by John Saul
“Your dad still pissed at you?” Jeff asked as they came to the cutoff that led up the floor of the canyon. There were still faint skid marks from the week before, when Jed’s own car had spun across the road and rolled into the ditch.
“Oh, yeah,” Jed replied. “Every single day he gives me another lecture on responsibility. It’s like he never made any mistakes at all when he was my age.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” Jeff suggested. “My mom says he was always a real straight arrow.”
Jed rolled his eyes. “That’s what they all say they were, isn’t it? But it’s a bunch of bullshit, if you ask me.”
“Yeah, but nobody asked you,” Randy said, switching on the radio and turning the volume up as high as it would go.
They turned up the canyon road, a cloud of dust rising behind the car as its wheels dug into the dirt. Jeff pressed down harder on the accelerator, shooting the plume even higher. The Plymouth shot across the desert toward the mouth of the canyon.
Five minutes later Jeff parked the car at a bend in the canyon where the stream had dug a deep hole next to the canyon’s south wall, leaving a gently sloping beach lined with cottonwoods on its northern bank. There was still a little light from the moon on the north wall of the canyon, but the stream was shrouded in deep shadows, and the night air had turned chilly. While Randy Sparks wedged the two six-packs of beer into some rocks a few yards upstream, so the water itself would keep it cold, Jed and Jeff stripped off their clothes and dove into the river.
The water was cold here, much colder than the surface water in the lake two miles farther up, for the water pouring through the turbines of the dam came from the bottom of the reservoir and wouldn’t warm up again until it reached the Colorado, a hundred miles away.
Jed’s body sliced through the water as he swam upstream, pacing himself against the current so that he could keep swimming as long as he wanted but never move from where he’d started. Finally he rolled over onto his back and let himself float, feetfirst, toward the point fifty yards downstream where the riverbed narrowed, coursing through a cluster of boulders worn perfectly smooth over the centuries. The water raced through the rapids—known to generations of Borrego kids as the Chute—turning and twisting for a hundred yards before coming into the next pool, and Jed sensed the familiar rush of excitement as he felt the current strengthen. The rapids could be dangerous—indeed, during the spring, when the spillways at the dam were wide open to release the floodwater from the melting snowpack in the mountains to the north, they were deadly. By September, though, even some of the more adventurous of Borrego’s junior high school kids were trying their courage against the Chute.
Tonight the current seemed a little stronger than usual, which meant the dam was probably operating at full capacity. If he got into trouble … For a moment he almost changed his mind, but the sound of Randy’s voice galvanized him.
“What’s the matter?” his friend shouted. “Is the half-breed chicken?”
Randy’s words struck him like stones. His first impulse was to swim away from the entrance to the Chute, to go ashore and shove the epithet back down the other boy’s throat. But a moment later the decision was out of his hands as the current grabbed him, hurtling him forward. He braced himself for the first turn. Here, you had to push off with your left foot at just the right moment, or risk becoming wedged between two huge rocks. That part wasn’t really dangerous, but it ruined the ride—once stopped, there was no way of getting back into the current, and you had to climb out, scramble over the rocks to the pool upstream, and start over.
He felt his foot touch the boulder, allowed his knee to bend, then shoved hard. His body twisted in the water, and he pointed his toes, using his feet almost like the bow of a tiny skiff. He knew every inch of the Chute, knew where to push off with his feet, where to use his hands instead.
He was getting close to his favorite spot now—an immense boulder with a deep cleft in it. Hollowed out by the river over millennia, it had become a perfect natural water slide. He felt the current strengthen even more, then was into the slide, his skin rubbing against the slippery rock, the water cascading over his body. He picked up speed, then shot over the final lip of the Chute and into the pool below.
And struck something unfamiliar, something that had never been there before.
He paused, treading water, then dived down to feel in the depths, to try to locate the strange object.
His hand closed on something, and then his feet found the bottom and he pushed upward.
When he came to the surface, he strained his eyes in the darkness to see what he held.
It was a mass of soggy flannel, and inside it was the broken body of Heather Fredericks.
Chapter 4
The slowly spinning lights on the roofs of the two police cars and the ambulance shot a kaleidoscopic pattern of reds and blues up the canyon walls, creating a strangely hypnotic effect on Jed. He was still sitting numbly on a rock a few yards from the spot where he’d found Heather Fredericks’s body nearly an hour before. Randy Sparks had stayed with him while Jeff raced back into town, and although no more than half an hour had passed before the squad cars and the ambulance had roared up the canyon, their sirens wailing mournfully in the night, to Jed it seemed as if hours had ticked by.
He had no memory at all of having pulled Heather ashore; the memory that stayed in his mind—and, he was sure, would stay with him the rest of his life—was the image of Heather’s face, her eyes open, staring at him lifelessly in the silvery moonlight.
He’d been only barely conscious of the arrival of the police, and as the medics had moved Heather’s broken body onto a stretcher, Jed had sat staring at the activity, his mind playing games with him, so that several times he was almost certain he saw Heather move. Listening, concentrating, he even imagined he heard a low groaning sound—the longed-for moan that would tell him she wasn’t dead after all.
It was the silence—the absence of the siren’s wail as the ambulance disappeared back into the night—that told Jed the girl he’d known all his life was truly dead, that what was happening was not simply a nightmare from which he would awaken to find himself back on the sofa in his living room, the television still droning in the background.
“You ready to talk about what happened?”
Jed looked up to see the two policemen, Billy Clark and Dan Rogers, standing on the riverbank, watching him. Clark switched his flashlight on, shining it directly into Jed’s eyes, and the boy’s arm went up defensively as he turned away from the blinding glare.
“We need to know what happened, boy,” Clark growled.
Jed shook his head, trying to clear it, but the image of Heather refused to go away. “N-Nothin’ happened,” he said, his voice barely audible. “I went through the Chute, and when I got to the bottom, there she was.”
Billy Clark’s lip curled. “Oh, sure. You and your punk buddies weren’t doin’ a thing, right? Just came up for a little swim, and there’s your girlfriend, drowned. You think anyone’s gonna believe that? Now, why don’t you tell us what really happened?”
Jed swallowed nervously and glanced around. A few yards away, sitting in the front seat of the Plymouth, Randy Sparks and Jeff Hankins were watching him worriedly. “But that’s what happened,” Jed said. “Didn’t you ask Jeff and Randy?”
“I’m asking you, boy,” Clark growled. “And I can tell you right now the coroner’s going to be going over that girl, looking to find out what happened to her. And if he finds out she had sex tonight, he’s also gonna find out who it was with. You understand me, breed? The best thing you can do for yourself is tell the truth, and tell it right now.”
Jed felt the familiar tight knot of anger begin to push the shock out of his mind. With narrowed eyes, and fists clenched against the desire to strike out against the insult, he said: “Come off it, Clark. If you’re gonna arrest me, go ahead and do it, and then call my dad. But if you want to know what happened, I’m trying to tell you.”
>
Clark seemed about to say something to Jed, but Dan Rogers interceded. “Come on, Billy. Everyone in town knows Jed goes with Gina Alvarez, and even if Heather had been his girlfriend, it doesn’t make any difference.” He turned to Jed, his voice friendly. “No one’s saying you did anything, Jed. We just want to know what happened.”
Slowly, almost hesitantly, Jed repeated what he’d said before, beginning with the moment Randy and Jeff had showed up at his house shortly after his father had gone to work. When he was finished, he looked up at Billy Clark, his eyes challenging the policeman. “It’s the truth,” he said. “I swear it is.”
Clark stared at him silently for a long moment, but finally, almost reluctantly, nodded his head. “All right. It jibes with what your buddies said. And the medics seemed to think she’d been in the water for at least an hour.”
Jed closed his eyes and felt a little of the tension drain out of his body. “Wh-What happened to her?” he asked.
It was Dan Rogers who answered him. “Don’t know. It looks like she might have fallen off the top, or gotten pushed. We’ll have a lot better idea after we find out what she was up to tonight.” He turned to Clark. “Billy, why don’t you call a couple of the day guys and go see Heather’s folks. I’ll take the boys back to the station and get statements from all of them.”
Clark seemed about to argue, then apparently changed his mind. Wordlessly, he went back to one of the squad cars, and a moment later disappeared into the night.
“You want to ride with me?” Dan Rogers asked as he walked back toward Jeff Hankins’s Plymouth with Jed at his side. “I figure you must be feeling a little shaky.”
Jed nodded, then went to wait in the police cruiser while the cop spoke to Jeff and Randy. Rogers slid behind the wheel and started the engine.
Jed, preoccupied with what had just happened, didn’t look back as they drove out of the canyon, Jeff following close behind.
He knew he was in trouble again, but not for something he’d actually done.
He was in trouble simply because of what he was.
Reenie Fredericks stared at the three policemen blankly. “That’s not possible,” she said. “Heather’s in bed, sleeping.” But the look on Billy Clark’s face made her turn and race from the doorway to Heather’s room, where she gazed in stunned silence at the empty bed.
Heather’s clothes were still scattered on the floor in the haphazard manner that sometimes threatened to drive Reenie crazy. Now she simply stared at them in dismay. If Heather had decided to sneak out, surely she would have dressed …
She started back toward the front door, then felt a draft. Turning, half expecting to see Heather coming in the back door, she saw instead the kitchen door was standing open, a gaping hole leading into the blackness of the night and the empty desert beyond the fence. As she gazed vacantly at the door, the truth of what Billy Clark had just told her struck home. A wail of anguish rose from her throat.
“But she wouldn’t have just gone out like that,” Reenie said twenty minutes later when Billy Clark had explained to her that when she was found, Heather was wearing nothing but a pair of pajamas. “If she’d gone on her own, she would have dressed!”
And yet, searching the house, the policemen found no signs of a struggle, and even her mother admitted that she couldn’t imagine sleeping undisturbed in the next room if Heather had been fighting off an abductor.
It was nearly one-thirty in the morning when one of the policemen brought a dog in and the tracking began. The scent was fresh, and the dog had no trouble picking it up. Sniffing eagerly, it moved steadily through the desert. After fifteen minutes the flashlights the men carried began to pick up spots of blood, still clear on the hard-packed earth of the desert floor.
At last they came to the top of the canyon, where the trail came to an abrupt end at the very edge of the precipice.
“Jesus,” Billy Clark said softly, staring down into the dark chasm. “What the hell happened up here?”
He and his men studied the terrain carefully, searching for any sign of struggle, any sign at all that Heather had not been alone. But there was none.
Only a set of bloody footprints, a dark outline on the windswept sandstone of the precipice. Heather seemed to have been walking normally; there was no sign that she was dragging her feet as if someone were forcing her toward the edge, nor was there any hint that she might have been running and seen where she was going too late to stop herself.
At the very edge of the cliff there were two prints, side by side, as if she’d stood there, staring into the abyss.
Stood there for a few seconds, then jumped.
“Jesus,” Clark said once again, shaking his head slowly. “What the hell would make a kid do something like that? Doesn’t make sense.”
One of the other men shrugged. “Who knows?” he asked. “Maybe she was drugged up. Kids these days do all kinds of crazy things.”
They stood silently at the edge for a few moments, looking down, then finally turned away and started back toward the town. They moved slowly, unconsciously putting off the moment that they would have to tell Reenie Fredericks that her daughter, an ordinary kid with no seemingly extraordinary problems, had committed suicide.
Frank Arnold said nothing as he drove his son home from the police station for the second time in the space of a week. He sat stolidly behind the wheel of the truck, his jaw set, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on the road ahead. But the tension in the heavy frame of his body was an almost palpable force within the confines of the truck’s cab. Jed, his face drawn, sat silently in the passenger seat next to his father, staring out into the night, oblivious to his father’s silent anger, still seeing Heather’s dead eyes staring at him. When Frank finally turned into the driveway of their small house on Sixth East and switched the engine off, Jed made no move to get out.
“We’re here,” Frank said, opening the door on his side and jumping out of the cab. For a moment he wasn’t sure his son had even heard him, but just as he was about to speak again, the other door of the truck opened and Jed slid out.
They walked down the driveway, entering the house through the back door, and Frank flipped on the kitchen light. Going to the refrigerator, he pulled out a beer. He thought a moment, then pulled out a second one and held it up toward Jed. “Want one? Or would you rather have a shot of brandy?”
Jed looked at his father uncertainly, and Frank managed a wry grin. “I’m still pretty damned mad at you, but I’m not so mad I don’t have any idea what you’re feeling right now. If you’re old enough to pull a corpse out of a river, I guess you’re old enough to have a shot of brandy to take the edge off it.”
Jed hesitated, but shook his head. “I think maybe I’ll just have a Coke,” he said.
Frank waited until Jed had opened the soft drink and sat down at the table across from him before he spoke. After his son had taken his first long drink of the soda, Frank pulled at his beer, then set the bottle on the table. “You okay?” he asked.
Jed started to nod, but then shook his head. “I don’t know. I just keep seeing her, looking at me. I—” His voice trembled, and he fell silent as his eyes welled with tears.
“What the hell were you doing out there, Jed?” Frank said quietly, staring at the bottle in front of him. “Didn’t you think I meant it when I grounded you?”
“I didn’t go out there to get in any trouble—” Jed began, but his father cut him off.
“Bullshit! Kids like Randy Sparks and Jeff Hankins don’t go out and get drunk in the middle of the night without intending to get into trouble.”
“They weren’t drunk,” Jed protested. “They’d had maybe one beer apiece when they came over here, and—”
“And nothin’!” Frank exploded, his fist slamming down on the table with enough force to knock the beer bottle over. He snatched it up just as the beer itself began to foam onto the table, but ignored the puddle as he glared at his son. “What the hell’s going on with you, Jed? You’re
twice as smart as those jerks, but you keep on letting them get you into trouble. Why the hell don’t you start listening to yourself for a change, instead of those two assholes?”
“They’re not assholes,” Jed flared, his own anger rising in the face of his father’s wrath. “There’s nothing wrong with them, and they don’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. I didn’t have to go with them tonight! I could have sat home by myself, just like I did last night, and the night before, and the night before that. But why the hell should I? You’re either sleeping or at work or at some goddammed meeting or something. What am I supposed to do, sit around talking to the walls all the time? And when I do see you, all you ever do is yell at me!”
Frank’s eyes narrowed angrily and a vein in his forehead stood out. But then, taking control of his anger, he bit back the furious words on his lips and found himself slowly counting to ten, just as Alice had always insisted he do when his temper—almost as quick as his son’s—threatened to get the best of him.
When he reached ten, he started over again.
By the third time through, his rage was back under control, and he finally began to think about what Jed had just said. For the last four years, ever since Alice had died, he’d tended more and more to let Jed raise himself. Part of the problem was the simple fact of his shift work, that his schedule matched Jed’s only once every three weeks. During one of the other weeks he was just going to work as Jed was getting home, and the third week, he was just getting up, still groggy from the restless sleep that was all he was ever able to get when he came home from the graveyard shift. And Jed had a point about the meetings too. But what could he do? He was the president of the union local, and no matter how hard he tried to organize his schedule so he could spend as much time as possible with his son, there always seemed to be something in the way.
Recently, for the last six months, there had been a series of rumors that Max Moreland was finally going to have to sell the refinery. Max insisted there was nothing to the talk, but it had long been Frank’s experience that when gossip was as plentiful as it was now, there was something to it. And so, ever since last winter, he’d involved himself in union business more than ever before, working with a group of lawyers and accountants in Santa Fe to see if an employee buyout of Borrego Oil might be possible.