Stony River Read online

  STONY RIVER

  ALSO BY TRICIA DOWER

  Silent Girl

  TRICIA DOWER

  STONY RIVER

  PENGUIN

  an imprint of Penguin Canada

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2012

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Tricia Dower, 2012

  Map created by Patricia Geernaert

  Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists, 94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

  Several scenes in Stony River first appeared in story form in Silent Girl (Inanna, 2008) and The Malahat Review (2010). Parts of Stony River were inspired by the crimes of Robert Zarinsky, as documented by Robin Gaby Fisher and Judith Lucas in Deadly Secrets (Newark Star-Ledger, 2008).

  Page 348 is an extension of this copyright page.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-318247-4

  Visit the Penguin Canada website at www.penguin.ca

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  FOR MY SISTER

  We’re home, Lillian.

  How brilliant to have come by this house at road’s end. Only the river’s liquid eyes on us.

  —JAMES HAGGERTY, MAY 12, 1944

  ONE

  JUNE 22, 1955. The river crooked its finger at her.

  Linda Wise crabwalked down the squishy bank, taking care not to slip. She didn’t dare show up at home with mud on her behind. Even the call of a tree frog or a fluttering swallowtail made her jump. Strides ahead, her new friend Tereza Dobra—a regular Marco Polo—carved a path through tall, hairy milkweed.

  The Stony River meandered for miles through a dozen New Jersey towns like Linda’s. Her geography teacher said the river passed through woodlands and wetlands, salt marshes and tidal flats, and once upon a time had harbored creatures with astonishing names like diamondback terrapin, alewife and cormorant. Now you were more likely to find rusty car fenders and stinky chemical foam.

  Daddy told of swimming in the river when he was a boy, of the whole town turning out for canoe races past bridges decorated with paper lanterns. Mother told of lying awake at night after Pearl Harbor, sick with worry that the Japanese would skulk up the river, signaling each other with jars of lightning bugs. She also told of two boys who’d drowned when Linda was a baby, the ice breaking as they slid across the river, their frozen bodies found with sad little arms outstretched. Linda was forbidden to go anywhere near the river.

  Honor thy father and thy mother. If caught, she’d be banished to her room without dinner. And there’d be one more black mark against her on Judgment Day. Nonetheless, on that hot, sticky afternoon, when Tereza said “Let’s go smoke punks at the river, it’ll be cooler there,” Linda had said “Sure.”

  It wasn’t fair. Tereza seemed to do whatever she wanted. Maybe because she was thirteen and Linda two months shy of twelve. Or maybe because, as Mother said, “There’s more than a little gypsy in that girl.” All Linda knew of gypsies was that they got to play tambourines and trek around exotic lands in painted wagons strung with pots and pans. Tereza’s family had rumbled into the neighborhood two weeks ago in a rusting blue truck chock-a-block with boxes, mattresses, a bicycle and furniture odds and sods. They’d lugged it all into the ground-floor apartment of a two-story building across the street and two doors down from Linda. The corner of the building held a store to which Mother sent Linda when they ran out of bread and milk. Mother didn’t like going there herself because it was “seedy.” Daddy said it had just been neglected. Linda tried not to feel superior to Tereza for living in a tidy bungalow with green siding and its own yard. Judge not, that ye be not judged.

  What Tereza called punks were cattail flowers that looked like fat cigars. To get to where they grew, the girls had scampered down a narrow road past Crazy Haggerty’s house, the biggest and creepiest in the neighborhood, its once white paint weathered to gray. It sat high above the water with no other houses around. The drapes were drawn tight, not a window open to catch a breeze. Linda wondered if Haggerty was in there watching. She’d only ever seen him on her way home from school; he’d be heading toward town, weaving back and forth, always wearing the same red shoes and satiny black suit with sequins. He’d scowl if you gawked, tell you to get lost. Mother had said to steer clear of him. Daddy said the poor man seemed “tortured.”

  Reaching the river’s edge without a tumble, Linda released a breath and lifted her gaze from her feet to brown water as sluggish as the air. Globs of bright green slime lazed on the surface. She couldn’t picture Daddy swimming in that.

  Tereza held her nose. “Smells like sweaty socks, don’t it?”

  When the wind was right, Linda would catch whiffs of the river on her way to school. The sometimes sweet, sometimes rotten smell of mystery lurked behind houses grander than hers with plush green backyards leading to wooden docks and rowboats. But this close to the water, she found the smell almost indecent, more like soiled underpants than sweaty socks.

  Tereza pulled a penknife from her pocket and cut a couple of punks, leaving short stems. She produced a small box of wooden matches, too. The punks weren’t dry enough to flame up and she wasted a couple of matches before they caught and smoldered. “Mmm,” she said, waving her punk under her nose, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”

  Linda hid herself behind a bush and held her punk down by her knees so the smoke wouldn’t give her away. She stuck the thin, hard stem in her mouth and puh-puh-puhed as she’d seen Daddy do to get his pipe going. The stem tasted like potato peel.

  Tereza snorted. “Ain’t nothing to inhale, genius. This your first punk?”

  So what if it was? “Of course not. It’s just more fun this way.”

  Tereza tried puh-puh-puhing, too, and then sucked on the stem so hard her eyes crossed. “No it ain’t.” She plopped on the ground without a care for the mud.

  Linda kept crouching, though her knees and thighs had st
arted to burn. “What should we do this summer?” she asked. Tereza was the only girl even close to her age on the “right” side of the highway Linda wasn’t allowed to cross alone. Tereza moving in was like finding an extra gift under the Christmas tree.

  “I don’t know. Hang out. Play baseball. I seen a couple of cute guys at the store.”

  Hoods. Rude boys who made Linda feel ashamed even when she hadn’t done anything.

  Tereza was first to spot the police car as it crept down the street. “Shit.” She snuffed out her punk and spidered up the riverbank.

  Linda was right behind her. Both girls wore pedal pushers, but Tereza looked better in hers. Her skin was the color of a root beer float and her body wasn’t lumpy. Linda squinted; she’d left her ugly glasses at home, but she could still make out two shapes in uniform emerging from the car. They scaled the hilly lawn to Crazy Haggerty’s and took the steps to the wraparound porch. One was stout enough to be the crotchety officer who gave talks at school on what to do if someone tried to force you into a car. All Linda could ever remember was: scratch the license plate number in the dirt with a stick. What if there was no dirt, no stick?

  “Somebody must’ve got bumped off.”

  “No one gets murdered in this boring town,” Linda said.

  THE DOG HAS ABANDONED his post at the foot of the lad’s bed.

  He bounds down the once fine staircase to the shadowy front entrance where Miranda stands awash in her own fear. His growl is a deep rumble she feels through her bare feet. Nicholas wouldn’t be growling if the footsteps belonged to James. And James wouldn’t be coming in the front. He’d be shuffling through the back where Miranda has looked for him off and on since last sunset, slipping up and down the stairs stealthy as a shadow, risking more than one furtive glance under the back-door window shade. She’s had to keep the lad amused on her own and cope with Nicholas doing his business all over the house.

  James never leaves her overnight. And they’ve not been apart before on Summer Sun Standing: the day of the year when the sun stands still before retracing his steps down the sky; when night holds her breath, beguiling you for a moment into believing mortal life can exist without death. James should be here, dancing with her on the summer king’s tomb.

  Nicholas’s growls become short sharp barks as one pair of feet and then another reach the porch: Miranda’s Veranda, as James named it when she was learning to rhyme. He tells her she trod on its boards when they crossed the threshold. She doesn’t remember. She was only three.

  Strangers knock from time to time. Most leave quickly after hearing the dog. Not these. Nicholas hurls himself against the ponderous oak door so violently it shudders. The impact throws him to the floor. Miranda winces, feeling his pain in her shoulder and hip.

  “Police!” A clean, hard voice, not breathy and musical like James’s. “Anyone home?”

  Nicholas’s nails click against the pegged wood floor as he scrambles up, readying himself for a second assault. If James were here, he’d be retrieving his shotgun from the closet and making sure she and the lad were hidden.

  The doorknob rattles. She ponders the lock and the long black key she’s never turned.

  Should they appear one day when I’m away, James said, welcome them a thousand times over but deny all knowledge. She closes her eyes and summons the memory, hoping to extract more guidance from his words, but the memory gets lost in the dog’s barking and the mewling of the lad upstairs who has woken to find Nicholas gone.

  Is there still time to hide?

  The door shudders again, this time from pounding on the outside. “Anyone in there?” Louder now. “Don’t make us break the door down and shoot the dog.”

  Miranda drops to the floor next to Nicholas and wraps her arms around his quivering body. He smells of decay. His heart thumps so hard she fears it will burst.

  “Breathe my air,” she whispers.

  He licks her face, his tongue hot and frantic. He’s already lapped up more than his measure of years, but she can’t bear the thought of anyone shooting him.

  “Open up!”

  One arm about the dog, Miranda drags him with her as she sidles on knees to the keyhole. She pinches and turns the key with thumb and forefinger until she hears the click. Stands and grips Nicholas by the ruff. She pulls open the door enough to detect two bodies, one near enough to touch. Muggy air infiltrates the entryway.

  “Good day,” she says, summoning the courage of Alice facing the Queen. But her voice comes out as thick as cold treacle and her legs go weak. Nicholas howls and a gun materializes in the closer man’s hand. Miranda presses her free hand against the wall to steady herself.

  “Silence,” she hisses. Nicholas obeys.

  “This Mr. James Haggerty’s home?” asks the man with the gun.

  “Aye.” In twelve years she has spoken only to James, the lad and Nicholas. She knows not how much or how little to say.1

  “This your home, too, Miss?”

  “Aye.”

  He inhales sharply and says to the other man, “Thought they said he lived alone.” He turns back to her. “We have news. Are you able to control the dog?”

  She points and says firmly, “Nicholas, go.”

  He backs up through the dining room into the kitchen and, with an extravagant sigh, slumps to the floor by the wood stove, in eyeshot of the door.

  Miranda’s arm shakes as she opens the door a smidgen wider and blinks into unfamiliar daylight. The one who spoke is tall and wiry, younger than James but clearly a man, a beautiful one, garbed in black trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt bearing a shiny metal emblem. Miranda would like to stroke the light brown hairs covering his arms. Although she means to admit only him, the second one, dressed the same, slides in behind. He’s older and potato-shaped, a gun belt hanging low under his belly.

  “Should we wait while you cover up?” that one asks. She shakes her head. On sweltering days she always wears her mother’s white cotton petticoat if she wears anything at all.

  The men remove their hats, revealing hair damp with perspiration. They exchange looks she cannot decipher. “It’s dark in here,” the tall one says. The house is illuminated only by sunlight splintered through gaps in the midnight-blue drapes drawn full across the windows. The older man flicks a switch on the wall up and down.

  “Power out?”

  “We use candles.” She doesn’t offer to squander any so early in the day. She anxiously follows the tall one’s gaze to the room on his right with the mahogany table where they eat and she does her sums, and then to the library, on the opposite side of the entryway, where she and James play the wind-up phonograph and he reads to her of “a time before time.” She sees nothing a spy could report. Our way of knowing isn’t wrong, James says, but others fear it and therein lies the danger for us.

  The tall one’s ears stick out like handles and she stares at them frankly. Curiosity instructs, James likes to say, and a sense of wonder is a gift. Is it wonder or dread making her draw a jagged breath? The house has shrunk with the men in it; they’ve swallowed all the air.

  The tall one dips his head, smiles and says, “Officer Nolan, Miss. Don’t be afraid. We won’t bite.” He shows her a thin black billfold with his photograph and name. “My partner here’s Officer Dunn. That a baby crying?”

  “Cian!”The lad’s old enough to climb from his cot, but he’s never tried. James says it’s a sign of Cian’s advanced trust in the universe to provide for his needs. She starts toward the staircase.

  “I’ll go with you,” Dunn says.

  Miranda turns back and searches his face, round and pale as the moon but with small, cold eyes. It looks as if the man’s spirit has been nearly pinched out of him, which is what James says about his own spirit on days he can’t bear to be human anymore.

  “You’ll vex him,” she says.

  “Where’re you from?” Dunn asks. “The way you talk is strange.”

  How to answer? She speaks like James. The officers
are the strange-sounding ones. Dawg. Tawk.

  “How ’bout you radio the station, Frank?” Nolan nods toward the door. “Let ’em know what’s up.” Officer Dunn leaves.

  Miranda climbs the stairs and hurries down the hallway to Cian, who’s rattling the bars of his cot and bleating.

  “Mandy!” he cries, his mouth pitifully distorted. He stands in his cot, hiccuping little sobs. A sodden nappy rings his ankles. Ammonia from it and others in a nearby bucket stings Miranda’s eyes. Cian’s fair hair is sweaty, his wee organ an angry red from rash. When James left yesterday, he said he’d return with the ingredients for a healing salve.

  “Mandy’s here, poor biscuit.”

  If she had the lad’s trusting nature she’d chance opening a window in hopes of a cooling breeze. If she didn’t fear exhausting the drinking water, she’d bathe Cian and launder his nappies. Fear is the mortal’s curse, James says. Look at me, so dreadfully afraid of losing you. She lifts the slight child, shaking the wet nappy from his feet. She carries him down the stairs.

  Nolan peers up from a notepad. His eyebrows lift. In surprise? Dismay? For a moment Miranda forgets to wonder why he’s here. Perhaps he isn’t. It’s easy to imagine herself, James and Cian as the only souls alive.

  She heads for the burgundy horsehair sofa in the library. As she sits, dust motes rise in a slow dance and drift back down. She drapes Cian across her lap and wriggles one arm free of the petticoat. He clamps his mouth on her breast and wraps a spindly arm about her waist. His head is warm and damp in the crook of her arm.

  Nolan remains in the entryway. To see him, Miranda would have to wrench her head around. “So the child is yours?” he asks. “You look too young.”

  In three years, when she’s eighteen, nobody can wrest her from James. She will stand beside him under a ceiling of stars while he invokes the mighty ones. When she’s eighteen, she’ll venture out on her own for Cian’s earthly needs. James won’t have to bring her lilacs each spring. She’ll seek them where they grow and drown her nose in their drunken scent. She’ll lie on soft grass, garbed in gossamer and sunlight. She will climb Merlin’s oak tree and Heidi’s mountain, row a boat down the enchanted river behind the house, tread on hot sand and sing as boldly as she wants without worrying someone will hear. She and Nicholas will lope over carpets of dandelions as they do in her dreams. Lope is a word she likes to say out loud for the way her tongue starts it off before disappearing behind her lips.