Crooked River: A Novel

by Valerie Geary

  Ollie was sprawled out on top of her sleeping bag reading the same book she’d been reading since the beginning of summer: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a green, pocket-sized hardcover with an embossed white rabbit on the front. She and Mom had been reading it together, one chapter every night before bed. They only got halfway through. Ollie lifted her eyes from the page and stared at me. Outside, voices rushed together, murmurs at first, too soft and far away for me to make out individual words.

  Then Bear raised his voice. “How many times do I have to tell you people to leave me alone? You’re trespassing, you know. Not that you give a good goddamn.”

  Ollie frowned at the door flap, then at the lump in my sleeping bag, then at me.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Pretend you never saw this.”

  Her frown deepened.

  “I’ll buy you two new books.”

  She touched the tip of her finger to her glasses.

  “Fine,” I said. “Four.”

  She tugged her braid. We had a deal.

  “Girls? Sam?” A familiar voice called through the canvas. “Are you in there?”

  The first time Deputy Santos came to the meadow, I was eleven and she was responding to a call from a concerned citizen who said there was a young girl living unnaturally in a teepee with a wild man out on the Johnson farm. She spoke awhile with Zeb and Franny, then with me and Bear, then she bought a jar of honey and went on her way. Every August after that, she made a point of meeting me for a sundae at Patti’s Diner. We talked about ourselves, about life and school and work, and we talked about other people, too, the kind of talk you can only do in a small town. I liked her. But she wasn’t family.

  “Can you come out here? We’d like to speak with you.”

  Bear said, “Leave them be.”

  Ollie closed her book and sat up. She fumbled to tie her shoelaces. The look on her face was panic.

  “Just let me do the talking.” I took her hand, and we went outside together.

  A few steps from the teepee, Deputy Santos stood with her hands on her hips, waiting. Her dark hair was pulled back and tucked under a brimmed hat. She smiled at me and Ollie, but there was sadness in the smile, a knowing. Someone had told her about Mom. Franny, probably, and I wondered who else in Terrebonne knew, and how many people I’d have to spend the next few weeks avoiding.

  “You must be Olivia.” Deputy Santos stuck out her hand. “Sam’s told me so much about you. It’s good to finally meet you in person.”

  Ollie stared at Deputy Santos’s fingernails. They were painted lime green and starting to chip around the edges. After a few seconds where no one did or said much of anything, Deputy Santos cleared her throat and placed her hand back on her hip.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Beside the fire pit, Bear stood with his hands shoved in his pockets. His banjo leaned against a stump we used as a stool, and on the other side of that was a man I’d never seen before. He wore a navy blue suit with shiny, fancy black shoes, not the brown uniform and boots I was used to seeing on deputies. But he had a badge and handgun clipped to his belt, so he must have been an officer of some kind. He was bald and thick across the shoulders and kept tugging at his sunset-orange tie like it was choking him.

  “That’s Detective Talbert.” Deputy Santos nodded at the man. “And we’re hoping you all can help us out by answering a few questions.”

  “You don’t have to talk to them,” Bear said to me, and then to Detective Talbert, “You don’t have my permission. They’re minors. You have to have my permission.”

  “It’s all right, Mr. McAlister,” Detective Talbert said. “No one’s in trouble here.”

  Deputy Santos took a small notebook from her pocket. “We just want to find out if you’ve noticed any suspicious activity in the past few days. Any strangers bothering you? Odd noises in the middle of the night? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything you can think of?”

  “No,” Bear said.

  Deputy Santos watched his face carefully, like she was looking for signs he was lying. Detective Talbert tugged his tie. Tugged and tugged. A muscle in his jaw twitched. The officers were wary of Bear, and I didn’t blame them. His hair tangled with leaves, the dirt on his hands, his shabby clothes and frayed moccasins, the way he jerked a hand out of his pocket to pull at his beard. Those scratches under his eye.

  “Even something small,” Deputy Santos said. “Something you might not have thought was important at the time could be helpful.”

  “Helpful for what?” Bear stared hard at Deputy Santos, and then at Detective Talbert. “Why are you here? Has something happened?”

  Detective Talbert cleared his throat and smoothed his tie flat against his chest, his hand lingering at the end.

  Deputy Santos said, “A woman’s body washed up in Smith Rock Park sometime last night. Early this morning, maybe.”

  Something pinched inside my chest. Ollie rocked away from me and then back, bumping lightly against my leg.

  “Tony Grant was out for a sunrise climb and saw her in the water, tangled up in some tree limbs,” Deputy Santos continued. “We thought she might have come from somewhere upriver, so we’re asking everyone who lives nearby if they saw anything. Just trying to get some answers for this girl’s family.”

  Bear kept staring at Detective Talbert. He didn’t blink or flinch or give any kind of sign that he knew what they were talking about.

  Finally, he said, “We don’t know anything about it.”

  He picked up his banjo, sat down on the stump, and started to play.

  Deputy Santos and Detective Talbert exchanged a glance I didn’t understand. Then Deputy Santos turned her attention to me and Ollie. “What about you girls?”

  “You don’t have to answer her,” Bear said over the sound of his plucking. “Like I said already, we don’t know anything about it. We didn’t see anything, hear anything. Go on and leave us alone.”

  I said, “It’s all right.”

  “You don’t have to say a goddamn word.” Bear bent his head down over his banjo and let his fingers fly.

  Ollie squeezed my hand, and I squeezed hers right back.

  Deputy Santos asked, “So yesterday? Anything strange happen? Or the day before?”

  How much time do you have? I wanted to ask. And where should I start? With Mom’s funeral? Or a week earlier, on the Fourth of July, the day she died? Or should I skip all that stuff and get straight to the part where Ollie and I just wanted to go swimming and pretend our lives were ordinary again, but when we got down to the river we found another dead woman instead? Everything about this summer was ending up strange, one thing no more than another.

  I glanced at Bear. He still had his head down, his fingers moving quick over the fret board. I swallowed all the words that had started to bubble up. If he wasn’t talking, then neither was I.

  I looked Deputy Santos straight in the eyes and shrugged. “We haven’t seen anything.”

  It would have been hard enough to explain why we hadn’t told somebody right away, why we let the dead woman drift downriver without going for help. And harder still to try and convince them that Bear had nothing to do with it. I knew what they said about him behind his back. How he couldn’t be trusted, a man living out here all on his own, abandoning his wife and kids the way he had, a selfish man, a bad man. I knew what they said and considering everything else—how he’d left me and Ollie alone all night, returning with scratches on his face and a bloodstained jacket, how he was acting now, all guarded and hot-tempered—I knew they’d find him guilty before they even held a trial. Before I ever had a chance to hear his side of the story. I needed to hear his side.

  “What about you, Olivia?” Deputy Santos asked. “Did you see anything?”

  Ollie glanced up at me and then shook her head.

  Deputy Santos clos
ed her notebook and tucked it inside her pocket again. She handed me a business card. “If you think of something, anything, call me. Okay? If I don’t answer, leave a message.”

  I held the card flat against my stomach and nodded.

  She hesitated another second, watching me, then she sighed and motioned to Detective Talbert that they were done here, it was time to go.

  The detective ran his hand over his scalp and said, “Appreciate your time.”

  Bear didn’t look up from his banjo, didn’t even stop playing.

  Deputy Santos and Detective Talbert disappeared into the trees, and then it was just the three of us again. Me and Ollie and Bear. And all the lies we’d told.

  Later that afternoon in the garden, I kneeled in the dirt and yanked weeds from a long row of tomato plants. Bear was crouched a few rows over beside a squash plant, pushing aside leaves, looking for fruit. I reached the end of a tomato row and started on another. When the tomatoes were finished, I worked my way over to the green beans. I wasn’t meticulous the way I was with Mom’s flower beds. Bear didn’t care if his garden looked nice, only that it was productive, so I pulled just the biggest weeds, the ones that were starting to overtake the vegetables, threatening to steal precious sun and water. I worked quickly, carelessly, leaving behind clumps and patches of smaller weeds. My shirt stuck to my back and sweat dripped down my forehead. My shoulders ached and my knees, too. My hands were covered in dirt. I kept picturing the woman’s shattered face and reaching arms and wondered what difference it would make to tell the truth now. Nothing was going to bring her back to life.

  I grabbed a large dandelion at its base and pulled, but it didn’t budge. I scraped away the top soil around the roots and pulled again, harder. The dandelion snapped in half somewhere beneath the surface, leaving me holding the greens. I tossed them into my weed bucket and looked over at Bear.

  “You think that woman they found is from around here?” I asked.

  He picked a squash from the vine and turned it over in his hands. It was close to a foot in length, slender at the top, bulbous at the bottom, a delicious butter yellow.

  “Don’t know,” he said.

  “You think Franny’d know?”

  He put the squash in an empty bucket and reached for another behind the leaves. He didn’t say anything for a while and then, “Does it make a difference if she’s from around here or someplace else?”

  I sat back on my heels. “How did you get those scratches?”

  Bear touched his cheek and looked off into the trees. “Blackberries caught me when I was out walking.”

  “And that jacket? You found it just lying on the ground? Or what? Hanging from a branch or something?”

  “It was tangled in some bushes by the river.” Bear carried his bucket half full of squash to a row of tomatoes. “I told you already, I thought it was yours. That’s why I brought it home.”

  I shook my head, then reached and pulled a tall thistle from between two bean plants.

  “You don’t believe me,” he said.

  “You weren’t back before dark,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Monday night. You said you’d be back before it got dark.”

  Bear was shuffling between the vines, gently squeezing the reddest tomatoes and picking the ones that were ripe. He glanced at me and then looked away.

  “Where were you?” I pressed.

  He sighed and dug his knuckles into his low back. “Communing with the stars.”

  “You were gone for a long time.”

  He bent over the tomato plants again.

  “Ollie and I were worried sick.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  I glared at him. “It’s not just you out here anymore, you know. It’s not just you who needs taking care of.”

  “You sound like your mother.”

  I snapped a green bean from the bush I was weeding under, broke it in half, and stuck both pieces in my mouth. I liked them best like this, straight from the garden, crisp and sun warmed. I chewed and chewed until I no longer felt so much like screaming.

  I swallowed the green bean and asked him straight, “Did you have something to do with that woman?”

  He dropped a tomato in the dirt, then picked it up and shined it against his shirt. “What the hell gave you that idea?”

  “You didn’t tell that detective about the jacket.” I picked at the dirt under my fingernails.

  Bear placed the tomato in the bucket with the others, slowly like he was thinking over something, and then he straightened up tall again and caught my gaze, held it steady. “Neither did you.”

  We stared at each other for a few seconds. I looked away first.

  “Something you need to tell me, Sam?”

  A chunk of hair had fallen in front of my eyes. I tucked it behind my ear, but it came loose again. My auburn curls used to be long, hanging just past my shoulders like Mom’s, but they were chopped short now and I still hadn’t gotten used to them tumbling and springing all over the place. I’d done it myself a few hours before Mom’s funeral. Took a pair of scissors into the bathroom, locked the door, and hacked away at my curls until they lay in a penny-colored heap at my feet. When I finally came out again, Grandma had asked, “Do you feel better?” And I had said yes, even though it wasn’t true.

  “Sammy?” Bear said again, softer, taking a small step toward where I sat in the dirt.

  I looked up at him. His eyes were the same color as Ollie’s—amber with gold and green flecks—but I hadn’t noticed until now how sad they looked, how many new wrinkles had formed around the edges.

  He said, “I didn’t hurt that woman, if that’s what you’re thinking. I would never do something like that. I would never put our family in trouble that way, not after everything . . . Sam, I would never—”

  “Me and Ollie saw her,” I blurted out.

  He pulled back a little, surprised. “What?”

  “In the river.” I was rushing, trying to say everything before I lost my nerve. “Yesterday morning. We went to the swimming hole and she was, she was . . . there floating. And dead. She was dead.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “We tried to pull her onshore, but she was too heavy. We tried, but . . .” My voice cracked. I hadn’t cried since Mom’s funeral, but all of a sudden pressure was building behind my eyes and my throat was stinging. If I started crying, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I sucked in a deep breath and wiped the back of my hand across my nose. I sniffed and said quietly, “The current got her.”

  Bear set down the bucket and came closer. He crouched beside me in the dirt but didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He reached for me, then pulled away again, patted my shoulder, pulled away. He worked his thumb over his knuckles and said, “So the jacket’s hers?”

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “Then we need to give it to Detective Talbert.”

  I stared at my dirt-covered palms. “Can’t we just put it back where you found it?”

  Bear laughed a little, but I didn’t see what was funny.

  “No,” he said. “We can’t. We need to tell them.”

  “What if they think you did it?” I mumbled.

  He shifted his gaze toward a patch of grass just outside the garden where Ollie sat, making a daisy chain. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. “We’ll be all right, Sam. If we tell them the truth, we’ll be all right.”

  He rose to his feet and squinted up at the sun. “Think we might reach a hundred today?”

  I didn’t answer. I stared as he walked away from me, as he lifted the bucket of squash and tomatoes and carried it out of the garden. When he was out of sight, I reached beneath the beans and yanked out another weed. Adults were supposed to fix things, not make them worse.

  4

 
ollie

  Four weeks, one day, fourteen hours, forty minutes, thirty-two seconds, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . . This is how long my mother has been dead and how long I’ve been living without her. Add fifteen more seconds. Another minute and another until I lose count and have to start again at the beginning.

  July 4, 1988.

  Time of death: 10:26 P.M.

  Four weeks, one day, fourteen hours, forty-nine minutes.

  And counting.

  Bear pours water around the base of a tomato plant. My sister pulls weeds. A daddy longlegs crawls over my shoe. A white butterfly dances above orange marigolds. I lift a leaf, look under, and find a ladybug. If I squint and imagine, the cornstalks grow a little taller.

  A shadow moves between the rows.

  She’s trying to hide, but I see her anyway. And I know who she is. She followed my sister up from the river, full of poison and rage. She wants our help. She wants revenge. I turn my head away from her and distract myself with daisies.

  Bear takes his empty bucket to the rain barrel to fill it up again.

  My sister sits back on her heels, wipes her hands on her pants, and squints at me. “It’d go a lot faster if you helped.”

  But the shade is cool. And my stomach is full. And every time her fingers work the dirt, I see my own hands scooping damp earth, holding it over an open hole, letting it stream through my fingers, down and down, hitting the coffin lid. Grandma said it was the proper way to say good-bye, and that even though I wasn’t ready and didn’t want to I had to be a brave girl and do it anyway. She said we weren’t leaving until I did. And I wanted to leave because there were so many Shimmering and I was having trouble catching my breath.

  I looked for my sister, but she was already done, already walking back through the cemetery to the parking lot.

  I scooped up dirt and let it spill down and down and thought, I’m sorry, please, I take it back, I take it all back. Like blowing out birthday candles or breaking the wishbone and getting the bigger half, it’s magical thinking and changes nothing.