Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  When they reached the house Gary came out onto the back porch looking relieved to see them, for since his return from the Half he had been manifestly nervous whenever Michael left for long.

  ‘Maguire called,’ Gary announced. Michael looked at Cassie. ‘Said to tell you he’s going to Fennville on his own. Whatever that means. He’ll call you later.’

  Cassie shook her head knowingly. ‘He won’t get anywhere with Ethel. What I don’t understand is how you know the fingerprints on the bat are hers.’

  ‘Like I told you, the flowers out back. No one else would have planted them. Plus, Mrs Jenkins said Ethel had been running away; I’m pretty sure someone’s been in the basement, and Ethel’s small enough to squeeze through the window. And her hands are tiny – Maguire thought the fingerprints were a child’s. Add all these together and it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to come up with Ethel.’

  An hour later Maguire phoned again, sounding more annoyed than contrite, and five minutes after that Michael and Cassie were in the car heading towards Fennville, leaving the kids in Gary’s care. Michael expressed mild apprehension abut this, but Cassie wasn’t worried. ‘They’ll be fine. Jack thinks he’s great and Sally’s nose is so deep in her book she’ll forget we’re not there.’

  Near the bottom of Happy Valley, just before the wooden bridge, Michael turned left, and they followed the smaller road – sand, but levelled smooth and hard-packed – up a rise of adolescent apple orchard to the east.

  The poorhouse, also known as Fennville Acres, had been expanded, with a new ground floor wing of yellow brick and smoked glass windows running along one end of the wooden gingerbread house, which had been built in the nineteenth century for the indigenous poor. Michael parked and said, ‘I’ll be back.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Cassie, opening her door and hopping out.

  ‘But Maguire said only me.’

  ‘What does he know?’ Cassie seemed completely confident. ‘She’s not going to talk to you either. If I come with you now it’ll save you fetching me.’

  The front hall had a bleached oak table and metal folding chair behind it, but was otherwise empty. Michael looked in vain for anyone, shouting hello up the pine staircase, then down along the corridor of the ground floor. So, like trespassers with good intentions, he and Cassie moved cautiously through the front hall and finally found a woman orderly in a white uniform, drinking a cup of coffee in a tiny room next to the kitchen. ‘You looking for Mr Maguire?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘He’s in the backyard.’ She added knowingly. ‘He’s being read to.’

  They went out the back door and stood on a rickety porch, which had a railing missing several posts. They looked out over a roughly cut lawn; it ended at a small red barn, which had a field of higher grass behind it, separated by a sagging fence of barbed wire. In the middle of the lawn, Maguire was standing impatiently over a deckchair, which was occupied by a small figure whose legs barely reached the ground. On closer inspection it was a woman of middle age, dressed in the shorts and baggy T-shirt of a teenager, reading aloud from a book she held in her hands.

  As Michael and Cassie approached, Maguire looked at them with a mixture of relief and irritation. ‘I don’t know why you got me over here. She says she’s never left this place since her brother put her in a year ago.’

  Cassie looked down at the chair and laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ demanded Maguire. He seemed even younger when he was cross.

  ‘Hello there,’ said Cassie. The face of the woman in the chair broke into a grin. She kicked her bare feet together like a gleeful toddler, and said, ‘Hello Cassie.’

  Cassie laughed again and Maguire looked ready to explode.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong twin,’ Michael explained gently. ‘This is Daisy.’

  ‘But she said she was Ethel,’ protested Maguire.

  ‘Daisy!’ said Cassie with mock sternness.

  Daisy looked up at Michael. ‘Ethel didn’t want to be bothered,’ she said.

  ‘So you stepped in, huh?’ asked Cassie, and Daisy nodded. ‘And where is Ethel?’

  ‘She’s in our room. She didn’t know you’d be here, Cassie, or she’d have come down.’

  They left Daisy with her book, and walked towards the house, with Maguire demanding to know how old Daisy was.

  Michael said, ‘She must be nearing fifty. Don’t you think, Cassie?’ She nodded.

  ‘Fifty? She was reading a Nancy Drew mystery when I got here,’ said Maguire.

  ‘There’s always been something childlike about her,’ said Cassie. ‘She’s probably read more books than all of us combined – not just kids’ books either – but in most respects you’d have to say she’s simple. They both are actually.’

  They found Ethel eventually, in a small alcove bedroom high up in one corner of the house. Michael and Maguire had to duck as they entered to avoid hitting their heads on the sloping cedar ceiling. She was lying on her back on one of two beds positioned on either side of a dormer window, which only slightly reduced the claustrophobic impact of the room. ‘Well, Ethel,’ said Cassie, ‘this is nice.’

  Ethel put down the gardening magazine she was reading but did not sit up. To an outsider she would have looked identical to Daisy. It was the bluish tinge on her jaw that gave the game away to Michael. Ethel had always needed to shave.

  ‘It was nicer on the ground floor.’ Her voice was deeper than Daisy’s by about half an octave.

  ‘Why did you move, then?’

  ‘They moved us. I used to be able to open the window and step outside. Can’t do it way up here.’

  Cassie sat down at the end of Ethel’s bed and said with an easy authority, ‘You two sit over there.’ Maguire and Michael obediently sat on Daisy’s bed. ‘You used to go out a lot, didn’t you, Ethel?’ asked Cassie in an encouraging voice. Ethel nodded, and Cassie went on. ‘Back to Stillriver sometimes?’

  Ethel nodded again, but more slowly. She said, ‘Benny didn’t like it. Told me not to.’

  ‘So where would you go? You were gone overnight sometimes, weren’t you?’

  Ethel’s expression set tensely.

  ‘Ethel, honey,’ said Cassie, ‘you’re not in trouble. That’s not why we’re here. You know you can trust me, don’t you?’

  She waited and eventually Ethel spoke. ‘I trust you, Cassie.’

  ‘Good. Now when you would go back to town, did you sometimes go to Michael’s Daddy’s house?’

  A nod. Her eyes were moving randomly.

  ‘Was he there?’

  Another nod.

  ‘Did he see you?’

  Ethel looked sideways at the wall and its yellowing wallpaper pattern of geese. ‘He saw me one time. He’d left a window open in the basement and I spent the night there. He found me.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said “Hi Ethel. You don’t look very comfortable sleeping down here.” I came upstairs and he let me use the bathroom. He gave me breakfast and then he let me garden in the back. I planted seeds, Cassie,’ she said proudly, ‘just like we used to do. Then he drove me back here. He promised he wouldn’t say nothing to Benny.’

  Cassie nodded. Then she asked with almost exaggerated casualness, ‘Did you ever happen to see anybody else at the house?’

  Ethel’s eyes darted back to the wallpaper geese. ‘Not that time.’

  ‘What about—’ Maguire interjected, but stopped when Cassie gave him a look that could cut ice. She leant forward and touched Ethel gently on one knee.

  ‘Tell me about the other time.’

  Now Ethel’s eyes were focused on the ceiling, and she spoke as if remembering for the first time. ‘I was sleeping in the basement again. Mr Wolf hadn’t told me not to and the window was still open. It wasn’t cold and I found a tarp to lie on in the corner by the boiler. He must have left it there. I was asleep but I woke up when I heard someone come down the stairs. Then the light went on. I thought may
be it was Mr Wolf, come to put something away, and I thought I’d tell him I was there, but then I thought it would scare him. And then I figured maybe it wasn’t Mr Wolf, and that scared me, so I stayed still and listened to the rustling.’

  ‘Rustling?’

  Ethel looked quickly at Cassie, then looked again at the sloping ceiling above her head. ‘Like leaves in the wind. Rustling. Then he put something down. It went tonk. Tonk,’ she repeated, with obvious relish at the sound of the word. ‘Then the light went out and the person went back up the stairs.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘When I couldn’t hear footsteps I got up and turned on the light, just like he did. I found what he’d put up against the wall. It was a baseball bat. It wasn’t there when I came in. I didn’t move it,’ she added anxiously.

  ‘It’s okay if you touched it.’

  ‘I might have touched it,’ Ethel conceded. ‘But I didn’t move it.’

  ‘Then what did you do?’ asked Cassie.

  ‘I left. I climbed out the window where I’d come in.’

  ‘Tell me, Ethel, did you get a look at the person in the basement?’

  She shook her head. Michael grimaced and Maguire gave a small moan of disappointment. Then Ethel said, ‘I only saw him outside.’

  ‘What?’ Michael exclaimed.

  Ethel was nodding. ‘I was about to cross the street to our house when I heard somebody come out on the back porch. So I hid behind the fence. Then I saw him cross the street and cut through Mrs Decatur’s backyard.’

  ‘Who was “him”, Ethel?’ asked Michael.

  ‘I only really got a look when he went under the streetlight.’

  Cassie took over again. ‘Did you recognize him, Ethel?’ she asked.

  ‘Was he the man who did the bad thing?’ asked Ethel.

  ‘You mean to Michael’s father?’

  ‘Yes. Was he the one?’

  ‘Probably.’

  She looked at Cassie. ‘Would he do the bad thing to me?’

  ‘No way.’ Cassie was emphatic. ‘Nobody knows you saw him. He doesn’t even know. But did you know who he was, Ethel?’

  Ethel was looking at the geese. ‘I think I did.’ She paused and Michael heard a deep intake of breath from Maguire. ‘But I can’t remember his name.’

  ‘Would you know him if you saw him?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Would you know his name if you heard it?’

  ‘Maybe. Sometimes it’s on my tongue tip. Then it goes away. I keep thinking capitals.’

  ‘Capital letters?’

  ‘No. State capitals. Don’t ask me why, that’s just what I keep thinking.’

  ‘Albany,’ said Maguire.

  ‘Springfield,’ said Michael.

  Ethel began to look anxious and Cassie held up her hand. ‘Hang on, let’s do this systematically.’

  ‘We need a list,’ said Michael.

  ‘Where we going to find that?’ demanded Maguire.

  ‘Let’s start in Michigan, and go state by state,’ said Cassie. ‘Was it Lansing?’ Ethel shook her head.

  By common agreement they moved south then east with the states, finding that between the three of them each state capital was eventually unearthed. Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont (they argued over that one, but neither Burlington nor Montpelier rang a bell for Ethel), Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island. Then they headed south, and with Maryland Maguire suddenly started to look excited. ‘Hurry,’ he said.

  ‘Annapolis,’ said Cassie.

  ‘Go on!’ Maguire suddenly shouted.

  ‘North Carolina is . . .’ began Cassie, and Maguire spat out ‘Raleigh!’

  They all looked at Ethel, who suddenly beamed, delighted that they all seemed so happy.

  ‘Raleigh Somerset,’ Maguire insisted.

  Ethel kept smiling and Maguire clapped his hands. ‘That’s our boy,’ he said and stood up, while Cassie patted Ethel on her knee again and said, ‘Well done. Let’s go down and find Daisy, should we?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Michael. ‘There’s something I don’t understand.’ Cassie and Maguire looked at him expectantly. ‘So Raleigh has the bat and he . . .’ – he struggled with words – ‘uses it. And then he puts it back later and Ethel sees it. Even touches it, which accounts for her fingerprints. But then how come the bat’s not there when the police arrive the next day?’ He looked at Maguire. ‘You told me yourself that both you and Jimmy Olds searched the entire house the day after the murder.’

  No one said anything – Maguire looked tense and seemed to be thinking hard. Then Cassie turned back to Ethel, who, having sat up on the bed, now stared down at her knees like a shamed child. ‘Ethel honey,’ she said gently. ‘Did you take the bat with you when you left that night?’

  Ethel refused to look at Cassie, who repeated softly, ‘Did you?’

  ‘I wanted it,’ Ethel said plaintively. She looked up at Michael. ‘We used to play with it.’

  Michael nodded, and Cassie said, ‘But then you put it back, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was later,’ said Ethel. ‘You had come home, Michael. I saw you at the Homecoming Parade. And I thought you might be needing it, so that night I put it back. I didn’t tell you because I was scared after the bad thing. I knew I shouldn’t have taken it.’ She looked utterly forlorn.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Ethel,’ said Michael. ‘You had nothing to do with the bad thing. We all know that.’

  They went downstairs as a group and at the bottom Cassie said, ‘I’ll take Ethel outside with me and find Daisy. After all this, I need to visit with them for a while.’

  Maguire said, ‘That was real good upstairs. You should have been a policeman.’

  Cassie looked at him coolly. ‘You should have been one too.’

  ‘Ouch,’ said Maguire as Cassie went out the back door. Michael ignored this and Maguire said, ‘You going home now?’

  Michael gestured toward the yard in back. ‘We’ll spend a little time with Daisy and Ethel first. What about you? What happens now?’

  ‘I’m going to find Raleigh Somerset, and put him in an identity parade. Then when that Ethel creature identifies him I’ll have a warrant all set to search his place.’

  ‘You almost had him once before.’

  Maguire looked at him sharply. ‘That’s right. Six sticks of dynamite. But no fingerprints. This time I’ve got two forensics guys you wouldn’t believe – if there’s anything in his house linking Raleigh to your dad they’ll find it. And I bet there is.’

  ‘I hope so. I can’t see you convicting him on the basis of Ethel’s knowledge of state capitals.’

  Maguire gave a tight-lipped smile. ‘She’s just the thin end of the wedge. I’ve got our killer, I’m sure of that; now I just need the rest of the wedge.’

  Ethel was tired so Michael and Cassie cut short their visit, promising to come back the following week. In the car both were quiet as they came down to Happy Valley and crossed the wooden bridge.

  ‘It’s hardly rained at all since I came back,’ said Michael, ‘but the water’s still high here.’

  ‘Spring was the wettest for years.’ Cassie sounded abstracted, as if talking to a tourist, and they drove in silence for a few minutes, while Michael wondered why he didn’t feel more relief that there was now a prime suspect in his father’s murder. Probably because if Raleigh had killed his father, it was for a completely pointless reason – revenge for something his father hadn’t even done. The motive for the murder still seemed hard to accept. Would you really beat a man to death for telling the police you were in possession of explosives? Apparently, if you were a racist semi-Nazi psychopath like Raleigh, you would.

  Gary would be right to blame himself, and Michael worried about how his brother was going to live with the guilt. It was a peculiar feeling, worrying about his brother, especially as it overrode any sense of completion or relief that the mystery of his father’s death now seemed solved.<
br />
  Cassie sighed, and glancing over as he drove past the charter school, Michael saw her top teeth clamp down on her lower lip, a certain sign that she was considering something. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said unconvincingly. Then she sighed again. ‘I guess that’s that then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She opened her window with the power switch in the console between them. ‘Well, you came back to find out who killed your father and now you know. So I suppose you can go now.’

  ‘That’s just stupid.’

  ‘Is it? Tell me why.’

  And he found himself unable to reply – every answer he considered fell apart in the face of his knowledge that he would have to call London soon and accept the Dubai assignment. He didn’t feel he had any choice; he couldn’t just sit and wait for the money to run out. Desperate to say something, he finally asked, ‘What do you want for supper?’

  ‘Come again?’ said Cassie. There was contempt in her voice. ‘Did you really just say that?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he pulled over suddenly and parked under the big elm at the entrance to the charter school.

  ‘Don’t worry about supper,’ she said curtly, ‘I’m going to pick the kids up and take them home.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Michael, wishing the words were back in his mouth. ‘I didn’t know what to say. But instead of me coming here, why don’t you come with me?’

  Her face filled with an expression of fixed intensity. ‘This is home. Why don’t you come here?’

  ‘I can’t, Cassie.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He stared over at the school, where several teachers’ cars were parked – they would be preparing for school’s opening on Tuesday. He was going to say that he couldn’t make a living in Stillriver, but found himself saying quietly instead, ‘Too many ghosts. I can’t seem to shed them.’

  ‘If you’d said to me, it’s too slow here, too small, or you can’t find work here, then I’d understand. I wouldn’t even argue with you; those are reasons. But ghosts? That makes it sound like you’re just running away. That you don’t want to be over in Europe, it’s just you can’t find your way back here. What are you scared of? Why do you pretend you don’t like this place? What is all this garbage about how much it’s changed? Sure it’s not the same – there’s more money, more retired people, more tourism. So what?’ She was almost shouting now. ‘The big lake’s still there, the beach is the same, the channel hasn’t gone away, there are still two branches to the river, the Back Country remains poor as poor can be, asparagus and cherries taste remarkably like they did when we were teenagers, and your daddy’s house still has big rooms and high windows. So just what are you complaining about?’