Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  He crossed the street, walking by Benny Wagner’s new bed and breakfast, where there were now five cars parked in the driveway. There was still no sign of the twins, and he found himself missing them. ‘Idiots-savants’, his father had once called them, to the young Michael’s mystification, then qualified this: ‘though if you ask me they’re mainly idiot.’

  They had never been girls in Michael’s memory, had been too old for school even when Michael was a little boy, though they were tiny creatures, standing as adults just over five feet tall, with the small hands and feet of pre-adolescent children. Born identical, they had very slowly moved apart in appearance over the years, though only to those, like Michael, who knew them well: Daisy got fat and Ethel’s moustache matured. Adopted, they had outlived their ‘parents’, and when their adoptive father died they had been put into a state institution until rescued by Benny, their sort-of brother, who came back from Florida to live in the house. They were occasionally annoying and consistently harmless, which is why most people in the town treated them with the tolerant condescension shown an idiot like Oscar Peters, rather than with the gratuitous cruelty often inflicted on borderline oddballs who live in small towns.

  Obsessives, they had filled their days with unvarying routines, which included once a week taking all their neigh-bours’ garbage cans down to the street for collection, an act of altruism that would have won greater appreciation had it not taken place at six o’clock in the morning. They were also compulsive readers (and re-readers) and had virtually all of Louisa May Alcott by heart, as well as much of Bret Harte, and they could act out between them most of the numbingly trite dialogue of the two eponymous brothers in the Hardy Boys mystery series. But the problem was that these literary leanings were mixed with such an autistic incompetence at simple things that you couldn’t leave them alone for twenty minutes in case they accidentally burnt their house down.

  Michael had never paid them much attention until Cassie had befriended them, and Ethel had subsequently taken to following her around like a puppy dog. Thereafter he had made a show of being attentive, bringing them Lifesavers from the drugstore when he remembered to, until in time he came to know them well and his interest became authentic. So he wondered where they were now, worrying that perhaps the reconstituted Wagner ménage had not worked out. Benny might have found them unmanageable without his father’s firm hand to help. And what would paying guests have made of them?

  He nearly tripped over a tree root that had erupted through the concrete pavement, so moved out into the street, which was lined all the way to Main Street by enormous maple trees, the few gaps in the avenues created by lightning strikes or disease. This was the oldest part of the town, and the houses remained mainly the original ones erected in the years after the town’s founding during the Civil War, when the empty lots of the master grid were gradually filled in, like a game of checkers played backwards. The houses were built from the white pine lumber that provided the original incentive for people to settle here, and they sat on disproportionately small residential lots – rarely more than a quarter-acre. As if in devising that original grid, the town’s settlers wanted to huddle together in a defensive measure against the elements (the local Indians had never been a danger), knowing that however snowbound and storm-struck a winter proved, you had neighbours almost within touching distance to help.

  As he walked, Michael saw that many of the houses now bore plaques with the date when they were built. 1871, 1866, 1882. It was a recent affectation: on his last visit, people had just begun to put them up, at the instigation of the local historical society which provided owners with a ‘certified’ date. His father had been contemptuous: ‘Bert James came here to sell me one of those gewgaws and had the date wrong by fifteen years.’ But then, his father had always found the local historical society insufferable, usually returning irritated from its meetings, which were attended chiefly by retirement residents of the town, interested only in the pedigree of their own properties, and indifferent to the town’s real history: the eviction of its Indians, its rise and fall as a lumber town, its commercial rebound after World War II as a tourist Mecca.

  It had become famous for its prettiness, this small lakeside town of old houses and tree-lined streets, but Michael had only come to recognize its quiet beauty after seeing it through someone else’s eyes. Someone else. He intended to walk down Calvin Street, but two blocks shy of its reaching Main Street found himself moving over to Henniker – he couldn’t help himself. There on a corner he saw the same small gable over Pastor Gilbert’s front door, the same neat strip of lawn in front. But everything else had changed. The house had been painted, changed from traditional bone-white to a light mocha he didn’t like at all. There was a new balcony outside the main bedroom – the pastor’s bedroom – with pale oak struts coming out from the house to support it from below. Sound engineering, hideous effect. A further ground-floor room was under construction in the back, and there was a second garage where once there had been flower beds full of roses.

  She must have sold up at last, he thought, feeling feeble about the sadness that threatened to fill him. And just an hour before, he had thought he couldn’t feel much about anything or anyone. Let it go, he told himself.

  He walked towards home on Fromm Street, cheered to see that at least Anthea Heaton’s house was unchanged – the big porch with the swing was still there, where, as just a freshman in high school, Kenny Williams had taken off all of Anthea’s clothes while her parents sat not twenty feet away inside watching television.

  At the next corner Michael turned left, passing the one old brick house in town, where Reverend Parker had lived with his ‘ward’ in the days when openly homosexual life was unknown. At the corner sat Marilyn’s bungalow, a long, low wooden structure, only one room wide, which had small cotton awnings over the south side windows. She’d had a stroke several years before, and according to his father’s report was totally incapacitated, so he didn’t stop to say hello.

  He started to turn for home then decided to extend his walk, remembering how exposure to daylight was supposed to be the best antidote to jet lag. Nearing the eastern perimeter of the town, he passed the vacant lot owned by Harold Riesbach – still not built on – where in a far corner he and Donny would brave an immense tangle of brambles to pick a few choice wild raspberries. The old dairy still sat unoccupied next door, but a chalet-style summer house was going up on its east side. Now he was on the very edge of town, and came to Alvin’s, which he inspected on foot more closely than he had from the car that morning. There was a new cyclone fence running along the property line, and several lilacs planted to replace the vast single bush which even in his childhood had gone woody. As always, the lawn was lush and thick and a rich, velvet green. He saw a little boy riding his bike in the yard, coming towards the fence. ‘You must be Phil’s little boy,’ he said, but the kid just looked at him, mystified.

  ‘Hey!’ The shout came from the screened porch of the house. Then a man in cotton shorts and T-shirt charged out and ran down the steps, then sprinted towards them. With a hammer in his hand.

  Keep calm, thought Michael. Probably the man had been nailing replacement siding onto the back of the house, or tacking down linoleum on the porch floor, but Michael was grateful nonetheless for the cyclone fence between him and the approaching figure. ‘What do you want?’ the man demanded, a little breathless as he neared.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Michael, holding his hands out as if to emphasize his harmlessness. ‘I thought I was saying hi to Betty’s grandson, but I guess I was wrong.’

  ‘Who the hell is Betty?’

  ‘Alvin’s Simpson’s widow. She used to live here. I thought she still did.’

  The man shook his head but seemed less tense, and he relaxed his hold on the hammer. ‘I bought the house from her son; she’d already moved to Florida. Sorry to be shouting like that, but we’re all a little jumpy – there’s been a murder in town.’ He looked at Michael for a moment
, and his suspicion seemed to return. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

  ‘My name is Wolf,’ said Michael quietly. ‘It was my father who was murdered.’ He extended his hand across the top of the steel fence.

  The man stared at it, slightly shocked, before slowly extending his own. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said as they shook, then added, with Michael wondering how often in the days ahead he would hear this formulation, ‘and so sorry for your loss.’

  He drove the back way out of town, discovering more new houses stretched out along Park Street, even at the Twin Kilns, where his father had taught him to shoot, throwing clays with a hand device for Michael to fire at with the smaller .410 shotgun. He crossed over the interstate which ended ten miles north in Burlington. It had originally been meant to stretch north all the way to Traverse City, but construction had stopped during the lean years of the 1970s and never resumed.

  Where the road curved left and north towards Burlington Michael went straight and east, onto what had been a sand surface but was now paved. The sun was high overhead and the day warm for May; here, entering the Back Country, the temperature could be ten degrees higher than by the lake. The older farmhouses had large hardwoods planted around them for shade, and lines of trees, oaks or maples, planted carefully in west-facing rows from the side of the house (to block the sun at noon) all the way to the end of the lengthy drives (to block the sinking sun of late afternoon). But the ubiquity of air conditioning made these traditional strategies unnecessary: by the iron bridge of the north branch of the Still there were many new houses, some no more than trailers hoiked up on blocks, positioned on the baking sand of the cheapest treeless land.

  He decided not to go to the Half, for he realized he’d been fooling himself – it was Sheringham’s he wanted to see. As he moved south the land began to roll, and turning onto Polk and heading east again he came to considerable hills. Polk was The Roller Coaster Road – his father’s name for it when as a family they’d come back from the Half. He dipped down into a valley with horses grazing on one side, and halfway up the far side pulled over. The Sheringham house was at the top of the hill, but the stand itself was lower down, set back from the road in a half-moon drive, with a field immediately behind it full of asparagus, and orchards in the distance further back. There were three cars parked in front of the stand and a tractor approaching from the field towing a large box of asparagus.

  He saw Nancy move out of the barn to the open shed where asparagus lay upright in racks, tied in bunches by rubber bands, two dollars per bunch. It was too early for anything else to be on sale, but soon there would be strawberries, then cherries and raspberries, salad onions, peppers, followed (in July) by the first corn, zucchini, then more corn, and pickling cucumbers and peaches galore, until finally the season ended with an autumn burst of apples, pears and hard squash. She and Lou had less than one hundred acres and Nancy had to substitute teach to make ends meet, but they sold a lot to the food middlemen in Fennville and at the height of the season the stand was busy with customers from early morning until suppertime.

  As he neared the shed Nancy saw him. She looked unchanged – tall and big-boned, wearing overalls with her straight blonde hair cut shoulder-length. She had never been a beauty, never in fact a pretty girl, but she was strong-willed, lively and smart, and she drew many men to her – not least Donny, Michael’s best friend in boyhood. He had gone out with her throughout college only to have her drop him after graduating for Lou, a farmer’s son from Shelby. She had married Lou within a year and moved out of town to farm here, in the middle of the county. Unusually for these parts, she had kept her maiden name, and her own friends knew the farm by her rather than Lou’s surname.

  Now she finished giving change to a lady in pink pants and came over to him. She did not look surprised to see him. ‘Michael, I was so sorry—’ she began.

  He held up a hand. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Thank you. It’s good to see you, Nancy.’

  ‘How long’s it been?’

  ‘Six years. Thanks for your cards.’ Christmas cards, every year, with news about her family and, until the recent years, about Cassie, too.

  ‘Thanks for yours. The girls always like to see where you’ve got to.’

  He pointed to an apple-cheeked girl who looked about ten years old and was taking money from a fat woman in slacks. ‘She’s one of yours, isn’t she?’

  ‘That’s Ellie. You’ve seen her before.’

  ‘Sure. When she was all of four years old. Where’s the other one? Hilary,’ he said, risking the name, fairly confident he had it right.

  ‘She’s at basketball practice. Hoping for a scholarship. She’s taller than me but got my build, poor kid. No messing with her under the boards. She always asks about you when we get your postcards.’ He usually sent one from wherever he happened to be working. Saudi, Germany, the Philippines, Sweden, Ireland, England, most recently Scotland. ‘You have travelled. Makes us seem pretty provincial. Mind you,’ she said with a laugh, ‘we took the senior class all the way to Chicago last year.’

  ‘That’s pretty adventurous.’

  ‘I’ll say. I got dizzy at the top of the Sears Tower. One of the kids had to hold my hand all the way down in the elevator. So are you still mending bridges?’

  ‘Fixing them. I fix bridges. I think you’ll find it’s fences that get mended.’

  ‘I stand corrected,’ she said with a short laugh. ‘Gary said you were working in Scotland now.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s nearing the end, though, so I’m leaving right after the funeral. I have to get back.’

  ‘Aren’t there things to tie up?’

  He shook his head. ‘Gary can do it easy enough.’

  ‘Don’t the police want to talk to you?’

  ‘Jimmy Olds already has. I expect they’ll want another session, but there’s not much help I can give them. I haven’t the faintest idea who would have killed my father. Absolutely none at all.’

  ‘I’m surprised you’re not staying longer.’

  Why was she pushing him on this? ‘I’ll be back at some point. Maybe Christmas to make sure Gary’s okay. The will should be through probate by then – I can’t believe there’s anything complicated. Gary can decide whether we should sell the house or if he wants to live there. I don’t know. It’s not like this is home any more.’

  ‘Scotland is?’ she asked with a dubious cast to her eyes.

  ‘Nancy,’ he said with a laugh, ‘I’m glad you weren’t ever my teacher. You don’t let anybody win an argument. You haven’t changed a whit.’

  But Nancy wasn’t smiling. ‘This isn’t an argument. I just thought you’d want to see her before you left.’

  ‘Who?’ He was genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Cassie. Who else?’

  ‘What?’ he said for the second time in two days. ‘Jimmy said they were still in Texas.’

  ‘She moved back last summer with the kids, just before school started.’

  ‘How old are those kids?’ he asked, though he knew. Calm down, he told himself. It doesn’t mean anything.

  ‘Sally’s ten and Jack’s six. They’re nice kids, they come out here a lot. Jack’s a little hard to handle, but hey – that’s what boys are like, right?’

  ‘I heard Ronald killed somebody.’

  ‘That’s right. Not entirely on purpose, I guess. He just hit somebody too hard. You know Ronald.’

  That I do. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘About three years ago. I’d have told you, Michael, but I figured Cassie would tell you herself if—’ and she left the sentence unfinished.

  If she’d wanted me to know, he thought. ‘Why did she move back?’

  ‘She never liked Texas. Ronald’s not going to die in prison – they convicted him of manslaughter, not murder – but the son of a bitch did get ten years. Excuse my French. Actually,’ she said, seeing a city lady waiting impatiently with money in her hand, ‘excuse me a minute.’

  When she retur
ned he asked, ‘Is she back for good?’

  ‘She’s glad to be here, I know that. But she hasn’t got a job and Ronald’s not exactly in a position to pay her child support. She sold her daddy’s house a while ago, and she’s got some money left, but not a lot. She’s living next to Turner’s, near the wireworks, renting.’

  ‘Has she divorced him?’ He tried to sound calm about it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is she going to?’

  Nancy reached over, took a bundle of asparagus from the racks, and gave it to him. ‘Here, don’t even think about paying for it. As for your question, ask her yourself.’ She looked at him full on, her big cheekbones already showing freckles from time spent out in the fields. ‘If you got to go back right away, fine, go ahead. But you come back, Michael, you come back soon. It’s best for everybody. I don’t want a foreign Christmas card this year, do you understand?’

  He avoided the interstate on the way home, skirting around Fennville, the county seat. He drove by cherry orchards still in late blossom, then swept down the steeply angled slope of Happy Valley, not its official name (was there one? he wondered) but how the small, lush valley was known locally. At its bottom, the road crossed the south branch of the Still as it flowed from Fennville Lake towards the Junction and Stillriver. He crossed the simple wooden bridge of thin pine planks, with the river only a foot or two below; the river was slow here, and wider than upstream.

  There was a black pickup truck parked in the lay-by and as he passed a man stepped out from its far side and waved at him urgently. Mystified, Michael pulled over. When he got out and walked back towards the river and the truck, he saw it was Donny, wearing hip waders and carrying his fishing rod.