Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  Blood pressure. No. Not now. Oscar. Not now. Please God, just give me enough time to find Macy Cosgrove. Then her fear turned to anger. You owe me, okay! You already took one little girl away from me.

  “It won’t be long now, only a couple of miles,” T.J. told her. They had gotten stuck behind several slow-moving cars, and with no place to pass, merely had to poke along behind them until the vehicles turned into a driveway or onto another road. Obviously, T.J. and Dobbs were used to the snail’s pace of travel in the mountains and took that into account when they told her how long the trip would take. Surely they did.

  Bailey found herself winding tighter and tighter every time they pulled up behind a pickup that appeared to be held together with duct tape and Bondo, traveling fifteen miles an hour, probably as fast as it could go without coming apart.

  Instead of following the latest road snail they’d gotten stuck behind, Dobbs took a sudden left turn and headed up a dirt road, a washboard of holes and rocks.

  The sign next to the road had no words, only a logo. The letter C with a 3 stamped on top of it.

  “Figured we ought to take a look at the dam, don’t you think?”

  They jolted up the side of the mountain on a road so torn apart by huge pieces of mining equipment it would have been utterly impassible in anything other than a four-wheel-drive vehicle like Dobbs’s Jeep.

  Suddenly, they were on the bare top of the mountain, and from here could see the ugly gash of wasteland there that the coal company had left behind after they’d sucked out all the coal. They’d also left behind the water used in the strip-mining process. A lake of it twice the size of a football field spread out at the end of the road.

  Bailey leapt out of the truck and went to stand at the edge of the water. It looked like viscous tar or used motor oil. The stagnant stink off the oily black liquid was almost overpowering — dead water, a chemical odor like sulfur and something else, something un-nameable. No wonder it had stung Macy’s eyes!

  T.J. and Dobbs left Bailey on the lakeshore and walked to the dam. Coarse coal mining refuse, rocks, soil, anything and everything that’d been lopped off the top of the mountain had been bulldozed into the valley where it narrowed at the top of the hollow to create a dam, with no more intent or forethought than a kid stacking up rocks to divert a creek. It was no engineering marvel, that was for sure. But for all that, it did look stable. There was no water leaking out of it anywhere. It looked like Brice had said it would look … just fine.

  “Now what?” Dobbs said.

  Even to Bailey, it seemed ludicrous to rush down into the coal camp in the valley at the base of this mountain, crying disaster, urging everyone to run, to get to high ground.

  They’d sound like Chicken Little.

  “I say we stick to the original plan,” T.J. said.

  The others turned to face him.

  “If we’re wrong, we gone look like idiots. Won’t be the first time … well, not for Dobbs, anyway.”

  “What if we missed something about the date or the time?” Bailey said. “We go crying wolf now, when the real flood comes, nobody’ll listen.”

  “That’s the worm in the apple, then, ain’t it? Do we believe this dam is going to let go and flood that hollow, wash away all them houses, drown all them people, including Macy Cosgrove? Or not? Do we believe it’s gonna happen today” — he looked at his watch — “in something like fifteen minutes?”

  He paused, then continued quietly. “Bottom line, do we believe the painting?”

  There was silence.

  “My mama wasn’t never wrong. All them paintings, all them years. Not one time.”

  Bailey closed her eyes. The “vision” of drowning was so horrifying that she always did everything she could to banish the images. But now she opened the doors, invited them in and they rolled over her in a flood of backwater.

  She had drowned, in the dark, hearing the cries of other people who were drowning with her.

  She opened her eyes.

  “It’s going to happen now, tonight. We have to get those people out. Convince them somehow that we’re not crazy.”

  She unconsciously touched the small bandage on her temple, then pulled off the yellow minion hair band holding her hair in a ponytail. It broke and she tossed it aside, fluffing her hair out so it covered up the wound.

  T.J. put his hand on Bailey’s arm. “You do know you could drown for real this time.”

  She looked deep into his chocolate-drop eyes. “Save Oscar the trouble of killing me.”

  As they pulled back onto the paved road and turned down the hollow, Bailey glanced back over her shoulder. A black van came around a curve beyond the road leading up to the dam. It seemed to slow down as it approached the turnoff, but then it was blocked from view and she looked resolutely forward.

  “Sheriff, we just got in some more information about Osbourne.”

  Brice looked up to see Deputy Tom Hennessy standing in the doorway.

  “The Lexington PD had an outstanding warrant for him, too. I just forwarded it to you. Don’t know why it didn’t show up in our system until now, but it didn’t.”

  “For what?”

  “Terroristic threatening.”

  “Who’d he threaten?”

  “He was pulling weeds in the tall cotton. Went after Maxwell Crenshaw.”

  “Crenshaw?” Brice barked out a sardonic laugh. “Had some sense of moral turpitude about gambling, did he?” Crenshaw owned two riverboat casinos on the Ohio River between Kentucky and Indiana as well as the Nautilus.

  “That wasn’t the bone he had to pick with Crenshaw.”

  “Why, then?”

  “It’s about 3C. Apparently, this dude’s a miner and got laid off.”

  “Get in line.”

  “Yeah, and then his brother got injured in a 3C mine in Eastern Kentucky — roof collapse, random rockfall, nobody’s fault, put him in a wheelchair, though. Says here the family sued the coal company, came up snake eyes, or if they got some kind of piddly settlement the lawyers ate it.

  “He blames the owner of the coal company for that?”

  “Hey, half the country blamed George Bush for global warming. This Osbourne guy was stalking Crenshaw, caught him hanging around Crenshaw’s horse farm outside Lexington. Made some pretty vicious threats, beyond your basic ‘I’ll-get-you’ variety. Serious enough Crenshaw swore out a warrant.”

  The deputy turned to leave, then stopped, considering.

  “You know, it might be Osbourne was out on that houseboat to do more than par-tay with his homies. Maybe he was going to dock it at the Nautilus and try to blow the casino out of the water during today’s grand opening.”

  “Why would you think a thing like that? There weren’t any explosives on the houseboat.”

  “Maybe he took them with him. I mean, anybody who can blow up an Adirondack chair without taking out the rest of the hillside knows his way around a stick of dynamite.”

  “Blow up an Adirondack chair? His buddies said he ‘destroyed’ it just for fun, nothing left but little pieces. You’re saying he blew it up?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what his friends told the state police before they lawyered up and stopped answering questions.”

  The deputy left the room. Brice sat where he was, processing this piece of information that’d somehow slipped through the cracks. Maybe the chair was — what? A practice shot? Maybe it wasn’t farfetched to believe the guy’d been planning to blow up the casino, and when he saw Fletch, the paranoid meth head thought the deputy was onto him. Made more sense than shooting a cop over assault and terroristic threatening charges any lawyer could plead down to misdemeanors.

  Witnesses said he’d had a backpack with him, looked big and heavy. Explosives, maybe?

  The sheriff’s eyes traveled to the piece of paper where he’d been doodling when he was on the phone to Bailey, curls and squares, shaded in. Simple shapes. Beside them were a couple of words he’d written down without thinking, sifted
out of his mind with the flow of conversation.

  He stared at one of the words, written in bold black strokes.

  Bomb.

  Bailey hadn’t said anything about a bomb.

  The other form on the paper had floated up into his consciousness out of … nowhere. Now he sat looking at the dark black letters.

  It was capitalized letter C with a 3 stamped on top of it.

  Crenshaw Coal Company owned the strip mine at the top of Turkey Neck Hollow. There was a 3C logo on the sign on the road leading up to the wastewater lake the mine had created.

  He picked up his phone and punched in Bailey’s number. The call went directly to voicemail. That meant either she had turned the phone off or she was up in the mountains where there was no cell coverage. He tried T.J. Then Dobbs. Voicemail.

  Brice got up and started for the door. Found himself running.

  “Sheriff—?” said Hennessy as Brice pushed past him in the hallway.

  “Gotta check something out,” he said and raced out to his cruiser.

  The coal camp in Turkey Neck Hollow looked just like the others they’d driven through on the way here. A collection of houses in varying states of disrepair on both sides of the road in an area probably half a mile long where the valley widened enough to build them. Some were occupied, others abandoned. The houses on the right side of the road backed up against a mountainside cliff face, a rock wall several hundred feet tall with the creek meandering along the base. On the left, a rocky hillside dotted with trees angled down to the valley floor. It was steep, but climbable. In desperation, it was climbable.

  Dobbs screeched to a stop in front of the first of the occupied houses. It was on the left side of the road.

  “This is where the Cosgroves live,” he said.

  It was clear the house hadn’t been built as a coal camp house, though it was in the same state of decrepitude as the ones that had been. It was a two-story clapboard shoebox with a tin roof, chimneys on both ends and a shingle roof out over the front porch. Two windows above the porch looked out like dark eyes on the road. The sagging porch roof was held up by five pillars that connected to a railing around the porch, the missing spindles there as evident as missing teeth.

  Bailey thought about Macy Cosgrove’s missing front teeth.

  The yard wasn’t full of weeds, but the grass needed mowing. There was a gravel driveway that led to an unattached building that appeared to be in better shape than the house. It was certainly of newer, sturdier construction. Maybe a garage, or maybe it was Seth Cosgrove’s woodworking shop. The untidy grass was littered with kids’ plastic riding toys in various states of disrepair. A tricycle was missing one back wheel, a bike had all its wheels but the tires were flat. There were two Adirondack chairs on the porch.

  For all its dilapidation, the house didn’t look uncared for, though. Only well used, worn out, not neglected. It had a kind of aliveness to it that was part a product of the yellow light streaming out into the dusk from every window on the first floor of the house and part a product of the music, Carrie Underwood wailing “Somethin’ Bad.”

  Bailey leapt out of the back seat of the Jeep into the road, slamming the door behind her. She paused for a heartbeat, her eyes on T.J. He held her look for a moment, then he and Dobbs roared off toward the other houses.

  Panic rose up in her chest as she looked at the mountains that sandwiched this narrow part of the valley. Behind the house was a hillside, not a rock wall. How high would they have to climb up it to be safe? Bailey had no idea, only knew that she had only minutes to convince them to try.

  She raced up onto the porch. The front door of the house was open and as Bailey looked in through the screen, the world cranked down into slow motion. She could see through the living room into the kitchen. A woman there was standing in front of an open refrigerator door. She was dressed in a blue tank top and cutoff shorts. A full sleeve tattoo covered her left arm all the way to the shoulder, a vine with green leaves and red and white flowers curled around it. Bailey felt her own arm leave her voluntary control and her fist came up and knocked on the door.

  The woman closed the refrigerator door. Behind the woman, Bailey could see a little girl with red braids lift a toddler out of a highchair — a toddler with a blue bib, maybe smeared with orange, with carrots — and start across the kitchen.

  “You take him out to watch,” the woman said to the little girl as she turned toward the door and Bailey. “I’ll be along directly.”

  The world returned to normal speed and Bailey craned around the approaching woman to see the little girl but she had disappeared from sight.

  “Yes?” the woman said, then turned, her blonde ponytail swishing, to see what Bailey was looking at behind her. When she turned back, the beginning of a confused look morphed instead toward hostile.

  “Can I hep you with somethin’?” Her voice was hard.

  Bailey stopped craning around trying to see behind her and looked into the woman’s eyes. They were a startling shade of light blue.

  Then she opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Not a word.

  She hadn’t been able to speak that other night, either, couldn’t make a sound. It had been the homeless woman who’d screamed.

  Bailey teetered on the edge of the abyss of memory, all the horror of the night Aaron had died lurking in the gray mists below, the ground beneath her feet crumbling. If she fell off into those memories, they would overwhelm her, steal her strength and she would never be able to do what she’d come here to do –- save the little girl in braids whose drowning death Bailey had shared.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The sheriff had killed his siren several miles back, but kept the light bar on the top of the cruiser flashing, warning the chronically slow mountain drivers to find somewhere — anywhere! — to pull over so he could pass. The handful of cars, pickups and trucks he came upon had obliged and he made it to Turkey Neck Hollow in record time.

  He careened around the last curve before the road spread out straight for a quarter of a mile and the valley widened slightly. The creek was on the right side and a dirt road, a pot-holed, rock-strewn dirt track on the left led up the mountainside to the dam. It was marked with a small sign that had no words, only a logo: a C with a 3 stamped on top.

  A black Ford van was pulled to the side of the road next to the track. The sheriff didn’t have to look at the license plate to confirm that the vehicle was the one he was looking for.

  Brice was momentarily drained of will, felt an immense weariness, as if all his internal organs had been turned into boulders, weighing him down. He recognized the feeling. Images beat with fluttering moth wings on the back side of his eyeballs.

  A little boy still strapped into his car seat, not a scratch on him anywhere but he is clearly dead.

  A floater hooked by a fisherman and dragged out of whatever had snagged it on the bottom, how the stench hit him fifty yards out.

  He knew the please-God-no! feeling would pass. But for a second or two after the lightning bolt struck, it was totally debilitating. Every time.

  One heartbeat. Two.

  He keyed his microphone.

  “Base, this is unit one. Dispatch immediate backup! Repeat, immediate backup to County Road 1720 in Turkey Neck Hollow, five miles east of the Route 11 intersection. Subject’s van is parked beside the road that leads up to the C3 impound dam.”

  He didn’t even hesitate before he continued.

  “Dispatch units three, five and nine and the closest state police units to the coal camp at the bottom of the hollow to evacuate residents. Subject has some kind of explosive device and intends to blow up the dam — repeat, blow up the dam.”

  He’d requested backup because that was protocol, but he knew he was on the hook for the whole thing here. One reason mountaineers were so independent, looked after their own, was because they were so isolated that traditional help was useless. He’d once heard an old miner joke that it didn’t do any good to call
the sheriff’s department when there was trouble “‘cause by the time they show up, the dead bodies is already be so stiff you gotta break their legs to get ‘em into the hearse.”

  The closest unit was probably number three, West Virginia State Police Trooper Virgil Furgeson, who was working a roadblock on Route 11. It’d take him fifteen minutes to get here with full lights and siren and the sheriff knew whatever was going to happen here this day would be long over by then.

  He also knew that the units he had dispatched to evacuate the residents would not arrive in time either. He refused to admit it even to himself, but he did not believe this was going to end well. He might be able to find Osbourne — arrest him. Or kill him. But he had no illusions about the likelihood that he’d be able to accomplish that task before it was too late. He had seen the painting of Macy Cosgrove in Bailey’s studio.

  Finally, his mind snapped into place beside Bailey’s, Dobbs’s and T.J.’s, a magnet pulled instantly into position. He knew now what he believed about the strange paintings, T.J.’s story and Bailey’s visions. They were all absolutely true. Incomprehensible. Absurdly, ridiculously impossible. But true. He’d been trying for too long to jam reality into the shape of his own personal belief system and it flat out didn’t fit. Reality was that there would be a flood here today, despite his very best efforts to prevent it.

  A little girl named Macy Cosgrove and a lot of other people were going to drown, unless…

  The dispatcher was still confirming receipt of his message when he slid his cruiser to a stop beside the black van like a slalom skier sliding sideways at the bottom of a hill. He leapt out of the car, unlocking his seatbelt with one hand while he grabbed his M4 rifle with the other.

  Protocol decreed that he wait for backup. Not a chance.

  “I’m going up to the dam after the subject,” he said into his shoulder mic.

  Leaving his door open so Osbourne wouldn’t hear it slam, Brice took off at a dead run up the road to the dam.