Emily’s bed was tightly made and covered with a thick hand-sewn quilt. She didn’t recognize it. Did Glynnis quilt, too? There was a pile of books by the bed. A couple of puzzle books with a pen clipped into one of them, and a novel or two. But the book on top was one of Glynnis’s for sure: Talking to Yourself: A Dreamer’s Guide. Hazel hoped it was evidence of her mother ingratiating herself; it frightened her to think of Glynnis trying to inculcate her mother. But she couldn’t imagine it; Emily was the original skeptic. She opened the book at random:

SHRUBS, SMALL FLOWERING PLANTS: Red or yellow flowers signify financial windfall; white flowers are unexpected visitors. Flowerless shrubs can mean respiratory problems or digestive issues. A dream of potted flowers is a warning of a suffocating relationship, especially if the petals have begun to fall.

She closed the book and put it back exactly where she found it. The phone began to ring in the kitchen and she hobbled down the hall to it. When she picked it up, she was out of breath.

“You okay?” came Wingate’s voice.

“Fine, I’m fine.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No, James. What’s wrong?”

“I think you better come in. Can I send a car around?”

“What’s going on? What happened?”

“I’m sending a car.”

Hazel knew the name Barlow. A George Barlow had once owned one of the largest apple orchards in Westmuir County. He’d sold it fifteen years ago and now it was a pick-your-own operation that was gradually transforming into a county fair/family amusement park that did most of its business during pumpkin season. Hazel remembered going there with her father in the fifties and coming home with bushels of tart, mottled apples. Not supermarket fruits designed for long journeys, but misshapen, delicious real apples.

The woman sitting in front of them – Pat Barlow – might have been a relation. She looked about as pale and shiny as a supermarket apple right now. She was on the other side of the slightly warped table that sat in the middle of the room, in her worn quilted coat, her black hair done up messily on top of her head. She had a smoker’s complexion: watery eyes, greying, pellucid skin. One hand curled loosely around a Styrofoam cup of coffee, her gaze lost in the dark liquid it held. Hazel sat down across the table from her, lowering herself slowly into the chair and hooking the cane over its arm. All eyes had settled on her when she walked into the station house and a couple of her people had come forward almost reverently to shake her hand. No one commented on her being half in uniform, for which she was grateful, but Barlow had cast her a strange look when she came into the room. Wingate brought another chair to the table and sat beside her. “Can you tell DI Micallef what you told me, Miss Barlow?” The woman nodded. “Take your time.”

Hazel already knew what this woman had told Wingate, but when there was suspicion about a witness, a twice-told story usually shook loose its inconsistencies. Barlow brought the coffee to her mouth, sipped it, and grimaced. “I took a couple out this afternoon. They wanted to go for pike.”

“You and -” Hazel checked Wingate’s notes, which were open on the table between them. “- Calvin Jellinek own Charter Anglers, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And what were the names of your clients yesterday?”

“Dean Bellocque and Jill Perry-something.”

The second name was Paritas. The woman spelled her name “Gil.” The other name checked out in Wingate’s notes. “Okay, go on.”

“We were about two kilometres out, on a shelf in like ten metres of water. I saw a school of something in the finder, probably bass, hugging the edge of the shelf, four or five metres down. We’d fished two beds and got nothing, so I told them this was their best chance to catch today.”

“You knew these people?”

“Never seen ’em before.”

“So you fished the shelf.”

“Yeah. And we caught a couple little ones. We threw them back.” She swirled her cup and looked into it like she was expecting to see a tiny school of something to go by in its surface. “I had an eight o’clock and I told them we had to go back, but they wanted ten more minutes. That’s when they hooked it.”

“Hooked what?” said Hazel.

Barlow sent a worried look across the table to Wingate, and he gave her a faint nod. “A body,” said Barlow, her voice almost inaudible.

“Keep going.”

“One of them – Gil – says, Jesus Christ, and I look at her rod, and it’s bent double, you know, like she’s hooked a monster. But there’s no action on the line – it’s a dead weight. I take the rod from her and let the line out because I figure she’s caught on a log, but it’s hooked hard. I whip the line a little to unsnag it, ’cuz it’s in there good, but then, when I try to reel in, I feel the log come off the bottom and I start drawing it in. And then I can see the log there under the water, the shape of it, and it’s coming up. I figure I can save my rig and not have to redo it for the four o’clock. Then Gil starts screaming. And we see it.”

Hazel was writing in her own pad now. “You see what, exactly?”

“A body. Tangled in some kind of net and completely naked. I’m surprised it didn’t snap the line. I dropped the whole rod and it went over the edge and the whole thing went back down. I about almost puked.”

“How did you know it was a body if you dropped the rod right away?”

“I saw it.”

“Tell me what you saw,” Hazel said.

Barlow looked to Wingate again, and received his silent reassurance to go on. “I seen a person’s rear, okay? She was bent double, like she was touching her toes, and her… ass was coming up out of the water.”

“How did you know it was a woman?”

“Geez,” said Barlow, shaking her head. “I know what a woman looks like.”

“What happened to your customers?”

“They got in their cars and left.”

“You have contact information for them?”

“We’ve got the numbers in our log at the shack.”

“Okay,” said Hazel. “So you called us, but when the cops showed up, you were back on the lake.”

“Season’s just opened,” said Barlow unhappily. “I got bills piled up from winter. Gannon doesn’t freeze anymore, you know, I lose all my ice-fishing gigs and I’m drydocked for five months. I can’t turn down customers when I get them.”

“You’ve got quite a constitution. You find a body in the lake, you’re almost sick to your stomach, but ninety minutes later, you’re back on the water.”

“I didn’t go anywhere near that place, trust me,” said Barlow, splaying her hands as if to fend something off. “I just left that thing where it was. I don’t want anything to do with it. The whole thing is way too eerie.”

“Eerie,” said Wingate, “why is it eerie?”

Barlow tilted her head at them. “Don’t you read the paper?”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Hazel.

She told Wingate to go get Monday’s and Thursday’s Records. He brought them in, and they opened them to the two story instalments, spreading the papers out over the table in an empty interview room. Hazel hadn’t read past the first paragraph of the first chapter. Now the two of them leaned over the papers, Hazel supported on her cane, and hurriedly read through both. “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” by Colin Eldwin, began:

The biggest muskie ever landed on Bass Lake was a forty-pounder with a face like an old lady’s. Dale Jorgenson and his son Gus headed out early on that Sunday morning with a mind to breaking the record, but when they tossed their lines into those murky waters, with the two flies they’d tied themselves that morning beside their campfire, they had no idea what strange catch waited for them at the bottom of that lake.

Dale stood at the stern, smoking a thick hand-rolled, and smiling at his son. What a big kid that one’s turning into, he thought. Dale owned the town’s best landscaping company, but he was going to retire one day, and then it would all belong to Gus. If Gus would take it. Dale had to be careful when talking to his kid about the future. The siren call of the big city could be audible even out here.