Free The Deepest Water by Kate Wilhelm

watched as lakeside fires were put out, until only darkness remained. Bits of conversations she and Jud had had over the years flowed through her mind. When she remonstrated him for putting Joe Beardwell in his first novel, he had laughed, had gone to her worktable, a card table in those days, and had picked up her model of the Iceman. The story was about an old man who froze everything he got near, and who kept acquiring more and more property where the sun never shone, the frost never melted. Holding up the figure, Jud had scoffed. “And where did this come from?” It was a caricature of Herbert, but of course Herbert would never have recognized himself in the grotesque little figure.
    “An artist,” Jud had said once, “is a person who looks into things, not just at them.”
    He had looked into many things, through them, and had written about them. And his words were true. Joe Beardwell had not recognized himself in the novel, and in fact might never have really read it, just skimmed the surface enough to say he had read and enjoyed it.
    By the time she realized that Herbert was the Iceman, she had been trapped in a marriage with four children, and later she had been trapped by his need for her. People had believed her to be the dependent one, but that never had been true; he had depended on her for everything, and toward the end, the last six years, as his mind had slipped, his dependency had turned him into a son of a bitch. She thought that Jud was the only person who had ever suspected the truth about her long marriage, described again and again as the ideal, the standard for other couples to strive for. She drained her glass and set it down hard.
    Jud had written her and Herbert into his second novel, The Black Shore , and Felicia had recognized them. She had wept when she read it, felt anger, embarrassment, humiliation, and finally acceptance of the truth, and even a deeper love and respect for the one person who had seen through the façade of a contented couple, and had been honest enough to tell the truth. But did others come to that point?
    Then she was thinking of the new work, the novel he had been finishing when she last saw him. If his death had not been the result of an uncontrollable passion, or simple greed or even an overwhelming need for money, there was a third possibility, she thought then. Fear of exposure. He had seen into and through so many things, and had written about them truthfully. Was there a truth in the new novel that had driven someone to kill him in order to keep secret?
    She stood up shakily and groped for the light switch. If the key to his death was in the manuscript, the police would never find it, she thought bleakly. Herbert had looked at the little clay Iceman and said only, “Ugly little critter, isn’t he?” She never knew if Lawrence Frazier had recognized his wife’s death when it appeared in fiction. People saw what they expected to see, what they needed to see, no more than that.
    Then she wondered: was the manuscript still in the cabin? Was it intact?
    6
    For more than an hour neither Abby nor Lieutenant Caldwell said a word as he drove back toward Eugene. It had grown dark, and there was much less traffic now than there had been earlier, but it was still a dangerous road that required attention.
    Abby was thinking hard of the implications of someone’s entering Jud’s cabin during the night without being challenged by Spook. And obviously someone had done that. But how? She kept coming back to the question: how had he managed a boat in the dark? Where had he launched it, landed it afterward? Or she. Abby huddled in her jacket, freezing.
    “I understand you work in the museum,” Caldwell said finally. “Full time?”
    “No. Three mornings a week, usually until noon, occasionally a little later.”
    “You going to keep working now?”
    She had not even considered what she would do now. “I don’t know.” It was, practically speaking, a non-paying job; she