by Scott Carson
Gillian took a step closer. “Who’s this?”
“I got no idea,” Arthur said. “Let’s see if they drive down.”
He hit the remote again. The video moved, but the white SUV didn’t. It remained in place, idling at the top of the hill, headlights angled down, searching, hunting, the exhaust smoke fogging the air like a wolf’s breath on a winter night.
“Can you zoom in?” Gillian asked.
This took Arthur a minute. He played with the remote, testing different settings, and finally found the zoom. It was only slightly better than useless. The video was the uneven blend of light and dark taken by infrared cameras, and the clarity became worse with each click of the zoom. The front plate was illegible, but you could make out the big silver H across the grill.
Honda.
Gillian removed her cell phone, thinking she wanted to compare the vehicle Aaron had sent her with this one, but Steve Ellsworth was watching her and so she pulled up the camera application instead of her email and snapped a quick photo of the video monitor. For a reason she couldn’t explain, she didn’t want him to see the email from his son. Not just yet, at least.
“What’s it mean to you?” Steve asked.
She looked into his ashen face, saw his wary eyes hunting for the truth.
“Nothing.”
“Come on. You requested this, now you’re taking pictures, and it’s nothing to you?”
“It’s strange,” she said. “All of it was strange. Don’t you think?”
Steve didn’t answer. Arthur Brady cleared his throat.
“She’s thinking it was the same car she saw before.”
They both turned to him. He made an odd, patting-the-air gesture, as if to press down hackles that were rising.
“We were all right here! We all saw it! Hell, I can prove it if you want—I can go back—but we all know that car was the same one that Fleming drove down.” He swiveled his chair to face Gillian, his eyes narrowing, smug. “Am I wrong?”
“It looks like his car,” she admitted.
“It is,” Arthur Brady said. “It’s Mick Fleming’s Honda.”
“How are you sure?” Steve said.
“Damn thing was parked here all day.”
“It could be another Honda Pilot,” Steve said. “They made a few of them.”
“Could be. But it isn’t.”
“What was he like after I left?” Gillian asked.
“Pardon?”
“Steve and Aaron left first. Then it was me and Fleming. Then he went up to talk to you, and I went…”
She didn’t want to say where she’d gone. Didn’t want to tell them how she’d paced the shoreline in the rain, staring into the Dead Waters and wondering…
I need to take a walk by the lake, her grandmother had said.
“He was odd,” Arthur said, looking at his boots, his bald head bright under the lights.
“What do you mean, odd?” Gillian asked.
Arthur ran a hand over his face and sighed. “I’ve known that guy for years now. He makes quarterly inspections, right? He’s an anal-retentive son of a bitch, and he always has problems to report. He hates this dam and wants maintenance money for it. He’s just… he’s an engineer. You know the type. Detailed, analytical. And he has never once left this place without concerns. Hell, he showed up with concerns! But yesterday he just left in kind of a fog.” Arthur paused, nodded at the screen and said, “Or I thought he left, at least.”
“So what do we do with him?” Gillian asked.
“What do we do? Lady, it was you that dragged us all down here!”
“Sergeant,” Gillian said mildly. “It’s ‘Sergeant,’ not ‘lady,’ and, yes, I asked you to see the videos. I didn’t ask you to call the sheriff.”
Brady looked back at the floor and let out a soft exhalation.
“When I found Aaron yesterday—when I called for you, Steve—he was lucid. He wasn’t ranting and raving. He wasn’t high. He was grim as the crypt keeper. I sat with him until you came along and he never said anything crazy. He was shaken, but he wasn’t seeing dancing pink gorillas in the woods or anything, okay? He knew where he was, and it seemed like he knew exactly what he’d done.”
For a long moment it was silent. Gillian looked at Steve Ellsworth, who wet his lips and shifted awkwardly.
“You’re not trying to tell us that Fleming lied about the whole thing, are you? Because that’s hard to swallow, Arthur.”
“No shit, Sheriff.” Arthur lifted a hand in apology. “Sorry. I don’t mean to snap, and I don’t even know exactly what I do mean to tell you. It’s just…” He paused, then gave an embarrassed laugh. “I believed your son.”
Steve Ellsworth rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Look, what in the hell are we all saying here? The man was a victim of my son’s attack but lied about it?”
Neither Gillian nor Arthur answered.
“Okay,” Steve said at length. “I’ll ask Aaron what he was staring at. That’s what you want out of me, right? To know what he saw.” His face darkened, and then he added, “Or what he thinks he saw.”
“No,” Gillian said, and both men looked at her with surprise. She met Steve’s stare. “No, you shouldn’t ask him just yet. It should be me.”
“How do you figure, Sergeant?”
Was there some snark to the way he said her rank? Gillian thought so, but she pushed on despite it. Or maybe because of it.
“I figure the Chilewaukee Reservoir is my department’s jurisdiction and has been for most of a century, Sheriff.”
He took her tone well. Studied her for a few seconds and nodded.
“Ask him your questions, then. But”—he waved his hand at the bank of security monitors—“I’ve got bigger problems than this, and so does Aaron.”
“Fair enough,” Gillian said. “I just want to talk to him. And maybe you can verify that Fleming actually went back to Albany. If that was his car that came and went out here last night… well, that would be good to know.”
“Agreed,” Arthur said.
The wind rose and drilled a line of raindrops off the window in a staccato clatter. They all turned reflexively. On the other side of the glass, the Chilewaukee’s surface was pitted from the downpour, giving it the look of hammered metal.
“We really need a break from that,” Arthur said softly. “Cresting twenty feet above pool level now.”
“What’s the record?” Steve asked.
“You’re looking at it.”
“You’re over twenty?” Gillian asked. “By how much?”
Arthur studied a monitor. “Tenth of an inch, right now. Yesterday we got up around there and I increased outflow, but there’s only so much of that we can do with the flooding problems downstream. People would rather have the floodwaters in the lake than in their backyards.”
There was a pause while they listened to the pounding rain. Then Arthur repeated “We really need a break.”
As if in response, thunder knocked in the west, an unwelcome visitor arriving with bad news. The rain wasn’t stopping.
Not today.
DOWNSTREAM
27
The New York City Department of Environmental Protection headquarters in Queens looked as if it had been designed to shout, Boring municipal work; nothing to see here! at passersby.
Ed Cochran couldn’t have been happier with that. Let Midtown have the media companies, the Wall Street power brokers, and whatever was left of the old publishers. Let Midtown have the tourists, forever and ever, amen, let Midtown have the tourists.
He was happy in Queens.
The bland building was jammed up alongside—and below—the Horace Harding Expressway and the Long Island Expressway just beyond, and it stood adjacent to a preschool, of all things. Hundreds of thousands of people passed his office on the LIE every day and had no clue that the DEP was down here. That was absolutely perfect as far as Ed was concerned. His mother had been a state representative, and she’d always proclaimed to anyone
who would listen that the real work got done in boring buildings.
His mother would have been a fan of his office.
He was in a good mood when he arrived that morning. A good mood despite the weather, which was the sort of chilled rain that shouldn’t arrive until those weeks on the fringe of winter and snow, but in this climate, who the hell knew what you were going to get and when? Ed was in a good mood because last night he’d reviewed the progress report on Water Tunnel Number 3. The day that all of Water Tunnel 3 came online was the day he could finally begin shutting down stretches of Tunnels 1 and 2 and getting engineers down there to assess maintenance needs that existed mostly as unknowns. Once they’d put a submarine through a few miles of Water Tunnel 1, because it was too dangerous for a man. And then there’d been the spring of 2000, when they’d used the deep-sea divers to repair an original bronze valve. The leak in that sucker was scarcely bigger than the hole a .22-caliber bullet would’ve left, but water was geysering out at nearly a hundred miles an hour, and that, boys and girls, was bad for business. After prep in a decompression chamber, the divers had gone down in a diving bell lowered by a crane. It took ten days to repair that single leak in a bronze valve—plus the fifteen days of time in the decompression chamber. The New Yorker had covered that. For a little while, people cared. Then the news cycle moved on. People forgot.
There were other leaks, deeper leaks, leaks that even the submarine couldn’t tell him about, or leaks that hadn’t sprung but were close, with all that ancient metal working against torrents of water. Ask any engineer who’d win that battle, given enough time.
Ed had spent years worrying about running out of time, but today he thought they might avoid the calamities. As he entered his beautifully bland building, he was feeling as confident as he could.
Then he sat down behind his desk with a cup of coffee, opened his email, and found the message from Mick Fleming.
Re: Chilewaukee Dam Spillway—Urgent
Ed—
I left you a voicemail earlier. Knew you wouldn’t be in yet but I was up because I haven’t been able to sleep. I think the situation at the Chilewaukee could be dire. While the water is not yet threatening to crest the dam, that’s only because of excessive and demanding use of the spillway. The spillway was not constructed for this level of water volume over sustained periods, and it has not been properly maintained nor outfitted with aeration, as noted in my previous site inspections, which are attached for your convenience.
During yesterday’s site inspection, I observed bubbling along and below the face of the spillway that I fear may be indicative of cavitation. As you know, the only way we can be sure of this is to shut down the spillway. Instead, Mr. Brady is only increasing the water flow. My attempts to make the risk of this clear to him seemed unsuccessful. He is typically dismissive but yesterday was a new low. In his defense, further conversation was made difficult thanks to some hysteria surrounding the Sheriff of Torrance County, Steve Ellsworth, and his son, who I believe had some sort of drug-induced outburst near the dam. My attempts to communicate concern for those in the floodplain with Sheriff Ellsworth and with Sgt. Gillian Mathers, DEP police, were met with further dismissals. It appears no one immediately involved with the Chilewaukee is willing to grasp the stakes here or appreciate the risks.
It is my recommendation that we arrange a full site inspection with consulting engineers from Tabor, Bruce & Goy, as well as all concerned parties in Albany and NYC. The risk at the Chilewaukee is real, and with the existing forecasts calling for even more rainfall upstate, time is of the essence. I will be returning to the dam today in an attempt to speak further with Mr. Brady and his associates. It would be enormously appreciated if you can communicate to Mr. Brady the critical importance of following my recommendations regarding the spillway, and intake and outflow. Please relay to him that a failure to follow these recommendations will be regarded as breach of duty for which he may be held liable. If this seems like an overreaction, I assure you it is not. I’ve struggled with the people in Torrance County for long enough. Meanwhile, if you could please arrange for a full site inspection, I would urge that for tomorrow at 8 a.m. If anyone views that as inconvenient, please convey the absolute necessity.
I will be in touch shortly. If you need me, please text or leave a voicemail, because as you know reception in the area is abysmal.
Regards,
Mick
Why hadn’t he called Ed’s cell? Something this big, why in the hell would you leave a message and then send an email?
Because he’s Mick, that’s why.
There were a lot of things that Mick Fleming was not—socially skilled, for starters—but none of that mattered to Ed where dams were concerned. The cliché about having forgotten more than other people knew should have been written exclusively for Mick Fleming’s knowledge of sluice gates and spillways. If Mick was worried, there was trouble.
Ed called him. The phone rang and went to voicemail. He called again. Same result. The frigging Catskills might’ve been settled for four centuries, but they could still eat a cell signal.
“Mick, call me. Soon as possible. You know what I’m going to sound like assembling everyone on notice like this when I haven’t even spoken to my own engineer? Call me.”
He hung up. The morning’s good mood was long gone, and in its place was old dread. He got to his feet and turned to stare at the wall behind his desk, where a map of the New York City water supply hung.
His eyes drifted northwest, past a thousand quality sampling stations, past a holding reservoir that was home to the world’s largest ultraviolet water treatment facility, past a hundred miles of tunnels. His eyes locked on the upper-left-hand corner of the map, where it all started, 125 miles away from where he sat now.
“Son of a bitch,” he said aloud. Then he went back to his desk and got to work. As he made his first call, he was thinking, Just be glad it’s the Chilewaukee. Not Pepacton or Ashokan. Not Cannonsville. It’s the Chilewaukee: surplus only, a risk to the region, maybe, but not the city. It can’t reach out a long finger of disaster and touch New York.
The only good news at the Chilewaukee was that Ed had the right man for the job up there.
UPSTREAM
28
Aaron was pouring a drink when Gillian Mathers called.
It was the one thing he’d promised himself he would not do. He’d promised his father the same, of course, and while that shamed him, weren’t the most troubling lies the ones you told yourself?
Aaron hadn’t meant to lie. Not this time. And yet forty-five minutes after his father left the house, he was pouring two fingers of twenty-one-year-old Glenrothes into a tumbler. Like an adolescent, he’d chosen the booze that was least likely to be noticed missing. The bottle had been a thank-you gift from some well-meaning county resident, or maybe one looking to make a clumsy bribe. Either way, it had been a swing and a miss, because Steve didn’t like whiskey. What little drinking he did was limited to light beer. The whiskey was stored in a largely unused cabinet above the fridge.
Aaron was light with the pour, as if an ability to limit his lie in ounces preserved some dignity. He wanted something to dull the sharp edges of his memory, that was all. His father had not gone out for any quick chat. Aaron didn’t believe that for a moment. Gillian Mathers had summoned him. She was sharing Aaron’s email, sharing her concerns and sympathies, and breaking the tenuous trust that had been building between Aaron and his father.
Aaron wanted a little buffer in his bloodstream for that.
He didn’t get it, though. He’d lifted the whiskey to his lips but hadn’t had a sip yet, when his phone rang. A 212 area code, someone calling from the city. He was about to ignore it when he remembered his father’s explanation of why Gillian Mathers had an NYC in her email address. Technically, she’s with the city.
He answered it at the last second. “Hello?”
“This is Gillian Mathers.”
“You ready to have me co
mmitted yet?” he asked.
“Not just yet, but I’ll keep the idea in mind,” she said dryly, and he was relieved, because people didn’t joke around with anyone they thought was insane.
“I don’t blame you.” He pushed the untouched whiskey away. “I don’t care how crazy it sounds: last night—”
“It looks like he was out here, yes,” she said. “I’d like to talk about that. Can you drive with that foot, or do you need a ride?”
“I can drive. I did last night.”
“I saw that.” She paused. “Saw you run on it, too.”
“You were out there?” he said, shocked.
“No. Surveillance cameras were.”
Of course they were. Why hadn’t he thought of that?
“Did you see Fleming on them, too?”
“Possibly. Saw his car, at least. Listen, if you can drive, I’d rather have this chat in person.” She paused, then added, “And your dad’s on his way back. I haven’t shown him your email yet. You can disclose what you want to.”
He was already on his feet. He dumped the Glenrothes into the sink and reached for the truck keys.
“Tell me where to meet you, and I’ll be there.”
“You know the Galesburg overlook?”
“Yes.” The Galesburg overlook was a lonely perch looking upstream at the Dead Waters and the dam with a few picnic tables and a statue commemorating the town. It was a popular place with kids in the summer and photographers in the fall, but a strange choice for an interview in the rain. He didn’t care, though. She was going to listen. That was enough.
“Meet me there in, what, fifteen minutes?” she asked.
“More like twenty. That’s a long drive.”
“I know it. But I also thought from there you might be able to point out the place where you went into the water.” Another pause. “Where you saw the body.”
She really is listening, he realized with a relieved thrill.
“I’ll be there,” he said. And then, almost too late but catching her just before she hung up, “Thank you.”