edge rose like a fin, and her boots slipped down the incline of it and she fell to her chest on the upended slab and slid legs-first into the water, plunging into the dark and the cold up to her ribs, clinging to the upended slab of ice, and there was the moment before the cold soaked through her clothes, and then it simply squeezed the breath from her like great jaws clamping down. She clung to the slab of ice but her own weight pushed it under, dunked it like a smaller body she meant to drown and it slipped under the surface of the ice and she let go and grabbed for the ice itself and she could hear the slab scraping and knocking along the underside of the ice, carried away by the same current that shoved her against the edge and pulled at her legs.
“Shit, I goddam told you,” said Moran.
She watched him. Her throat wanted to call out to him—Help me, please—but she would not let it. Would not speak to him. Already her jaw was chattering.
“You couldn’t just cooperate, could you?”
The water so cold and so strong and Moran just standing there. She turned her face so she wouldn’t see him. Before her, downriver, the ice banked around the woods and disappeared. If she went under how far could she go? Was there a place downriver where the ice didn’t freeze and she could surface? How far was the dam, where Caroline had been found?
But this wasn’t that river.
Yes, it was—Upper Black Root, Lower Black Root, all the same river going the same direction, toward the same dams . . . but how far?
The water so cold you couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.
But there’s another dam, Deputy—remember? Where we fished when you were a little girl?
Yes, Daddy . . . but how far is that?
Fishermen left holes in the ice—but the holes would freeze over an hour later and would be too small anyway.
There was movement, scraping sounds, and she turned to see Moran on his hands and knees, making his way out toward her. He’d left his hat behind and he looked ridiculous and hideous. Like an animal come from the woods to see if this floundering thing in the ice could be had for dinner.
“Go away,” she said, or tried to say. Her breath was gone.
He got down on his stomach and drew himself forward on his elbows. The ice popped and he went no farther. Resting there on his elbows, getting his breath, and the breath gusting white from his open mouth.
She turned from him and tried to raise herself on another part of the ice, but there was nothing to hold on to and the current was strong and she slipped down again and stopped trying and rested. All the blood had gone to her heart but her heart was cold too.
Moran breathing, watching her.
“All you had to do was cooperate,” he said. “You’d think I deserved that much, at least. All the years we’ve known each other.”
Against her will she turned to look at him—looked into those bug eyes and saw not hostility but . . . confusion. Or something like it.
He looked down at his hands, then cupped them and blew into them. White shoots of breath escaping at the seams. He looked away, downriver.
“You remember when your daddy would send me to pick you up at school?” he said. And looked at her again. “You remember that?”
Her head was shaking and maybe he thought she was answering him.
“Sure you do. You were just a little girl. He’d get hung up and couldn’t make it so he’d send me. Trusted me with that—picking up his daughter from school.”
She watched him from her hole of ice and water, her backteeth knocking.
“And you’d ride up front with me, and I’d let you use the PA . . . remember? You’d scare the bejesus outta some kid on the sidewalk and then duck down out of sight.”
He smiled at her, almost shyly. Then the smile died away and his brows creased. “But then he stopped doing that. Stopped sending me. I figured you must’ve said something. Must’ve told him you didn’t want me picking you up anymore.” He watched her. As if she might have something to say to that. Some kind of confirmation.
“You never . . .” she said with her rattling jaw.
Moran cocked his head. “Never what?”
“Never told him . . . my dad.”
“I never told him what?”
“That you pulled