Читать книгу Where Drowned Things Live - Susan Thistlethwaite - Страница 10

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live

I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.

Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” The Dream of a Common Language

The shrill ring of my cell phone jolted me out of the pain meds-induced sleep I’d had for . . . I glanced at the time displayed on the cell . . . five hours?

What the hell? Who was calling me at 6:30 in the morning on my cell?

I thought about ignoring the call, but I didn’t give out my personal cell number to that many people. I picked it up and the number displayed on the screen was a university number. Better answer. I pressed ‘ok’ and held the phone to my ear.

“Kristin? Kristin?”

Margaret Lester’s voice was tight, like she was controlling herself with effort. We did not have good news here.

She barely waited for my affirmative grunt.

“Ah-seong Kim has been found drowned in Mendel Pond. I’m there now. Could you come right over?”

The words were business-like but the tight voice was veering toward panic.

I fought my way up through the haze of the medication and too little sleep. I’m never at my best first thing in the morning anyway, at least before an infusion of caffeine. I ran my hand over my face and tried to focus. What had she said?

My lack of response shredded Margaret’s fragile control.

“Kristin! Please! Students are starting to come to the Union for breakfast and the police have sealed off the west entrance of the cafeteria. They’re all just hanging around, looking, talking, crying, even though the cops keep ordering them to move on.”

Margaret’s shrill voice drilling into my ear had the simultaneous effect of waking me and starting to give me a headache. Okay. Okay, my brain said. Now for my mouth.

“Hang on, Margaret. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

I pressed end and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The movement jarred my arm. I’d slept in the sling as Grayson had advised so I’d move it less. But it hurt like stink.

Well, no pain pills for me. I tried to think. Tylenol, maybe. Then clothes. Then coffee. Then Carol and Giles. Oh, how I wished coffee was first.

I stumbled into the bathroom and managed to locate some Tylenol. I gulped three down and eased out of the sling. I used my good arm to get my clothes off. I’d not bothered with changing last night. I looked down at the bloody martial arts uniform on the bathroom floor. I lifted it and stuffed it down into the bathroom trash can. I’d get another.

I gingerly eased a loose sweater over my head and drew the sleeve carefully over the bandage. It wasn’t easy to position the sling again, but with a little help from my teeth I got it pulled into about the right place. Pulling up sweatpants didn’t require teeth, but it was awkward. I shuffled into slip-on low boots, got my purse and my cell and made my way to the kitchen. The blessed auto-brew coffee machine just required a one-button tap to start, and in seconds it was gurgling. I hovered over it until some had dripped into the pot. I pulled the pot out and poured some into a travel mug and took a minute to gulp it down despite the risk of scalding my tongue. I sipped more slowly and called Carol’s cell phone. I didn’t have the energy to troop up two flights of stairs to their apartment. She answered with her soft, kindly voice. I explained briefly, leaving out the drowning, just that there was a problem with a student on campus and the Dean of Students had asked me to come. I did ask her not to tell the boys, just that I had to go into work early. As I was finishing saying that, she walked into the kitchen and gently gave me a brief hug on my good side. Then she wordlessly took my mug, topped it off and handed it back to me. The little kindnesses in life help us get through. I leaned my cheek down and rested it for a second on her brown cap of hair. She helped me get one arm in my trench coat and belted it securely so it closed over my arm in the sling.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said.

Carol didn’t smile.

“Are you up to this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I picked up my coffee and my purse and headed out the door toward the part of the campus that contained Mendel Pond.

I walked the three blocks to campus. It was ridiculously tiring. As I approached the entrance to the main quadrangle, it began to rain lightly. Great. At least I had the coat wrapped around me, but where the sweater was exposed in the front was getting wet. Wet and cold. I started to shiver.

The flashing red and blue lights of four Chicago police cars and about four more university police cars around the quad reflected crazily off of the wet ivy covered pale stone of the surrounding buildings. Mendel Pond was in a cul-de-sac created from the backs of Myerson, where my office was, and the student union. Directly behind the pond to the north was one of the high walls that ran between buildings. The walls were topped with spikes, hundreds and hundreds of spikes topped with balls. They always reminded me of German Christmas ornaments.

A stone arch cut through the wall with a monumental gate, probably thirty feet high, made of elaborate bars, convincingly medieval. “Crescat scientia; vita excolatur” was spelled out in an ironwork banner arching above the gate. It was creepily reminiscent of the pictures of the ironwork banner above Auschwitz, only this didn’t mean “Freedom Through Work,” it translated as “Let knowledge grow from more to more, and so be human life enriched.” English always has to fill in the Latin gaps. Given what that gate must have cost, even more than a century ago, it plainly enriched quite a bit.

I continued to slog along through the growing puddles toward the lights. Mendel Pond I had always assumed was named for Gregor Mendel, the famous botanist and priest. Long ago, Myerson had been the science building. Botany students had probably messed around with plants in this pond in those days. Nobody did anything scientific with it now, at least that I’d ever seen. Plants did grow in it, waving their big leaves over the surface. Now in the fall, those leaves were gold, a gold turned blue and red from the flashing lights. The flickering lights showed where a canopy of large leaves had been torn. Some were scattered on the grass.

Mendel Pond was irregular, shaped like a jigsaw puzzle piece, jutting in and out, wider at the end closest to Myerson, narrower where it came closest to the gate. It was about thirty feet across at the widest place and rimmed with a concrete wall, about two feet high. Not impossible to fall in, but how likely was that?

Police tape was strung around the whole pond. I spotted Margaret toward the gate, standing beside an ambulance. The medical team had obviously arrived, as had the city cops. I doubted any detectives had arrived yet. They’d be here, though. They’d examine the scene, and with the medical examiner’s report determine if it was accident, suicide or even a homicide.

“Margaret!” I called out.

Margaret started and then hurried over to me.

“Oh, Kristin! Thank you so much for coming.”

But her eyes narrowed as she took in my arm in a sling.

“Are you okay? What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. Right now, tell me what you know about what happened to Ah-seong Kim.”

“Well, what I know so far is that the sanitation guys drove in here at about 5:30 in the morning and they spotted a body floating in the pond. She was out toward the middle. One guy jumped in and pulled her out, tried CPR, while the other called the University Police who must have called the EMT’s. They were just over at the hospital ER and got here really quickly, they said, but it was no use. She was already dead and had been for some time. Our police called me after they got a look at the body. Guessed she might be a student. I suppose they called the city cops too. I got here just before 6. I looked at her face, saw it was Ah-seong and I called you.”

Margaret glanced at the ground beside the pond nearest the ambulance. A little mound under some kind of covering was visible.

I frowned at Margaret.

“That’s not right. That can’t be right, Margaret. The body couldn’t have been floating. She must have died sometime during the night and the water in the pond is fairly cool. She wouldn’t float for a couple of days. Besides, if it was a suicide, she might have weighted her pockets. Same with murder, really. This pond’s not that deep, is it? It doesn’t make sense.”

Margaret looked blank.

“What do you mean, she couldn’t have been floating?”

I spoke slowly.

“Dead bodies don’t float for several days. And that’s in warm water. In cooler water they stay submerged even longer.”

I needed more information. I looked around.

“Where are these sanitation guys?”

“Over there.”