A burble, a rounded chuckle like the giggling of many children.
Water.
Doug reached it first. He dropped to his knees, plunging his arms into the stream, and began splashing handfuls over his face.
“Careful,” Natalie wheezed as she caught up. Every breath cost her now. “Don’t get any in your mouth.” She too got down on the ground and began scrubbing the accumulation of dirt and dried sweat and grit from between her fingers and underneath her nails. It was too cold to slide all the way into the creek, though the notion was tempting: the thought of washing off her entire body. But hypothermia was a risk at these temperatures, especially in wet clothes after the sun went down. Besides, just seeing clean, pink skin on her hands again was mind-altering.
Doug stared at her.
Craig. Natalie heard the name in her mind. Of course I knew him, Nat.
“What?” she asked, though Doug hadn’t said anything out loud.
“Did you just tell me not to get any in my mouth?”
Natalie frowned, then nodded.
“Are you nuts?”
“Am I nuts?” Natalie rose to her feet. “This from the man who proposed a whole menu’s worth of inedible foodstuffs today as if he’d never even heard of the taste test?”
Doug’s hand shot out, pointing like an archangel up to the heavens, toward some distant alpine summit where the stream had its source. “This is the clearest, purest water I’ve ever seen. It’s like God put it here in front of us. To save us. Before it was—”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. Before it was too late.
Still, Natalie shook her head, confounded. “Doug, we just rinsed about four pounds of dirt into this water. I’ve got news for you. The things in here that will make us sick are very, very small. As in microscopic.” She glared at her husband, fuming. “In other words, you wouldn’t be able to see them!”
Doug drew back. Natalie had never spoken to him like that before, and she wondered if her tone wasn’t born of the widening gap between them. Was there a connection between them taking a honeymoon and a murder victim being found in the same place? Did Doug really know the dead man? Because if he did, then one thing was for sure. Her husband had had some reason for leading them into these woods.
Doug continued to point at the creek, avoiding her eyes.
Natalie knelt down beside the streambed. The water leaped over mossy rocks, silvery sheets forming miniature cascades. It looked like something out of Eden. But appearances could be deceiving. Especially out here.
“Doug,” Natalie tried again. “There’s a reason why we were so careful to pack in water from home—and backup batteries for the purifier—and iodine tabs for if we really got stuck.” She knee-walked over to her husband, placing both hands on his grizzled face. A coppery scruff had grown in to cover his cheeks and chin. “You know as well as I do. Some creature could’ve died miles upstream and fallen into the water, polluting it. There’s runoff from animal waste. The soil harbors spores our bodies can’t tolerate. There are a billion reasons not to drink this water. Literally.”
Her stomach lurched, and she used a newly cleaned hand to rub strands of dry skin off her lips. They floated like feathers to the ground, her body ridding itself of layers, paring itself back to its core. Before too long, that core would start to disintegrate too. You needed water to survive. They’d already made it an amazingly long time without any, and Natalie wanted to scoop up a handful from this stream as badly as Doug did. She could feel the silvery wash on her throat, taste its cold, clear nothingness. She got to her feet and stumbled away, not trusting herself.
“Goddamn it!” Doug shouted.
She blanched mid-step, and turned.
“I’m going to die if I don’t get a drink,” he told her. “Is that what you want? For me to die? Do you know how much my fucking head hurts?”
Natalie felt a tearless sob rise in her throat. “You’ll die if you do.” How easily, seamlessly they had come to acknowledge the proximity of death.
“Maybe,” Doug replied. “But it’ll take longer.”
His eyes met hers like blazes, and Natalie knew she couldn’t oppose him any longer. She’d never been able to oppose him really—Doug had always overpowered her. He’d even gotten her to come out here to complete whatever wicked task had wound up getting his friend killed.
Doug must’ve seen the fight wilt in her eyes for he lay down on his stomach, flattening himself out on the ground. He angled his face beneath a spot in the creek where the water tumbled over a series of stones, flowing through open space as if from a faucet. Liquid coated his hair and beard in silvery droplets, and Doug tossed his head back and forth, welcoming the torrent.
Then he opened his mouth and drank.
• • •
Natalie watched her husband with a feeling of impending doom, as if the judge’s gavel had just slammed onto the block.
It took minutes for Doug to slake his thirst. Natalie could hear him slurping and glugging, and the noises triggered spasms in her own belly, sharp and painful. She had to turn away from the sight of the syrupy water. She could feel its slippery unctuousness coat the insides of her cheeks as if she had actually drunk. Her mouth cramped, agonizingly.
Doug gulped until the water began to overflow and bubble out, till he appeared to lack the strength for one more swallow. His face slackened. Water flooded over his lips and teeth, dripping back into the stream, an abundance sufficient enough to waste. Then he jumped to his feet, shaking moisture from his head like a dog, and laughing.
“Natalie!” he called out. “You’ve got to have some! It’s the most delicious thing you ever tasted! It’s nectar! The elixir of the fucking gods!”
Natalie watched him, her eyes stinging with unshed tears.
Doug lay down again on the ground, spent and wiping his mouth with the back of one hand. “Oh God, that was better than sex. Don’t deprive yourself, Nat. Nothing that good could be bad for us.”
She wasn’t sure if he registered the lack of logic in his words. A heroin addict might’ve said the same thing. She averted her face, hoping to spare Doug the knowledge in her eyes.
It was now full dark. Her husband was going to start to get cold. Natalie went to him, dabbing at his wet hair and flesh with the hem of the shirt he had given her to wear.
Doug looked at her as she dried him. There was a sharpness to his vision that hadn’t been there for days. The water had revived him, restored him to life. Natalie was a fool to avoid the same thing.
She’d viewed Doug’s hysterical ardor as he drank with a feeling of disgust, behavior akin to gluttony. But in this moment Natalie envied her husband the self-indulgence. He had given in, done what they both knew not to, and for Doug all the aches and pains of a desiccating body were gone.
Although even without experiencing the benefits of hydration, something had enlivened Natalie too, at least a little bit. The doubt she now harbored about her husband was injecting its own brand of alertness, a jittery buzz through her veins.
There on a bed of pine needles, sitting beside Doug in the dark, Natalie found her husband’s hand like a targeted missile, while she met his gaze precisely.
“Tell me the truth,” she said.
The pause ambled out, as if they had all the time in the world, though for Natalie the silence seemed ready to snap.
At last Doug said, “There were drugs in the hull of our canoe.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Natalie half turned in the blackness. She wondered if Doug could make out her expression: the tight folds of her face, a stitch between her brows. “What?”
Doug took a breath. “Maybe I’d better backtrack.”
Natalie leaned against the trunk of a tree, while Doug scooted to follow her. “Yes,” she told him. “Maybe you should.”
Doug’s bare ch
est rose and fell steadily. Even his breathing was easier since he’d drunk from the stream. “There were five of us growing up,” he began. “Me, Mark and Brett—who you know—Luke, and Craig.”
So there really was a Craig.
“Actually,” Doug said. “You met Luke too.”
Natalie frowned, going back in her mind over their guests.
Doug seemed to read her thoughts. “Not at the wedding. In that town you liked. Wedeskyull.”
“The outfitting place?” Natalie asked, and Doug nodded. “One of your childhood friends is a river guide in the Adirondacks?”
Doug stared off into the distance, although his vision couldn’t have penetrated far. Clouds had slid in, threadbare and diffuse, but sufficient to blot out the thin hook of moon. The starless, lightless sky was a bubble all around them, as if they were floating underwater.
“Not a real one,” he said.
A chill washed over Natalie that wasn’t borne of the night.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Doug said. “I was being an asshole earlier, the way I talked about your friends, and I’m sorry for that, but I was also getting at something. When you’re part of a group, it becomes like your family. Closer, in our cases, since our families were all so screwed up.” He threaded their fingers together. “When we were little kids, the five of us would’ve done anything for each other. We had an unspoken pact: if one got in trouble, the others got him out. Like soldiers who won’t leave a man behind.”
Doug’s renewed vigor was amazing—his voice strong, his mind and memory operating at full bore. “I hadn’t seen Craig or Luke for years—since we graduated high school—which is why they weren’t invited to the wedding. But still, when Mark and Brett told me Craig was in trouble, I knew I didn’t have a choice.”
What had happened was still murky; Natalie felt as if she were swimming in a thick gruel of questions. “Why did you have a falling-out?” she asked, settling on just one of them. “With two of your friends, I mean.”
Doug stared into the darkness again. “It was for the same reason that Craig needed help now. Back when we were in high school, he and Luke began getting into trouble. I mean, all of us were kind of acting out at that time. I spent more days in suspension in tenth and eleventh grade than I did in class. I’ve told you about that.”
Natalie nodded.
“But Craig and Luke got into some serious shit. Hard drugs, gambling. A bet on that night’s game to pay for their next fix, dealing to schoolkids so they could pay off whoever they’d just lost to. It was a mess. They were a mess. Mark and Brett and I had to cut them loose or get dragged down even further than we already were.”
Natalie felt herself drifting, away from the truth Doug was holding out. Had this distance always been there between them, even if she hadn’t known about it?
Doug didn’t appear to notice her waning attention. “It hurt like hell to cut my best friend out of my life—like slicing off a piece of my skin,” he said. “I always felt guilty about it, especially because Craig never really got himself back on track. I should’ve done something to help my friend instead of just abandoning him.”
“You were just a—” Natalie thought to say, still from very far away, as if this story had nothing to do with her own life at all.
“Kid. Right,” Doug replied. “But that’s why when I learned the trouble Craig was in again—he owed money to these really bad dudes—I knew I had to step up. We weren’t just kids anymore. And Craig’s life was in danger.”
She was floating back now, like a balloon without a string. “The men who came to our wedding,” Natalie guessed.
Doug shook his head. “They only supplied the product. Luke found them—a contact from his past because Luke did manage to go straight. Kind of. He lives in a monastery somewhere in New York State, rarely sees other people.”
Natalie was having trouble keeping up, and she didn’t think that was due solely to thirst and hunger. Her whole identity felt shifted. Who was this man using terms like product, who had friends that got into life-and-death trouble?
Doug compressed his lips. “Hold on,” he said. “I want another drink.”
Natalie heard him make his way through the dark: elbowing branches aside, leaves crinkling underfoot. The sounds continued even after his departure. Whispery breezes, sudden, sharp cracks, the burr of insects. A bird’s insistent caw. Natalie jumped and swung around, sure that somebody else had appeared, but saw only Doug returning from the stream, droplets glistening on the stubbly hairs on his chin.
Natalie tried to lick her lips, and failed. Her words tasted chalky on her tongue. “So the body we found was Craig’s.”
The statement thudded like a stone.
No wonder Doug had become unhinged when he first saw the body, even more so than such a discovery would’ve normally warranted. Natalie could still hear how his high, yowling screech slit the silence, recall Doug stumbling across the forest floor, his loss of control greater than any dose of whiskey could’ve imposed.
Her husband turned away, but not before Natalie saw his eyes begin to shine. He could cry again; he had tears. The water was bringing him back to life—but what kind of life? Natalie had known so little about it, about him, this man she’d married. Their outdoor excursions, the obscure restaurants they took such joy in finding, nights they’d spent drinking, talking, having sex, all felt as if she and Doug had had stand-ins for their roles, two other participants put there in their places.
He lowered himself down beside her. “Guess what we tried to do for Craig didn’t wind up working,” he said, bitterness coating his tone.
“What did you do?” Natalie asked. Was she always this slow and stupid? God, how she wanted to make a trip down to that creek herself, drink from the same devil’s fountain as Doug had.
He let out a shaky sigh. “So Craig needs money, right?” he said. “The kind of sum that isn’t easy to come up with, even illegally.”
Doug seemed to be waiting for something. Natalie gave a nod.
“And he needed it fast,” Doug said. “The men he owed weren’t exactly patient types. I didn’t think there would be anything for me to do. It’s not like I had access to that amount of cash.”
Natalie nodded again.
“But then Mark told me a fact about drugs, and New York State, that became important. Provided I didn’t mind the prospect of altering our route.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Natalie turned her head, and Doug caught her eyes in the dark.
“Altering our route,” she repeated. She realized with a quiver of shame that beyond the name of their put-in at Gossamer Lake, she’d never made it her business to know which direction they were traveling, or much of anything else about their itinerary. Maps again maybe, her lifelong aversion to them. It wasn’t like she would’ve been following along. Or perhaps her hands-off attitude stemmed from an even worse weakness. Her tendency to defer to Doug, relinquish responsibility when he was around.
“Yes,” Doug replied. “We had to go due north instead.”
Natalie waited.
“So, Mark’s a teacher, right?” Doug went on, taking in a breath. “He picks up stuff from his kids. You wouldn’t believe what eleven-year-olds get up to these days.”
“Okay,” Natalie responded.
“In Canada, drugs carry twice their U.S. street value,” Doug told her. “Any drugs. All drugs. I purchase half a kilo of horse for $50K here in the good old US of A, get it across the border somehow, and boom, I can sell it for 100 thou.”
Doug was sounding less and less like the man Natalie had married—or any man she would have wanted to marry. She moved her tongue around in her furry mouth. Her hands curled into fists she was surprised she had the strength to make.
“Ah, but getting it across the border,” Doug continued. “That’s the rub. Customs, drug-sniffing dogs,
and those aren’t the only ways to get caught. There are video cameras along the highway whose tapes Homeland Security scans, looking for indicators of illegal activity. They profile. Two guys traveling together, a guy alone, who knows what looks bad to someone, sets off an alert?”
And with those words, things finally came clear, a whole new reality appearing out of the gloom. “Getting something across the border where it isn’t manned, though, would be much easier,” Natalie said. “Say, in the middle of the wilderness.”
Doug dropped his head. “Exactly.”
“But we weren’t supposed to be anywhere near Canada,” Natalie said. “I would’ve asked why you wanted to go that far when there was plenty of backcountry to explore here on our side.”
“That’s where Luke came in,” Doug told her.
“The guide.”
Doug nodded.
“The fake guide,” Natalie bit out. This lie was a swelling body, extending outward, its boundaries uncontained. “I knew he was too good to be true. That new-age crap about everybody paddling their own river. He was straight out of central casting.”
“We prepped him,” Doug muttered.
“And that’s why he led us to the lake to talk,” Natalie said. “Instead of meeting in the building. He didn’t really work there.”
Doug studied her in the dark; Natalie felt more than saw his eyes.
“Why did he come find us that first night?” she asked. “On the island?”
“You weren’t supposed to see him,” Doug said, still low. “I had been planning to meet Luke in the woods. We had that great sex, and then I fell asleep—”
He broke off as Natalie sent him a stare.
“—so he had to come look for you,” she finished. “I heard him from the water.”
Despite his renewed vigor and health, Doug looked miserable. “Up till then, I wasn’t sure if I’d have to go through with it or not. Craig was still trying to come up with another plan. We arranged for Luke to give the signal, yay or nay.”
Wicked River Page 18
