Ronal Kayser

Country Coffins Ronal Kayser

There had been a death at Oak Lake -- a party of fishermen had pulled the body of a woman out of a hole in the lake's ice -- and Ken Svederup was pulling on his winter armor to go out and cover the story for the Milquevais (Minn.) Globe. The long-distance phone call from San Diego, that Ken's wife Kelly had been picked up in a gambling raid in Rosarita Beach and tossed in a Tijuana pokey, made no difference to managing editor Ed Horace. Those fishermen at Oak Lake wouldn't wait forever to be interviewed and photographed in the fifteen-below cold, and thanks to Kelly's incarceration, Ed had an inducement to wave in Ken's face. More reasonably, Ed could phone the U. S. consul about Kelly while Ken covered the Oak Lake discovery.

The body of a victim, a blonde, lay under a tarpaulin in the truck where the fishermen had placed it. No one recognized the dead woman, now frozen fast to the truck's floorboards, but the outfit she wore meant one thing--foul play. No one went swimming in Oak Lake in winter and drowned accidentally under the ice, and this woman wore a bathing suit. Someone clever -- but probably unaware of the fishermen's seining holes in the ice -- had expected the dead woman to remain submerged until the spring, when the bathing suit would indicate she had drowned swimming the summer before. Looking at the body, Svederup figured the victim had been dead two or three weeks.

It seemed odd to Svederup when, later, he saw a light shining from one of the cottages bordering Oak Lake. The cottages here were cheap summer shacks -- in winter, about as cozy as a woodshed. But what led him across the lake, to the meeting with the jittery mink-swathed beauty in "Valhalla" cottage, was a hunt for information. If someone had buried the dead woman under the ice, it would have been at night, and the blows of the steel spud as the villain chopped a hole in the ice would have rung clear across the lake. Someone in one of the cottages would have heard...

Wearily, Ken Svederup trudged across the frozen lake to "Valhalla" cottage, wondering what was with Kelly, still locked up in the Mexican clink, not knowing he was involving them both in a murder as complex and fascinating as those he solved in Dale Clark's Death Wore Fins.