Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  Bailey stepped to the table where she had set her phone, reached for it and was surprised to see that her hands were shaking. She took several photos, too, showing the frame sitting on an easel, and then the painting itself. She even stepped close and captured a shot of nothing but the little girl’s face. It was a haunting picture. The child’s eyes closed, mud on her cheeks and smeared across her mouth, her braided hair tangled with black mud and pieces of debris.

  “Pizza’s on the table,” said Dobbs as he came into the room through the door behind them. “I got extra cheese on—”

  He stopped in mid-sentence but Bailey paid him no mind, studying the lines of the perfect little face, awed by so many things at once, emotions and thoughts flitting around like moths around the back porch light at night.

  She was awed at the perfection of the painting. Every detail was just right, the whole much bigger than the sum of its parts, a captivating — no, spellbinding — portrait that would stop anyone in his tracks. The art itself, merely on the face of it, was the work of a spectacular talent.

  And, of course, that talent was not Bailey’s. Which, of course, begged the question — if not Bailey’s, then whose?

  Sophia Watford’s?

  The mysterious beauty from some strange land who had to have possessed an artistic skill level second to none, a woman brought here to escape … what? What had happened at the governor’s mansion that night? What was she running from to this house? To that kitchen, where she died?

  But was Sophia Watford actually dead at all? Was some part of her, some force, some—?

  Nope, couldn’t go there. Talk about crossing the line with the warning: beyond here be dragons!

  Bailey was willing to admit only so much. She did not of her own free will or with her own level of skill, paint that portrait. Who did paint it, to what end — not for her to say.

  As Bailey stared at the face in wet paint perfection before her, she yearned to connect with the child. Oh, not as she had in death, in dying with the child in the cold dark waters of Whispering Mountain Lake. But to connect to the living child, the person who this minute still breathed, wrinkled what was surely a freckled nose at her baby brother, Jakey, making faces, cajoling him to take that last bite of carrots so they could go outside to…

  To something. To what? What was she rushing outside onto the back deck of the houseboat for?

  It then occurred to Bailey, what fancy houseboat with a name like Mama’s Mink Coat or My First Million — with a supped-up ski boat and jet skis in tow, and a thirty-foot sundeck on top for sunbathing — had a screen door? With a squeaky hinge?

  …the sound of running feet, and the stretching of the spring on a screen door.

  “Don’t let the door sl—”

  Bam, the door slams.

  Houseboats had sliding glass doors that led from the interiors out to the decks on the front and the back, with screens, sure. Sliding screens.

  “…Take these pictures and show them around,” T.J. was saying, “so we can figure out who this little girl is, get her name and—”

  “I know her name,” Dobbs said.

  She and T.J. turned from the painting to gawk at Dobbs, who had come into the room earlier and stood silently behind them.

  “That’s Macy Cosgrove, Seth Cosgrove’s little girl. I saw her with him yesterday in the check-out line at Piggly Wiggly, gave her a piece of bubblegum and told her I’d teach her how to blow a bubble if her daddy’d let me. And Seth laughed.”

  “‘You ain’t gonna be blowing no bubbles, are you, sugar?’ he said, and she gave me a great big smile and I saw why not — she didn’t have any front teeth. That’s Macy Cosgrove. I’m sure of it.”

  The statement sucked all the oxygen out of the room and Bailey was suddenly almost as breathless as she’d been when she was drowning with … Macy Cosgrove!

  T.J. wasn’t ready to give it up yet.

  “That can’t be right. The Cosgroves live up in Turkey Neck Hollow. Ain’t no way Seth and his family would be out cruising around on the lake in a houseboat! Shoot, he’s a laid-off coal miner, part-time carpenter, got three or four kids. They don’t have that kind of money.”

  “That’s Macy Cosgrove,” Dobbs said, but T.J. talked over him.

  “If she ain’t on a boat in the lake, how’d she fall in and drown? Tell me that! And she did drown, didn’t she, Bailey?”

  Bailey could only nod her head, had no words or voice for speech.

  “And how’d all them other people Bailey heard screamin’ drown?”

  T.J. had started to pace in front of the two portraits of dead people side by side on easels, seemed angry but he wasn’t, only keyed up and frustrated. Clearly, he was trying to make it all fit in his head and it wouldn’t.

  “I bet the Cosgroves ain’t never even been out on the lake. Maybe on the shore fishing, but not in water deep enough to drown in. And ain’t no other body of water bigger’n a bathtub anywhere near their house ‘cept that wastewater impound at the top of the holler. And that sludge lake ain’t ‘xactly a tour bus destination,” he turned to Bailey, “for folks who want to jet around on them motor skis, maybe decide they want to take a dip in black sludge to cool off!”

  There was a beat of silence after T.J.’s bluster, before Dobbs dropped the next words like pebbles into a pond that sent ripples off in all directions.

  “You wouldn’t have to go swimming in that sludge lake to drown in that water. Not if the water came looking for you. Not if it came after you, came roaring down the mountainside and washed you away.”

  T.J. stopped in mid-pace, literally froze as he was about to lift his foot off the floor. Dobbs’s words was bouncing around in his head, echoing, multiplying and fracturing.

  His mind wanted to back up from it.

  “That ain’t possible.”

  “Why not? It’s no more improbable than some houseboat blowing up out on the lake.”

  “What are you two talking about? What’s a coal sludge lake?”

  “A lake formed by a strip mine,” Dobbs said.

  That was the simple answer. Then Dobbs told Bailey how strip mine canker sores had first infected the West Virginia landscape before World War I and the blight had spread like smallpox in the decades that followed.

  “The coal companies done the math — it don’t take hardly no manpower a’tall to rip the tops off mountains, which makes it a whole lot cheaper than paying miners to dig the coal out.”

  The environmental ramifications were enormous, of course.

  “Strip-mined coal’s gotta be washed, and when you do it leaves behind an acidic sludge that’d just about eat a hole in boot leather.”

  “That water has to go somewhere. Most coal companies bulldoze all the coal waste, it’s called slurry or ‘gob,’ across a hollow to dam up one end of it and then release the black sludge water behind it.”

  “The coal companies don’t got to draw up engineering designs for a dam like that ‘cause technically what they built wasn’t no dam. Just a gob pile. Wasn’t no lake, neither. Just an ‘impoundment.’”

  “That’s how they danced around federal regulations about the structure and safety of dams. There are a handful of state regulations regarding impoundment dams, but a lot of palms were greased in Charleston when those were drawn up.”

  “You’re saying one of those dams might be damaged or defective and cause a flood?” Bailey said.

  “If the whole damn let go, it wouldn’t be just a flood. It’d be a wall of water roaring down that hollow.” Dobbs looked at T.J. “Water — how high?”

  “Shoot, with that much water, thirty, forty feet.”

  “Black, oily sludge water. The force of it … it would be like pointing a high-pressure water hose at the ground.”

  “I seen where a run-off dam busted, wasn’t nothing like big as this one, but it took out the whole streambed below for half a mile, like a bulldozer had scraped off everything down to bare rock, then poured motor oil on it.”
/>   Bailey had been standing, but she sat down then on the arm of one of the wingback chairs.

  “How many people live in Turkey Neck Hollow?” she asked.

  T.J. wasn’t sure. “A dozen, maybe more. There’s four or five houses, strung out all down the hollow. It’s an old coal camp, a small one.”

  “And a coal camp is…?”

  “The housing coal companies built for their miners. They created strings of small communities clustered up and down just about every creek in West Virginia.”

  “Shoot, they’s maybe a hundred-twenty coal camps in the Pocahontas Coal Field alone with five, maybe eight hundred people living in each one. And that’s just one coal field. You ever been up in the mountains?”

  Bailey shook her head.

  “They’re so steep there usually isn’t enough room in the hollows between them for more than a creek and a road. But anywhere there was enough space to put a house, the coal companies built one. A couple here, a couple there.”

  “The coal companies got hold of them miners and run they whole lives.” T.J. scowled. “They wasn’t nothing but white slaves, Irish and Welsh mostly.”

  “I haven’t been in Turkey Neck Hollow in years, but whether there’s one house there now or fifty, if that dam lets go, they’ll all wash away. There’s nowhere for the water to go but down that creek bed, no place for it to spread out until the meadow that’s a mile and a half downstream.”

  “And I don’t know if they’s people living in all the houses that are there — them houses was shacks when they were built, out of the cheapest material. Unless a man worked on ‘em, fixed the roofs, shored ‘em up, eventually they’d fall apart. They’s hundreds of falling-down houses up in these mountains.”

  As T.J. listened to his own description, the sickening possibilities began to sink in and it was so horrifying he backed up from it, like yanking his hand off a hot stove.

  “Whoa, whoa!” He quoted back to him what Dobbs had said about the painting of Bailey. “Let’s pull this buggy back up to the barn and start over. We got to reason this out.”

  “Okay, let’s say it’s not a houseboat,” Bailey said. “Let’s say it’s a flood like you’re describing. That explains some things.”

  “What things?” T.J. asked.

  She pointed to the painting of the little girl, to her smeared dress and legs. “Most mud is brown. That’s black. I didn’t think about it at the time, and the water stung her eyes. She opened them underwater and it burned. When she came up out of the water she was squinting and couldn’t see, like she’d gotten something more in her eyes than lake water.”

  Bailey got to her feet, didn’t pace like T.J. had done, but couldn’t keep still either, walked to the paintings, to the window, along the rows of shelves and back to the paintings.

  “And the chair!” She grabbed T.J.’s arm. “She couldn’t hold onto the chair because it was slick. It wasn’t just wet, it was slick, almost slimy.”

  “About that chair — if she wasn’t at the lake, why’d you connect with her when you touched that chair?”

  But T.J. answered his own question as soon as the words left his mouth.

  “Seth Cosgrove builds Adirondack chairs.” His voice was soft, full of wonder. “That’s why Bailey connected with the little girl when she touched the chair. The little girl had touched the chair … Macy Cosgrove had touched that chair while her father was building it.”

  All three fell silent then, the enormity of what they were saying so sobering they had nothing left to say.

  Bailey picked up her cellphone from the table where she’d placed it after she used it to take pictures of the painting. “We have to call the sheriff.”

  “And tell him what?” T.J. asked.

  “Tell him the little girl’s not on a houseboat, that we were wrong, that there’s going to be a flood—”

  “And he’s going to believe what you’s saying because…?”

  Bailey sagged. “He won’t believe us. If I were him, I wouldn’t believe us either.”

  “But don’t we have to try?” That was Dobbs. T.J. would have bet his pension that’s what he’d say. “Without the sheriff, how can you evacuate the hollow?”

  Bailey lifted the phone and punched a number. T.J. didn’t fail to note that it was on her “favorites” list.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Brice McGreggor sat alone now in his office in the sheriff’s department, which occupied most of the first floor of the Kavanaugh County Courthouse. It had become the de facto command center for the massive manhunt the sheriff’s department and the West Virginia State Police were conducting for Derrick Osbourne, the whack-job who had shot Fletch. Brice was in charge of the search. He had shoved the paperwork, the forms and files and reports to process, into a cardboard box so he could spread out a map of the county on his desk. Earlier in the afternoon, he and deputies Owen Smith, Jason O’Loughlin and Tom Hennessy had been pouring over it, pointing out things to four West Virginia State Police troopers jammed between his desk and the walls.

  “We’ve set up roadblocks here, here, here and here,” Deputy Smith had said, pointing to red stick pins on the map in the lower right-hand corner, another two higher up the right side, and a fourth at the very top of the map on a dotted line indicating the road was not paved.

  “If he’s still in here,” Brice had indicated the whole width of the county, “we’ve got Osbourne bottled up. As far as I can tell, he’s not local. Maybe we missed something, but right now I can’t establish any ties to anybody in the county other than the uncle who owns the houseboat on the lake. So he’s in the wind in a place he’s not familiar with. If he’s just looking for somewhere to hole up, he could stop anywhere, stash his van in the woods. Or in a barn or behind a chicken house, and if that’s the case, whoever has him as a guest isn’t entertaining him willingly.”

  The department had been a beehive of activity all afternoon. Osbourne’s description and a description of the van and the plate number had gone out over the local radio station and was being rebroadcast every half hour. The county also boasted its own small local-access television station — WWML for Whispering Mountain Lake — and activities there were ninety percent of its programming. Admittedly, few people watched it, but the fugitive’s picture was there to alert any who chanced to turn it on.

  Officers had been fielding calls and investigating sightings for hours, but for the moment it was quiet and the stillness gave Brice time to think, to consider all that had happened since he’d answered the first call of the day at Fantastic Bob’s Fireworks on Route 19. He felt a flash of guilt, but shoved it resolutely aside. Maybe he ought to feel guilty, maybe Fletch’s gunshot wound was his fault for involving him in the wild goose chase to find a little girl and an Adirondack chair on a houseboat. If he should feel guilty about that, he would. Just not right now.

  His cellphone buzzed in his pocket. Caller ID identified Bailey Donahue. He almost sent it to voicemail, but she wouldn’t call him, certainly not now, unless she had a good reason.

  “Bailey, what’s up? Is something wrong?”

  There was a pause.

  “Okay, this is going to sound … please, hear me out.”

  And she told him the story. As he listened to her description of painting the little girl’s face, of drowning again with her, he felt himself being sucked back into the drama.

  “What we figured out about the painting — we were wrong. Dobbs says the little girl is Macy Cosgrove, Seth Cosgrove’s daughter.”

  Then he listened to her explanation of the conclusion she, T.J. and Dobbs had reached about the fate of the little girl. She wasn’t going to drown in the lake. She was going to drown in a flood, when the dam at the top of the hollow let go.

  Brice did not have time for this.

  “Bailey … Bailey! Listen to me.” He interrupted the flood of words coming from the woman he had been so intent on keeping alive that he had set Fletch up to get shot for her.

  That wasn�
�t fair. Fletch’s shooting might or might not be his own fault, but it certainly wasn’t hers. Still, enough was enough.

  “Bailey, I can’t talk about this right now.”

  “But you have to evacuate—”

  “No. I don’t have to evacuate anybody. There is nothing wrong with the dam on the sludge impoundment in Turkey Neck Hollow. Are you listening to me?” His tone had become stern but he couldn’t help it. “The dam has passed inspections by the Mine Safety and Health—”

  “Brice, please…”

  He felt the anger drain out of him, but he was still done with this conversation.

  “You want me to evacuate the hollow? Go up there and warn those people to run for the hills, that if they don’t they’re going to drown, that the dam is about to bust? So tell me — when is it going to blow?”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “I can’t evacuate unless there’s imminent danger. Is the danger imminent? Is it, Bailey? Is it?”

  More silence.

  “I have to go now.” He ended the call. Then he sat back for a moment, listening to the dispatcher down the hall confirm the description for a neighboring county sheriff’s department.

  “…Is a white male, approximately thirty years old, six feet, a hundred and seventy pounds. He was last seen wearing a black t-shirt, jeans and carrying a blue backpack…”

  He shook his head, the words “armed and dangerous, approach with caution” ringing in his ears.

  Fletch had had no such warning. And now Fletch was fighting for his life.

  Bailey put the phone back down on the table.

  “Sounded like that went well,” T.J. said.

  “He says the dam is safe.”

  “If he thinks it’s safe because it’s been inspected, then he’s not thinking about who was doing the inspecting and who owns the inspectors,” Dobbs said.