Ring of Years

by Grant Oliphant

  “It used to affect me like that,” Scopes says when Natalie pulls her head back inside and raises her window.

  “What’s that?”

  “Prison. That place we just left is pretty depressing.”

  “It’s not just the place.”

  “No, I imagine it’s not.”

  They drive for a while in silence, then Scopes speaks again. “You don’t buy all that stuff he said, do you, about him being your sister’s father? I mean, if he was, that’s the sort of thing he would have mentioned during his trial, don’t you think?”

  To Natalie, that’s not much of a puzzle. “Not necessarily. It would have complicated his case,” she explains. “The jury would have been that much harder on him if they knew he killed his own daughter. And you have to remember he was fighting an image as a promiscuous megalomaniac who made all his female followers sleep with him. Presenting Stephanie as his love child wouldn’t have helped.”

  “So you believe him?”

  Natalie can feel tears burning her cheeks. “It’s not like I want to. I’m sorry I wasted your time this way.”

  “Don’t be. You did what you thought you had to do. I don’t blame you for wanting to try.”

  When they reach the city half an hour later, Natalie asks Scopes to drop her at Emily’s place. She needs some time to think, away from everyone. And she hasn’t really gone through the house yet, to survey the damage. She figures she might as well get that over with now. It’s not like she has anything else to do.

  They pull up behind Natalie’s car, which she left here this morning after Maureen insisted on picking her up. Scopes whistles when she sees the house. On the neat street with its row of trim suburban homes, it looks like a spent fuse, black and broken. A large hole has been hacked into the roof. The windows, their glass shattered, gape out onto the street. Great plumes of angry black soot, the memories of flame, cover the siding.

  “Wow,” the agent says.

  “Yeah,” Natalie agrees, “wow.”

  “You’re not going in there, are you?”

  “Just to poke around a bit.”

  “I wouldn’t. It’s probably not safe.”

  Natalie opens her door and steps out. She’s not in the mood to explain herself anymore. “So what do you do now?” she asks.

  “We go on looking,” Scopes answers. “Just like we have been. Hope we catch a break.” She leans over and pulls a heavy black flashlight out of the glove box. “Here, you’ll need this.”

  “Thanks.” Natalie takes it and pushes the door shut. She can tell from Scopes’ expression that she doesn’t expect to catch much of anything, least of all a break. Less still a miracle.

  * * *

  Fire is a voracious creature, but it can be capricious as well. It does not necessarily consume in an orderly or predictable fashion. In the case of Emily’s place, it chose to consume vertically, along the front of the house, and was extinguished before taking its ravenous appetite toward the rear.

  Natalie enters through the back door. By the light streaming in through the shattered windows, the kitchen, covered in ash, looks like the surface of the moon: leeched of color, a landscape of dust and shades of gray. It reminds her of something else, too, something she can’t place at first but then remembers: the eerie black-and-white stillness of photos taken inside sunken ships. Inhospitable places. long since dead. Her breath catches in her throat like maybe she should be careful breathing.

  The part of her where habit dwells is tempted to call out Aunt Emily’s name. but she stops herself. She has no desire to summon the angry ghosts who dwell here.

  She sets out across the kitchen, lowering her weight onto each foot with every step, testing the floor, hoping she won’t plummet through into the basement. The fire marshal told her the house was unsafe, that she should hire someone trained in such things to retrieve any items that might be salvageable, and she thinks that perhaps she will at some point. Just not right now.

  She stops at the threshold to the living room, where the fire seems to have lapped up against the doorway and stopped. The room beyond is a blackened wasteland, the ashes of what once had been carpet and drapes, couch and television. A strange, jagged shadow fills the center of the floor, and it takes her a moment to realize it’s a hole, where the fire ate through to the basement. Much of the stairway to the second floor is missing. The walls are a shade of black that Natalie smells as much as sees, acrid and full of rage. Gone are the curlicues that Emily traced in the wallpaper last night; there is no wallpaper anymore, just soot and guilty memories.

  Struggling not to cry, Natalie turns away and heads across the kitchen to the basement steps. When she opens the door, a new odor assaults her nostrils: the damp, burned smell of water-soaked embers. The steps disappear into darkness. Natalie clicks on the flashlight that Scopes gave her and follows its beam downward.

  The water is so perfectly black and still, so thirsty for light, that Natalie doesn’t even notice it until she moves off the bottom step and her foot lands in two inches of liquid darkness. Startled, she jerks back, the beam of her flashlight darting back and forth as though looking for a culprit. But the water is everywhere and unavoidable, as opaque as any underground lake. Girding herself against the cold, she steps down again and feels the inky water seep through her shoes to her skin.

  The basement is mostly empty, a shrine to Emily’s ruthless disavowal of things past. Off to Natalie’s right is a pile of burnt, fallen timber—pieces of the floor from upstairs. Straight ahead, on the far wall, is a set of shelves lined with boxes, which Natalie sloshes her way toward. None is marked, but it doesn’t matter. She’s not looking for any particular item. What has pulled her here is the same instinct that drove her up to Normalville – a desire to find mementos of what she has lost. Surely, she thinks, her aunt couldn’t have thrown everything away.

  But the boxes turn out to be full of junk: old shoes, old papers, Christmas decorations long since forgotten. No photographs or letters to family, nothing to be remembered by. Frustrated, she turns to go back upstairs when her light lands on a footlocker shoved underneath the steps.

  She heads toward it more quickly than she should. Her foot catches on something in the water, debris from the ceiling, and with a startled cry she pitches forward, landing in a painful splash on her hands and knees. The room is plunged into impossible darkness. Her flashlight, though still in her hand, is submerged, so that its beam is just a hint of light under the surface. Up close, the water’s stench is overwhelming, a form of liquid smoke. It occurs to Natalie that this is the water that slayed the fire that killed her aunt and she thinks of it as a kind of death-eater, as something that swallowed the fire’s soul, in which case this is where that soul is trapped, in this reeking pool, seeping slowly into her skin. She jumps back to her feet and sends the flashlight’s beam swirling around her like some kind of protective talisman.

  “Shit” she says. “Shit.”

  Sliding her feet through the ashen muck, she works her way over to the footlocker. It is, true to its name, locked, but with one of those ridiculous padlocks you find on luggage—the kind that airline baggage handlers seem to annihilate on principle. She kneels in the water again and presses down hard with her car key. The lock springs apart with a tinny pop and plunks into the water.

  At that moment Natalie has the overwhelming, pins-and-needles sensation of being watched. She shines her light behind her again, into the faceless dark, but sees only the stairs and the still water. She tells herself to keep her imagination in check, that there’s nothing there, but she can’t escape the feeling that the darkness is somehow alive, somehow conscious of her presence and unhappy about lt.

  She opens the lid and peers inside. The locker, like the space in which it sits, turns out to be mostly empty. In fact, at first it seems to be entirely empty, filled only with the same two inches of swamp water that she herself is sitting in. But then she plunges her hand down inside and comes up with a photo album, its page
s soaked and heavy.

  Careful not to damage it, she opens it up. On the first page is a single damp photograph of her father, a rifle slung over his shoulder. He is in the woods, handsomely outfitted, and his foot is resting on the body of a large deer, its antlers splayed upward from the ground.

  On the next several pages appear photographs of her father with her mother, her father with Natalie, her father with friends, her father alone, but always her father. Natalie flips through the whole album. The photographs stop about midway through, but up until then every one includes her father.

  It is, she realizes, a gallery of obsession.

  “Oh, Em,” Natalie whispers. “Not even you could totally let go, could you?”

  Her legs begin to stiffen in the cold water and her teeth feel as though they might begin to chatter, but she is too captivated to move. She flips slowly through the photographs again, studying them in the light of her flashlight. In every one, her father is smiling, appearing youthful and triumphant. The photographs in which she appears evoke memories she had forgotten she had—of flying kites, of playing tag, of eating together at a picnic.

  One photograph in particular seems to catch her eye. In it, her father is teaching her to swim, or at least that’s how it appears. He is holding her at arm’s length, struggling to keep her body parallel with the water. She’s bawling, he’s laughing, the sun is sparkling on the ripples around them. In the background, a faded orange canoe sits on the rocky green shoreline.

  There was a time, she realizes, when her father did love her, and when that love was real. There was a time.

  But of course, neither of them remembers it now.

  She continues flipping through the pages but something keeps drawing her back to the swimming lesson. She wonders what it is about the photo that she finds so fascinating.

  The more she studies it the more she seems to remember of the moment it captured. Not crisply, the way many memories come to her; not as though it’s still with her, still happening in some parallel place that she can visit simply by turning her attention there. This is one of those early memories that slips quietly and forever into the miasma of childhood.

  She was only five, after all. Maybe six.

  Still, prompted by the photograph, she recalls fragments: the metallic chill of the water, her father’s strong grip, her terror that he might let go and that the water would swallow her up. The water seemed to stretch on forever, miles across, endless from side to side. She suspected it was just as deep, too. Sunlight danced on the tiny waves, but in the ruffles between were shadows, and beneath the shifting blue-green-black surface she imagined monsters with grotesque, ancient faces lurking watchfully in the slimy depths.

  At least she thinks she remembers all of that. Or maybe it’s just what she would expect the girl in the photograph to be feeling.

  It reminds her of another photograph, the one she saw hanging in Marida Latham’s house, of Selena and her fish. Slowly, almost as if on their own, her fingertips trace over the canoe and the shoreline – once, twice, a third time – then around the grainy contours of her father’s face.

  “Oh my God,” she whispers, suddenly understanding the allure of the faded image.

  Ralston told her that the answers she seeks reside in the past with her father. What if he wasn’t just screwing with her mind, as she has been assuming? What if he was telling her exactly what she wanted to know?

  What if he was telling her where to find Selena?

  * * *

  The trip upstairs and out to her car takes less than a minute, but by the time Natalie gets there her wet clothes are stiff from the cold. The temperature is plummeting with the lowering sun, and the damp chill clings to her, sucking the warmth from her body. While she waits for the car’s heater to kick in, she tries to argue herself out of any sense of excitement.

  It couldn’t be that simple, she tells herself, it just couldn’t be.

  Except that maybe it could be, if you understand the most basic rule of Guess. For the game to work, Natalie remembers, there had to be a ready and apprehensible answer. If she and her playmates did impersonations of people the others had never met there would have been no point and no solving it. No one would have played. They kept playing precisely because they knew the answer could be guessed; it was the very solubility of the puzzle that kept it alive.

  Ralston never played Guess but he would have understood the principle. The answer to the puzzle had to have meaning for the players. It had to have meaning for Natalie.

  She picks up her cell phone, calls information and asks for the number at her father’s law firm in Santa Monica. The operator connects her automatically, and seconds later a properly officious-sounding woman answers, “Mr. Krill’s office.”

  “Is he in, please?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Krill is preparing for court. May I take a message?”

  “This can’t wait!” Natalie says. “Tell him it’s his daughter.”

  “LeAnn?” the secretary asks tentatively.

  “No, not LeAnn.” Natalie has never met her stepsister. All she knows is that she’s a pre-med student somewhere, the shining apple of her father’s eye. “I’m his other daughter, Natalie, the one you’ve probably never heard of. Please, it’s urgent.”

  “Oh,” the woman answers, obviously taken aback and unsure. “Please hold.”

  A minute later Natalie’s father comes on the line, his voice a study in staged enthusiasm. “Natalie!” he exclaims. “What a pleasure! I’ve been meaning to call you, but it’s been a madhouse around here with this trial and all. In fact, I’ve only got a few minutes.”

  Her father is always busy with high-profile cases. “Who is it this time?” Natalie asks only because she knows he’ll tell her anyway.

  “Are you kidding? I thought the whole world was following this. “ His voice fills with pride. “My firm’s part of the team that’s representing Marti Tillotson. “

  Natalie stares out her car window at Emily’s broken house. She wonders if her aunt knew that and guesses she probably did. “Aunt Emily’s dead,” she says flatly. She has no interest in breaking the news to her father gently.

  “What?” he exclaims.

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh.” The shock in her father’s voice is genuine. “Oh my God. When, how?”

  “Last night in a fire. I thought you should know.”

  “A fire.” He seems at a loss for words. “How awful. At her place?”

  “Yes.”

  “It burned down?”

  “Not completely.”

  “All those cigarettes . . .”

  “She died from the smoke.”

  “That’s, I don’t know—I don’t know what to say. My God, Emily dead. It just seems so unbelievable. You weren’t there when it happened, were you?”

  “I was at the cemetery.”

  “Thank God. I mean, that you’re alive—thank God for that.” He pauses, then asks. “When’s the funeral?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Maureen volunteered to help with the arrangements, so Natalie is leaving the details up to her. “A few days, I guess. I’ll let you know when it’s firmed up.”

  “Do that, please. I doubt I’ll be able to come, though, not with this trial going on. Damn it! I really should be there. Maybe I can send Leila.”

  Natalie can’t help herself. “Won’t that be kind of awkward?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Given what went on between you and Aunt Emily.”

  Her father is quiet for what seems like a long time. “I don’t know what your aunt might have told you, Natalie.” he says guardedly, “but we left that behind us a long time ago.”

  Natalie thinks of the photo album, of her aunt’s lonely, ruined life. “Maybe you did.”

  But he refuses to be baited. ‘‘I’ll ask your stepmother if she wants to go and let you know,” he says firmly. “I have to get moving now—I’m due in court in a few minutes.”

&nbs
p; “There’s one other thing,” Natalie says quickly.

  “Yes?”

  “I found a photograph, down in the basement. It was a picture of you and me, from when I was little. We were swimming in a lake somewhere. Do you remember where we were?”

  “Christ. Natalie, I don’t know,” her father says. “How am I supposed to think about that? I’m still reeling from the news you just gave me. Can’t we revisit that some other time?”

  “It’s important.”

  “I’m sure it is but—”

  “I think you were teaching me to swim,” Natalie presses.

  “I don’t—oh wait, yeah. I did take you swimming in a lake once. You were maybe five. We were visiting my cousins in Wisconsin.”

  “Wisconsin? Where?”

  “Just outside of Madison. You’d been pestering me about wanting to swim in a lake for months, ever since I’d told you about how I swam across the one near my hunting lodge. I’d been meaning to take you up there but never found the time. So when we went to my cousins on vacation and I found out there was a lake nearby, I decided we should go. You didn’t like it much, from what I remember.”

  “No, I guess not,” Natalie says. What she wants to add but doesn’t is that, while that may be true, she almost certainly appreciated the fact that he took her.

  “I really do have to go.”

  “Did the lake have a name?”

  “Not that I’d remember. I suppose you could call my cousin George. He still lives out there. My secretary can get you the number. Call me about the funeral, okay? And let me know if you need help paying for it.”

  This is how their conversations always end, with her father offering her cash. Natalie wishes that, just once, he would spare her the trite proffering of money as love. “Sure,” she says. “I’ll call.”

  He puts her on hold and a moment later the officious secretary gets back on the line and gives her cousin George’s number. Natalie dials it immediately. Madison is about nine or ten hours away, which means the Guardians could have made it there, at least in theory.