Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she was killed.’

  ‘Jesus. He killed her by falling asleep at the wheel?’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused and spoke more slowly. ‘I’m tempted to say it could happen to anyone. I know there’ve been times I’ve almost nodded off. Haven’t you?’

  After a moment, Michael agreed. He remembered driving once, late at night, to Stillriver from Ann Arbor, exhausted from finishing a term paper but too eager to see Cassie to wait until morning. He’d almost gone off the bridge in Grand Haven, which scared him so much that he felt too awake during the remaining sixty miles home.

  ‘Like I say,’ Patsy continued, ‘it’s tempting to think it could happen to anyone, but the fact is it was his fault. He should have pulled over, or sung to himself, or whatever it took to stay awake. But he didn’t. The only consolation was that she was asleep when it happened. She wouldn’t have known what hit her. Not that there was any consoling your father.’

  Michael sat stunned, trying to sort this new answer into the complicated mosaic of his life with his father. Detroit – no wonder he’d loathed the place. And driving – Henry had hated driving, inexplicably, almost phobically. Now Michael knew why.

  ‘I was worried for a while that your father might go crazy, and in a way he did. His grief was terrible: his mother was all he had in the world. But his guilt was even worse. He told me he couldn’t bear it. And the next time we talked he said he had to leave. He couldn’t live with himself if he stayed in Detroit. He said he wanted to begin again, have a fresh start. That’s when he came to Stillriver.’

  ‘Is that the last time you saw him?’

  She nodded and said with a trace of wonder, ‘Over forty years ago.’

  ‘How much were you in touch? Or has all this happened only since he died?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. He lent me the money a few years after he came here. I wrote him in desperation but I never expected him to be able to help, not five thousand dollars’ worth anyway. After that, every few years I’d get a Christmas card with a message on it. It was never very long – I knew when you were born, when your brother was born, when your mother died, and then the year your father retired. He never had much more news than that. Until I wrote him a few years back and told him about the sale – we got bought out and I wanted him to know. After that we started to write, though still only occasionally. And then last winter he called me.’

  ‘On the phone?’

  ‘Yes. He wanted to let me know he’d changed his will.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘I suppose in case anything happened to him, I should know who to contact.’

  ‘No, sorry, I mean did he say why he had changed the will?’

  She turned and looked at him with softer eyes. ‘He wasn’t mad at you, if that’s what you think.’

  ‘He left me the house,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve got nothing to complain about.’

  ‘He was very proud of you. I think he felt bad you’d been divorced, though he told me he’d never thought she was the one for you.’

  ‘He was right there.’

  ‘You had a girlfriend he was very fond of – he mentioned she was back in town. Have you seen her?’

  He nodded. Yes, he thought, but not for much longer.

  ‘It was your brother he was worried about. He said Gary was in and out of trouble all the time. According to your father, he’d need the money more. As I told your brother yesterday, you should both sell your shares as soon as they’re traded. There’s nothing to be sentimental about – it’s not as if we own the company any more.’

  ‘That was in winter. Did you hear from him after that?’

  ‘No. I wrote him in April about the flotation. But I never heard back, until the lawyer wrote to say he’d been murdered. What a terrible thing.’

  They sat in silence, looking out over the lake. A front was approaching from Wisconsin in a tumbleweed-shaped pack of dark cloud. The people on the beach were packing up their towels and coolers and hurrying up through the sand to their cars. Michael sighed, then turned on the ignition and drove slowly out of the State Park.

  When he got to Benny’s B&B he pulled over and parked. As he handed over her car keys, Patsy broke the silence. ‘Could a not-so-old old lady give you some advice?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Your brother thought the world of your father; he doesn’t need to know what happened. Don’t you think?’ she said, turning her head to look at him in a friendly but dispassionate way. ‘As for you, I’d hate to think that what I’ve said would lower Henry in your estimation. He was a fine man who made a mistake. I’d say that he more than paid for it. And I’d like to think you’d forgive him, because I know for sure he never forgave himself.’

  She opened the side door and began to get out. ‘Mrs Minsky,’ he said, ‘could we give you dinner? My brother and me, and maybe that friend of mine you mentioned?’

  She smiled again and he started to think of where to take her. ‘That would have been very nice,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got an engagement already.’ His face must have shown his surprise, for she explained. ‘I’m seeing Mr Atkinson, your lawyer. Now that he’s found me at last, it’s like he doesn’t want to let me go.’ She pushed the door closed, then leaned in through the open window with an extended hand.

  He shook it and said, ‘Would you like to come to breakfast?’ He gestured with his head towards his house across the street. ‘It’s not exactly far away.’

  ‘That’s very kind, but I’m leaving at the crack of dawn. I have to get back to the family.’ She drew her hand back through the window. ‘It was very nice meeting you.’

  He got out of the car and watched her walk towards the front steps of Benny’s B&B, wondering why she had come all the way up to see him and Gary if she didn’t want to get to know them.

  Of course. She had wanted to put faces to the two sons of Henry Wolf because that was as close as she would ever get to seeing Henry Wolf again. She didn’t really want to know Gary or Michael – she wouldn’t, in his father’s phrase, even break bread with them. It was his father’s ghost she had chased halfway up the lower peninsula, not the living, breathing figures of his sons. He was my hero.

  3

  THAT EVENING IT began to rain: first patchily in an intermittent spray; then heavily, even tumultuously, in thunderstorms that lit up the sky with silver; finally steadily, relentlessly, from a solid ceiling sky of grey.

  Cassie had taken the kids to a movie in Fennville with Nancy Sheringham and her youngest daughter. ‘Will I see you tomorrow then?’ he had asked, trying to keep the anxiety out of his voice. There was silence at the other end. ‘Please,’ he had added.

  ‘Yeah,’ she’d said quietly, and put down the phone.

  So after a supper of sandwiches he sat in the living room reading while Gary made financial calculations on a yellow legal pad he had found in their father’s study. Michael had said nothing to Gary about his own conversation with Patsy, other than to confirm that she seemed above board and their inheritance real enough. He had been distracted, anyway, by a call from Donny, to whom Michael related the latest developments in the murder inquiry. Donny sounded surprised by the news of Raleigh’s involvement. ‘I told you he was nasty, but I never took him for a killer.’

  ‘Who did?’ said Michael. ‘The revenge of the nerd. Just like in the movies. But I still don’t really understand it. Do you kill an old man you think has squealed on you, even if you’ve got off? And why put a swastika on the house?’

  ‘Well, let’s hope Maguire gets him to tell all.’

  Then Michael reminded him about the Junction bridge and its downstream vulnerability. Donny had yet to speak with Cassavantes. ‘I will tomorrow,’ he told Michael. ‘Don’t you worry about it; you’ve got more important things on your plate.’

  When he came back to the living room, Gary looked up from his pad. ‘Will I have to pay those bastards tax on it?’

  ‘Which bastards?’ asked Micha
el, knowing full well.

  ‘The feds. How much will they get?’

  He resisted the temptation to bait his brother. ‘Nothing. We’re way below the inheritance ceiling. That’s something like six hundred grand. Pop wasn’t that rich.’

  Gary grinned. ‘It seems a lot of money to me,’ he said, and Michael didn’t say anything. Let him enjoy it while he can.

  It was still raining the next morning. Michael had heard a car leave Benny Wagner’s just as the first light slanted in through his bedroom window, and getting up he saw that Patsy’s car was gone from the yard across the street. Outside the grass was slick with rainwater, and the leaves on the trees hung limp and sodden. Deep puddles had formed in the small dips of the street, and there was a sleek basalt shine to the new patch of asphalt at the corner.

  When Cassie and the kids came over in the late morning, they decided to have an indoors day. Michael made roast beef for lunch, with sautéed potatoes and green beans, and then Jack and Sally took ice-cream cones into the living room and began a seemingly endless game of Stratego with Gary while Michael and Cassie read the papers, deferring any continuation of their conversation by the charter school. He wanted to tell her about his father, too, but felt it would have to wait until things were clearer between the two of them. Clearer? It wasn’t clarity he wanted; it was closeness.

  The rain stopped briefly in mid-afternoon, but by evening it was coming down hard again. ‘It’s arrived too late to make much difference to the farmers,’ said Cassie, ‘but just in time to spoil Labor Day for everybody else.’

  Yet liking or loathing the rain seemed beside the point in the face of the sheer amount of it. After sixteen hours of non-stop precipitation, Michael felt a mixture of oppression and alarm. He was used to climatic extremes, which was perhaps why he found himself so worried now. For this was not a county accustomed to natural disasters. Tornadoes never really liked a lake; they preferred the milder, flat prairie of the country further south. Snowfall, too, was comparatively moderate, unlike the southwest corner of Lake Michigan (where snow got trapped like flour in a sieve), or the Upper Peninsula two hundred miles north, which had a winter landscape straight out of Jack London – snowshoes were a necessity rather than an affectation, and the inhabitants of remote cabins could be snowed in for weeks.

  Usually the rainfall in Atlantic County was moderate: thirty-six inches a year, roughly half that of some other places on the same latitude. But Michael reckoned that they had received the average monthly rainfall due the county in the last twenty-four hours alone. When Cassie and the kids left he stayed up to listen to the forecast on the Blue Lake station, though his thoughts were mainly on Cassie’s goodbye. ‘We need to talk,’ he’d whispered as she’d gathered up the kids.

  ‘I don’t see what there is to discuss,’ she said crisply. ‘Just tell me your leaving date a little ahead of time so I can start to adjust. This time I’d appreciate a little warning, if only for the sake of the kids.’

  Blue Lake radio announced that flood warnings were in force in the counties that stretched along the shoreline on the western side of the state, from South Haven to Traverse City. Atlantic County was mentioned by name, and although there was no specific mention of the Still river, Michael went to bed feeling uneasy. For he had seen catastrophes before, seen them creep in like uninvited guests showing up for the weekend – though unexpected, they behave well and prove no trouble, until they try to burn the house down Sunday morning.

  He woke now in the dark to an intermittent burring sound. For a brief second he thought he was in Scotland, on the job, and that something terrible had happened on the site. It was only as he jumped out of bed in his boxer shorts and T-shirt that he got his bearings, and recognized the noise of the old-fashioned telephone in his parents’ former bedroom.

  ‘You awake?’ It was Donny.

  ‘I am now.’

  ‘It took you so long I was about to phone Cassie’s. Listen, the dam’s close to going, and I thought you’d want to be there. Christ knows what’s going to happen.’

  ‘Pick me up in five minutes.’

  ‘Call it ten so I can make us some coffee.’

  He had promised to take Jack to see the dam, but it sounded as if it would be too late for that now. He would make it up to the boy somehow. He and Donny drove in silence out of town, sharing coffee from the thermos’s cup. When they went over the Junction bridge, Donny shook his head. ‘I told Cassavantes what you said about bracing the downstream side of the central pier. He said he’d “take it under advisement”. What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘It means that if the dam goes we might lose the bridge.’

  They took the interstate to Fennville and the rain came down in thin sheets which, as Michael rolled the window down, sailed through the dark air like spitting icicles. This time Donny didn’t approach the dam through the park on the far side. ‘It’s probably flooded over there. No time to get stuck.’ He parked instead in the empty lot next to Cameron’s hardware store, and they picked their way along the soggy bluff for a quarter of a mile until they could look down on Fennville Lake as it was gradually illuminated by the light of the imminent sunrise. Michael was wearing his waterproof jacket from work and thick corduroys, but his hair soon grew soaked because he hadn’t been able to find his hat. Jack had been wearing it as a joke; it dwarfed his little head like an oversized sombrero. I have to teach him to put my things back where they belong, he thought. And then, When are you planning to do that?

  Michael looked around the lake shore, as morning arrived through the misty air without colouring the scene at all. It was surprising how big the circle of water looked from this high vantage point, and surprising too how unchanged it seemed from his earlier visit with Donny. But what had he expected? Surging, frothing waters? A tidal wave propelled across the surface like a billowing sail filled with wind? Something like that – anything other than this slow, almost imperceptible rise.

  He looked down at the dam. The clay section was closest to them, with the level of the lake now within a foot of its restraining lip. The far side of the dam was slightly higher and made of concrete; where he and Donny had walked casually along it on their earlier visit, now a group of men stood in a long chain, passing sandbags down to two brave souls who stood stacking them on the imperilled clay edge. One of the workers from the concrete end ran skittishly across the clay lip until he jumped with visible relief up onto a knoll of grass, where another group of workmen stood, almost directly below Michael and Donny.

  They all seemed to be staring out at the lake, and Michael peered out at the water, wondering what they were looking at. Gradually a figure emerged from the lake’s mild mist, swimming slowly in a black wet suit with goggles and a long flashlight held aloft in one hand. Reaching shore, the frogman clambered out and stood awkwardly, catching his breath, his black flippered feet splayed out. He climbed up onto the grassy point where the watching group stood and pulled back the rubber hood of his wet suit, then began talking urgently to a burly balding man, who was wearing a knee-length raincoat of luminous orange that reminded Michael of New York traffic cops in bad weather.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Brixton,’ said Donny.

  ‘Which one’s Brixton?’

  ‘The guy in the wet suit. He was a SEAL in the navy; he likes to show off his diving prowess. Cassavantes is the guy talking to him, the guy in the orange.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be down there? I don’t want to get in your way.’

  ‘I’m on the Home Guard – for Stillriver. But come on, let’s go down.’

  They worked their way down the bluff and through the crowd of helpers, who had stopped stacking sandbags and were staring glumly out at the water while they drank steaming coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Donny nodded to most of them and sometimes stopped to say hello; eventually they came to Cassavantes, who was still talking to the former SEAL.

  ‘Boss,’ said Donny, ‘this is Michael Wolf, the guy I was telling you about.’
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br />   Cassavantes nodded but didn’t shake hands. He was a little shorter than Michael but much broader. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, just on the edge of a sneer, ‘you’re the big time engineer. Problem is, we’re not trying to build anything here, just keep it from being destroyed.’

  Oh no, a tough guy, thought Michael with an inward groan. In the work he was used to, nobody ever bothered to act tough, since most of them were tough, and posturing could get you hurt, either from doing something foolhardy, or from pissing off someone tougher than you and happy to prove it.

  ‘I appreciate that,’ said Michael. There was no point pushing it. ‘If I can help in any way, just let me know.’ He added quietly, ‘I have seen a dam give way before.’

  ‘Stick around and you’ll get to see another one.’

  Michael pointed at the dam itself, no more than forty feet away. ‘I reckon the clay end will go first.’

  ‘Do you now? Well, thank you very much – I don’t know how I would have figured that out myself.’ And Cassavantes turned on his heel and walked off to another group of maintenance workers.

  Michael looked at Donny. ‘Sorry about that. I should have kept my mouth shut.’

  Donny shrugged. ‘If you had, he would have complained you weren’t being any help. That’s just the way he is. You can’t win.’

  ‘Okay. But listen, I’m going to go up there again.’ He pointed to the bluff where they had been standing. ‘Do me a favour: talk to Cassavantes and try and persuade him to get all those guys’ – he pointed to the men on the concrete side – ‘off the dam.’ Then he pointed to the group on the knoll below them. ‘And try and get him to move these guys as well.’