The Deepest Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

He glanced at her. “The road’s passable, isn’t it?”
    “At this time of year it’s okay, unless it’s snowed recently. Later you’d need a four-wheel drive, but it would be crazy later even then. We never drove up in the winter. In fact, we hardly ever drove up at all. We used the boat to go across the finger unless we had big things to carry. You’ll add another forty-five minutes to the trip.”
    “I thought we might,” he said. He drove past Coop Halburtson’s property, and soon after that turned at the entrance to Two-Finger Lake State Park onto a winding lava-rock road with smaller lanes that led to camp sites hidden among trees on the right. He passed them and drove to the boat launching area, where he pulled in and parked. There were canoes, rowboats, even a kayak or two on the lake, nothing motorized. Motor boats were forbidden here.
    “Let’s stretch our legs,” he said, “before we attack the mountain. Why is the water so black?”
    It looked as black as ink, but that was deceptive. From another vantage point it would appear to be almost as blue as Crater Lake. “It’s underlain with basalt in places,” Abby said.
    They walked to a rail and stood gazing at the water, at the surrounding cliffs, the boats. Like most of the state parks, this one was well-used year round; there were a lot of people in the area that day.
    “One of the things bothering us,” Caldwell said, watching the boats, “is how the killer approached the cabin. Can you see it from here?”
    Abby shook her head. “You can see part of the finger, but not the cabin. It’s only a couple of miles from here actually, but the cabin is set back a bit, trees block it from view.”
    “Four miles,” he said musingly. “Why couldn’t someone have launched a boat down here and paddled up?”
    She had rowed across to the state park many times, and occasionally someone did row up the finger to the end, but only in daylight. She pointed. “See that cliff over there, the basalt rimrock? It goes into the water, just below the surface mostly, but there’s a place where it’s actually above the water level. You can spot it from here. But just barely. There’s a break in the rocks there, at the left of the basalt. At night, you’d need a powerful light to find your way through without grounding. There’s another break over by the cliffs, and you can’t see it at all unless you’re out on the water. They’re both hard to see in daylight, and invisible at night.”
    Caldwell was peering at the lake, frowning, but Detective Varney exclaimed, “I see it. A little island, a little black island.”
    Abby nodded. Siren Rock. Jud had rowed her out to it one hot summer day; about four feet long and half that wide, it rose from the water no more than six inches, black and shiny, as smooth as the back of a Loch Ness monster. She had said, “It’s a Siren rock, isn’t it? Calling you to the deep water where the fish are.” She had been reading a lot of mythology that summer, and Siren Rock the island had become. Jud’s first novel was titled Siren Rock .
    Their finger was quite shallow, no more than eight feet deep at the deepest point, but at this side of Siren Rock the basin plunged down eighty or ninety feet, and the water was many degrees colder than in the finger. They always fished in the deep water, and swam in the warm shallow water.
    There were no boats visible in the finger that day, and never any boats in the north finger, which was a spring-fed creek that had spread out fifty feet or more, and was hazardous with boulders and blowdowns, unnavigable. It was good for finding crawfish and pretty rocks, and places where she used to slide down slippery, moss-covered boulders and splash into tiny pools.
    She turned her back on the lake and looked instead at the high mountains.
    “Let’s move on,” Caldwell said. “We brought sandwiches and things. We’ll eat when we reach the cabin. I suspected there wouldn’t be much in the