He’s my friend, I didn’t mind.”
“Be that as it may, I’m working on a little surprise.”
“Cara, you really don’t—”
“I can’t wait,” she said, cutting me off. “You’re going to love it.”
“On the count of three,” the man said into the megaphone. “One.” The crowd chanted along. “Two. Three!”
It turned out there were three kinds of Tilikum pumpkin plungers. Men who stepped carefully, wincing at the cold, clearly ready for it to be over as soon as their toes hit the water. Men who waded in with more gusto, sucking in quick breaths as each bit of skin submerged beneath the water.
And then there was Gavin.
He let out a whoop and rushed into the river, splashing the men next to him. When he got closer to the center, he dove under, then popped back up and hollered again. He raked his hair out of his face, and his eyes were wide and bright, his smile huge.
The crowd cheered from the riverbank. Gavin’s brothers shouted his name, calling out encouragement. Not that he seemed to need it. Two pumpkin plungers turned around and immediately ran out of the water. Another was right on their heels.
“That’s it, Gav,” Logan shouted.
Gavin jumped up and down a few times in the waist high water. Seconds ticked by, but the longer it went on, the more excited he seemed to get.
Another plunger succumbed to the cold, hurrying out of the water into a waiting towel. Pretty soon it was a mass exodus, more and more men running for the riverbank.
Finally, it was down to Gavin and two other men. One clutched his bony arms around himself while he shivered, his teeth chattering. The other was a burly man with a bald head, thick auburn beard, and the hairiest chest I’d ever seen.
“Earl,” a woman called from the bank. “It’s not worth it. Get back up here or you’ll catch your death.”
Earl—the bony one—seemed to agree. He came out of the river, shaking and dripping water from his swim trunks.
“Who’s the one left with Gavin?” I asked.
“Gerald McMillan,” Cara said. “He thought he could beat Gavin last year, too.”
Gavin’s eyes met mine and he smiled through chattering teeth. He swung his arms back and forth across his chest, then shook out his hands. Gerald stood still, arms crossed over his barrel chest, like a big hairy tree trunk.
Logan started chanting, “Ga-vin, Ga-vin, Ga-vin,” and some of the crowd picked it up. An answering chant for Gerald began down the riverbank.
Gavin jumped, swung his arms, and shook out his hands again, all with that adorable smile of his. Gerald looked miserable, shivers beginning to overtake his big body.
“You’ve got this, Gavin,” Logan yelled.
“Crazy son of a bitch,” Levi said, just loud enough that I heard it.
It occurred to me, standing on the riverbank on a chilly fall morning, that maybe I didn’t know Gavin as well as I’d thought I did. And maybe that had something to do with the fact that for most of the time I’d known him, he’d been hobbled by a broken leg. Because this Gavin, who seemed to be having the time of his life while he was probably giving himself hypothermia, was kind of insane.
Hypothermia… Another body is found, but on closer inspection, it’s discovered that he’s still alive, just in a state of deep hypothermia. He’s rushed to the hospital and put on life support. If he survives, he might hold the key to finding the identity of the killer—
“Look at him,” Ginny said, rousing me from my brief daydream. “It looks like he’s having fun out there.”
“What? Oh, yeah it does. Did you know a body decomposes four times faster in water than on land?”
She laughed. “Ew.”
Gavin flashed Gerald a big grin, then dove back under the water. He came up still smiling and wiped his hair back off his face.
With a full-body shudder, Gerald seemed to decide he’d had enough. He shook his head and hurried to the river’s edge.
A cheer rose up from the crowd and Gavin raised his arms in the air. He high stepped out of the water and I opened his towel for him as he raced up the riverbank.
“Holy shit, I’m fucking cold,” he said, his voice breathless—with cold, or excitement, it was hard to tell.
I wrapped the towel around his shivering body and he grabbed it, holding it at the top of his chest. River water streamed off him, making little rivulets in the rocky dirt at our feet.
The announcer stepped back on