Transgressions

by Ian Rankin (ed)

  It wasn't much of a plan, but then it wasn't much of a life, and Steve Beck climbed softly out of the tent, the wind twisting through his uncovered hair, and zipped Longo back in as his fingers started cramping with the cold. He pulled the pack into place and felt Amy there between his shoulder blades. His cheeks were wind-ripped raw, and he was really past telling whether it was tears or flying specks of ice that stung, but he set out alone with Amy—he had her this time, had her good—to see if together they could find that sweet crevasse.

  * * * *

  He relaxed against the leather seat in the back of the limo that picked him up every day from his office, and brushed at the creases in his Ferré pants. Rukhi the driver eased into Toronto rush hour traffic and headed up Bay Street. It was late April, warm enough to leave jackets behind but cool enough to hurry, a month away from going back to the lake, once the ice went out. People crowded the crosswalks, skirted by rollerbladers. He sat back and enjoyed the bicycle bells, the car horns, the neon. Anything that flashed and fluttered. At the intersection of Bay and Bloor, a young father with a blond-haired kid in a backpack joined the crowd, crossing. The kid had a yellow coat with a hood that had fallen back.

  And he remembered Amy McCallum. Dead six years now. He didn't think about her very often—why should he?—but he found himself remembering regatta day on the lake in 2000. Mostly what he remembered was himself, how he saw it all in an instant—that he was going to let the McCallum kid drown.

  Steve Beck had outsailed him, finding those slivers of wind all the rest of them missed, sensing the perfect moment to come about like it was written in water bugs on the surface of the water. Beck, in his scuffed-up Invitation he had bought cheap off an old cottager who no longer even took it out of his boathouse. Beck, who had met Mo McCallum somehow in Toronto over the winter, rounding her like just another marker, easing into their world on that lake whether or not he belonged. And then came the news, at cocktails at the Dineens’ three days before the regatta. The wedding plans. Mo and Steve Beck. Sometime in the fall.

  And he watched all his own careful preparations—over two long years—with Mo McCallum vanish. How he had circled her, kept her in sight, while he figured out she would dash if he moved too fast. He could tell by the set of her shoulders, by the slender muscles in her feet. So he settled on the dinners with her at Susur and North in Toronto, bankrolled by his savings, drives in the olive-green MG convertible he had borrowed from his roommate Chad, and topped by the schooner cruise through the Carolina lowlands, after he talked her into leaving the brat with the nanny for five days. It was there he finally had her, had her good, every night in a row, keeping it easy, while he consolidated his position.

  Then suddenly there he was on the Dineens’ deck, there among the canapés and the seagulls and the shrieking pleasure of all the others, his heart no more than red coals caving into ash, having to shake Beck's hand, and kiss Mo McCallum's beautiful cheek with a smile so slash-like he thought his lips would part over his teeth.

  He never gave her Beck's message that day when she was helping out in the Wellers’ kitchen. Could you tell Mo I'm going to race after all and can't watch Amy? He didn't give her the message because he suddenly thought that deliberate oversight might lead somewhere interesting. And when he rounded Wendigo Pass, racing alone in his Laser, he took in two very separate sights that changed his life.

  In the far distance he could just about make out the Invitation, becalmed near the final marker. Beck the frontrunner—Beck who had won Mo McCallum, Beck who in one month had delighted all the cottagers he himself had worked on for years, Beck who was the seat of every thwarted hope—had lost the wind. And near at hand he could see Amy McCallum all by herself, toddling over the rocks jutting out from the Wellers’ island, bending, reaching for stones, reaching—

  He could have called out to the kid, he could have swum to her faster than he could have reached her in the Laser, but he didn't because he suddenly saw as clear as the sky on race day that forces were coming together that he could summon. He was going to let her drown and he'd fix it to lay the blame at Beck's feet.

  So he let the sail luff while he watched the kid spot something under-water—maybe a fish—and point it out to nobody, stump two little steps closer to it and tumble off the rock. She splashed only once and slipped under. The last he saw of her were loose yellow curls floating black from the weight of the water, then gone.

  How long to give it? Two minutes? Five? Could he spare ten? Any minute some kids in a Sunfish would come rounding the bend into Wendigo Pass and he had work to do. Nearly five minutes—it would have to be enough. He pushed the tiller to leeward, sheeted in and headed there on a beam reach. Then he grabbed his collapsible paddle to bring her up, pulling the body into the boat, and covering it with a windbreaker. One less complication in a life with Mo McCallum and the McCallum millions that was suddenly seeming very possible again.

  He set a course through the pass, catching a glint of metal on the Talbot side, seeing old Polly wheeling herself back up the path. How much had she seen? He twisted away from her, mouthing Fuck to the sky, and kicked at the body with his bare foot. Then he sailed right for Beck, having to reach him and dump the kid overboard before Beck could catch the wind and beat him to the finish line.

  As he closed in, he hiked out, away from the spectators cheering at the front of the Wellers’ island. It was perfect, an ecstasy of risk, and nobody saw a thing when he tipped the body into the lake just twenty feet from Beck, who was distracted by the sudden wind he must have thought had abandoned him—like his luck. For how could Steve Beck ever explain to the grieving mother's satisfaction that he had sat there with not a goddamn thing to do for twenty minutes and not seen poor little Amy walk right into the lake?

  "Rukhi?"

  Two dark eyes met his in the rearview mirror, as the limo glided around the corner onto Yorkville. “Mr Wakeman?"

  There was Mo McCallum up ahead, stepping out of the condo building right on time, her blond hair swirling up around her ears in the breeze, wearing a light camel coat that hung well over the shoulders he had always worried would carry her away. “Pull over up ahead, Rukhi,” he said. “There's my wife."

  * * * *

  She liked the lake in October because she didn't know it well. Birches yellowed, and the loons were rafting up to leave for the winter. The town, only ten minutes away by boat, felt as remote as the wind. The cottagers had all closed up and left for the year, so the work of seeming normal to these good people she had known all her life, which included her life before Amy, was done for a while. There was no one she could tell that the Mo McCallum they used to know was now making her home in the raven's kruk, or the silent whitecaps that had their own places to go.

  It was simply what had happened to her when Amy died six years ago. So much was spoken and so little made sense that it all just sounded like buzzing.

  told you to

  no, I don't

  were standing hear me?

  know I didn't

  Mo, for supposed to be

  maybe you'd—

  After a time, she wasn't crushed, she wasn't even bedeviled. Something lifted her, finally, and she only pretended her feet touched the ground so that others wouldn't comment. Something made her continue to clothe herself because she realized she still had a form and needed to pay attention to those things. But she was now as diaphanous as the wing of a dragonfly and she had felt herself relocate to a place unreachable by all her old passions and sorrows.

  She took the news four years ago that Steve Beck had slid off a mountain with that odd, concentrated airiness that filled her at those times and made her arms drift up from her sides. She couldn't call up any of the old warm presence of Steve Beck—it wasn't something within the powers of a thin, crinkling dragonfly wing—but she sat for a while at the Toronto waterfront and sent her mind out over Lake Ontario, as if she could connect with him somehow, just for a moment, in that place where all airy things collid
e and veer, without regret.

  In the years since the regatta of 2000, Mo had placed herself at the head of the McCallum Foundation because a mere canister with a brain that was passing for human could at least get some work done. And she had. And she had married Rick Wakeman, finally, because he had a head for business and she could tolerate sharing her closets and bed and dinner table with him.

  Mo puttered the sixteen-footer slowly around the shallows of what had been Polly Talbot's island. When Polly had died—her heart gave out the same day Amy drowned—and her estate finally settled three years ago, the cottage had come to Rick, and they were finally putting the place up for sale. Mo took on the job of deciding just what Polly's place needed, while Rick took out the Laser for one final sail of the year before they finished closing up their own cottage in the northern part of the lake, and leaving until next spring after the ice went out.

  She had walked around Polly's island making notes into her digital voice recorder—new flashing around the chimney, three fallen trees that have to be cleared, torn screens in the main cottage—and now she was looking the place over from the water. The main dock was floating, probably dislodged ever since all the rain early in the summer when the lake reached a new high-water mark. Mo carefully avoided looking over at the sloping rock at the southeast point of the Wellers,’ where the spectators had stood during the regatta—and waited, later, while divers brought up Amy.

  Even in the lee of the island, Mo felt the cold wind hit all the places she hadn't covered with fleece as she took the boat around the back of Polly's, near Wendigo Pass, where she checked out what was left of the old swimming dock. She shifted into neutral while she rambled into the recorder. Beautiful setting here, lots of red pines, the rock kind of a natural waterfront. It might really be worth rebuilding the old Talbot swim dock, Rick. While she talked she drifted, and the wind pushed her closer to the Weller side of Wendigo Pass. She was unfamiliar with the spot, couldn't read the shallows, what with the overcast, so she pulled up the motor and grabbed an oar in case she had to jab herself away from the rocks.

  Then in a strip of cool October sunlight, the yellow birches on the Weller side of the pass shone. Light waves splashed the side of her boat and she heard the conversational kruk of a raven at the very top of a tall white pine. Pushed toward the rocks, Mo kept her oar ready as she watched the thin sunlight stream over the water, changing it from something dark and impenetrable—in the third week of October, a fatal 12?—to a place where she could see a fish dart and soft brown algae reach up from the bottom.

  Not far from shore, maybe in four feet of water, something glinted. A lure on a broken line? It was blue. Mo leaned carefully over the side of the boat, trying to make it out. Rocks, boulders, sticks, algae. What could possibly be blue that had a place there with everything else? The sun continued bright, and Mo saw something else, strange and white, next to the flashing underwater blue. So many things, finally, are castaways. So many things are just dragonfly wings.

  She took her oar and carefully drove the strange white thing over the submerged rocks, going back to snag the blue lure before she lost it down there in a cloud of disturbed dirt. Mo worked with the oar, teasing the white thing up to a place where she could grab it if she rolled up her sleeve. Then she pushed the oar slowly back over to the blue lure, twisting delicately to get under it before it sank between the rocks. She angled it finally onto the blade of the oar, which she levered carefully out of the water.

  Her fingers lifted the lure.

  Which wasn't a lure at all.

  It was a bracelet, a bracelet of tiny blue metal beads.

  On a thin elastic band.

  The kind of thing a child might wear—

  Amy.

  She could see Amy, there at the landing—all of them, Steve, Polly, Mo, Amy—her eyes big, sitting in Mo's lap, dancing her little bare arms in the warm June sun, watching the play of the light on all the loose strands of many-colored bracelets while Mo read to her about butterflies and Steve loaded the houseboat.

  Mo set the cold blue bracelet on the wooden seat, next to her, her fingers cramped like claws from fear and cold. Very carefully she took the oar, the chill starting at her wrists, a chill that had nothing to do with October, as she lowered the oar back into the water, heading right for the white object, which kept slipping off the oar, first to one side, then the other.

  With a cry Mo tore off her jacket and plunged her arm into the lake, her other arm ramming the oar down between two boulders to keep the boat steady. She felt the thing tickling just a hair past her fingertips, but then she caught it between two fingers and tugged slowly against the water to bring it up.

  What she held in her hand was a clear, plastic sandal.

  Amy's missing jelly shoe.

  Mo sank to the floor of her boat, her fingers trembling as she set the blue metal bracelet inside the shoe and held them long enough for the clouds to move in front of the sun, but not long enough to bring back Amy. How in the name of God did they get here? She placed them on the seat and stood up in the boat, gently rocking in the wind, looking around. Mo lowered the motor, pulled the cord, and headed farther into Wendigo Pass.

  She looked at the place ten feet up from the water where Polly Talbot's path ended. No, I'll just watch the race from my own land's end, dear, Polly had said when Mo offered to ferry her over. And Mo could tell that from that spot Polly had a view of all the colorful sails as they came through—and Polly died sometime that afternoon. Did something alarm her?

  Mo remembered the end of the race, when Rick had rounded the final marker, hiked out dramatically, underscoring his own win as he passed Steve and skimmed over the finish line. Steve came in second, followed by the rest of the sailboats, so close to each other that Tom Fellows yelled something about a school of Sunfish, and the crowd cheered while someone honked the air horn.

  It was Rick who had sailed the race alone.

  All the way.

  Too far behind Steve.

  Too far ahead of the others.

  Alone through Wendigo Pass.

  Amy's shoe and bracelet were in the shallows off the pass because—Mo turned the boat in a tight circle, staring at nothing—because that's where Amy drowned. How did she get to the final marker, where Steve sat, losing the race, losing it all? Did a current carry her, all that way, in three hours? It could, it had to, that's how it happened—but Mo knew the lake, and knew there was no true current, only fickleness, determined by whichever way the wind came over the water on any given day. So, how—

  She slammed into neutral and staggered to her feet, seeing the rocks, the path, the Laser alone between them. The child, the old woman, the man alone between them. And as she staggered to her feet, she pushed her hands away from her face and looked down at herself. Herself. Mo McCallum. It was Mo McCallum that lay across the finish line that day. She howled into the wilderness of sun and water, and the birds rose crashing from the treetops, driven into the great true silences of her own ruptured heart.

  Mo rode all the way back to their cottage with the throttle wide open, and pulled up rough alongside their own dock, where she tied up while she got what she needed and headed out again in the cold gray afternoon. She ran the boat fast over to Veil Point—nobody. Changed direction and cut across the waves to the secondary channel past the Dineens’ island—nobody. Then she headed down to Fortune's Strait, another favorite sailing spot because there were no shoals.

  There was the Laser.

  A red starburst on a tall sail.

  It helps to know a husband's habits, Mo thought as she idled, loading her dad's double-barreled shotgun, then setting it beside her. The Laser was clipping along, and when it had reached a point far enough away from any island, Mo opened up all 25 horses and headed right for her husband, who was hiked out like it mattered, hiked out with the kind of extravagance he had needed the day he had pushed Amy overboard.

  He started to scramble as he heard the boat approach, trying to see what
was heading his way, but she announced herself by tucking the shotgun up tight under her other arm and blasting several good holes through the sail. At the last possible moment, she veered to the left, ramming his hull, and capsizing the sailboat. She had to work fast, pulling right up against the bow of the Laser, plunging her hands into the water to hook a tow line through the bow eye, and roaring off in her sixteen-footer, towing the sailboat out of her husband's reach.

  While he cursed, sputtering, “What the fuck—?” she did a tight turn, stopping not twenty feet away from where he trod water, and faced him. His eyes were wild as he tried to shake off the cold water—and when he realized it was Mo, Mo McCallum, his wife, his millions, and that a shotgun was leveled at his chest, he got very still and worked on sounding reasonable. “Mo! What do you think you—"

  As he started to swim toward her, she blasted the water in front of him—he shrieked and hurled himself backwards—then quickly re-loaded and snapped the barrel closed. She checked her watch. One minute, maybe a minute and a half, he'd been in. One hundred fifty-five pounds—it was comforting to know he weighed himself daily and always reported the results—in 12? water, how long could he last? Twenty minutes? Longer? Before he slipped under for good she wanted the truth out of him.

  She switched on her recorder and held it up in her left hand. “Tell me about Amy,” she shouted. “And speak up."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I found her shoe, in Wendigo Pass. And her bracelet."

  A wave broke against his jaw. “Let me in the boat."

  "No. First tell me about Amy."

  "First let me in the fucking boat."

  She was filled with regret. “Then tell me about Polly."

  He nearly lifted himself out of the water with rage. “No!"

  He kicked violently toward her. She blasted him back, watching the shot plink into the steely gray water, this time closer to him, nicking an arm. “Goddamn crazy bitch,” he screamed, flinging himself onto his back to inspect his arm, shaking.