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myself as flat as I could, my eyes closing involuntarily.
    I waited for the inevitable impact of the Zamboni or the icy rush of West Battle Lake in January.
    And then the world grew quiet.
    I opened one eye. The Zamboni was on the edge separating the thick lake ice from the prepared Dunk ice. A man in overalls was laying stomach-down across Mrs. Berns’s lap with the expression of someone who’d just swallowed a goldfish. Mrs. Berns, on the other hand, looked completely exhilarated and ready for Round Two.
    I opened the other eye and breathed in the heavy, oily scent of diesel, grateful I was still around to smell. “What were you doing? You almost killed me!” I didn’t know if she’d be able to hear my shrill voice above the pounding of my heart.
    Mrs. Berns rested her hands on the man on her lap. “You’re the one who kept skating into my path.”
    The man on her lap raised the Zamboni keys into the air. His hand was shaking. “Got ’em,” he said weakly, sliding to the ground.
    I shook my head, fear turning to anger. I gently pulled myself onto my knees, intending to very carefully hoist myself up and off the ice so I could go give Mrs. Berns a piece of my mind. I was balanced on all fours, the roar of the Zamboni still echoing in my head, when a motion under the ice caught my eye.
    I glanced down and into a dead man’s eyes.
    I was suspended above his frozen corpse, his blank gaze staring into mine, his open mouth and clutching hands mirroring my gesture, only a thin skin of ice separating us.

Seven
    “You were just … skating along.” Police Chief Wohnt stated. The disbelief sounded like it had less to do with the veracity of my story and more to do with the sheer variety of ways in which I had discovered bodies.
    I was sitting on the bumper of his car, my head between my knees. I hadn’t stopped shivering since I’d been pulled off of the dunk hole. Jed was standing to the side, where he’d been begging me to drink hot chocolate for several minutes. Mrs. Berns was on the other side shooting me the stink eye, a cross between “don’t tell him about the Zamboni” and “really?!? another dead body?”
    I sat up. The blood rushed to my head. The ice had blurred the corpse’s face, but not so much that I couldn’t stare right into his brown eyes, his mouth open in a silent cry. It was impossible to make a positive ID, but he looked an awful lot like Maurice, my recent library regular and the guy who’d rescued us just last night. My stomach had been greasy since, my brain on overload.
    The entire lake had been cleared, the mood gone from festive to shocked, children quickly herded to cars, conversations dropped to whispers. Only twenty or so people remained, milling on the edges of the lake, a handful talking to the waiting EMTs as the police were cordoning a wider area around Darwin’s Dunk in preparation for removing the body.
    “Did he drown?” I asked Gary, ignoring his question.
    He glanced over my shoulder, his breath showing up big and bold in the frozen air. He was wearing a trim blue winter coat and a fur-lined cap. His face was free of sunglasses. “We’ll do an autopsy,” he said.
    “But what do you think ?” I asked. The horror of that sort of death—being trapped and suffocating under the ice with freedom so close by—was overwhelming. It didn’t help that I had liked Maurice, at least what I knew of him. My shaking grew so strong that I had to tuck my hands into my armpits to contain myself.
    Gary’s jaw clenched. “I think you should go home.”
    He strode off toward the lake, leaving me to wonder why he’d interviewed me in the first place. One of his deputies could have handled the duty. His absence also left me wanting Johnny, though I didn’t want to think too much about that. I didn’t like the idea of being dependent on someone. I knew I loved Johnny, though I hadn’t told him yet. Since we’d slept together, I was feeling even more vulnerable, and if I was