by Scott Carson
The dispatcher came back and asked if Gillian copied. Still, she waited on Aaron.
“My father did not do anything to disrupt their cameras or alarms,” he said. His voice was ragged. “My father would’ve taken a bullet before that. It sounds like he took two of them.”
Gillian finally keyed the mike and spoke into it. Copied the information and said she was en route to the dam.
“Sheriff Ellsworth wouldn’t have tampered with emergency systems,” Gillian said then. “That’s insane.”
“Sergeant, I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. We’ve got the county sheriff shot to death on the same night as the dam broke. Rumors are flying, and the Bureau wants you here, not there. Do you copy that?”
“I copy,” Gillian said. “It’ll take me a little while, but I can get there.”
“You need transport?”
“No. I’m en route,” she said, and lowered the radio.
Aaron stared straight ahead. Up here on the ridge, in the pines and sun, everything he’d seen in Torrance felt imagined, a nightmare from which he’d woken. Somewhere below where they sat right now in the idling truck, his father’s body had been found. Somewhere in the mud, floating amid the garbage.
“He must have been up at the dam,” he said. He heard each word distinctly and listened to them as if they were coming from someone else. “He must have been there when it happened. He wouldn’t have been in Pleasant Ridge. The water swept him down there.”
Gunshots. Two gunshot wounds. Someone had murdered his father and left him to the flood.
Gillian Mathers put her hand on his leg but didn’t say a word. He looked down at her hand, thought about covering it with his own, but didn’t move. The warming breeze gusted and filled the truck with clean, pine-scented air. The sun was bright on the hood of the truck.
“I wonder if he got the message,” Aaron said.
“What message?”
“I left him a voicemail. It was in the afternoon. Right before I fell asleep. Before the dam broke and it all went to hell. I wonder if he heard it.”
If he had, would it have mattered? Probably not. There had been no grand exchange of sentiment. Aaron had told him to be safe, that was all. His father had scribbled a note before he left, had written, Thank you, son, and Aaron had called back and told him to be safe. Not a great loss if he hadn’t heard that.
Thank you, son.
Be safe, Dad.
The sun glare on the hood was harsh on his eyes. He turned away. Looked into the pines.
Gillian said, “They’re not going to blame him for the cameras and the sirens, Aaron. He was murdered, and they’ll understand those things all fit together.”
“Does it matter if they do blame him?”
“Yes,” she said, and her sharp tone brought his face around to hers. Her raven-dark hair was hanging in still-damp tangles across her face, underneath the DEP baseball cap, and there was a streak of blood along her right cheek. Maybe hers, maybe not.
“It matters,” she said.
He nodded. He supposed she was right. It did matter. His father had policed the county in the right way for too long to leave any rumors behind.
“Then let’s set that much right,” Aaron said. “You can help. I’d appreciate that. But I don’t want to go to Kingston. I want—I need—to go back to the dam. I need to see Fleming.”
“That’s where we’re headed,” she said.
“You said you were en route.”
She took her hand off his leg and put it on the gearshift. Immediately he missed the touch, the warmth.
“It’s a circuitous route,” she said, and then she put the truck back in gear. Before she moved her foot to the gas, she said, “I’m so sorry, Aaron,” in a voice that trembled.
“Thank you,” he said, and he might have offered more but he wasn’t going to get the words out now, so he didn’t try. She pressed down on the gas and the truck rumbled forward.
Aaron looked down the valley. Birches and pines and hemlocks weaved in the wind. You couldn’t see the damage down below, but when the wind shifted, you could smell it. The stink of overturned earth, like a grave.
I was sober when I called, he thought, and I worked all night, Dad. I helped people last night. Saved a few, maybe. Maybe not. But I was there, and I was helping. If anyone saw me, they didn’t feel embarrassed for you. Not last night. For a few hours there, I had it all together.
He wished Steve had seen that much. It wouldn’t have fixed everything—wouldn’t have fixed anything—but it would have meant something for him to see it.
“I’m glad you kept me at the dam yesterday,” Aaron said.
Gillian glanced at him, surprised, or maybe confused.
“We found the body where I said it would be,” he said. “So he knew that much was real. And you told him I was sober. He knew that, too.”
She watched him without speaking.
“I’m glad for that,” he said simply, and then he went quiet again. She turned away, and they rode along the sun-splashed ridgeline together in silence.
61
An interesting thing happened at the Chilewaukee Reservoir in the hours between midnight and dawn. As more people from more agencies began to arrive, more people and more agencies began to lay claim to Mick Fleming’s plan to blast the old intake chambers and use the antiquated tunnels to relieve pressure on the dam. Mick was amused by this but pleased by the consensus.
Let it seem as if it had been a group consensus, and let it gather momentum. The old tunnels beneath the mountain loomed like manna from heaven, too good to be true, a temporary and safe place to deposit millions of gallons of water while utilizing the natural grade of the lake bed to draw down the water level and save what was left of the dam. Then they could build a temporary dam behind the original structure and add emergency spillways. It would all work. It would save the day.
Over and over, he heard references to the original flaws of the water-tunnel design. His grandfather’s design. He’d wondered about those flaws himself in years past. The engineering of the Chilewaukee tunnels simply hadn’t worked.
Not for New York City, at least.
Mick finally understood that it hadn’t been designed for the city at all. Somewhere along the line, Jeremiah Fleming had begun to work for Galesburg.
He’d done a fine job, too.
By the time the sun came up and lit the lake, mist rising off the surface like sea smoke, a temporary sluice made with felled trees and riprap had been finished. It wasn’t much, but it would use the grade of the lake bed to channel the water where it needed to go.
He was intrigued that not a single soul seemed to remember the far side of the mountain. Somewhere over there, decaying and collapsing in on itself for decades upon decades now, was the discharge chamber that had been built to receive the water from the tunnels and empty it into Gideon’s Gorge, funneling the water toward the Ashokan, the largest of all the reservoirs in the New York system. The old discharge basin was out of sight and out of mind now because the tunnels had never been completed, but nevertheless, Mick thought it would be prudent to send a team down there to get a good look.
He was hardly going to suggest that, though.
All they needed now was the blasting. Fuse cord had been obtained, but explosives that satisfied the Army Corps team had not. They were inbound on a helicopter.
It was only a matter of time before the Chilewaukee’s tunnels were finally unsealed.
While Ben Quirk and Sandy Clemmons negotiated with the blasting engineers, Mick was finally able to slip away. In the early hours, every time he turned around, there’d been someone with a fresh question. Now they were focused on their endeavor, racing against time, and nobody seemed to have anything new to ask. The moonshot had been decided, and the moonshot would work. He could feel their optimism in the air like an electric current. They were going to conquer the dam, the lake, the mountain.
They were quite sure of that.
When
Mick looked at the spires of granite reflected on the surface of the lake, he thought they seemed amused by all the human labors. Don’t they remember? the mountains asked the water and the water asked Mick, the three of them in a secret alliance of whispers and snickers.
Of course not, Mick thought. Of course, they do not remember. You smacked them in the mouth just yesterday, and already they believe they’re back in control. They haven’t even gathered all of the dead yet, and somehow they believe they’re in control.
Human confidence was extraordinary.
He made his way up the hill and into the birches, where he could watch the work but have a moment of privacy. Anders Wallace trailed behind.
“I’m still not sure it will work as you hope,” Mick said as they sat alone in the cool breeze and watched a dozer move earth below. A helicopter made slow passes over the lake, its rotor wash roiling the water and whipping the treetops.
“Rest easy,” Anders said, looping his forearms across his knees. “Much has been done before tonight.”
“Have they made it all the way through?”
“They’ve been hard at work for many years, sir. Many generations. They’ve had no distractions.” He paused, then qualified, “No options, actually. They work. They toil.”
Mick remembered the ceaseless labors he’d seen below the dam, the crack of picks off stone, the scrape of shovels.
“Are there enough of them?”
“Don’t limit your thinking, sir,” Anders said. “Remember that where you see one crew, it’s not the sum total. Think of the system.”
Mick did. The system was more than a century old and spanned more than a hundred miles. How many had died building it? How many were involved in whatever work had taken place since? Sealed away, forgotten, but still toiling.
“It’s only a matter of connecting them?” he asked. “Not just the water, but the… workforce?”
He was uneasy saying ghosts around Anders, as if the term might offend. While the Galesburg crew was most certainly made up of ghosts, they were unique, and they were proud. He didn’t wish to insult them.
“That’s a good way of looking at it,” Anders said.
“You needed someone like me, though. You couldn’t have done it without me.”
“We’re indebted, yes. And grateful, of course. But you were always headed this way, sir. The Chilewaukee was special. You always knew that.”
“I don’t believe that’s true.”
“No? You worried about it. The neglect angered you. It was personal, wasn’t it?”
“Not personal,” Mick said. Had it not been, though? Had his inspections of the Chilewaukee not struck a more emotional—and perhaps darker—chord than those conducted anyplace else? He loved the look of the place but hated the lack of attention it received. Hated its lack of utility. “My grandfather designed it, sure, but I didn’t think about him much. Why would I? I never knew him.”
Anders watched with a smile.
“I never cared for this place,” Mick said. “That’s the truth.”
“Yet you came back.”
“Because I had to be here. For the job.”
“I agree.”
Mick felt uneasy with him, which was strange on a day when Anders had been such a comfort.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said.
“The past is never passive,” Anders told him. “Not even when it’s forgotten. Especially not then.”
As the wind shifted branches overhead, the dappled sunlight found him and slipped through him. He was clearer in the darkness, his existence undeniable there. Under a full sun, though, Mick wasn’t sure if he’d be able to see him at all.
“My grandfather designed it for you, didn’t he?” Mick said. “Not for the city. Not in the end.”
Anders smiled. “He came to see what was special about this place. In time, he came to understand that it was not the right spot for a concept such as eminent domain. No, Galesburg was never the right spot for that.”
Mick turned from Anders and studied the mountain at their backs. Reached out and laid his hand on an outcropping of granite, felt the coarse rock under his palm.
“The city was always told that,” Anders said. “Repeatedly and stridently, they were told. The point was made in as many ways as it could be.”
For a moment, tethered to the mountain by the feel of the cold rock under his palm, Mick had a memory of the man he used to be. Just a flash. He saw his office, his house, his wife, his life. Saw his maps of the system, his data on each dam under his purview. He remembered his visits here, and the ominous feeling that would overtake him when he saw the name Chilewaukee on his calendar.
He jerked his hand away in pain. A sliver of sharpened stone, invisible until his flesh touched it, had opened his palm like a blade’s edge. A thin line of blood shone in the sunlight. No more than a paper cut, but still, it felt like a message.
“Where are you from, Anders?”
“Galesburg, of course.”
“How long ago?”
Anders Wallace smiled without any trace of humor. “You ask too many questions, sir.”
Mick looked at him and then back down at the line of blood creeping across his palm. He closed his fist tightly on the blood, and he asked no more questions.
62
Deshawn came to a stop at a steep Y-shaped intersection. Go left and it would take him down toward the dam; go right and the road wound into the mountains. He wasn’t sure if it led all the way to the other side or if it would get him badly lost, but fortunately the fool who’d tried to rob him had an outdated Garmin GPS unit in the old Bronco. Navigation was critical for the days of martial law, clearly. Deshawn sat in the idling truck, studied the Garmin, and decided to go right. It seemed the road climbed up into the mountains and then back down and tracked parallel to a course that led toward Ashokan. There was no indication of the old structure that Deshawn remembered, but he thought it had to be down there, or close. Somewhere down there was the crumbling rock basin where he’d once sat with a beautiful girl and skipped stones and sipped champagne and tried not to show how unsettled he was by the place.
He cut the wheel of the Bronco, hit the gas, and started up Maple Ridge Road, the floodplain receding behind him as he climbed, falling out of sight behind sharp S-curves and forested hills. Even the smell of the flood began to fade, the air growing cleaner as he gained elevation.
As he came around one of the sharp bends, he heard an engine and saw a flash of gunmetal gray. He was driving across the centerline to hold a higher speed through the curves, and he thought it might prove to be his last mistake, causing a head-on collision. He pounded the brakes, the tires smoked, and he came to a jarring stop not three feet from the grille of the oncoming car. It was a big pickup, one of the new Jeep models, and he lifted his hand in embarrassed apology toward the other driver.
Only then did he realize he was looking at his daughter.
He put the Bronco into park with a trembling hand and opened the door and climbed out. Gillian was already out of the truck. There was someone else with her, a tall young man in uniform. Coast Guard? That made sense. They’d been performing water rescues all night.
“Dad? What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” he said, but of course that was only partially true.
Gillian gathered her emotions with a laugh and a shake of her head. He remembered how she’d done that as a little girl. In youth basketball games, when a call went against her, she would always step back and make that little laugh and headshake. He remembered that well. Look at her now. A grown woman, a police officer. Just look at her.
He didn’t want to have to tell her the truth. It might break her heart if she heard the truth about Deshawn’s headful of ghosts.
“This is Aaron Ellsworth,” she said. “He’s the sheriff’s son. He’s been helping me try to… to sort it out.”
“It sounds very bad in Torrance,” Deshawn said, shaking the young man�
��s hand. Aaron had big hands and a strong grip but his eyes were foggy, exhausted.
“It is,” Aaron Ellsworth said tonelessly. “A lot of people died. My father was one of them.”
Stunned, Deshawn managed to say, “I’m so sorry.”
Aaron nodded with the polite detachment of a grief that hadn’t fully landed yet. Gillian was surveying the Bronco, with its Don’t Tread on Me logo and Confederate flag.
“Nice truck,” she said. “Where exactly did you think you were headed?”
“It was an Uber situation,” he said. “Five stars for one, and none for the other.”
“Where were you going?”
Deshawn looked away from her and up the winding mountain pass. How much time left? Enough to explain? Probably not.
“There’s a place I need to see,” he said. “It won’t make much sense to you, but I need to see it, and once I do, we can talk, and I can explain.”
His daughter’s dark eyes bored into his. “What place?”
“It doesn’t matter. It won’t make sense yet, but—”
“We’re on our third day of things that don’t make sense, Dad. You’d be surprised at the things we’re ready to understand.”
We. He looked from her to Ellsworth and saw the young man’s eyes had lost their bleary, distracted quality. He was focused now.
“Did you know?” Ellsworth asked Deshawn.
“Did I know what?”
“That the dam was going to break. Was that something you were told by her mother, or grandmother, or somebody in that schoolroom?”
“No,” Deshawn said, “I didn’t know that. I was… I’ve been told someplace I need to go.”
“By who?” Gillian asked. She had her hand on his arm, squeezing just below his elbow. “Dad? Who told you to head up here?”
What was he supposed to say to that? A dead man sent me, dear, and I can’t be delayed, not even by you.