Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  The pain was now constant, but he thought of Ronald holding on desperately, and forced himself to keep running, wondering why Jimmy Olds and the others weren’t moving to help, starting to feel infuriated that they were just standing there, waiting for him. And then through the noise of his own heavy breathing in the air, and the internal wheezing that seemed to come from his ribs, he heard the figures shouting, and they were saying Run! And again, Run, run! He thought, I am running goddamnit, and as he came up the hill to the causeway and neared its rim, three men came out of the dark and helped haul him up. He stood with his hands on his knees, gasping for breath, until he lifted his head when someone shouted, just in time to turn with the others and watch as the river came sweeping towards the bridge below them in one vast, translatory wave, an immense rolling surge that would have carried anything along with it, including, he realized at once, Ronald Duverson. As it reached the bridge he peered into the dark roll of water, curved like an enormous breaker, and sought something human. But he saw no sign of Ronald – no boot, no white and flashing arm, no face twisted by hate – and then the wave hit the scaffolding with a reverberating ring and the water came up and onto the bridge with an explosive whoosh.

  Then Jimmy was by his side, holding Jack, who was now wrapped in a blanket and shivering. ‘There was someone back there,’ Michael said, not wanting to say the name out loud in front of Jack.

  ‘I know,’ said Jimmy. ‘The boy just told us. Who was it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘I’ve called up to the Meadows. If he goes back up that way they’ll get him.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘He was in the river. That’s why I was yelling for help. He was hanging on to some rocks and I came to get help.’

  Jimmy’s eyes widened. ‘He won’t be there now,’ he said quietly.

  Michael nodded, then looked over at the bridge, where the water was draining away from its surface. Amazingly, the bridge was standing, still shrouded on the upstream side by scaffolding, seemingly untouched by the translatory wave, its beam-and-slab construction not really so different from those of the early simple bridges that had first enthralled him years before. Somebody had moved the big searchlight until its light shone out over the Junction, and Michael suddenly saw that although the bridge had survived and its three piers were still standing, the banks supporting the highway approaches on either side had been completely washed away. The river now flowed both under the bridge and around it, through channels it had rudely cut on either side.

  The effect was as severing as if the bridge itself had fallen. As he looked at the two police cars now marooned on the bridge, he felt an absurdity to the spectacle that made him want to laugh. Cassavantes’ last-minute meddling had taken its toll after all; Michael realized that it would be weeks, more likely months, before this main route to town was usable again. One bridge out of action, he thought, and one man dead.

  He felt something brush against his leg, and when he looked he saw that Jack had got down from Jimmy Olds and was standing next to Michael, looking up at him with an expression at once mystified and beseeching. The boy was still wearing the blanket and Michael tucked it firmly around him. ‘I’d pick you up, Jack, but I can’t. I think my ribs are broken.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ the boy said simply, and slid his small hand into Michael’s. They stood together, looking down at the bridge, and at the cascading flow already widening the gap between the causeway and the bridge itself. Something was fluttering on the scaffolding on the upstream side, and when Michael stared at it, wondering what kind of debris it could be, he saw that hooked on a pipe’s edge was a latex glove, flapping empty in the wind above the flooding waters of the Still.

  Epilogue

  THEY FOUND RONALD’s body the next morning, caught by the rocks at the Stillriver end of the channel, not far from Nelson’s boathouse and only about a hundred yards from the channel where Ronald had once ‘saved’ Raleigh Somerset from drowning. To spare Cassie, Michael identified the body, with Jimmy Olds having to hold his arm as they walked down to the edge of Stillriver Lake – an x-ray had shown that four of Michael’s ribs were cracked. As another policeman pulled the tarp back, Michael looked down at Ronald’s face, seeing that in death the mouth of his tormentor was taut and unsmiling, his face bruised and purple from the violence of the river.

  That day, and in the days that followed, Michael had a growing conviction that the world he had been living in was for ever behind him. Like it or not, he was now in the new world he had sought for so long, a new world that, curiously, he had rediscovered; for it was the world of his childhood and adolescence, the world of his growing up. He had been confident for so long that he would find it elsewhere – Ann Arbor, New York, London, a Swedish island – that it seemed amazing to discover it had always been right here, waiting for him.

  This feeling of arriving back where he had begun was accompanied by an entirely unexpected sadness about Ronald’s death. Cassie didn’t share this feeling, for she was at first plagued by feelings of guilt that she had believed Ronald when he told her he had been rejected for parole. ‘If only I had checked for sure,’ she kept saying to Michael, until finally, with just a hint of exasperation, Michael pointed out that if Jimmy Olds had been even slightly more on the ball he would have taken the fifteen seconds required to check the National Crime Index database and discover that Ronald was no longer in prison.

  At Cassie’s insistence, and to Michael’s relief, Ronald was buried in Texas. Mex, his younger brother, did not travel there to attend the funeral. Neither did Jack or Sally; they stayed with Nancy Sheringham during the week it took their mother to bury Ronald and wind up his affairs.

  Cleared of any direct involvement in the murder of Henry Wolf, Raleigh Somerset soon found he had other problems. For despite Ethel’s failure to identify Raleigh, Maguire managed to obtain a warrant to search Raleigh’s place on the grounds that he might find evidence linking Ronald Duverson to the murder of Henry Wolf. No one doubted Michael’s account of Ronald’s confession, but there was no forensic evidence to prove that Ronald had killed him. When Maguire searched Raleigh’s house with two local policemen (though not Jimmy Olds), he discovered nothing relevant to the homicide; but he did find four sticks of dynamite in a wooden box in the basement. Raleigh’s fingerprints were all over them.

  When he heard this news from Gary, Michael told his younger brother not to bother trying to look surprised.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean. Now I know why you were out at the Half. You could walk to Raleigh’s from there, plant the dynamite and wait until the right time to let Maguire know about it.’

  ‘What dynamite?’

  ‘Maguire said he arrested Raleigh with six sticks of dynamite the first time.’

  Gary shrugged as if to say, So?

  ‘You told me there were ten in the crate you buried at the Half.’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘And this time when they got him, they found four sticks.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ asked Gary sourly.

  ‘Six plus four equals ten.’

  ‘Why would I tell Maguire anything?’

  ‘You tell me. I still don’t understand why you told him about the dynamite the first time around. Were you just being a good citizen or did Maguire have something on you?’

  Gary blushed so dramatically at this – it looked as though cherry juice had suffused his face – that Michael didn’t have the heart to press it. Of course. Maguire knew about the proclivities of Bubba and the boys. He probably threatened to tell Pop. Or Gary’s ‘girlfriend’. Or the world.

  ‘But this time,’ said Michael thinking hard, ‘you and Maguire were on the same side. You told him about the dynamite that you still had because you were scared of Raleigh, scared he was going to try and kill you. You thought he’d killed Pop. You wanted Raleigh put away, and so did Maguire, if not for murder, then the dynamite would do.’
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  Michael looked thoughtfully at his younger brother. ‘And that’s why Maguire came by here after he heard Ethel’s story. It wasn’t to tell you that you were in the clear – that’s far too humane a thing for Maguire to do. No, it was to establish that if he couldn’t nail Raleigh on the murder charge – all he really had then was Ethel’s word for it – he’d at least get him for something. With your help.’

  To which Gary replied with a smug and knowing smile.

  Certain mysteries remained, though one was cleared up in the week after Ronald had been killed when Michael read his brief obituary in the Atlantic County Herald. RONALD SALEM DUVERSON, 39, FORMER STILLRIVER RESIDENT, read the small headline on the piece. The middle name made him pause. Salem? That was where Streatley had grown up. In Oregon. Then Michael remembered that yes, Salem was the state capital. Ethel’s peculiar mnemonic had been correct after all; Maguire had been so keen to nail Somerset that he had stopped too early – at North Carolina and ‘Raleigh’.

  Maguire himself proved something of a mystery, for despite all the detective’s talk about peach trees and his sister’s smallholding outside New Era, Michael later learned from Kenny Williams (who had bought the beach property after all) that within six weeks of Ronald’s death Maguire was back in Detroit, working for a new federal unit specializing in counter-terrorism. Michael would have liked a further session with the man – he had more than one bone to pick – but by this time Michael had left town, having given countless interviews to the police and having testified exhaustively at the coroner’s inquest into Ronald’s death by drowning.

  The job in Dubai was quick and straightforward – a concrete beam-and-slab job that actually could have been supervised by someone less experienced and cheaper. Jock wasn’t needed, really, and though Michael had offered to bring him along, the old man had declined, though he seemed touched by Michael’s offer.

  The site crew was a mix of Pakistanis and Yemenis who spoke little English, and Michael spent his nights in his air-conditioned trailer reading, resisting the temptation to make expensive overseas calls, writing letters instead. He still found the day-to-day problems of concrete rehabilitation interesting, but they were no longer a substitute passion, indeed not a passion at all. He was happy to discover that what quickened his heart was no longer inanimate.

  Returning to London in early December, he found the Ealing flat under offer. Ten days later he had exchanged contracts and managed to sell the buyer all his furniture as well. When he flew out of Heathrow, the only property he owned was the house in Stillriver.

  He arrived there a week before Christmas. Gary had long ago decamped to his bungalow, where he celebrated his prospective inheritance non-stop with Bubba and the boys until the day after Thanksgiving. Then, as if someone had thrown a switch, he had driven out with a hangover to Harold Lashing’s, made peace, and became Harold’s junior partner again.

  The house had not been neglected, for Cassie, Jack and Sally had been living in it since the beginning of the month.

  Before Michael had even unpacked, Cassie drove him and the kids eighty miles north to Sugar Mountain, the ski resort, where they stayed for two nights in a chalet on the main lodge grounds. There, while the kids spent the daylight hours in ski school, he and Cassie stayed in bed. Making love again for the first time in more than fifteen years, they found their first try tender but awkward – though not so awkward that they did not repeat the process three more times before darkness loomed and they went to pick up Jack and Sally from the bottom of the bunny slope.

  They had only a single conversation about Ronald, but it was an important one, for there was something he felt he needed to know. ‘Tell me,’ he said as they drove on an icy road to Manistee the next day to buy Christmas presents, while the kids went back to ski school, ‘Why didn’t you come with me when I asked you to, back in Texas?’

  ‘I told you why.’

  ‘Sure, but I can’t believe being pregnant with Jack was the only reason.’ He said this as mildly as he could.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said with a show of nonchalance. ‘I guess it was a lot of things.’

  ‘Like what, exactly?’

  ‘Well, there you were a married man, asking me to join you in God knows where – you weren’t positive yourself – while I was about to give birth to another man’s child. What if you’d changed your mind six months later? What would I do then? I’d already followed one roughneck halfway round Texas. Did it really make sense to follow another?’

  This was the same argument she had made in the summer for staying put in Stillriver. He looked at her dubiously and she lifted her eyebrows, as if to say, That’s the way it was, whatever you may think.

  ‘There was something else, wasn’t there?’ he asked. ‘You were worried about what Ronald would do.’

  ‘Can you blame me? You were worried about what Ronald would do, too.’

  ‘Did he ever say he’d kill you?’

  He knew she wouldn’t lie outright and she didn’t. ‘No,’ she admitted, ‘he did not.’

  ‘Was there anybody he did happen to say he’d kill, I mean, way back then?’ He wasn’t sure why he was persisting with this, except that he had never fully accepted her coldness in the motel room near LaGuardia, her studied certainty that she had to go away from him. So he was not entirely surprised now to see tears well up in her eyes. He nodded. ‘I thought so. It was me he said he’d kill, even seven years ago. Wasn’t it?’

  She sniffled and nodded at the same time and he reached over and put his arm round her. ‘You sent me away because you thought he’d kill me if we got together.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, wiping her eyes with her hand.

  He withdrew his arm and drove carefully down the snow-packed road approaching town. There was still one thought in his head that wouldn’t go away, an uncomfortable one he could see might hang around in future, like a bedroom mosquito at night, which buzzed infuriatingly close to your ear, then receded while you lay in the silence, waiting for it to come buzzing back.

  Cassie lifted her head up. ‘You’re not stupid, Michael, but neither am I. You must be wondering why I wanted you back here so much last summer if Ronald was still saying he’d kill you if I were with you. I mean, you probably think it was asking you to be a sitting duck, just waiting until Ronald got out of prison and came to get you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Of course it does. What you have to understand is, I thought we had at least a year. I didn’t know what would happen in that time. Maybe Ronald would calm down before he got out. Or maybe we would have to go away – I’d have come to Dubai or wherever if I’d thought there was the slightest chance he’d come harm you. But I needed to know first that you wanted to be with me – wanted me enough even to come back here.’

  He pulled into the highway mall parking lot and stopped the car, then put his arm round her shoulders again. ‘I’m glad you told me,’ he said. And then he did tell one lie: ‘Honest, that had never even crossed my mind.’

  They went home to find a Christmas tree deposited on the back porch by Nancy Sheringham from the farm. On Christmas Day Gary joined them for presents and a Christmas dinner of baked ham, which Cassie and Michael cooked together. New Year’s Eve they stayed in, drinking most of a bottle of champagne and just managing to stay awake until midnight and the new millennium.

  In January, after an internal inquiry into the flood of the Still river, Cassavantes was suspended from his job and promptly resigned, moving to Panama to work on Canal-related restoration work. Donny told Michael at once about the vacancy, and there was an ad for the post in the following week’s Atlantic County Herald.

  But having laid the ground by correspondence, ten days after New Year Michael flew to Florida and visited Betty, the widow, who lived pleasantly in a bungalow on the Gulf Coast near Sarasota. She was not crucial to the deal, but it seemed appropriate to pay his respects before flying on the next day to Chicago, where he expected
Betty’s son to drive a hard bargain. In fact, it wasn’t clear the son even knew who he was, or had any memory of Michael’s past connection with his father. And as for the retail premises, he seemed delighted that someone was willing to take them off his hands. Having dreaded the negotiation, Michael flew north out of Chicago in a tiny prop plane that wavered in the wind on take-off like a tippy little bird, feeling almost guilty about how little money he would be paying Alvin Simpson’s son Phil for the drugstore.

  He went to work at once. He was alone most days, redecorating the premises, having company only for specialized tasks – the whole place needed rewiring, the plumbing downstairs proved beyond him – though occasionally Cassie would come downtown to help after school. He decided to cater unabashedly for the affluent summer clientele and was determined to be open before Memorial Day. He reinstalled the soda fountain, and was delighted to learn on an expedition to Manistee that people seemed willing to part with $3.50 for a hot fudge sundae. He bought 200 beach towels from the previous owner at a knockdown price, along with seventeen cases of sun tan lotion he planned to mark up even more than Alvin had. Finding the old pine racks buried in the back of the liquor cage, he stained them afresh and bought 300 bags of charcoal at a closing down sale in Grand Haven. Most significantly, he lined up the part-time services of two retired pharmacists, one from Burlington, the other who lived in a cottage on the Stillriver Lake side of South Beach.

  He looked forward to opening, since he felt it would somehow seal away the recent past and, as far as the store was concerned, atone for the distant one. Surprisingly few people ever talked to him about his father’s murder, and he was only aware that many people thought it strange – even creepy – that he was living in his father’s house again, because Donny told him so. Thanks, he wanted to tell his oldest friend, but decided that if he talked about it with him at all he might as well talk to everybody else.