They lower the Stokes basket, the bottom of it covered by two spread-open black body pouches, and I help guide the hook of the gaff until Marino has the buoy line. He coaxes it closer to the boat, reaching down to grab it, and her pale fingers with their painted nails suddenly are visible just below the surface. Her white hair floats up, and for an instant her face appears in the trough of a wave.

eleven

“EASY!” I EXCLAIM TO MARINO. “HOLD IT! HOLD IT! Don’t pull.” I push my mask up. “Just hold the line and let me do the rest.”

I smell her odor, moldy and foul, and I reach down to grab her under the arms, turning my back to the boat. I hold her firmly from behind.

“Keep her rope as slack as you can,” I call out, and I dip my right shoulder under the yellow buoy line, taking on some of its tension so it’s not pulling hard on her neck. “Bring me in very, very slowly as I swim with her. Pull me, not her.”

I feel the tug at my upper back and can feel the weight of whatever the line around her ankles is attached to. She is cold, at least as cold as the sea, her skin wizened and hard. Her arms are relatively limber, but the rest of her is stiff from the cold, as stiff as she will get. Rigor mortis bypassed her weeks, possibly months, ago while she languished somewhere in storage, a place very dry and frigid.

When she begins to warm up there will be no postmortem artifacts forming to give me the usual hints about when and where she died and exactly what position she was in, because it is much too late for that. Whatever is present right now is as much as I will see, and she will rapidly go from being cold and well preserved to putrid.

Parchmentlike tallow scalp shows through her wet white hair, her ears and the tip of her nose discolored brown, and there’s the slightest frost of patchy white mold on her face and neck. She’s been dead long enough to begin mummifying, was kept somewhere quite a long while before she ended up underwater. I move her very slowly, the crown of her head under my chin, and I worry about her holding together as I keep the buoy line on top of my shoulder and feel it hard and rough against the side of my jaw.

I do anything I can to keep the fender from pulling on her, and it bobs in front of us like a fat yellow fish in lazy pursuit, and then we reach the Stokes basket rocking against the side of the boat and I maneuver both of us around, facing the men. I tell Marino to hold his line steady, to keep the body close to the surface, and I ask Sullivan and Kletty to slacken the ropes attached to the basket’s harness and the back of my drysuit.