The Chill

by Scott Carson

  He’s made the right choice, Steve thought with sudden certainty. He’s read the rehab paperwork, he’s thought about last night, and he has made the right choice.

  “Of course,” Steve said, hunching forward over his desk, his eyes closing involuntarily with gratitude. “I’ll come get you. I can be at the house in—”

  “I’m at the dam.”

  Steve opened his eyes. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not at the house, Dad. I’m down at the Chill. Right here at the dam, with Mr. Brady. You need to hurry.”

  The steadiness in his voice scared Steve now. There were only two things that could chase the smart-ass out of his boy: maturity or fear. Real fear.

  “What’s happened?” Steve asked. “Aaron? Are you okay?”

  “No,” Aaron said. “No, I am not.” Each word carefully and slowly spoken, as if they took an effort to find. “I am not okay, and I am sorry.”

  “I know you are,” Steve said, for an instant rekindling the hope that this was all about rehabbing old troubles away and not introducing a new one.

  Then his son said, “I killed a man, Dad. I didn’t mean to, but I did it, and I…” The steady voice finally broke. “I need you to come down here and take me in. Don’t send someone else, though. Please. I need it to be you.”

  Questions rose and faded in Steve’s mind like waves on an endless sea, individually powerful but irrelevant because the sum of them was so vast.

  When he finally spoke, all he said was “I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  Later, he would realize that he didn’t remember the drive at all. Couldn’t even recall which route he’d taken from the station to the reservoir. He knew only that he drove with the lights on but the siren off, drove through the rain and down to the waters where his son waited, drove with Aaron’s words echoing in his mind—I killed a man, Dad… Don’t send someone else… I need it to be you—and then those were replaced with his own words from the morning, his own snarling and snapping words. I’m evicting you… I want you to think about your mother today… Get out of my car, Aaron…

  Why hadn’t he just let the boy sleep it off? Why had he come at him so hard, challenging him, pushing him, pushing him, until…

  I killed a man, Dad.

  There were three cars in the parking lot beside the dam. He recognized his own truck and Arthur Brady’s old Toyota SUV, but he didn’t know the third, a white Honda Pilot. The rain was still sheeting down, but he saw that Aaron was out in it, sitting on a flat rock and staring into the tailwaters, blank-faced. He had a wet towel wrapped around his shoulders, and one of his shoes had been replaced by a gauze wrapping as thick as a boxing glove.

  What in the hell had happened down here?

  Arthur Brady was at the window before Steve had even cut the engine. The old dam supervisor’s face was ashen beneath the hood of his rain poncho.

  “I can’t find him,” Arthur said when Steve opened the door.

  “He’s sitting right down there.” Steve pointed at Aaron, who still hadn’t turned.

  “No, no. The man he hit with the bottle. Mick Fleming. I’ve been up and down the tailwaters, Sheriff, but I don’t see a sign of him. I knew I should’ve called for more help sooner, but he was insisting—”

  “Arthur.” Steve held up a hand. “Slow down. Mick Flemish doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Fleming. Mick Fleming. He’s the engineer they sent to look at the dam.”

  Steve tried to process this. His mind was working too slowly. Aaron called out, his voice soft against the clatter of the rain on the car.

  “I’ll tell him, Mr. Brady. I’ll explain it.”

  “I told him not to swim,” Arthur muttered, pacing in a circle beside the hood of Steve’s cruiser. “If he says anything else, he’s lying. I told him—”

  “Arthur?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Stay here and keep quiet. For just a minute.” Steve turned and walked to his son.

  Aaron was soaked, the mass of gauze on his right foot saturated with blood and water that left it a pale pink mess. His face and arms were lined with scratches, and his complexion matched the sky, a washed-out gray that offered no hope of change anytime soon.

  Steve sat beside him on the rock, the rain soaking through his duty trousers, and said, “What happened?”

  There had been many occasions over the years when Steve had looked at his son and wondered when he might see the face of a man looking back at him. He’d wondered how it had felt for his own father. When did your boy go from child to man, or did it never feel that way? Steve had wondered if the moment with Aaron might come on the other side of rescue swimmer school. It hadn’t. Lately, he’d thought it was unlikely to come at all.

  When Aaron looked him dead in the eyes and said, “I killed him. The evidence might not show it—the evidence might show a drowning—but I murdered him,” Steve finally saw the man in him.

  And, dear Lord, how he wanted to see the boy instead right then.

  11

  Steve didn’t speak while Aaron told it. He sat in the rain and listened to the story of the swim that had gone from bad to worse with the misstep on a broken bottle in the weeds, the throw that had been aimed high but landed low, the desperate but fruitless effort to recover the man in the water. He listened to the report of the second corpse, the one with chains and fishing lines hooked into downed trees, and although he knew this was important, he could scarcely register it. An old corpse, an old murder—these things he’d encountered before.

  His own son, a killer?

  No.

  He listened to it all without uttering a word, and while he tried to stay focused, he couldn’t. His mind was stuck on the knowledge that he’d put the whole thing into motion. This one would go on his son’s scorecard according to the rule of law, but it belonged on Steve’s.

  I wanted to show you that I could still do it, Aaron had said. I wanted to show you how wrong you were. But you weren’t wrong. I couldn’t make the swim anymore.

  Their dueling failures laid bare: Steve’s testosterone-laced taunt had sent his son down here, Aaron had been unable to rise to the challenge, and the resulting frustration had brought disaster. The key in the ignition belonged to Steve. He knew already that he would say something to this effect in the courtroom, and he knew already that the judge and the jury would not care. Oh, they’d sympathize with him, maybe, or blame him, maybe, but they would not be able to hold Steve’s guilt up against Aaron’s, not with the family of the dead man also sitting in the courtroom.

  The rain fell, and the water flowed by the rocks, and his son’s fate drifted away with similar inevitably.

  It was a cold world ruled by gravity. This much Steve had known for many years, and still he’d nursed a foolish faith that the world might do better by his child than it had by so many others. Now the fruits of both their sins lay somewhere down there in the depths.

  A drowning, Steve thought, watching the leaden water flow by, hammered by the rain. A drowning is all the coroner will see. The bump on the man’s head, well, that was surely from a rock, right, Doc? Of course it was. The man slipped and fell in, maybe knocked himself unconscious—who’s to say?—but what’s done is done, dead is dead, now go write your report.

  Steve could make that happen. Steve had a lot of capital in this county. The only person who could so much as spread a rumor about anything that had happened down here with Aaron was Arthur Brady, and Arthur could be handled. Hell, he hadn’t even seen anything. He’d just heard Aaron’s version. Once he learned that the boy was on drugs and hours removed from a jail cell, he’d begin to understand the truth. Steve could make sure that he did. He could make damn sure that the death certificate had one crucial word on it: accidental.

  And why not? It had been accidental, hadn’t it? Aaron hadn’t intended to hit the man with that bottle, and he surely hadn’t intended for him to fall into the water. How in the world could a sane man consider that anything but a
tragic accident?

  “Do you read me my rights now, or do you need to get somebody else to do it?” the man who had once been Steve’s boy asked.

  Steve turned and faced him. Aaron looked back with sorrow and resignation. Waiting. Steve put an unsteady hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He realized that he was crying, but out here in the rain, maybe nobody could tell.

  It was an accident, Aaron. We both know that, and I’ll make sure the rest of the world does, too. It was an…

  “Can’t be me,” Steve said, and the words left him like they’d been torn free with a gutting knife. He wasn’t sure that it was even him speaking. It was his dead father, maybe, and a grandfather who stood behind him. His wife was with them, and his mother. Also crowding into the mix were the faces of dozens of people he’d visited in the middle of the night to share news that shattered lives. All of them watching him now.

  “It can’t be me,” he repeated. “I’ve got a… conflict.” He cleared his throat, wondering who to call, thinking of the state police, and then finally his cop brain caught up with his father brain and he remembered where they were. The Chilewaukee was more than a hundred miles from New York City, but it was still the property of that city’s water supply. The water supply had its own police department, too, most deployed in the city, but some scattered in the rural precincts where the reservoirs held the sacred supply. The Chill was in the Ashokan Precinct, and Steve knew who to call: Gillian Mathers, a woman who was scarcely older than Aaron but who was a kind and competent police officer. She was from the city, but her family was from Torrance County. Steve thought she’d be compassionate, because once, long ago, he’d been compassionate with her.

  “It’s actually the DEP police jurisdiction,” Steve said. “That’s the right place to start.”

  His son accepted the news with a single nod.

  “I guess we should call them, then,” Aaron said. His voice thickened and he nodded once more and then said, “He’s down there in the Dead Waters, I know he is. I was sure I could get to him in time, but…” He took a shuddering breath, passed his palm over his face, and said, “I’m so sorry, Dad.”

  Steve had buried his parents and his wife. He had heard all manner of devastating news and endured more than his share of loss, but he had never felt as shattered, as completely drained of hope, as he did listening to those four words from his son.

  “Me too,” he said, and his voice broke and it took him a few tries before he managed to say, “I love you, Aaron.”

  His son leaned his face into Steve’s shoulder then, and Steve put a hand on his broad but trembling back and thought that they’d sit here together in the rain until someone came to get them.

  Then Aaron pulled back and said, “Call them.”

  Steve rose on weak legs and found his cell phone and dialed. Words left his mouth but he had scant awareness of them. Words came back, and he tried to pay attention to those, but again they proved elusive. He got the location out, though. He knew that because he heard them say it back twice, and he answered each time: “Yes, at the Chill… Yes, right down by the dam at the Chill.”

  Then the call was done, and a car was en route, and Steve sat on the rock with his son once more and they waited in silence and in the rain for the arrival of the arresting officer.

  12

  Gillian Mathers made her dispatcher repeat the news, as if he’d made a mistake the first time.

  “Steve Ellsworth’s son killed someone. Steve told me himself. They’re down there at the dam, waiting on someone to come arrest him. Steve doesn’t think it should be his people. He wants it to be us. You.”

  Of course he would. Steve Ellsworth was so by-the-book he seemed positively boring—right up until you needed courtroom-ready product. Then you appreciated him. No cases were going to be thrown out for police misconduct when Steve was involved.

  He wants it to be me, she thought, and she wondered if that was about police procedure or something deeper. She wondered if Steve Ellsworth even remembered the day he’d come to the house and found her there alone. If he remembered bringing her back to his office and waiting on her father to arrive from the city. If he remembered the letters she’d sent him afterward, asking for updates on the search for her missing grandmother.

  He’d responded to every letter.

  “You got it?” the dispatcher asked.

  “I got it. En route.”

  She headed east, toward the Chill.

  Aaron Ellsworth? Waiting on me to cuff him, with Steve looking on?

  She’d known it would be a bad-luck day. The rain seemed to promise that. Even in the early hours of the morning she’d felt trouble on the way, but she had not imagined this. Truth be told, she often felt troubled by the weather in the Catskills, where each storm seemed to carry a more primal intensity than anything she’d known in the city. A city where she was supposed to be working. The dream was NYPD or FBI antiterrorism, and the dream had been rerouted thanks to a series of record flood seasons in the Catskills and memories that Gillian couldn’t shake.

  Flooding in the upstate reservoirs was dangerous. Maybe more dangerous than people appreciated.

  Don’t think like that.

  How often did she chastise herself for such fleeting notions? The internal lectures didn’t take, though. Instead of working in her beloved New York City, she was up here in the rural mountains at her own request, policing the reservoirs. She told herself that it was because she had a chip on her shoulder when it came to the Catskills. Coming back was a middle finger to her family, to the dead. And some of the dead deserved that.

  The stay here was supposed to be brief, though. Anyone who held her middle finger in the air for too long began to feel the absurdity of it after a while. You were no longer making a point; you were making a fool of yourself.

  Gillian was beginning to think the joke was on her. She was a mere hundred miles away from the greatest city on earth and yet felt like she was on another planet.

  She’d gotten to detective sergeant in a hurry, though, and there were opportunities here: a full-time aviation unit, marine patrol, K-9 unit, and detective bureau, all in the tiny force that policed the city’s watershed. Still, most of Gillian’s cases involved illegal dumping or, in one high point of the past year, investigating the concealment of a series of septic tank failures. It was hard to imagine why they didn’t have any franchise movie star playing the role of a DEP detective sergeant. Where was Angelina Jolie when you needed her?

  Today, though, Gillian had a murder.

  We will need divers, she thought, but she wanted to have a few minutes of a lead on them. She wanted to have Aaron in custody before things got chaotic down there, before anybody showed up with a camera. She wanted to do that much for Steve.

  When she turned onto the lonely road that cut through the woods to the reservoir, she had the first of the dark memories that sometimes rose out here, a vision of the old schoolhouse and its lantern-lit room, the chalkboard in front of her, the empty inkwell near her hand. As usual, she was able to push the vision away, will it gone. It had been twenty years since she’d lived near this place, and memories of her time here were both distant and actively resisted. The combination left her feeling as if the memories she did have belonged to another person entirely. It was not her childhood. It couldn’t possibly have been.

  I need to take a walk by the lake, her grandmother had said the last time Gillian ever saw her.

  Soon after that, Gillian was gone from Torrance and off to the city, reunited with a father who’d been a nonexistent presence in her life until her grandmother went missing. Then he came for her, and he took her away. Neither of them had expected her to make a return.

  The dam came into sight. A long, bleak stone structure that seemed to match the color of the sky today. She pulled into the parking lot and saw no flashing lights or sign of police presence, let alone any indication that it was a murder scene.

  They’d seen her pull in and met her halfway, s
tanding in the gravel that was pooling with rainwater. Steve looked worse than his son, almost. He was a big man, several inches over six feet, with wide shoulders and thick hips. Aaron had the height but not the bulk. He was pale, his pallor contrasted by the dark tattoos on his arms and the bright bloodstain on his heavily bandaged foot.

  Steve stood next to Aaron with his arm protectively around his son’s shoulders, and Gillian looked at the water dripping off the brim of his hat and wondered how long they’d been out here in the rain.

  “I don’t know the details yet,” she said, “but should we be calling for a search-and-rescue—or is it absolutely too late for that?”

  “Too late,” Aaron said. His voice was low and empty, but he kept his eyes up, his square jaw held level, his shoulders back. “I had the chance of saving him, and I… failed. But I can show you where to find…” He cleared his throat, blinked, and faced her through the rain. “… where to find his body.” He blinked again. “Both bodies. They’ll be close together.”

  Gillian felt a spider-crawl sensation along her spine. She almost lowered her hand to her gun.

  “What do you mean, two bodies?”

  “An old one,” Steve said, lifting a hand as if to placate her. “He found an old one.”

  He found an old one. Like they were talking about lost golf clubs or something. Gillian looked from Steve to Aaron, struggling to catch up. “You found another corpse?”

  Aaron started to nod, then hesitated. “I only found one corpse. But there have to be two now, because the man I hit drowned in the same spot, or close to it. The person I thought was him was actually… someone else. Someone who’s been down there a long time, I think. Chains on their feet, and fishhooks… a hood over the head, it looked like.” He gave an involuntary shudder, as if trying to push the memory away, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer. “It confused me. It made me waste time. I was trying to save a skeleton because I thought it was… the person I’d hit.”

  Gillian hadn’t been prepared for this. Suddenly she had an active case and a cold case? She took a breath and tried to refocus. “You’re sure the man you hit went under?”