by Erin Hart
When the song finally came to an end, Nora lifted her head, and turned to see her father standing in the doorway, supporting himself on the door frame with both arms. His hair had gone completely white since she had last seen him, and his face, so much older than she remembered, seemed drained of blood. She had never seen him shed a tear, not even in the terrible days immediately following Tríona’s death. He did not weep now, but she could read distress in the deep hollows of his eyes.
“I thought you were—” Suddenly the words seemed to choke him.
Nora looked down at the faded chambray shirt.
“Tríona,” she murmured.
Her father flinched, and Nora felt a surge of regret. She hadn’t meant to say the name aloud. He shook his head and looked away. “I thought you were lost to us as well.”
“But now I’m found,” she said quietly. “The prodigal, returned.”
He offered a wan half smile, and Nora realized that this strange, sad welcome was more than she had hoped for, and probably far more than she deserved.
There was a noise from downstairs, the rustle of someone pushing through the back door. “That’s your mother home,” he said. “Shall we go down to her?”
14
Frank Cordova closed his trunk. He’d just wasted three fruitless hours at the courier service on West Seventh where Natalie Russo had worked, and another two at the nearby house she’d shared with some of her coworkers. The company had never contracted with Peter Hallett’s architectural firm, and not one of the current crop of bike messengers had ever known Natalie. To these kids, five years ago might as well have been ancient history. No one knew whether any of Natalie’s belongings remained at the house, a run-down side-by-side duplex that held an accumulation of many temporary lives.
He checked his watch as he left the messenger service. A quarter to seven, just enough time to make his meeting with the coach at the Twin Cities Rowing Club. Natalie’s emergency contact. He dropped down to Shepard Road at Randolph and sailed along the bluffs beyond Crosby Farm Park. The boathouse was on a private road that hairpinned from the top of the bluff down to the river’s edge. He parked along the service road and began to make his way down the steep incline. The road’s surface was loose gravel, and his leather-soled shoes weren’t suited to the terrain.
Nobody was around when he reached the boathouse, but the doors were open, and he scoped around inside. Some of the wall racks were empty; brightly colored sculls hung from others. Outside the open door stood matched pairs of fabric-and-metal slings, evidently waiting for the rowers to return. He heard a shout through a bullhorn, and turned to see a flotilla of long, narrow watercraft approaching from downriver. Some were rowed solo, some in pairs; one of the boats held a foursome stroking gracefully in unison. Oars lifted as the boats pulled in on both sides of the dock, and the rowers glanced at him as they lifted their lightweight sculls from the water and flipped them upside down onto the waiting stands. They began unscrewing the rigging hardware, swabbing the boats down with towels.
He approached the nearest sling. “I’m looking for Sarah Cates. She said I’d find her here after practice.”
The woman glanced up only briefly, eyes flicking to the badge he’d clipped to his belt. “She’ll be along in a minute. She was following in the launch.”
After all the rowers were in, a woman he gauged to be in her late thirties steered a motorized rowboat to the dock and raised a hand, signaling that she’d seen him. Not that hard to spot him, really—the only shirt and tie amid all the spandex. Sarah Cates had a lean, muscular body, and bronze skin that hinted at mixed origins like his own. Sunstreaks in her curly dark hair were evidence of hours spent out on the water. She tied up the launch and made her way up the dock. Cordova walked down to meet her.
“Ms. Cates—thanks for seeing me on short notice.”
“Sarah, please. No trouble at all. I’m here every day—when I’m not out rowing myself, I’m coaching the women’s team. We don’t have a coach at the moment, so we’re taking turns. Come on up.” Halfway to the boathouse, she turned and threw him a sideways glance. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Cordova felt uneasy. He hadn’t been involved in the initial investigation of Natalie Russo’s disappearance, but then again, his memory seemed to be playing tricks on him recently. He shook his head. “Sorry—”
“You interviewed me—it was about three years ago.” Still didn’t register; he felt a little bewildered. She continued: “I found a body in the river. It’s okay. I know it’s impossible to remember everyone you talk to. You know, I’d always imagined that being a detective might be interesting, but after that—I certainly don’t envy you that part of the job. He was so tiny.”
At last Frank felt his memory kick in. The baby’s body had been discovered first; his mother turned up a mile downstream the next day. Witnesses said that she had cradled the newborn in her arms as she jumped from a bridge more than a hundred feet above the river. The memory of mother and child laid out side by side in the morgue had disturbed his dreams for a long time. “That was you?”
She nodded. “We meet again. And I’m guessing you’re here about another death.”
“I’m afraid so. How well did you know Natalie Russo?”
From her reaction, Sarah Cates had been expecting this visit. “That body at Hidden Falls—it was Natalie, wasn’t it?” Frank nodded, and she rubbed her bare arms, as if suddenly chilled. “I’m not sure any of us knew her all that well. When we talked, it was mostly about rowing.”
“How often was she down here at the boathouse?”
“Every day, morning and evening, rain or shine, whenever the water was open. She was a serious rower.”
“Isn’t everyone here pretty serious?”
Sarah Cates smiled. “Yeah—but some more than others.”
“Natalie was wearing running clothes when she was found. Can you tell me anything about that?”
“She ran every day, in addition to rowing practice. Most of us do some sort of cross-training—it helps build endurance.”
Frank said: “The people at her job and the house where she lived didn’t seem to know a lot about her. I was wondering if we might check club records for anything that might shed some light on what was happening in her life around the time of the disappearance.”
“Not sure what the club records might tell you. All we keep is contact information and membership stuff, speed and distance records, and the daily logs.” She pointed to a book hanging from a hook near the open boathouse door. “Liability insurance requires them on club equipment and private boats. It’s a safety thing; if somebody checks a boat out and doesn’t check back in, we have to send out a search party. That’s just this month. All the older logs are upstairs. You’re welcome to have a look.”
She pointed to an open stairway that led to a loft on the second floor. Cordova took note of signs at the foot of the stairs that pointed the way to men’s and women’s locker rooms as they passed. “Would Natalie have kept a locker here?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you. Not being uncooperative, it’s just that we’re not too strict about lockers. They’re not assigned; you just bring a padlock if you want to use one. We don’t really keep track of them.”
As they continued upward, Frank glanced at the row of photographs that followed the staircase. The more recent images appeared in color; the older ones were black-and-white.
“Team pictures,” Sarah Cates confirmed. “All the way back to the twenties, when the club was men only. We’re still not terribly organized, but at least we operate a little less like a frat house now.”
“Would Natalie be in any of these pictures?”
“At least one, I think. They’re in chronological order, so if we start at the bottom and count back—here she is.”
The photo showed Natalie Russo in the front row. She was smaller, slighter than most of her teammates. Her fellow rowers, caught up in the spirit of camaraderie, had arms thrown around o
ne another’s shoulders. He let his gaze rest on the blonde standing directly behind Natalie. The face was partially obscured by someone’s elbow, but he was almost certain he’d seen it somewhere before, in a different context. The feeling was vague, but insistent.
Sarah said: “You know, it’s funny; even though they’re taken at the start of each season, you can tell just by looking which teams are going to be the great ones—”
“And this bunch?” Cordova nodded to the photo before them.
“Our best women’s team ever. We could have sent at least four people to Olympic trials that year, but—”
Cordova prompted: “But what?”
“Natalie disappeared just before they were supposed to go.” Her lips pressed together in consternation. “Things sort of fell apart.”
The upstairs office was a jumble of loose paper and lost-and-found clothing. “Please excuse the mess,” Sarah Cates said. “The usual problem—no one’s really in charge. The office is always in chaos.” She hauled a stack of boxes out from under a table, and found the one that held logbooks for five years previous. Flipping through the pages, she said: “Like I said, Natalie was on the water pretty much every day, from the time the ice was out—she usually did morning and evening workouts, and lots of running in between.” She turned the heavy ledger to face him.
Cordova peered at the handwritten pages of the log. Most names were illegible, except for all the repetitions of “N. Russo” in neat blue ballpoint. From June 3 onward, no “N. Russo” appeared in any column. Here one day, gone the next. Like we’ll all vanish some day, he thought, without so much as a ripple.He raised his eyes from the book. “She must have been good.”
“Only the best natural rower I’ve ever seen. Flawless mechanics. I remember something she said once, that winning a race was the best high. She told me she’d grown up sort of uncomfortable in her own skin. Rowing had turned her from this awkward, chubby kid into someone who actually knew what she was doing, what she wanted. The way she said it—just made me think she’d overcome some difficult things in her past, you know? Most people float along, but Natalie never did. She definitely had that fire in the belly, a competitive spirit, but not the kind that made her hard to live with. There’s always a certain amount of backbiting in any place like this, ego and temper and all that goes along with competition, but Natalie seemed above all that. She’d go out of her way to cheer on teammates, try to lift everybody’s game—unlike most of the lightweights I’ve known.” She lowered her voice. “They have to be cutting weight all the time, so they’re usually hungry. Makes ’em cranky.”
“Did any of Natalie’s teammates resent her ability?”
“Why should they? It wasn’t like she went around rubbing people’s faces in how great she was. We all like winning. And we had a much better chance of winning when she was with us.”
“What about friends, anybody in particular she hung out with?”
“Not that I recall. She did things with the team, but nobody in particular stood out.”
“You know that you were her emergency contact?”
“Yeah, they told me when she disappeared. I thought it was kind of sad. She didn’t seem to have any family—no one she wanted to stay in touch with, anyway.”
“What do you remember about the time she disappeared?”
“She didn’t show up for practice. That was totally out of character, especially with the trials coming up. I called her cell phone, but there was no answer. So I tried the messenger service, but they said she hadn’t been to work either.”
“So you reported her missing—”
“I wasn’t sure anybody else would do it. Then somebody spotted her bike behind the boathouse. I remember having such a bad feeling, right here.” She pointed to a place just below her sternum. “I’m constantly reminding people—novices, especially—what a dangerous place the river can be.” She gestured to the top of the bluffs. “It’s still wild down here, not like the world up there. We’re dealing with weird stuff all the time—currents, hypothermia, deadheads, floaters—and don’t even get me started on the wackos who think it’s funny to drop things from bridges. We have to be constantly on our guard. I was always telling Natalie not to run alone, but she said she didn’t need a bodyguard just to go for a run. I totally got what she was saying—it’s not fair. But whenever I run down here by myself, I always come home feeling like I’ve dodged a bullet.” She eyed him curiously. “It must be strange, doing what you do every day. Getting to know people only after they’re dead, I mean.”
“Guess I never looked at it that way,” Frank said. “It’s like any other line of work; some days are better than others.” His eyes suddenly focused on the delicate sprinkling of freckles across Sarah Cates’s face. All the time they’d been talking, and he had never noticed that detail until this moment. And her eyes, such an unusual hue—pale green, the same color as the river in the bright sunlight. “I could wonder about what you do every day, too. Cold, currents, deadheads, dead bodies—that’s enough to keep most people in bed. And yet you’re out here on the water every day.”
“I can’t really explain.” She looked away for a few seconds. “When the wind is calm, and your cadence is just right—it’s hard to put into words. If you really want to understand, I could take you out for a beginner’s lesson some evening—we do it all the time. No charge.”
15
The reunion with her parents was going somewhat better than Nora had expected. There were no recriminations about not calling, no questions about her plans. As if they all realized that the elaborate pas de trois they had been engaged in for the past five years had become necessary.
Going about the everyday rituals of preparing a meal, Nora felt two discussions going on at once—on their lips the mundane details of the flight home, her work in Dublin, the small permutations of her parents’ daily lives, while the larger questions lurked beneath the surface, unasked and unanswered. She had already imagined most of the conversation: her father’s inquiries about her work at Trinity, her mother asking after people they had known in Dublin, even the occasional awkward silences. They never spoke Tríona’s name. Still, as the three of them ranged around the kitchen, opening drawers and cupboards, Nora felt how good it was to have her bearings, to know precisely where everything was. But for some reason, she was filled with a distant ache as well.
She understood on a rational level her father’s reluctance to condemn Peter Hallett—or anyone else, for that matter—without proof. Watching him wrestle the cork from a wine bottle, she tried to imagine the place he’d been reared, the wild, wind-whipped west coast of Clare, where bleak history and compounded misfortune had fed a general faith in forces beyond the known world. From an early age, he had rebelled against that upbringing, rejecting all the old beliefs, demanding a rational explanation for everything. After Tríona’s death, Nora and her mother had watched him retreat deeper and deeper into his research, taking refuge in his orderly, microscopic universe. He delighted in the abstract beauty of individual cells, in cracking open their inner workings, unmasking invisible chemical changes. In her own work, she had followed her father a long distance down that path, but had come to see the fault in hewing too closely to scientific method. Where human behavior was involved, there was often no rational explanation.
The conversation that had flowed almost normally as they’d moved about the kitchen suddenly slowed once they sat down to the table. Nora sensed her mother trying to coax the conversation forward, but one gambit after another faltered and failed, and they finished their meal in silence.
“You haven’t told us how long you’ll be staying,” her father said abruptly. “I hope you haven’t left Trinity for good.”
“They’re expecting me back for fall term.” That much was true, at least.
A few moments later, Tom Gavin rose from the table. “I’m sorry to leave you, but I’ve got an early presentation tomorrow, and I’ve a few things left to prepare. Forgive me.” As
he passed by the back of her chair, Nora felt her father’s hand hover briefly above her shoulder. Five years after Tríona’s death, and here they were, still in limbo.
When he had retreated into the study, Eleanor Gavin said: “There’s no presentation tomorrow. He’s just having a difficult time.”
Nora began to speak, but her mother hushed her. “I know—the past five years haven’t been easy for any of us. But your father’s been waiting out on the porch almost every night since you phoned. Now that you’re here, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s completely exhausted. I’m not saying any of this is your fault, love—please don’t misunderstand. I’m just telling you what’s going on. He did the very same thing before you were born. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate. And when you finally did arrive, he was a complete wreck. He’s missed you terribly, Nora. We both have.”
“Is he all right, Mam? He looks so pale—and I know doctors make rotten patients.”
