Wicked Eddies Page 8

  The detective had brought a photo of Faith with him. It was clear to everyone that the body was hers. When he said he would notify the Ellis family, Mandy volunteered to tell Cynthia. It was the least she could do for her best friend—especially given what Cynthia had done for Mandy after her Uncle Bill died.

  Mandy turned her Subaru onto the asphalt driveway that led to the detached two-car garage over which Cynthia’s studio apartment sat. She parked on the left side, behind the bay allocated to Cynthia and not the homeowners, who were out in the yard, returning to their house with gardening tools and a half-full plastic bag.

  The retired couple waved at Mandy when she got out of her car. “Dead heading,” the husband said and held up the bag. They were meticulous gardeners.

  Not wanting to get into a discussion with them, Mandy just nodded and gave them a return wave before they turned and went inside.

  The last rays of the dying sunset picked out the pink and yellow zinnias blooming in front of delicate red penstemon spikes and blue caryopteris shrubs along the front of the main house. The beautiful combination was ideal for attracting butterflies and hummingbirds. As she walked to the garage, a hummingbird trilled past Mandy overhead on its way to the flower feast. In the deepening twilight, she couldn’t tell if it was ruby-throated or rufous. She almost wished she could follow the tiny bird back to its nest and sink into a torpor with it, rather than face the heart-wrenching task ahead of her.

  Mandy hadn’t called in advance, but looking up, she saw that the lights were on in Cynthia’s place. She took another couple of deep breaths while she climbed the wooden stairs leading up to the narrow deck running along one side of the garage. She stepped past Cynthia’s small gas grill, a couple of plastic chairs, and pots of red geraniums. A tranquil scene, soon to be shattered.

  Mandy knocked on the door.

  Cynthia opened it, dressed in an extra large T-shirt and sweatpants. She held her calico cat, Mittens, draped over her arm. “Mandy! This is a surprise. Come in, come in.” She stepped aside.

  Mandy reluctantly entered the familiar cozy room with its brown plaid sofa and mismatched pink paisley side chair, both yard-sale finds. A small TV sat on a cinder block and pine board bookcase, and a square wooden table and two matching chairs filled the other end of the room. On the table were the remains of Cynthia’s dinner, an empty pot that had held some kind of soup, and half a package of Ritz crackers.

  Cynthia closed the door and turned off the TV. She let Mittens leap out of her arms to rub against Mandy’s ankles. “So, what brings you here tonight?”

  Mandy sat on the sofa and clenched her hands in her lap. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. Maybe you should sit down.”

  Brow furrowed, Cynthia sat next to her and covered Mandy’s hand with her own. “Mandy, your hands are like ice. What is it?”

  Mandy licked her lips. “We were out on the river today, searching for a missing fisherman. We didn’t find his body, but we found someone else’s.”

  Eyes widening with sick, dawning realization, Cynthia said, “Oh, God. Who?”

  “I wish I knew how to tell you this so it wouldn’t hurt as much, but I don’t, so I’m just going to say it.” Mandy paused, her eyes already starting to burn with unshed tears. “It was Faith. We found Faith’s body in the river.”

  Cynthia’s hand dropped. Her body crumpled, and her face with it. “No. No. Not Faith.”

  Mandy put an arm around her friend’s shoulders. “I saw her. I recognized her. It was Faith. I’m really, really sorry, Cynthia.”

  While she stared at Mandy in horror, tears welled up in Cynthia’s eyes and overflowed down her cheeks. Her mouth dropped open, and out came a wail of pure misery. Starting softly, it rose in volume, growing into a howling scream that went on and on, raising the hairs on the back of Mandy’s neck.

  Cynthia gulped in a breath and screamed again. And again, her hands stiffened into claws raised to the heavens.

  Shaken by the depth of Cynthia’s reaction, Mandy grabbed her friend’s shoulders and gave her a shake. “Cynthia?”

  Staring at her without seeing, Cynthia went on screaming.

  Mandy gave her another shake. “Cynthia.”

  Finally, Cynthia’s gaze focused on Mandy, and she collapsed against Mandy’s shoulders, deep sobs shaking her frame.

  Mandy just held Cynthia and stroked her back and her hair, letting her tears soak into Mandy’s long-sleeved T-shirt until it stuck to her chest. Mandy’s own tears slid down her cheeks and dripped from her chin.

  Mittens meowed plaintively and rubbed against her mistress’s legs, but Cynthia paid her no attention.

  Finally, as the sobs subsided, Mandy gently extracted herself from Cynthia’s clutches. She stood up and grabbed the tissue box next to the TV, took a tissue for herself, and brought the box to the sofa.

  After snatching a couple of tissues, Cynthia wiped her face, and blew her nose. She dropped them onto the floor and repeated the process. Her face was blotchy red and swollen and looked awful.

  Cynthia pulled Mandy down next to her. “Tell me everything. Please.”

  “Are you sure you can handle it?”

  Cynthia’s grip tightened on Mandy’s arm until it hurt. “Yes, tell me.”

  “I was the one who found her,” Mandy said, while loosening Cynthia’s grip. “Under the last huge boulder in Pinball Rapid.”

  “Do you know how she died? If she drowned or if someone killed her and threw her in?”

  “No, we really don’t know. Her body was bruised and scraped, but the river could have done that. I didn’t see any large wounds, or a bullet hole or anything. Maybe the autopsy will tell us something.”

  Cynthia gasped. “They’re going to carve her up?”

  Mandy put her hands on her friend’s arms and gently rubbed them. “It’s not Faith anymore. She’s gone.” She sent up a silent prayer to her Uncle Bill, asking him to guide and comfort Faith’s soul on her journey, if that was possible.

  “What did she look like, besides the bruises and scrapes?”

  “She looked peaceful, like she was sleeping. Her skin was so white and her hair was floating in the water, like a drowned princess or nymph or something. Beautiful, even though …”

  Cynthia dabbed at fresh tears. “Her skin? What was she wearing?”

  “Um, nothing, actually.” When Cynthia looked aghast, Mandy quickly added, “That’s typical, though, for bodies found in the river. The rapids. They tumble the body. And …” Unable to find a delicate way to word it, Mandy shrugged. “The clothes end up being torn off.”

  “Oh, God.” Cynthia stuffed her knuckles in her mouth and took a moment to compose herself. Then she got up and started pacing the room. “I should have done something, something more. Warning her wasn’t enough. Now she’s dead.”

  “Warning her? What are you talking about?”

  Cynthia stopped and stared at Mandy. Her mouth opened and closed, as if she were debating whether or not to say something. Then Mittens meowed at her and batted her leg. Cynthia reached down, scooped up the cat, and started petting it, her lips pursed.

  “Nothing,” she said finally. “Faith was depressed. I tried to help her, but not enough. She wasn’t safe yet, and now it’s too late.”

  Before Mandy could ask more, a knock sounded on the door. The plaintive voice of Cynthia’s landlady asked, “What’s going on, Cynthia? Are you okay?”

  When Cynthia rose, Mandy stood, too. “What do you mean Faith wasn’t safe yet? Do you think she committed suicide? Was she depressed enough to throw herself in the river?”

  “Maybe. Or she took a risk and someone killed her.” Cynthia’s grip on the cat had tightened, and it let out a yowl of pain.

  “Sorry, Mittens.” She loosened her hold and let the cat jump out of her arms, then opened the door.

  The retired couple stood outside. Wringing her hands, the woman looked from Cynthia to Mandy. “We heard screaming.”

  “Mandy just told me that my co
usin died,” Cynthia said.

  The woman gasped and put a hand to her face, while her husband gripped her shoulder. “We’re so sorry,” he said. “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know,” Cynthia replied, rubbing her forehead. “I need some time to absorb the shock.”

  Mandy touched Cynthia’s arm. “What kind of risk was Faith taking? What were you warning her about?”

  Cynthia held herself, her fingers making white marks on her arms. “I can’t talk about this. Not now.”

  “Can I make you some tea, dear?” the woman asked.

  Cynthia’s gaze flitted across the worried faces surrounding her. “I really need to be alone. Could you all just leave?”

  “Sure, sure,” the man said, and he turned to leave.

  The woman made to leave with him, then turned back. “You call if you need anything. Anytime. And I’ll check on you in the morning.”

  Cynthia nodded, then looked expectantly at Mandy, still clutching herself.

  “Are you sure you want me to leave?” Mandy asked. “I’ll stay the night. I’ll do whatever you want or need me to, to help you through this.”

  “I know, and I appreciate it. Thank you for coming to tell me. I know it was hard. But right now, I just want to be alone.”

  _____

  The next morning, Friday, dawned bright and clear with a piercingly blue sky. Worried about Cynthia, Mandy called her and woke her up, but when she offered to bring breakfast by, Cynthia turned her down, saying she was going back to sleep. Mandy felt bad about waking her friend, but at least she knew Cynthia was alive and hadn’t succumbed to her grief and done something drastic—like following her cousin into the river.

  If that was how Faith died.

  After driving to headquarters, Mandy rode with Lance in one of the ranger pickup trucks from Salida north to the Railroad Bridge put-in at the entrance to Wildhorse Canyon. Last Sunday, a commercial rafter had called in a strainer, a dangerous tangle of branches in the water, in the Frog Rock rapid. The river rangers cleared strainers as soon as possible because they could trap and hold a swimmer underwater. But since Wildhorse Canyon wasn’t one of the popular runs on the Arkansas, the clearing of that particular strainer had been deferred. With the weekend coming up, though, it needed to be taken care of.

  The tools and paddles rattling in the truck bed kept up a percussive beat to Lance’s tone-deaf humming with the radio. Mandy tuned him out and watched the landscape of grassy ranchland stream past the window while she reflected on Cynthia’s words about Faith the prior evening.

  What did she mean when she said Faith wasn’t safe yet? Safe from what? Was the teenager using drugs? Did she owe someone money for drugs? Someone who would get violent if they weren’t paid? Or was she involved in a gang? Had she been sneaking out of the house to see some boy or to drink at one of the bars that wasn’t careful about carding?

  And what had Cynthia warned her young cousin about? The dangers of drugs and alcohol? Date rape or safe sex?

  Or was Faith suffering from deep depression or some other psychological condition? Maybe it was the demons of her own mind that she wasn’t safe from. Cynthia had said that “maybe” Faith committed suicide, as if she felt the girl was capable of it. But the alternative was even weirder. What “risk” would Faith have taken that would have gotten her killed? Mandy vowed to talk to Cynthia again, when she’d had a chance to process her cousin’s death.

  Lance gave her a poke in the arm when he turned off Highway 24. “We’re almost there. What ya’ been thinking about? That girl you pulled out of the river yesterday?”

  “Yeah, sorta. Sorry I haven’t been better company.”

  “Hey, I understand. It was a bad scene.” He drove the pickup into the parking lot and maneuvered it so the small flatbed trailer behind them was near the ramp down to the river. He turned off the engine and rested a large hand on her shoulder. “Time on the river will help. It always does.”

  Mandy gave him a smile. “Yes, it does. Let’s go.”

  She hopped out of the truck and started unlashing the catarafts from the trailer. Since it was likely they would need two boats to deal with the strainer, they’d taken two of the single-person craft that river rangers usually used for river patrols. Each one had an oaring seat clamped onto a metal frame suspended between two bright blue inflatable pontoons. Mandy and Lance stowed their lunches and the tools for cutting branches in dry bags in the equipment cages bolted behind the seats.

  After they’d parked the truck away from the ramp and locked it and pushed their rafts into the river, Mandy took a deep breath and let the music of the gurgling water start working its magic. A large black rook let out a loud caw and flapped its wings overhead. A trout splashed near one of her oars, and a bright yellow butterfly fluttered among cattails along the bank sawing against each other in the slight breeze. When the sun warmed her back, she pushed up the sleeves of the splash jacket under her PFD and dipped her oars in the water again.

  Yes, trouble had occurred in Mandy’s human community of Salida, especially for Cynthia’s extended family, with the death of two members—her uncle Howie Abbott and his niece Faith Ellis. Mandy knew firsthand how wrenching even one death in the family could be. But all was right with the world of nature, at least today here on the Arkansas River, and it made her feel glad to be outdoors and alive to enjoy it.

  Lance whooped when they rode their two rafts over a class III riffle, and Mandy flashed him a smile.

  “You know,” he yelled over the rush of the water, “I’ve never understood why the commercial outfits don’t run this section more often.”

  “It is beautiful,” Mandy shouted back. “But let’s keep the secret.”

  Soon, they reached Frog Rock Rapid and tied up upstream. They hiked down and studied the strainer. A couple of huge cottonwood limbs with lots of interlocking smaller branches were wedged between two large rocks. There was no way to get to the bundle from the shore, or to eddy out a raft near it. They decided to tie Lance’s raft to a nearby cottonwood, let it drift down to the spot with Lance inside, then cinch up the line so the raft stayed there.

  After that was accomplished, Lance leaned out of the raft and alternated using a hand saw and a pair of large clippers to cut the branches into sections. Mandy stayed on the shore and threw him ropes, when needed, to tie off and drag larger sections to shore. There she chopped or sawed the sections up into smaller pieces that would float down the river without getting tangled. All the while, she kept an eye on Lance and her throw bag within reach, because she was his downstream rescue backup if he ended up in the river.

  They worked companionably, Lance being an easy-going and methodical guy, for a couple of hours until he shouted, “Done,” and tossed the last section into the river. “Glad I didn’t need the chain saw. I hate trying to control it in a bobbing raft.”

  Mandy made quick work of chopping that last section up, then stood and stretched her aching back. She shouted, “I’m done, too,” and swiped sweat off her forehead.

  “Meet you at the next eddy for lunch,” Lance shouted back while he untied the line from his raft and oared his cataraft out into the current. He whooped while his raft bounced down the tongue of standing waves below Frog Rock.

  Mandy hiked back upriver with her equipment and ropes. She retrieved the line that had been tied to Lance’s raft, and stowed everything in dry bags in her equipment basket. After pushing her cataraft off from shore, she ran the now-cleared rapid with a “Whoop!” of her own.

  She soon spied Lance waving to her from a quiet pool downriver and spun her cataraft into the eddy next to his. He had already tied off his raft to a tree on shore and secured hers to his.

  He popped the cap on a bottle of Gatorade and held it up. “Here’s to a job well done.”

  Mandy tapped her water bottle against his Gatorade and drank deep, then sank her teeth into her peanut butter and raspberry jelly sandwich. “You know,” she said after swallowing, “nothing tastes as go
od as a smushed PBJ sandwich as long as it’s eaten on the river when you’re starving after a morning of hard work.”

  Lance laughed and held up his sandwich. “Except maybe a salami on rye in the same circumstances.” He gave her a wink while he took a big bite and hummed while chewing.

  While they were eating, a fly fisherman in waders came sloshing upstream alongside the opposite bank. He returned their wave, then went back to swishing his fly line overhead and casting it into eddy pools behind rocks lining the shore—favorite hang-out spots for river trout. He soon snagged a trout. He high-sticked his rod to hook the fish and bring it closer to him, then reeled in some line. As the trout flopped nearby, he reached behind him for the net stuck into his belt.

  That’s when something went wrong. He lost his footing, possibly because of a jerk from the good-sized trout, and fell forward with a splash into the main current. The current swept him downstream.

  Yelling, “Don’t stand up,” Mandy untied her cataraft line from Lance’s and shoved off with her oars. She pushed hard on her oars to catch up with the fisherman.

  The man had flopped over on his back with his feet pointed downstream, the best position for self-rescue in whitewater. He paddled with one arm, trying to steer himself toward the river bank. Since he held on tightly to his expensive-looking fly rod with the other arm, though, he wasn’t making much progress.

  Mandy came up alongside him and shouted, “Grab hold!”

  He rolled and threw his free arm over the nearest pontoon.

  Mandy steered her now sluggish cataraft toward shore. She soon felt Lance’s cataraft behind her, nudging against her raft to help propel the fisherman into the shallows.

  When they reached a large shallow eddy next to shore, the man let go. He pushed himself off the bottom to stand on a calf-deep cobble bar. After grabbing hold of a bush overhanging the river bank, he took a few deep breaths.

  Mandy oared into the bank and grabbed a bush to keep her cataraft in the eddy.

  Lance pushed off and ferried across the river, where Mandy spied the man’s net bobbing in a small whirlpool near the other bank.