He passed empty beer bottles and cans left to litter the ice, and he passed circular holes cut into the ice, for fishing, holes that had not frozen again, each hole filled with black water.
The klunker seemed further away than it had looked from the road. He heard a loud crack from the south of the lake, like a stick breaking, followed by the sound of something huge thrumming, as if a bass string the size of a lake was vibrating. Massively, the ice creaked and groaned, like an old door protesting being opened. Shadow kept walking, as steadily as he could.
This is suicide, whispered a sane voice in the back of his mind. Can’t you just let it go?
“No,” he said, aloud. “I have to know.” And he kept right on walking.
He arrived at the klunker, and even before he reached it he knew that he had been right. There was a miasma that hung about the car, something that was at the same time a faint, foul smell and was also a bad taste in the back of his throat. He walked around the car, looking inside. The seats were stained, and ripped. The car was obviously empty. He tried the doors. They were locked. He tried the trunk. Also locked.
He wished that he had brought a crowbar.
He made a fist of his hand inside his glove. He counted to three, then smashed his hand, hard, against the driver’s-side window-glass.
His hand hurt. The side-window was undamaged.
He thought about running at it—he could kick the window in, he was certain, if he didn’t skid and fall on the wet ice. But the last thing he wanted to do was to disturb the klunker enough that the ice beneath it would crack.
He looked at the car. Then he reached for the radio antenna—it was the kind which was meant to go up and down, but which had stopped going down a decade ago, and had remained in the up position ever since—and, with a little waggling, he broke it off at the base. He took the thin end of the antenna—it had once had a metal button on the end, but that was lost in time, and, with strong fingers, he bent it back up into a makeshift hook.
Then he rammed the extended metal antenna down between the rubber and the glass of the front window, deep into the mechanism of the door. He fished in the mechanism, twisting, moving, pushing the metal antenna about until it caught: and then he pulled up.
He felt the improvised hook sliding from the lock, uselessly.
He sighed. Fished again, slower, more carefully. He could imagine the ice grumbling beneath his feet as he shifted his weight. And slow…and…
He had it. He pulled up on the aerial and the front door locking mechanism popped up. Shadow reached down one gloved hand and took the door handle, pressed the button, and pulled. The door did not open.
It’s stuck, he thought, iced up. That’s all.
He tugged, sliding on the ice, and suddenly the door of the klunker flew open, ice scattering everywhere.
The miasma was worse inside the car, a stench of rot and illness. Shadow felt sick.
He reached under the dashboard, found the black plastic handle that opened the trunk, and tugged on it, hard.
There was a thunk from behind him as the trunk door released.
Shadow walked out onto the ice, slipped and splashed around the car, holding on to the side of it as he went.
It’s in the trunk, he thought.
The trunk was open an inch. He reached down and opened it the rest of the way, pulling it up.
The smell was bad, but it could have been much worse: the bottom of the trunk was filled with an inch or so of half-melted ice. There was a girl in the trunk. She wore a scarlet snowsuit, now stained, and her mousy hair was long and her mouth was closed, so Shadow could not see the blue rubber-band braces, but he knew that they were there. The cold had preserved her, kept her as fresh as if she had been in a freezer.
Her eyes were wide open, and she looked as if she had been crying when she died, and the tears that had frozen on her cheeks had still not melted. Her gloves were bright green.
“You were here all the time,” said Shadow to Alison McGovern’s corpse. “Every single person who drove over that bridge saw you. Everyone who drove through the town saw you. The ice fishermen walked past you every day. And nobody knew.” And then he realized how foolish that was.
Somebody knew.
Somebody had put her here.
He reached into the trunk—to see if he could pull her out. He had found her, after all. Now he had to get her out. He put his weight on the car, as he leaned in. Perhaps that was what did it.
The ice beneath the front wheels went at that moment, perhaps from his movements, perhaps not. The front of the car lurched downward several feet into the dark water of the lake. Water began to pour into the car through the open driver’s door. Water splashed about Shadow’s ankles, although the ice he stood on was still solid. He looked around urgently, wondering how to get away—and then it was too late, and the ice tipped precipitously, throwing him against the car and the dead girl in the trunk; and the back of the car went down, and Shadow went down with it, into the cold waters of the lake. It was ten past nine in the morning, on March the twenty-third.
He took a deep breath before he went under, closing his eyes, but the cold of the lake water hit him like a wall, knocking the breath from his body.
He tumbled downward, into the murky ice water, pulled down by the car.
He was under the lake, down in the darkness and the cold, weighed down by his clothes and his gloves and his boots, trapped and swathed in his coat, which seemed to have become heavier and bulkier than he could have imagined.
He was falling, still. He tried to push away from the car, but it was pulling him with it, and then there was a bang which he could hear with his whole body, not his ears, and his left foot was wrenched at the ankle, the foot twisted and trapped beneath the car as it settled on the lake bottom, and panic took him.
He opened his eyes.
He knew it was dark down there: rationally, he knew it was too dark to see anything, but still, he could see; he could see everything. He could see Alison McGovern’s white face staring at him from the open trunk. He could see other cars as well—the klunkers of bygone years, rotten hulk shapes in the darkness, half-buried in the lake mud. And what else would they have dragged out onto the lake, thought Shadow, before there were cars?
Each one, he knew, without any question, had a dead child in the trunk. There were scores of them down there. Each had sat out on the ice, in front of the eyes of the world, all through the cold winter. Each had tumbled into the cold waters of the lake, when the winter was done.
This was where they rested: Lemmi Hautala and Jessie Lovat and Sandy Olsen and Jo Ming and Sarah Lindquist and all the rest of them. Down where it was silent and cold…
He pulled at his foot. It was stuck fast, and the pressure in his lungs was becoming unbearable. There was a sharp, terrible, hurt in his ears. He exhaled slowly, and the air bubbled around his face.
Soon, he thought, soon I’ll have to breathe. Or I’ll choke.
He reached down, put both hands around the bumper of the klunker, and pushed, with everything he had, leaning into it. Nothing happened.
It’s only the shell of a car, he told himself. They took out the engine. That’s the heaviest part of the car. You can do it. Just keep pushing.
He pushed.
Agonizingly slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the car slipped forward in the mud, and Shadow pulled his foot from the mud beneath the car, and kicked, and tried to push himself out into the cold lake water. He didn’t move. The coat, he told himself. It’s the coat. It’s stuck, or caught on something. He pulled his arms from his coat, fumbled with numb fingers at the frozen zipper. Then he pulled both hands on each side of the zipper, felt the coat give and rend. Hastily, he freed himself from its embrace, and pushed upward, away from the car.