by Jodi Compton
“Give me a minute here, Ellie,” I said. On her level now, I was cautiously switching my handholds around so that instead of facing inward in my climbing stance, I could stand sideways, toward her, to talk.
“That’s better.” My feet were braced and I could lean back against the webwork. “That’s not an easy climb for a grown-up,” I told her. There were times when I liked being five-foot-eleven, but this wasn’t one of them.
“How did you know my name?” she asked.
“Your sister came to see me yesterday,” I said. “She’s very worried about you.”
“Ainsley is here?” Ellie glanced up and toward the road, from where Vignale and I had both come. I couldn’t tell if she was hopeful or unhappy at the prospect.
“Uh, no. But she’s in town,” I said.
Ellie looked down again, toward the water. “She wants me to go back to Thief River Falls.”
“We both just want to know what’s bothering you,” I said. When she didn’t speak, I tried again. “Why’d you leave home, Ellie?”
She said nothing.
“Was it the kids at school?” I said, floating the broadest, gentlest question possible, so she could pick up on it or not, as she wanted.
“I can’t go back there,” she said quietly. “They’re all talking about me and Justin Teague. He told everyone, the shithead.”
Somehow I liked Ellie just a little more because she’d used that word. Besides, it sounded like it might be warranted.
“Was he telling lies about you?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “No, it was all true. I did sleep with him. I had to.”
“Because you liked him and were afraid of losing him?”
“No,” she said flatly.
I’d thought this was what you were supposed to do with jumpers, talk to them about their problems until they felt better and agreed to come in. That didn’t seem to be happening here. Ellie Bernhardt didn’t appear to be feeling any better.
When I was her age, I was still new to Minnesota, separated from what remained of my family, feeling I would never belong anywhere. It wouldn’t help to tell Ellie any of that. When-I-was-your-age stories invariably fail to pierce the walls and barriers and defense systems of troubled kids who think all adults are, if not the enemy, at least useless civilians.
“Look,” I said, “there seem to be things in your life that need straightening out, but I don’t think the underside of a bridge is the place to do it. So why don’t you come with me, okay?”
She sniffed loudly. “I slept with him because I didn’t like him. And I wanted to change things.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Ainsley doesn’t, either,” she said quietly. “I… I like girls.”
“Oh,” I said. This just in from left field. “That’s all right.”
Angry tears stood in Ellie’s eyes as she stared me down. “All right for who?” she demanded. “For you? Some cop in Minneapolis?”
As if her rage had freed her, Ellie jumped.
And I did, too.
If it had been January, the river at its most frigid, my decision might have been different. Or maybe I would’ve stayed where I was if I’d done everything right, instead of making Ellie talk about her problems and getting her upset enough to jump.
Or maybe I was lying to myself when I called it a decision. I don’t really remember thinking anything. When I let go, that is. In between the time when I realized I had really let go of the framework and the time I hit the water, I thought of several things in very quick succession. The kid on the bank with his ridiculous pretend fishing pole. My brother, holding my head under the water in a trough when I was five.
Last of all, I thought of Shiloh.
I learned something that day that I’d only thought I’d known: the river you stick your feet in on a summer’s day, with a little shiver at its coldness even in June, is not the same river God throws at your body when you fall from even a moderate height. I felt almost as if I’d hit a sidewalk; the impact was so jarring I bit my tongue, drawing blood.
Most of the first moments after I jumped passed too quickly for me to remember much of them. My lungs were burning when I finally broke the surface again, and almost immediately I was breathing like a racehorse. The environment was so different from the tame, cool, chlorinated waters of the lap pool in which I’d been taught to swim that I was reduced to struggling in the current like someone who’d never learned at all. It was pure coincidence, I think, that I bumped Ellie and got hold of her.
She’d either knocked herself out hitting the water wrong or had gone motionless from shock. Either way, she wasn’t struggling, which was a blessing. I got an arm around her and rolled onto my back, breathing raggedly.
Anxiety stabbed me when I noticed how rapidly the railroad bridge was disappearing, and how quickly we’d been carried to the center of the river. The current kept pulling at my scissoring legs, particularly my flooded boots, which felt as heavy as cinder blocks.
I kicked for the shore, and paddled weakly with my free arm. I did that for a minute or two. And then I realized something: I wasn’t going to be able to save Ellie. I wasn’t a strong-enough swimmer.
I could keep us both above the surface, if I kicked hard enough. But that was all. And how long could I do that? After a certain point, Ellie might be dead, because I wasn’t at all sure I was keeping her face above the surface enough to keep her from inhaling water, filling her lungs.
And if I remembered my geography right, before too much time we’d be at the spillway, the lock and dam near the Stone Arch Bridge. That was, by far, the greatest hazard in the area. I’d heard that someone had gone through it once and survived. The word I’d heard in connection with that incident was fluke.
I could let go of Ellie and swim for the bank in my serviceable crawl stroke, and live. Or I could stay with her and drown.
I don’t think I really weighed that choice much. Rather, my cold arms wouldn’t let go of Ellie’s frame. We went under, briefly. I swallowed water, came up coughing, and saw in the sky above me that the sun had gone behind another cloud. The cloud was dark gray and wet-looking, but its torn edges were turned a fiery gold from the sun behind it.
God, that’s beautiful.
And then something on the periphery of my vision distracted me. It was a boat. A towboat, actually, but one without a barge before it.
It was all luck for Ellie and me that day: luck that the towboat was stalled in the water where its crew had time to notice us, that its powerful engine wasn’t going, kicking up a current that would have made a rescue impossible.
The crew had seen us. They were yelling at us, but my ears were too full of water to hear anything, turning them into the cast of a silent movie, animated, gesturing. One of them was throwing something.
It was a line, with an empty, sealed two-liter soda bottle tied to it to keep the far end from sinking. I kicked up great splashes on the surface as I headed for it, and with great relief got my free hand on the floating bottle.
Something strange had happened to my flesh in the water. Usually, when the weather is frigid and even warm winter clothes aren’t enough, the fingertips and toes go numb first, followed by the whole of the hands and feet. But when they pulled me out, I could still feel my fingers, but the skin of my upper arms and chest had lost sensation, so that I barely felt the edge of the deck as many hands pulled me ungracefully onto it. It was then I realized I’d shrugged off my jacket; at least, I wasn’t wearing it anymore.
Ellie was already lying on her back next to me, eyes closed. The skin of her face was so white from the cold water that the freckles I had seen as fading now stood out in stark relief. I sat up.
“Is she-”
“She’s breathing,” the oldest of the crew told me. As if to prove it, the semiconscious Ellie turned to her side and vomited up some river water.
“Jesus,” a young Hispanic deckhand said, watching.
“Are you all ri
ght, miss?” the old one asked me. His doubtful eyes were a piercing blue, although the rest of him was grizzled and faded. He looked Scandinavian, like a Minnesotan of old, but I heard Texas in his voice.
“I can’t feel the surface of my skin,” I said, pressing my shaking fingers into my triceps. It was a very disconcerting sensation. I got shakily to my feet, thinking that walking might help.
“I have rye,” he said.
In my first-aid training, our instructor had advised against offering or accepting “field medicaments” in time of trauma: alcohol, cigarettes.
But at that moment I wasn’t thinking about my training, the fact that I’d mostly quit drinking a few years back, or that the water patrol’s boat was on the horizon now, its prow bouncing on the water as it approached. A little rye whiskey sounded eminently reasonable at that moment.
But it was my own weak flesh that saved me from myself. When the riverman put the bottle in my hands, it slipped right through my shaking fingers and shattered on the deck.
chapter 2
Fallout from Ellie Bernhardt’s attempted suicide ate up most of my afternoon.
We were both taken to Hennepin County Medical Center. After they took Ellie away, a middle-aged physician’s assistant looked at me and said, “I’ll have a look at you in the second exam room down the hall.”
“Me?” I said, startled. “I’m fine.”
“Probably,” she said. “But I got to look at your ears and check-”
“My ears feel fine,” I said, ignoring the faint but telltale cool heaviness that meant there was water in one of them. At her skeptical look-medical people take challenges to their authority nearly as badly as cops-I said, “Really. I don’t do exams.”
I meant it. Few things frighten me. Doctors’ offices do. “Just point me toward your showers, all right?” I said.
She gave me the skeptical look a moment more, and then said, “Fine, at this time of year I doubt you’ve even got mild hypothermia.” There was a definite fox-and-grapes sound to her dismissal, as though she hadn’t really wanted to examine me anyway.
In the doctors’ and nurses’ locker room, I took a fifteen-minute shower under very hot water and put on a set of nurse’s scrubs they’d provided me, a flowered top and sea-green pants. My wet clothes I balled up and put in a plastic bag. When I came out, I peered into the examining rooms, looking for Ellie. A young nurse saw me.
“We already took her over to the crisis unit,” she said, meaning the psychiatric ward. “She’s going to be admitted overnight, at least. We gave her a chest X ray to see if she inhaled a lot of water, and it hasn’t come back yet, but I think she’s fine, physically.”
Officer Moore had been dispatched back to headquarters to retrieve the change of clothes I kept in my locker there. Detectives don’t get bled on and vomited on nearly as much as patrol officers do, but we do spend time at crime scenes that are muddy or still smoldering from a suspicious fire, and I’d figured a change of clothes might come in handy sometime. That day had definitely arrived.
When I got out into the waiting room, Moore wasn’t there yet. Ainsley Carter was. She jumped from her seat quickly, but the hug she gave me was very tentative, shoulders only, as though I were sick or injured.
“Do you have children, Detective Pribek?” Ainsley asked me.
“I’m sorry?” I said. I’d expected a question about Ellie’s situation. “No, I don’t.”
“Joe and I have been talking about it,” she said. She twisted her solitaire, the way she had yesterday when talking about her husband’s unwillingness to have Ellie move in with them. “We want kids, but after this, a child seems like”-she shook her head-“a terrifying responsibility.” For the first time I saw the dried trails on her cheeks from the tears I’d heard over the phone.
Officer Moore was coming through the sliding double doors, carrying clothes on a plastic hanger in one hand and boots in her other.
“You’re going to be at the same phone number, the same motel, right?” I asked Ainsley quickly. “I’m going to have to touch base with you later.”
“I’ll be at the same place,” Ainsley said. “And… thank you,” she added quietly.
I met Officer Moore halfway across the room and cleared my throat. “Thanks,” I said awkwardly. I hadn’t been a detective very long, and I felt uncomfortable having a patrolwoman run this kind of errand for me.
“Sure,” she responded as I took my things from her. “You were Genevieve Brown’s partner, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I still am.”
“How is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t talked to her recently.”
“Well, a lot of us miss her.”
“She’s coming back,” I told her quickly.
“Really? When?”
I had to backpedal. “She hasn’t mentioned a date yet. I just meant, it’s compassionate leave. She’ll be back.”
Moore shook her head. “Sure, it’ll take time. It was just awful, what happened.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”
Genevieve Brown had been my first friend in the Twin
Cities. I wasn’t surprised that Officer Moore had known her; Genevieve knew everyone.
Her roots were in the Cities, and she’d spent her entire career with the Sheriff’s Department: first on patrol, then in community relations, and now in the detective division. Her real strength was interrogation. Genevieve could talk to anyone.
No criminal ever really feared her: She was short and not imposing, with a low voice soft as suede. She was logical, educated, reasonable; before the perpetrators knew it, they were telling her things they wouldn’t have told the guys. A few of the detectives called her the Human Polygraph.
I’d known her from way back in my patrol days, and had learned a lot from her. I paid her back for her shared wisdom by training with her in the gym, pushing her, keeping her at a physical peak as she went into her late thirties. When I lived alone in a cheap studio in Seven Corners, Genevieve used to invite me to dinner from time to time at her place in St. Paul.
It might have been the happiest day of my life when I got my shield and went to work with her. She was a good teacher and mentor, but more than that, she was fun to work with.
We used to get coffee in the skyways, the interconnected second-story warren of shops, restaurants, and newsstands that served the businesspeople of Minneapolis. She’d stop sometimes in one of the glassed-in passageways, usually on a morning when the weather was at least ten degrees below zero. Holding her paper cup of French roast in both hands, she’d look out at the city beyond, where white steam escaped from every building vent and the sunlight bounced with deceptive brightness off every heap of snow and icy surface.
“Today’s the day, kiddo,” she’d say. “We’re going to turn the radio off and drive south until we get to New Orleans. We’re going to sit in the sun and eat beignets.” Sometimes, for variety, she’d say we were going to San Francisco instead, to drink Irish coffee by the Bay.
But she was never serious. After more than a decade of police work, she still loved the job.
Then her only child, her daughter, Kamareia, was raped and murdered.
I’d known Kamareia since she was a child, from the early days of my career when Genevieve had first begun inviting me home for dinner. Born of Gen’s early, interracial marriage to a law student during her college days, Kamareia had been mature beyond her years, generally supportive of her mother’s demanding job.
Sometimes, we’d listen to other detectives talking about their teenagers: tales of incomplete homework and teacher conferences and coming home to messy houses. Afterward, Genevieve would say, “God, sometimes I don’t know how I got so lucky.”
I had been there the terrible evening Genevieve came home to find her daughter badly injured but still alive. I’d ridden to the hospital with Kamareia and held her hand until the ER crew had taken her away. I’d stood around in the waiting room unti
l a doctor came out to say that Kamareia, who wrote poetry and had applied to the early-admission program at Spelman, had died of massive internal bleeding.
Genevieve had come back to work two weeks after Kamareia’s death.
“I need to be working,” she’d told me, the Sunday night that she’d called me and told me she’d be at work the following day. “Please make everybody understand.”
The next morning Genevieve had turned up fifteen minutes early, eyes reddened but neatly dressed, with a clean herbal scent clinging to her damp hair, ready to work. And she’d done okay, then and in the weeks to come.
It seemed to help that there’d been an arrest made right away: a housepainter working on a place in Genevieve’s St. Paul neighborhood. Kamareia herself had identified him as her attacker. While he was in the system, and Ramsey County prosecutors built their case, Genevieve was all right. She buried herself in work, concentrated on the job like a white-knuckle passenger on a rough flight or an alcoholic drying out with nothing but willpower.
Then the case was dismissed on a technicality, and Genevieve lost her way.
I carried her for a month. She lost weight and came in with violet shadows under her eyes testifying to her sleepless nights. She couldn’t concentrate at work. Questioning witnesses and suspects, she could only ask the most basic questions. Her powers of observation were worse than those of the most oblivious civilian. She didn’t make even the simplest logical connections.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her to hang it up, and in the end, I didn’t have to. Genevieve was just together enough to realize she wasn’t doing any good to the department, and asked for an indefinite leave of absence. She left the Cities and went south, to stay with her younger sister and brother-in-law at a farmhouse just south of Mankato.
When had I last called Genevieve? I tried to remember as I drove back downtown. The thought caused me a pang of guilt and I set it aside.
Back at the station, I wrote up a report of the morning’s events, trying to make my leap into the water sound like rational behavior, something any detective would have done. Had I “pursued” Ellie into the river? That sounded weird. I backspaced and tried followed instead. Writing was my least favorite part of the job.
