Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

She set the steaming cup of coffee down on the small table at the end of the couch, went to the chifforobe, opened the top drawer and took out the blanket. She lifted it to her face, closed her eyes and rubbed the soft fabric against her cheek, then she took the blanket and the coffee out to the front porch and sat in the swing, moving slowly back and forth, listening to the comforting squawk of the protesting chain against the S hooks in the ceiling.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  She smoothed the blanket out in her lap, looked at the little yellow creatures on it and smiled. She could smile, now — well, most of the time she could smile — looking at them. When she’d first purchased the blanket, she’d cried every time she touched it.

  Now, she smoothed down its soft surface and used it to conjure up Bethany’s face. Bethany had had a minion blanket just like this one. Aaron had purchased it and brought it to the hospital and they’d wrapped Bethany in it to bring her home. As she grew, it became her blankie. She couldn’t go to sleep without it clutched in her tiny fingers, sucking on an edge of it like some children sucked their thumbs.

  This blanket was all of Bethany that Bailey had. She’d been sitting in that windowless room when it had first struck her that she didn’t have a single photograph of Aaron or Bethany.

  The room looks for all the world like every interrogation room in every stupid cop show she’s ever watched. The table where the suspect sits, waiting. The two-way mirror on the wall that conceals the detectives who are sizing him up, deciding who will be good cop and who will be bad cop, figuring out how to break him.

  There is no two-way mirror in this room. No cop show. No drama. Reality.

  How she had come to be here in this room is such a blur that even when she concentrates hard she can’t make out but a couple of clear images.

  The field of tall weeds in the rain, running away from the rats under the dumpster.

  Aaron’s body.

  He’s dead.

  She shakes her head in denial but there’s no denying it. How long has it been? Hours? Days? Years? They had been on their way to the airport. A flight to Freeport in the Bahamas. A taxi to the cruise ship. Then five days aboard, dining in the best restaurants, lounging in comfortable deck chairs in the sun, drinking fine wine … and at night, making beautiful love while the smell of salt air filled the room from an open porthole.

  That had been the plan. That had been the dream. Gone. Gone as soon as they’d stopped to pick up a woman standing out in a downpour. If they hadn’t picked her up — Bailey didn’t even know her name, had not even had the time to ask. If they hadn’t picked up No Name Woman, they’d have gotten on the interstate to the airport instead of taking the back route that wound through the industrial park to the homeless shelter. They wouldn’t have been on Baxter Street. Wouldn’t have seen.

  The door opens and two men and a woman enter and sit down at the table with her.

  “I am so sorry we had to bring you here, not a very comfortable place. But it is safe.”

  “Safe from what?”

  The three of them exchange a look.

  “You’re very fortunate that the black-and-white that picked you up brought you directly here, didn’t take you in through central booking, but came directly to me,” says the tall man with a bulbous nose and sad, hound-dog eyes.

  She remembers flagging down the police car, staggering out into the middle of the street so he would have to stop for her or run her down. She didn’t think at the time how she must have seemed. Soaked to the skin, her clothes muddy and torn, her arms scratched and bleeding.

  How had her arms gotten scratched? Something to do with … rats under the dumpster?

  The policeman had thought she was drunk, on drugs, was taking her to the police station when she started babbling about what had happened. He had called in on his radio then, written down some information, and then taken Bailey around to the back of a building, a police station maybe, she didn’t know. She was met there by what seemed like a crowd of people, who herded her inside and closed the door behind her.

  Her memories are blank after that.

  There was a shower somewhere. She’d stood under the hot water with a woman, a nurse or a policewoman, holding onto her arm so she wouldn’t collapse.

  She’d dressed. Prisoner’s clothes, an orange jumpsuit. With a tender grimace of apology on her face, the woman had told her it was all they had, like she’d be offended.

  She remembers her arms being bandaged.

  Someone had toweled her hair dry. Someone else had brought her coffee. But she couldn’t hold the cup, her hands were shaking so badly that coffee splashed everywhere. Into her lap, staining the clean orange jumpsuit. The woman, the same one who had held onto her arm while she showered, helped her hold the cup to her lips and drink. It had been scalding, burned her mouth and her throat going down.

  Nothing again. A black hole in her memories.

  Then here, in this room, looking down at her bandaged arms.

  She wiggles her toes and glances down at the floor. She’s wearing shoes, those disposable slippers that the plumber wears so he won’t track mud into your house and soil your new carpet when he comes to fix your clogged sink.

  Aaron’s shoe had come off. When the man had dragged Aaron’s body across the wet pavement, his shoe…

  She wants to cry. It’s an urgent need in her, feels the way it feels when you’re so nauseous you want to throw up, have to throw up, try to throw up, know that the pain in your gut will only go away when you vomit it up and out of your body. But you can’t.

  She can’t cry either.

  She wants to see Aaron’s face! Bethany’s face! She looks around, frantic. Where’s her purse, her phone? She has pictures of…

  She’d dropped her phone after she called 911. Aaron and Bethany are gone. Even their images are gone.

  When Bailey had first realized in that windowless room that she didn’t have a single photograph of Aaron or Bethany, she’d believed she would see Bethany soon.

  Right, soon.

  After a couple of months, she had gone in search of a minion blanket like the one Bethany slept with. She searched store after store. It couldn’t be merely similar. It had to be identical. And she’d finally found one in Babies R Us, bought it, took it home and held it to her breast as she sobbed. Every time she looked at it in those first few months, she’d cried. Now it hurt, it hurt … there was an aching need in her chest that almost stole her breath whenever she stroked the soft yellow minions. But it felt like a connection, too, to the little girl who had just celebrated her third birthday … without her mother.

  And now, Bailey was “connected” in some strange, supernatural, totally nutty way to another little girl, more powerfully even than her connection to Bethany. She couldn’t feel what Bethany felt, couldn’t hear what she heard, smell what she smelled, hear her thoughts and look out at the world through her eyes. So in that way, she was more connected to the little girl who might die, might drown tonight or tomorrow night or … than she was to Bethany.

  She couldn’t let that little girl die! In some bizarre way, it would be like letting Bethany die. If she could just find her! She could make a difference in the life of that little girl and in some way she was unwilling to pick at and examine, that made the loss of Bethany a little easier to bear.

  She paced back and forth in the living room, unable to form any intent to do anything, unable to think of anything but the little girl and the blue chair and the belligerent man, when her cellphone rang and Sheriff McGreggor told her that the man was at the marina to pick up the chair. She grabbed her car keys, raced out to her car and peeled rubber out of her driveway. The little girl was only minutes away! Bailey felt a hope well up in her chest she hadn’t felt in a long time.

  She had turned off onto Joe’s Hole Marina Road when she heard the first wail, a mournful sound behind her, coming up fast. It was joined by a symphony of sirens that curdled the air with their cries. In less
than a minute, the first sheriff’s department cruiser blew past her as if she were standing still. Others followed, one after the other, sheriff’s department and West Virginia State Police cruisers with lights flashing and sirens screaming. And an ambulance, a big boxy truck followed by a Kavanaugh County Rescue Squad truck in its wake.

  The hope that had welled up in Bailey’s chest was replaced by sick dread, a cold hard stone deep in her belly.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Bailey pulled her car off to the side of the road and got out when she saw the road ahead blocked by a West Virginia State Police cruiser turned crossways. The trooper was directing drivers to pull into the driveway of a house about fifty yards away to turn around, was not allowing anybody through.

  Bailey approached the trooper, who held up his hand before she had a chance to speak.

  “I’m sorry ma’am, you’ll have to turn around. This road is blocked.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “There is a police emergency,” he said dismissively. “You need to move your car. You can’t leave it parked on the side of the road.”

  “But I’m supposed to be there, supposed to go to the marina.”

  “Nobody’s going to the marina right now except police and emergency personnel. You need to move your car.”

  Bailey felt a flash of desperation. Had the boat blown up? Is that what happened? But that made no sense. The explosion had happened at night, not in the daylight. It had been dark, and she saw the bright lights of the explosion glowing against the night sky. And besides, she had the sense, irrational as it seemed, that she’d have known if the boat had blown up. That she would have felt something. She was connected to that child and she would have felt something if the child had … died.

  “Please, I’m supposed to be here. Sheriff McGreggor called me and told me to come. Call him. You can do that, can’t you, radio him or something? Tell him Bailey Donahue is here.”

  The trooper looked at her and she was certain he was going to tell her no, send her away, but instead he stepped aside, waved another trooper to take his place directing traffic while he used the microphone attached to the shoulder of his uniform. She couldn’t hear what he said, but after a brief conversation, he approached her.

  “The sheriff said to let you through. But you’re to stay on this side of the police line, do you understand? There’s a yellow tape across the parking lot. Don’t cross it. The sheriff said he’d meet you there.”

  Bailey hurried up the hill and around the bend. Below her, the parking lot stretched out in a flat area above the marina. It was a zoo. There must have been a dozen law enforcement officers there, and a crowd of onlookers, people from the marina and the houseboats were herded behind the piece of yellow tape. She saw paramedics slam shut the back door of an ambulance, rush around to the front and leap in. Then the ambulance pulled back, turned and came roaring up the hill toward her, siren screeching, lights flashing. She stepped to the side of the road and watched it pass, crest the hill and heard the siren wailing as it raced down the back side of the hill and away.

  The booths were set up as they had been the day before, but they were deserted, the operators forced back behind the police tape, which she could now see outlined an area around the first booth, the one for the Kavanaugh County Craftsman’s Association where the day before she had stood with the sheriff as the owner loaded up Adirondack chairs into the back of a van.

  She spotted the sheriff striding toward her as she approached the tape. He wordlessly lifted it for her to duck under, then turned back toward the booth. The man before her was not the kind, affable man who had spent an afternoon on a jet ski searching the lake for a little girl he didn’t really believe existed. He was a lawman, all business.

  “What hap—?”

  “The man who came back for the chair — name’s Derrick Osbourne — he shot my deputy.”

  Bailey gasped and her hand flew to her mouth.

  “Shot…? Is he … all right?”

  “Stable.” He paused, and she could see the next words came hard from his throat. “He was gut shot, a wound in the abdomen right below his vest. That’s … bad.”

  “But why?”

  “Osbourne’s wanted.” The sheriff’s words were clipped. “One of the bystanders got his license number when he hauled butt out of here and I got the registration. The vehicle’s registered to a Derrick Neal Osbourne, twenty-eight, from Akron. Outstanding warrant in Cincinnati for assault, broke a guy’s jaw in a bar fight. When he saw Fletch, he must have figured out that Ragland was stalling him until the police arrived.” He looked at her full in the face for the first time and she could see the anguish in his eyes.

  “He just pulled out a gun and fired. Fletch had no warning, never had a chance.”

  He looked away from her then.

  “Ragland said the guy looked even more juiced up than he had when he bought the chair. Scared him so bad he acted like he was going to his van to unload the chair, got in the back and climbed through to the front door, jumped out and ran, left the guy standing there waiting.”

  She didn’t need all the details, but she could see the sheriff needed to talk so she stood there, heartsick.

  “He’s a meth head, probably hasn’t slept since he and his buddies got down here to the lake three days ago, been partying nonstop.”

  “He and his buddies?”

  He looked back at her.

  “Osbourne’s uncle owns a houseboat here, and the uncle’s on a cruise with his family so Osbourne rounded up some buddies and busted into the houseboat. They’ve been tied up in a cove for the past couple of days, partying hard, but came back to the dock yesterday for gas and supplies.”

  He unconsciously adjusted his sunglasses on his nose. She’d noticed the gesture the day before. It was something he did when he was focused hard on something.

  “The crazy junkie destroyed an Adirondack chair just for fun — nothing left but little pieces, they said — so Osbourne came up here to replace it so the uncle wouldn’t know. That’s why it had to be blue.”

  Bailey felt a hole in her belly. “Then…”

  “There’s no little girl, only his two buddies, both with outstanding warrants.” Brice pointed with his chin and she turned to see two men in handcuffs being escorted by state troopers to their cruisers.

  She was stunned, speechless.

  “But the chair…”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Bailey, but there is no little girl involved in any way with that houseboat.” One of the deputies looked his way. “I have to go now. Every law enforcement officer in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Virginia is looking for this guy. He shot a police officer, he’s on meth, armed and in the wind. That’s the picture they put beside the word ‘desperate’ in the dictionary.”

  He paused for a moment, a tender expression briefly softening his hard features.

  “I’m sorry, Bailey.”

  Then he turned and headed back into the pandemonium.

  Bailey stood where she was, ignoring the hum of activity around her, trying to make sense of what had just happened. The sheriff’s deputy had been shot.

  She gasped. Was that her fault? Was it her fault the man might die?”

  And she couldn’t help thinking that if Brice had been the officer who approached the meth head, he would have been in that ambulance with a bullet in his belly.

  She wandered toward the booth where the owner had only unloaded a couple of chairs and tables before running for his life. Thoughts chased themselves around in her mind so fast she couldn’t grab hold of any one of them long enough to think it.

  No little girl.

  The words echoed like a gong on some mountainside in Tibet.

  It made no sense at all. She stopped next to the van, looked in the open back doors and saw the chair, the now-blue chair. She reached out a finger in a might-be-wet-paint gesture and touched it.

  Bailey’s vision goes black, no ligh
t, the total darkness of someone sightless since birth — even though she has her eyes open, she knows she does, she can reach up her hand and touch her face and feel her eyelids.

  Then other eyes open in front of hers. It’s like she’d been looking out through binoculars with the lens cap on and someone removed it.

  Now there is a scene in front of her, but it is not the parking lot where she is leaned up against the back of a van, reaching inside it to touch the arm of an Adirondack chair with still-wet blue paint.

  What she sees is a room somewhere. It doesn’t have the sense of immediacy that she’d felt when the little girl was at the carnival, a sense of “this is happening right now!” It feels more like the vision she had when she painted the child, a sense that this is reality, alright. It will happen, but it hasn’t happened yet.

  When the lens cap comes off, she sees a child in a highchair. It’s a little boy, looks to be about eighteen months old, with fat cheeks, rust-colored hair and eyes as pale blue as a baby blanket. He is wearing a bib smeared with something orange, creamed carrots maybe. And when Bailey sees a hand reach toward him with a spoonful of food, she grasps the perspective. She is looking out through the eyes of the person holding the spoon out to the baby. She is looking out through the little girl’s eyes at the world she sees.

  The little girl holds the spoon toward the baby’s mouth and he turns his head to the side and pushes the spoon away, spilling its contents on the highchair tray.

  He used to be so easy to feed, the little girl thinks. It was fun, like he was a life-sized doll. But he’s gotten cranky lately and she doesn’t like feeding him anymore.

  “Stop that, Jakey,” the little girl says. “This is carrots. They’re gooooood!” She smacks her lips but the baby is not impressed.

  Bailey hears background noise behind the little girl, conversation, though she only catches bits and pieces of what is said.

  “…a piece of chocolate pie when it’s cooled off…”

  “…got the last chicken leg…”