The Taken Read Online Free PDF Page A

to Wingate again, and received his silent reassurance to go on. “I seen a person’s rear, okay? She was bent double, like she was touching her toes, and her … ass was coming up out of the water.”
    “How did you know it was a woman?”
    “Geez,” said Barlow, shaking her head. “I know what a woman looks like.”
    “What happened to your customers?”
    “They got in their cars and left.”
    “You have contact information for them?”
    “We’ve got the numbers in our log at the shack.”
    “Okay,” said Hazel. “So you called us, but when the cops showed up, you were back on the lake.”
    “Season’s just opened,” said Barlow unhappily. “I got bills piled up from winter. Gannon doesn’t freeze anymore, you know, I lose all my ice-fishing gigs and I’m drydocked for five months. I can’t turn down customers when I get them.”
    “You’ve got quite a constitution. You find a body in the lake, you’re almost sick to your stomach, but ninety minutes later, you’re back on the water.”
    “I didn’t go anywhere near that place, trust me,” said Barlow, splaying her hands as if to fend something off. “I just left that thing where it was. I don’t want anything to do with it. The whole thing is way too eerie.”
    “Eerie,” said Wingate, “why is it eerie?”
    Barlow tilted her head at them. “Don’t you read the paper?”
    “Oh,
Jesus,”
said Hazel.
    She told Wingate to go get Monday’s and Thursday’s
Records
. He brought them in, and they opened them to the two story instalments, spreading the papers out over the table in an empty interview room. Hazel hadn’t read past the first paragraph of the first chapter. Now the two of them leaned over the papers, Hazel supported on her cane, and hurriedly read through both. “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” by Colin Eldwin, began:
    The biggest muskie ever landed on Bass Lake was a forty-pounder with a face like an old lady’s. Dale Jorgenson and his son Gus headed out early on that Sunday morning with a mind to breaking the record, but when they tossed their lines into those murky waters, with the two flies they’d tied themselves that morning beside their campfire, they had no idea what strange catch waited for them at the bottom of that lake.
    Dale stood at the stern, smoking a thick hand-rolled, and smiling at his son. What a big kid that one’s turning into, he thought. Dale owned the town’s best landscaping company, but he was going to retire one day, and then it would all belong to Gus. If Gus would take it. Dale had to be careful when talking to his kid about the future. The siren call of the big city could be audible even out here.
    Dale threw open the lid of the cooler. “Time for a beer, I’d say.”
    “A bit early for a brew, isn’t it?” Gus said, laughing.
    Dale cracked two big cold ones and tossed one of them to his son. “The fish’ll know if you’re not drinking, kid.”
    The two men tipped their cans back into their throats and drank thirstily. Gus finished his in one long gulp. If Dale ever wanted proof that he really was Gus’s dad, he’d need no more than the sudsy smile on that kid’s face to have it.
    “Well, if it’s the writer’s body down there, there might be just cause,” said Wingate. “So this is him?” he said, indicating the picture of the man in the parking lot. “He looks like a piece of work.”
    “Who the hell fishes muskie with a fly? Who is this idiot?” said Hazel. They read on. At the end of the first section, which had been printed in Monday’s paper, Gus’d had a heavy bite, but when he tried to reel the fish in, his line snapped. The chapter ended with father and son staring at each other in wonderment, and Dale saying: “The fish of our lives is down there, Gus, waiting for us to catch it!”
    In the second instalment, the two determined fishermen had rerigged with heavier line and this time, when Gus felt hisrod bend against the force of something big, he and his father