"The Monster Beneath" by Meagan Lucas
Now - Spring 2018
Minna’s mother set the mug on the scarred wooden table. Minna wrapped her cold hands around it. The mug was one her mother had made, but deemed unsellable. The glaze was the exact rich cobalt of Lake Superior on a July afternoon, but smoke had gotten in the kiln, adding blots of dark gray and black, hints at the danger beneath the waves. It was Minna’s favorite mug. She looked to the basket where her mother kept the Coffeemate, and a bottle of maple syrup, and then stood to grab the sugar bowl from the buffet. Her sidearm caught against the edge of the table with a clatter.
Her mother winced.
“Sorry,” Minna said and stirred four heaping spoonfuls of sugar into her brew.
“Someday that’s going to catch up with you,” her mother said, patting her farm wife hips. “Being the sheriff is a lot more pressure. It’s hard on your heart.”
“I’m not really the sheriff.”
“Yet,” her mother said and wiped a generous smear of butter on her pulla and took a bite.
“Interim,” Minna said, and then smiled and said: “For now.”
Minna’s phone rang. It was her deputy. “We got a body,” he said in his usual soft-spoken brevity. Her heart raced.
“One sec,” she said into the phone as she stood, the chair screeching across the floor. “Sorry Mama,” she mouthed as she ran out the side door and across the slushy drive. “Okay, shoot,” she said, every nerve in her body snapping and ready.
“Twenty-something female. Agawa Bay. Appears to have washed ashore. Puncture wounds on her leg. Perhaps an animal bite. Found about an hour ago by some local boys. We are securing the scene.”
“Make sure they leave the body in position. I’m on my way.” As Minna hung up and turned to open the driver’s door, she was surprised to see her mother standing in the slush.
“A body?”
“Not him,” Minna said. “Female.”
Her mother nodded, and handed her a piece of bread wrapped in waxed paper. Minna hugged her mother, got in the truck, and then left her behind. In Northern Michigan distance was measured not in miles but time. In twenty minutes, Minna would see her first dead body as Interim Sheriff, and only her fourth in the fifteen years she’d been on the force. But every time she wondered if it was him. And every time a body disappeared into the cold dark of Lake Superior she wondered if it was Mishipeshu taking someone else.
Then - Fall 1991
Winter was near, fog clouded the windowpanes. Minna’s daddy usually put plastic over them to keep out the cold, but he hadn’t yet. A draft brushed her bare knees beneath the Michigan Tech t-shirt she stole from his drawer and wore to bed every night. Minna looked out to the sky darkening behind the trees, and wished she could see the lake beyond. She imagined watching her dad coming across the water in his new blue fishing boat, named after her, running downstairs and telling her mama and pappa that he was home. She’d had this wish for a week now.
“You’re supposed to be in bed, little one,” Pappa said from the door. The light from the hall spilled warm around him into her darkened room. “Come now, I’ll tuck you in.”
Minna didn’t want to sleep until Daddy came home.
“Come now, I’ll tell you a story.”
She turned at that, toward her grandfather, his hair sticking straight up from pulling off his toque. She got under the covers.
“When I was a little boy, almost exactly your age,” he said, pulling a chair to the side of the bed, speaking low, more like a whisper.
“Tell me the one about the storm.”
“Not tonight.”
“Yes tonight. I want to hear a true story.”
He said: “I only tell true stories. Now, your mother is going to be mad…fine, fine, settle in. When I was a wee lad, I went fishing with my pa one morning before school. Mama didn’t want us to go. She didn’t like the look of the sky. She thought a storm was coming. My pa thought that it was hogwash, and that women were always worried about the sky. If it was raining, they’d holler about umbrellas and boots, snow it was toques and mitts, hell, even in the sun they went on about sunscreen and dehydration. They were never happy, he said, so he ignored her.
“It was cold, even for November. Windy, misty, like God was spitting, but we bundled up because we knew we only had a few of these mornings left before the bay iced over. It was still dark as my pa dropped anchor on our favorite spot, a little cove tucked beside a cliff. When I stood to cast my line, I noticed how wild the lake was. The waves were huge, even in that protected cove. The waves were so large that the boat rocked and we rubbed against the cliff wall, scratched the gunwale all up. Pa cursed. It started to rain harder, the water was getting under my hood. I was starting to think Mama was right, but couldn’t say that. Instead, I said: ‘We should go back. I got to go to school.’ It was so dark, we still had the lantern on, and he went to argue with me but looked at his watch first. I remember how all of the color fell out of his face. It was much later than he thought. It was dark because of the weather. Not the time.
“‘Put your lifejacket on,’ he said. And then tried to start the boat, but it wouldn’t turn over. All I could think about was Jeffrey Smith, a boy in the grade above me. He had gone missing that summer. He and his dad had got caught out in a storm. Their boat was found days later, upside down on the rocks, but they never found Jeff or his dad. All anyone at school talked about was what it felt like to drown. If you’d be able to feel the water in your lungs, taking your breath. Or if the temperature of the water would make you numb, and you could just watch as you sunk to the bottom. Others were convinced that Mishipeshu took them, but everyone was afraid to talk of her, as if saying her name would summon her from the deep.
“I just watched the light bulb in the lantern and tried to ignore how many times my dad yanked that starter. We hit the cliff again. He made me hold an oar out to keep us off the rocks. I was trying, but I was all of seventy pounds then and that oar was heavy, and the wind and the waves—I’d never seen them like that before. I tried to hold on, but a bigger wave came, and stole my weight. I was airborne, and when I reached out so as to not end up in the water between the boat and the rocks, I dropped the oar. Then we had nothing but the two of us, two rods, a dead motor, and a lantern; and a lake that wanted to swallow us. I knew the next wave would be the last.
“I watched the swell of the dark water move toward us, charging like wild horses across a field.
“I watched the side of the boat rise in the air above my head.
“I turned to the space between the boat and the rock, the space where I should soon find my small body trapped in icy water, but there were scales there instead of water. And spikes. And eyes. Big, intelligent eyes that looked into mine as she held up the side of the boat.
“My dad had the pull start in his hand as he fell and it finally yanked hard enough to start the motor. As he drove the boat out of the cove, I tried to find her again, but I couldn’t. I only got that one time. The time she saved my life.”
“Do you think she saved my daddy?”
“I think she would if she could.”
“And if she couldn’t?”
“Then I think she took him down to her home in the very bottom of the lake and is taking very good care of him there.”
“I wish you wouldn’t fill her head with nonsense,” said her mother from the door. “It’s not like we aren’t having a hard enough time without fairy tales.”
“Mishipeshu is not a fairy tale,” said Pappa. “I saw her and I’m not the only one.”
“Minna, say night-night to Pappa. You’ve got school in the morning.”
Minna rolled over so she could look out the window, stuck a piece of her white blond hair into her mouth. Her mom and pappa were arguing in the hallway. Her mama never liked stories about what lived below the surface of the lake. She couldn’t believe in things she couldn’t see, she said, and that went for God and Mishipeshu or whatever, and she didn’t think either of them had her husband.
Whenever Mama talked like that Minna put her fingers in her ears and pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth and counted the ridges.
Her daddy was Sheriff Kokkenen. Her daddy was who you went to if your dog was missing, or if you got separated from your mom at the grocery store. He rescued people from burning car wrecks and found them lost in the snowy woods. He stopped bad guys and saved the day. He would come back to her; it was just a matter of when.
Now
Lake Superior has plenty of beautiful beaches, Agawa Bay was not one of them. It wasn’t a surprise that a body would wash up here, the currents were strong, and the waves seemed to beat on the land even when the rest of the lake was calm. Minna climbed over the rocks and picked her way along the stony shore to meet her deputy, Rankin, and two medics.
“No footprints but the boys’ when I arrived,” Rankin said by way of greeting.
They hadn’t had any new snowfall in days. The woman hadn’t walked or been carried in. She’d washed ashore, and Minna could tell. She was soggy. Her naked body: white, gray, and purple, verging on translucent, except for the dark puncture marks in her mangled lower leg.
Minna squatted for a closer look. “Bear?” she asked, but knowing that her guess was off, the bite wider than a bear’s muzzle, more like a fish, or a big cat.
“Looks more like a sturgeon,” one of the medics said. “You know they pulled an eight-footer out over in Marquette just two weeks ago. She looks like she could have been in the water for more than two weeks. Minna stood, rubbed her outer arms, and then walked over to Rankin, who was taking pictures of everything.
“No local girls missing. Send these pics to the state cops and see who she is. Get these guys to pack her up to the ME then I guess we wait our turn for news. About all we can do,” she said and then nodded to the medics who slid the woman onto the backboard and carried her to their vehicle. Minna looked out to the water and shivered.
“You want me to check with the Canadians?” Rankin asked.
“That’s a good idea. Jesus, I wonder what happened to her leg. The ME will have to tell us if the water killed her or not, but that leg…fuck, those wounds say that that horror happened when she was alive.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“I know you do. Don’t worry, I won’t say it out loud. I won’t tank my career before it starts. But seriously, doesn’t it look like it?”
Rankin was trying to hide a small smile when Minna’s stomach growled loudly.
“You headed home for dinner then?” Rankin asked.
“Nah. Chris is meeting the realtor.”
“I don’t know if I told you how sorry I am for your loss?”
“You did. Thanks.” She turned and smiled at him. “I think I’m going to look around a bit and see if anything else has washed up.”
“I’ll help.”
“You go home to your girls. I know they’ll be missing you.”
Deputy Rankin frowned the way he always did when she said something like that. Something meant to be nice but served as a reminder of her heartbreak. She looked over at him and smiled. “Go,” then chuckled, “that’s an order.”
“You’re going to start that now, eh?”
“Nah.” She smiled again, looking across the lake, trying to hear his footsteps over the crash of the surf. He was notoriously light-footed, and one of the few people in this town she could trust. Only six weeks ago they had been equals, before her father-in-law died and left the Sheriff’s desk empty, and she took the interim position. Rankin was a better police officer, she knew. Better at procedure. Better with people. There was a sense of calm and safety about him. Maybe it was his size. Maybe his stillness. Maybe the kindness in his brown eyes. But Minna had the questions. She was suspicious. Pushy. He comforted victims. She caught perps. So, she got the promotion and the support from the department to run.
She had so many questions. Who was this woman? Whose daughter? Wife? Mother? How long had she been in the water? How did she get there? What happened to her leg? Minna hoped she was dead before the water got her. Minna had spent a lot of time in the last years thinking about what it would be like to bob in the middle of the lake, with no land in sight, just flat blue as far as she could see. To bob until she couldn’t tread any longer, until her muscles gave out, and then that sinking, sucking, feeling as the water absorbed her.
It was anyone’s guess how long the ME would take to get her answers, their backwater county not being high priority. All she would have for now is what she could pull together, and as interim sheriff all eyes were on her. Her father-in-law had been beloved: smart and kind, he’d bend over backward for victims and their families. She was filling big shoes.
The gray water was dotted with icebergs. The ice on the bay had only been broken for a week. She wondered if the woman had been trapped under it. If the coming of spring, the warming water, had brought her to the surface. If she wasn’t looking for a woman who just went missing.
She turned from the water and looked at the spot on the beach where the body had been. She wished she’d had Rankin’s pictures. The woman had looked good, but Superior was so cold. Perhaps her leg injury was from the pack ice. The sharp ice that pushed and stacked on each other like tectonic plates along the beach could certainly destroy a leg. This was a theory she could bring to the public, one that didn’t involve mythic creatures from the bottom of the lake.
She squatted next to the outline of the body, the footprints of her coworkers, the flat slide of the backboard a ring in the snow. Remembering the splay of the woman’s limbs, the purple of her lips and fingers, she promised the woman that she would solve this mystery. She wouldn’t leave this woman’s family wondering. She was about to stand when a glint caught her eye. She leaned closer; a shard of metallic gray was lodged in the stones that had been beneath the woman’s damaged leg. She pulled gloves from her pocket and picked it up. It looked like a piece of a saw blade, or a shark’s tooth. She put it in a plastic baggie. She searched the rest of the woman’s impression but found no other foreign matter.
Minna stood on the shore, listening to the wind whistle past her ears, looking down at the gray triangle in her hand, and thought about the pictographs of the water lynx on the cliffs across the lake. She wasn’t the first one to consider this beast. She thought of its sharp teeth, and claws, and the spikes that graced its back and remembered yet again why she stayed out of the deep.
Then
Snow was falling from the flat gray sky in fat clumps. They stuck to Minna’s eyelashes as she lifted her face and stuck out her tongue to catch them.
“Is that supposed to be Mishipeshu?” Chris asked, brushing his mittens together and stepping away from his snowman version of Gordie Howe.
“Yep, but I can’t get the spikes on her back to stand up.”
“We could knock some of the icicles off the garage and use those.”
The two kids charged over to the garage and stared up at the jagged ice dangling from the roofline.
“There’s got to be a stick, a shovel, or something in the garage that we can knock them down with,” he said.
They went into the garage and while Chris looked for something with a long handle, Minna looked up to the rafters.
“What about that,” she said pointing high up on the wall.
“My grandpa’s old saw. He and his brother used it to clear this land. They each held the side and yanked.”
“It’s perfect,” Minna said. “I want a closer look.” She turned over a bucket and used it to climb up onto the freezer. The saw looked exactly like the water lynx’s spine in her mind, long and flexible.
“That would look cool,” he said, climbing up beside her.
“What the hell are you two doing?” Chris’s dad asked from the door. He was still in his uniform. His new sheriff badge winked at Minna and she swallowed hard. “Minna sweetheart come down from there,” he said, holding his arms out to her so she could jump. “You two know not to play around freezers. This one locks on its own. If you ever ended up inside you wouldn’t get out. And Jesus, Chris you know that, how many times have I told you these aren’t toys. You could lose your hand if you touched them wrong,” he hollered, pointing at the collection of traps hanging from the wall. Minna knew not to touch them. Her dad had some at home. She had seen him catch a coyote once. Her stomach turned at the thought of the sounds that animal had made before Daddy shot him.
“Minna, sweetheart, can you go get in the cruiser? Another person’s gone missing, and it’s not safe for you to be out. I’m going to take you back to your mom on my way back to work. Chris, you go on inside. Your mother is waiting.”
Minna climbed into the passenger seat of the cruiser. There was a paper bag sitting on the floor with a loaf of bread sticking out of the top.
“Buckle up,” he said. “That’s for you and your mama, okay?” he pointed at the bag. Chris’s daddy’s car was just the same as her daddy’s, but it smelled of cologne and peppermints, while her daddy’s smelled like salt and Christmas trees.
“I know your mama is really angry right now, and she has every right to be. And I know that she doesn’t want to talk to me. But you know if you ever need anything you just call, eh? Your daddy was my best friend, and I’ll do anything for you.”
“Is,” she said.
“Sorry, love?”
“Is your best friend. He’ll be home soon.”
Now
The bell above the door jangled as Minna stepped into Pour Boys and knocked the slush off her boots. John was behind the bar. He waved, and pointed toward the back corner. She nodded her thanks. Chris was waiting for her, a Bell’s in front of him, and a Coke waiting for her. She knew as soon as she sat, Susie, John’s wife, would put plates of fried walleye and French fries in front of them. Her stomach grumbled with anticipation. She’d spent a long day looking for more gray triangles on the beach, and leaving harassing voice messages for the ME. She slid into the booth and smiled at her husband.
“Hey baby,” he said, putting his phone down. “Found Mishipeshu?”
“I’m not in the mood to be poked.”
Chris raised his eyebrows. Normally she would smile, but she was too tired.
“I’m being serious,” he said. “You know we’ve talked about this for decades, you know how I feel.”
“I know. Sorry. It’s just,” she pulled her phone out of her pocket and swiped at the screen, “look at that bite on her leg. It’s not a bear. It’s not a sturgeon either.”
Chris handed back her phone as Susie set the plates down. Minna was sure to tip the screen away from the waitress, aware that not everyone talked about bodies and wounds over dinner. Except maybe the interim sheriff, and the son of the former sheriff, who was also a world-class rescue diver.
“There’s nothing in that bay that would have made those marks. That’s for sure,” he said, shoving fish into his mouth. “But we both know that there’s plenty of predators out there.”
Minna squeezed lemon on her fish, and bit her lip. He was right. She could have got that injury on land, but Lake Superior was full of secrets. Anyone who spent any real time on the water had stories, experiences that couldn’t be explained any way other than a fantastic beast. Fisherman and sailors on freighters came to town with tales of boats being bumped, nets with holes larger than any fish ever caught. Her father had no respect for the environmentalists, but they had stories too of mutilated animal remains, fish and wildlife with horrible injuries. Every local family had a story. The lore ran deep. These bites were pointing to Mishipeshu, but would the beast have given this woman up? How had she gotten away? How was Minna going to explain her theory to the other officers and not get laughed out of town?
“How are you?” she said. “House cleaning still? Need some help?”
“God, he was a pack rat, there’s something in every corner, every drawer is full of shit, from fishing lures to old mittens to receipts from lunches decades ago that I’m sure he had with your dad. Trophies and certificates, and pictures, so many pictures. But no, it’s okay, it’s kind of cathartic, saying goodbye to things he loved, things that meant something to him, getting to revisit all these memories, just me and him.” He took a bite and chewed. “It will be really nice to get the house on the market and off our hands though. Clean slate, you know?”
Things hadn’t been easy the last couple of years. Working for her father-in-law was a challenge, but he’d always been good to her. She suspected out of his love for her father, maybe out of guilt that he hadn’t been able to find him or save him. She knew though that he’d hoped that Chris would do something bigger with his life. He hated him poking around the bottom of the lake, he said. Hated that they entertained the idea of Mishipeshu and called them old-fashioned.
“What’s that?” she said pointing at a package sitting next to Chris in the booth.
“New weight belt,” he said. “Getting too thick in the middle for my other one.”
Her phone vibrated on the table. It was the ME. She didn’t even wipe the grease from her fingers before she answered. But when the doctor gave her the news, it wasn’t at all what she was expecting.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Chris said as she put down the phone.
“I sort of have.”
“What?” he said, laughing, taking a drink of his beer. “And people think we’re crazy for believing in a water panther.”
She shook her head. “It’s the woman. They identified her. She’s been missing for thirty years. It’s her, Chris. It’s the woman that disappeared when my dad did. Chris, everyone always said that they had been together. What if he’s out there too?”
Then
Minna lay on the end of the dock peering down into the lake. There was ice on the wooden planks, and surrounding the post that went down into the water, but it would be more than a month before this bay would freeze. She had time.
“What are you doing kiddo?” Pappa asked, standing over her. “This isn’t a safe place for you to be hanging out. I know you’re a good swimmer, but your snowsuit and this cold water don’t mix.”
“I’m being careful. I need to see.”
“See what?” he said, and bent over, looking into the water. “What is that down there? An anchor?”
“Coyote trap.”
“What? How do you know? How did that get there?”
“I couldn’t find the bear traps.”
“You put that down there? Jesus, Minna! Someone is going to get really hurt.”
“Not in the winter. No one’s going down there in the winter. Except Mishipeshu. We’re going to catch her, and then ask her where she took my dad.”
“Oh Minna!”
“You said that’s why we couldn’t find him, because he was with her. That’s why Lake Superior never gives back its dead. It’s because of her, and I want him back.”
Now
Minna pulled into the rutted drive and wished she’d brought Rankin with her. He was so much better at this kind of stuff than her. He knew what to say to grieving families. She just seemed to make it worse. But the notification was an hour from the station and they both couldn’t be gone that long just for this. Someone had to hold down the fort. She closed the truck door and stamped her boots on the ground to warm her feet. A man came out of the open garage door.
“Can I help you?” he asked, his eyes running over her uniform.
“Are you Rebecca Whitefish’s next of kin?”
“That’s my mom. Did you find her?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Wow,” he said, stepping back into the garage and leaning on the edge of a saw horse. “I didn’t expect that, not after all this time, not this way.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “Wait. I heard on the news a body washed up on the beach, that’s not her, is it? It can’t possibly be, thirty years in the water….”
Minna nodded. “That’s what we are investigating now. I’m sorry I don’t have more answers. Will let you know, as soon as we know, but I thought you’d want the closure of at least knowing—”
“That she’s dead. She isn’t living in Detroit or Minneapolis. That’s what the police tried to tell my grandfather.”
“Can I speak to your grandfather?”
“He’s dead, too.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.” She took a deep breath. “And I’m very sorry that the police at the time were not as helpful as they could have been. I know there was a lot going on for them.”
“It’s not real comforting when your mom is missing though, yeah? Shit,” he said and leaned harder into the sawhorse.
Minna turned to give him a minute to pull himself together and noticed a boat in the back of the garage covered with a tarp. Sky blue boat. A boat exactly the same color as her eyes.
“Where’d you get that?” she asked
“Sheriff gave it to my grandpa. Said it was to help with his environmental protection projects. Grandpa knew it was a bribe, or a warning maybe for him to stop making trouble with his protests.”
“Protests?”
“All the waste from the paper plant used to be dumped into the lake. Decimated the fish population, which drove the predators into town because they’re starving, but that’s an excuse to trap those big beautiful beasts, isn’t it? Anyway, because of my grandpa they don’t dump or trap wolves or bears anymore.”
“Which sheriff?”
He shrugged. “What does it matter?”
“After your mom went missing?”
He shrugged again. “I wasn’t there. Mighta been before. Grandpa had a lot of run-ins with ’em. I just keep it because the police gave it to us, and they never did nothing else for us. Seems like maybe that means something.”
“Can I look in there?” she asked.
His eyes narrowed. “You have a warrant?”
“It could be a crime scene.”
“I don’t think the police would give us a crime scene? Do you?”
He was right, there wouldn’t be any blood evidence in there. She just wanted in to soothe the ache inside her. Maybe it would still smell like him. Maybe there would be some of his things. Her mother had been so angry, she hadn’t kept anything.
“I’d like to see in it.”
“No. I don’t want you to find some reason to take it.”
She could reveal herself. She could tell him that she was an orphan, too. That she was angry at the police, too. That she also lived in a state of constant hope that made her brittle and fragile. She could lay claim to this boat, but she’d compromise everything. She’d get a warrant. She’d come back.
She nodded, “I’m sorry for your loss. I’ll be in touch with any further developments.” She looked at the blue boat one more time. The one she knew said “Minnow” on the back, above the motor, and then she left wondering whether it was her dad or her father-in-law who gave the boat away, if her mother knew, and if this was why her father-in-law and mother hated each other.
Then
Despite the cold weather, Minna was sunburned. Her cheeks felt hot and tight. The feeling reminded her of fishing with her dad. She swallowed hard. They were headed back to land with a cooler full of fish. It had been a good day.
“I wish we were in your dad’s boat,” Chris shouted over the loud motor. “It’s so much faster and nicer than my dad’s. I just want to go home and eat.”
“Yeah,” she said, but she wasn’t paying attention, she was scanning the surface of the water for swirls, or lumps, or anything out of the ordinary. Anything that could be the monster that took her father. And gripping the gunwale. She’d never been afraid of the deep water before, but when she looked down all she could imagine was beasts, lurking.
Chris’s dad docked the boat, and the kids raced to shore to pee and warm up and then watch Inspector Gadget on the basement TV while the grownups dealt with the fish. Minna loved Penny. Chris said they looked alike. This was her favorite show, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was so angry at her pappa for pulling that trap out of the water.
“You still thinking about Mishipeshu?”
“Always. I’ve realized I can’t catch her, though. I have nothing big enough to get her inside. So, I’m going to bait her, if I could just get a picture of her, I’d have enough proof. Someone would believe me, and help.”
“You just got to get a pile of fish. We could catch them.”
“I can get it from the garbage at the market. My dad used to get his bait from there for his traps.”
“You’re gonna be just like Penny,” Chris said.
She smiled, crossed her arms and sunk into the couch to watch the end of the episode.
“Minna,” Chris’s dad called down the stairs to the basement. “Time to go home sweetie and take that container with you, okay? Some of the fish we caught today.”
“I don’t know why you’re sending so much,” Chris’s mom said. “It’s just the three of them. Put the extra in the freezer in the garage.”
“Because,” Chris’s dad said widening his eyes, “I’m not sure how she’s paying the bills right now, you know.”
“I’m not sure he’s not in that kiln of hers. Have you checked there? The woman is a first-class bitch.”
Minna hated when adults talked about her like she wasn’t there, and since her dad disappeared it happened more and more. Rumors and guesses about where he’d gone, rhetorical questions about how the family was holding up, or making ends meet. But today it didn’t matter. Minna had a bag of fish so big she could barely lift it, and she couldn’t believe her luck.
Now
Minna was parked at the county boat launch, watching the water, remembering the look on her mother’s face thirty years before when her father pulled that blue boat on its trailer into their yard. Disbelief, and then anger, and then screaming. He’d spent all their money, and money they didn’t have. It had been the subject of a hundred arguments in the weeks preceding his disappearance. She was wondering how to ask her mother if she’d known about Rebecca’s family having the boat when the ME’s office called. She punched her steering wheel, and drove straight to the office. She needed Rankin’s calm head, she was losing hers.
“Frozen,” she said, slapping the desktop. “Fucking frozen like a goddamn lasagna.”
“The water is very cold. The ice is just breaking up. She was probably trapped in the pack just like you thought.”
“No like frozen in someone’s freezer.” She skimmed through the report on her phone while she talked. “Fish scales, deer DNA, and residues that are consistent with the plastic interior of a freezer.”
“So not commercial then? Are most of them metal?”
“Jesus Christ. Some regular person had this woman in their home freezer for thirty years. And, and the punctures are from a bear trap.” She collapsed into her desk chair. “You know the rumor right? Rebecca and my dad ran away together. That they took his boat and started a new life somewhere else, but instead her family has his boat and she’s in a freezer.”
“You think maybe her family didn’t want them to be together, killed them both and hid the boat? Made up some story about it being a gift. It’s a really generous gift.”
Her head was hot, her stomach doing somersaults. Rankin continued: “Minna, what would your mom have done if she found out your dad gave that boat away?”
She rested her head on the desktop. She was thinking about her mother, and what she would have done if she’d found the two together. She couldn’t imagine her mother not selling the boat if she had the chance, certainly she wouldn’t give it to her husband’s mistress. Her mother had been so angry for so many years. She’d been sure that her husband had abandoned them for that woman. Minna couldn’t imagine the energy it would have taken to fake that. She knew her mother didn’t have it. Minna felt a loosening in her neck muscles, relief. That left her father, and Chris’s. She had a hard time imagining her father giving away his boat, he’d been so proud of it, but maybe if he’d run out of money, maybe Rebecca’s son had been mistaken and his grandfather had bought the boat to use for his protests. Minna found herself wishing that the answer was as easy as Mishipeshu. It was so much simpler when she was a child and had something to blame, one easy target for her anger.
“What’s our next step?” Rankin asked quietly. He would suggest action of course. “A warrant for the boat? Canvassing? Or waiting for more information on the metal?”
Minna lifted her head as her gut tightened into a knot. “I know whose freezer she’s been in,” she said. “I just need to know why.”
Then
Chris was standing at her front door with an ice auger.
“I can’t. I’m grounded.”
“Still?”
“Still.”
“Over the fish?”
“Yep. Wasting food, two weeks. Huge mess, two weeks.”
“God, your mom is mean. You’re grounded till Christmas! I thought we could go drill some holes and set some traps.”
“I’m not allowed out.”
“Am I allowed in?”
Minna thought back to her mother’s red-faced instructions. She hadn’t said anything about Chris coming over, and she wasn’t home, and Pappa was asleep in front of the hockey game.
“Sure, but be quiet,” she said and they tiptoed to her room and closed the door.
Chris pointed to her dad’s work hat, laying on her bed. “You really miss him, eh?”
Minna picked up the hat and smelled it. “Yeah. And I’m going to be police when I grow up so I can find him. So, I’ve been wearing it to practice.”
“Don’t you think Mishipeshu has him? My dad’s trying, he’s working overtime, he’s never home and he’s crying a lot. My mom tells him he’s working too much. I know if your dad was out there on land he’d find him.”
“My mom says he left with that woman. Took his new fancy boat and his new fancy woman and split. So, I’ll be like Inspector Gadget and find them. Plus, I can’t look down the bottom of the lake, it’s too deep.”
“I could,” he said. “I’d do that for you.”
“It’s so deep,” she said. “It’s dark and cold and she’s down there, and people who go down there don’t come back. I don’t want you—” She burst into tears.
He wrapped his arms around her. “I’ll do it right,” he said. “I’ll look and I’ll come back. I’ll find the answer. You don’t have to do it alone.”
Now
At first, she thought no one was there. His truck wasn’t in the driveway. She was relieved that she was wrong, but then she opened the side door to the garage and found it, and Chris. He was wearing rubber gloves. The room smelled of bleach.
“Is my dad in that freezer?” she said, pointing to his father’s game freezer.
He shook his head.
“Was he?”
Chris looked down at his hands. He nodded.
“Where is he now?”
“With Mishipeshu.”
“What?”
“She was the first and I messed up. I thought she would sink and she didn’t. I should have weighted her.”
“But you knew better for the second time.”
He nodded.
“How long have you known? Since we were kids?”
“No.”
“I’m such a fool. I trusted your dad. I trusted you. You’re the one who encouraged me to think it was that fucking monster all these years. And you knew!”
“No! I didn’t. Not till Dad started to get sick. He knew he was going to die and his position was going to be open and he wanted me to join the police so I could run for it, and continue his legacy, but I didn’t want to. I’m happy diving. I love it. He told me I was doing it out of loyalty to you, out of some misplaced sense of duty to a stupid fairy tale that you convinced me of, and that you were just as dumb as your father. And then he told me.
“Your dad and Rebecca weren’t together. It was mine. He loved her. He was going to leave my mom. Your dad was trapping bears for their parts. For the money. That’s how he could afford that boat. Rebecca came from a family of conservationists. One night she went out in the woods to disable his traps, to ruin them, and she stepped in one. Our dads were together when they found her dead, your dad wanted to cover it up, wanted to bury her where he buried the remains of the bears. But my dad loved her and was so mad at your dad, and his stupid, greedy, traps, and what happened, that he killed your dad, and put both the bodies in the freezer. I’m so sorry Minna. I had no idea. When we were kids, he was so devastated, he was a mess, drinking all the time. I thought it was because your dad was missing. I had no idea it was this. I would have told you. Fuck, I wouldn’t have spent my life searching the bottom of the lake.”
Chris leaned against his truck. Pulled a rubber glove off and rubbed his hand through his hair. “But I kind of understand. If he loved her even half as much as I love you, I would kill anyone who hurt you, even my best friend.
“He was so ashamed. I think he would have taken the secret to his grave. He probably only told me because he was too weak to move the bodies and he knew he was going to be found out anyway. He probably wanted to defend himself. But what he did, it’s indefensible. And all I’ve ever wanted was you, to protect you, to take care of you. I didn’t want you to carry this. I thought this was better.”
Minna watched his fingers, his hands, and how they grasped each other as he spoke, pleading for her to understand. How over the years, with those hands, he had held her, protected her, and helped her. She thought about how he pulled the flesh of Rebecca, and her father from the freezer with those same fingers. How he had loaded them into his truck and then into a boat all by himself. All the work and care it would have taken, the burden that he had carried. How he had done it for her, to save her the pain of knowing how stupid her father’s end had been. And she hurt for him, knowing not only had his father put him in this terrible position of knowing, but he had also stolen Chris’s lifelong dream to find the monster in the water; instead, he’d been living with the monster all this time.
But still her trust had been broken, and she needed to know. She needed to see for herself.
“Take me,” she said. “Take me down in the water where you dropped him. I need to see him.”
“Minna, no. That’s a terrible idea. It’s so deep where I dropped him and you’re a beginner and you’re afraid of the deep. We won’t be able to go far enough down to find him.”
“I have to try. Thirty years, Chris. I’ve waited thirty years.”
He sighed, and nodded, and they got their gear, and Chris’s boat, and he brought her out to the deepest point of the lake. “It’s 1,300 feet here. You can only go about fifty. So please don’t expect anything.”
“Maybe he got caught on something,” she said, put in her mouthpiece and tipped backward into the water.
It was breathtakingly cold. Every muscle in her body contracted into a hard ball. She pushed through the cramps, trying to enjoy the quiet and the rhythm of her breath, trying not to think about the darkness below.
Chris signaled her and they began to descend slowly, her heart breaking a little with each foot of open water. It wasn’t until she was nearing her limit of fifty feet that she saw rocky outcroppings. She pushed on. She could see Chris signaling, but she ignored him. More and more rocks appeared in the beam of her flashlight, but she saw nothing suspicious. It was darker and colder than she’d ever been, and she was angry and disappointed. She was just about to stop and return to the surface when she saw a flash of red in her beam, red like Chris’s old weight belt, and she kicked down toward it, but it was gone. She kept descending, looking, sure she’d seen it. Pain built in her ears. Sparkles emerged in her vision, and she finally stopped. She’d lost Chris in her frantic swimming and was alone in the dark.
The weight of the lake was pressing down on her. Plus the weight of the knowledge of what their fathers had done, and the heavy realization that finding her father and knowing for sure was a lost cause; Superior didn’t give up her dead.
She should swim, but her limbs wouldn’t obey and she was so very tired.
She dropped the flashlight.
As it descended, the falling beam shining through the black water caught the flash of scales, and spines, and big intelligent eyes.
Meagan Lucas is the author of the award-winning novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs (Main Street Rag Press, 2019). Meagan’s short work has been published or is forthcoming in journals like The Santa Fe Writers’ Project, Still: The Journal, MonkeyBicycle, BULL, Pithead Chapel,and others. She is Pushcart-nominated. She lives in Western North Carolina where she teaches Creative Writing and edits Reckon Review.
Meagan’s story “The Monster Beneath” is featured in It Came from the Swamp, available now in the Malarkey store:
