It had to be You

gone in there in the winter.
    “The first odd thing my former deputy officer noticed,“ he went on, “was that the body had one ice skate on, and the other foot had been gnawed on, probably under water. We thought at first he might have been sitting on the steep bank putting on the first skate when some animal attacked him.”
    Walker thought it was time to get to the point. “And later?“ he urged.
    “Later we found that the upper front part of his skull was crushed, and then when he was turned over, that there was buckshot in his shoulders and upper back. Someone shot him, and the impact must have thrust him headfirst, and he broke the ice thoroughly enough for him to sink and drift under it.“
    “So it’s clearly murder? Or an attack by somebody that resulted in his death? Can anyone determine when the ice was at a point that a hole large enough would have formed? Was this man extra heavy? Or thin?”
    Simpson thought for a few minutes. “There was the bloating to account for, but the autopsy showed that it was a young man, possibly twenty years old or a little younger, and small-boned. About five feet six. But he could have been fat to start with. As for the condition of the ice, it never crossed my mind. That’s one of the things you’ll have to ask the neighbors about. Sometimes it gets damned cold early in those secluded little valleys up there. But the locals say it’s good fishing. I don’t fish, so I can’t swear to that.“
    “What about clothing and hair color?“
    “Hard to tell. What little hair was left was light brown with a hint of red. The red could be a result of the horrible quality of the water though. There wasn’t much of his clothing left except the one ice skate. The fish and snails and whatnot must have fed on him. You’d of thought the cold would preserve a body. On the other hand, in the winter, fish don’t feed on bugs and such that fall in over the other three seasons. Maybe there’s something nasty in the water that dissolves clothing.”
    At that point Simpson’s deputy arrived, and Mrs. Simpson set out another plate of muffins and a cup of coffee for him.
    “This is Deputy Ron Parker,“ Chief Simpson said. Howard thought he could actually see the boy blush slightly. He seemed very shy. He also looked too young to know anything about police work. No wonder Chief Simpson needed help. Howard just wished he’d asked someone else for it.
    “Did the pathologist suggest how long the boy had been in the water?“ Walker asked.
    “He says that it was probably all winter, and I had reason to believe he went in sometime around Christmas. You see, there’s a dotty old woman who lives in a shack close to the lake. She called a few days after the holiday with a bizarre story about a man banging on her door and telling her to call the police because he’d seen someone shoot a person who fell into the lake, breaking through the ice and disappearing.“
    “You investigated this?“
    “Reluctantly. By the time she got around to calling, there was a hard freeze and significant snow cover. There wasn’t any way to guess if this was even true, or where to try to brush away the snow and cut through the ice,“ Simpson explained.
    “I suppose we should start investigating,“ Walker said.
    Deputy Parker, who’d eaten half his muffin, dropped it back on his plate as if it had suddenly become too hot to eat. He almost ran out of the house, car keys jangling, and opened the passenger door of the police car for his superior with a small nod that was almost a bow. He drove slowly and carefully toward the hills, as if he were still learning the fine points of how a clutch worked.
    Howard, in a brief moment of pity, asked, “Would you prefer that I drive? And you give directions?“
    “Oh, yes please, sir,“ Parker said as if addressing a kindly god. “I know how to drive a tractor, but I don’t yet understand this automobile.”
    They changed seats and Parker directed Chief Walker to the only long view of the lake where the body had been found. When Walker saw it, he understood how it could have happened. The hills around it were steep. It wasn’t a lake that water flowed into and then out of. It looked more like a sinkhole that a long, skinny mass of underlying sand had washed out from under, making the stone above collapse.
    There was one small flat area near the shore, with a slight rise at the left side that was muddy. It half concealed some sort of old structure. The