FrostLine by Justin Scott Page A

the best sense, and a very light armful at that. And an armful of intimate memories. I scooped her up easily and walked her back to Tim. Anyone with half a brain would have recognized lovers. But the vanished lake still had everyone’s attention. I handed her up to him. Tim’s a fair-size guy, but she looked heavy in his arms.
    â€œWhere you going?” they asked.
    â€œSaw something. I’ll be right back.”
    The wind carried the approaching howl of Trooper Moody’s siren. I forged back through the mud that had spilled from the lake, searching for the funny shape that had caught my eye just before Vicky cut her foot. I spotted it again, a muddy root or tree branch with a crook in it that made it look like a man’s boot.
    Closer, I saw why. It was a man’s boot, a good-looking cowboy boot, the outlines of the tooling showing through a skim of mud. It was attached to a leg. I tugged. The leg came too easily. Then I saw a hand in a deerskin glove eight or ten feet away, and I realized this was going to be a lot worse than it looked.

Chapter 8
    I staggered back, frantic to look away. Green trees, blue heavens, puzzled friends lurching around the lawn. Anything that wasn’t the horror scattered at my feet.
    High on the horizon rose the rim of the Butler farm. Above it, silhouetted against the sharp sky, I saw Mr. Butler standing on his Farmall, watching. He was far away, but the sun shone brightly on the red tractor and the flicker of his windblown hair.
    If I’d taken King’s peacemaking assignment more seriously, if I’d gone back to Mr. Butler one more time, could I have prevented this?
    The state police siren got shrill.
    I wished I knew a better candidate among the fifty or so people staring at the mud to tell the man that his son was dead. I forced another stomach-wrenching look. Enough details might keep him from coming down to see for himself.
    The spillway had cracked like eggshells. Some of the pieces had burnt edges. I could guess the center of the blast by the re-bars broken as if something very large had snapped the steel in its jaws. But all I could see of Dicky was that one booted leg and his gloved hand. God knew where the rest of him was: deep in mud, or sluiced downstream in the water path.
    Far off I heard the exuberant horns of Newbury’s fire trucks—young men and women exulting on powerful machines—and did not envy the volunteers their search.
    Ollie arrived first. His big silver-gray Ford swung around the house, bounced down the lawn, headlights flashing, siren whooping drunks out of his way.
    I slogged out of the mud, trying to step in the tracks I’d left coming in, sat on the grass beside a puddle, splashed the mud off my feet, and put on my shoes and socks. My hands were shaking and I felt sick.
    Ollie came storming over just as I stood up.
    â€œWhat were you doing in there?”
    â€œDicky Butler’s dead.”
    For a second the tension went out of the state trooper. His broad shoulders sagged and the anger that was the perpetual foundation for the structure of his face melted away, leaving it smooth and almost benign. Bye-bye false arrest suit.
    â€œYou sure?”
    â€œBlown apart.”
    â€œYou touch anything?”
    â€œHis boot.”
    â€œDon’t you know better than to keep your paws off a crime scene?”
    I repeated the phrase that had provoked Ollie to hit Dicky with his Mag light and walked away. People had fallen silent, realizing something was terribly wrong. Vicky limped up to me. “What happened?”
    â€œDicky Butler blew himself up.”
    â€œOh, my God.”
    â€œI gotta tell Mr. Butler.” I eyed the field and the woods beyond, scouting a route to the Butler farm, dreading arrival.
    â€œDo you want me to come with you?”
    She had not grown up in Newbury, and I asked, “How well do you know him?”
    â€œHe came in to talk about his taxes.”
    â€œBetter not.