Dispatch: The Body In the Cove
When an alluring outsider swam into an insular New Hampshire community last summer, she raised some eyebrows. When she wound up dead, it raised disquieting questions about the darker side of our vacation paradises.
- Illustration by Heather Burke.
Jen Cannon, out on the raft, thought it was a rock, a flat rock near the surface of the water. But her husband, Lee, didn't think much of it. One of the Cannon clan from the upper road, Lee had swum in this part of New Hampshire's Chocorua Lake hundreds of times, as had his parents and grandparents before him. "There's no rock over there." He lay back next to his wife and let the August sun beat down on him. He would have remained there on that raft, letting the gentle waves rock him the whole afternoon, if he hadn't heard the shouts.
They came from a couple of kayakers who had been picking blueberries along the shore. Lee had never heard shouts like that on the lake. "There's a body here!" one of them was yelling. "Looks like she drowned!"
Frantic, Lee dove into the water and scrambled toward the rickety piers that run out into the water, where he retrieved his cell phone and called 9-1-1 while one of the kayakers—he never did get the guy's name—guided the body to shore. There, the dead woman's blond hair billowed in the shallow water, which sloshed over her shiny white tank top and rumpled cutoff jeans. A woman in her thirties, looked like. Her body shifted a little with each ripple of the lake. It didn't seem like she was dead, more exhausted. So exhausted she couldn't even breathe.
About a half-dozen emergency vehicles responded, lights on, sirens going, all of them jouncing down the rutted two-track path that led to the shore. State troopers and local police fanned out to take statements while the EMTs lifted the body onto a gurney and then into an ambulance, which would take it to nearby Concord for an autopsy. This time, the ambulance's lights were off and the sirens silent. There was obviously no rush.
