The Deepest Water by Kate Wilhelm Page A

trained them. They know his property.”
    Caldwell nodded. “Right. And the trail leads back to the road now?”
    “Yes. A couple hundred yards, but it’s like the rest of it, zigzags all the way.”
    “Let’s have a look.”
    She sighed and followed the trail, back and forth among trees, around rocks, over roots and blowdowns to the road. “See?” she said tiredly. They caught glimpses of Sal and Bear now and then, pacing them.
    “Okay,” Caldwell said then. “Wait here and I’ll bring the van.” He began to walk down the road.
    She hurried after him. “You can’t get it alone. Spook wouldn’t let you.”
    “Even after we’ve been together the way we’ve been?” he asked, looking surprised and a little offended.
    “Not even. Coop trained her, too. She knows her job is to guard the cabin, the rowboat, the van, me.”
    The lieutenant stopped moving and regarded her soberly. She realized the implication of what she had just said. But Spook had let someone enter Jud’s house, someone who had put her out, and closed the door on her, locked the dog door on her, someone who had killed Jud and left without being attacked. If she had attacked anyone there would have been signs; Coop would have seen signs, or the police investigators would have seen them.
    “Just how savage can she get?” Lieutenant Caldwell asked softly.
    Abby swallowed hard and shook her head. Spook was big and strong; she could get savage enough to frighten off a bear, or a cougar. No stranger would have dared to try to get past her.
    They started to walk again, not speaking now. At the van Spook whined softly. “I was going to say why don’t you drive,” Caldwell said, “but I think you’re too beat. I’ll do it.”
    Not just beat, she thought. Shaken, stunned, frightened… Something else, not just beat. It had been someone Jud had known, someone Spook had known well enough to let in without attacking.
    5
    Felicia Shaeffer had always thought of the basalt ledge out in the lake as the break until Jud wrote about it and called it Siren Rock; it had become that in her mind as well. Standing at the rear window of her cottage, she watched Abby row a man close to Siren Rock, then along the other side of the ledge, as if to demonstrate that there really were no good passages through, except the two narrow ones that only a suicide-bent fool would try to navigate after dark.
    Florence Halburtson had called to tell her Abby was coming with some more police officers, and she expected that now Abby would come through the break and deposit the policeman on the park side, let him question the people over here. But they didn’t come this way, and soon were out of sight again. They shouldn’t dawdle much longer, Felicia thought worriedly, or they would have to drive down that damned road in the dark, and while she didn’t care a fig about the police officers, she did not want Abby in a car coming down the mountain at night.
    She gazed about her cottage distractedly. When Herbert, her husband of forty-two years, died, she had completely remodeled the building. Walls had come out, a woodstove put in, a skylight cut into the ceiling, rugs and carpets junked, and good, washable vinyl put down, and then, finally, at sixty-nine years old, she had a real studio. That had been four years ago, and she loved her studio with a passion that had not diminished a bit. She had sold the big house in Eugene and bought a condo unit, big enough for one, she had told her four grown children. Her daughter Sara had suggested that perhaps she and her husband and three children could share the big house, so Felicia would not be lonely. She had no intention of having any of them move in on her, or to move in with any of them. Besides, she had her two beautiful dogs, Daisy and Mae, snow-white, curly-haired poodles, who had more sense than all her kids put together. She had never said that out loud, but she certainly had thought it. None of her children had come to the lake