Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Michael dressed in corduroys and an old, soft, blue work shirt. Looking around his old room, he found only the wallpaper was familiar from childhood. A Van Gogh poster he had never seen before was the sole picture on the walls; his own pictures – what had they been? He could remember only a photograph of the Mackinaw Bridge – were gone. The bookshelf on the wall above his bed held overflow history books from his father’s study downstairs; where were his own books on baseball, his Robert Ludlum novels, and geometry texts? Had they still been here on his last visit six years before? He couldn’t remember – it was memories of the room of his childhood that provided the contrast to his surroundings now.

  He searched the chest of drawers but found only Gary’s old clothes until, at the back of the bottommost drawer, he felt a soft, bulging pouch of chamois. As he drew it out, its contents rolled and clicked. Opening the drawstrings, he looked inside and saw his old friends – blue, aquamarine, green and clear marbles. How odd a source of comfort they had been. He started to reach inside the pouch, spying the chipped deep blue marble he always made the leader in his imaginary games with them. Jesus, he thought, how old are you now precisely? He pulled the drawstrings tight and put the bag back in the drawer.

  Buoyed by the imminent prospect of daylight, he walked through the other rooms of the second floor. Gary’s bedroom was also almost stripped of belongings, though a few photographs remained on the walls: an ensemble shot of Gary’s high school graduating class, a pennant of the Detroit Tigers, and the famous poster of the blonde woman tennis player, taken from behind as she hikes up her skirt and scratches her backside.

  He stopped outside his father’s room and thought for a moment. If they had already dusted for fingerprints, then, provided he was careful, he couldn’t do any forensic damage. He undid the tape and opened the door, looking quickly around and going to the chest of drawers. One drawer down he found his father’s wallet, which held a driving licence, one credit card, a membership card for the town library and, to Michael’s surprise, over $300 in cash – six fifties and some singles. Why this surfeit of cash from a man who had rarely carried more than twenty dollars with him at any one time? He assumed the police had seen it already, although he was surprised they hadn’t taken it away. Then he realized: the killer didn’t want his money.

  Before going downstairs he stopped again in his parents’ bedroom. It faced north, and had tall windows still flush with dark. He felt for the bedside lamp and turned it on. The room had been kept unchanged, down to his mother’s bedtime reading: novels mainly, always hardbacks, in the little book-stand next to her side of the bed. He ran a finger along the glass top of the dressing table – clean. His father must have dusted regularly. Or did someone come in to clean?

  His father’s study downstairs, a small room with just one window on the front side of the house, was the first room that felt lived in. The far wall was ceiling to floor bookshelves, which held his father’s American history books. In the corner sat a soft armchair, covered in scarlet plush, positioned to face the portable television sitting on a low coffee table in the middle of the room. His father’s mahogany desk sat by the window, with a padded swivel chair that faced the front yard.

  On the desk he found a stack of old bills, presumably paid, which were held down by an oval piece of jade Michael had sent his father from the Philippines. A tin can held pencils and pens, but otherwise the desk was bare. In the drawers he found more bills, a protracted correspondence with the IRS about a tax refund, the annual letter from Adlard Ferguson, a local timber merchant, offering to cull trees on the Half, and a mimeographed copy of a short history of the county’s Indian population, which his father had produced for the local historical society in the days before photocopying. And, tucked beneath a ledger book, he found an unfinished letter on a piece of stationery. It was dated three weeks before in his father’s hand, and read in its entirety: Dear Patsy, I was very happy to hear about the float.

  Patsy who? A girlfriend? It seemed unlikely, for his father had never shown the slightest romantic interest in any woman after Michael’s mother died. Yet who knew what his father had got up to in the six years since Michael had last visited? Though if ‘Patsy’ were a girlfriend she must not be local, since why else was he writing her a letter? And what was the float?

  Michael put the letter back under the ledger and went and sat down in the armchair, turning on the television with the remote control to catch the morning news. He found nothing but static except for one Pontiac channel, which was broadcasting a cartoon. Too mean to put in cable, thought Michael, then regretted his own lack of charity. For his father had been necessarily frugal, was hardest on himself, and simply never had much time for television. He read a lot instead, very slowly (odd, perhaps, for a teacher), mainly local and Indian history, sometimes large tomes about the Civil War. No fiction.

  He walked out to the kitchen. Opening the freezer on top he found frozen hamburger, French fries, peas, even ice-cream – enough for a short stay. In the fridge below there was little other food and the milk smelled borderline sour.

  He hated black coffee. Nothing would be open in town, but there was a new twenty-four-hour gas station by the interstate exit, which he had passed on his way in the previous evening. So he went outside and drove with his lights on in a daze of sleep and jet lag through the persisting dark. He filled up at the gas station, and bought a quart of milk and a replacement sixpack of beer from a bemused teenage boy behind the counter. On the way back it was suddenly lighter, and as he drove down the hill towards the Junction, the very top of the sun had just touched the horizon line.

  The Junction was not a meeting of roads, but the precise point where the two branches of the Still river met at the bottom of a bluff, flowed as one under the bridge, and emerged into the wide flood plain of Stillriver Lake. The bridge itself was a standard beam-and-slab job, a Butler’s Tray as it was known in the business (his business after all), a simple plate of reinforced concrete slapped across three perpendicular bents. Crossing the bridge, his rental car made a flat, metallic sound, like driving over tin, and he looked down to see the water level of the river – it was high for May, so it must have been a wet spring. As his eyes moved up from the water to the bridge’s balustrated side he saw that the concrete was pitted and cracked and beginning to flake. Not good.

  He drove along the winding road to town that hugged the shoreline, looking out first at the flood plain, then, as he passed the causeway to South Beach, at Stillriver Lake itself. Inland lakes abounded in the county, but were mainly small, mild affairs, rarely more than twenty feet deep and therefore warm and good for swimming. On any map of Michigan they looked like tiny spots of paint, thrown randomly on to the canvas of the state. Stillriver Lake was bigger, a proper lake, over three miles long and almost a mile across at its widest, continuing up to and around the southern border of the town until it flowed through a thin channel into the great cavern of Lake Michigan, which the locals knew simply as the big lake. In places the smaller lake was as much as three hundred feet deep, and it would freeze over completely only in severe winters, when ice fishermen would materialize with saws for cutting holes, put up wood shacks, and build fires inside that were kindled without fear, such was the thickness of the ice.

  As he drew closer to town, he saw, in the small strip of shoreline between road and lake, new summer cottages that developers had somehow managed to put up, many of them hanging out on stilts over the water like stacked dice. It was hard to imagine that none of their sewage made its way into the lake. The cottages had been erected after a loosening of the zoning regulations ten years before, when the town planning board had decided physical expansion was the only pre-emptive strike available against economic stagnation. Through gaps between the cottages he could see that, like the river, the lake’s waves were grey, with small whitecaps from the wind the only variance to the monochrome. No diamonds today, he thought, remembering his mother’s name for the points of light that sparkled on
the surface, jewel-like, when the sun was out and the lake flushed blue as a girlfriend’s eyes. My old girlfriend, he thought ruefully.

  The road curved up the hill away from the lake and suddenly he was in a tunnel of trees, swaying poplars planted years before. The road swung ninety degrees west, heading straight for the big lake at the other end of town, and he saw new houses sitting where even recently there had been only scrappy woods and a field of high, uncut grass that seemed to say Gophers live here undisturbed and SNAKES. Coming into town from this direction, his father would ask, ‘Back way or Main Street?’, and now Michael faced the same choice. He chose the back and quicker way, for he didn’t want to run into anybody, not until he had got to the house and seen – seen what? He remembered again that his father wasn’t going to be there.

  He drove by Alvin Simpson’s house, separated from the road by an acre of neatly-tended grass. Alvin’s son had never pushed a mower in his life, exempt on account of his putative prospects as a baseball player, so Alvin had operated a sit-on tractor affair throughout Michael’s childhood. Michael half-expected his former boss to emerge now, although he knew perfectly well that Alvin had been dead four years.

  At the stop sign he turned left past Kyler’s house (Kyler was the town’s one-man band of maintenance), saw the City truck, used for everything from ploughing snow in winter to transporting the town’s mowers in summer, then saw Kyler himself through the kitchen window reading the paper while his wife cooked breakfast. At the next street he turned right, driving past the empty sandy lot, once the site of the town’s school, now clotted with patches of scrub grass, weeds and wild flowers, and took a deep breath as he got closer to his block, his home.

  There, as he made a pot of coffee, he looked out the window into the backyard. A clothes line, full of pegs hanging down like swallows, stretched from the spruce tree to the old chicken shed door – the chickenless chicken shed, for within living memory it had only been used for storage. His father kept his tools there; it was where Gary and he had stored their bikes, their baseball bats, and their fishing gear. Occasionally, as little boys, they would even sleep out there in its windowless confines, leaving the door open and lying next to each other on camp beds.

  He took his mug and went outside to sit in a solitary deckchair under the spruce. Its lower boughs had been lopped off years before to let the light in, and the sun was just high enough over the chicken shed to start to warm him in the slight morning chill. He looked in the daylight at the houses around him. The neighbourhood. This early, the street was still silent: there were no kids playing, no one mowing a lawn. Nothing stirred and the deceptive peace held.

  When his ex-wife had phoned him two days before with the news, he had kept asking ‘What did he die of? What did he die of?’ Until finally, in exasperation, she had shouted down the line: ‘Michael, I’ve said it three times. Somebody’s killed him. He’s been murdered.’ And all he could say, feebly, was, ‘You must be joking.’ Even now, drinking coffee less than a child’s stone’s throw from the scene of the crime, he found the fact of homicide unreal. Death was real enough; a chapter had closed, about the biggest chapter left other than his own. But murder seemed the odd, peripheral accessory to death, a supplementary feature he had yet fully to take in. Why would anyone want to kill his father?

  He didn’t know how he was supposed to feel, and when he tried tracking his own emotions, they seemed to have disappeared. Maybe he was in shock. He remembered how once, in Germany, he had watched as a young local engineer slipped and fell from an uncompleted cantilevered span into the river thirty feet below. They had managed to fish him out, unconscious, just before he would have drowned, and two hours later the young man was sitting in the site’s Portakabin wearing dry clothes, munching a wurst, and discussing the next day’s work. Everyone was impressed, until three days later the engineer was found holding a blueprint and sobbing uncontrollably. No sign of that in me, Michael thought without surprise, figuring that he was just being his now-normal, unaffected self.

  A car slowed down in front of the house and for a moment seemed about to turn into the driveway. Michael stood up and stared, but it was no one he knew – a man and woman in a Passat, staring at the house. They noticed him, and drove on.

  Five minutes later it happened again, this time an elderly man on his own. When another car repeated the process – slow down, stare, move on – Michael grew irritated. In summer cars often went by slowly, the passengers looking at the house appreciatively, for it was a large classic of its kind. But not this often, and not these people. They had come to see the murder site.

  He felt he had to stay busy, but there was no point ringing the Portakabin in Anfernachie, because on a Saturday afternoon (the time there) Jock and the crew would already be in the pub. But he had to do something, preferably out of doors. Things inside could wait.

  His mother had been an avid grower of flowers, exceptional in a town where usually only lawns and vegetables were cultivated with intensity. So inspecting the grounds, he noticed with dismay that his father had let the yard go, or rather let the garden recede to yard. The flowering bushes all around the house – forsythia, philadelphus, white- and purple-flowered lilac – now were ragged and overgrown. Around the front door his mother had trained a Rambling Rector rose that now looked to be dying; he’d prune it hard and hope for the best. Almost all the flower beds were gone; even the once-neat bed of iris that stretched in a trench all along the house side of their fence was empty, gone to scratchy grass. And the lawn itself had always been a struggle; between the hard play of two young boys and soil that tended to sand, even ryegrass had trouble establishing itself in anything but clumps. As he wondered whether any wild flowers still bloomed in the high grass behind the house – there’d been ox-eye daisies and fleabane and dog fennel – he suddenly remembered there was a swastika painted round the back.

  Jimmy had said the forensic people were done with it; they’d photographed it from twenty-three angles or some such, then scraped and taken away samples of its paint. In the chicken shed Michael found an old can of white primer (not a perfect match but it would do) and a stiff brush that softened when he poured thinner in a bucket and let it soak while he looked around the shed. Everything was neatly arranged: the gas mower, a spade hooked on a pegboard by its handle, two rakes, a wooden wheelbarrow, a gas can.

  It took two coats to mask the black paint effectively, and while he waited for the first coat to dry he inspected his handiwork and wondered what the swastika was meant to signify. Could it have been there before the murder? No one would have seen it, here on the back side of the house, sheltered by the cedars. But his father would have, surely. He had still been active about the place – his hands hurt from arthritis but he was otherwise in no way infirm. He would have seen the swastika and painted it over as Michael had.

  So it had been put there after the murder. But why a Nazi symbol? What did it mean? Was there even a US Nazi party any more? There’d been one in his childhood, he could dimly remember – Rockwell, wasn’t that the leader? Wasn’t he assassinated? They caused trouble in Chicago with blacks, and one of their leaders turned out – naturally – to be a secret Jew.

  But there weren’t Nazis any more; as far as he knew there had never been any up here anyway. No Klan, either. The Michigan Militia had a decade before been much in the news, along with other emergent paramilitary organizations, but it had never prospered here and even its strongholds elsewhere in the state had largely wasted away after the Oklahoma bombing of 1995.

  No, this was not fertile ground for the lunatic fringe. Although Atlantic County was overwhelmingly rural, Republican and conservative, it had never been a home for extremism. It was full of decent people, by and large, tied to an upright life by the demands of making a living – if you worked hard you didn’t always do well, but if you didn’t work hard you never did well – and by religion. Lutheran, Methodist, Dutch Reform, Baptist, a handful of Catholics, and a few stuffy Episcopalians �
�� there were not many variants of Christianity unrepresented in Atlantic County. And few heretics to get between them and their God, for the bogeyman stayed in the cities, where, according to the pervasive local wisdom, nobody worked or went to church, and everyone was a welfare cheat.

  So who in this comparative haven of peace would want to kill his father? He’d had few close friends, especially after the death of Michael’s mother. There were the Fells, the local doctor and his wife, a bond strengthened after they had lost their only child, Ricky, a contemporary of Michael’s who had been killed in a car accident the summer after graduating from high school. There was Charlie Anderson, the postmaster, who had fished for years with Michael’s father on the very upper reaches of the Still’s north branch, using worms for brook trout. But Charlie got grumpy and Michael’s father’s arthritic hands hurt – Michael doubted they would have fished together once in the last ten years.

  His father had been an intensely private man, but there was nothing sinister about him, and he had led a life without controversy. If he held a mild disdain for the holders of public office (shared, in Michael’s experience, by most people who saw life as essentially a private affair), he was nonetheless no recluse, and took pains as a citizen to meet his civic obligations: a veteran of Korea, he had paid his taxes, supported bond issues, and voted, as far as Michael could remember, Republican in the semi-automatic way of virtually everyone else in Atlantic County. He had broken no laws of consequence (only fishing without a licence when he forgot to buy one) and had served until old age in the town’s all-volunteer Fire Department.