The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(72)

I reach a hand down and measure the temperature at a few different spots. The dark end, the deeper side, is much warmer. Not scalding, but like a warm bath.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

“Did you know that they discovered microbes in the hot springs in Yellowstone that thrived at much higher temperatures than we thought possible? Extremophiles. They’re the reason we think there might be life on other planets.”

She gives me an uneasy look. “Um, great. So, what, you’re thinking we’re dealing with aliens now?”

“One second.”

I turn toward the brush and start digging through for a large stick. I find something like a misshapen medieval rake and bring it back to the pond.

“You think there might be a body in there, don’t you?”

I probe the water with the stick and confirm the drop-off is as steep as I estimated.

“Hundreds of people have been in this pool,” I say out loud, rationalizing my thought process.

“They would have found something if it was in there.” Jillian tries to say this as a fact.

“Not if . . .” I stop talking as my mind starts to zero in on something.

There’s no way to avoid it. The bottom of the pond is what I need to investigate.

I take off my shirt and lay it on a log. Still focused on the pond, I begin to untie my shoes.

“Theo . . . you’re not going in there.”

I glance over at her. “Sorry if this makes you uncomfortable. I have boxer briefs on.”

“You’re an idiot.”

I remove my pants and take a step into the water. My foot is already warmer than the rest of my body. I go all the way in until I’m chest-deep.

As I move toward the darker section, the water gets much hotter.

“How is it?” she asks.

“Nice, right here. Down there? Good question.”

“Promise me you’re not going to go diving? It has to be boiling down there.”

As she says this, a bubble breaks the surface near my face. “Technically, yes. But it’s not the water that scares me.”

“Your extremophiles?”

“Go for help if I don’t come back in ten.”

“I’m going home and forgetting I ever met you,” she replies.

I take a deep breath and dive under. As I descend, the water gets dramatically hotter. I feel it on my scalp and the back of my neck. When I shove my arms in front of me, my nerves are burning pinpricks.

I kick my legs, bringing me lower, then hit a wall of even hotter water. My hands begin to burn, so I pull back and head upward.

When I break the surface, the cold air slaps me in the face.

“My god,” says Jillian, now sitting on the log. “Your face is beet red.”

“It’s warm.”

“Satisfied?”

I dog-paddle closer to the bank. “I’m satisfied that no sensible person would go down there.”

“Great. Will you come out now?”

“No. That just confirms my suspicion. Would you hand me my stick?”

“So you can go bobbing for bodies?” She doesn’t move.

“Well, if you don’t hand me the stick, then I’ll have to use my teeth. Your choice.”

“Disgusting.” She tosses it into the water, splashing it next to me.

“Thank you.”

I grab the end, push it in front of me like a spear, and dive back down. I go as far as I went last time and use the branch to poke around the bottom.

The end collides with rocks and what feel like logs. I’m only able to keep probing for a minute before the heat is too much. I swim back to the surface to catch my breath and cool down. Jillian looks none too pleased.

“This is what you signed up for,” I tell her. “I told you that there might be bodies.”

“I wasn’t expecting one of them to be yours. I didn’t come here to watch you boil like a lobster.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You know about the frog and the pot of boiling water?”

“That’s a myth. They hop out. They always hop out.” Unless they’re single-minded professors who don’t know any better.

I dive back down and probe around in another area. This time the stick hits a rock that gives way when I push it, as if it were stacked on top of another rock. I have to go back up before I can investigate further.

“Why do you have to be the one doing this?” Jillian asks as I emerge.

“I couldn’t even get the police to show up three miles away from their station for the first body. What do you think they’d say if I told them that this was tied to the Cougar Creek Monster?”

I dive back into the water and return to probing. My stick stabs into something that feels wooden. When I pull the stick back, I can tell that it’s wedged into something.

I carefully pull it toward me and reach out to touch whatever it is that I speared. My fingers feel a row of something that’s curved and slatlike.

I try not to get ahead of myself. It could be a deer’s rib cage. I slide my fingers over the back and check the vertebrae for prominent dorsal spines, like you’d find on a deer or a bear.

They’re short and blunt. Just like you’d find on a human.

I stick my head out of the water. Jillian’s expression changes the moment she sees me.