The Monster of Twenty Mile Pond Page 9

  “I say I saw it, but nobody else on board did. And I never saw the orca or any sign of seals afterwards. Nor did anyone else on board or on shore. What is more, I’d been filming precisely where I’d been looking when I saw the phenomenon, but there was nothing whatsoever of that nature on the developed film. So, what can one say? It was as if my mind took advantage of the conditions—weather, atmosphere, water, low blinding sun. Deciding they were ideal for something dramatic to happen, it supplied the missing drama of its own volition. Probably as a result of my watching too many nature shows on TV. So, what would be your lawyer’s rejoinder to that, Mr. McGill?”

  “We lawyers do recognize, Dr. Atwood, that first-hand, so-called eyewitness accounts can be very imprecise, dubious, and unreliable. But on the other hand, that’s no reason to dismiss them entirely, simply because the event seen was improbable. The reasons you gave to explain away your vision of the killer whale and the seal are certainly thought-provoking, but frankly, the explanation may be just as dubious and fanciful as the existence of your sighting itself. Moreover, I’d require some additional evidence that your camera continued, in fact, to point directly at the phenomenon itself, which must have startled and astonished you when it first came into your line of vision.”

  I saw the professor stiffen and bristle in annoyance at what he must have considered a dilettante upstart’s challenge to his professorial authority, but he remained silent. I went on. I described to him the cases: the governor’s granddaughter being helped ashore by some huge creature when by all accounts she should have drowned; the Multi-Million Dollar Man, about to desecrate the shoreline and being grabbed by something in the lake and never seen or heard from again; a client of my firm, a young lady accused of murder, who insisted that the victim was flung up against a tree at a height of eight feet and killed. “How would you respond to assertions, Professor, that there is something—call it a monster—in the lake?”

  Atwood studied me with some hauteur for ten seconds before speaking. “I trust, sir, that you are not considering calling me as an expert witness in the hope of confirming the legitimacy of those anecdotes. My professional services are available solely in support of science, and naught else. To any lawyer as would query me about such tales on a witness stand in court, I must needs respond to in this manner: you may, if you wish, practise your sophist’s art of making the worse argument seem the better by multiplying together such baseless and unfounded incidents, that is to say, you may continue to practise law, and I, if I may, shall confine myself to proven facts derived from the science of marine biology.”

  Call me defeatist, but I deemed further interrogation of Professor Atwood futile.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The winter that crept upon us, nearly unnoticed while we fretted about the case, settled in as an unusually frigid, relatively windless one, with very little snow. Ponds and lakes were well frozen over by early January, and the delight of the city’s children and adults all month was to go skating and to play outdoor hockey on the natural rinks found everywhere.

  All the bodies of water I passed in the city one weekend—Quidi Vidi, Kent’s Pond, Kenny’s Pond, Burton’s Pond, Virginia Waters, Long Pond, Mundy Pond—were like nostalgia scenes from the cover of a New Yorker magazine: hundreds of young and grown-up bodies twirled or glissaded or raced across the ice, and makeshift hockey goals sprang up in the middle of it all. On a whim, I drove out Portugal Cove Road until I reached Twenty Mile Pond, which I hadn’t looked at since the freezing set in.

  The contrast with the other ponds and lakes was striking. The ice on the surface was nearly clear of snow and visible everywhere, with the occasional swirl kicked up now and then by a light gust of wind. But the lake was entirely empty. There wasn’t a soul on the large expanse of ice.

  A bright idea worthy of our Esme came into my mind: after dark I should go out on the ice and see if I could spot anything moving in the water below. A monster, say. Yes, Esme would probably take it into her head to do just that. She and I must share the same gene for “adventure.”

  That night, I told Jennifer I was going to the office for a couple of hours, but when I was about to get in my car, I went and opened the trunk instead, and looked in. There in a corner were the crampons I sometimes pulled over the soles of my boots for traction on road ice during winter walks. With their presence confirmed, the temptation became too great. I drove out to Twenty Mile Pond and parked my car beside it.

  A flashlight and camera phone stowed in my outer pockets, I put on the crampons and crept a few feet out on the ice. Many Newfoundlanders called the crampons “creepers.” A good descriptive name for them tonight. I hoped the ice was safe. Other natural ice surfaces on ponds had been measured and found to be at least five inches thick, sturdy enough to hold people, snowmobiles, and all-terrain vehicles. But of course this lake’s ice had not been measured for safety; nobody was supposed to be on it. I could only take it on faith that the springs that fed the lake were all cold, none warm. Edging my way out in the dark and concentrating as best I could on the condition of the ice, I heard constant sounds of groaning and loud cracking travelling across the lake. The night was overcast, with some blowing snow, so I thought I wouldn’t be very visible from the road. The black expanse of nothingness, the bitter temperature, the sudden, hostile squalls of wind—I felt so alone and lost, the sensation was physically painful. If I were to perceive something monstrous under the ice, I didn’t know if I would die of shock or welcome it as a friend.

  But apparently I wasn’t as alone and invisible and lost as I felt. There was a shout behind me. I turned and saw two cars stopped near mine; one of them was now shining its headlights on high beam right at me.

  A man called out: Was everything all right? I replied in the affirmative and crept back toward the shore, thinking that one of the glories of Newfoundland and Labrador was that everyone tried to look out for everyone else. But tonight the only thing this laudable tradition accomplished was to ruin my damned monster patrol.

  Back on shore, I told them my sweater had blown out there and I was trying to retrieve it, but it looked like I’d lost it forever. They listened to me and then glanced at each other as if to say that my sweater might not be the only thing I’d lost forever. Then one of them asked, “Aren’t you Mr. McGill? We met at a reception last year. My wife works in the same building as your wife.”

  The next evening at dinner, Jennifer asked me what I thought I’d been doing out in the middle of Windsor Lake the previous night, creeping about all by myself in the dark. Her neighbour in the office building had been accurately briefed by her husband.

  I shook my head and laughed a little. “I told you, I was heading for the office. The scenic route.”

  “Did you ever find your ghost sweater?”

  “I may have been mistaken about that. It may still be in the closet.”

  “How about your ghost monster? Any sightings?”

  “No, he’s still in the closet, too. I’m sorry, Jennifer, I was taken by a whim, and it was such a nice night for it. I should have told you, but I was trying to keep my lunacy from you a little while longer, if I could.”

  “I don’t know if it’s lunacy, Bill, but you do seem to be a bit obsessive about that lake and whatever you imagine is in it.”

  “Grasping at straws is what I’m doing.” A sigh burst out of me. “God, those poor silly little girls.”

  Jennifer got up and came around the table. She enfolded my head in her arms and kissed me. “I know,” she whispered, and kissed me again. “I know.”

  Molly suddenly materialized in the kitchen. Then I heard Matthew bouncing down over the stairs. They’d been late getting home because, after her diving practice, Molly had had to pick up her brother from his rehearsal for the class play: he was playing Nagg, the man in the garbage can in Endgame. She glanced at us now, feigning indifference as Jennifer withdrew her arms
from me, although she did say, “Not hard to know it’s only two weeks till Valentine’s Day.” She opened the oven door. “Ah, lasagna. Lamb, is it?”

  “Nothing but your favourites around these parts, Your Highness.”

  “My favourite is chicken,” said Matthew from the doorway.

  “Yeah, but you’re only the boy,” said Molly.

  “I really miss Esme around here. When is Aunt Maggie going in for therapy again?”

  “Chicken next time,” said Jennifer.

  Matthew went to the notepad by the phone, wrote on a piece of paper, tore it off, and stuck it on the fridge door under a magnet. “Note to self for English: Good definition of ‘forlorn hope’—chicken next time.”

  Molly had to smile, and Jennifer laughed. “Poor child. Promise me you’ll hide that when child welfare raids the place. How’s Nagg coming along?”

  “Great, I think. The drama coach says I take to a garbage can like a duck takes to water.”

  “He’s famous,” said Molly, “for spotting talent.”

  As they bantered, it crossed my mind that I hadn’t heard Molly coming down the stairs or walking through the hall before she strolled into the kitchen. I wondered if she’d been out there eavesdropping on the conversation between Jennifer and me. If she hadn’t been, then the way she and Esme duplicated my dangerous folly a few days later was a pretty huge coincidence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Jennifer had to drive to Clarenville for the weekend to visit her mother and father, who were both down with the flu. If she’d been home, she would have heard Molly sneaking out of the house at two-thirty Saturday morning. I never asked Matthew if he’d heard her, or had known what she was planning, because I didn’t want to force him, ever, into a future choice of having either to lie to me or to rat out his sister.

  As for myself, after a rough, nearly sleepless week dealing with the legal consequences of a safety crisis on a helicopter ferrying workers to an offshore oil rig, I was semi-comatose all Friday evening in front of the TV set and then zonked out all night in my bed. So, fortunately, nobody stopped Molly and Esme and their friends.

  The next evening, Molly invited Esme and two boys they knew to our house for pizza. She asked Matthew and me to join them. The boys, Craig and Dwayne, had been a year ahead of Esme and Molly at school and were now in their first year at Memorial University. Esme was equally friendly with both, just buddies apparently, but extra chemistry was obvious between Molly and Craig.

  He was tall and good-looking, heading for medical school, or so he hoped, and big in sports, especially volleyball. I realized this must have been the lad Jennifer had mentioned to me during the past fall, who had caused Molly to shriek in ecstasy over the phone to Esme because he had invited her to the Halloween dance at Memorial.

  The other boy, Dwayne, apparently just a sidekick, jumped into our conversation around the kitchen table, saying, apropos of nothing, that he lived with his mother in St. John’s, but on visits to his father in Blaketown, they often went ice fishing on Dildo Pond. Molly and Esme looked at him in satisfaction for his contribution, for some reason.

  “What an interesting name for a pond,” said Esme. “I wonder what else people do around there besides fishing?” She and Molly and the three boys laughed. I did, too, but less genuinely. And I shot the girls a bit of a look. The last thing I wanted Molly to do was to give an impression of fake-sophisticated looseness to Craig, her teenaged Romeo. He seemed a little too self-confident, a bit too full of himself, to suit me.

  Molly caught my look and said, “You can relax, Dad. Aside from the odd murder every now and then, we’re not totally degenerate yet.”

  They all cackled at that, accompanied by head shaking at the absurdities that life imposed. Dwayne said, “My father thinks that Dildo is from Italian for delight, diletto. It’s just as harmless, he says, as the name Heart’s Delight is, farther out Trinity Bay.”

  “Italian?” said Craig. “If he believes that, tell him I’m an agent for an honest Italian broker named Ponzi who’s got some great investments for sale.” They all laughed again, Molly most of all. She was right in love with this guy.

  After the pizza feast, Molly said they were going to play Scrabble. Who else wanted in? Matthew uttered the word Scrabble with a terrified look on his face and responded that, tragically, he’d already told his buddy he was going over to his house to watch the hockey game. Even to my antiquated way of thinking, Scrabble seemed to be an unusually conservative way for seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds of the opposite sex to be spending Saturday night.

  I told them there were a few things I had to do, too, and went to my den. The only thing that rang true to me about their get-together was when I heard them out there whispering at length, keeping from me in my geezer’s den the contents, no doubt naughty, of their plotting. Then Molly appeared in the den doorway. “Dad, have you got a minute to talk to us out in the kitchen?”

  “I certainly do, sweetheart.” I put down my file and went out.

  “Now don’t get mad,” she said, as I sat down at the table.

  “I’m not mad . . . yet.” I forced a smile. God alone knew what was coming. One quarter to one half of the foursome pregnant? More criminal activities? “But you do have me frightened out of my wits.”

  “Dad, the four of us snuck out last night—early this morning, rather—and drove out to Windsor Lake.” Then she and the others unfolded their story. They had slipped out of their respective homes and residences at 2:30 a.m., and Esme had picked the other three up. They arrived at Windsor Lake about three in the morning. They had selected that hour because vehicles would be scarce on the road. And they had consciously chosen last night because the forecast weather conditions seemed ideal. The moon was full and thick clouds were scudding past it so that, one minute, hardly anything was visible in the dark, and the next minute everything was brightly lit. All in all, with the dark intervals and the slight wind blowing some snow around, and the lack of traffic, they figured there was little risk of being seen.

  Dwayne, the Dildo Pond ice fisher, had an auger with him which he always used to test the thickness of ice on ponds. His expertise in this area, known to Craig, was the reason he’d been asked along on the adventure. He found that the ice on Windsor Lake was seven inches thick a few feet from shore, which was sufficient even for a car to drive on safely. I had to admire to myself the intelligent preparedness they had displayed, but I could hardly bear the cocky adolescent confidence with which they now described it.

  “That lake is spring-fed,” I growled. “There might well have been dangerous, thin places anywhere.”

  Molly looked at me in surprise. “Dad, we’re not idiots,” she said. “Dwayne knew what he was doing, and we also had a couple of lengths of board and some rope with us for safety in case any of us suddenly broke through the ice. You were out there the other night all by yourself with no precautions or security measures at all—nothing. And you didn’t even tell anyone you were doing it so we’d know where to go to look for the body.”

  “Yeah, but I’m an adult,” I muttered. “I’m allowed to act stupid on my own. You’re still minors in my care and so you have to ask for my mature consent to act stupid.”

  “If they’re going to try us as adults,” said Molly, “we’re going to act like stupid adults when we feel like it.”

  Esme looked down from Molly’s face with a smile. She always seemed to appreciate her cousin’s comebacks.

  “Point made,” I murmured. “Go on.”

  “I didn’t mean to be rude, Dad. But just wait till you hear what we saw.”

  They’d had flashlights but they didn’t use them. They inched along in the dark when the moon was covered and lay down flat to hide from any observers when the moon shone bright. A few hundred feet out, when they were all lying on their bellies on the ice, Esme saw, directly
below her eyes under the clear, transparent ice, something that looked like a big dinner plate.

  She raised her head to get a better bead on the circular object, and she figured it measured about a foot in diameter. Nothing else was visible around it except black water. In the moonlight it looked green, with an inner black circle several inches wide. As she studied it, the circle startled her by moving. Suddenly it came to her: it was an eye, a huge green eye containing a large pupil, and it was staring right at her.

  She got slowly to her knees, shushed the others, and motioned them toward her. She leaned back as Craig approached with his cellphone, bent right over the object, and took a picture. The flash went off, and they all saw the disc beneath the ice jerk away and then vanish. They heard creaking and groaning from the ice, and everybody had the feeling that it heaved upwards slightly, as if it was expanding or contracting from a temperature change. They all clamoured to look at the picture. There it was. They couldn’t believe it. Craig had been able to capture the eye in his camera.

  Craig pulled out his cellphone and showed me the image. As I examined it, I asked if they had other copies stored elsewhere. Yes, Craig said, he’d saved it in his computer, and he’d sent email attachments to the other three.

  Their interpretation of the photo was more positive than mine, perhaps because they had actually seen the thing itself under the ice. For myself, I had to confess that the picture looked indefinite and ambiguous. If you weren’t told what it was supposed to be, you could only say, really, that there was something round under the ice.

  Craig had also taken a couple of distance shots of Dwayne and the two girls, three points of a triangle looking down at the ice between them. This was intended to show context and background for the object. But nothing was clearly visible under the ice in those pictures. In the close-up picture of the “eye,” no context or background had been captured around the object. It might have been a hubcap, or a Frisbee, or a reflection of the moon off the ice coloured by some effect from the water beneath. Or it might have been a gigantic eye.