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after a few minutes and tugged on the safety line, in order to let them know that I was heading towards the body and away from the entrance. Small chunks of ice circled around me like frozen coral broken away from a reef. I turned on my back and tried to figure out how thick the ice was above me. I might have to break through it if I lost sight of where I was, or became disoriented.
    The cold of the water felt like steel beams pressed against my arms and legs. My chest hurt. Again, I reminded myself that I would have to check to see if the body had been tampered with, rigged or weighted to remain submerged and unnoticed. I listened to my breath collide with the apparatus. As I neared a bright marker attached to a piece of rebar they had forced through a small hole drilled in the ice, I saw the boy. His body was stationary next to the inlet of the pond, and remained several inches beneath the surface. One shoe was missing and there was a belt tied around his ankles, which strapped his legs together. The coroner would determine if it had been placed around his ankles post-mortem. I pulled down on the marker flag to let the officers above the ice know that I was in place.
    Nothing in the pond appeared alive. It looked like a blurred, underdeveloped photograph of images captured in the dark. I took a deep breath, grabbed the boy’s hand and tried gently to move his body. The water and the surrounding environment tugged back. Part of his right hand and the crown of his head were frozen into the ice but not far up enough that it could be seen from the surface. Perhaps it was covered with leaves or blocked by some debris. He would have to be cut out. I screamed and bit down on the breathing apparatus. After turning away from his body for several minutes, I finally removed an underwater measuring tool I used on pipeline repairs and started calculating a spot where we could begin chipping away at the ice from above without damaging the body.
    The water could teach you how to forgive if you let it.
    After I came back up onto the flatland, near where I had parked my car, I watched everyone’s reaction to the body being placed onto a collapsible gurney and loaded into the coroner’s van. I had assisted the officers in cutting a diameter around the body using a gasoline-powered chainsaw. The block of ice was removed cautiously from the pond and placed onto a tarp and dragged to the edge of the pond. From where I stood I could see the boy’s knuckles. Nearly all of the fingers on his left hand were blackened from the cold. It didn’t look real. Without knowing that it was a child I had removed from the water, I could have sworn that the ice contained an elderly man or woman. Officers started to take the names of the people at the scene again. Mull told me that sometimes perpetrators returned to the scene of the crime to gain some sort of sexual satisfaction.
    Someone patted me on the back while I removed my dry suit, like I had just done something noteworthy or commendable, or had somehow saved someone. I hadn’t saved anybody. It was totally the opposite. I ruined lives by providing the indisputable answers that destroyed lingering hope. I pulled down on my undershirt that had ridden up on my chest. Wisps of gray smoke emanated from the exhaust of the coroner’s van as it started back towards town. A woman reached out and touched the side of the van as it drove away from the scene. Until the body had been removed from the ice no one would be able to identify him with any certainty. Mull assigned someone to research local missing person’s cases in our county and surrounding districts.
    People always say that they want closure in missing person’s cases, disappearances, or child abductions. When I looked at the way that woman reacted after touching the coroner’s van, I wished that she would never know what had happened to that boy. At first, she moved through the other people in the crowd