by Scott Carson
“It was you or septic tanks,” she said, and then she disconnected.
29
Gillian had been to the overlook only once since her return to Torrance County.
That had been three days after taking the job. She’d driven out to the wooded hills southeast of the lake with the intention of finding the old house. She knew it was still there.
Once, she’d timidly asked her father what had happened to the house. He said it was foreclosed, a word she didn’t know but found in the dictionary.
He didn’t like to talk about the house. He certainly didn’t like to talk about the school. Once, he’d asked to see what she was drawing, and she’d felt safe showing him that. It was a sketch she’d done from memory of a photograph from the school: three men standing before three tunnels, each man dressed in high boots and suit coats. The tunnels seemed to narrow and darken behind them. It was one of her favorites, but she saw that it scared her dad. She didn’t want to lose the sketchbook, so she said she wanted to draw a giraffe, which was his favorite animal. Would he like to see that?
He’d seemed relieved, and she gave him the giraffe picture, which was the first and only page she ever ripped out of the sketchbook. She hid the sketchbook then. Tucked it between the mattress and box spring and later climbed on a kitchen chair and slid it on top of the cupboard above the refrigerator.
When she was older, she tracked the property records on the house: foreclosure, sheriff’s sale, another foreclosure, another sheriff’s sale, the price point declining each time. She used Google Earth to look at the house, watching as the years went by and the forest moved in around the grounds, overwhelmed the vegetable garden, claimed the flower beds. She expected the house to collapse beneath the years of neglect in all those brutal upstate New York winters. Somehow it remained upright, though, protruding just above the tree line like a raised middle finger.
On the day she’d gone to find it, she was more than fifteen years removed from her last visit to the place, she was a cop, she was confident… and she backed out. Turned off and followed the winding lane up to the overlook, where the Galesburg memorial statue stood above the reservoir, a plain monument with a tidy, simplistic inscription. Today she followed the same route and read the inscription once more:
On September 21, 1940, what remained of the village of Galesburg was evacuated prior to the flooding of the valley for the construction of the Chilewaukee Reservoir. Galesburg was at that time one of the oldest settlements in the area, with documented history dating back to 1682, when Hiram Wallace and Isaac Mathers established farms in the area.
Families and memories of Galesburg live on in Torrance County to this day.
She wondered who had crafted that epitaph. So clean, so neat, claiming to tell you something but offering nothing that mattered. Sanitized.
Beyond the statue was a shelter house, so she could get out of the rain if not the wind. From the shelter, you could look to your right, northwest, and see the Dead Waters and the dam; you could look straight down and see a beautiful stretch of Cresap Creek carving its way through the valley below; or you could look left, southeast, and see the Mathers homestead. The house was scarcely visible through the trees, and on the day Gillian had chickened out and come here instead of the house, she had to strain to find it.
That had been August, and the trees were in full leaf. Today most of them were bare, picked clean by the unseasonable winds and rains, and she found the house quickly. The high roofline with its steep pitch to shed snow seemed to rise a bit higher now, as if it had grown over the years. The siding had been white when she lived there but now was faded to a filthy gray that matched the sky. The front porch railing was gone and it looked as if the porch itself might have collapsed.
She was considering going back to her car for binoculars when Aaron Ellsworth pulled in.
He walked toward her with a slight limp, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d expected. He was wearing boots and jeans and a black jacket open over a flannel shirt, and seeing him like this instead of down on the ground, raving about corpses and killings, she was reminded of just what a good-looking kid he was, tall and broad-shouldered but narrow waisted, the swimmer’s V-tapered torso evident even under the jacket.
He wasn’t really a kid, though. Was maybe five years younger than her.
“So… why here?” he said, hands in his pockets, head ducked against the wind and rain. He had long, tousled dark hair, in contrast with all of the photos of him in Steve’s office. She wondered if he’d grown it out to ward off questions about his short-lived military service, trying hard not to look the part.
“I’m curious if it’s all a joke to you,” she said. She’d turned and leaned against the railing, which allowed her to face him and keep her old house at her back, the way she preferred.
His expression seemed to grow sad, as if he should have known better.
“You could’ve asked me that on the phone,” he said. “And I wish you would have, because I don’t have the energy to talk to anyone who thinks I’m full of shit. I dealt with enough of that yesterday. If I wanted more, I would—”
“Easy.” She held up a hand. “I said I was curious if it was all a joke to you. Not that I thought it was.”
“Why here?” he asked again, and she watched him closely.
“There are old stories about my family,” she said. “I don’t know how many you’ve heard.”
“I don’t remember hearing much of anything about your family. That’s honest. Sorry if I missed out. I was too busy trying not to be known as the sheriff’s son. What are you famous for?”
“Me? Nothing. My family was… eccentric, though. I figured your dad might have told you some of the old stories.”
“He hasn’t.” Aaron took his hands out of his pockets and crossed the deck to stand beside her, only he was facing toward the water and she was still facing away from it.
“Have you heard about the schoolhouse?” she asked.
“No.”
“You know what the Dead Waters are?”
“Yes. Those I know. You can still see some of the old buildings. I never liked it up there. When the light is right and the water is clear, you can see down and…” He trailed off and looked at her with fresh interest. “Hang on: they set it on fire, right? The school. I did hear that. That’s one of the stories about the Dead Waters, at least. There were so many, but I never really paid attention. Every town has their dumb old stories, Halloween shit. That was never for me.”
Their dumb old stories, Halloween shit. That dismissiveness angered her. It shouldn’t have, because he was right, of course. Old stories and Halloween shit, childish campfire tales. But if you’d done any years in the Galesburg School, you couldn’t be so blasé when referencing the old fire. In the Galesburg School, the fire was treated like Pearl Harbor.
Or the book of Genesis.
“There was a group of landowners who wouldn’t sell,” she said, trying to keep her tone neutral. The wind had shifted and was blowing the rain in underneath the overlook’s roof. It was coming from Aaron’s direction, and she was grateful for that, because it gave her an excuse not to face him. “Old families. Some went back to the 1600s. Every little town they flooded out had them: West Shokan, Cannonsville, wherever. But none of those towns had families that hung on quite so… resolutely. These families in Galesburg just would not leave. The city claimed eminent domain, and still they stayed. They’d been told the police were going to arrest them. I guess that would have been your great-grandfather, right?”
He nodded without much reaction. This was all new to him, and that struck her as incredible. How had his family never spoken of it?
Because it happened eighty years ago, Gillian, in a town that no longer exists.
“Anyhow, it had gotten dangerous for the workers up here. Attacks on the camps, sabotaged equipment, that sort of thing. There was a tunnel collapse that killed a bunch of people, most of them from the city, men who’d come up to c
heck on the progress. There were rumors that the tunnel collapse was anything but an accident.”
He was watching with interest but no personal stake.
She wanted to grab him and shake him and shout, Why didn’t your family talk about this? They were part of it, they were here to protect the townspeople, and they chose to protect the outsiders. How have you not heard that? But of course he wouldn’t have heard it. The Ellsworth family had survived it and drowned it, just like the town. Buried it down deep where it couldn’t scare them or shame them.
But in the Galesburg School, such an approach didn’t fly. In Galesburg, local history was paramount. The only risk was in forgetting it.
“You okay?” Aaron asked. Only then did Gillian realize she’d stopped talking and was staring past him, up the flooded valley and toward the dam.
“Yeah. Sorry.” She swallowed, refocused. Plunged ahead. “This group of Galesburg residents called for another meeting with the state. The people who were in charge of settling the eminent domain deals came up here thinking this was finally the end. They’d been told the residents were prepared to negotiate. So they drove up with their surveys and their maps and their checkbooks, and the locals asked to hold the meeting in the school. There was a real school, a nice brick building, newer. But the locals wanted to meet in the old school. This dingy one-room place built back in who-knows-when.”
Gillian knew when—it had been built in 1887 by Abram Wallace and Eli Mathers; the year and the names were answers to questions that had been on some of her first school exams—but she wasn’t inclined to overshare.
“They got them all in there, five people from the state who thought they were going to close a deal, and ten people from Galesburg who knew better. And while they pored over the maps and deeds and dollar figures, someone dropped iron bars across the doors and windows and then lit the schoolhouse on fire.”
She wiped rain off her cheek and turned back into the wind, forcing herself to look him in the eye when she said, “That was my great-grandfather.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes. His name was Amos Mathers.”
“Was his wife one of the ones who died?” Aaron asked, and she felt some of the dissonance melt.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Because Fleming said your name last night.” His voice was low.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. He was talking to somebody, but… no one was there. Or if someone was, I didn’t see them.” He paused, staring at the creek below them, and added, “I still don’t know what he was standing on, either.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was right out in the water. It was almost up to his knees, but it should have been over his head.”
“What did he say about me?”
“Nothing about you. He acted like he was talking to you. Other people, too, but he said Mrs. Mathers at one point. I heard that clearly.”
A tremble worked through Gillian’s knees and thighs. She put her hand on the railing, trying to make it look casual and not show that she needed the support to stay on her feet.
“Okay. Well, I’m nobody’s Mrs. Mathers, and I definitely wasn’t standing in the water down there.”
“Nobody was except for him.”
Her mouth was dry. She ran her tongue over her teeth. “Hear any other names? Isaac, maybe? Anders?” She took a breath, then rushed out: “Or Molly or Kelly?”
“No.” He paused, swallowed. “But he mentioned a sacrifice.”
“You said that in the email.”
He nodded. “He said, ‘That is not an alarm; it is a sacrifice.’ Something like that. I cleared out pretty fast then. I guess you saw it if you watched the security videos. When he said the word sacrifice it scared the hell out of me. It was the middle of the night, and he was standing out there in the water, carrying on a conversation with no one… Yeah, it frightened me.”
“It looked like it did.”
If he was ashamed by the idea that she’d watched him run away in the darkness, he didn’t show it.
The rain picked up, clattering off the shelter house roof, and Aaron shifted closer to her to keep from getting drenched.
“So your grandfather—great-grandfather, whatever—he murdered fifteen people?”
“Five.”
“The rest escaped?”
“No,” Gillian said, and he stared at her, puzzled.
“Then how—”
“The other ten were suicides,” she said. “They’d signed a document attesting to that. Notarized it, even. They were determined that it be formal.”
Now he was finally interested, because he was horrified.
“Ten people were willing to die over that?”
“Eleven. My great-grandfather killed himself, too. He used a shotgun outside the school. Lit the place on fire with fifteen people inside, and then walked away from it, went down to Cresap Creek, and blew his brains out. They found the body downstream a day later.”
“I can’t believe there were so many,” he said. “I mean, one crazy family, okay, but… ten? Eleven?”
“It was only four families. Last of the originals who’d settled here centuries ago.”
The old knowledge was rising without hesitation now. And why not? She’d had to memorize all of this.
“I think it was like Waco or Jonestown,” she said. “Grievances collided with faith that collided with insanity, and whatever was legitimate about the grievances or redemptive about the faith got swallowed up by the insanity. That’s the way I think it happened, at least. I can only guess, obviously.”
“All of that was to stop the lake from coming?” he said. “To keep their land?”
He said that as if the notion were insane. Dying over land? Killing over land? She felt like snapping at him, asking if he understood the first fucking thing about the history of this country—or any country, for that matter. Die for land, kill for land. Rinse and repeat. Grow an empire, destroy another. Everyone was righteous in their cause at the moment; it was not until you looked back with the sophisticated eye of a supposedly more civilized time that you found the old beliefs and the old actions to be absurd, barbaric. Those savages would scalp people, burn them at the stake! historians would say in shock, even while their own nations fired cruise missiles, carpet-bombed villages with napalm, and raced one another for development of nuclear and biological weapons. Some of the same people who were appalled by a scalping were proud of the invention of VX nerve gas.
She took a beat, took a breath, and kept her tone level when she spoke again.
“Initially, that was the idea. They thought they were providing a voice for the town. The rest of the townspeople took their money and left, so then they decided they were a voice for the land. By the end, yeah, it was awfully damn strange.”
Aaron pushed back from the railing and straightened up. He was standing closer now and she was aware of his full height—he had to have eight inches on her five-seven.
“So your question is whether I’m crazy enough to have incorporated all this into my delusions or if I stumbled across you yesterday and decided that I’d, what, just screw with you for the fun of it because of your name?”
“I don’t think that.”
He stared at her steadily. “Then what do you think?”
She turned from him and pointed upstream. “Where did you find the body? The one with the hooks and the bag over her head.”
“He was up—” He caught himself, looked back at her, and said, “Why’d you say her head?”
“It was a man?”
He frowned. “It could have been a woman. All I saw was a skeleton in the water. Trust me, that was plenty, too. I wasn’t looking for identification after that.”
“Right.”
“Is somebody missing out here? Did some woman go—”
“Let’s get back to the question of where you say you found the body.”
He turned and studied the water. Shielded his e
yes with one hand and pointed with the other.
“It’s hard to see from here because of the trees, but it was in the Dead—in the stilling basin.”
Gillian stared at a high rock bluff above the stilling basin. The Dead Waters.
“You said there was a hood over the head? Or it looked like there had been?”
“Yeah. It was starting to decay, and I could see the skull, but it wasn’t like a hood on a sweatshirt or anything. It was more like a bag that had been pulled over his—or her—head.”
Gillian couldn’t stop looking at the bluff. She remembered picnic lunches and sunset viewings there with her grandmother. Molly Mathers had been very partial to that spot.
“I’d like to know if it’s real,” Aaron said quietly. “If there’s nobody down there, okay, then I hallucinated my way through the whole day, and I’ll have to deal with that. But if there is a body, then…”
“Then you’ve got new questions about Mick Fleming,” she finished for him.
“I guess so.”
“They’re going to seem like very strange questions.”
“They’re going to seem utterly insane.”
“Let me give you one more fun fact,” Gillian said. “Mick Fleming’s grandfather is the man who designed the dam.”
“What?”
She nodded. He looked deeply troubled, but after a pause said, “I guess that doesn’t mean much, but it feels weird, you know?”
She didn’t answer. It might mean a lot more than he thought.
“I’m going to call for a diver,” she said. “We’ll give the basin a look.”
“Thank you,” he said, earnest. “Thank you for believing it’s worth a try, at least.”
“We’ll see what we can find,” she said, and then she bit the tip of her tongue to keep from saying what she felt: I think you’re right, and if you are, then my grandmother died in the water with a black silk bag over her head. She died thinking she was a hero, though. So that’s something, right?
Keep biting the tongue. Don’t put all the memories into words.