one

Francine McNamara loitered by the pool alone. It was around midnight, pitch black, and though the Summer Ridge Bridge Club had gathered here to skinny-dip, no one was close to being wet. In fact, she was the only one close to the pool.

Seventy years old and we’re all still too wrapped up in our body images to slip off our robes and get in the water, she thought. But she supposed she was just as guilty. Though she exercised regularly and kept herself in good shape, she wondered if she wouldn’t look better with a few less pounds. It’s the media.

Fellow club members Alice, Joy, Mary Ruth, and best friend Charlotte had been here since early in the evening. Francine had almost convinced herself to be the first one to skinny-dip when Mary Ruth approached her. Of all the Bridge Club members, Mary Ruth was the one who most needed to lose weight. Her plump body was wrapped in an extra-large pink cotton robe and its hem bunched on the surface of the pool deck.

“Something smells wrong,” she announced. She breathed in deeply with her discriminating nose, analyzing the odor through the filter of her many decades as a chef. Then she wrinkled in distaste. “It’s a rotten smell, but I can’t pinpoint it.”

Francine raised an eyebrow. She viewed this charade as yet another attempt to divert the five-member club—Mary Ruth regularly stepped in when a substitute player was needed—from their intended purpose. They had carefully chosen this warm July night to help Joy McQueen check item #10 (Go Skinny-Dipping) off her bucket list.

Francine gave a half-hearted sniff. “Sorry, I don’t smell it. Have you checked with Alice to see if she sprayed anything? She seemed to be obsessed with the idea that mosquitos carrying the West Nile virus will show up.”

“I think she’s more obsessed with the threat of being discovered. I don’t see how, though, not on Alice’s watch. She seems to have thought of everything to make it as dark as possible.”

That was certainly true. Alice had been nervous about skinny-dipping from the start. Though her house was the only one with a pool and she’d agreed to host the event, she’d insisted on waiting until her husband was away at a real estate convention. She’d also made sure there were no outside lights. The women had to navigate by a trail of citronella candles spaced around the pool deck. There were lights within the pool, but those only gave a soft, eerie blue glow to the water.

Alice, clad in an expensive robe pulled tight around her body in an effort to look thinner, ferried replacement candles around the large pool. The taut robe wasn’t working for her, Francine thought. Another victim of the perfect body-obsessed media.

Joy trailed Alice, collecting candles that were spent. Joy was the irrepressible president of their Bridge Club. Though she was thin as a stick, Joy didn’t appear to be any readier than anyone else to disrobe. Tonight she was enveloped in a powder-blue terry cloth robe heavy enough to be used in winter. She complained of being cold despite the fact it was the warmest night they’d had all summer. Francine wasn’t sure what Joy’s insecurities were, but the closest she’d come to the pool had been an hour ago when she was referencing her bucket list, accidently caught it on fire with Alice’s propane lighter, and raced to the pool’s edge holding it aloft, saying “Ow, ow, ow!” She’d let the list go and it caught the wind, which sent it back toward her. Joy fled from the pursuing paper, producing squeals of laughter quickly hushed up by Alice so as not to attract any undue attention.

Realistically, Francine knew the only hope of getting the party back on track was her usually reliable pal Charlotte. She glanced around, looking for the tightly curled silver wig Charlotte wore. She spotted her short friend off in the distance studying the stars like there might be an astronomy test tomorrow.

“What do you think, Charlotte?” Francine called as quietly as she could. “Do you have any idea what Mary Ruth is smelling?” She touched her nose and made a shallow sniff to demonstrate.

Charlotte heard and walked over using her cane. “Well, it’s not me.” She turned her chubby butt toward them as she said, “My system’s been behaving itself tonight.”

Mary Ruth chuckled. “That’s not what I smell, although the odor does have a faint outhouse bouquet to it.” She checked to see her bathrobe was securely fastened before she toddled a few steps in the direction of the house. Detecting nothing, she went the other way, shuffling past Charlotte out of the candlelight toward the darkness by the pool shed. “It’s stronger over here.”

“I haven’t even been over there …” Charlotte began, a little testy.

Francine interrupted. “It’s the citronella,” she said, while simultaneously thinking it was likely the wine, of which they’d all had one too many glasses over the course of the evening.

Charlotte mimicked Mary Ruth’s sniffing process. “No, she’s onto something. There may be enough candles to make this place look like a nighttime prayer walk, but citronella’s not that potent. If it were, the mosquitoes would have packed up and fled Brownsburg like vampires fleeing from garlic, and we know that didn’t happen.” She scratched her legs. “I’m getting bit on my thighs. I didn’t think mosquitos fancied cottage cheese,” she said, aiming the comment toward Alice. She gave Francine a mischievous smile.

Alice heard the criticism. She stopped her dalliance among the candles and moved toward the group. As she reached the pool, its blue glow caught the edges of the large crucifix hanging from her neck, making it glint. With the robe wrapped practically to her neck, Alice almost resembled a nun, albeit one who didn’t practice fasting. She swept her arm over the twinkling candles. “Perhaps you’d rather I replace these with smelly candles that attract insects.”

“At least it would cover whatever that smell is Mary Ruth has detected,” Charlotte said.

Francine needed to nip this in the bud. “You can all stand around and play guess-the-odor,” she said, “but I’m getting in.” She walked back toward the shallow end of the pool, disrobing as she went. She threw the robe over a nearby deck chair. Naked except for the large, black-framed bifocals she couldn’t see without, she waded into the pool.

The women all tittered in excitement. They stared at Francine.

She tried hard not to feel conspicuous. She moved farther into the water so it covered her body up to her shoulders. “Mary Ruth just has an overly sensitive nose,” she said, trying to divert their attention with the earlier topic of conversation. “It’s probably the chlorine.”

The atmosphere was charged now, the woman uncertain whether to follow Francine’s lead. “Maybe you were just a nurse too long,” Mary Ruth stammered. “Maybe your nose has become impervious to bad odors.”

“Move away from the pool shed and I bet you don’t notice it any more. Better yet, join me in the pool. The water’s warm!”

“That’s good to hear,” said Charlotte. “I sure wouldn’t want to go skinny-dipping if it were freezing. Then we’d be the Frigid Ridge Bridge Club.”

Joy erupted in nervous laughter. “You’ve been waiting all night to use that line, haven’t you?”

“I was beginning to think no one would set me up.”

Francine decided to call Joy out. “It’s your turn to follow me in, Joy. This party was set up for you.”

Joy hesitantly dipped a toe in, still clutching the robe around her. “Speaking of chlorine, has anyone put any in this pool recently?” She asked it a little too loudly, prompting a “shhh” from the rest of the women.

Mary Ruth rushed over and assumed a bent-over position, examining the water. Great, Francine thought, just what we need. Our resident germaphobe to take up the cause.

Alice scurried next to her. She squinted at the water, looking for anything that might have caused the comment. “Well, no, I kind of forgot about the chemicals. Larry usually does that. But I know he put them in the last time we used the pool about a week ago.”

“A week!” Mary Ruth continued. “You know how I am about germs! Do you know what could be living in this pool after a week without a chlorine shock?”

“No,” Alice said, offended. “Do you?”

“Well, not exactly. Algae, I think. But I’m sure it’s awful. Makes me not want to get in the pool.”

Joy took this as a way out. She backed up toward the pool shed instead of getting in the pool. “Perhaps we should get the chlorine out now, although we’d need a little more light back here.”

Mary Ruth followed Joy, stepping carefully so as not to land on something she couldn’t see, got within two feet of the shed, and stopped. “There’s that smell again. Maybe a raccoon died in there. I once had a raccoon die in the crawl space under my kitchen. I took the trash out three days in a row before I figured what the smell was. I’ll never forget it.”

Joy wrinkled her nose. “Ewww. Did you clear it out yourself ?”

“For heaven’s sake, no. You hire people for that. If there’s something dead in there, we need to know so Alice can have it removed. Think of all the germs teeming inside a rotting animal.” She fumbled with the door latch.

Francine swished the warm water over her shoulders, thinking this may not be headed to a happy conclusion. Mary Ruth successfully conquered the latch and the pool shed’s door flew open.

Something large and stiff thumped onto the concrete with a sickening thud.

The women began to talk excitedly at once.

“What was that?” Joy asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t look.” Mary Ruth’s hand was over her eyes, but there was a small gap between two of her fingers where she was peeping. “Whatever it is was, was propped up against the door. Now my foot is almost touching it.”

Joy crept a little closer. “Can you make it out?”

“Not as dark as it is.”

“It’s not my fault something got locked in there,” said Alice. “I’m not responsible.”

“It sounded bigger than a raccoon,” Charlotte observed.

“I’m pretty sure it is,” said Mary Ruth. “I’m poking it with my toe and it’s not moving.”

“Is it furry like a raccoon?”

“No, it’s stiff and kind of humanlike. And it smells like a … like a porta-potty. Can you not smell that from there?”

This is surreal, Francine thought. She had a bad feeling about where this was going, yet her friends maintained an intellectual curiosity as though they were playing Twenty Questions.

Francine swam a quick few overhand strokes to the edge of the pool. She gripped the ladder rails and climbed out. The air was cool and it chilled her. She glanced for her robe and remembered she’d left it at the shallow end. She grabbed one of Alice’s large fluffy pool towels and covered herself as best she could. As she scrambled to the spot Mary Ruth was backing away from, she tried hard not to breathe in the odor she recognized from her days as a nurse. She squinted, trying to be certain it was what she thought it was—a man-sized thing that flopped out of the shed and landed on its side.

Mary Ruth, normally short of breath, was now gasping. “Don’t touch it, Francine.”

But Francine felt she had to do something. She couldn’t imagine it was anything other than a body. Propped up by a stiff arm, it faced away from her. She braced herself for what she might see, then nudged it with her toe. The body teetered over onto its back. She bent over and was pretty sure she could make out a face. A stiff, dead face. “Call 911. Quick!”

Alice made the sign of the cross. She clutched her satin robe and ran for the house.

Joy grabbed a citronella candle and rushed over. “What is it?”

Though she was afraid the group would plunge into hysteria, Francine answered honestly: “A dead body.”

Remarkably, the intellectual calm held. “Really?” Joy used the candle to get a closer look at the head. “Are you sure it’s dead? Shouldn’t you try something, like CPR?”

“No, I’m confident he’s dead. Likely a day or so.”

“I’ll go look for a flashlight.” She handed the candle to Francine and hurried off after Alice.

Charlotte hobbled toward them, excited by the mention of a dead body. She leaned over it. “He certainly looks dead.”

Francine flashed back to the last time Charlotte had said that to her, an incident that had become legendary in their hometown of Brownsburg—which was not too difficult considering the Indianapolis suburb had a population of just over 20,000 and the article had appeared in the Indianapolis Star. The two of them had visited Charlotte’s uncle’s house across from the Indianapolis 500 racetrack, which is located in the Town of Speedway. They found him deceased, supposedly of a heart attack. Charlotte believed it was murder and proceeded to prove it, nearly on her own. Since she didn’t feel she’d tied it all together neatly, she refused to count it against her #1 bucket list item, (Solve a Murder Mystery), even though Francine insisted she should. Charlotte spoke in her know-it-all tone. “You’re practically right over him, Francine. Tell me everything you observe about the body.”

Francine felt a knot growing in her stomach, but she knew better than to put this off. “Well, he’s hairy, so I think we can safely say he’s a man. Plus, he’s wearing boxer shorts. And he’s stiff, so he’s still in a state of rigor mortis. What more do you really need to know?”

“Is he short or tall? Wounded? Is there blood anywhere?”

Francine moved the candle over him, looking for the answers. “He’s short. Kind of skinny. I don’t think there’s any blood.” She let out the breath she was holding and backed away, waving a hand in front of her nose.

“Shouldn’t we cover the body or something?” asked Mary Ruth, carrying a pool towel she’d picked up on the way back over.

Charlotte straightened up and gave her a withering glance. “Of course not. We should have left it undisturbed until the police got here. Technically, Francine shouldn’t even have flopped him over.”

“I didn’t know for sure he was dead until I could get a good look at him!”

“Don’t get defensive, Francine. I’m just saying …”

Joy returned with a flashlight at that moment but stopped several feet short of the body. She tried to shine a light on it, but her hand shook so badly it was like watching a TV game show where a spotlight dances over the audience before they call up a contestant.

Mary Ruth snatched the flashlight. She widened her stance so she could bend over closer to the body. She shined the light into dead man’s face. “Oh, my God! I know who that is. That’s Friederich Guttmann!”

Charlotte leaned over the body again. “Really? Who’s Friederich Guttmann?”

“He’s a race car mechanic.”

Alice came running out of the house waving a portable phone. She stopped short when she saw the dead face revealed by the flashlight. She made the sign of the cross again. “That’s Friederich Guttmann.”

“Does everyone know who this guy is except me?” asked Charlotte.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Francine admitted. “What was it you were going to say, Alice?”

“Oh. Dispatch is sending an ambulance and a squad car. They should be here any minute.”

Jostled by all the activity, Alice’s robe fell open. The women stared at her nude body underneath. Then they stared at each other.

Mary Ruth looked under her robe and screamed. Then they all screamed.

“Keep it down out there. It’s twelve fifteen in the morning,” came a shout from next door. Francine recognized the disapproving voice of Darla Baggesen, the nosy homeowners’ association president who lived beside Alice. This isn’t good, she thought.

She scurried to find her robe. Everyone fell in behind her like they were the Keystone Cops.

At least they’re not screaming any more.

“We need to get our stories straight about what we’re doing out here in the pool this late at night,” said Mary Ruth.

“Never mind that,” Alice said. “What am I going to tell the police when they ask me what a dead body is doing in my shed?”

“Decomposing,” suggested Charlotte.

“We’re going to tell the police we were swimming. Nothing more,” Alice insisted.

Francine shook her head. “We can try to avoid the skinny-dipping part, but my guess is it’ll come out somehow. I think we should tell the whole truth from the beginning. Otherwise we’ll get ourselves in trouble.”

Mary Ruth gasped. “No, no skinny-dipping. We just went for a midnight swim. Everyone agree?”

“Don’t count on my silence,” said Joy. “This’ll land us on the front page of the Indianapolis Star. Number six on my list.” (Be on Front Page of Major Metropolitan Newspaper.)

Squabbling over what to tell the police, the women scrambled into the house.