ONE
Nina Truhler screamed when she found the man in the water. Later, she would tell me that she hadn’t been afraid, merely startled. I didn’t believe her, though, because I heard the scream.
What happened, a mutual friend had invited us to go boating on the St. Croix, the river that formed much of the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin. Dave Deese was pretty excited about it. The weather had improved dramatically by mid-March. Unseasonably bright, warm sunshine had melted the snow and most of the ice and Deese was anxious to get his boat out of dry dock, a forty-two-foot Sea Ray Sundancer that he and his wife often slept on just because. I mean the man had all but given up playing golf so he could spend more time on the river, how nuts was that? He had his “big splash” a few days earlier. Apparently, that’s the term luxury boat owners use when they launch their boats; guys with fishing and pontoon boats probably not so much.
Nina and I were excited, too, about the prospect of taking a river cruise and for the same reason—spring. So we accepted the invitation and drove a half hour from Minneapolis to the marina located a few miles north of Stillwater. Only by then the temperature had plummeted to a few degrees below freezing and the sky had turned a dark shade of gray. I half expected to see icebergs floating on the St. Croix and the fact that I didn’t, well, that didn’t prove they weren’t lurking beneath the surface.
The lot was nearly empty; only four vehicles were parked there when we arrived including a black SUV with the name E. J. WOODS TREE CARE SERVICES printed in white letters on all of its doors. We bundled ourselves in heavy coats, boots, and hats, and walked onto the mazelike steel-and-wooden pier that jutted from the shoreline into the river. The marina boasted over two hundred and fifty U-shaped slips but finding Deese wasn’t difficult. I counted less than two dozen boats secured to the cleats and plugged in to the electrical outlets. That, plus the sparsely filled parking lot, told me those of us who thought spring had come early to Minnesota were in a true minority.
Before we could reach Deese, though, we were intercepted by a woman; her words came in puffs of condensation.
“Help me,” she said. “Please.”
I had no idea how old she was. Her eyes were clear and blue; yet her face suggested that she had discovered the fountain of youth in an artful amalgamation of cosmetics and neurotoxins. Her skirt was short, her jacket lightweight, and her head uncovered; shoulder-length blond hair was whipped about in the wind and she used both of her hands to keep it out of her face. The wooden planks beneath her feet were as steady as a concrete sidewalk, yet she bobbed back and forth as if they were being buffeted by heavy waves.
“Please help me,” she repeated.
“Help you what?” I asked.
“My husband…”
She wrapped her arms around herself as if she suddenly realized that it was cold outside.
“My husband…”
“Yes?”
She shook her head.
Nina stretched out a hand and rested it on the woman’s shoulder.
“Tell us about your husband,” she said.
“I can’t find him. I’ve looked and looked and I can’t find him.”
“You can’t find him?” I asked.
“He was here.”
“Here at the marina?”
“But now he’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
Stop it, my inner voice told me. You sound like an idiot.
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “Can you help me?”
“Of course we can,” Nina said.
Her gaze turned from the woman and settled on me.
So, when you say we …
I spun in a slow circle, my eyes first scanning the boats moored in their three-sided slips. Next I examined the parking lot. The marina was located on the eastern side of the St. Croix Scenic Byway along with a couple other marinas, a business that rented paddleboats, and the St. Croix Scenic Overlook. On the western side, there was a restaurant, a coffeehouse, a massage parlor, and plenty of houses. Yet, as a man once said, nothing was stirring, not even a mouse. Finally, I turned toward the large red, white, and blue building with the name HEGGSTAD MARINA painted in large white letters above the front door and huge windows. There was a parklike area reserved for picnics and barbecues located between the building and the river, along with a dockside gas pump, only I could see no one moving.
“Did your husband go inside?” I asked.
The woman shook her head.
“Did you look?”
She shook it some more.
“I’ll be right back.”
I walked across the wooden planks and climbed the concrete steps leading to the building. A sign on the front door told me that cable TV and internet access were available to slip renters as well as free shower rooms and a coin-operated laundry. Bright lights inside Heggstad Marina made the place seem like an automobile showroom, only for boats. There was also a large area devoted to the sale of all the things you might find on a boat, from life jackets to bumpers and fenders to ropes and harnesses to bags of Fritos and precut fruit, plus a section where a fellow might buy dry clothes, deck shoes, and rain gear. I started walking through the building, my head on a swivel, searching the empty spaces between the boats.
A man called to me.
“May I help you?”
He had a name tag above his left pocket that read BRAD HEGGSTAD.
“Hey,” I said. “I met a woman outside who’s looking for her husband. I thought he might have wandered in here.”
“I haven’t seen anyone.”
“Restrooms?”
“Good idea.”
He gestured at a corridor between the showroom and the boat supplies. I found the men’s room. It was large with several shower stalls and empty. I tried the women’s restroom on the off chance. It was vacant as well.
Heggstad was waiting for me when I returned.
“Nothing, huh?” he asked.
“No.”
“When did he get here?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s his name? Does he have a boat?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could he be visiting one of my early rentals?”
“His wife didn’t say.”
I expected him to be annoyed by my answers. God knows I was. Yet there was genuine concern in his voice when he said, “Maybe he’s not here at all. Maybe he wandered across the street to get a cup of coffee.”
“I’ll look,” I said.
I went to the door, opened it, and stepped outside. The cold wind slapped me in the face, yet the scream hit me harder.
Nina’s scream.
I didn’t see her as much as her long blue winter coat. The coat was at the far end of the marina where two boats were parked. It was standing at the very edge of the dock and looking down. A sleeve came up to cover Nina’s mouth and the coat backed away from the edge. Another sleeve seemed to search behind her for a bench. Finding none, the coat sat down in the middle of the dock.
By then I was running. I sprinted down the stone steps to the pier and past the woman who was standing exactly where we had left her, staring at nothing in particular. The dock was wide and stable and I had no trouble jogging the length that stretched along the shoreline and then over one of the arms that jutted out into the water. My heavy Columbia hiking boots pounded on the wooden planks and seemed to echo across the water beneath them. I was chanting Nina’s name by the time I reached her.
“Nina, Nina.”
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” she chanted back.
I knelt next to her; my arm circled her shoulder.
“I’m okay. The woman, she told me—after you left she told me that she thought she saw her husband on the dock next to these boats.” Nina shrugged a shoulder toward the cabin cruisers moored behind her on opposite sides of the dock from each other, one very near where we were sitting and one closer to the shore. “No one is on the boats, but McKenzie”—she raised a hand and pointed—“I went to the edge of the dock and looked down. I don’t know why.”
I followed Nina’s pointing finger to the edge. There was a wooden ladder attached to the dock. I looked down, went to my knees, and looked some more. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at; the water was clear, only the overcast sky wasn’t giving me much help. As my eyes adjusted, I realized I was staring at the top of a man’s head about a foot and a half beneath the water. He was fully clothed for winter, his gloved hands were tightly gripping each side of the ladder, and he was looking straight ahead as if there was something under the dock that demanded his complete and undivided attention. I removed my own glove and immediately felt the cold. I was about to dip my hand into the icy water, yet thought better of it.
What are you going to do, check for a pulse?
I spun on my knees toward Nina.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Her expression suggested that she had no idea what I was talking about. Probably because I had never told her that the thing I hated most when I was a cop was delivering bad news.
“I’m sorry, there was an accident … I’m sorry, there was a shooting … I’m sorry, we conducted a welfare check…”
Now I was going to have to deliver some more bad news, even though I hadn’t been a cop for a long time, and I was not looking forward to it. I stood and gazed across the marina.
The woman was still standing where we had left her, her weight shifting from one foot to the other. What I found remarkable, though, was that despite enlisting our aid to find her husband, Nina’s scream, and my mad sprint to Nina’s side, the woman wasn’t looking anywhere near us but instead gazing across the river toward Wisconsin.
Don’t you think that’s a little off?
If I was still a cop, I would have questions to ask her, I told myself.
I looked down at Nina.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said. “I mean, of course he is, but how? Did he drown?”
“I don’t know.”
Aren’t you getting tired of saying that?
“Geez, McKenzie, I knew these things always happened to you but I didn’t know when we got married that they would happen to me, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
Copyright © 2024 by David Housewright
