by Scott Carson
He didn’t know what he could tell her, but he could show her, at least.
He walked back to the Bronco. Opened the passenger door and fumbled through Rochelle the Uber driver’s purse and located Gillian’s old sketchbook. He was curious if she’d even remember it.
His curiosity didn’t last long—her face changed before he’d even put the book in her hands. Just the sight of it was enough.
“Why do you have that?” she said.
“I want to ask you a question about it,” Deshawn said. “It’s time. You said so yourself, on the phone. It’s time to talk.”
“I wasn’t talking about those old pictures.”
“Yes,” he said. “You were. You just may not know it yet.”
He opened the book. Flipped through the pages filled with her child’s work. A skilled child, yes, but a child’s hand all the same.
Gillian’s lips were pressed into a flat line and she stared at the pictures in silence as they passed. All those old faces. Men in helmets or high boots, men with picks, men with dynamite. Men in tunnels.
Deshawn got to the one that had scared him the worst, the one he hadn’t let himself look at even a few hours earlier, standing in his own apartment. He looked at it now.
The sketch was of a hard-faced man with a broad jaw, a pug nose, and close-set eyes. Dark slashes of eyebrows that nearly met in the middle. A squat, muscular build, with a wide neck. He wore dungarees and a black T-shirt and his hard hat was in his hand. That would prove to be a problem for him later. His lip curled at the left corner in the faintest hint of a cocky grin. He was resting his weight on the rung of a ladder. Behind him, an empty cage hovered above a shaded circle of blackness.
“You drew this,” Deshawn said. “When you were a little girl, you drew it. You remember that?”
She was staring at the sketch as if it might come to life.
“Gill? Do you—”
“I remember it.”
He nodded. Wet his lips. Said, “Do you know who it is?”
Silence. The wind worked over the mountain, ruffling the sketchbook as if trying to flip the page. Deshawn put his thumb down to keep the picture from turning over.
“Biddle?” Gillian said. Faint-voiced and questioning, uncertain. “Eddie Biddle? No, Teddy.” She looked up at him. “Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that’s right?”
“Because I knew him,” Deshawn said. “We worked together in the tunnels, before you were born. Before I met your mother. And he died down there.” He paused, remembering the way the blood had rained out of Teddy’s face when the cable sheared through him. “How’d you come to draw him?”
“Because I was supposed to,” she said, almost whispering. “It was homework. I was supposed to draw them and remember them.”
“You drew it from a picture?”
She nodded. Aaron Ellsworth was staring at her with fascination, not looking at Deshawn or the sketch but only at Gillian.
“Haupring’s pictures?” Ellsworth asked.
Gillian nodded again, and Deshawn said, “How do you know that name?”
“Because I’ve met him,” Aaron said. “I saw him at the dam. Two days ago. Day before it burst.”
“I saw him last night,” Gillian said, still in the near whisper.
Deshawn felt light-headed in the way you did when you stood up too fast, putting the brain out of equilibrium with the body.
“Did he take your picture?” Deshawn asked. “Either of you?”
Gillian shook her head, and Ellsworth said, “No. Did he take yours?”
Deshawn shook his head.
“That’s probably why we’re standing here,” Ellsworth said. “Isn’t it? He didn’t pick us.”
There it was, voiced aloud for the first time in Deshawn’s life. How funny—or sad—that it hadn’t come from him. All these years of silence and denial, and now a stranger just came out and said it.
“Maybe,” Deshawn muttered. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to believe anything like that—didn’t want to think anything like that—but…”
“He came to document the story,” Gillian said suddenly.
They both looked at her. She’d gotten her voice back, and her jaw was tightly set, the way she’d gotten as a girl when they argued. Stubborn. Stoic.
“Haupring documented the story,” she said. “But he wouldn’t tell it. We had to do that.”
Deshawn remembered her mother saying words so similar to him, right before he’d fled from her for good.
“He’s not… he wasn’t a real man, was he?”
She hesitated. Seemed to turn the question over.
“He had different rules,” she said carefully. “That’s what he told the families when he came to Galesburg. That he was a different man, with different rules.”
“He just showed up?” Aaron Ellsworth asked.
Gillian shook her head. With the DEP baseball cap on, she looked younger, so much like she had as a girl.
“They found him,” she said. “Anders Wallace. Maybe my grandfather. There were rumors about him, legends that went back to the older reservoirs, back to Croton, all of the earliest camps. Always the same idea: he was documenting the construction.”
“Your mother told me that his name mattered,” Deshawn said. “It was like a game to them. He didn’t really have a name, or at least he never offered one, so they gave him one. Is that right? Some kind of joke. Or it seemed like a joke to people who didn’t understand him yet.”
“It was an anagram,” Gillian said, and gave a sad laugh that almost broke into a sob. “I had to unscramble it. That was homework, too. It was a hard one for me, because I didn’t know the last word. I had to learn it first.”
“What was it?” Aaron Ellsworth asked.
“Hubris,” she said. “Curtis B. Haupring. The letters of his name spelled capturing hubris. That was the joke. Anders Wallace gave him the name, I think.”
“What is he?” Deshawn said.
“He looked for people who had contempt,” Gillian said. Her voice was steady but she seemed very distant. She reminded Deshawn of her grandmother, a woman he’d hardly known but remembered well. Molly Mathers had a unique bearing. Present but contained, with critical parts of her held at a distance. “Contempt and arrogance. For the past, for nature, for power.”
She reached out and tapped the sketchbook.
“Is this the one who told you where you’re supposed to go?” she asked. “Teddy Biddle?”
“No.” He turned the pages and found the man with the high rubber boots. “It was this one. Just yesterday.”
She studied the picture. “Downstream,” she said. “Sure. Somewhere between Westchester and the city. He died in a pressure tunnel. I think it collapsed on him. He was a foreman.”
“You remember him, too?” Deshawn said, amazed.
“I remember them all,” she said simply. “I’ve tried to forget, but I can’t. I remember them all.”
“You said they have to work,” Aaron Ellsworth said. “By work, you mean…”
“Down below,” she said. “I don’t know what the work is like. I was supposed to find out, though. At some point, some drought season, when they’d be tired and in need of help, I would have to—”
“Don’t,” Deshawn said, suddenly unable to bear it, hearing these words again, words that once her mother had spoken to him.
“It’s time to say it,” she said. “I would have to die. Sacrifice myself to help them. Galesburg was waiting for me. It was up to me to make sure they hadn’t been forgotten up here, that people still believed, and then… then I was supposed to join them in the Dead Waters. Just like my grandmother. Just like my mother.”
“What’s different up here?” Deshawn whispered. “In the Chill? It’s different than downstream.”
“That’s the point,” she said. “It was built to be different. Wallace and Fleming and the rest made sure of that. The Chill is where old mythologies
met modern engineering.”
“I don’t understand that.”
She took a breath. “Think I do?”
“You know the idea, at least.”
“Yes. The idea is that people didn’t listen, and then people would forget they hadn’t listened, and when that happens, people will pay a price.” She shifted uneasily, looking almost embarrassed by her words. “They were told not to take Galesburg. They didn’t listen.”
“Why not just destroy the dam to begin with?”
“You can’t destroy a dam that doesn’t exist. But you can build one designed to fail.”
Beside her, Aaron Ellsworth said, “That’s the equation. The one on the chalkboard in your old house.”
“Yes. That’s what we saw yesterday. Only it didn’t work, not the way they’d intended it to.”
The wind gusted again and this time the pages did turn over, and Deshawn closed the book. They all faced each other there on the lonely mountain road, waiting for someone to speak.
“I need to go,” he said finally. “I’m not sure what’s waiting on me down there, but I know that I have to go.”
“Where?” Gillian asked.
“An old spot. Other side of the mountain. It’s the place where once they were supposed to bring the water out of the tunnels.”
“The discharge basin,” she said.
“You’ve been there?”
She nodded. “It’s bone-dry, mostly. Not now, of course. After all this rain, it may be close to full.”
“Can you tell me how to get there?” he asked. “I think wasting time is a mistake. A risk.”
“I can show you.”
“No. It needs to be me. Alone. Just tell me—”
“Nobody’s going anywhere alone,” his daughter told him, and then she turned on her heel and walked back to her truck. “You can follow me.”
63
It was only five miles to the old discharge chamber in Gideon’s Gorge, but the road was steep and winding and the drive couldn’t be made quickly on the best of days, let alone after the rains had left washout and debris scattered across the asphalt. Gillian drove the first few minutes in silence before Aaron Ellsworth finally broke it.
“Did you know your dad believed it before today?” he asked as she braked hard on a banked curve that was blanketed by soil runoff and damp leaves.
“Believed what, exactly?” she said.
“Any of it. He stood there talking about ghosts with you, and it was like you were hearing him for the first time.”
The tires threw mud and leaves into the air and found firm footing again, and now they were angling down, out of the sun and into the shadowed valley.
“We never talked about it.”
“Never? It was your mom, it was his wife, and—”
“They weren’t married.”
“Fine. Still, he never talked about any of it?”
Gillian navigated another curve and found a straightaway below. The sun spilled through the trees here, landing on the road in drops, as if passed through a strainer. She looked in the mirror and saw her father behind her, driving the old Bronco. She tried to think of a way to explain it that made sense. Why hadn’t they ever spoken of Galesburg?
“He was scared of me,” she said. “When he first came to get me and take me home, he was scared. Not just of being a parent and having the responsibility. That was part of it, I’m sure, but he was afraid of what I believed.”
“Then I wouldn’t expect him to show up here talking about the advice he was getting from dead men in the water tunnels.”
Neither had Gillian.
“Maybe,” she said, “I misread his silence.”
“What does that mean?”
“I thought we needed the silence because he didn’t want to hear what I’d been taught. But maybe it was really because he didn’t want to admit what he believed.”
She nodded as if in affirmation of her own theory. She remembered his face on that drive back to the city, and she remembered the day he’d seen her sketchbook.
“He was truly scared, and the only things that can truly scare someone are the things they’re capable of believing. The nightmares that linger in your mind during the day linger because they feel possible.”
She crested a hill and drove down the other side. To her left, sparkling water flowed down the rock face of the mountain. A freshwater spring, one that would be dry in the summer, but now was open. The Catskills were offering up all their wealth this autumn. She had a feeling the discharge basin would be underwater and wondered what her father would do then. What he was expecting to find down there. The real action was on the other side of the mountain, and they were driving away from it.
“He needs to be right,” she said, “or we’re not going to achieve much out here.”
If Aaron had an answer, it was drowned out by the sound of another helicopter passing overhead, its blades thumping the air, carrying someone or something across Maiden Mountain and toward the dam. Gillian glanced up, curious if it was a TV chopper or something more official. It passed in a flicker, but for a moment she saw it clearly: military paint job, a large, squat helicopter. A cargo mover, probably. What was being delivered to the Chill?
Then the helicopter was gone and she lowered her eyes and followed the road on down the slope. There was a pullout at the bottom of the hill that had once been lined with gravel. The gravel had been washed away, and all that was left was mud. She pulled in, and her father brought the Bronco in beside her. Gillian cut the engine and looked at Aaron.
“Well,” she said, “I guess we’re about to find out.”
“This is it?”
She pointed to a narrow footpath through the trees. It was steep and rocky. Everything here was lined with rock. They were in Gideon’s Gorge, a narrow notch in the mountains that funneled groundwater into the south fork of Cresap Creek and on toward the Ashokan and the eight million New Yorkers beyond.
“It’s up there,” she said. “And it’s nothing but forgotten stone in the ground. Unless, of course, my father is right.”
“Then what will it be?”
She opened the door. “I have no idea,” she said, and stepped out.
Her dad was already out of the Bronco. He was holding the rifle and facing the trail with an expression torn between apprehension and appreciation.
“This is it,” he said. “I would’ve driven right past it. I thought you could see the stonework from the road.”
“No,” Gillian said. “You’ve got to walk a bit. It’s not far. There’s a waterfall, and then there’s the basin. It’s nothing but overgrown old stone.”
He nodded, eyes far off, as if remembering the place.
“Since when do you have a gun?” Gillian asked.
He looked at the rifle as if he’d forgotten it. He was holding it awkwardly, which was no surprise; as far as Gillian knew, her father had never fired a gun.
“I acquired it on my way,” he said.
“You think you’re going to need it?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he gestured at the trail. “Nobody comes out here, then?”
“Maybe some hikers, but it’s not part of a trail system. We still come out here because technically the city still owns the land. It’s something we have to check, but it hardly receives regular patrols.”
She studied his broad, dark face, looking for some reassurance that he knew what he was doing. He looked confused but determined to see it through. He didn’t know why he was on the mission, maybe, but it seemed he was damn well going to complete it.
“Let’s give it a look,” he said, and started forward. Gillian followed, and Aaron fell in behind them, walking beneath the steep, jagged walls of the gorge. Hemlocks grew along it wherever they could find enough soil to take root, and ferns lined the bottom. Clean water dripped from rocks in all directions.
They’d walked only a dozen paces when Gillian’s radio crackled to life. Dispatch, asking for her twenty. The FBI was wait
ing. The FBI had questions.
Gillian stopped walking and so did Aaron. Her father kept pushing ahead. She wasn’t sure if he hadn’t heard the call or just didn’t care.
She took the radio off her belt, looking Aaron in the eyes.
“Thoughts?” she said.
“We’re either on the wrong side of the mountain,” Aaron said, “or he knows what he’s doing. But I don’t know how in the hell you’re supposed to explain that to them.”
She looked up the trail to where her father’s stocky form was already disappearing into the hemlocks. He was walking fast and with purpose. And a gun.
She clicked off the power on her radio.
“Let’s see what we find,” she said, and they started down the trail again, taking their lead from a New York City sandhog who hadn’t set foot in Torrance County in two decades as he hurried down the path that a dead man in a tunnel under Queens had instructed him to find.
The walk was short, a half mile at best. Slippery going, stepping across wet rocks and mud slicks, and alive with the sound of dripping water. The sound intensified as they walked, and Gillian knew they were nearing the waterfall now. Usually it was twin trickles chasing the sides of a boulder, but today it was pouring over, the twin falls turned into one. They used rocks to cross the brook that formed below it, and then the trail curled to the right and brought them out into a stretch of dark valley. In front of them, bluestone walls lined a long chamber of churning brown water. A rusted, decaying fence ran above the stone walls. A handful of beer bottles sat on the walls, and some sodden trash was pinned against the fence, but otherwise there was no indication anyone had been there in years. Gillian hadn’t seen the spot since summer, and then the basin had been nearly dry, with just a few trapped puddles. Now it looked like an angry sea.
“How deep is it?” Aaron asked.
“I’m not sure. Last time I saw it, we could have walked the bottom. Now?” She tried to remember, estimating the height of the walls. “Maybe ten feet deep? Fifteen?”
Her father had walked ahead. He gripped one of the rusted fence rails in his hand and looked down at the water and then up at the dark wall of rock on the far side.