Лори Касс - Pouncing On Murder

Kick. Pull. Kick. Pull.

I was taking a steep angle toward shore, trying to travel as far along the lake’s edge as I could while still getting into shallow water. If either my engineer father or engineer brother had been handy, he could easily have figured out my rate of travel and the maximum time I could swim between breaths, and plotted the best possible course for me to take.

Kick. Pull. Kick.

Of course, neither one was around, and to be honest, I would have preferred a law enforcement officer to either of my closest male relatives. I loved them dearly, but I wasn’t sure how either one would perform in this kind of situation.

Pull. Kick.

Then again, who was I to talk? I wasn’t performing very well myself. My lungs were, again, burning with the urge for air, but I wanted to get farther away, way farther away.

Carefully, slowly, I rose, breaking the smooth surface so quietly that the only thing that made any noise was my hair, dripping water off its curly ends.

“Hey!” Duvall called.

I froze, and never had the phrase seemed so appropriate. Reaching down, I could tell that my fingers were brushing rocks, but there was no sensation of feeling. Same with my toes—though I could feel them smacking something, it was a feeling of numbing dullness.

How long had I been in the water now? Five minutes? Six?

“You’ve been in there ten minutes,” Duvall said. “Bet you’re losing feeling in your toes, huh? And your fingers, that’s probably long gone. Fingers are the first to go.”

And he’d know this how, exactly? Somehow I was sure he hadn’t researched the topic properly. At most he’d used the computer and the top return on his search engine. Certainly he hadn’t looked up any scientific journals. That was what a librarian would have done—librarians do it correctly.

With the useless appendages I used to call my toes, I pushed myself forward.

“Twelve minutes,” he called. “You know what I’m going to do when I get to twenty? I’m going to walk up to the cottage and make myself a hot toddy. Steaming hot. It’ll practically scald me when I take the first sip, but there’s nothing like a hot toddy when you take a chill.”

Since I didn’t care much for strong spirits, this particular taunt didn’t bother me a bit. Now, if he’d mentioned hot chocolate, that would have been different.

I was walking myself along the lake floor with my hands now. I could stand and be thigh-deep in water, but I’d make too much noise climbing out. I had to get as shallow as I could before attempting my final escape.

“Sixteen minutes,” Duvall said. “Bet you’re cold as the dickens now, aren’t you?” His voice sounded different. I slowed almost to a stop, then realized he was talking in the opposite direction. It was pitch-dark and he couldn’t possibly see me. As long as I got out of the water and stayed out of his grasp, I’d be safe.

But now my body had started to shiver. These weren’t the normal shivers that everyone gets on occasion, the shivers from eating ice cream too fast or the shivers from sitting in a cold car before it got warm. No, these were the shivers that meant Minnie’s impending doom. Large, quaking things that rippled the water out from around me. Huge teeth-chattering shivers I couldn’t control.

I had to get out of that water.

Moving faster than I dared, but not as fast as I would have liked, I forced my lumpy hands to propel me onward and upward. One step, two, three . . .

“And bingo, here we are at twenty minutes!” Duvall shouted jovially. “Ready to come in?”

Absolutely.

It was dark and I couldn’t see diddly and Duvall was still too close, but I had to get to shore. Maybe Duvall’s twenty minutes was a figment of his manipulative tendencies and maybe it wasn’t; either way my body was starting to shut down.

I inched toward shore.

“Where the hell are you?” Duvall called.

Way over here, I was tempted to call, just to hear his reaction, but even if I could have safely done so, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get out the words. My face was so cold that I wasn’t sure my mouth would work well enough to speak intelligibly.

“Bet she already drowned,” he muttered.

Not a chance, buster.

“Well,” he said. The bench creaked under his weight and I pictured him standing. “There’s only one thing left to do, then. What do you think about that, you mangy little ball of fur?”

My feet were set wide, since I was trying to get as much stability as possible, and I stood slowly, slowly, easing myself up out of the water, inching up, letting the water slick away, trying to keep it from dripping, keeping my movements silent and hidden and invisible.

The dock creaked under Duvall’s weight. I pictured him walking up the length of it, climbing the stairs to the cottage, and the door slamming shut behind him.

And as soon as that door shut, I’d tiptoe to the dock, get Eddie, and sneak away into the dark. We’d get into my car, drive away fast, crank up the heat as far as it would go, and zoom to the sheriff’s department, where, with luck, the cell phone’s audio recordings I’d made while I talked to Duvall would be recoverable.

“Come here,” Duvall said. “I know you’re up there. Get down already.”

“Mrrrr-rrrr.”

I stopped dead.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” Duvall crooned. “Don’t you want to take a bath? A cold bath, but you won’t notice that after a few minutes. Here, kitty, kitty.”

All the cold I’d been feeling was pushed aside by sheer fury, and the fuzziness my brain had been sinking into sharpened into hard thought. Still moving slowly, still moving silently, I changed my plan. Instead of moving away from Duvall, as soon as I got out of the water, I would head straight toward him.

“Why are you being like this, cat?” Duvall asked. There was a metallic clang. He was climbing onto the boat lift, trying to get at Eddie.

Urgency shouted inside me, yelling at me to move, screaming at me to run. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I couldn’t let Duvall know I was still alive and kicking, not out there in that frigid water, succumbing to the effects of hypothermia.

I inched into shallower and shallower water, hoping the clouds would stay in front of the moon long enough for me to get to land. My feet, numb now, rolled left and right as they stepped on rocks. I wondered how many times someone could sprain an ankle, then decided that was something I didn’t need to know.

“Get down here!” Duvall yelled.

“Mrrr!” Eddie yelled back.

If my face had been working properly, I might have smiled.

“Same to you,” Duvall said. “Tell you what. You stay right there and I’ll come and get you. I can’t have you being around here when her body is found. You’re too noticeable. But if you drown, too, well, who’s to say what really happened?”

I was out of the water now and on the lake’s rocky shoreline. Fast as I could make my body move, I clambered up the stubby bluff and onto . . . someone’s front yard, probably, but there was still no light to see by. Running in the dark would send me straight into a tree, a fire pit, or a fence, so I had to creep along, waving my hands in front of me.

From the dock, I heard Duvall, still trying to entice Eddie into his reach. “Come here, you flea-ridden mouse brain. You’re useless and pointless and the world will be better off without you, so come here and—ouch!”

This time I did smile. Eddie had given him full warning; I’d heard both his growl and the hiss that always came right before a paw swipe, claws extended.

“I’ll get you for that,” Duvall said in a low voice, “you crappy little cat. More trouble than you’re worth. And . . . ah. Gotcha.”