Silence on Cold River

by Casey Dunn

  “Are you referring to his interests in animals?”

  “Anything, ma’am.”

  “To talk about Michael, we need to talk about me. I was a firm mother. Expected a lot. After my daughter died, and then my husband passed, my world became very dark, and Michael—” Her voice broke. “Michael was where I put all that darkness. I remember I would be so angry.” Her fingers squeezed so hard into fists that her knuckles blanched. “Rage. Just… rage.” She reached for the back of her head and needled a finger into her scalp.

  “A few years ago, a clinic in Atlanta started testing anyone who worked at the factory for cancer, free of charge,” she continued. “Bill, a friend of my husband’s, insisted I go. He took me, and we were tested together. Tumors had stolen my sight—not my grief, not my son, not the river. Cancer, and that damn factory. For Bill, it stole the end of his life. His cancer was terminal; his tumors were inoperable. A year or so ago he left town. I imagine he was checking off a bucket list of sorts. Most of us in Tarson don’t leave much, if ever. My tumors were operable—a cluster in my brain and one on my kidney. It makes sense now, things I thought I’d seen, the way an emotion would spark and then grow and roar. And Michael, God forgive me. Michael was the only target I had.”

  “What are you saying, exactly, Mrs. Walton? Do you feel you mistreated your son?”

  “Oh, yes. I blame myself for everything.”

  “Are you referring to the trial?” Martin asked carefully. “Or your son’s suicide?”

  A smile broke over Mrs. Walton’s wrinkled face. “My son didn’t jump to his death in that river,” she said. “I know people think so. I let them think so. But I can tell you that river would not see my son dead. I tried, Detective.”

  “You tried what, exactly?” Martin reached for his pad and pen.

  “Early one morning, when Michael was twelve, I heard him open the refrigerator then leave the house. I watched him from my window. He went to our neighbor’s property, stood behind a tree, and lured her cat to him with a piece of sandwich meat. I wasn’t seeing well—my peripheral vision was all but gone, and what was left had double imaging. But then later that week I found a dead cat in the yard, eyes plucked out, heart in a Dixie cup, belly split open. The next morning, I heard him leave again, earlier this time, and I followed him. He went into Tarson Woods. I caught up with him. I took him to the river, and I pushed him in.”

  “Mrs. Walton, it’s my understanding that Michael died in Cold River when he was eighteen.”

  “I didn’t say he drowned. I pushed him in. I chased him downstream, waiting for him to go under and stay under, but the river spat him out. I told him… I told him he had to prove his life was destined for something great to keep it, that I wouldn’t let him suffer this town for no reason, and I made him jump two more times. But the river wouldn’t keep him. And come dawn, what was left of my vision had gone dark. You see, it doesn’t matter how many times he jumped into Cold River. He could’ve tied cinder blocks to both feet, and the river would still have found a way to save him. And I swear, it punished me for trying to keep him in it.”

  “I thought you said the tumors affected your sight.”

  “They were part of it, to be sure. But you aren’t from around here, are you, sir? You don’t know the way this town works, the way it holds on to people. For a few months after my diagnosis, I thought all of it was tumors. But now my tumors are gone and the light treatments I do have helped me regain minimal sight. But I still hear the river. I still feel nervous every time I get close to the county line.”

  Martin smiled, nearly disregarding her suspicions, but then he remembered the pull of the Tarson police station, the little job post on a message board, the way he couldn’t stop staring at it. But his obsession with this town had everything to do with Toni Hargrove… didn’t it?

  “So if you don’t think Michael drowned in the river, what do you think happened to him? Why would he carve I’m not sorry into a tree?”

  “I used to teach piano, and I thought I could make him better than I had been, find him a ticket out of this town if he could just play well enough. But he had no ear for music. Utterly talentless, and to hear it would just rile my blood. He would cry and snot and say he was sorry, and I would bark at him, ‘Don’t be sorry, be better. Sorry doesn’t do anything for me!’ ” She was yelling by the end of the recollection, her face distorted.

  Martin sat back. If this was a cancer-free Mrs. Walton, Martin couldn’t fathom spending time with her and her tumors.

  “The message was for me,” she concluded. “I believe he was telling me goodbye. He was leaving… to be better.”

  “So why let people believe he’s dead if you think he’s still alive?”

  “I owe him that much. After what I did, what he did, the trial, the way his father died… there was no life for him here.”

  “What do you think Michael would mean by ‘better’? What would his dream be?”

  “A doctor, maybe. Or a coroner.” A bitter smile pulled at her face. “He liked to understand how things worked. I really think that’s what he was doing with those animals. Maybe he found them dead.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” Martin pressed.

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore. But I do know he wanted to be great. I could feel it in him. He got that from me. He just didn’t get the talent to back it up.” She held up her hands and stretched her spindly fingers wide. “I was made for the piano. Michael had the deck stacked against him—a short reach, no ear, no feel for the keys. He just needed to find his instrument.

  “Before I lost my sight, I found a few blank pages of composition paper in his room. He was going to try to write a song. He’d titled it ‘Molly’s Song.’ Molly was his sister’s name. She lived a matter of minutes. The silence in the house, in the nursery, when there should have been coos and squeals and cries, it was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. I think he wanted to fill that silence for me.”

  Martin jotted down some notes, until a thought struck him between the eyes and he put his pen down.

  “Mrs. Walton, do you think there’s any chance your son would ever come back to Tarson?”

  “Not of his own free will,” she started. “But Tarson has a way of drawing people back, and that river… I swear that water runs in his veins. Detective, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” Martin answered.

  “Do you believe in Fate?”

  AMA Chapter 59 | 10:00 PM, December 5, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia

  AMA SAT ON THE FLOOR of her motel room. Beside her was a nearly empty suitcase. Before today, she hadn’t opened it in over a decade. It was hard to imagine that ten years had passed since the day she organized all the evidence and information she’d ever found on her father’s case and filed it inside this piece of luggage. Five hours ago, Lindsey had brought it to her motel room on her request, along with a takeout container of chicken soup Ama hadn’t asked for. Now, the soup sat untouched where Lindsey had left it, and most of the contents of the suitcase were arranged around Ama in a circle, organized in chronological order.

  The room was silent, a Do Not Disturb tag hung on the outside doorknob, the motel phone unplugged from the wall, and Ama’s cell phone switched off. Her mind roared. She jotted down thoughts as they came, typed fragments of information into a search engine, and wrote down anything that stuck out, desperate for a linchpin, a foundation stone: the beginning of this thirty-year-old crime, something neither attorney had ever been capable of providing at trial.

  She wanted to believe now like she had then that her father hadn’t known what was going on, that all he took in that deal gone bad was the fall. But she also remembered the two-story house they’d moved into, the four-poster canopy bed she’d slept in, the gleaming new car her father had driven home one Friday evening and the look on her mother’s face when he’d pulled into the driveway and said he was taking them out to eat. If he hadn’t known, hadn’t suspected, had he at least wondered
why he was being paid so much to route freight trucks?

  She wished her mother were alive to sit on this floor with her and sort these pieces of her father’s life. She had only been nine when he was arrested, eleven when he was convicted, fifteen when he died. As an adult looking back, she knew she was remembering only the very best and very worst moments—that there were days’ and months’ and years’ worth of moments that had faded from her memory. But from a young age she’d known her father was innocent, good, wrongly put away, and this truth had made her who she was, what she was, had steered every step of her path.

  Ama worked through the night, sifting pieces, turning over proverbial stones. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, what grain of evidence would be heavy enough to tip the scales one way or the other. The weight of uncertainty pushed down hardest of all, locked her to her spot on the floor. Her legs cramped beneath her, and her shoulder ached from propping herself up on her hand. Her eyes were so tired from reading in low light that she had to squint to keep the small letters from blurring. At last, she curled up like a cat and drifted into a fitful sleep within the circle of her father’s past.

  HAZEL Chapter 60 | December 31, 2005 | Tarson, Georgia

  THROUGH THE GRATE, I HEAR the cabinet door open, and Michael’s footsteps echo down into the hole. For once I don’t mind the distraction. For the last untold number of hours, I’ve only been able to hear the memory of Bill’s yawning, last breath. I swear it’s still echoing even now.

  The cable is pulled taut by his weight. His forehead is resting on my knees, and I don’t dare to kick out for fear of dislodging him. The vision of him knocking against the wall is not one I am willing to let become reality if I can help it.

  The lid slides open, pulling Bill’s hands and wrists above water. Michael lords above me, backlit from light spilling in from the main room. His expression becomes elated the moment he realizes it’s just my face staring back at him.

  “You see, Hazel. You see. Fate chose you.”

  “You put me in here with a cancer-stricken old man who had been in here for God knows how much longer than me,” I spit back at him. “It would only be Fate if the fight had been fair. There was nothing fair about that.”

  “Who said fair had anything to do with Fate?” Michael cocks his head to the side. “I find it’s actually quite the opposite.”

  “Then yeah, sure. Call it whatever you want.”

  Michael plucks the ladder from the wall. I tremble with weakness and the constant exposure to cold and water. My shorts sag on my hips, heavy with water and now two sizes too big. Yet my mind remains strong, steel forged in fire, and I conjure an image of reaching the top rung, grabbing his ankles, and yanking his legs from beneath him, watching him disappear in the black water before dragging the grate over the hole and locking it shut. But this plan can only exist in my mind, keeping me warm from within. There are two other things tending to that internal fire, two secrets Bill told me before he died: the code to the door behind the main ladder, and how to find the gun he’d hidden beneath the false floor of his locker in the basement of the factory. But there is one door I can’t open between me and that gun. One door I can’t open between me and the rest of the world.

  I grip the ladder. My arms shake harder. My legs wobble, feeling loose and disconnected at the knees. I drag myself up the rungs, colder with every step.

  “I need my shoes,” I say, bending to retrieve them from where they’re tied.

  “First, you need a bath,” he says as he slips a cord around my neck like a choke collar for a dog.

  We walk into the main bunker, me ahead of him, and take an immediate left through another pair of cabinet doors. We have to duck to fit under the counter, and the grade immediately turns downhill. My back and core are too sore and weak to carry my body at the angle, and I am forced to crawl. The floor of the tunnel is dry and clean, as if it’s been swept. Michael’s feet fall behind me. He doesn’t apply pressure on the leash, keeping the distance between us the same, and I resent the twinge of unbidden gratitude.

  The slope levels off, and I feel cold sand under my palms. I strike the crown of my head as the tunnel narrows and I hear Michael drop to all fours, his knees scuffle, and the collar jerks at odd intervals with the disunion in our movement. He pulls on the wire, and it bites so hard into my throat that I cry out and rock back, desperate to loosen it. I imagine the cord cutting into my skin, blood running down, and I start to thrash.

  “Stop.” Michael feels around my shoulders for the wire and loosens the pressure. “I will have to keep this drill in mind. That was a nice sound, high octave. You gave me chills.”

  “I’m not going to sing for you,” I rasp. “Never again. Not another note.”

  “You will. Everyone does.”

  Ahead, the utter blackness gives way to a crescent of moonlit dark and a burst of fresh air. I hear moving water and can smell the pine-sap-and-rotting-leaves scent of the forest. Michael holds me still with the leash and wriggles past me, leaving the tunnel first, where the top and bottom thirds of his body disappear from view. He stands still, waiting. I do not want him to pull the leash again.

  I hoist myself out with my hands and immediately have to duck so I don’t hit my head on a tangled overhang of roots from a fallen tree, which all but conceals the tunnel. When the water is high, it would be completely submerged. I will not allow him to drag me up that tunnel again. I draw in a breath, flooding my lungs to bursting, and scream.

  The collar snaps tight around my neck, and then I am flung backward so fast and hard that I land on my back before I even think about throwing my hands down to catch my weight. The collar draws tighter still. I can gasp in tiny breaths, but exhaling past the pressure is nearly impossible.

  “No,” he scolds. I struggle to my feet, desperate for slack, but the knot doesn’t slide back. It takes every ounce of willpower left in me to not lean away as he reaches for the knot and draws the loop toward him. “Not a sound,” he says.

  I plant my hands on my knees, heaving air, and wonder if even this is too loud.

  His fingertips press into my back between my shoulder blades and steer me to the water’s edge. We walk out together, each of us submerged to our armpits. The current tugs me downstream, and I have to lean against it to keep from drifting. He cups water and spills it into my hair. I shake so hard my breaths become choppy, and my teeth clatter together.

  Michael hovers over me and samples the air. “That’s better,” he says. “Once you’re dry, we’ll get to work.”

  “I won’t sing for you,” I whisper.

  “You will.”

  “I won’t.” I clamp my teeth together to keep them from chattering.

  Michael walks back to me until our faces are inches apart. “If I can’t make you sing, I will make you speak. You’ll see,” he says.

  AMA Chapter 61 | 7:30 AM, December 6, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia

  AMA WOKE TO POUNDING ON the door and Lindsey’s voice calling her name. The numbness of sleep slipped from her like a blanket sliding away, and instantly she was chilly and sore from half a night spent on hard ground. She pushed herself to standing, teetering on bare feet, then limped to the door and cracked it open. Morning light burned her tired eyes, and she shielded her face with her hand.

  “Lord have mercy, Ama. Are you okay?” Lindsey asked, taking stock of Ama. “Did you… are you hungover?”

  “I’m fine. Why are you here? I don’t need you. I didn’t call you.”

  “I called you. About twenty times.” Lindsey peered past Ama, probably trying to see if Ama had anyone else in the room with her.

  “Just me. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Lindsey asked, and her expression hardened.

  “I’m working on something. You talk too much, and I can’t think with all that blabbing,” she snapped.

  Lindsey frowned at her, and for a second Ama wondered if Lindsey was about to cry, wondered, too, at the guilt sti
rring under her ribs. Then Lindsey planted a hand on the door and shoved it completely open. Ama nearly stumbled in her effort to get out of the way. Light flooded the room and illuminated the ring of paper, the unopened dinner, the empty suitcase.

  “What is all this?” Lindsey asked as she strode inside.

  “It’s not your business.” She moved in front of Lindsey, but Lindsey walked around her.

  “This is all from your father’s trial.” Lindsey glanced back at her. Then her gaze shifted to the empty suitcase. “Is that what you had me bring up here last night?” She walked the circle of information, two chronological arcs meeting at top and bottom, the left half for innocence, the right side for guilt. “What are you looking for?” Lindsey asked softly.

  “The beginning.” The confession fell from Ama, heavy and barbed, and it took pieces of her with it as it left her body.

  “Why?”

  “What if he was guilty?” She can barely speak the words.

  “What if he was?” Lindsey echoed.

  “I’ve built my whole life around knowing he was innocent, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt they’d put an innocent man away. I have been determined to put the system on trial ever since. But what if they weren’t wrong? What if, all this time, I’ve been wrong, and the system worked?”

  “Having faith in your father doesn’t make you wrong, no matter what he did or didn’t do.”

  “Doesn’t it, though?” Ama turned away from the pressure of Lindsey’s attention and caught herself staring at a photograph she’d tucked into the netting of the suitcase. Her and her father, at a park for her eighth birthday.

  “You were a little girl with a father who adored you. You weren’t on trial then, and you’re not on trial now.”

  “It feels like I am,” Ama said. She leaned back against the wall and ran her fingers over the textured surface, anchoring herself to the present.