Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  When Bethany was born, they loved the child, of course they did, they were grandparents after all and that’s what grandparents did. But tainted as she was by Jessie’s twenty-three unpedigreed chromosomes, the child would never be “in the club” with Aaron’s nieces and nephews.

  She didn’t care. She had Aaron and the two of them made their own home, the first real home Jessie’d ever known. They’d shared it briefly with María before she went off to business college, and then welcomed Bethany into it, a for-real family.

  And then it was gone. All of it. It had vanished without even the little sparkle of a soap bubble and the word home meant nothing anymore.

  “Don’t call it a home!” she’d wanted to shout at the doctor last night. But she hadn’t, aware as she was that the doctor had the authority to keep her tied to a bed, that if he suspected she didn’t have all four wheels on the road he could have her committed even over the objections of Dr. Halfwit, the bungling psychiatrist. So she’d smiled, nodded like a good little bobblehead doll.

  She had gotten out of bed this morning, dressed in the gray t-shirt and jeans — freshly washed — she’d been wearing when…. They were so loose she could have pulled them on without unzipping them. Shooting yourself in the head was an effective, though extreme, weight-loss strategy. Don’t try this at home.

  When the nurse brought her final discharge papers, she’d been agreeable and pleasant, said she’d “stop by the business office sometime next week” to iron out any issues with her insurance coverage, smiling until her gums felt dry. All so she could go — not home, house. And there’d better not be any insurance issues because she most definitely would not be back with an ironing board next week. She planned to return to the Watford House and settle in, relax, sort out the crayons still spilled on the floor, and begin again to plan her own death. There was no urgency now, not anymore. She could take her time and do it right this time so she wouldn’t wake up later in a hospital bed, becoming close personal friends with a ceiling tile. The next time she exited this life she would step out of it and bang the door shut behind her. Lock it with a dead bolt and a chain. The next time she left this world, she wouldn’t come back.

  She smiled at that thought, and when she looked up, a tall, red-haired man in a brown uniform was standing in the doorway of her room, smiling back at her.

  “Looking forward to going home?” he asked.

  She ground her teeth. “Who wouldn’t look forward to getting out of this place?”

  “Well, your chariot has arrived.” He crossed the room in long strides and extended his hand. “I’m Sheriff Brice McGreggor. You came here in an ambulance, so I figured you probably needed a ride home.”

  The sheriff was a big man, at least six-five, broad shouldered and handsome in a rugged, lumberjack sort of way. His hair was dark red, wine colored, almost burgundy. She looked into his eyes expecting blue but found brown instead, light brown, the color of the caramel squares that were her favorite candy. And his face and hands wore an overlay of freckles so close together there seemed hardly any space in between.

  “So the police here provide a hospital shuttle service?”

  He chuckled. It was a relaxed, friendly sound.

  “No, you can call a cab if you want. But Shadow Rock only has one taxi service and it only has two cabs. Those stay pretty busy shuttling tourists back and forth from the airport. Trust me, my cruiser is a much more reliable conveyance.”

  Brice McGreggor stood in the doorway, studying the young woman sitting on the side of the hospital bed. Not for the first time, of course. But this time, her eyes were open and when he crossed the room he saw that they were an amazing shade of green, a multi-hued dark hazel.

  He’d wanted to dash to the hospital as soon as he’d learned she was awake, that she had come back. It upset him more than he was willing to admit that he felt that way, and he most certainly didn’t give in to the urge. There were a host of reasons why not, most of which he didn’t want to pick at. She wasn’t Sleeping Beauty, after all. She was awake. Aware. And thus in the no-fly zone into which he had placed all women. Somehow, crazy as it was, he was disappointed about that. He felt … lonely? He didn’t have a perfect sleeping doll to visit who wouldn’t expect a reciprocal response he could not give.

  The first time he’d come to her hospital room, he hadn’t gone in, merely looked at her from the door. Looked from her to the picture of a painting on his cellphone, the picture he’d taken of the piece of art that’d been leaning up against the side of a chair in her living room when he’d responded to T.J.’s 911 call. From one to the other. The painting. The face. They were the same. From the doorway, he couldn’t tell if she did, indeed, have a perfect triangle of moles under her right ear, but he didn’t doubt that it was so. Everything else about the painting had been as accurate as a digital photograph.

  He’d mentioned to T.J. Hamilton that night how strange he thought it was that a suicidal woman would paint a self-portrait of how she would look dead. But that had been before he really examined the painting in her living room. Before sunlight and a magnifying glass had revealed what lamplight the night before had concealed.

  The frame, cracked dry wood. Dusty on the edges where a hasty cleaning had failed to remove the years of grime. The paint itself, so old it had peeled off in places, leaving bare canvas beneath. Old canvas, so fragile he feared to touch it, afraid it might disintegrate under the slightest pressure.

  The woman who lay in a hospital bed with a bullet in her brain could not possibly have painted the portrait that captured the image of her own dead face. She might have been an artist sufficiently talented to pull it off — though every other painting in the house suggested she was a skilled technician at best, with an ability level equal to the task of rendering a gallbladder realistic enough to be useful to a medical student. Nothing there suggested she was capable of the magic of the death portrait. It was perfectly detailed to be sure. But it was much more than that. It was art! It conveyed an emotional wallop that was a product of much more than the sum of its parts. It was stunning. And if the art teacher at Kavanaugh County High School — whom he’d consulted as the only art “expert” to which he had access — was correct, it was also at least thirty years old. More likely closer to fifty.

  He’d stood on the front steps of the high school after Ted Byerly’s assessment, studying the painting in the bright summer sunshine, trying to cram facts into his head that refused to fit without dangling in tangles out both ears. This was unmistakably, unquestioningly a portrait of the woman who at that time was lying unconscious and unresponsive in a bed at Kavanaugh County Regional Hospital. But just as unmistakable was the reality that it had been painted more than a quarter of a century before she was born.

  Then she woke up. With a bullet in her brain.

  He thought of the Tar Baby in the Uncle Remus story. Touch it and you stuck to it. The more places you touched it, the more bound to it you became.

  Bailey Donahue had become Brice’s Tar Baby. He’d reached out to her as she lay unconscious and been captured by Sleeping Beauty and her mysterious portrait. Okay, he was mixing his fairy tales here, but the metaphor still held. The fact that she knew the bullet in her brain could kill her at any time forged another connection — stuck him to her in yet another, even more profound way. He knew what it felt like to live every minute of every day with a guillotine hanging over your head. He understood as few people in the world understood, what it was like to wake up every morning wondering if today was going to be the day, the day his life was over. Instant death was a much less terrifying prospect than what he had faced every day since he’d put the final piece in place and saw the horrifying completed puzzle.

  The woman sitting on the edge of the bed didn’t view death as a bad thing, of course. She was here, after all, because she had done her dead level best — no pun intended — to end her life, and had been thwarted in the attempt. She would welcome death. At least in the frame of mind she’d b
een in when she put a revolver to her temple and pulled the trigger. But her frame of mind could change. Might already have changed, in fact. Even if it hadn’t, there was still hope.

  She saw him, and he turned up the juice as best he could on his “disarming, unthreatening smile.”

  It was a calculated thing, though he was not by nature a calculating man. He had learned over the years that the best officers used whatever gifts they’d been given in whatever way would help them get the job done. He knew he could seem stern and unyielding at times and so he had learned to display a kinder, gentler version of himself. He was not pretending to be charming, merely being intentional about it.

  That he was so affable and well-liked was, after all, what had gotten him elected in a county where competition for the sheriff’s job was fierce. Those on the outside looking in saw it as a cush position. Police a small population of mostly law-abiding locals. Be a hard-ass keeping the peace and an ambassador for the chamber of commerce with the tourists who returned year after year to spend their money on paddle boats, rented bicycles, mopeds and jet skis, sailboats, tour guides, historic site admission fees, and the basics of food, gasoline and tourist crapola that kept the county solvent. Without them, Shadow Rock would have collapsed into the same financial ruin that had struck down every other small town in West Virginia when the coal mines closed.

  But the affability was just one side of a man much more multifaceted than the less discerning of his constituents would have believed. Oh, when the manure connected with the air conditioning and some situation started to slide south, it was definitely Brice McGreggor you wanted in the foxhole beside you. More than that, though, he was a man who would know instantly when the slide began. He was uncannily intuitive about people and behavior. Perhaps because of his own constant sense of impending doom, his innate understanding of others was dialed up. If he thought a guy was bluffing, well then, the guy was bluffing. Even if he wasn’t, McGreggor could handle it, with force, swift and brutal, or with the strength of his words and character. He’d calmed down and disarmed more broken-bottle-wielding drunks in almost a decade in law enforcement than most men in his position did in a thirty-year career.

  Right now, he wanted to put this young woman at ease. She was a conundrum, a mystery that had been wallowing around in his mind ever since he’d walked into the living room of the Watford House more than a week ago and heard the paramedics call out that the “suicide” was still alive.

  The “suicide” who had painted a picture of herself as she would look dead. Except she hadn’t painted that picture. Couldn’t have. And if she hadn’t, who had?

  He tried to make small talk with her as he walked beside the wheelchair the nurse insisted she ride in out to the portico where he had left his cruiser, with the engine running so the air conditioning would have the interior cooled to something less than a gazillion degrees.

  How long had she been in town? Making the question casual, of course, not like the cop grilling the suspect in the featureless room with the two-way mirror, the empty table and two straight-backed chairs depicted in every idiot cop show on television.

  Where had she come from and why had she moved here? Those were the questions next in his lineup, but she had so tensed at the first one that he switched tactics smoothly in midstream and gave her his humorous monologue about the weather in Kavanaugh County affected as it was by the lake, and how its changeability had provided days like Monday of this week, where it had been foggy, misty, then rain, then bright sunshine, then thunderstorms in the afternoon that surely had raised the water level on the lake half a foot in their deluge and laid down an inch-thick blanket of hail on the far side of the county.

  Talking. Watching. Reading her. And what he read confirmed for him what he already knew. She was not at all who she appeared to be, who she wanted the world to think she was.

  And if he couldn’t figure her out, couldn’t unravel her mystery, there was no way he could keep her alive. He knew that it was impossible to prevent a determined suicide. But in his view, the key word in that sentence wasn’t “impossible.” It was “determined.” In that word, there was hope.

  He got into the cruiser behind the wheel, but didn’t put the car in gear.

  “How about we get the elephant out of the front seat so it’s not so crowded up here. That head injury,” he indicated the bandage on the side of her face, “is a self-inflicted wound. You tried to kill yourself.”

  He left it there, hanging, waiting to see where she would take the ball once she picked it up and started dribbling it.

  “How about we get the real elephant out of the way.” She turned eyes on him that he could see now had golden streaks in the center of the dark hazel. The eyes were sunken in dark craters in her thin face. “Tell me, Miss … Donahue…” She hesitated, only a fraction of a second. Most people wouldn’t have picked up on it but Brice McGreggor wasn’t most people. The name was, as he had suspected, bogus. “Are you planning on trying to finish what you started?”

  “Okay. We’ll start with that elephant. Are you?”

  Now, she studied him. The intensity of the eyes would have been disconcerting to a man not accustomed to probing looks.

  “Oh no, officer, I’d never do anything like that again. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m grateful to be alive. I don’t want to die anymore.” She paused. “You believe any of that?”

  “Not a word.”

  “The doctors bought it. If they hadn’t, I’d be locked up in a rubber room in Saint Somebody’s Home for the Bewildered, making some other ceiling tile my new best friend.”

  He didn’t get the last reference, but let it go.

  “So why are you being straight with me? I could get you locked up in a rubber room as easily as they could.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “I’m not sure, exactly. You don’t strike me as a man who plays games. You could put me away for … I don’t know, however long is legal in West Virginia. And I’d just make nice with the doctors there and eventually they’d have to release me. Then maybe you’d show up again to give me a ride home and we could have this whole conversation all over again and — what’s the point?”

  “Meaning nobody can stop you. If you want to kill yourself, you’ll do it. Sooner, later, eventually, you’ll do it. End of story.”

  “Yeah, pretty much. Game over.”

  “And do you intend to kill yourself?”

  She shifted her gaze away from his face and into a thousand-yard stare out the front window.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  She cut her eyes back to him. He could tell he puzzled her. Good.

  “And you’re not going to ask me why? Why would a young, healthy — well, except for a bullet in the brain, there is that — but still a woman with a ‘bright future’ and ‘everything to live for’ want to die?”

  “Would you tell me if I did?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “Figured that, too.”

  Something approaching a smile skittered across her lips, a suggestion, then it was gone.

  “Buckle up. Seatbelts save lives.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “You want to listen to that dad-gum buzzer? They tested it on lab rats, you know, found the sound that made them turn on their own kind and eat each other alive.”

  She buckled her seatbelt and he pulled out from under the hospital portico and drove away.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Bailey had arrived in Shadow Rock, driving the nondescript four-year-old Honda that’d been provided to her, registration bearing the same name as her driver’s license — Bailey Nicole Donahue, Donahue! — she had not been interested enough in her surroundings to care about anything except following the directions of the British-accent GPS voice to what had already become, in her mind, the end of the line.

  Riding along with the sheriff to a destination he didn’t need a GPS to find, she could look around, and when she did
she had to admit that the little town had charm. In fact, with its gift shops, ceramics shops, dress shops, candle-and-aromatherapy shops, and tourist do-dad shops in every shape and size sandwiched between ice cream parlors on every corner, the little town was relentlessly charming.

  “Is this place for real?” she finally asked. “It looks like something out of a model-train catalogue.”

  “Thomas the Tank Engine, actually.” He stopped at a green light and waved on a package-bearing pedestrian in the crosswalk. “These aren’t real people. It’s all make-believe. Sir Top’m Hat has an office right down from the pretend post office and the faux courthouse.”

  She smiled, a real smile that felt uncomfortable on her face.

  He glanced at her. “I can introduce you, if you’d like to meet him. We’re homies.”

  “You’re from here, then? Kavanaugh County?”

  “Born in Big Mac Hollow.” She looked skeptically at him and he crossed his heart and held up two fingers. “Not making it up. It was named after my family a hundred years before some dude in a white suit flipped his first burger. You don’t have to invent strange place names in the West Virginia mountains and Big Mac is tucked so deep in them the sun only shows up about three times a week.”

  “Lived here your whole life?”

  “I didn’t say that. I was born here, almost three centuries after the first settlers built cabins on this side of the lake, and a dock stretching out into the water so boats carrying supplies would have a place to tie up and offload.” His grin was self-effacing and a bit sheepish. “I’m a history buff, love digging into the old records in the courthouse, finding out the stories of the people who built the town and settled in the mountains around it. I could have been a tour guide — safer line of work but the pay sucks. I’d be glad to give you the ten-cent tour if you like and won’t charge you but a quarter.”