THE FLOOD AND THE FREEZER

Note: When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, I read that the two major American cities most vulnerable to flooding were New Orleans and my hometown of Sacramento, California. This past January, my wife and I happened to be enjoying a trip to New Orleans when heavy (but not catastrophic) flooding hit the Sacramento region. On our flight back to northern California, we looked down and saw a lot of rivers that had swollen over their banks and flooded various fields and housing tracts. That’s when the idea for this story came to me. My short crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere. But this is the first piece of it I’ve written in years, and the length makes it a difficult fit for the few remaining magazines devoted to crime fiction. So I am offering it to you here. Enjoy!

THE FLOOD AND THE FREEZER

The TV weathermen had all sorts of apocalyptic terms for it: “atmospheric river,” “bomb cyclone,” “Pineapple Express,” and so forth. But for Jamie Breyer, the torrential rains that had been falling on Sacramento for a week now were more like manna from heaven.

A flood warning had been issued days earlier. Nearly everyone in Jamie’s neighborhood had temporarily abandoned their homes. Most of them had gone to stay with relatives who lived on higher ground. The levies that kept Jamie’s neighborhood, known as Curtis Park, from flooding, were dangerously close to being breached, and fissures were opening up in the earthen structures faster than the public-works crews could repair them. When those levies gave way – and it was, indeed, now a matter of “when” rather than “if” – ten feet of water would roll through Jamie’s neighborhood, pushing everything – everything not bolted down, that is – west towards the Sacramento River.

Jamie wasn’t concerned about surviving the flood. His one-story house was nearly seventeen feet tall. It was built in 1935 of solid materials and had withstood almost a century’s worth of bad weather, including a few minor floods. The house was designed in an architectural genre known as “pueblo style.” It looked vaguely like a small Mexican hacienda. The structure covered 1,235 square feet of space and had a flat roof that could be accessed from the small attic (more like an overhead crawlspace, since the floor and the roof were less than four feet apart). Even in a worse-case-scenario flood, neither the attic nor the roof of Jamie’s house would be affected by the floodwaters. He had stockpiled the attic with essentials: food, water and other potables, toilet paper, a bucket that could double as a toilet, medicines, etc. Jamie was almost completely ready for the deluge to come sweeping through his neighborhood. Now all he had to do was prepare the dead body in his garage for its voyage towards the Sacramento River and beyond.

It happened six years ago when he and Valerie were still married. Valerie had flown off to an old high-school friend’s wedding in New Orleans. Jamie had just gotten his job as a baker at Raley’s, a Sacramento supermarket. He hadn’t earned any vacation time yet, so he couldn’t go to the wedding. Not that he minded. In fact, he was kind of glad for the six-day break from his marriage. He and Valerie had been married for eleven years by that time, and a sort of staleness had crept into their relationship. It wasn’t anything you could point your finger at. When he was younger, he assumed that marriages were destroyed by big things – infidelity, domestic abuse, contentious arguments about money or in-laws – but by the time he had been married for ten years he realized that – just as more houses are damaged by termites or mold than by fire or falling trees – marriages were more often undermined by things left unsaid and undone than by things said and done. He and Valerie were in that phase of their marriage. They didn’t fight much at all, but that was because they barely communicated with each other on anything other than a practical level (“Is tomorrow a recycling day?” “Where’s the TV remote?” “Don’t forget that the plumber is coming this afternoon at three.”)

Valerie had been in New Orleans for two days when Jamie decided he’d like to go to the Fox and Goose and watch the 49er game while drinking a few beers. The place was only about a quarter full and nobody seemed to be paying much attention to the game, which had turned into a bit of a puntfest. That’s when a slender woman, about thirty-years-old and wearing a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap out of which her short blonde ponytail arced, sat down at the bar a few stools away from him. She watched long enough to see three additional punts. Finally she turned to Jamie and said, “They need to change the rules.”

“Huh?” he said.

“About punting,” she said. “Too much of it just ruins the game.”

He shrugged. “What can they do about it? Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to go for it on fourth down.”

“They could make it illegal to punt the ball once the offensive team crosses its own forty-yard line. Or they could allow each team only four punts per game, just like they allow them only three time outs per half. Maybe that rule could be waived if a team is facing a fourth down and needs more than ten yards for a first.”

Jamie was impressed. This woman knew her football. “I like it,” he said.

“Which one?” she asked.

“Four punts per game,” he said. “Plus one more if it goes into overtime.”

“No way,” she said. “Overtime is supposed to be fast and exciting. Punts should be outlawed entirely at the end of regulation.”

He laughed. “The problem is the coaches. Not enough of them have the guts to go for it on fourth down. Not even on fourth and short.”

“How about you?” she said.

“How about me what?” he said.

“Do you have the guts to go for it?” she said with a sly smile.

The sex was great, but afterwards Jamie felt nothing but an un-nameable dread. While Ellie lay sleeping beside him in his bed, Jamie lay awake and worried. What if Valerie and Angie had gotten into a heated argument down in New Orleans and Valerie had stormed out of the rehearsal dinner? Even now, she could be in a taxicab headed home from the Sacramento Airport. Of course, Jamie understood that the odds of Valerie storming out of her best friend’s destination-wedding celebration were exceedingly remote. And if it did happen, Valerie would surely call or text him to let him know that she was coming home early. Nonetheless, he felt a tightness in his chest, as if something horrible were about to happen. Even if Valerie never found out, the marriage was now irreparably damaged. It might survive, but Jamie worried that Valerie would somehow intuit that something had changed inside of him. And whether she did or not, he would always know that he had betrayed his wife in her very own bed. He couldn’t see any way of walking back from a screw-up like that. His guilt and despair kept him awake until nearly two a.m. After that he fell deeply asleep. Sometime around five a.m. he was briefly awakened by a crashing sound that came from somewhere outside. But his head was so groggy that he just ignored the sound and went almost instantly back to sleep.

When he awoke, Ellie was gone. Or, at least, she was no longer in his bed. Desperately, he hoped that she had simply called an Uber or a Lyft and gone back to her hotel room after realizing, as he had, that what they had done last night was a mistake and could never be repeated. He got up from the bed and put on some jeans and a tee shirt. His hopes were crushed when he entered the kitchen. Someone had made a fresh pot of coffee. Random cupboard doors remained open, as if a person unfamiliar with the house had been looking through them for coffee mugs, filters, and other paraphernalia. Someone hoping to make a quick getaway from an unfortunate one-night stand wouldn’t hang around long enough to fix a pot of coffee. She’d slip out the front door and scurry away quickly, maybe call an Uber and arrange to be picked up a few blocks away.

But where was Ellie? Jamie noticed that the back door was ajar. He went through it into the backyard. At first he saw no sign of her. But then he caught sight of the tile-topped table beside the backyard pool. It had been knocked over. And a broken coffee mug lay in two pieces on the brushed-concrete surface that surrounded the pool. He walked toward it with a feeling of dread. His dread turned to horror when he saw Ellie lying facedown in the pool, just beyond the spot where the table had overturned. He ran toward the pool and grabbed hold of Ellie’s right biceps. He turned her face up and, for a moment, felt his whole body become infused with relief. She had a beatific look on her face. Her eyes were open and she seemed to be smiling. Surely no dead person could look so…untroubled. But Ellie had a reason for looking untroubled. Her worldly woes were over.

He dragged her body up out of the water and laid it, face-up, on the concrete. She was wearing only flimsy panties and a tee shirt, both of which had been rendered diaphanous by the water. Conditioned by various high-school CPR classes and countless TV shows and movies, he pushed down hard on her belly to try to pump the water out of her system. Unlike in the movies, no water came spurting up out of her mouth. He pinched her nose and attempted to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When that proved ineffective, he placed both his hands on her chest and began pumping down on the spot where he guessed her heart must be. He vaguely remembered something called the 30/2 rule of CPR: Thirty chest compressions followed by two rescue breaths. He tried this several times, but he soon realized it was a waste of effort. Ellie wasn’t unconscious. Ellie’s heartbeat and breathing could not be restarted. Ellie was gone. Even if he had a defibrillator and paddles he couldn’t bring her back to consciousness. She was dead and had been for quite a while.

Suddenly he remembered the crashing noise that had briefly awakened him in the night. When did that happen – five a.m.? It couldn’t have been much later than that, because, as he recalled, no sunlight had penetrated the room. During his brief moment of wakefulness, the room had been pitch dark. Thus, the crashing sound couldn’t have occurred much later than five. The time was now 7:42 a.m. Slowly it began to dawn on Jamie what must have happened. He saw that Ellie had a bump on her head, and a cut just below her hairline. He looked at the concrete near the overturned table and saw a dark drop of liquid. It was thicker than the nearby spilt coffee, which had mostly dried up by now. Clearly Ellie had made herself some coffee and then walked out into the backyard in the black of night. She had probably gone over to look into the pool. Maybe she even planned to dangle her legs into the water, or go swimming. But, in the dark, she hadn’t seen the short, black table on the swimming-pool surround. She had banged right into it, dropping her coffee mug and then falling forward, smacking her head on the ground. The fall probably knocked her unconscious. And she might have bounced hard enough on the ground to be thrown into the pool beside her, where, after a minute or so, she would have drowned. Had he come running outside when he heard the crashing sound, he might have saved her. But now, he realized, all he could do was try to save himself.

Calling the police was out of the question. The cut on Ellie’s head, the blood on the pool surround, the DNA he had left inside of her last night – all of those things would tend to suggest foul play. But even if the police had no difficulty accepting Jamie’s explanation of how Ellie had died, his life would be forever altered if he were to report her death to the authorities. The police and the D.A. might be able to satisfy themselves that not enough evidence existed to justify putting Jamie on trial, but that didn’t mean that he’d be regarded as innocent by the rest of the community. The friends and family members that made up his and Valerie’s social circle, his co-workers at Raley’s, his neighbors, Valerie herself – they were under no obligation to look for evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. They were free to suspect him of anything they wanted to. He couldn’t possibly defend himself against the charge of having slept with Ellie, of having violated his marriage vows. And if a man can do that, and in the very bed that his wife shares with him, why couldn’t he also be guilty of doing something worse, something much worse? No, he couldn’t allow himself to get linked to Ellie’s death in way whatsoever. But then what was he supposed to do with her dead body?

If this were a movie, he thought, I could roll her body up in an old rug, stuff it into the back of my car, and then drive out into the countryside and dump it in some remote location. Of course, in a movie, the police would be sure to find some way of connecting the body to me, probably by comparing fibers found on the body to fibers from the trunk of my car. Perhaps the rug could be traced through computer records to its owner. In any case, Jamie knew that he couldn’t get rid of the body just now. The sun was up. He could hear some neighbors stirring. Even if he backed his car up the driveway, anything he did there would be visible to the prying eyes of his next-door neighbors. His old one-car garage was too small to hold his Toyota Avalon. Besides, like most garages in his neighborhood, it was used solely for storage, and it was packed nearly full. And it was about to get a little bit fuller.

Jamie was a hunter. Once a year, he liked to go out with his buddy Trevor and hunt for deer in the Sutter Bypass Wildlife Area outside of Yuba City. Jamie didn’t know a lot about hunting, but Trevor was an expert. He knew how to cape out a deer’s head for mounting. He knew that slitting an animal from pubic bone to breastbone and removing all of its internal organs was the quickest way to cool down a carcass in the field (necessary in order to prevent bacteria from building up inside). He knew how to field dress a deer after the kill, so that it would be easier to transport back to the truck. Trevor also knew how to butcher his own deer meat once he got it back to his home in Roseville. After Jamie and Trevor went hunting, Trevor would butcher both animals – the one he’d killed and the one Jamie had killed – and then keep two thirds of the meat as payment for his services. Jamie kept his share of the meat in a freezer in his garage. Valerie wouldn’t eat deer meat. She was convinced that wild game was dangerous to consume, full of all kinds of impurities. She would eat no meat that hadn’t been inspected by the USDA. Thus Jamie was forced to keep his venison out in the garage. But Jamie hadn’t been out hunting with Trevor for nearly a year. The freezer in his garage was empty. What’s more, he always kept it padlocked shut, so that no one could steal the meat from it, and so that foolish neighbor kids couldn’t accidentally lock themselves inside it while playing some dumb game. Valerie wanted nothing to do with the freezer, so she didn’t have a key to the padlock. Only Jamie could open it. And right now he decided that unlocking the freezer was exactly the thing to do.

He ran into the house for his key ring. Then he came outside, wrapped his arms around Ellie’s chest, and lifted her up. She wasn’t very heavy, and he had no great difficulty dragging her into the garage through a side door that opened into the backyard. He unlocked the freezer and lifted the lid. The freezer had been empty for months, so it was unplugged and not the least bit cold inside. Jamie lifted Ellie up and then lowered her, back first, into the freezer. He bent her legs and then pushed them as hard as he could into her chest. Then he rolled her onto her side, so that she lay at the bottom of the freezer in something resembling a fetal position. She had come into the world in that position and now she would be spending the initial portion of her afterlife in that exact same position. Jamie lowered the lid, locked the freezer with the padlock, and then plugged the electrical cord back into the wall socket. He hoped that the cooling powers of the freezer kicked in before the body could become foul enough to give off a stench that might attract a nosy neighbor. In a few days, when Valerie got home, he’d tell her that he and Trevor had gone hunting while she was gone and that he’d filled the freezer with venison. That would explain why it was once again plugged in to the wall socket.

In some ways, he was lucky. Ellie wasn’t from Sacramento. She’d flown into town from Memphis, Tennessee (“A Titans’ fan,” she’d said). She’d been rather vague about the purpose of her trip to Sacramento. And once he realized that they were probably going to be engaging in some adulterous activity together soon, Jamie didn’t press her for too many details about her life. If she was married with children, he didn’t want to know about it. She had taken a taxi from the Sacramento airport to a downtown hotel somewhere near the Fox & Goose. If she had mentioned the name of the place, Jamie had forgotten it. Of course, he wanted to carry out their brief affair in her hotel room. It seemed like the ideal spot for something like that. But Ellie was turned off by the idea. It struck her as too much of a cliché, too sleazy. “Like that Sammy Kershaw song Third Rate Romance,” she’d said. “I don’t want to be anybody’s low-rent rendezvous.” And so he had brought her to his house. To Valerie’s house. Which had turned out to be a huge mistake. That Sammy Kershaw song had gotten Ellie killed.

It didn’t take long for Valerie to figure out that something was wrong with Jamie. She had come back from New Orleans still buzzing with excitement about the reception at the historic Swoop-Duggins House, the rehearsal dinner at a restaurant in the French Quarter called The Kingfish, the great food she had eaten, the great music she had heard, “all those fascinating southern accents.” But over the next few weeks and months she couldn’t help but notice that something was wrong with Jamie. For one thing, he was trying too hard to appear as if nothing was wrong with him, and that wasn’t natural. Jamie had never hesitated to complain when Valerie had used up all the hot water in the shower, or left the car windows down before a rain shower, or made a reckless purchase online without even consulting him. But now, nothing she did seemed to bother him – and that bothered her. She kept trying to get him to confide in her. Eventually this started to seem like nagging, and he lost his (fake) equanimity. He became quiet and brooding but still he wouldn’t talk with her about his feelings. After all, what was he supposed to say? “Hon, I’m unhappy because I had a one-night sexual fling with a young woman who is now lying dead in a meat freezer out in the garage.” That would go over like a limbo contest at a funeral. And so he just grew quieter and his mood grew darker and Valerie grew further and further away from him. Thus it was no surprise when she finally announced that she wanted a divorce. He wasn’t even all that upset about it.

What did upset him was that she expected him to move out of the house and let her have it as part of the divorce settlement. He couldn’t allow that to happen. He hadn’t opened the freezer since he first locked Ellie’s lifeless body inside. He had no desire to try to move that freezer out of the garage. It was too heavy for one man to lift and, of course, he couldn’t ask anyone – not even Trevor – to help him move it to another location. It wouldn’t make sense to move it without emptying it first, and perhaps removing the lid in order to lighten the load. And emptying the freezer was not an option. Jamie was already emotionally distraught by the dissolution of his marriage. He had no desire to add to his psychological distress by trying to dispose of a dead body hidden in his garage. In the end, he was able to hang on to the house but he had to take out a crushing second mortgage on the property and give all of that money to Valerie. Ironically, because of his two mortgages and the softness in the local real estate market, his home had been underwater long before the current flood began to threaten it.

But now, finally, relief was on its way, in the form of a wall of water. His neighborhood had been abandoned. The power company had shut off all of the electrical and natural gas lines into the area. They didn’t want falling power-lines to set off fires, fires that would be exacerbated if they combined with a gas leak in the same spot. But the lack of power wasn’t a problem for Jamie. He had purchased a portable Geneverse HomePower electronic backup battery, which he had kept plugged into a wall socket for days, until it was at maximum capacity. He also had an older gasoline-powered generator that he hoped he wouldn’t have to use but would be available if he needed it. The electric generator could power the average American household for seven days on a single charge. And Jamie didn’t need anywhere near that much power. He needed just enough energy to keep his cell phone charged and his portable radio running, so that he could keep up with the latest storm information. He had set up his emergency command post in his squatty little attic. He had a moved a sleeping bag up there, several boxes of imperishable food items (purchased from Raley’s with his ten-percent employee discount), several cases of water and cola, his generators, his radio, his cell phone, some flashlights, some books to read, a can-opener, spoons, forks, knives, towels, extra clothes, and various other items. When the floodwaters made the living area of his house unusable, he would climb the pull-down attic ladder and wait out the storm up there. The attic had a pop-open emergency exit that opened onto the flat roof above it. To escape the claustrophobia that was sure to set in during his long hours of attic living, he could exit the house through the pop-open hatch and spend some time pacing about up on the roof. But first he had some important business to take care of.

Jamie had unplugged the freezer days earlier, as all of his neighbors were preparing to abandon their houses. He had no idea how long it would take a human body to completely thaw. He expected Ellie to still be largely frozen when he removed her from the freezer. And he was right. Two days after unplugging the freezer, Jamie opened the padlock and lifted the lid. He was terrified of looking inside. He feared he might find a hideous corpse crawling with maggots and being feasted upon by rats. What he found wasn’t quite that awful, but it wasn’t pleasant. Ellie’s body had turned a sort of purple-black, and she was still almost solidly frozen in the fetal position, as if waiting to be reborn. Her skin seemed to have shrunk and her lips had pulled away from each other, exposing a beautiful (and terrifying) collection of teeth. Jamie didn’t have the strength to lift her directly out of the freezer. With great effort, he pushed the freezer on its side and then he dragged the body out onto the floor of the garage. He expected the limbs to be frozen in place by rigor mortis but then he remembered reading somewhere that rigor mortis lasts for only about 36 hours. The body was still stiff and difficult to unfold, but that was because it remained partially frozen. He left it alone on the garage floor. He couldn’t drag it out into his front yard and wait for the levy to break and the floodwaters to come and carry Ellie away. News teams and Federal Emergency Management Teams and others had been flying helicopters over the area regularly, looking for residents who might have gotten stranded somehow. If someone in one of those helicopters spotted a human body on a lawn, they might send in a team of emergency workers to investigate. Of course, Jamie could wrap Ellie’s body in a sheet and stick it out on the lawn without attracting much attention from above. But if her body were found wrapped in a sheet, her death would look suspicious. Jamie couldn’t afford for that to happen. His hope was that the floodwaters would carry her westwards towards Miller Park, which was located less than a mile from his home. From there the waters would be sure to merge with the Sacramento River which runs right past the park. Once she hit the river, the current would carry her south. He was hoping that her body wouldn’t wash ashore until it reached Stockton. If he was really lucky, it might get washed all the way to the San Francisco Bay and then disappear into the Pacific Ocean. If that happened, it could be lost forever, or it could continue to journey south and then wash up someplace so far from Sacramento that no one would ever think of connecting it with Jamie’s hometown. But first Jamie needed those damn levies to break.

In a sense, you could say that Jamie had been prepared for this flood since his teenage years. He was sixteen years old, a high-school sophomore, when he first read a book by George R. Stewart called Storm. It was required reading for a course he was taking called “California and the Environment.” It depicted exactly what would happen to Northern California in the event of a massive, once-a-century winter storm. Such a storm would devastate Sacramento. Jamie had the book with him now, and was reading from it by the light of a Coleman lantern. “The city of Sacramento, state capital,” he read, “was by far the most valuable piece of property in the whole Valley. It stood in the narrow angle between the American and Sacramento rivers, a ticklish place. And of all the tributaries, the American was quickest to rise, and most treacherous.” Jamie had read the book many times, and he knew what was coming. So he skipped all the pages dealing with the San Francisco Bay Area and Lake Tahoe and read only the passages devoted to his own hometown. “From every river and creek in the great horseshoe of mountains about the Sacramento Valley the water was pouring out. Foot by foot the level rose at the gauges…At Sacramento the gauge-reading was as yet just under twenty. There the American was pouring its flood into the main stream. As yet its outflow had moved down the channel of the Sacramento between the levies without preventing the waters of the upper rivers from following the same course. As a result, water had not yet begun to flow over the wicket-tops of Sacramento Weir, four miles upstream from the city. But the level at the gauge was steadily rising.”

Jamie knew that the book had been written in 1941, and that the completion of the Folsom Dam, in 1955, had mitigated much of the potential damage that could result from a once-a-century rainstorm like the one depicted by Stewart. Nonetheless, the dam was already near capacity. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had no choice but to conduct a controlled release of water from the dam or else risk a catastrophic failure if the lake behind it should rise high enough to overtop the structure and send an uncontrolled spill into the levy system. Thus, the levies were already restraining the maximum amount of water they were designed to channel towards the Sacramento River. What’s more, as Stewart’s book pointed out, Northern California was home to dozens of smaller, undammed tributaries of the American River that were also sending water west towards the city. Stewart seemed to positively delight in listing all of these small waterways, most of them named by miners during the Gold Rush: Deer Creek, Otter Creek, Grizzly Creek, Bear Creek, Devil’s Creek, Humbug Creek, Hangtown Creek, Robber’s Creek, One-Eye Creek, and many others.

At about two a.m. on Wednesday, he received an emergency alert on his phone that the levy had been breached near Sacramento State University and that a wall of water was heading west towards Curtis Park and other downtown Sacramento neighborhoods. Jamie darted out to his garage. The wind was now blowing fiercely. The radio said that wind speeds had reached up to sixty miles an hour and tall trees had fallen down all over the City of Sacramento. Out in the garage, Jamie discovered that Ellie was fully thawed. He was about to grab her feet and drag her towards the exit but then it occurred to him that her feet might come off in his hands. Her tendons and other connecting tissues might have grown weak and fragile in the six years since she died. Freezing them might have only made them more brittle. Dragging the body was out of the question, so he was going to have to carry it to the front of the house. With a disgust bordering on horror, he lifted Ellie into his arms. He was stunned by how light she was. Some essential essence had fled from her body and now she seemed to weigh no more than a child of ten.

As soon as he exited the garage and stepped into the backyard, the wind began to beat up on him. He felt as though he were being pummeled by a heavyweight boxer. He had to put the body down on the ground to open the gate that separated the backyard from the driveway. As soon as he unlatched the gate it blew in towards him as if it had been kicked by a raging bull. Jamie bent down and once again took Ellie in his arms. His neighbor’s house, which abutted Jamie’s driveway, protected him a bit from the wind but he still found it difficult to make his way down the driveway towards the front yard. His house was forty feet long, but he had covered only about a quarter of that distance when he felt the cold water rising up into his shoes. He looked down and saw that a blanket of water was spreading itself across the driveway and the sidewalk and the street beyond them. He began to panic. He thought of just dropping Ellie here in the middle of his driveway and then racing back inside and climbing to the safety of his attic. But he feared that if he dropped her in the driveway, the water might just push her into his backyard, where she would be trapped by the wrap-around fence. He needed to get her out to the street. He wished now that he’d left his front door unlocked. But he hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be to get Ellie to the end of the driveway. He assumed he could quickly get her out into the front yard and then turn around and sprint to the backyard, where he could latch his gate and then hurry back inside the house through the back door. But now he wished he could just drop her in the front yard and then enter his house through the front door. So much for his brilliant planning.

When at last Jamie stepped beyond the front edge of the house the wind battered into him with such ferocity that he fell over and dropped Ellie’s body. By now the water was up to his ankles, and it immediately began to carry the body away. Unfortunately, Ellie’s limbs became entangled in the V-shaped double trunk of a small orange tree in his front yard. If he didn’t get out there and release her, she might still be there when the floodwaters receded. And so, fighting against his panic and his flight instinct, he lowered his head and bulled his way towards the orange tree like an NFL running-back trying to break through a crowd of tacklers at the goal line. He reached the tree with great difficulty and anticipated a lot more difficulty getting Ellie’s body free of its slingshot-shaped trunk. But he had lifted her body only an inch or two when the power of the rushing water pulled her from his hands and sent her cartwheeling – horizontally, that is – down the street. She looked almost like a giant Frisbee floating on a current of air as she hurried away from him. Within seconds she was at the end of the block and it seemed unlikely that anything could obstruct her journey towards the Sacramento River. Nearly every car in the area had been moved to higher ground. And so, with the water nearly up to his knees now, he turned and began struggling to move in the direction of the garage. With his neighbor’s house acting as a windbreak, he was able to reach his backyard in less than a minute despite the rapidly rising water that kept pushing him against the stucco exterior walls of his own house. He climbed the three steps to his back door and then entered the relative warmth of his dark house.

The floors in his house were still dry, but he knew that the situation wouldn’t last. It might take another hour, but eventually the floodwaters would insinuate their way into his house. And so he climbed into his attic, zipped himself into his sleeping bag, and tried to sleep.

Amazingly, he slept for nearly eight solid hours, despite the howling of the wind, the cold chill of the powerless house, and the fact that his sleeping bag offered little more comfort than the hardwood floor alone would have. He knew immediately that he had entered a new phase of his life. An enormous burden had been lifted from him. Whatever might happen to him now, he would never again have to worry about the body in the freezer. He realized now that he hadn’t really had a good night’s sleep since Ellie’s death, six long years ago. Perhaps now he could stop grinding his teeth at night, and wouldn’t have to wear a bite-block to bed every evening. Perhaps now he could sleep without the Tylenol PMs he’d been taking every night since Ellie’s death in order to get to sleep and ease his pain a bit. Perhaps he would once again find himself smiling in the middle of the day for no reason at all, something he hadn’t done in years.

Jamie’s plan appeared to have worked even better than he had hoped. Weeks passed. The floodwaters receded. Sacramento’s hardest hit neighborhoods slowly began to return to a semblance of normalcy. Insurance estimators were out in droves. FEMA personnel assessed the damage in order to see which homeowners might be available for federal aid. Contractors and cleaning services had more work than they could handle for a few months. And absolutely no news about an unidentified female body appeared in any online news venue – local, regional, or national – that Jamie regularly scoured for information. For all Jamie knew, her body had floated far out to sea and been eaten by sharks.

But then, two months after the flood, an item on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website caught Jamie’s eye. A farmer near Stockton had found the body of a dead woman out in one of his fields. The field had been underwater during the flood. The body had gotten trapped in a blackberry bramble near the far edge of the field. The farmer hadn’t found it earlier because his field was too muddy to traverse easily. The body had been identified by the FBI as Sheryl R. Baumann. She had a long criminal history, and the Chronicle published one of her mug shots. It was a face that Jamie recognized. One of Ms. Baumann’s favorite cons was to lure a married man into a one-night stand and then blackmail him afterwards, always asking for relatively small amounts of money -- $500, $1000, nothing much more than that – so that it was easier for most of her victims to simply keep paying her rather than go to the police and risk jeopardizing their marriages. But apparently one victim had refused to pay up. The police found skin cells under Sheryl R. Baumann’s fingernails which suggested she had tried to fight off an attacker shortly before dying. The police were now trying to see if they could find a match for the DNA they had retrieved from the skin cells. Naturally, Jamie began to panic.

Jamie didn’t recall the sex between him and Ellie/Sheryl being particularly rough. For sure, it had been athletic. She was clearly in good shape and had plenty of experience in the sack. And Jamie had been in much better physical condition back then too. But he didn’t recall her leaving any scratches on his back – or anywhere else for that matter. Of course, the sex had taken place more than six years ago. And he had been fairly drunk by the time he and Ellie had gotten to his house. And the shock of Ellie’s death had tended to blot out his memory of the details of what had occurred between them in bed the night before. So he had to concede that it was possible that the skin found beneath her fingernails belonged to him. For days on end, he spent every waking moment, whether at work or at home, fearing the arrival of an FBI team on his doorstep or, worse, at Raley’s during his working hours, one of them holding an arrest warrant for Jamie and the others handcuffing him and leading him out to a black government SUV. It appeared that his luck, like the floodwaters, had receded. But he was wrong.

According to a follow-up article in the Chronicle, the DNA was found to belong to a man named Mike Cobb, a resident of Virginia City, Nevada. Cobb confessed to having had a one-night sexual relationship with Sheryl R. Baumann, whom he knew as Katie Collins. When, a few days later, she contacted him and threatened to tell his wife about their liaison unless he gave her a thousand dollars, he told her to “shove that threat where the sun don’t shine.” Instead, she made good on it. She showed up at the Cobb household while Mike was at work and told Andrea Cobb that her husband was a filthy, dishonest adulterer and, if Andrea knew what was good for her, she would kick his sorry ass to the curb. At first Andrea didn’t believe Ms. Baumann. But then Ms. Baumann began describing the interior of the Cobb home to a tee. She also took out her smart phone and showed photographs she had taken of the interior of the Cobb home. This, apparently was part of her modus operandi. She never lured her victims to a motel room. She had sex with them in their own homes, and then she took photos of those houses with her phone. It made her approaches to her victims much more frightening. A straying husband might be able to lie about having been in some anonymous hotel room with a woman, particularly if he’d been smart enough to give the proprietor a false name when he checked in, and paid in cash rather than with a credit card. But how could he contradict photographic evidence of the kind that Sheryl R. Baumann was accustomed to collecting?

It turned out that Andrea Cobb did indeed kick Mike’s sorry, lying ass to the curb. Or at least, she filed for divorce from that sorry, lying ass. And, afterwards, Mike became determined to make Katie Collins/Sheryl R. Baumann pay for what she had done. Luckily for him, she had made one dumb mistake. She had handed her cell phone to Andrea and allowed her to scroll through the photos that had been taken inside the Cobb house. But Andrea had scrolled a little too far and come across a screenshot on Ms. Baumann’s iPhone of a receipt for an online purchase at a Wichita, Nebraska, clothing store. Andrea Cobb worked in the medical records department of the Virginia City Community Health Center. She spent her workdays rapidly processing information requests from insurance companies and doctor’s offices. She could glance briefly at a computer screen and memorize all the important data long enough to type it into a response email. She did this with Sheryl R. Baumann’s receipt from the Apricot Lane Boutique in Wichita. She memorized the information and wrote it down as soon as Ms. Baumann turned and strutted away from the house. Later, when she confronted her husband, Andrea told him, “I know about your little fling with Sheryl R. Baumann of Wichita, Kansas.” At first, of course, Mike had no idea what she was talking about. Eventually, however, he figured out that Sheryl R. Baumann must be the real name of the woman he knew as Katie Collins. After the divorce, he hired a private detective to track down Sheryl R. Baumann. When the detective found Ms. Baumann, he followed her for several days. From the front seat of his car, and using a powerful pair of binoculars, he watched as Ms. Baumann sat in the outdoor eating area of Deano’s Grill & Tapworks in downtown Wichita and, between bites on her hamburger, booked a round trip airline flight to Sacramento on her laptop computer. He passed the information on to Mike Cobb. The night before Ms. Baumann was scheduled to fly to Sacramento, Cobb got into his car and drove the 160 miles from Virginia City to Sacramento at a nice steady pace of sixty-five miles per hour. Considering the mission he was on, Mike knew that it wouldn’t be smart to get a speeding ticket. He wanted to be at the Sacramento airport when Ms. Baumann’s flight arrived and then follow her until he could find an opportunity to get her alone.

He was at the Fox & Goose when Ellie/Katie/Sheryl first made her move on Jamie. When Jamie and Sheryl left the pub together, Mike followed them. And when they got into Jamie’s car and drove off to his house, Mike Cobb followed them in his own car. He parked a few houses away from Jamie’s and waited. He knew what was going to happen inside that house. An hour or so of incredible sex, followed by twenty minutes or so of a vulnerable female pleading to be allowed to spend the night before disappearing from the homeowner’s life forever in the morning. A reluctant agreement to the arrangement by the homeowner. Then, sometime in the middle of the night or very early morning, the woman would awaken, walk through the house and take photos of every room, photos she would later use to blackmail the poor schmuck who had been unlucky enough to cross her path.

Night fell. Mike sat patiently in his car, munching on Hershey’s candy bars and Slim Jim meat sticks. At about four-thirty in the morning he noticed some flashes of light coming from the windows of the house he was staking out. Clearly, Sheryl R. Baumann was awake and taking photos with her camera. He exited his car and crept up the driveway to the side of Jamie’s house. Peaking through a side window, he saw Sheryl wandering through the kitchen by cell phone light, gathering the makings of a pot of coffee. He waited and watched as the minutes ticked by. Eventually, she poured herself a mug full of coffee, exited the kitchen, and wandered out into the backyard. Mike decided that the backyard of a stranger’s house might not be a bad place to confront Katie/Sheryl. She wouldn’t want to wake the man she had spent the night with. If that poor schmuck came outside and listened to what Mike had to say about Ms. Baumann, he might just call the police on her. And Ms. Baumann couldn’t afford that. Mike had learned from his private detective that Ms. Baumann had an impressive arrest record. So he opened the gate and silently stepped into the backyard. He saw her standing by the edge of the pool. He crept up behind her. “Hello, Katie Collins,” he said.

Ms. Baumann spun around and saw Mike Cobb standing before her. “What the hell are you doing here?” she hissed at him. “Get away from me.” Mike took another step towards her. “You and I have some unfinished business to settle,” he told her. “Maybe you should go inside and wake up your latest lover. I have news about you that might interest him.”

At that moment, Ms. Baumann dropped her coffee mug and struck out at Mike, scraping her fingernails into the skin of his face, as if she wanted to scratch out his eyes. He shoved her away as hard as he could and she fell backwards, knocking over the low-lying table behind her. As she fell she struggled to turn around and get her hands between herself and the concrete, but it didn’t work. She smacked her face against the concrete edge of the pool. Her body bounced slightly and she wound up facedown in the water of the swimming pool.

The crash had made a loud noise, an echoing sound that had caused Mike to freeze for several seconds in fear. He turned towards the house, expecting to see Sheryl’s latest lover walking into the backyard with a handgun or a shotgun any second now. He waited there in the dark, not sure whether he should run for it, or stay and see this whole retribution scheme out to the end. He expected that at any minute, Sheryl would rise up and come at him again with those razor-sharp talons of hers. But when he turned towards the pool, he saw that she had never pulled herself out. She was lying in the water, facedown and apparently unconscious. Mike had no desire to see her die. His plan was simply to let her know that he was aware of her true identity and he planned to use that knowledge to prevent her from ruining any more marriages. He thought about pulling her body out of the pool and then running off to his car and letting the homeowner deal with calling an ambulance for Sheryl. But the homeowner was apparently sound asleep inside his house. Mike himself could call for an ambulance, but the call could be traced to his cell phone. And how could he explain his presence in a stranger’s backyard at five o’clock in the morning? If Sheryl lived, she might tell the police it was Mike who had nearly killed her. And if she died…well, that wouldn’t be a problem for Mike, not if he could get out of Sacramento before anyone even knew he had been there. If he headed back to Virginia City now, this whole situation would become a problem for Sheryl’s final lover/victim to deal with. Mike hated to burden the poor sap with a potential murder rap, but he certainly wasn’t willing to take the rap himself. In the end, he decided to hightail it out of Sacramento pronto and let the homeowner deal with Sheryl. But before he left, he looked down and saw a cell phone lying next to the mug of coffee Sheryl had dropped. He knew that it must be the phone that Sheryl had been snapping photos with. He also knew that it might still contain photos of his own home, photos that could now connect him to a dead woman. So he grabbed the phone, shoved it into the front pocket of his jeans, and then silently departed the backyard and hurried back to his car. He drove directly towards Interstate 80 and then headed east, again at a steady speed of sixty-five miles an hour. He stopped at a scenic overlook alongside Lake Tahoe and hurled Sheryl’s cell phone out into the waters of the lake. He heard a satisfying plop as it broke the placid surface of the water down below. Sheryl and her cell phone had died in two different bodies of water, one death occurring about two hours after the other, and about 130 miles away. Even Sherlock Holmes might have a difficult time figuring that one out. By eight-thirty in the morning, Mike was back in Virginia City. And, as far as he knew, no one was even aware that he had left town. His car was an old beater, a Dodge Charger, and it wasn’t equipped with a GPS device with which the police could track his recent trip. His cell phone could be tracked, but he hadn’t used it at all. Besides, why should the police suspect Mike of Sheryl’s death? The most obvious explanation would be that, after a one-night stand with a Sacramento homeowner, she had wandered out into the homeowner’s backyard, tripped, hit her head, and then fallen into the pool and drowned. The homeowner’s protestations of innocence to the police should be fairly convincing. After all, the homeowner had committed no crime.

This was the account that Mike gave to the FBI. But the FBI didn’t believe him. The investigators couldn’t find a report for a drowning death in Sacramento that matched the details Mike had given them. Making matters more difficult was the fact that Mike couldn’t remember the exact location of the home where Sheryl had died. Mike wasn’t a regular visitor to Sacramento. When following Sheryl and her final victim to the victim’s house, Mike hadn’t paid any attention to street signs or house numbers. He had a vague recollection that the house was painted orange, but that was about all he could recall. The story made no sense to the FBI investigators. “Why would a man not report finding a dead woman in his swimming pool?” they asked Mike. “Isn’t it obvious?” Mike responded. “He didn’t want the wife to know that some smoking hot young broad had been at the house in the middle of the night and then drowned in the pool. And if he called the cops, they might suspect him of killing her. He must have taken the body somewhere and dumped it. Six years later, the flood came along and swept her out of her shallow grave, washing her all the way to a farm in Stockton.”

But the body was too well preserved to have been lying for six years in a shallow grave. The evidence suggested that someone had kept the body in cold storage for years before using the flood as an excuse to get rid of it. The FBI suspected that Mike might have driven to Wichita and killed Sheryl there, then driven back to Virginia City with her body. They believed it was possible he had kept the body in cold storage for six years and then, when he heard about the flooding in Sacramento, had loaded her body into his car and driven down in the middle of the night and dumped her somewhere near the Folsom Dam, knowing that the levies west of the dam were breached and that Sheryl’s body could travel a long, long way before anyone ever discovered it.

Reading about all these developments in the Chronicle, Jamie was almost inclined to feel sorry for Mike. But then he remembered those six years of torment he suffered during which Ellie/Sheryl lay frozen out in the garage. Mike was responsible for that torment. If Mike had not followed Ellie to Jamie’s house, none of this would have happened. Had Mike not snuck up on her in the backyard, she would still be alive. Had Mike plucked her from the pool immediately and called an ambulance, she might also still be alive. The six years of hell that Jamie had lived through were far and away the worst period of his entire life. And he had Mike to blame for that.

But perhaps he also owed Mike a small debt of gratitude. For one thing, Mike had spared Jamie the blackmail scheme that Ellie was surely planning on ensnaring him in.  What’s more, Mike’s confession would now absolve Jamie of having any involvement in Ellie’s death. Sure, if Jamie came forward with what he knew, the police could charge him with failing to report an accidental drowning and concealing a dead body for six years. But, after all this time, would they even bother with those minor crimes? After all, Ellie/Sheryl was a career criminal. Her death had probably helped prevent a handful of acrimonious divorces. Perhaps Jamie should contact the FBI and let them know that it wasn’t Mike who had consigned Ellie’s body to the waters of the flood. It was Jamie himself who had done that. Jamie’s testimony might help Mike defend himself against a charge of premeditated murder.

Jamie walked out into the backyard and sat down beside the pool to mull over the situation. He brought a beer with him and he set the bottle down on the table beside the pool, the very same table that had played a role in Ellie’s death. He turned his back on the pool and looked back towards the rear wall of the house. It occurred to him that this might be a good time to repaint the house. Perhaps a nice teal color.