Potter didn’t have many years left, and he’d spend them alone.
On Saturday afternoon, Potter collected his fishing gear and headed out to the sewage plant. The plant was on the river south of Trippton, and he’d been told any number of times that the water coming out of the effluent canal was clean enough to drink.
He was willing to believe that insofar as catfishing wasconcerned. He stopped at the Piggly Wiggly for a tub of chicken livers to use as bait and drove out to the plant.
There’d been a heavy snowstorm on Thursday night, followed by light but persistent snow all day Friday and Saturday morning. The sewage plant’s parking lot had been plowed clean, as he’d hoped, and he parked near the gate. He got his gear out of the back of the truck, pulled on his Sorel’s, his insulated overalls, and a parka. Years before, he’d epoxied a cheap thermometer to the back hatch of his camper. He peered at it now: five degrees above zero. He went back into the truck, found a face mask, and stuck it in his pocket in case it gotreallycold.
Headed downriver, a tough trek for an old guy, carrying poles with one hand and a plastic fishing bucket with a tackle box inside it with the other.
There was normally a walked-in path through the snow, but he was breaking trail now. He could see where the path was but not the individual ruts and rocks that littered it. He nearly fell twice, which he wanted to avoid at his age because getting back up was so difficult. He took fifteen minutes to make the four hundred yards down to where the warm effluent stream cut into the river’s ice, leaving an oblong pool of open, steaming water.
Potter was by himself. Too cold for fair-weather fishermen. Workers at the local tree service, who liked to fish, had set up a dozen cutoff cottonwood stumps around the outflow as chairs. Potter brushed the snow off one of them and sat down to bait his hooks.
That’s when he noticed the burgundy-colored cloth floating slowly in a wide circle around in the open water. The cloth caught the eye because... it was the size and shape of a body.
A body?
He kept looking, but the shape was partly submerged, and what he could see was mostly bumps of fabric, now pink against the black water.
Was that asleeve?
Potter watched for a minute, then looked around. No help nearby. He hadn’t expected any, but he had looked anyway.
A body?
He swallowed once or twice, opened his tackle box, and found a treble-hooked bucktail. He clipped it on, hands trembling with cold and foreboding, cast and watched the bucktail fall in the open water on the other side of whatever it was. He reeled in the lure carefully until the bucktail hit the floating fabric. He set the hook and towed the thing over to his shore. There was weight to it. A lot of weight.
The closer it got, the more it looked like a body.
He got it right up to the narrow rim of ice around the open area, reached out with a bare hand, caught a bare foot, and dragged the body up on the rim of ice.
“Oh, jeez,” he muttered. He was afraid, literally shaking in his boots, his hands trembling so violently that he dropped his fishing rod. He rolled the body over to look at the face.
His hook had gone into the woman’s cheek, a couple inches below her eye. He didn’t try to remove it. He simply gawked...
Then, “Gina Hemming? Gina Hemming?”
Horrified, he turned and shouted into the winter’s silence, “Help! Help me!”
No response. There wouldn’t be one, he knew. He stepped away from the body, couldn’t help looking back, and looking again, and again, as he broke into a slow, stumbling old man’s run back to the sewage plant...
THREEVirgil Flowers sat uncomfortably hunched over in a camouflaged blind on the banks of the frozen Mississippi, roughly a hundred miles, as the crow flies, north of the Trippton sewage plant. He was wrapped from his chest to his stocking feet in a heavyweight sleeping bag, the lens of his Nikon D810 digital camera peeking out through the blind’s front screen. His boots sat next to him, stuffed with air-activated hand warmers.
Light snow drifted over the riverscape fronting the tent, while to his left, a few hundred yards away, the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant pumped huge volumes of steam into the bitterly cold winter air. Virgil wasn’t sure whether the snow was natural or condensed from the steam.
He’d been in the blind for two hours, and though he was wearing a parka, his lack of movement let the January chill seep into his shoulders and down his spine. He’d brought the sleeping bag to deal with that problem, and when he’d begun to lose feeling in his butt, he’d taken off his boots and pulled on the bag. Overhead, his breath was condensing into ice crystals on the inside of the tent.
Virgil was a tall man, thin, with country singer blond hair and cool blue eyes. An agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, he was in the final two days of a weeklong winter vacation, which he was using in an effort to get photos of an owl.
As a part-time outdoor writer, Virgil liked all the Minnesota seasons; the best months were the lush August days and the brilliant blue days of February. There was hunting in the fall and spring, fishing almost year-round; and he liked to walk, to simply get out and look at the place he lived.
A birder friend had mentioned seeing a great horned owl fishing over the open water south of the nuclear plant, which they weren’t supposed to do. Great horned owls ate rabbits, not fish. The birder said the owl had been around since a big cold front had come through in mid-December, fishing the whole time.
Virgil wasn’t that much of an owl fancier, but he’d made some inquiries, andWing & Talon, a magazine focused on raptors, had guaranteed a thousand dollars for good photos of a great horned owl taking a fish, with a short accompanying article.
—
At three o’clock on this sunny afternoon, Virgil still had good light, but it’d be fading quickly over the next hour and a half. He wanted to be out of the blind before sunset, which came at 4:48. Despite an air temperature of minus three degrees, the river in front of him was open, with wisps of steam rising up like cartoon ghosts. The heat came from the nuclear plant’s cooling towers, which used cold water to keep the nuke from turning into a fiery hell pit of radiation and doom. From the cooling towers, the warm water flowed through canals and a couple of ponds and into the river.
