Free Lizzie! by Maxine Kumin Page A

there I saw someone out on the very end of the jetty. At first I thought he was fishing. He didn’t move at all, so I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. With the tide coming in, I thought he’d wake up pretty soon or else he was going to get very wet.”
    â€œWas that a dead body? I bet it was.”
    â€œHold on, Lizzie. I’m getting to that. Well, I picked my way out there along the sandy strip between the rocks to see if I knew this guy and when I got there I saw his throat had been cut. The blood wasn’t running down him anymore but the whole front of him was the reddish brown of dried blood, so I knew he’d been dead for a while.”
    He paused for a moment. “Thing was, I had my flashlight but I’d forgotten my cell phone.” He turned to Teresa and said, “I knew you’d raise holy Toledo with me for forgetting it. You bought it for me to take whenever I went walking alone. I didn’t see any lights on in any of the cottages and I didn’t want to terrify anybody by pounding on their door. I know, I could have come around the side of your cottage and rapped on the window and woken you up, but there’s something about finding a dead body and knowing it was a gruesome murder that gets me deep down. It’s not my first murder, it’s not even the first one involving a knife—the last one in California was a young woman who was killed in almost exactly the same way. It’s an ugly discovery, it’s something about knowing you were too late to stop all the blood loss; no, I couldn’t barge in. I needed to walk it off. And even if I did wake some family up, after I used their phone to call 911 I’d have to wait around for the squad car to show up and then go back with them to the body and answer a hundred questions—and me barefoot! That would not look professional.”
    He put his arm around Teresa. “By then you’d have called out the National Guard to look for me. So I walked back to call the police from our apartment and work it through my brain and also get some shoes on.”
    â€œAnd then what happened?” I asked him. “Did they take the body away on a stretcher? Did they call the—is it the coroner? What do you call the guy who determines the cause of death?”
    â€œLizzie, where did you learn that language?” Digger asked.
    â€œIt’s in the newspaper whenever there’s been a mysterious death.”
    â€œI give up,” he said. “You’re right. It’s called the medical examiner.”
    â€œYes, the medical examiner. And did they dust the body for fingerprints? How about on the jetty, did you find any clues?”
    â€œLizzie’s into reading detective stories,” my mom said. She said it like she was apologizing for me, so I tried not to ask anything after that.
    Digger went on to tell us that there was no identification on the body. “No wallet or keys, but maybe they’ll find some labels in his sweatpants and sweatshirt. He was wearing a sort of ratty suit jacket and it had an L.L. Bean label but from the looks of him, he probably got it at a Goodwill store.”
    â€œYou didn’t find a single clue?” I couldn’t help asking. I was disappointed.
    â€œThe one item that might provide a clue though, was a silver flask in one pocket.”
    â€œA silver flask just for water?”
    Digger smiled. “No, mi amor , for liquor.”
    â€œBut it’ll probably have fingerprints on it, don’t you think?”
    â€œPossibly. But if the victim hasn’t ever been arrested his fingerprints won’t be on file.”
    â€œMaybe you can figure out where he bought it.”
    â€œMaybe, my little detective. I know one detail about the killer that may prove useful going forward.”
    â€œYou do? What is it? Tell us, Digger.”
    â€œI’ll tell you but I don’t want this to be known outside this room until I