HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down

by T. J. Brearton

“Where is it? Where’s the volume?”

  “Look along the bottom, under the screen.” Liz’s voice sounded far away.

  Tom found the dial for the volume and turned it up. Gramone was in mid-sentence.

  “—which is my job. The hydraulic fracturing process creates what are basically like mini-earthquakes. A blast of water with a stew of chemicals shoots down into the earth, and blasts around in there to try and bring up the natural gas. I’m not saying we know that this is exactly the cause of the highwater. But it is possible that drilling in the Marcellus Shale, which doesn’t reach this far north, has still released some deep aquifers we didn’t know about, and that might be what’s creating a kind of watershed and feeding into the Adirondack systems. The water table has risen dramatically, that’s what we know. And there could be natural gas contamination.”

  They watched as Gramone turned and swept his arm over the scenery behind him, which included a body of water Tom recognized as Lake Colden, right near the Red Rock Medical Center.

  “And it keeps rising,” said Gramone. “It’s officially highwater.”

  The story cut back to the anchor as Tom’s cell phone rang. It was such a coincidence that for a moment, Tom thought that the news anchor, a pretty blonde, was the one with the ringing phone, absurd as that notion was. Then he looked down at his coat and fished the phone out of his pocket.

  “Tom Milliner,” he answered.

  “Tom,” the voice on the other end was out of breath, but Tom recognized it at once. It was Jim Cruickshand again.

  “Jim,” said Tom.

  “Sorry about before. I, uh, hadn’t slept.” His voice sounded pained.

  “It’s okay, Jim.” Tom walked across the small break-room to the door. He held up a finger to Liz, who nodded.

  “Jim, what’s wrong? You sound like you’re having trouble breathing.”

  “No, not having trouble . . . fine.” The connection was patchy at best. Tom wasn’t sure whose end the disruption was on.

  “—the girl?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have the girl?” Jim said the words slowly and deliberate.

  Tom hesitated. He looked at Elizabeth, who was glued to the TV. “What do you need, Jim?”

  “—coming to you,” was all Tom heard.

  “You’re coming here? Why?”

  “The birds.” Jim’s breathing was labored. His exhalations snuffled the phone; blasts of air between his words. His tone was mixed with wonder, fear, and humor. Tom thought he heard other voices, shouts, in the distance.

  “What birds? What’re you talking about?” But he looked at the girl again. Tom’s throat was dry.

  “—with me,” said Jim, sounding conciliatory. It wasn’t Jim’s usual half-haughty, half-redneck aggravation. It was something else.

  “What? Jim, why would you come here?”

  More breathing and rustling. Tom heard a car door shut. He heard the digitally-received, scratchy bing!-bing! of keys in an ignition.

  “You know why, Milliner. They’re in the trees. And tell Cruder I’m coming too.”

  “Okay.” He attempted levity, “But I won’t tell her you called her that.” Jim had enjoyed making fun of Maddy’s surname since they were kids.

  Tom heard the engine come to life on the other end. He thought to himself — if something was going on with Jim, if he’d snapped (which more than one person on the force had said might happen someday) then why call and announce that he was coming? Tom guessed it was a cry for help. That Jim, any sane part of Jim still in operation, was warning Tom. Preparing him. Jim was an asshole, always had been, but he had his good moments — Tom had witnessed them. Jim’s dad was a terrible gin drinker who had kept his own concoction in mason jars in the basement of the Cruickshand family home, dozens and dozens of them — fifty gallons worth it was found when he’d been first taken to the hospital. Jim’s dad was an active drunk, but Jim wasn’t. He’d spent most of his life avoiding the drink, Tom knew, but sometimes that could wear a man down, consistently withstanding temptation.

  “Jim, what are you doing?”

  “Something I should have done a long time ago.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? What should you have done a long time ago?”

  Tom heard the ticking of what could’ve been a turn signal blinking. Then the flick of a lighter. The signal was crystal clear for a few moments. Tom realized that the problem wasn’t his location, but Jim moving in and out of patchy spots of reception.

  “Anyway, I’m sorry I got so pissed off earlier. I don’t know what . . .”

  Either he trailed off or was clipped off by the connection.

  “Jim?”

  “—kids coming back with blown-off parts. It’s as bad as the theater of ’Nam, Tommy, you know that, I know that. Let’s just say it. Did you know three ’Nam vets have committed suicide for every soldier who died in combat?”

  Tom felt a chill. Not because of Jim’s words, but because he suddenly felt like he was back in high school. Like he was standing on the smoker’s path behind the school grounds. A shortcut through the woods down to Dorsey Street on the other side, where Tom and Jim had smoked their first Marlboro together, when Vietnam had been brewing.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “And these girls,” Jim was saying. “These young girls . . . you know, I don’t like what comes over me, Tommy.” His voice was different now, it was higher, emotional; a quality Tom had rarely heard in Jim’s voice, even at his father’s funeral. But the moment was soon gone, and that agitation, injustice, and anger returned, discernible even over the bad connection.

  Tom suddenly thought of the recent visitors, and wondered why he had yanked the girl out of the recovery room, away from those boys in their clothes harkening back to the stock market crash of 1929. Standing around the child’s bed, reciting nursery rhymes in Spanish accents.

  Tom felt the back of his neck getting warm, a sensation he got when he was being watched, but when he looked, the girl was still gazing at the TV. His hands clammy, he shifted the phone from one ear to the other and leaned into it, tucking over at the waist, whispering.

  “Listen to me, Jim. Turn around. Do not come here. You’re unstable right now, and you know it. Go back home, get some rest. I’ll call you in the morning and fill you in.”

  “—happen,” said Jim.

  Tom had a thought. “What happened to the Kingston kid? Where is he?”

  “—et him, too,” was all Tom heard. Then: “We got soft, Tommy.”

  “Listen to me,” said Tom, doing his best to be authoritative and to keep his voice down, all at the same time. “We didn’t get soft, Jimmy. The party just ended. Now we work in the system — you know that. It’s not about tearing it down. It’ll tear itself down if need be. We need to work within it. Like boundaries of a country, Jim.” He thought of Mark Massey.

  “. . . no boundaries . . .” was all Tom heard at the end.

  A beeping sound indicated that the connection had been lost.

  Tom snapped the phone shut and replaced it on his belt. He found this small task difficult, fumbling with his phone and cursing under his breath. He was shaken, and he knew it. It felt like he’d just been in a scuffle. His heart rate was up, his neck still felt hot. Tom stood still and forced himself to close his eyes. It was a technique Steph had taught him to help himself when he got wound up. “Nobody can do it but you, Tom,” she’d said, standing there in that yellow sweater, “and nobody will do it but you.” It had been one of his favorite days with Stephanie. A summer day that had faded into a cool evening. Brian had been away at his father’s and they’d had the place, the Acres, to themselves. It was one of the times he’d thought of asking her to marry him. But he hadn’t.

  He stood and he closed his eyes and felt his body pulse with his heartbeat. He willed it to slow down. He pictured the Acres, his modest little home there, all paid for, a hundred percent his. He thought that maybe he would get a dog again. He hadn’t had
a dog for a long time. He could already see it — a chocolate Lab — bounding toward him through a light spring snow as he walked to the end of the drive and to the mailbox. He’d name him Crook, just for fun.

  Tom opened his eyes. He let go of the thought. Enough of that. He took a deep breath. Whatever was going on, whatever strangeness was around him, it wouldn’t do anybody any good from him to fall off the planet.

  The young man, Samuel, had said to him, as they sat in Tom’s Blazer, because they’re coming.

  Had Samuel meant Jim? Someone like Jim? More people like Jim?

  Or, Tom wondered, were there still others?

  He wasn’t happy that his instinct told them that there were.

  No more boundaries, he thought.

  PART V

  Dreams

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Jared awoke to darkness and motion. His first thought was that he was wet, so he assumed that he was still in the rain, that he was on the deer run and had fallen asleep in the woods surrounding his house. He thought he could even smell the wet clod of earth beneath him, fragrant with freshly bled maple and rain-slick birch bark.

  In his mind’s eye he could see the area of the woods where he’d last been, a sparse region of beech trees with their small, orange leaves, and the shorter firs. He’d found a spot where he could see reasonably long distances through the trees, the better for spotting the coy dogs.

  Those mongrels. While many had come to invade his home and sanctuary, only one slinking beast had survived the counterattack he’d made. One that he had wounded, or had been wounded on some glass it had broken through, snapping and baring its teeth and gums.

  Jared didn’t know whether the animals had been rabid. He didn’t think coyotes got rabid, so maybe it had more to do with an ecosystem kind of thing. Maybe they were starving — their ribs had been visible through their pelts, like birdcages. Maybe it had something to do with the honeybees disappearing, or global warming, chem-trails in the sky, who knew? Maybe their homes had been displaced by deep, toxic mixtures seeping to the surface in the natural-gas drilling frenzy.

  He shifted where he lay and heard a strange noise.

  Voices.

  Other people in the woods? At this time of night? He tried to ignore them. He was so tired. He squeezed his eyelids together and hoped to fall back asleep.

  He saw the coins, huge ones, hovering in the air. In his vision, it was dawn, a kind of hungry dawn that promises a dangerous day, the orange shades thicker than the pink hues. Coins of varying sizes, some as big as dinner plates, some like glinting snowflakes, were fixed in the air at different heights, spinning. Some were copper, like huge pennies, but bearing markings that were unfamiliar. Some were silver, and still other coins were a color he had never seen before; a sort of light green that flashed iridescent within the otherwise gunmetal color of the spinning disc.

  They hovered and spun there above a stretch of road now, a long drive unspooling out of the mountains. The coins were there, up above, and in the road he saw something else shining. It was a small object, like a jewel or a locket. He sought to get closer to it, to determine what it was, but he was suddenly slapped hard in the face.

  “Sit up.”

  Jared’s hand went to his cheek, instantly hot where he’d taken the blow. He blinked several times and realized he was looking at the ceiling of a car. He sat up, not because he’d been instructed to, but to get a better look.

  He was in a police car. He put a hand to his cheek and opened his mouth a few times, testing his jaw.

  The driver was facing ahead, sitting up straight like a soldier, hands on the wheel at ten-and-two. Jared thought he recognized the back of that head, the buzz-stubble that was black and grey around the neck, disappearing up beneath the state-trooper hat. He couldn’t say why, but it was familiar.

  “Officer,” Jared began. “There’s a misunderstanding.”

  “Shut up.”

  Jared sat back in the seat and looked out the window. He recognized things, even in the dark — familiar landmarks, like the highway department garage with the Harrington township sign embossed on its front — that was easy enough. They were on Route 33. The road from his dream just now.

  That cop just hit you.

  He looked at the back of the trooper’s head. He then glanced to the rear-view mirror, but the brim of the trooper’s hat and the darkness of the car obscured the man’s face. What the hell had happened? This couldn’t be protocol. It seemed like the cop had clubbed him and dragged him off. Jared had no recollection of it — the last he’d known he’d been closing in on the coyote, having followed him out for probably a mile, and then kept on his trail as the mongrel had doubled back to the pond.

  No, that wasn’t right. They’d captured him out on his land and taken him in. A woman cop — Branch, her name was — had taken him to county jail for processing. But then that big Statie had shown up at the arraignment a few hours later, and he’d just grabbed Jared out of there.

  Jared wondered what it could be about. He wondered about the other coyotes, the three dead mongrels sitting in the cooler in the shed, along with the riding mower and skinning tools, including his homemade two-piece stretcher. He’d been planning to string them up and shear their hides that night, when he got back from hunting the last one, then tan the pelts on the stretcher. He had his hunting license, and while it was for deer and small game, psychotic coyotes attacking your home had to fall within the remit of the hunter. Even in the eyes of the law.

  Jared sank further into the seat.

  He wondered how his father was going to respond when he found out about this.

  Marshall Kingston wasn’t fond of giving out money to his son, and especially not for bail. Jared’s two sisters, oh, they got whatever they wanted, whatever they asked for. When Jared had dropped out of school, his father had made it very clear that he was going to have to make his own way.

  Fixing up the summer home, really refurbishing it had been Jared’s idea, and not the Kingston family’s. They weren’t trying to increase the resale value or rent it out to vacationers, as Jared had sometimes suggested. They didn’t even think much about the place and only visited for maybe two weeks out of the year, in August or November. Marshall would go bird-watching, and Jared’s sisters and mother would go into Lake Meer, a half an hour away, and go to the shops and restaurants. They had never voiced any concern over the condition of the house, what Marshall called a “mid-thirties Adirondack Classic.” Not even his mother, with her push-button-everything, had a negative word to say about the house. She seemed content to be there for the two weeks, as they all did, and “rough it” for a little while (insofar as driving in and out with the Land Cruiser for packages of lox and Yellowtail Chardonnay could be considered “rough”). Jared had begun work on the place, unprompted, and hadn’t even told them about it yet. August was still months away, the backend of a summer that went quick enough, sure, but still a good ways off. He had time to finish it. He would sink further into debt, but he would finish.

  It had been four years since he’d dropped out of Pratt, and he hadn’t paid back his student loans yet. Marshall had covered them while Jared was there, but after dropping out, the payments stopped and the bills started coming directly to Jared. Neither Jared nor his father had mentioned it. Jared had assumed it was just more of his father’s disapproval with his educational rupture in particular, and with Jared in general. Marshall Kingston had been pissed with Jared as far back as Jared could remember. From the days when he first showed Jared how to draw a rough floor plan (a “plane’s-eye view with the roof removed,” as he’d explained it to the then eight-year-old boy), and Jared had spent more time drawing the shrubs and trees around the imagined site, and woodland creatures there, much to his father’s disappointment. Marshall wanted his son to think about architectural structure, not landscaping and pretty pictures. “But it’s not a pretty picture,” Jared had defended himself. “See that deer there? He’s been killed by
a hunter.” But his father didn’t get it. He’d never hunted, not even small game, while Jared had long dreamt of it. Marshall could have all of his fancy buildings, banks, college campuses, and libraries; Jared didn’t care about any of these things. He’d been in love with the place on Macmaster Pond since they’d bought it that year, Jared’s ninth. And after six months in Vermont, and after a final blowout with his father, Jared had moved into the house by the pond. He hadn’t spoken to his father since.

  Instead, he had become preoccupied by the refurbishments to the house. He was unaware that the darkness surrounding his tunnel vision was like black water. He drank it; he drank it down in whatever bottle it came in.

  * * *

  That cop just hit you. He yanked you out of the courtroom and now he hit you.

  Maybe the trooper was deranged. Who knew? In these goddamned woods, who knew? Jared sat forward, just a little, and chose his words carefully.

  “Sir, please, can you just tell me where we’re going?”

  The cop’s eyes found him in the rear-view mirror. “Were they prostitutes, those girls?”

  Girls, thought Jared. His mind worked quickly. The trooper thought he was messed up in something having to do with girls, with prostitutes. Missing, maybe? Jared proceeded cautiously. He didn’t want to get hit again.

  They were in the middle of nowhere.

  “I’m not sure,” he replied.

  The trooper was silent. The back of his head remained in position, only wobbling on the wide neck some from the frost heaves and potholes in the winter-abused road.

  “There are no prostitutes in Red Rock. Where were they from?”

  Jared wondered what to do. He could either play ball, and go along with it, to keep the cop off him and prevent the situation from escalating; or he could continue to maintain his innocence.

  “I think there’s a mix-up, sir. I really do.”

  The cop went quiet. Headlights appeared around a bend in the road and the vehicle approached and passed them before the cop said, “Don’t fuck with me.”