The River King

by Alice Hoffman

  “There was a mix-up with the film,” Abe quickly decided. “Some old photograph already on the film was overlaid on top of the one you took in his room. That would explain it, wouldn’t it?”

  “You mean a double exposure?”

  “That’s what it is.” She had him going for a minute there. He’d actually felt the cold hand that people say reaches out when the border between this world and the next splits apart. “It’s just a mistake.”

  “There’s only one problem with that theory. The water. He’s drenched. How do you explain that?”

  They both stared at the photograph. Streams of water ran down Gus’s face, as if he’d risen from the river, as if he’d been held down too long and had already turned blue. There were the weeds threaded through his hair, and his clothes were so sopping that a puddle of water had collected on the floorboards at his feet.

  “Do you mind if I keep this for a while?”

  When Betsy agreed, Abe placed the photograph in his jacket pocket. It was his imagination, of course, but it was almost as though he could feel the damp outline of the image against his ribs. “That girl who was in Gus’s room before you took the photographs, I thought I might talk to her.”

  “Carlin.” Betsy nodded. “She’s usually at the pool. I think she was Gus’s only friend.”

  “Sometimes one is enough.” Abe paid for their coffees. “If it’s the right person.”

  They went out into the sunlight where a few bees rumbled around the white chrysanthemums Pete’s wife, Eileen, had set in an earthenware pot in front of the store. Across the street was Rita Eamon’s ballet school, where Joey’s daughter Emily took lessons, as well as Zeke Harris’s dry-cleaning shop, established more than forty years earlier. Abe knew every shop owner and every street corner, just as he knew that anyone born and raised in this village who was foolish enough to get involved with someone from the Haddan School deserved whatever consequences he received.

  “We could have dinner sometime,” Abe suggested. Immediately, he rethought the invitation, which sounded too serious and too formal. “No big deal,” he amended. “Just some food on a plate.”

  Betsy laughed, but her expression was cloudy. “Actually, I don’t think we should see each other again.”

  Well, he’d gone and done it, made a complete idiot of himself. He noticed that one of those damned swans from the school was traipsing along the sidewalk across the street, hissing at Nikki Humphrey, who had been on her way over to the 5&10 Cent Bank to make a deposit, but had become too alarmed to proceed.

  “I’m getting married,” Betsy went on to explain. She was smart enough to know that not everything a person might want was necessarily good for her. What if she were to sit down with a dozen chocolate bars and devour each one? What if she drank red wine until she swooned? “June seventeenth. The Willow Room at the inn.”

  Across the street, Nikki Humphrey was waving her hands around, trying her best to shoo away the swan. Abe should have gone over to help her out, but he remained in the doorway of the pharmacy. Plenty of people arranged weddings, but not every one went off exactly as planned.

  “I’m not asking to be invited to the reception,” he commented.

  “Good.” Betsy laughed. “You won’t be.”

  She must be insane to be standing out here with him; she’d be better off anywhere else. But even on a beautiful day, it was impossible to predict behavior, human or otherwise. The swan across the street, for instance, provoked by the crowds and the heat, was going wild. It had scared Nikki Humphrey off the sidewalk and into the Lucky Day flower shop and was now crossing Main Street against the green light. Several cars screeched to a halt. People who couldn’t see the swan leaned on their horns, wishing an official was present to direct traffic. Abe should have sorted out the mess himself—someone could get hurt with that swan flapping around in the middle of the street—yet he stayed where he was.

  “You could invite me to something else,” he said, as if he were a man who asked for rejection on a regular basis. “Anything other than a wedding, and I’ll be there.”

  Betsy was unable to gauge whether or not he truly meant this declaration. She was staring at the swan, which had stopped in the middle of the road, plucking at its feathers and causing a tie-up of cars that reached all the way to Deacon Road.

  “I’ll think it over,” she said, lightly. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Do that,” Abe said when she walked away. “Good to see you,” he called, as if they were merely two people who had cordially exchanged recipes or household tips, suggesting vinegar for sunburn, perhaps, or olive oil for damaged woodwork.

  Mike Randall, the president of the 5&10 Cent Bank, had come out to the street in his shirtsleeves, his suit jacket in hand. He went right up to the swan and shook his coat as though it were a matador’s cape until at last the stubborn bird took flight, hissing as it rose into the air, and still sputtering angrily when it landed on the walkway in front of Mrs. Jeremy’s house.

  “Hey,” Mike called to Abe when he caught sight of him, all moony and distracted in front of the pharmacy, standing in a square of sunlight and blinking his eyes like a lovesick boy. “What were you waiting for? A head-on collision?”

  It was more like a train wreck, actually, the kind Abe had seen back when he was a kid and the train into Boston jumped the rails. For weeks afterward bits of clothing and shoes without soles could be found along the tracks. Abe had accompanied his grandfather to help search for personal items, such as wallets and keys. The accident was unavoidable and unstoppable; it had taken people unawares, so that they were tying their shoes or catching a catnap, completely unprepared for what was to come.

  Late in the day, when the sky was turning inky and the last of the geese flew above Haddan traveling south, Abe drove over to the school and parked in the lot closest to the river. By then, the weather had begun to change, as everyone knew it would. Before long, all traces of the heat wave would be gone. Abe went around a mud puddle that would freeze solid by morning. He knew his way to the gym; local kids had always been envious of the basketball court and especially coveted the indoor pool. One night, when they were seniors in high school, Abe and Joey and Teddy Humphrey, along with half a dozen other guys they hung out with, spent an evening getting loaded, thinking of new ways to stir up trouble. Somehow, they’d chosen the Haddan pool as their target. They’d walked in during swim practice as though they owned the place, drunk on beer and fury, brimming with the sort of courage numbers can bring. They’d stripped off their clothes and dived right in, shouting and cursing, having a grand old time, naked as the day they were born.

  The Haddan students who’d been swimming laps got out as fast as they could. Abe still recalled the look on one girl’s face, the contempt in her glare. They were pigs to her, nothing more, morons who were easily amused by their own stupid stunts and would never amount to anything. One guy, Abe could no longer remember who, got up on the ladder and peed into the deep end, then was wildly applauded for his efforts. It was then Abe found himself agreeing with the girl who had considered them so disgusting.

  He was the first to get out of the pool; he pulled his jeans and T-shirt over his wet body, and it was lucky for them all that he did, for someone had phoned the police and Abe was the one who heard the sirens. He alerted his friends and they hightailed it out of the gym before Ernest could walk in and blame Abe for everything, the way he always did back then.

  This evening, Abe was well within his rights as an officer to come looking for Carlin at the pool, yet he felt the same trepidation he had all those years ago. He went along the tiled corridor until he reached the glass partition through which it was possible to peer down at the swimmers. The girls on the team all wore black bathing suits and caps, but he could pick Carlin out right away. It was her attitude that distinguished her from the others. She was a strong swimmer, clearly the best on the team; she had talent, but most likely it was ambition that drove her, for when other girls got out of the
pool, Carlin kept on, exerting herself in a way the others did not.

  The rest of her teammates were already showered and dressed by the time Carlin dragged herself out of the pool. She sat on the ledge and pulled off her goggles; her black bathing cap made her head look as sleek as a seal’s. She swung her legs back and forth in the water and closed her burning eyes; her heart was pounding from exertion, her arms ached.

  When she heard someone rap on the glass, Carlin looked up, expecting to see Harry, but instead, she spied Abel Grey. Carlin should have been upset to have a cop come looking for her, but actually she was relieved. Being with Harry had been difficult lately; whenever they were together, she had to hide a piece of herself: all her sorrow, all her grief. She had stopped going to the dining hall at mealtimes, in part because she had no interest in food, but also as a way to avoid Harry. Unfortunately, he still expected Carlin to be exactly as she was when he first saw her on the library steps, but she wasn’t that girl anymore. Now, she was the friend left behind, the one who couldn’t stop wondering what it might be like to see light filtering deep underwater, to breathe in water lilies and stones rather than air.

  “Harry was looking for you,” Amy would inevitably say when Carlin came in at night from walking the paths Gus had taken, along the lanes and through the alleyways. “I don’t know why you treat him the way you do.”

  Often, when Harry phoned or came calling, Carlin would have Amy tell him she was asleep or suffering from a migraine. “You’re very peculiar,” Amy marveled at such times. “Which is probably why he wants you. He grew up with girls like me.”

  It was too much work to be with Harry, to pretend life was made up of fun and games, when it was sorrow and river water Carlin was thinking of. At least she could be herself with this cop, as cold and as distant as she wished to be.

  “What do you want?” she called to Abe, her voice echoing off the tiled walls.

  Abe made a talking motion with his hand as though he were throwing a shadow puppet onto the tiles.

  Carlin pointed to the door. “Meet me out front.”

  She went to the locker room, toweled dry, then dressed without bothering to shower. She found Abe outside, waiting beside Dr. Howe’s statue. It was four-thirty but the sky was already darkening, except for the farthest horizon where there was still one delirious band of blue. The weather had returned to the usual chill of November, cold enough for ice crystals to form in Carlin’s wet hair. It was foolish, she knew, but in the very back of her mind, she hoped this cop had searched her out to inform her that a mistake had been made and that Gus had been found. That’s what Carlin wanted to hear: it was some other ill-fated boy who had fallen in the river and drowned.

  Abe patted Dr. Howe’s statue on the foot. Luck in love, he’d heard, came from doing so, although he’d never put much stock in such tales. “What a creep this guy was,” Abe said of the illustrious headmaster. “A real fuddy-duddy”

  “Supposedly, he screwed everything he could get his hands on.” The cold center that had been growing inside Carlin ever since Gus’s death was rattling around in her chest. “Didn’t you know? He was a womanizer.”

  “Dr. Howe? I thought he was a bookworm.”

  “Bookworms have sex. It’s just lousy.” Or at least this was true for Harry, who had gotten more and more selfish, until it seemed he didn’t really care who he was with, as long as she was a living, breathing girl who did as she was told.

  Carlin took out her cigarettes, suggesting to Abe that they walk behind the gym, so she could smoke. As he followed her, Abe recognized her coat as the same one the dead boy had been wearing when they found him.

  “Smoking will slow down your swimming.” In spite of Carlin’s bad temper, Abe pitied her. She looked so lost inside that big coat; you couldn’t even see her hands.

  “Gee whiz.” Carlin lit up, that cold kernel throbbing right beside her heart. “No one ever told me that before.”

  “Fine. If that’s the way you want it, go on. Don’t give a shit. You’ve got my permission.”

  In spite of Gus’s heavy black coat, Carlin was shivering. “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? My smoking?”

  She was shaky, either from the exertion of swimming or because she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She simply couldn’t stop feeling bad no matter how hard she tried. Every now and then she sneaked into the bathroom and took the straight razor to her arm. This cold thing inside her had taken root and changed her into a foul little girl whose hair was turning green at the edges and who wanted to hurt someone, most of all herself.

  “I came to talk to you because I’m trying to figure out what happened to your friend.”

  Carlin let out a short, harsh laugh, then quickly covered her mouth with her hand.

  “Is that funny? Did I miss something?”

  Carlin blinked back tears. “He’s been contacting me. Gus or his spirit, or whatever. I know it sounds stupid. I don’t even believe in any of it. It’s crazy, right?”

  She looked so desperate then, with her pale hair and her even paler face, that Abe couldn’t bring himself to tell her about the photograph in his pocket for fear she’d be even more disturbed. He couldn’t tell her how many times his own brother had spoken to him; night after night, he had heard his brother’s voice, and what’s more, he had wanted to. Even now there were times when he said Frank’s name aloud in the dark, still hoping for an answer.

  “He keeps leaving me things.” Carlin punctuated her words with puffs of smoke. “Stones. Water lilies. Sand. I find fish all the time, little silver ones. And that’s not all. I can hear him when it’s quiet. It sounds like water, but I know it’s him.”

  Abe waited politely as Carlin wiped her eyes with the back of her hands, then lit another cigarette from the one that had already burned down to ash. Watching her, Abe was grateful he was no longer young.

  “Maybe he’s leaving you things and maybe he isn’t, but what I’m interested in is how he died,” Abe told the girl when she’d composed herself. “I just have this need to be convinced, and when it comes to Gus, I’m not convinced of anything. Too many questions, not enough answers. So maybe you can answer something for me. Did he talk about suicide?”

  “Never,” Carlin said. “I already told Mr. Pierce, Gus would have left me a note. Even if it was just to make me feel worse, he would have written something down.”

  Of course, Abe knew that not everyone discussed such plans. You could live with someone in the very next room and have no idea what he might be capable of. As for Carlin, she appreciated the fact that Abe hadn’t tried to comfort her the way most people would have. He was honest, and his doubts matched her own. He took a notepad from his pocket and jotted down his phone number.

  “Call me if you hear anything about your friend. If he ate corned beef hash on the night when he died, I want to know. Any detail, no matter how unimportant it seems, I’d like to hear about it. These things can add up when you put them all together. You’d be surprised.”

  “Okay.” Carlin had discovered that she didn’t feel quite as vicious anymore. Her wet hair was freezing into disorderly strands and the black coat coiled around her legs as she walked with Abe across campus.

  When St. Anne’s came into view, Abe could see what was surely Betsy Chase’s window. In all probability, Betsy had not thought to lock her windows, not here in Haddan, where the nights were so safe. For an instant, Abe thought he saw her, but it was only Miss Davis out on the porch, trying to fill her bird feeder with seed.

  “I’d better go,” Carlin said. “I work for her.”

  In the settling darkness, the thicket of quince beside Miss Davis’s door trembled as the nesting finches fluttered with anticipation. Abe could tell that Helen Davis was ill; it wasn’t her age that gave her away, but how carefully she lifted each handful of seed, as if such things were too heavy for flesh and blood to manage.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Carlin called. She would hardly have time to fix the cheese pudding a
nd fruit salad she’d intended to serve; Miss Davis would have to make do with sliced cantaloupe and cottage cheese.

  Helen peered through the darkness. “Of course you’re late if you’re spending all your time wandering around with strange men.” She may have been speaking to Carlin, but it was Abe she was staring at.

  “He’s with the police,” Carlin informed Helen Davis as she went inside to get supper on the table. “I was safe the whole time.”

  Right away, Abe noticed there were no locks on Miss Davis’s windows. He went to appraise her door. Exactly as he thought, one of those useless hook and eyes any six-year-old could get past. “Your security is practically nonexistent.”

  “Are you always such a worrywart?” Helen Davis was intrigued. Ridiculous, but she was actually quite breathless in this man’s presence.

  “No, ma’am,” Abe said. “I was the guy breaking in.”

  “Were you?” Helen tilted her head, the better to see him through the shadows. “You don’t have to worry about me. No one would dare bother me. I’ve scared everyone off.” Helen had finished with the bird feeder, she should have gone in and had her supper, but she could not remember when such a handsome man had appeared on her back porch.

  Abe laughed at Miss Davis’s remarks. He liked to be surprised by people and Helen Davis had surprised him. He’d expected some snooty sourpuss, but clearly he’d been wrong.

  “If anyone broke in, they’d get nothing for their efforts,” Helen assured Abe.

  Beyond the thicket of quince, a motionless creature lay in wait below the bird feeder.

  “What do you know.” Abe whistled, then turned back to Helen. “There’s my cat.”

  “That’s Midnight,” Helen corrected him. “My cat.”

  “It looks a hell of a lot like mine. Hey you,” Abe called.

  The cat turned to him disdainfully and glared. A nasty disposition and one yellow eye. No mistake about it.