Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  Bailey didn’t get the reference.

  “W. Maxwell Crenshaw.” T.J. said the name like it tasted bad in his mouth. “He owns the Nautilus Casino that’s opening with all the hoopla today. Also owns Crenshaw Coal Company. You prob’ly seen the C3 logo around town, a big yellow C with the number three stamped on top of it.”

  Bailey hadn’t, but nodded as if she had so as not to interrupt him.

  “He also owns one out of every two legislators in Charleston, the governor, maybe a supreme court justice or two—”

  “And the pope,” put in Dobbs.

  “Brice said he couldn’t evacuate that hollow — even if he’d believed me and I’m sure he didn’t — because he could not establish ‘imminent danger.’ And he’s right. We may know where, and even who. But we don’t know when.”

  “Soon. The stamp ain’t gonna stay on that little girl’s hand for long.”

  “We have to figure out when,” Dobbs said.

  “How?” Bailey asked.

  “I don’t know—” T.J.’s head snapped up and he turned to her. “You told me you had another one of them encounters with that little girl when you touched that chair, right?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “But you didn’t tell me much of nothin’ about it.”

  “There wasn’t much to tell.” She thought back, remembered the blackness that came into her head, opening her eyes in a new reality.

  “I was in a room. It was a kitchen with a screen door that had a squeaky spring.”

  “That narrows it down.” Then T.J. dropped the sarcasm. “Think on it, see what else you can remember.”

  “All I saw was a baby in a highchair.”

  “Now, that ain’t all you seen, was it?”

  “Yes, it is. That’s all I saw.”

  “What color was the bib the baby was wearing?”

  “I don’t know.” She thought about it for a moment. “It was blue, and it was smeared with orange. Macy was feeding the baby carrots.”

  “See, you did see mor’n you think you did. What else did you see?”

  Now T.J. sounded like a cop. Brice had mentioned to her that T.J. had been a Chicago police officer and that had sounded farfetched at the time. It didn’t now.

  “Nothing else.”

  T.J. gave her a look sharp enough to fillet a fish. She closed her eyes and concentrated hard, calling the scene back to mind, scrutinizing every detail of what she saw out Macy Cosgrove’s eyes.

  “The baby has blue eyes, and freckles on his nose, not much hair, but I can see a fuzz on his head and it’s red. Like his big sister’s. The highchair back is colored in some floral fabric, plastic, and it’s torn on the right corner and the tear has been repaired with duct tape.”

  Now that she was concentrating hard, she did notice details. Not important ones, though, details that would tell them when the events were happening. But the scene had more clarity than before.

  “The little girl is mad at the baby for taking so long because she wants to go outside and she can’t until he’s finished eating.”

  “Why does she want to go outside?”

  “I thought she meant on the back deck of the boat, but she was talking about the backyard. There’s something out there she wants to see. To watch.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me more about the kitchen.”

  “The countertop behind the highchair has a turquoise Formica top, I think. There’s spilled flour on the countertop, and an overturned half cup measure with a little bit of milk dripping out.”

  “Fried chicken,” Dobbs said.

  He looked from one to the other when they turned to stare at him. “She made fried chicken for supper. Mrs. Cosgrove. Her name’s Hattie, I think. She’d put some milk and a couple of eggs in a bowl, stirred it up and dipped the chicken pieces in it before rolling them in flour.”

  “What else?” T.J. said.

  “Nothing else.” Bailey was frustrated, but she continued to describe the useless details she could see through the little girl’s eyes. “There’s a toaster on the cabinet, pushed back because where the flour’s spilled is probably were it’s set and there’s no flour on it. It’s shiny and clean. And beside that is the open flour canister and—”

  Bailey stopped. In her head, her eyes jerked back to the toaster. The surface was metal, shined up so clean you could see your face in it. The toaster was facing the wall across from the highchair. Bailey could see a window reflected on its surface, but it was a dark hole. It was night outside. Then she saw a sudden flash of color — red. Then another, blue.

  “Colors,” Bailey said, excited. “The toaster is facing a window and reflecting smeared flashes of red and blue … lights of some kind.”

  “Maybe the lights on the top of a police car on the road outside—”

  There were green flashes, too. “No, not a police car … some other kind of flashing light.”

  “Ain’t no flashing light.”

  Bailey looked at T.J. and his face was at once wondering and frightened. His eyes were open wide and she had time to think that if he were a cartoon, there would be a lightbulb lit up right now over his head.

  “Fireworks. Them lights is fireworks.”

  “The fireworks display on the lake!” Dobbs said.

  “It wasn’t the lights of a houseboat exploding that little girl seen when she was drowning. It was fireworks. And what she heard — it was the sound of the dam lettin’ go.”

  “Or the boom of the cannons,” Dobbs said.

  “What cannons?” Bailey turned bewildered from one to the other.

  “Every year, Crenshaw pays for a massive Fourth of July fireworks display on the lake to entertain the tourists. Shoots rockets so high the lights are visible for miles. Even folks in the mountains can see it. They bring in howitzers from American Legion posts as far away as Gilbertville and Rutherford, a dozen of them, maybe more, and fire off a round from all of them at the same time. It’s deafening. That starts the show.”

  “When? What time?”

  “As soon as it’s dark enough.”

  “Last year, it started at eighteen minutes after nine o’clock. The boom jarred the ‘larm clock off the table beside my bed, knocked the battery out.”

  “That’s our when. Tonight.”

  Bailey’s breath caught in her throat. “How far is it to Turkey Neck Hollow?”

  “It ain’t about distance, it’s about time. On them roads — least half an hour.”

  Dobbs choked.

  “Okay, probably more’n that.”

  Bailey looked at her watch. “It’s almost eight o’clock now!” Her hands shook when she reached for her cellphone to call the sheriff back.

  “You gone tell him you know when the dam’s gone blow ‘cause you looked out through somebody else’s eyes and seen a reflection of flashing lights in a toaster? Think that’ll work, do you?”

  She put the cellphone down again. She’d already lost one little girl…

  The man sitting across the table from her is talking and she ought to pay attention to what he’s saying, but she can’t.

  She had listened before, in another room, somewhere else, or here in this room. She doesn’t know. She had talked, too, poured out words. Once she got started, the torrent of words swelled up in her chest and gushed out so fast and furious she could barely get her breath. She told the men seated there … one was the guy across from her now. Or maybe not. And the woman. The woman from the shower was here.

  She’d told them what had happened, what she’d seen. About running through the rain, all of it. No, not all of it. She didn’t tell them about the baby. There weren’t any words to use to tell such a thing. If she had opened her mouth and tried, she’d have found nothing but broken pieces of glass, rusty can lids and razorblades on her tongue instead of words.

  The man is speaking again; she should listen. She tries.

  “…Mikhailov.”

  “What?�
�

  “I said his name is Sergei Wassily Mikhailov.”

  “Whose name is Sergio Mik-Whatever?”

  The three people at the table exchange a glance.

  “Stop looking at each other like that, like you think I’m simple-minded, like I’m crazy or something.”

  “We know you’re not crazy. Your story checks out. We found a shoe, a Rockport, in the street. And—”

  “Story? My story!”

  Heat rushes into Bailey’s cheeks and her tenuous control on her emotions slips out of her grasp.

  “Like maybe I made the whole thing up — is that it? Concocted an interesting tale to tell as a bedtime story to my little girl?”

  Little girl. Bethany.

  Bailey had not once, not since … since … the sound of a firecracker … thought about Bethany. Now images of the child flood into her consciousness so fast and rich her eyes fill with sudden tears. Bethany, sweet precious, alive Bethany.

  She has lost her Daddy. A sob starts in the back of Bailey’s throat but she swallows it. Aaron is gone. But Bethany is alive.

  She starts to rise.

  “I want to see my little girl.”

  “You need to sit down, Mrs. Cunningham, and listen to us.”

  “Why? Am I under arrest? Did I break the law?” She sticks out her arms, the ones with bandages from the dumpster … and the rats. “Here, cuff me. Lock me up or let me go. I want to see Bethany.”

  “Mrs. Cunningham, if you see your daughter, you are putting her life in danger.”

  It’s like he has kicked her hard in the belly and she sinks back into the chair.

  “Her life in danger? What do you mean?”

  “That’s what we’ve been trying to explain to you.”

  The woman speaks then, the woman from the shower.

  “You’ve lived a nightmare, a horror none of us can even begin to imagine.” She shoots glances at the two men and their faces match hers in either real or feigned sympathy. “I know it’s hard for you to concentrate, to understand what we’re saying. But you have to listen. Your life is in danger. So is the life of your daughter … your whole family.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Bailey’s heart begins to hammer, beats so hard and fast she can see the movement, or thinks she can, in the fabric of the orange jumpsuit that has coffee stains down the front.

  “If you’ll be patient and listen, I’ll explain it to you,” the man says, and this time Bailey listens.

  “The man you described is Sergei Wassily Mikhailov. He is a Russian mafia boss, one of the most powerful men in the organization, maybe the most powerful of all. It’s hard to know, we don’t have good informants … anymore.”

  They look at each other again and this time it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Jessie.

  “Informants?”

  She knows she sounds like a parrot, but she can’t seem to do anything but burp out single words.

  “We have a mole placed in the organization. Had a mole. He was discovered and … killed.”

  “So the man is some kind of mafia boss? What does that have to do with anything?”

  Again, the shared look. If they do that again, Bailey will scream.

  The third speaks now for the first time. He’s short, square. Dressed as he is in a dark blue suit, he looks like a mailbox.

  “What the two of you saw, that’s why your husband had to die. And you, too. Sergei could leave no witnesses.”

  It begins to sink in, a little.

  “So this Sergei … he wants to kill me now?”

  There is no fear in the question because she’s so wrung out she doesn’t have any emotion left in her body to be afraid.

  “No. He doesn’t want to kill you because he thinks you’re already dead.”

  Nothing about that makes any sense.

  “Apparently, they didn’t see you. When your husband called out to you to run, the homeless woman ran away. They thought she was you.”

  Soaking wet, hair drenched, the woman didn’t look like a derelict. She could have been anybody.

  “So they put her body and the body of your husband into the car and then set off the gas tank. The bodies were burned beyond recognition. No medical examiner could determine that the cause of death was gunshot wounds.”

  “They thought that woman was me? But who was she?”

  “We don’t know. We’ve been trying to find out, but the homeless community doesn’t exactly keep census records of its residents. We’ve done a little asking around, but so far we haven’t turned up a name.”

  “And Mrs. Cunningham, that’s the good news for you. As long as she remains anonymous, she can … be you.”

  “Be me?” The parrot speaks two words this time.

  “Sergei thinks he killed you both. He heard your husband call out to you, telling you to run, so he knows you were there, that you saw. And he thinks you died there, too, end of story. He needs to continue to think that. He needs to believe that you’re dead.”

  Confusion begins to well back up inside Bailey, clouding her thinking. Images swirl around and around in front of her and she feels dizzy. They see her lurch in her chair and the woman is instantly beside her with her arm around Bailey’s shoulders.

  The others are talking but Bailey isn’t tuned in to it, tries but can’t, like when you hear a song on the radio through static and you really want to listen to it, want to sing along, but when you turn the dial you can’t get the station clearly. The static gets louder or softer, but the music stays in the background, drowned out by the other noise.

  She catches words, phrases.

  “…spend the night…”

  “…safe house…”

  “…sedative…”

  The woman gets close to her face and speaks to her, and her words rise up through the static.

  “We’ll talk about this later, when you’re up to it.”

  And then the static comes back and Bailey gives in to it and it all melts away, all the images and sounds. The whump. The firecracker. Aaron’s shoe in the street. Everything. She lets her head fill with delicious mind-numbing white noise that erases the world.

  Bailey had put a gun to her temple and pulled the trigger because she yearned for that white noise again. Wanted it to fill her forever. That had been the only thing that mattered to her … until she painted the portrait of a little girl slathered in black mud. Until she died with that little girl.

  “I will not let Macy Cosgrove drown!” She ground the words out through clenched teeth, the steel of determination in her voice.

  “That’s it, then,” Dobbs said, getting to his feet.

  T.J. rose, too. “Let’s go get them people, that little girl, out of that hollow.”

  How? Bailey wondered as the three of them hurried to Dobbs’s Jeep. Maybe she spoke or maybe T.J. just read her face.

  “We’ll think of something,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Bailey watched the world fly past the windows of Dobbs’s Jeep. Even as big as it was, it felt crowded with the big man taking up so much of the front seat. She sat in the seat behind, looking out at a world unlike any she had ever seen.

  The steep, tree-lined Blue Ridge Mountains rose up around her like the walls of a Medieval castle, their lush green set against a perfect blue sky dotted with cotton-candy clouds that floated like hot air balloons tethered to the mountain tops.

  The resort town of Shadow Rock on the lakeshore was all she had seen of West Virginia, had been driven there in the night by two taciturn federal marshals she had never met. Why did they always show up to move her in the middle of the night? She sometimes had the sense that the federal marshals liked the cloak-and-dagger quality of their lives, like they played to it, were the stars of their own movies.

  She’d done as she had done in the past, packed up what she could carry with her, then selected furniture and the necessities of a new home out of a catalogue — from a used furniture place, of co
urse, because showing up with all-new furniture would raise the eyebrows of the neighbors, and if there was anything Bailey had learned to do in the past year and a half was to make sure all eyebrows with which she came in contact remained resolutely down.

  Oh, she knew there were mountains in West Virginia, the same way you know there’s an ocean on the other side of California. But knowing there’s an ocean, and standing on the shore as the surf crashes against the rocks were two entirely different things.

  This world of mountains and hollows was as staggering in its grandeur as any ocean.

  As they followed the winding roads, they seemed to be traveling through time as well as space, back to another era, another century. Certainly into another culture Bailey had only read about. They passed houses that looked ready to collapse from the weight of the sunlight on the roof, and other neat ones, one-story shoeboxes out of red brick, with flowers lining the walk to the drive and lawns so manicured they might have been cut with cuticle scissors.

  The sign out front of the Four Square Full Gospel Pentecostal Church proclaimed “Stop, drop and roll won’t work in Hell!” Trailer houses clung to the mountainsides as precariously as the nests of mud-dobbers to rocky cliffs, alone or in small flocks, affixed with round, white satellite-dish stickpins. She remembered T.J. remarking that the satellite dish was the unofficial state flower of West Virginia.

  The road hugged the creek that spilled in a white cascade back the way they’d come. The mountains grew taller, and the sides of the valley rose so sharply on either side in some places there was room only for the creek, the road and the railroad tracks.

  They passed through coal camps — a dozen houses, maybe half of them occupied, or a scattering of half a dozen all fallen into disrepair, with sagging roofs, weedy yards, broken porch railings. People lived in some of those. And it seemed they came upon an elephant’s graveyard of cars around every bend in the serpentine road, carcasses, propped up on blocks in the front yard beside pieces of unidentifiable machinery, wires going every which way, looking like the autopsy of a robot.

  She couldn’t seem to draw in a full breath, only little sips of air, could feel her gut tie in such a knot it’d take a boy scout a week to get it straight. She knew her blood pressure must be soaring,