by Scott Carson
He put on his hat and uniform jacket and his gun belt. He’d taken the day off, but when he arrived back at the Chill, Steve Ellsworth was damn well going to look like the sheriff of Torrance County.
35
Aaron stood in the cold rain and waited in silence while the body was loaded into an ambulance for transport to the county morgue. He kept a respectful distance, but even so, the disintegrating condition of the corpse was obvious. Gillian Mathers put on rubber gloves and clipped the long, dangling fishing lines away from the body, then coiled them methodically, bagged them, and tagged them. She reached out with one gloved hand and touched the decaying fabric over the skull gingerly. She rubbed it between index finger and thumb as if the touch could tell her something. Then she stepped back, removed the gloves, and nodded to the ambulance driver. The doors swung shut, and the remains of her grandmother headed away.
The divers had already left, so when the ambulance was gone, it was just Gillian and Aaron again.
“I’ll give you a ride back,” she said.
“Huh?”
She looked at him. “Your car? Going to want that, right?”
“Oh. Yeah.” He’d forgotten about his dad’s truck, still parked up at the overlook. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” She started for her own car, the Ford Explorer with the brightly painted DEP logo. He fell in behind her, feeling that he should say something but unsure what.
“Your grandmother?” he blurted finally. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” She opened the door without looking at him and had the engine going before he was even in his seat. Okay. Maybe Gillian Mathers was not interested in telling any more family stories.
“I’m sorry,” Aaron said as she drove away, and it wasn’t clear if he was expressing sympathy for her loss or for talking. Gillian didn’t seem to care one way or the other. The gatehouse stood like a lonely sentry in the rain, with its medieval arched windows and stacked block walls. The parking lot below was now empty except for Arthur Brady’s car.
It was ten minutes on winding roads from the dam to the overlook, but it felt like an hour with her silent tension weighing down the air. When she pulled up next to the Silverado, he said, “Thanks,” and was acknowledged with another silent nod. He popped the door open and then she finally spoke.
“You got time to take a walk?”
“A walk?”
She nodded. Looking across the flooded creek and into the woods, not at him.
“I’ve got time,” he said.
She looked at his foot. “Can you walk, though? It’s not far but it’s not easy.”
In truth, his foot had been aching from just standing there watching the divers, but he shook his head. “I can walk fine.”
She seemed to know he was lying but then shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, and cut the engine.
They left the parking area and entered a trailhead not far from the shelter. She left the trail almost immediately, headed downhill. Aaron followed. She pushed through saplings and young pines, thin branches flinging water like windshield wipers.
They’d made it about a hundred yards up the slope when another trail became clear, and she followed this, walking sidehill on a narrow ridge. More of a ledge than a ridge, really. The rain was falling harder, drumming into puddles on the narrow trail and streaming down the slope. Aaron was breathing hard and his heart was thumping in his ears and his foot was hurting, really hurting now, but he limped along, fighting to keep pace.
The trail curled downhill, and they arrived at the banks of Cresap Creek once more. They were facing an ancient wooden footbridge that Aaron had never known existed. The creek was narrow here, and the bank on each side was rock, which forced the water higher, almost to the bridge. Gillian eyed it and said, “Been a few years since I crossed. Think it’ll hold?”
“No idea.”
“You’re a good swimmer, at least.”
Aaron looked into the walnut-colored water below, which was tinted dark from all the soil the flooding had inhaled.
“Right,” he said. “There’s that.”
She started across the old bridge, stepping quickly but wisely, each foot coming down where the rotted planks seemed sturdiest. The bridge creaked but didn’t break. Aaron had to have seventy pounds on her, maybe more, but he followed in her footsteps. The old wood held.
The bridge deposited them into what seemed like a pine forest, but they were young trees. Gillian walked through them and up another rise and then they were in a cleared stretch, one that had definitely been a road. Shell casings from hunters lay in the gravel, and a few rusted beer cans. Gillian walked farther up the hill. Aaron stopped and stood for a moment, catching his breath. His throbbing foot felt damp in his sock. Sweat or blood? Had he torn the stitches open?
She realized he was no longer keeping pace and turned back.
“Coming?”
The question was hopeful, not challenging, and although he’d intended to ask her what in the hell this was all about, he just nodded.
“Catching my breath,” he said, and started up the hill.
Another hundred yards and the old road leveled out in a clearing that was on a plateau about halfway up the mountain. At the back corner of the lot stood a house.
It was an old Colonial-style structure with a high, steeply pitched roof, evenly distributed windows, and a long front porch that was collapsing, the rails filled with missing or twisted boards that gave it the look of a meth addict’s smile.
“Where are we?” Aaron asked.
“Home,” Gillian Mathers said. “I lived here until I was nine.”
What to say to that? The place looked like it was auditioning for the next Amityville Horror reboot. Was he supposed to ask why she moved? Was it the poltergeists or the black mold?
She walked up to the porch. “If my grandmother saw the way it looked now, she’d spin in her—” She caught herself before the last word, gave a little chuckle, and shook her head. Her grandmother didn’t yet have a grave to spin in. She was probably being shaken out onto a morgue table right now.
“It used to look better,” she said.
She stepped carefully over the first broken step and then crossed the creaking porch. Aaron followed and grasped the railing for balance. It came free in his hand.
“Sorry,” he said, and tried to set it back in place. It fell into the mud, taking two balusters with it. Nice place you’ve got here.
He limped up the steps and then across the sagging porch. Gillian tried the door, but it didn’t budge. Either locked or swelled shut. When she stepped back and kicked it, there was real anger in her, as if the house were an enemy.
The door burst open with a splintering sound and wobbled inward, revealing the staircase directly in front. The interior of the home smelled of moisture and mold but the stairs looked sturdy enough. Gillian stepped inside, looked left, and seemed to bristle, like a bird dog on point.
Aaron pushed closer to her and looked over her shoulder. The room was a small library. Shelves with damp and dusty books lined the walls. In the center of the room a thin line of water leaked out of the wall. Or maybe seeped up from the floor. No sign of a leak overhead, and no sound of a drip. The only water sounds were outside. In here, despite all the damp smells, it was strangely quiet. The disrepair of the porch hadn’t crept inside the house, and the walls stood straight and solid.
“Why’s it empty?” he asked, but she ignored him and crossed the room. Gripped the molded lip of one of the built-in bookshelves and tugged. The shelf swung on a soundless hinge. It was cut perfectly into the wall, every joist plumb, and built out of good hardwood that didn’t swell or contract with the seasons. Redwood or good seasoned fir, cut from the heart of the tree. Chosen with care.
“What’s back there?”
“Welcome to the Galesburg School.” Gillian’s voice was empty.
He edged closer. Peered into the darkness. “This place was the school?”
“Not exactl
y. But it was my school, for a little while.”
She unzipped her rain jacket, found an inside pocket, and withdrew a small tactical flashlight. When she thumbed it on, the hidden room lit up. He saw over her shoulder a single desk in the center of the room and felt a prickle. The desk was ancient, built from wood and iron and with a glass inkwell in the upper right-hand corner. The way it sat there alone in this room hidden behind a wall felt deeply disturbing.
“What do you mean, your school?”
“Just what I said.” Gillian slipped into the room, and Aaron hesitated. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to set foot in there. It was wrong. That was the only word for the place. Wrong. Everything from that hidden door to the old desk to the very feel of the room, with its chilled damp air and lack of windows and…
He saw the photos then.
They lined the wall. He stepped inside. Looked left, then right, and realized that, no, they didn’t line a wall; they lined all of the walls. Each was framed, mostly black-and-white or that even older brownish-gray tint, sepia. Some hand-drawn sketches in the mix. All of them seemed to be of construction sites. He stepped closer, realizing as he moved farther into the room how the smell changed—not the odor of flooded basements or stagnant water but of fresh water, cool and clean and in motion.
He studied a row of old photographs. Dam construction in one. Maybe the Chill? No, too old for that. This photo had to be at least a hundred years old, the images almost washed-out. The one beside it showed men in a tunnel. The men wore high boots and overalls and leaned on shovels and picks. Just above that picture was another of workers in a tent, gathered around a central woodstove. One man held a banjo, another had a harmonica, and the rest were looking on.
Below each photograph, a thin silver plaque was fastened to the frame, identifying the pictures as being from the Curtis B. Haupring Collection.
36
Aaron’s breath caught.
“Is this some…” His words drifted off.
“Kind of joke?” Gillian asked. “Same question I asked you up at the overlook. But you know better.”
“Is it a family name? Is this guy part of your family?”
“No.”
“Then who was he?”
“Said he was a documentarian. Archiving the old towns for history before they vanished from the face of the earth.” She pointed at the photo of the men around the woodstove. “Workers in camp, Ashokan Reservoir, 1910. Winter. January, I think.” She moved to the next, the one in the tunnels. “Excavation of the Garrison Tunnel, halfway between here and New York City. June 1911.” She moved her finger to the one of the dam.
“Not the Chill, right?” Aaron said.
“Correct. That’s Kensico going up.”
“So he was taking pictures the whole time. Documenting the system. And yesterday someone thought it was, what, funny to use his name?”
The way she was holding the flashlight out in front of her, it was hard to read her eyes.
“That’s one possibility,” she said.
“Give me another.”
“His grandson.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s either a family member or someone pretending to be him.”
She looked at him in silence.
“Can’t be the same guy,” Aaron said.
“No?”
“No. Because…”
“Because that would be madness, right? Absolute lunacy.”
Aaron looked at the photograph closest to him. In it, a worker was driving a sledgehammer into a massive piece of stone. He was working in the shadows of a derrick that threw spiderweb patterns. It looked like a spillway somewhere. Maybe the Chill.
“Do his pictures matter?” He was thinking suddenly of the way he’d felt with the camera on him, unsettled by the strange silver light of the lens.
“I think so.”
“You have to think so,” Aaron said, voice rising. “You wouldn’t have covered the walls with them otherwise.”
“I didn’t hang those pictures,” she said. “Trust me.”
“Then what in the hell are they doing here? What’s any of this doing here?” He waved his hand around the room. In the shadows came a soft dripping sound. He couldn’t see any water, though. Why couldn’t he see the water?
Gillian lowered the light and paced away, toward the front of the room, where an old chalkboard stood. “You remember what I told you up at the overlook, about the families who stayed in Galesburg?”
“Families who killed themselves in Galesburg. And others.”
She nodded without looking back. “My grandfather got most of the blame, and maybe he deserved it. But he wasn’t the architect or the leader, whatever you want to call him. Remember when I said it was like Waco or Jonestown?”
“Yeah. Like a cult.”
“Like that, yes. So the, um… spiritual leader, I guess you’d say, was a guy named Anders Wallace. His family was the first to settle in Torrance County. Four hundred years ago. Cleared land, built a cabin, and the Iroquois burned it down. The Wallaces built another. The Iroquois burned that one, too. The Wallace family stayed the winter in a tent. Or in a cave. At any rate, the cabin was ashes, the snow was flying, and the Wallace clan stuck it out. In the spring, they built another cabin. The Iroquois came down. The Wallaces fed them. This is at least what we—what I—was taught. And lo, duly impressed with the courage and generosity of these white folks, the Indians didn’t kill them, and Galesburg began.” She paused. “In retrospect, it would’ve been great if they had killed them.”
She walked the room, shining the light from photo to photo. Ancient faces stared back.
“A hundred and twenty-five years go by, and then the French and Indian War starts, and the early Galesburg families sided against the British, and then another hundred years goes by, and now they’ve fought in the Revolution with the colonists, and in the Civil War with the Union almost a hundred years after that, and wars are really the only things that get them out of their valley. The nation moves west, but some Galesburg families stay.” Pause. “The Mathers family stays. By then we were here. Another couple wars go by—you know, we did a hell of a lot of fighting when you think about it—and other than those who went to war, we stayed. Generation after generation. They kept winning the wars, but then along came the city and the Board of Water Supply. And this one they weren’t gonna win.”
She made a wide arc around the single teacher’s desk that faced the single student desk. Started coming back toward him, her face dark behind the light.
“Around this time,” she said, “a photographer arrives. From where, nobody knows. He was there to document it, as you say. He stayed with the Wallace family. My grandmother remembered him. Didn’t like him. She couldn’t remember why, only that she didn’t—”
“Want her picture taken,” Aaron said.
Gillian studied him. “You felt that, too?”
“I was half-naked, so I wasn’t really eager for a photo regardless, but… yes. I did not want him to take my picture.” He tried to force out a laugh. “I know, I sound like some sort of aborigine, right? Afraid the camera was going to steal my soul.”
Gillian didn’t laugh. She looked at him steadily and then moved the flashlight beam on to another photograph. This one showed what looked to be a collapsed derrick. A silhouette beneath might have been a corpse. It was hard to tell, but it looked like a man trapped beneath a few hundred pounds of lumber.
“There were all kinds of problems with construction at the Chilewaukee,” Gillian said. “Equipment sabotage, shit like that. But they kept plugging along. Then things got worse. A handful of engineers came up. They went into the tunnels that were supposed to link the Chilewaukee into the Ashokan, into the city’s supply. They didn’t come back out. They were killed, along with some of the workers. A tunnel collapse was the official verdict, but not many people believed it had been accidental.” She paused again. “Work got started again, though. This time, the engineer in charge was on
site permanently. Jeremiah Fleming. He’d been going back and forth from the city, but as problems mounted up, he relocated. Most of the locals hated him. Anders Wallace, of all people, went out of his way to befriend him. After a few months, he actually moved in with the Wallace family.”
“And with Haupring?”
She nodded. “By now, people in New York weren’t feeling as good about Galesburg as they had been originally, but it didn’t stop just because a few engineers got killed or a few bulldozers were blown up. They were building an empire, right? There was talk of adding National Guardsmen to the police force already here, like an occupying army. Before it came to that, though, the resisters in Galesburg said they’d play nice: ‘Come on up, we’ll sign the papers, and take your damned eminent domain money. We know when we’re beaten.’ ”
“That was the night of the murders?”
“The sacrifices, if you were one of the weird families who preferred that idea.”
“Where was Fleming?”
“Inside. Officially, he was considered one of the murder victims.”
“Unofficially?”
“There was a lot of talk that Anders Wallace had gotten in his head. That Jeremiah Fleming had begun to hate his own creation up here.”
“That he was one of the killers, you mean. Not one of the victims.”
“Essentially. My grandmother remembered Haupring being there that night, too. She remembered him taking pictures of the old school. His body wasn’t found there, though. By the time the meeting happened, my grandmother was home. Then morning came and she woke up to learn her father had burned the place and that he was missing. It took them a while to find his body.”
Aaron tried to imagine that. Waking up and realizing that your father had never come home was a regular nightmare for a police officer’s son. But the rest of it? The idea that your father was a mass murderer? Even his darkest childhood dreams hadn’t reached that place.
“Is all of this why they decided to leave it a surplus reservoir? Why they backed off on the tunnels?”