiness too common to handsome men.
Robert was expounding to Wyatt on the bright future of Grantronics Electrical Technology, a firm of Gary’s which Beth knew to own two soldering irons and a broken oscilloscope. She found an excuse to go to the back of the house for paper napkins, passing Tom at the telephone. He might be a jerk who didn’t believe her story from last night, but he
did
smell good. Looked good.
Let it go. He’s not interested. And you’re not so sure about him
. She killed two minutes fussing in the storage room, and was about to go back to her rapidly cooling breakfast with the table napkins when Tom came into the room and closed the door. He held a finger to his lip.
“What?” she snapped, not all that quietly, telling him he couldn’t shush her in her own house.
Just above a whisper he said, “The state police have a fat man’s body at the hospital morgue. It was found in the brush piled up against the bridge a few hundred feet downstream from here.”
“Ohmigod. Found it now, today?”
“Yes. Some preacher who fishes there before he does his Sunday service saw it.”
She should have said, “Oh, my, a man has died, how terrible.” Instead her words were, “So now do you believe I found someone by the river?”
“I believe you saw something down there. I’m not sure you got it just right.”
Damn it, what an infuriating man. Then she digested what he and the policeman together had told her. “Wait, I don’t get it. We didn’t report anything last night. Why did a cop call here? And why a campus cop asking for you, not me?” He backed away from her onslaught. “Why, Tom?”
“This fat guy they found in the river was in my dorm room when it caught fire.”
“So you know him?”
“No. I don’t, but I have to go to the morgue and look at him. After that I have to leave here. I have to move on. I don’t expect any rent refund.”
What the hell was this
? “Hold on. Not so fast. Someone you don’t know was in a dorm room you hadn’t moved into, so you have to bug out and stick me with an empty room?” Tom Hawk wasn’t only conceited, he was thoughtless.
He was angry too, now. “Hey, your damn room was empty a day ago. I said you can keep the two week’s rent, didn’t I? I have to go.”
“Go where? Your car is wrecked. This fat man
does
have something to do with you. You’re a terrible liar.”
He moved back close to her. “You’re pushy, and tactless as an innkeeper.”
“You lack appeal as a guest. You don’t have a car or the money to go anywhere else. If you’re in money trouble you can stay here free for a while and pay me later, you preening, egotistical jerk.”
He reddened, paused, took hold of her and kissed her. Maybe she was supposed to slap him, but her arms went around him and she kissed him back—hard. She felt him hardening too. It wouldn’t have stopped there if there had been any padded or reasonably clean, flat surface in the storeroom.
After a deep breath, she pushed away and begged, “What’s really wrong? Why are you afraid? I’ll know if you’re lying.”
He shook his head vigorously, then slowly, then made a surrender gesture with his hands. He was capable of vulnerability, for Pete’s sake.
He talked and she listened, mesmerized. He had discovered a mob murder after a couple days working in a California pizza joint. An aging jockey in the secret employment of a tinhorn mobster had failed to lose a big race as instructed. For this insubordination, the little man had been fired, prompting him to threaten to tell all. He had been roasted in a pizza oven and Tom had stumbled on the crime scene.
The cops had moved him to one of those new
witness protection
safe houses in Arizona. He had been tracked there, and had barely escaped alive to flee to Houghton. A shot meant for him had winged a paper boy and Tom was irrationally hung up on that kid’s injury. He was certain the body in the river belonged to someone from California looking for him. It was a lot to process before breakfast was done.
“You’re not leaving, you’re staying here.”
“Beth, I may have no choice but to get out.”
“No. We can talk about it later. Look, if the body in the river isn’t the man I saw, these California people may not have found you here. I’m coming with you to see the body.”
“That’s a bad idea. If you come, you may have to tell the police the truth, whatever it means.”
“I’m coming, so deal with it.”
“Pushy broad.”
“Conceited jerk.” She was the one to kiss him this time. Then she said, “We have to get back to the breakfast table. The others will be wondering what we’re doing.”
****
They had been away from the dining room for maybe ten minutes, and it seemed a lifetime. Beth and Tom sat down almost unnoticed.
Dani was saying to Robert, “You need to stop defending Gary Grant. I told you how he screwed me, how he…”
She looked at Beth. “You got some bad news.”
Beth opened her mouth and couldn’t speak. Tom came to her rescue. “That was the police. The dead body of a man was found by the river this morning. Beth and I have to go and look at it.”
“Why—why did they call here?” stammered Renada.
Beth looked at her, puzzled. “I imagine we’re the closest house, that’s all.”
Wyatt asked, “Did you tell them you thought you saw a man at the river, Beth?”
“No. Only Tom spoke to them.”
Four heads turned to Tom, who remained silent.
“The fat guy you saw wasn’t Big Ben Whitefish from the tribe was it, Beth?” Robert wanted to know.
“No. I mean, I don’t know. I really can’t even describe his face as I sit here.”
“Then there’s no need to mention it or for you to get involved. It’s a coincidence.”
Renada piled on, “Yes, coincidence. There’s no need to bring bad publicity on the inn when you’re just getting established. It can only cause trouble for everybody. In East Berlin we had bodies popping up all the time. I could tell you such stories; it would knot your hair.”
“Curl your hair,” corrected Dani.
“Beth, they’re right. Just forget about the whole thing last night,” pressed Wyatt.
“A man is
dead
,” Beth answered sharply. Why was Wyatt, who’d just arrived wet behind the ears, telling her what to do?
“Why did they ask for you and not just talk to Beth, Tom?” demanded Robert.
He was a while in answering. At last he said, “They seem to think this man was in my dorm at the time of the fire. So what? Beth will take me to town to look at the body and make them happy. I’m sure it doesn’t concern her
or
me. Right, Beth?”
“Right,” she confirmed, with what she hoped passed for conviction.
Renada pivoted in her chair. “I have identified bodies in the GDR. It is an awful thing to have to do. I want to come with you, Beth.”
“Not a good idea. There’s no reason for you to see the body. They’ll ask more questions,” said Tom, and four heads nodded assent.
Renada stood as if about to give a toast to the table. “Very well, I did not want to alarm you people, but I too saw a fat man on this property before Robert and I went to dinner. I made nothing of it then, but it could be important if it is the same man. I must come along.”
Beth turned to Tom. He said, “Okay, let’s go.”
“Just make sure it’s not Big Ben Whitefish,” whimpered Robert.
Beth’s stomach started churning again. “I’ll get the station wagon.”
****
After the miserably cramped Nash and the lethargic Plymouth, Tom enjoyed driving Beth’s relatively spacious, relatively powerful station wagon. He had Renada, who had beaten Beth to the front passenger door, beside him and Beth in the back seat. What was the deal with Renada, so concerned about an unknown corpse? She was like a box of jigsaw pieces from different puzzles. She was blatantly sucking up to Beth while ignoring Robert, who was supposedly the reason she had come here.