Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  From that time, the baby thrived like a true child of the wilderness, a noisy, barefoot imp, fearless even in the darkness of the woods. Soon Adam running about the house and finding his way to the chickens for their eggs and to the cow for her milk. When he was barely five, he could already lead the oxen and manage them with the switch.

  “He’ll make a good farmer,” Seth said.

  The boy was so bright and cheerful, so happy and eager, that it was easy for Seth to think of present and future happiness rather than of past questions and doubts. How deeply all these had been buried was revealed to Seth one day when a small train of wagons passed through. They were Connecticut people and one man, in particular, aroused both Seth’s interest and his anxiety. The stranger was tall and wide shouldered with a black beard and high bony cheeks. They were heading for new land in northwest territory, he said, and hoped to find his brother there.

  “Went out before you then?” Seth asked.

  The man held up the fingers of one hand. “Five years it’s been and never a word. I been asking all along and I’ll ask you, too: a big man with a beard like mine and a blind wife and a little girl of eight or nine? They drove an ox cart with one red spotted ox and one dun colored beast.”

  Seth shook his head. “Course, not everyone stops. And we’re a little off the main track,” he said.

  When they were gone, he wondered why he had lied when it would have been so easy to have set the traveler’s mind at rest, so easy to have said, “fever took the man— and they said the little girl, too— and the woman died in child bed. I can show you their grave. We put a good big stone over it.” But Adam came running in from the field, whooping and capering, his fair baby hair gone dark now, almost black, and Seth knew he’d done the right thing, though he could not quite have said why.

  As for Abigail, her delight in the child knew no bounds. She made the neatest little clothes for him, played with him, sang to him, showed him, with endless patience, all she knew of everything in and out of the house. And Adam was a very likely lad but for one thing: he refused to read, and no matter how many times Abigail sat him on her lap, he never learned his letters.

  To be read to was a pleasure he craved, but no sooner did his mother pull out the slate or attempt to trace letters in the Bible or in their battered blue backed Shakespeare, than he was up and away like a wild creature. “He does not need book learning out here,” said his father. “And he’s young yet.”

  As Adam grew tall, he became handy with anything to do with tools or animals. Seth could see him taking over the farm in another dozen years, so his mind was at ease for the future. Almost. It was, Seth, sometimes thought, because Adam was their only child that trifles, meaningless in themselves, provoked such anxious fears.

  Trifles. The boy could not, no matter how he tried, sight the rifle Seth used to hunt squirrels and rabbits. And more than once, when Adam had been allowed a day away to play with the boys on the neighbor’s farm, he returned in tears over the ball game which he could not master. Seth told himself that ball games were children’s play, and one could live without squirrel meat.

  One bright fall day, Seth and Adam had been clearing rocks and old stumps out of the original corn field, the first, hastily cleared land he’d broken. After they’d loaded up the wagon with some flattish rocks for the foundation of a new shed, he told Adam to go ahead and tell his mother they were coming in for dinner. The boy ran off, his hands slightly outstretched the way he did, as if to caress the tall weeds that grew along the track.

  Seth followed with the oxen. He had reached the barn and he was unharnessing the team, when he heard a terrible scream of pain and horror. Seth sprinted around the corner of the barn, fear for his son flooding his heart. Adam stood perfectly still before the cabin, looking straight into the sun with a bewildered expression. His mother was on the porch, her face frozen in anguish. At that precise moment, Seth felt darkness opening inside him.

  “Oh, Seth,” she cried. “I have been so terribly punished. This is my fault! This is all my doing.”

  “Hush,” he said, for he did not want to know what, in some way, he already understood. “We’ve known, haven’t we, that his sight isn’t good? He’s still our Adam, who can do most anything . . .”

  “It is my punishment,” his wife sobbed wildly, her features distorted with terror. Seth opened his mouth, but it was too late to stop her.

  “I killed the blind woman for her child,” Abigail screamed, “and now she stands again before my face.”

  A Meeting at the Café Visconti

  The sun still lit a high, cloudless sky, but the worst of the heat had sunk into the sienna- and ocher-toned buildings, making them glow as if by some subtle, internal fire. The big courtyard of the café was now mostly shadowed, and, freed of the heat and glare, the Bolognese were loitering over a Campari or a glass of mineral water or ordering pretty dishes of ices and biscuits. Michael smelled the smoke of their cigarettes, exhaust from the street, and a woman’s passing perfume, all touched with that more elusive smell, the faint exhalation of old stone and old buildings. Overhead, the swifts were beginning to swoop and twitter, while fat pigeons whirred between the tables and looked for crumbs underfoot.

  Michael opened his notebook and glanced again at the column of figures. He had done all right. More than all right. The astronomy faculty had liked his presentation, admired the new software, understood the documentation; he had done the translations and now he had the orders sewed up. It was a good feeling, and he was thinking how much he liked Italians in general and the Bolognese in particular when a woman’s voice asked, “Do you speak English?”

  Sometimes Michael ignored these appeals. His Italian was fluent, nearly perfect; his German was passable; his French, very good; and he could manage in both Portuguese and Dutch. Sometimes he would shrug, smile sympathetically, and shake his head.

  “You must be American,,” said the voice. “I’ve got one of the older models. A bit slow now.”

  She must have noticed his company briefcase. Michael turned to see a nicely dressed woman with faded blond hair pulled back into an untidy knot. She was wearing oversized sunglasses with very dark lenses, and Michael was reflected as a tiny figure against a vast and somber sky.

  “That must be the P— ninety-six?” he asked politely. You never know when you may find a customer.

  “A generation before, actually. I’ve got one of the P— eighties.” She was somewhere in late middle age, a tall, sturdy woman with the confident smile of someone used to meeting people, used to making friends, or, perhaps, like Michael, used to making useful contacts.

  “Really! Bane of our existence,” Michael joked. “How can we sell new software when those old dinosaurs are still going strong?”

  “Slow but sound,” she said.

  “A vintage model,” Michael admitted. “For personal use. For business applications now, our new line is the only thing to consider.”

  He could hear himself switching into his sales mode and smiled. “But you’re not here on business.”

  Her expression adjusted subtly, and Michael wondered if he’d given offense. He nodded toward the guidebook and map that lay on her table.

  “Travel and business,” she said after a moment, and there was a long pause. “You could saw that travel has become my business.”

  A waiter approached, very bright, neat, and important like all the café staff, and she ordered a San Pellegrino. Her Italian was quite passable, Michael notice.

  “I look at restaurants, hotels, tourist itineraries,” she remarked. “This is only my second time in Bologna. An underrated city.”

  “One of the nicest in Italy.”

  “That is what I think. I think it’s ready to be an important secondary destination if presented in the right way. Much more could be done with the university area as a package of entertainment, culture, and history. But not too touristy. That’s important for the publications I write for.”

  Michael smiled a
t her enthusiasm.

  “You’re wondering why I spoke to you,” she said.

  “Americans abroad usually appeal for translations.”

  “You are”— she hesitated, tipped her head to one side— “thirty-six, thirty-seven?”

  “Thirty-six. Thirty-seven soon,” he added and instantly regretted it, for she said, “My son’s age exactly. He would have been thirty-seven next month. I saw you sitting there, and I said, he’s Mark’s age. That’s what Mark would have looked like. That’s what Mark would look like sitting in Bologna at the Café Visconti.”

  “Your son . . . died?”

  “I don’t know. I think now that he is dead, but I don’t know for a certainty.” Her expression momentarily turned vague and distracted, and Michael began to fear eccentricity, mental disturbance, all the anguish of emotional illness.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said. He would wait a minute, he thought, then call the waiter and ask for his check. He was glad now that he had his briefcase and could use the excuse of a meeting.

  “I didn’t believe it for a long time,” she said in a reflective tone. “There are days when I don’t believe it yet. I can understand those MIA families, I really can. Until you have something to bury, you don’t believe. It doesn’t seem real, does it? Someone is young and alive without a problem in the world and then— he’s gone.”

  “An auto accident?” Michael asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders and something about the gesture made him think that she must once have been attractive, desirable. “I don’t think it could have been an auto accident. Those are reported. No, he disappeared years ago on a cross-country trip. He’d been camping out, hitching from one town to the next. It was the thing to do then, backpack, hitchhike, ‘see the world.’ Perhaps you did the same thing yourself.”

  Michael nodded before he could stop himself. “I traveled around a bit after my senior year.”

  “You’d have been seventeen,” she said very definitely. “You might have been at the same campsites. It’s a small world. When I travel, I meet so many people . . .” The waiter appeared with a coaster, a napkin, a little bottle beaded with condensation, and a glass garnished with a slice of lime; he laid them out smartly and was gone with a flourish. “. . . who might have known Mark,” she resumed without a break, “who might have seen him, who were the right age or in the right place. Over the long run, that has become comforting.”

  “There was an investigation, of course . . .”

  “No ‘of course’ about it,” she said sharply. “It was strictly after a fashion. You know that was also the time for running away, dropping out. It was hard to convince the authorities that Mark would never just have disappeared.”

  “You did not accept that.”

  “Never.”

  “I supposed you searched, yourself . . .”

  “Searched, hired detectives, put up posters, leafleted the entire area. It was in northern Arizona— not a very populous place. I don’t think I left anything undone. That’s a bad thought, the thought of having left something undone. I still wake up sometimes at night, sit up in bed with my heart pounding, thinking, ‘I’ve forgotten something. What was I supposed to do? Where was it I was supposed to go?’ But I haven’t forgotten anything.” She took a sip of her mineral water and looked around the café and then back at Michael. It was impossible to see her eyes behind the sunglasses. “I can assure you I’ve followed every lead, every clue.”

  “I’m sure you have,” Michael said. He put his hand on his briefcase, ready to get up, ready to leave.

  “Twenty years,” she said. “A lifetime. It’s been a very curious life. But you’d have a different perspective. Twenty years ago, you’d have been seventeen, and twenty years later my son would have looked like you.”

  “It’s a very sad story,” Michael said and shifted forward in his seat. He looked around with his hand half raised, but the alert and efficient waiters were all inside.

  “There was a grove of aspens,” she said, and as soon as she spoke, Michael felt the shift of some inner tide. “There was a small lake, too. When I first went there, the aspens were turning; I remember little pale gold leaves shivering in the wind and, behind them, mountains the color of lead.”

  “But you said he ‘disappeared,’” Michael said. “No one was to blame, was there? There was no suspicion, no evidence? You’ve said as much . . .”

  She studied her glass for a moment. “There was evidence,” she said, “if you looked hard enough. What was hard was to convince the authorities to do something. To convince them that Mark would never have . . .”

  “It’s hard to be sure sometimes,” Michael said abruptly. “It’s hard to know what anyone will do in a given situation.”

  “But some people you just know,” she said. “In extraordinary circumstances, yes, that’s true. In extraordinary circumstances, who knows what we would do. I look at those poor Bosnians and Romanians sitting in the arcades . . .”

  “Some of them are professionals,” Michael said. He prided himself on knowing a scam when he saw one. “They’re refugees today, Gypsies tomorrow, pickpockets the day after.”

  “They look miserable enough,” she said, “wherever they come from. That is a drawback to Bologna.”

  “As an ‘important secondary destination’?”

  Like so many determined and energetic people, she was immune to satire. “What would we do in their place?” she asked in turn. “In their place, with poverty and disaster? That is one thing. But on a camping trip in the West?”

  “Sometimes extraordinary things find us in ordinary places.”

  “That was what I said! I said something terrible must have happened. That’s why I believe he must be dead.”

  “Other things can happen,” Michael began. “People have been known to—”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. Let me tell you . . .”

  “I’m sorry. It’s been good talking to you, but I really must be going.”

  Even to himself, Michael found his voice unconvincing. “I’ve got this meeting.”

  “Not now, surely,” she said, imperturbably, relentlessly. “This is the hour for cafés, for aperitifs, for reflection. Especially for reflection. I see you are the sort of man who reflects, who remembers. As soon as I mentioned the lake and the aspens, I saw that you were a man who remembers.”

  Michael laughed and gathered his forces. “You made me think about camping in the mid-seventies. Evenings in a sleeping bag, listening to Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and the Stones.”

  “Yes,” she said eagerly, “all that wonderful music. All that loud, wonderful music. Generation-breaking music, but not for us. Mark and I grew up together. Was that an advantage or a disadvantage, do you think?”

  Michael shrugged. “My parents were older than average. Quite a bit older.”

  “I had Mark when I was eighteen. So, you see, I understood him. I understood his generation. The wanting to get way, to experience life, to see the world. Our town was small. The button factory and the cloth mill were still running then. ‘Make something of yourself or you’ll end up in the mill,’ that was what I was told as a girl. And then the sixties came and the new electronics plant and the real estate businesses and it wasn’t as hard for a woman to earn a living anymore.”

  “And Mark’s father? What did he do?” Michael asked abruptly, although it was rude, although it would surely delay his departure.

  “That’s what Mark always wanted to know.”

  “He didn’t know?”

  “It was irrelevant, completely irrelevant.”

  “Perhaps not to him,” Michael protested.

  “Mark’s father was like me, young and foolish. But he didn’t have any staying power, and so he became irrelevant.”

  “Boys need a man in their lives.”

  “Of course, you had a father. A conventional life. But Mark had his grandfather. My parents were very kind. I had a wonderful life when Mark was small. I had a part
-time job with the local travel agent. Twenty-five hours a week. The rest of the time I took care of Mark. We went fishing and on picnics along the river; we went to the swings in the little town park. We never missed the children’s matinee at the movie theater or the special programs at the library. That was the happiest time of my life.”

  “Then he grew up,” Michael said. “He got too old for the park and picnics and being perfect.”

  She took a sip of her mineral water and ignored the implications. “It was an adjustment when he went to school. Though I had to work, so I was away part of the time anyway. And then he did so well, no one could say I hadn’t done a good job with him. No one. He started the trumpet in elementary school, then played with the high-school band. Do you play an instrument?”

  “As a child.” He remembered the shiny, flaring brass mouth, the padded valves, the amazing amount of slimy fluid distilled from puffing out the notes of the “Triumphal March.”

  She smiled. “And sports. Baseball, of course. That was the big sport in our town. We had an adult team as well. And he insisted on playing football, although he was too light. That was the only thing we ever argued about. I went to all his games, and I suffered through every one of them until his junior year. Junior year, he broke his right leg in a game. I remember that awful sound, that terrible, unmistakable crack. I was in the stands and the sound went right through my heart.”

  She put her hand to the base of her throat. Her hands were strong and capable, Michael noticed, but spotted with age and beginning to wrinkle.

  “After that, I said ‘no more,’ though I think he played sometimes with the boys after school. I think he did.”

  “But he was off the team?” Michael asked.

  “The leg didn’t heal quite right. It was shattered. A bad, bad break. And the local hospital wasn’t the greatest— I still regret I didn’t insist he be taken to Providence or Hartford. But he was in such pain, and I was scared to death. Do you have children?”

  Michael shook his head. “I haven’t been married long. We’re hoping.”