Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Hanging up, Nash left his hand on the receiver and thought about Stella. She was from a small town in Georgia and had come to Los Angeles with her husband to work for Pacific Telephone when they were both nineteen. Before long, Stella was pregnant, and her husband was out partying every night, drinking and smoking stuff with his buddies from work. Stella lost the baby and ultimately left her husband. On her own for five years, she had been seeing Nash for a year, seriously for half that time. He was fourteen years older than she, but Stella didn’t seem to mind. Never one to be totally at ease around women, Nash felt he had found a comfortable niche with Stella. He liked everything about her, from the naturally unrestrained drawl of her speech, to the spontaneous humor of her personality, to the abundance of her healthy body and uninhibited libido. And she liked him because all of his excesses were practiced in private, with her. That was all Stella required of a man. Practice gluttony, drunkenness, sexual perversion, whatever — just do it at home with me, sugar.

That suited Jack Nash just fine. Maybe, he thought, after half a dozen false starts over the years, he had found a woman to keep.

While his hand was still on the receiver, Nash’s phone rang. “Jack Nash,” he answered.

“You still here?” Sam Spear asked incisively.

“Just leaving, Sam,” Nash answered. He hung up and left.

Nash flew to Reno, rented a car, and started driving north. He had fifty miles of decent scenery and good highway up to and around the bottom shore of Pyramid Lake, then began a hundred miles of steadily worsening blacktop that took him through dry flats, lava beds, and alkali prairies that looked like moonscapes. After five hours, he reached the stark foothills of the Granite Range and began a slow, steady climb on narrow, snaky roads from four thousand feet up to sixty-seven hundred. There he found high, green meadows, thick pine forests, and crystal streams of clear, cold water. When he rounded a bend and pulled into the little mountain town of Cascade, just before sunset, he felt like he was driving into a picture postcard, it was that pretty.

An attendant at the town’s one service station directed him to the sheriff’s office. It was a compact brick building with a public room in front, two jail cells in back, and a small private office off to one side for the sheriff, a ruddy outdoors-looking man about Nash’s age.

“Sheriff Dan Bosey?” Nash asked, sticking his head in the door. “I’m Jack Nash, claims investigator for California All-Risk Liability Company in Los Angeles. I believe you spoke on the phone with Sam Spear, our director of claims.”

“Sure did,” Bosey said, rising. “Come on in.” He extended his hand. “Like some coffee?”

“Sure would.” Nash shook hands. “Pretty little town you have here.”

“Whole country’s pretty up here on the mountain,” said Bosey with a smile. “It’s getting to it that’s not so pretty.” He poured Nash a cup of coffee from an old-fashioned metal pot on a hotplate in the corner. “Sugar’s there. No cream, sorry.”

“Black’s fine.” Nash sat. “Has the plane been found yet?”

“Nope. Not likely to be, either. I told your boss first time I talked to him not to get his hopes up. Look here.” He handed Nash an eight-by-ten plat diagram showing a cutaway side view of Granite Peak, the mountain they were on, and Ghost Lake, which lay in its center at the top. “Elevation here is sixty-seven hundred and twenty-two feet. Ghost Lake is four miles wide, twelve miles long, and fourteen hundred and twenty feet deep — and it’s a spreader lake. That means that it’s bigger at the bottom than it is at the top. The walls of the lake bed stay pretty much the same nearly all the way down: about four-by-twelve miles, just like at the top. But at the bottom, the bed spreads out just like the mountain does and expands to something like eight-by-twenty miles, with a depth of maybe thirty feet. Just picture a huge mountain cavern down there, only it’s filled with water. Anything sinking vertically to the bottom then starts floating off in some horizontal direction in the surrounding cavern. It could go anywhere the water movement takes it, for miles, before it settles. Or, it might not settle at all; it might just keep moving until it rots away to nothing.”

“So you don’t think the diving operation will be successful?” Nash asked. Bosey shook his head.

“In the fifty-eight years since the town was incorporated back in 1941, which was when we started keeping official records, there’s been six swimmers, four fishermen, and nine boaters lost in Ghost Lake, along with five boats. Not one body and not one boat has ever been brought up. Only thing we ever find is surface debris, pieces that broke off of something, or articles of clothing, like a shoe. Believe me, Mr. Nash, when something or somebody goes down in Ghost Lake, it stays down. It can’t be found, and it can’t be brought up.”