The Music of the Deep: A Novel

by Elizabeth Hall

  They shook now, as she poured herself another cup of coffee from the enamel pot on top of the potbellied stove. She turned, trying to use her body to shield the sight of her hands, vibrating back and forth, making the coffee slosh from one side of the cup to the other. Carefully, she retraced her steps to her own table.

  “Hm-mm-mm.” Maggie cleared her throat, her eyes on her work.

  Alex jerked. The coffee cup jumped from her hand and crashed on the floor. Pieces of broken pottery lay scattered; a brown stain spread across the floorboards and dripped off the edge of the table. “Oh,” Alex gasped. She ran to the kitchen for a towel, started sopping up the liquid on the table before it could reach the stacks of paper.

  Maggie jumped up, too, grabbing files before the coffee could works its way over to them. When Alex finished mopping up the mess, Maggie gave her a hard look. “Is there something wrong with you?”

  Alex swallowed. “I . . . I caught my foot on the edge of the rug, and . . .”

  Maggie’s mouth was a thin, firm line. “Why don’t we call it a day?”

  Alex nodded slowly. “Okay. See you tomorrow.” She grabbed her fleece jacket and headed out. The wind was blowing, and she flipped up the hood of her jacket, feeling the chill seep into her bones. But instead of crossing the driveway, back to her own dark and quiet quarters, back to the ghosts of that house, Alex headed to the end of the driveway and turned right, away from town, down a dirt road that ran past the driveway of Maggie Edwards and curved into the trees. The forest here was tall and thick and dark; the branches of the cedars were draped with silver threads of mist.

  She stood there, breathing in the scent of rain and trees. Just breathe. That’s all she had to do. Just breathe.

  The sound of voices carried through the mist, a rise and fall of sound, murmurs too indistinct to decipher actual words. Alex listened, trying to figure out where the voices were coming from. She could hear the rain, droplets landing on the leaves of bushes and trees with a soft tick tick tick.

  “Watch out!”

  Alex jumped, as if the words had been meant for her. It took her a moment to realize that it was one of the voices she’d been hearing, and that they were not speaking to her. She rounded a bend in the road, and there they stood, one small woman with a red raincoat, her face lost inside the hood, and the other tall and slender. The white hair of Emmie Porter glowed beneath her canvas rain hat, a dark brown cross between cowgirl and world traveler. The two women stood next to a horse that was neighing, moving nervously, trying to pull the bridle out of the hands of the smaller woman. When the horse saw Alex, it stomped a foot on the ground.

  A gust of wind swept out of the trees, down across the open space where the women stood. Emmie’s hat lifted and wheeled away, making a drunken dash across the grass and right into Alex’s path. She grabbed it before it was gone forever, and it was at that moment that the two women noticed her.

  Alex walked slowly toward them, hat in hand. The horse pulled back, neighing and moving her head up and down.

  “Whoa, Cocoa, settle down.” Underneath the hood of the red raincoat, Grace Wheeler spoke softly to the horse. She held fast to the bridle, trying to calm the animal.

  Emmie stood in front of the horse, watching her carefully. “Something sure has her upset.”

  “Is it me?” Alex whispered, standing back behind the two women. They did not turn to look at her.

  “I don’t know,” Emmie murmured. All three women watched as the horse’s ears went back flat against her head, her eyes large and nervous. She stepped backward, pulling against Grace again.

  Emmie’s voice was quiet and low. “They’re prey animals, you know. Have to be keenly aware of all the dangers around them. Rattlesnakes, mountain lions, coyotes. Something is happening out here somewhere that she doesn’t like. Something that we haven’t picked up on yet.”

  Emmie was quiet for a long moment, studying the horse. “Or maybe it isn’t something that is happening right now. Maybe something out here has triggered a memory. She’s had some trauma in her life, and she’s got PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “I just bought this horse a few months ago,” Grace said quietly. “Got a good deal on her. But that’s because she has issues. She belonged to a man who thought you had to break the animal to make it work for you. He broke her, all right. Broke her spirit. Made her afraid . . . more afraid than normal, that is. She’d been kicked and yelled at. Tied up where she couldn’t even move her head up and down.”

  Emmie still stood quietly, watching. She made no move to touch the horse. “I saw it so many times when I was growing up. Men who tried to control the animal through fear. Through physical pain. Intimidation. It backfires, every single time. Kick a horse a few times, and you end up creating a monster. Hard to catch, hard to bridle, hard to get a saddle on, because they’re afraid of what’s coming next. They know what’s coming. And they’ll do almost anything to avoid it.

  “If you do it enough—hit them, kick them, abuse them—one of two things will happen. The horse might just give up, refuse to do anything. Or it might turn on you. Try to bite you or throw you or kick you. Either way, you no longer have a horse that you can work with. I saw a horse take a hunk out of a man’s head once, when I was growing up. They had to put her down. Too dangerous to keep around. You can hardly blame the horse, though. Not after everything it had been through. Seemed like a normal reaction to me. When an animal has been abused that much.

  “It’s like when a soldier comes back from war, or someone who’s been in a bad car accident—any kind of really traumatic event. They cope any way they can. But sometimes that means that the brain buries the actual memory. Allows them to forget, at least for a little while.”

  Emmie turned and looked at Alex. “And then some weird random event will trigger all that buried trauma. Hearing a loud noise, or somebody yelling, or the smell of fire, anything like that—can cause the brain to go right back to the moment it happened. Living the event all over again. And that’s when things can get dangerous. I once saw a horse nearly trample a woman, just because she rattled her cup of ice.”

  Alex could not look at her, and turned away to stare into the trees.

  “That’s what a lot of Eastern medicine is all about. Reiki, massage, acupuncture, yoga. It’s all about moving those places where the trauma, the negative energy, is stuck. Working it out. Getting it moving again. That’s what I do with the animals.”

  Alex spoke softly. “Do you ever work on people?”

  Emmie stood in front of Cocoa, her eyes still on the little mare. “No.” She took a deep breath. “Horses, dogs . . . they’re completely honest. Horses sense if the rider is afraid or not paying attention. If they don’t like you, they let you know. If they don’t trust you, they let you know. You don’t have to worry that they’re hiding something.”

  She turned and looked Alex directly in the eye. “Which is usually not the case with most people.”

  Alex took a step backward. She swallowed and dropped her eyes to the muddy ground in front of her.

  “When I was eighteen, I met this blue-eyed cowboy who showed me that there was another way,” Emmie continued. “That the best way to work with an animal is to learn how to cooperate, how to work together. You have to try to understand what the horse is thinking, what the horse might be feeling. What the horse is afraid of. And when you can do that—when you can feel what it feels—then you can make some progress. Then you can work together. Then the horse will do just about anything you ask it to.”

  Emmie took a long, slow breath. “I don’t know what has upset her, Grace, but I don’t think you should ride her today.” Emmie touched Cocoa gently on the forehead.

  Grace led the horse inside the barn stall, and then stepped back out, locking the stall door in place. “You two want to come in for a cup of tea?” she asked.

  Alex shook her head. “I better not.” After dropping her cup at Maggie’s, Alex was certain that she could not handle
a teacup, not with Emmie nearby.

  Emmie watched the younger woman for a moment, and said, “Thanks, Grace, but I have to pass.”

  Grace said her goodbyes and headed into the house. “See you at the spinsters, Alex?”

  Alex nodded.

  Emmie turned to Alex and took the hat from her hands. She dusted it against her leg and put it back on her head.

  They started ambling down the driveway, back to the main road. Emmie’s voice, when she spoke, was barely audible. “You can’t run, you know.”

  Alex slowed her steps, but she watched the ground in front of her and did not look at the woman who could read energy.

  “It never works—trying to outrun the pain. It gets lodged in the body, in the subconscious, and there’s no running away from that. Nowhere on earth to escape what we carry in here.” Emmie held her hand to her heart.

  Alex did not speak. Tears leaked, but she made no move to wipe them away.

  The two women continued down the dirt road, curving out of deep woods and back to the top of the hill where Maggie had her house and cabin.

  Emmie stopped in the road, directly in front of Maggie’s driveway. “Well, this is me,” she said. She raised her hand to indicate the small home set back in the trees, almost directly across from Maggie’s driveway.

  “You live right there?” Alex asked.

  Emmie nodded. “For years and years.”

  “That explains why I see you out walking your dogs so often.”

  “Yeah. I have to go by Maggie’s every time I want to leave the house.” She stopped and turned to Alex again. “But I quit asking permission years ago.”

  Alex watched as a small twitch of a smile lifted the corners of Emmie’s mouth. She turned down her own driveway, raising her hand in goodbye.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Alex shoved her hands in the pockets of her coat and turned her back on Emmie, walking down the driveway to the captain’s house. The rain had started, yet again, and was coming down hard.

  She glanced up at the house, her hood and the mist on her glasses obscuring her vision. It was as if the house itself were watching her, keeping an eye on her comings and goings. The windows stared down at her, like the eyes of an animal. Like everyone and everything was watching her—Maggie, Emmie, the ghost in this house.

  It did not feel like home, this house with its own secrets. She had no home, and she hadn’t had one in years, not if home meant a place that was supposed to feel safe, to feel like a refuge from the problems in the world. She had run from Albuquerque, run away from that awful marriage and all its deep, dark secrets, but she had not escaped. The ghosts of the past were sifting up from the layers of her mind, refusing to stay silent. And now this house, with ghosts of its own, was twisting and wrapping around her own muddled past, as if the secrets of the house were invading her dreams, invading her thoughts. Conspiring to make her remember.

  A movement to her left caught her attention, and she turned slightly to see Maggie, standing in the window of the front room of her cabin. Maggie tipped her head toward Alex, and moved away.

  She ran the last few steps to the house and up the porch. She unlocked the door and stepped inside, shaking water from her coat before she locked the door behind her.

  It was bad enough that she had her own demons to worry about. She did not want to think about what might have happened here, at this house above the cemetery.

  Alex moved to the window, looking out at the graves, staring into the dusk, lost in the gray-green-blue light of hard rain and coming night. Focused on the stones outside, on the movement of the trees, she almost missed it. Something had moved, in the house behind her, reflected in the window. Out of the corner of her eye, she had seen a flutter, just a shadow that registered in her vision. Alex stared at her reflection in the window, stared at the reflection of the area just over her shoulder, barely able to discern the darkness of the house behind her, barely able to see the staircase that twisted up to the second floor. She stood still, listening, watching.

  The wood on the stairs groaned, a faint noise that might have been nothing more than the house adjusting to wind and damp. There was a creaking noise, like hinges on a door.

  Alex turned and walked over to the front hall, to that weird staircase that wound up to the door. She eased up the steps, watching above her, and put her hand on the door. It was locked, just as she had imagined. She dropped her hand to her side and stood still for a moment. Once again she heard that creaking noise. The doorknob in front of her twisted, she heard the click of a lock, and the door opened. Alex moved, inch-by-inch, step-by-step, keeping her back pressed against the wall as she edged up the remaining two steps and crept through the door.

  The upstairs was much like the floor below it. Four-inch thick mahogany trim ran along the bottoms and tops of each wall; it framed every door and window. Three doors opened onto the hallway. She inched along, the shadows thick with the dusk and the rain. To her left was a bathroom, a relic from the fifties, with old pink tile work. To her right was a large bedroom, furnished with antiques. This room was directly over the dining room, and boasted an exact replica of the bay window below. Alex moved there now. The view from this room was spectacular, or at least it would be when the rain and clouds and dark were not clamped down so tight. She could make out the lights of town below, the outlines of the cemetery, the deep black of the water out in Haro Strait. She wondered if this was the place where the captain used to stand.

  She turned and went back to the hallway, headed to the last door, at the back of the house. The door appeared to be closed, but when she raised her hand to the doorknob, it swung open easily. The room was cold, much colder than the other two rooms upstairs. Alex shivered and ran her hands up and down her arms.

  The room held a bed, covered with a quilt made of patches from old blue jeans. She turned to see a stack of shelves. There were a few books: Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness, The Best of Edgar Allen Poe. The owner’s taste certainly ran toward the darker titles in literature. Trophies lined the shelves: basketball, football, baseball, mostly from Copper Cove High School. Most valuable player, 1987. Division champions, 1986.

  This room must have belonged to Maggie’s son, when he was still at home. Alex turned and moved to the dresser against another wall. There were a couple of photographs sitting on it. She picked up the first: a boy, about eight, standing with Maggie and what must have been his father, Maggie’s husband. The man had a thick beard, shot through with gray.

  She picked up another, and there was Brian as a teenager, dressed in a tux for some school prom or dance. He smiled at the camera, all white teeth and dark hair. He was posed with a young woman who had long dark curls. She was wearing a lacy black gown, smiling just as he was. They made a striking couple. Another photo showed Maggie’s son, dressed in his high school cap and gown, that same beautiful girl standing next to him, smiling.

  Alex put the photograph down and looked around the room. There were no secrets jumping out at her. No strange noises or whispered clues about what had happened in this house on the hill. She took a deep breath and started back down the hall. She was almost to the top of the stairway when she finally registered the one thing that was not quite right, the one thing that could not be true for rooms that had been locked up for a long time. She could smell roses. Just like this was a June morning in a beautiful garden, the scent of roses wrapped around her. Alex stopped, scanning the darkened corners. She exhaled and started down the stairs, careful to close the door at the top so that no one would ever know she had been up there, snooping.

  It wasn’t until much later, when she was lying in bed, tossing and turning, that the face in that photograph came back to her. She had seen that young woman somewhere before, she felt certain of it.

  She lay on her side, staring out the window. And then it came to her. That photograph in Maggie’s box of papers, the one with Maggie and her son and the young woman, all standing on Maggie’s boat and smiling at the cam
era. The girl in the photographs upstairs had to be the same one. She had the same long dark curls, the same striking beauty.

  What was it Maggie had said? Some intern? Something about having so many that she couldn’t remember all their names. But surely she would remember the name of a girl her son had dated, wouldn’t she? Surely she would remember a girl who was that beautiful?

  Had the great Maggie Edwards lied?

  TWENTY-NINE

  Alex sat for several moments, frozen, staring into space. And then she reached for the spinning wheel, pulling it closer to her chair, right square in front of her. She slipped her shoes off, placed her stocking feet on the treadles, and took roving in her left hand. Just a week ago, she had not known how to do this—how to take a handful of roving and turn it into yarn. But now she understood what the spinsters had said the first day she went down to the old Hadley house. Spinning was a place of calm, a place deep inside her where she could lose her conscious awareness. Where she could shake off all the fears, all the odds and ends and bits and pieces of foreboding that hung around her like the heavy clouds of a storm.

  Alex swallowed and started the wheel, one hand holding the roving gently, the other pulling a few fibers at a time, letting them build up twist. Every few seconds, she moved her hand forward to feed the twisted yarn onto the bobbin. It didn’t take long before she forgot to be afraid, forgot to feed the monster of worry that hung over her shoulder. She felt her body calming, felt her breath changing to an even, deeper vibration. She spun, lost in the rhythm, lost in the quiet song of the wheel, until the clock in the living room struck ten.

  She tied off the roving, moved the wheel back a few feet, and stood and stretched. Maybe now she could sleep. Maybe now all the monsters were asleep, as well. She went to the fireplace and added one more log to the coals inside, tamping all of it down with the fireplace poker.

  She hung the tool on the hook next to the fire and headed for bed, dropping almost immediately into an exhausted sleep.