Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  “Look at that mark.”

  There was a smudge on the top of her hand, but the sheriff had paid it no mind because her whole body was covered in mud and debris. Now, he leaned close and examined the smudge and realized it wasn’t a smudge, it was a shape, like a tattoo.

  “You know what that is?” T.J. asked, and Brice figured it out as the old man was speaking. He hadn’t recognized it at first because of the angle of the hand; he was looking at it upside down. “It’s some kind of stamp, some—”

  “It’s an admission stamp to that carnival that sets up in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly,” Dobbs said.

  “The one that comes every year with the rigged games.” T.J. amended, then cast a baleful eye at Brice, who didn’t bother to point out that he and his officers had patrolled the carnival every night since it opened, and could find nothing rigged about the games. What they found instead was that it was indeed a whole lot harder to toss a ring around the neck of a milk bottle than it appeared to be.

  True, the design of some of the games caused optical illusions, making the targets seem bigger or smaller, closer or farther away than they actually were. But Brice had long ago done the math, figuring out how much the carneys paid for prizes and how much they charged for attempts to win them. Every prepubescent boy and jacked-up-on-steroids badass wannabe was so determined to impress the hottie on his arm that he’d spend ten, fifteen, twenty dollars to secure for her a stuffed animal filled with sawdust in some sweatshop in a Third World country that would begin to leak said sawdust out of the seams before she got it home and would likely come completely apart in less than a week.

  The carneys paid a dime, a quarter tops, for each of the prizes, then charged patrons three-tries-for-a-dollar to try to win them. They didn’t have to rig the games to make money.

  “That’s the ink stamp they put on kids when their parents pay their admission.”

  Brice leaned forward and squinted. “These things are dated, using the kind of indelible ink that won’t wash out for several days.”

  “With kids who don’t wash their hands very often, might last longer than that.” Dobbs said.

  Brice tilted his head to the side, trying to get a better angle on the smudge. “I can see ‘Jul’ and ‘15’ here, but I can’t make out anything else.” He looked at Bailey. “What was the date you intended to paint?”

  She looked as if he’d asked where she kept her third eye.

  “I didn’t intend to paint anything at all.”

  Dobbs pulled out cheaters, parked them on his nose and looked at the blob on the back of the child’s hand. “I can’t make out the date, either, with the mud smeared on her hand. But it has to be July something, 2015. Since the carnival closes up on July 4, that’s a four-day window.”

  “Today’s July 2, which means sometime in the next forty-eight hours, this little girl and a whole lot of other people are going to drown in Whispering Mountain Lake,” Bailey said. “Unless we can figure out who she is and stop it … somehow.”

  Brice studied the three earnest people. Every one of them believed that unless they acted, did something, a little girl and maybe others would die.

  They all believed it. Including Bailey.

  Maybe the three of them were operating on the strength of some grand group delusion. Or maybe everyone in the room had been dragged unwilling through a door into The Twilight Zone. Brice had no idea which. But one thing he did know for certain — as long as Bailey believed it, as long as she thought the life of a little child was in her hands, she wouldn’t try to finish the job she’d started when she put a gun to her temple and pulled the trigger.

  This craziness or whatever it was had given Bailey a reason not to kill herself. Which meant that whether or not there really was an endangered child out there somewhere didn’t matter. As long as Bailey believed there was, she would be saved from her own death wish.

  At that moment, Brice McGreggor set aside his own belief system, and when he did, he felt a great burden lift off his shoulders. He didn’t have to decide right now whether or not he believed what the three other people in the room obviously believed. There was for certain a life at stake — Bailey’s. And to keep her safe, all he had to do was play along.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bailey watched the play of emotions across the face of the sheriff and felt a pang of sympathy. The poor man. If she were in his place, she wouldn’t have believed a word the three of them said. The story was totally preposterous and the three of them must look — what was it that old man next door used to say? — crazier than a soup sandwich.

  She wouldn’t believe it herself if she hadn’t lived it. And even then … some part of the Essential Bailey wanted to keep arguing the case before the High Court of Common Sense. Things like this — painting the future? Living somebody else’s death? That was ridiculous. Things like that didn’t happen to real people! She and T.J. and Dobbs were real people, normal people, ordinary people. Maybe it was all a dream and she’d wake up tomorrow morning — No! She wouldn’t go there again. For months after she’d crawled through the mud to escape the rats under a dumpster, she’d told herself that the whole nightmare had been just that, a nightmare, that she’d wake up with Aaron beside her and Bethany sound asleep in the nursery. Well, she hadn’t. It hadn’t been a dream. It had been real. This was real, too. She really had drowned with a faceless little girl who existed only in wet paint on her canvas. She might not want to believe it, but she had no choice.

  The sheriff did have a choice, though. He had to decide to believe, and when he finally stopped studying their faces and spoke, she appreciated his honesty.

  “I’m not going to pretend that I’m buying what you’re selling.” he said. Then he cast a glance at T.J. “Not that I could get away with lying to you, T.J.”

  She didn’t know anything about the tall, thin man who had shown up in a thunderstorm with a sixty-year-old painting and a dripping dog. But she could tell that the sheriff held the man in high regard. And the sheriff didn’t strike her as a man who handed out his approval, respect — no, admiration — like he was throwing feed to chickens.

  “But if there is even the possibility that someone’s life is in danger here, then I have to act ‘as if.’ So…” He spread his hands, fingers splayed in a gesture of submission. “So let’s figure this out.”

  She hadn’t expected him to cave in so easily, thought it would take way more convincing than he’d been given. T.J. appeared to be equally skeptical. Clearly, the sheriff was humoring them. But what if he was? If he was willing to help them, what difference did it make why?

  She watched the big man step effortlessly into police officer mode, then noticed as he began to speak that T.J. seemed to be on the same page, asked questions in the same manner. It occurred to her then that maybe T.J. had once been a police officer, too.

  “Okay, Bailey,” the sheriff said. “You say you … saw, felt, experienced, whatever, this little girl drowning. I need to know everything you can remember about it.”

  Goody. She’d been expending considerable effort not to go back there. Even remembering the panic, the choking, the terror was a horrible experience.

  “I just saw/felt this little girl drown.” She hoped he wouldn’t ask for anything more specific than that.

  “You say she was not alone. How do you know that?”

  “I couldn’t see, but I could hear other people, other voices crying out for help, other people … drowning.”

  “Why couldn’t you see?” T.J. asked. “Was it night?”

  “Yes, the sky was dark. I could see the lights of the explosion on it.”

  “Explosion?” the sheriff asked.

  So Bailey described what she’d seen a second time. The sheriff withdrew a small notebook from his pocket and jotted down notes in it.

  “An Adirondack chair on the boat — that tells us something we can use,” he said. “There’s an organization of local craftspeople, the Kavanaugh County Co-op, that
sells handmade items — Adirondack chairs, tables, small pieces of furniture — to the tourists in the parking lot of Joe’s Hole Marina. If there was an Adirondack chair on the boat that little girl was on, there’s a good chance it came from that booth. Only the big boats — like houseboats, or a pontoon, maybe — have decks big enough to put those chairs on.”

  “Wouldn’t be a pontoon,” Dobbs put in. “There’s nothing to a pontoon but the pontoons, the deck, some metal railing and a canopy. Even if there were something on one to blow up, like a propane tank maybe, there’s nothing of the boat to make the kind of debris she saw in the water.”

  “We’re talking about a houseboat, then,” the sheriff said. “Not even a yacht — the yachts have seats built in, bench seats, captain’s chairs on swivels, that kind of thing. The furniture below the decks would be custom made. You don’t put an Adirondack chair below decks. That’s a chair to relax in to get some sun.”

  “That’s progress, then,” T.J. said.

  “Narrows down the field … some. I’ll make a call to the state water patrol boys, get the registration numbers on the houseboats.”

  “How many boats are we talking about?” Bailey asked. “How big is this lake?”

  When the three men looked at her in surprise, she realized they must have believed she was like the tourists who cruised the streets of the make-believe town, that she’d come because of the lake, when in truth, she had barely noticed it when she drove into town.

  She was on thin ice here. She had revealed nothing of her past to these men. At least, not on purpose. She had let her real name slip and now both T.J. — which meant, by extension, Dobbs — and the sheriff knew what it was. But that was all they knew — she hoped. They didn’t know why she had come here. Most everybody else who moved here came because of the lake, and since she knew nothing about it she couldn’t palm herself off as merely one of the throng of “everybody elses.”

  The best lie always had an element of truth in it.

  “When I decided to move here, I wasn’t interested in sunbathing or fishing. I had already decided to … so I was more or less oblivious to my surroundings. Tell me about Whispering Mountain.”

  As the sheriff spoke, Bailey readjusted her understanding of what they were up against. Twenty-five thousand acres of water! She couldn’t even fathom how big that was. Six hundred miles of shoreline.

  “And then there’s the Nautilus Casino.” T.J. made a humph in his throat that in one sound conveyed his opinion of the establishment. “The super whiz-bang grand opening is set for the Fourth of July, but couldn’t a’been the casino that blew up. It would be way below crass for Mr. W. Maxwell Crenshaw the third to put something as pedestrian as Adirondack chairs on that floating money pit. Wouldn’t fit in with the undersea theme of the place anyway.”

  “There’s a small fleet of support craft.” The sheriff’s tone of voice mirrored T.J.’s assessment of the enterprise, and the man who owned it. “But the yachts that ferry customers out to the casino aren’t Adirondack-chair kinds of crafts either.”

  He must have noticed the confusion on Bailey’s face. “The casino isn’t on the shore of the lake, it’s in the lake — to get around the casino gambling laws in West Virginia. The lake is federal property, and Crenshaw greased enough palms in the right halls of power to get a permit to put his money-sucking machine in a spot where gaming laws don’t apply.”

  “How many boats are there on the lake that might have those chairs on the decks?” she asked.

  “Hundreds of them.”

  Bailey felt like she’d been kicked in the belly. She’d had no idea there could possibly be that many.

  “Hundreds? How will we ever figure out which ones have chairs?” One conundrum added to the next. “Once we figure out which have chairs, how do we figure out which ones of those also have a little girl with braids as a passenger?” And to the next, gaining speed on the downhill slide. “And once we figure that out, how do we … stop it? How do we prevent the explosion?” Bailey’s heart sank and she had to stifle a sob. “We can’t. There’s no way we—”

  “You don’t know that,” the sheriff said. “We don’t know anything yet. We take this one step at a time. We need to take a look at the houseboats — the ones we can find, anyway — see which ones have chairs on the decks. Go from there.”

  The sheriff was as dubious about their chances of success as she was. But he appeared to be no less determined. She knew the little girl was going to drown. Knew it, felt it, lived it. He had experienced none of that. But he was a policeman, had the whole to-protect-and-to-serve motto on the door of his cruiser, maybe stamped in his underwear and very likely tattooed on his soul.

  After the sheriff left, Dobbs and T.J. started for T.J.’s truck, but Sparky had not yet gotten his fill of Bailey’s affection. He turned at the door and jumped up on her, wagging his tail and generally being adorable. Bailey stooped to pet him and T.J. stopped and waited.

  “You might as well give up,” he said. “No matter how long you pet him, he’ll always want more. Sparky the Wonder Dog has an infinite, inexhaustible need for human affection.”

  There was something odd about that statement and at first Bailey couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. Suddenly, she knew.

  “Wait a minute. You don’t sound like … What happened to your accent?”

  A smile took over his face.

  “It went away.” He made fluttering motions with his hands to indicate flight and Dobbs did an eyeroll and grinned.

  “I wondered if you’d notice. You don’t miss much, do you?”

  Was this some kind of test?

  “It was phony? You mean that hillbilly—?”

  “West Virginians are not hillbillies,” he corrected. “You need to remember that if you are ever to live in harmony among us. We’re mountaineers.”

  “So that mountaineer accent was just an act?”

  “No, it was real. This part is the act.” He drew in a breath. “I left Possum Run Hollow when I was eighteen years old to join the Marines. I didn’t come back home to live for forty years.” He looked at her earnestly. “As long as I was the country bumpkin whose accent sounded like he just fell off a hay truck, I would stay a Marine grunt forever.”

  He paused and shook his head.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of a dialect? Think: My Fair Lady.” Then he feigned a reasonably passable Henry Higgins accent. “‘It’s aaaow and gwaaan that keep her in her place, not her wretched clothes and dirty face.’”

  Bailey was speechless.

  “It took me the better part of five years. On my own, listening hard, practicing pronunciations in a toilet stall after lights-out. But I managed. Once I sounded like everybody else I…”

  He let the rest of it go.

  She wanted to ask him about his military career, the medals he’d won that had earned him a lifetime of respect from fellow Marines. But she suspected that if she did, he’d slam the personal-life door shut in her face. From the look on his face when Dobbs brought it up earlier, it was not a subject he would be willing to talk about.

  Besides, those conversations had a way of backfiring on you: I’ve told you about my past, now you tell me about yours.

  “Every minute of every day for four decades, I was speaking a foreign language. It wasn’t natural, native; it was always uncomfortable, like walking around with sand in my shoes. When I came back to the chicken house to roost, I relaxed, took off my shoes and settled into a pair of old, comfy linguistic slippers that ‘didn’t pinch my toes nowhere a’tall.’”

  “You mean you went back to—?”

  “Is that so strange? If you lived in Spain speaking Spanish for forty years, would you keep right on speaking it when you got back home?” He grinned. “Still, once you’re fluent in a language, it may fade some with disuse, but you can usually summon the right words in a pinch.”

  “You are a complicated man, Thomas Jefferson Alexander Hamilton.”
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  “I ‘spect I am, Miss Donahue. I ‘spect I am.”

  He turned and walked out to the truck with Sparky following obediently behind.

  Bailey stood on the porch until they drove out of sight down the street. Miss Donahue. He remembered she’d introduced herself as Jessie Cunningham. She’d hoped it had slipped his mind. She sighed and closed the front door. Now that she knew T.J. better she realized that wasn’t going to happen. She suspected there wasn’t much of anything that slipped that man’s mind.

  Bailey awoke to the smell of fresh coffee and frying bacon. She lay for a moment in her bed, eyes closed, savoring the aroma, smiling at the image of Aaron slipping out from under the warm sheets, tiptoeing into the kitchen, easing the cabinet door open — because the one that housed the frying pan was in desperate need of a large dose of WD-40 — and…

  Her eyes popped open. Dawn light filtered in between the lacy yellow curtains through the leaves of the black walnut tree outside her window. There was no Aaron. No squeaky cabinet door. She was lying alone in a bed in an enormous old house in a small town in West Virginia. Aaron was dead. Bethany was … gone.

  Like it always did, those twin thoughts knocked the breath out of her.

  Those people who said time heals all wounds — they were full of crap. Time only blunted the pain, that’s all. So the agony didn’t slice you open with a filleting knife but hacked at your soul with a rusty Boy Scout hatchet.

  She breathed back in the breath that’d been knocked out of her. And smelled bacon and coffee.

  If Aaron hadn’t … who was cooking? The smells were overpowering, making her mouth water before fear nausea began to work its greasy fingers through her.

  Who…?

  She got carefully out of bed, quiet, slipped into her houseshoes and crept down the darkened hallway to the kitchen. Her heart stumbled through a flurry of irregular beats as she pushed gently on the door to open it. The kitchen was empty. No one stood at the stove, turning crisp pieces of bacon frying noisily in a pan. The room was dark. The coffee pot sat unused and silent on the cabinet next to the refrigerator.