Well of the Three Sisters: A Presumption of Death

By Ron Benedict

When rakish, man-about-town Connors Loy appears in Larry Canes Kansas City law office wanting his wife, city councilwoman Rita Stanton-Loy, declared not only legally dead but accidently dead, he does not know that the case will put his life and the lives of others in terrible jeopardy. He only knows that, financially and professionally, he must take the case and win!

Larry enlists the aid of longtime friend Barton Lisle, the newspaper reporter who, over a year ago, covered the news of the councilwomans mysterious disappearance, and friend/barmaid Sandy Schooley.

The very week their investigation begins, strange and sinister troubles afflict the friends. Unable to connect these events with their investigation, the three begin their quest. But the deeper they dig, the more apparent it becomes that somebody doesnt want the matter solved.

Their search leads them to a bleak Arizona hamletWell of the Three Sisters. This tiny, dusty, and high desert town sits on property Rita had invested in shortly before her disappearance. Its a property bordering the Navajo reservation where, over the last few years, horrifying events have been occurring to those Native Americans living nearest the town.

In Arizona, Larry, Bart, and Sandy meet Littlebird, Rita Stanton-Loys half Native American daughter and team up with John Todachine, who is a Navajo engineer, and deputy sheriff Ramon Gutierrez, who believes the answer to the mystery lies in Ritas investment property. When the investigation turns to the land, a faceless opposition resorts to a less subtle means of dissuasionguns.

Frightened but committed to solving the case, the six forge ahead in their quest, leading to unimaginable evil and a spine-chilling showdown with a multibillionaire presidential hopeful.

In the meantime, Larry is finally able to search for the woman he loved and lost to the Arizona desert many years ago, but will finding her only endanger her life?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524656157

Ron Benedict

AUTHOR AND RETIRED LAWYER RON BENEDICT is a former adjunct professor of paralegal studies at NAU. He has a JD from Touro College of Law in Long Island and a bachelor of science in communications from Pace University, New York, where he was awarded the prestigious Curtis Owen Writing Award for Short Story Fiction. Ron is married and currently resides in the Kansas City suburb of Independence, Missouri, with his wife Carmen. Born and raised in the area, he has spent the better part of his life there except for his time in military service and during his graduate and postgraduate education years while working and residing in Long Island, New York. Ron is a decorated veteran of the US Army where he served as a platoon leader with the First Infantry Division in Vietnam. His work, education, personal travels, and military service experiences have taken him to numerous locations throughout the United States and the world. Well of the Three Sisters is Ron’s first novel in a planned trilogy. Being of Native American heritage, he has a particular interest in Native American culture and is a frequent visitor to the sprawling Arizona desert. He loves the American Southwest particularly the areas of the great Navajo and Hopi Reservations, which much of the novel has its setting.

Book preview

Prologue

Missouri, 1999

D OWNTOWN KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, COMES to an abrupt, melancholy, and dilapidated end in a section known simply as the River Quay. For certain, the area has seen hard times, but it is also rich in history. A young French employee of the American Fur Trading Company out of St. Louis named Francois Chouteau came north along the Missouri River—the Old Muddy, as the Indians called it—in 1821 and erected a fur trading center not too far east of where the Missouri and Kaw Rivers join. Nearly a decade later, a nineteen-year-old boy by the name of John C. McCoy established the village of Westport some distance to the south and transformed Chouteau’s little spot into a riverboat landing where fine ladies could debark without getting the fringes of their petticoats muddy. Commerce followed, but so did the hard times.

As the population grew, the town of Kansas (which, but for one vote of the thirteen businessmen gathered at One-Eyed Jack’s cabin one night, nearly became known as Possum Trot) spread south and eastward. Soon, the bulk of its economy and neighborhoods were built upon the bluffs overlooking the once-industrious river bottoms. To the likes of Kit Carson—and in ensuing years, Bat Masterson and Jesse James—the river staging area became known as Old Towne, and later, ignominiously, the Quay.

In the early 1970s, a group of entrepreneurs pumped some twenty million dollars into the area in an attempt to give the Quay a flowery rebirth. Restaurants, tourist attractions, and service-oriented businesses popped up all over in an admirable attempt at re-developing the blighted area by establishing paying businesses and face-lifting century-old architecture. But all this was short-lived. Infighting among local mob families for control of the budding economy routinely ended in bomb blasts that, in turn, resulted in a quick wilting of the blossom and a return to desolation. The Quay had become, as before, a gathering-place for losers of every stripe.

Attorney Larry Cane was one such loser when he moved law practice and personal belongings into the second-floor apartment at 197 Grand Avenue. Built in 1873, the old structure had weathered a lot: vandalism, fire, flood. The years had not been kind to the old girl; her walls sagged, her marquee had been torn away long ago, and any windows that were not cracked or missing panes were dingy with a decades-long accumulation of grime. However, the building still had some pride. The stone Gothic-arch doorway remained intact, and inside, the walnut floors and creaking stairway leading to Larry’s office had survived, polished smooth by innumerable footsteps.

197 Grand was just one of a handful of buildings and businesses remaining in the River Quay, straining hard to hold on. Redbrick skeletons of pre-twentieth-century row buildings line the streets and alleys, looking more reminiscent of post-war Europe than a legacy of once-thriving commerce. Rotted warehouses totter precariously over cracked sidewalks speckled with broken glass. Empty lots, sprinkled throughout, merely serve as collection points for windblown paper and rubbish. The area is populated by a few rather obscure folk, peering forlornly from darkened doorways, who, like the streets to which they cleave, appear as relics of better times past. Aging fences of rotting wood and rusting metal, long ago erected by good-intentioned men for some lost purpose, now only separate cold reality from dreams that could have been.

Chapter One

I N HIS MODEST, NEARLY BARE office at the center of this ghost of the past, Lawrence Cane leaned slowly back in his creaking office chair and stared a little dumfoundedly at the handsome, early-middle-aged man across the desk from him. The man, Connors Loy, famed as Cherokee Lightning, a nickname given him when he was a running back for the University of Oklahoma, had just asked him to do something that in his more than twenty years as an attorney he had never been asked to do. For a moment, he forgot that his hands were shaking and that he badly needed a drink. He even quit worrying that the man could smell the telltale odor of liquor on his breath.

Mr. Loy wanted Larry to have his wife, a woman named Rita Stanton-Loy, declared legally dead. Not only dead, but accidentally dead. According to the conditions of the double-indemnity term life insurance policy which Loy had handed him to read, if the policy holder, Rita Stanton-Loy, were to die accidentally while the policy was in force, the beneficiary, Connors Loy, would receive twice the face amount of the policy—a tidy little sum of two million dollars, tax free.

Loy had entered Larry’s life at the precise moment when the latter had decided to quit it, or at least the legal business end. The practice of law had not been good to him the last few years, though most of his peers believed it to be his own fault. What was it that Whittier Tate, an old law school buddy and now a judge of the Sixteenth Judicial Circuit, said to him the day his license to practice was reinstated after a six-month suspension? Larry, the practice of law is like making love to a woman: you give her what she wants, and she’ll give you everything you want. But Larry had never found law practice to be anywhere near as pleasurable as making love. Instead, he thought law to be more akin to a jealous mistress, never allowing him time to make love to anybody, including his wife.

After the suspension for spending an expense retainer before it was actually earned, his wife, Marla, a pretty little redhead who at one time had served as Larry’s paralegal, simply got up—though not really altogether unexpectedly—and walked out of the office and out of his life without a word. He never saw or heard from her again until the day, six months later, when the decree dissolving their marriage of nine years was signed by a judge. It had been a nasty divorce—at least from Larry’s perspective. Marla got the house, the car, the savings, and a sizeable alimony award. He got the bills and the cat—the latter by grudging agreement. Having no place to live, no place to practice law, and little money, he moved himself and his practice to the Quay and this no-longer-impressive address.

It was the cat, Stoli, who brought him back to the reality of the current situation, as the large tiger-stripe jumped from the top of the file cabinet into the lap of Traci, the young, tight-bodied blonde who sat next to Mr. Loy.

Not expecting a seventeen-and-a-half pound cat to jump her, Traci suddenly screamed and stood straight up from the chair in which she had been seated. Stoli, startled by the woman’s reaction, bolted through the opening in the door leading to the living quarters that lay just beyond.

Larry pursed his lips and looked at Traci. Oh, gee, he said. I’m so sorry. Listen, Stoli is harmless. He hasn’t even got claws. He was just trying to be friendly.

The woman’s eyes were blazing.

Connors Loy, who had not bothered to move throughout the entire event, grabbed the blonde by her wrist. Set your ass down, Traci, he hissed. For God’s sake, it’s just a damn cat! The girl started to protest, but then obeyed him. Continue, Counselor, Loy said, turning from Traci to Larry.

What makes you think your wife is dead? Larry asked. He could tell he was not going to like this man by the way he had treated the woman.

She just up and disappeared one day, Loy replied.

What do you mean, disappeared?

I mean she hasn’t been seen by anyone that I know of for nearly two years.

I assume this was reported to the police?

Loy looked at Larry quizzically. You don’t know who my wife is? he asked.

Larry thought a moment and repeated the name Rita Stanton-Loy over in his mind; it certainly seemed familiar, but … No, I can’t say that I do, he finally answered, shrugging his shoulders.

My wife was a city councilwoman, Loy said.

It suddenly dawned on Larry. You’re not talking about Rita Stanton-Loy! He was stunned by the sudden realization of her identity. This sort of thing was entirely out of his league.

She disappeared in a flood, said Loy precisely, as if he were talking to a slow schoolboy. Her body has never been found. Lord, man, it was all over the newspaper for weeks.

Highly embarrassed by his slow-wittedness, Larry cleared his throat. Well, why’ve you come to me? He wanted to change the subject as quickly as possible.

That’s an easy one. The insurance policy. Loy smiled, indicating the document on the desk in front of Larry. My wife took that out through the city when she became an elected official. As you can see, it has a face value of one million dollars, and, as I told you before, it pays double if she died accidentally.

Larry looked at Loy. "I understand why you’re here, Mr. Loy. What I asked was, why did you come to me?"

That’s easy, too, Connors Loy replied. An acquaintance gave me your name. You represented her several years ago. Shirley Cassidy. She’s a member of my—our country club. You got her old man declared accidently dead, and the insurance company had to pay off three million, remember?

Indeed, Larry remembered Shirley Cassidy. Cassidy versus Great Central States Life and Casualty Company. That was his claim to any notoriety in the legal profession. Cassidy had come to him while his office was still on the twenty-first floor of the prestigious Two Pershing Square Building overlooking the old Union Station and the Kansas City Terminal Railway tracks. He practiced mostly insurance defense law back in those days, and that was the reason he nearly turned down Cassidy’s case the first day he spoke with her. While he did not, at that time nor at any time prior, represent Great Central, he believed it would be a conflict of interest for him to represent a private client against any member of the insurance industry. After all, he was making a pretty handsome living off monthly billings. News travels fast in the inner circles of the insurance claims business, and loyalty to principals was an important factor in obtaining work. If word got around that he was working both sides of the street, he and the firm could lose the steady income. Yet, the Cassidy case was potentially too rewarding to allow such remote ethical considerations to interfere with his judgment. If he were successful, he could realize a half-million dollars for himself.

Shirley’s husband, Michael Cassidy, a well-known commodities broker at the Board of Trade, was killed in the crash of a private plane. The insurance company refused to pay Shirley’s double-indemnity claim on the ground that it believed Mr. Cassidy had died as the result of a heart attack sometime prior to the plane’s impact, which was, in fact, what caused the plane to crash.

Larry carefully investigated the matter prior to filing a lawsuit against the intransigent insurer. While the coroner’s report had concluded the cause of death to be from a heart attack, Larry had argued—and convinced a federal court jury—that the fatal arrhythmia was brought on as a result of Cassidy having become disoriented while attempting to pilot the plane through a severe storm in southern Iowa. The confusion was due to pilot error and a faulty horizon meter, the gauge that, among other things, tells the pilot whether his wings are level with the horizon. Michael Cassidy, not paying attention to the altimeter that would have told him he was dangerously close to the ground, and having become disoriented by the horizon reading, literally flew the plane at an angle just below the horizon into a corn field. The shock of seeing the ground coming up at him at a hundred forty knots with no time to react caused the man to have a heart attack, Larry contended. The plane slammed into the ground, skipped twice, and spun around backwards before coming to rest; its tail section had ripped through a barbed-wire fence a little over fifty yards from its first impact. But for the faulty equipment, there would have been no heart attack, and, hence, no crash.

Not only did Larry win big for his client in that case and make the half million for himself, but he thereafter strategically filed a wrongful death suit on behalf of Shirley Cassidy against the plane’s equipment manufacturer. That case was settled out of court for another million, of which he was paid half for his troubles. Needless to say, he never practiced defense law again.

Why, yes, of course I remember Shirley Cassidy, Larry said, returning from the momentary trip into his glory days. But does two million dollars mean all that much to you? According to this, you’ve got some fancy address. Larry was looking at Loy’s client questionnaire, which he had required that Loy complete upon entering the office.

Loy nodded his head, smiling. Don’t let that address fool you, Counselor. I’m only there until Rita is declared dead.

Larry was confused. I’m afraid I don’t understand.

Simple, Loy said. A prenuptial agreement. My dear wife made me sign a prenuptial agreement. In the event of her death, I get absolutely nothing from her estate. It all goes to her Little Princess.

So, how come you’re the beneficiary on the insurance policy? Larry asked, now totally confused.

Loy chuckled cynically. When she got elected to city council, Rita had to keep up the big act that she was a happy woman with an ideal marriage. We were never happy or ideal. Anyway, the city provides all of its council people with insurance policies when they come on board. It certainly expected the policy beneficiary to be the man of her dreams. So she put me on there for looks. Believe me, once Rita is declared dead, I’ll be out of house and home in a New York minute, thanks to her will and that damn pre-nup.

"You ever think about fighting the agreement? I mean, getting it declared void ab initio?" Larry asked.

If you mean finding it to be unenforceable, the answer is yes, Loy replied. But let me tell you something: That document is ironclad. I’ve been to several lawyers who have just the same as told me to forget it.

I see, Larry said, nodding his head.

Well, then? Loy asked, staring at the lawyer.

I’m sorry … ? Larry said, puzzled.

Will you take the case?

Oh … uh, well … uh, I’ll need to look into this thing. I’ll have to check out the law and do a little fact-finding.

Loy’s face lost its expression. Look, he said coldly, leaning forward in his chair. If you don’t want to take this case, I know a dozen other lawyers out there who would. Now, do you want the case or not?

Larry’s eyes met Loy’s. The man seemed serious. Larry could tell that Connors Loy, dressed in his designer clothes and sporting a young blonde toy on his arm, was used to getting his way; he wanted what he wanted when he wanted it.

Larry sat for several seconds in silence. His ears burned. He wanted to tell this spoiled brat to take a flying leap, but he needed the money. He was nearly broke and had only six other clients remaining: two were worth only a few thousand dollars each; on the other four, he had no hope of winning anything at all.

Yes, Larry finally said. Yes, of course I do. I certainly want your case, but, what I really mean is, I’ll need an expense retainer. Your case will need a lot of proving-up.

The cynical smile returned to Connors Loy’s face as he sat back in his chair. Loy was smart, and he knew Larry Cane. Expense retainer? he said, as if already prepared. That’s not a problem. He pulled a letter-sized manila envelope from the left breast pocket of his gray Brooks Brother’s suit and threw it on the desk in front of Larry. "There’s ten thousand there. Count it, if you want. Will that be enough, Counselor?"

Ten thousand dollars all at once was more than Larry had seen since the Cassidy case. He fought off a momentary loss of tongue control.

Well, certainly, he heard himself say. Ten thousand ought to be … more than enough.

Good, then, Loy nearly smirked. I’ll expect you to keep me informed regularly. So, what is your fee?

Larry realized that, although he had a smattering of knowledge concerning the area of law involved in such a case, he had absolutely no idea what it would take to get a person declared legally dead.

My usual fee is fifty percent, he said almost apologetically, still stunned at the sight of the bulging envelope.

You must be kidding, Loy sneered, looking around the office, his voice reflecting his contempt for the station in life to which Larry had fallen. I’ll pay you ten percent of anything you recover above what I know I’ve already got coming.

Loy was smart, all right. He was also a user. And, indeed, he knew Larry. He knew Larry was in desperate straits. He knew Larry was a good lawyer, but a lawyer who nonetheless needed money. In his mind, Larry could be bought and used with little consequence.

In the end, it would only mean a hundred thousand dollars—and then only if he was successful. But Larry nodded his agreement to the terms.

If you need anything, just call me, Loy said with a knowing smile, pointing to the telephone number on the questionnaire. He rose from his chair and Traci followed suit. Come on, baby. Let’s get out of here, he said with a demeaning smack on the blonde’s shapely rear end.

The lawyer and the client shook hands, and Larry saw the couple to the door of the office. He watched as they descended the stairway and moved through the proud Gothic arch below. A bit of stone that had fallen from the structure, ground and cracked beneath Loy’s shoe as he disappeared through the threshold into the street.

For a moment, Larry stood looking down the empty, darkened stairwell. He then closed the door and walked silently back to his desk. Reaching into the lower left drawer, he extracted a half-empty bottle of vodka and a water-spotted glass tumbler. He poured two fingers of the clear liquid into the glass and then set the bottle squarely atop the Loy questionnaire. Raising his glass, he toasted the manila envelope that both thrilled and taunted him. He had been bought again, but maybe this time for real. Another man now owned him—a man he did not like. He pulled the glass back to his lips and threw the vodka down his throat. The alcohol burned through his chest and into his stomach. Then, suddenly, he felt the warmth work its way to his brain.

It was a good feeling—a familiar feeling. Yet the pleasure was dulled by a sense of unease. Did he have a case? Larry wondered to himself as his eyes moved again to the manila envelope. Admittedly, he had sold himself out on the fee, but he did have a sizeable retainer—a retainer against which he could charge case expenses, at least. Used correctly, he could float on the retainer for a while, settle some of his other petty cases and use the proceeds to replenish the retainer. Who knows, he might even get Mrs. Stanton-Loy declared accidently dead.

Larry poured another two fingers of vodka and sat down at his desk. He leaned back and placed his feet upon the envelope containing the money. Stoli, from whatever hiding place he had before scurried into, was now back and looking to claim his master’s lap. The cat looked up at Larry, who patted his leg softly.

Yes, baby, Larry cooed. You can come up here. The cat jumped from the floor to Larry’s lap, circled once, and then lay down, purring softly. Larry stroked the animal’s soft fur and sipped the drink as Stoli licked himself.

Larry was beginning to mellow now. He looked at the money pinned to the desk by the heels of his loafers. Finally, he thought, things are going to change. Maybe this case was the pivotal event of his life. He finished the drink while watching the rain splatter against the front window and listened while thunder rolled gently through the Quay. Yes, maybe this could be the start of something good. Maybe he wouldn’t have to take those petty cases anymore. No more having to run for court.

Suddenly, Larry sat bolt upright in the chair, his feet dropping from the desk with a thud. Stoli jumped from his lap and hid behind the wastebasket. Larry looked at the old clock above the door and cringed. It was ten minutes after four. He had just realized that he was to be in court at four o’clock. He scrambled from the chair, took a last look at the manila envelope, and shoved it into his vest pocket.

He had been late to docket calls and even to hearings before, but this one was different. This was a contempt hearing, and not just any contempt hearing. It was his own. He started for the door and then suddenly stopped. Retracing his steps to the desk, he picked up the telephone and dialed it. After speaking a few words, he hurriedly slammed the phone down, grabbed his raincoat from the back of the closet door, and exited the office for the courthouse.

Chapter Two

B ARTON LISLE WAS SICK, HANGOVER-SICK, sick to the point of not being certain that he could make it through the day ahead or even knowing that he wanted to. Last night, once again, he had tried to drink dry a veritable Missouri River of vodka, and now, once again, he was feverishly attempting to save his job and his ass with yet another piece of journalistic pablum. This particular story, ordered by the powers that be in the downtown office, was about the Kansas City, Kansas, Men of Iron. It concerned a pair of brothers, Earl and Cole Vitch, who had, for years, run a small metalworking shop in the Kaw River bottoms. The Vitches had, the week before, returned from an Indianapolis metalworking convention with three first-place prizes. Somebody had decided that the two were deserving of a story. Bart didn’t see much charm in it, but having little option, he was on his way—with head pounding, stomach retching—to get the interview.

Bart had always said, If God wanted to give the world an enema, He’d stick the tube in Kansas City, Kansas, and now, here he was, relegated to working out of the KCK office instead of the upscale office across the river. Guess that’s what a liter-of-vodka-a-day habit will get you.

When he finally found the grubby-looking shop, which sat in a virtual sea of twisted, rusting metal, there seemed to be absolutely no one around. He stood for a time in the cool solitude of the dirt-floored barn before he heard a sound and followed it out back. There, he found a skinny man with a greasy cap on his head using a huge file on what appeared to be the top of a wrought-iron fencepost clamped in a vise. Thinking this man must be one of the Vitch brothers, Bart introduced himself. After shaking hands, the fellow jerked his head.

They’re over next door, he said.

Stepping through and around piles of what appeared to him to be rusty trash, Bart wended his way to a small, white clapboard house next to the junkyard. There, he discovered the Brothers Vitch.

What nobody had told him was that both men were dwarves. He found them sitting upright on a broken-down sofa, drinking beer out of cans; their feet barely reached the front edge of the sofa cushions. When Bart thought back on the interview later, the vision that always came most immediately to mind was that of their stubby fingers wriggling worm-like on the frosty beer cans. They had offered him a beer, which he accepted; this led to another, and another, and soon they were all laughing and jabbering like long-lost friends.

It had been a long run from The Nightcap Lounge, a half-block away down Minnesota Avenue, through the pouring rain. It was now 5:42 p.m. Twenty minutes ago, Darl Ninna, his editor downtown, had bellowed into the phone, You get that story here, you drunken piece of crap—get it here by six or, so help me heaven, you’re out the door!

Darl (short for Darlene) was a skinny, breastless, little humpbacked creature with thick butterfly glasses. She seemed to flaunt her plainness at the world. Her stringy, straight hair was hacked off at the shoulders in a severe approximation of a pageboy, and the bony face framed by the dull cascade of hair had never, at least in Bart’s memory, known even a scintilla of make-up. She was an incredibly brainy, tiny wisp of a woman who attained her lofty position as Assistant City Editor at the unheard-of age of twenty-three. There had been a time—a year or two ago—when Bart had been her pet; every story he wrote, she praised as Pulitzer Prize material.

But that was when he was doing seven stories a week—seven stories of major interest—not the rushed dreck like the one he was about to send downtown over the wires. In that seemingly long-ago time, he would send them a well-researched, well-written story for each day of the week, which meant that most times he was doing two stories at once. Now, his palms were sweating as he attempted to send over a story which, disconcertingly, was his first in three days, and which he had promised Darl four hours ago. It seemed as if lately he could barely force himself out of bed.

Upon his return to the office following the beery interview, Bart was unable to find a place to park in front of The Report’s bureau office; instead, he parked directly in front of The Nightcap Lounge and went in for a quick refresher. That, as he remembered it, was at about one p.m. He had almost inhaled two straight vodka shots poured by Anne Todd, the proprietress, then settled down to cozily nurse the third. Of course, the time got away from him, which necessitated his headlong run to The Report office through the rain forty-five minutes ago. When he got there, the office was locked, and he had to fumble for the key. On his desk, he found a note in Bureau Chief Marvin Day’s perpetually-angry scrawl: Meet Larry at Steed’s at 6 p.m. P. S. Where have you been?

How different from his salad days! Those days when he would daily come in with a new story about Rita Stanton-Loy, the city-councilwoman who had disappeared during a flood raging through the Country Club Plaza (the world’s first shopping center) nearly a year-and-a-half ago. In the 1930s, a Kansas City mayor named Tom Pendergast, who owned a concrete company, had grown fat at the city’s tit by gaining city contracts for his business. Some Kansas City roads, it was said, would outlast the pyramids, since they were, in spots, 16-foot-thick solid concrete. And a meandering little stream called Brush Creek, flowing lazily out of Kansas immediately to the west of and through the Country Club Plaza area, likewise had a streambed of concrete through much of its length. The effect was that, in any of Missouri’s frequent gully-washers, the creek would roil up and become an instant flash flood. One such flood, in September 1977, killed 26 people. Despite millions spent by the city on flood control in the subsequent years, another flood 18 months ago killed eight, with one person still unaccounted for. By sheer accident, Bart had been on the scene during what impressed him merely as a little-more-serious-than-normal Missouri downpour when the brown, foaming waters had, it seemed within five minutes, filled the streets and began floating cars past him with terrified, helpless passengers inside, staring wide-eyed out the windows. He had climbed a spindly tree beside 47th Street and thought himself to be safe, but the water had continued to rise until it was sucking around his chest; had he not wrapped both arms