“No, at the worst, we’d be swept away in the freezing water and drown.”
“Yeah. Well.” He tightened his hold on her. “I’m going to try it. I want you to sit tight on these stairs.”
“So I can be the girl from Titanic who stays high and dry while you, the guy, vanish beneath the icy waves? I don’t think so.”
“Didn’t we just agree you should have stayed in the car?”
“I was joking.”
“Clare.” Maybe it was the total darkness that made his voice so intimate. “If anything were to happen to you, I’d…”
“You’d what?”
The darkness, and the sense that they were the only inhabitants of a world bound by the unseen walls stretching out around them.
“I’d walk into my brother-in-law’s field and lie down and let the corn grow up around me.”
No one else in their world. No costs, no considerations, only two voices in the dark. And honesty.
“Okay. Same here.” She twined her arms over his, hugging him closer. “Remember the helicopter?” She had taken him for a disastrous ride last summer.
“I promise you, I will never, ever forget the helicopter. So long as we both shall live.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “You told me to hold on.”
“So now we’re both holding on. No you going and me staying behind. We sink or swim together.”
He pressed a kiss into her hair. “Even if I said please?”
“No.”
He made a noise deep in his throat.
They sat in silence for a while. Clare was damp where she wasn’t wet, aching with the chill, and both of them reeked. She felt as if she could stay right where she was forever. But the realization of it roused her. They didn’t have forever.
“I may as well get down there and see if I can find this bulkhead before it gets any deeper.” She leaned forward, folding her coat and draping it over one of the steps. She climbed down the stairs and waded into the water.
“Hang on.” She could hear a bumping sound as Russ went down the steps on his rear. He gasped when he hit the water. “I’m coming with you.” He jostled her arm, trailed down and took her hand. “Let’s see. The stairs are parallel to the river side of the building, so the wall should be right-” They struck an uneven patch of stone. “Here,” Russ said. “You go left, I’ll go right.” He gave her hand a squeeze before letting go.
She spread her hands over the dank stone and began her search. Step, sweep. Step, sweep. Cobwebs stroked her face and clung to her hair. She tried not to think of the creepy-crawlies that might be living there. At least nothing was squeaking. The only sounds were the lapping of water against stone, Russ’s periodic huffs of pain as he bore down on his broken leg, and her own chattering teeth. She reached the corner of the building.
“I’m at a corner. Do you want me to continue? This wall runs away from the river, parallel to the street.”
“No, come on back toward me.”
He didn’t have to ask twice. She waded through the water, trailing one hand over the stone to keep her bearings. “Where are you?”
“Right here.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Better. Of course, that’s because it’s gone numb.”
“Mine, too.” Touching his back to orient herself, she moved past him and pressed both hands against the foundation wall. The moldy, old, something-died-in-here smell was worse. She tried not to breathe too deeply. Step, sweep. Step, sweep. “Is it my imagination, or do you feel the water rising?”
“It’s your imagination.”
Imagination or no, the faster they found the bulkhead-if there was one-the sooner they’d be out of this death trap. She increased her pace. So she had no one to blame but herself when she tripped over a knee-high obstacle and tumbled into the water. The shock of the cold took her breath away, and she flailed and scrambled her way back onto her feet.
“Clare? What is it? What happened?”
She forced words from her tightly clenched jaw. “There’s something here. I tripped.”
He bumped into her, and brushed her as he bent over, feeling out the obstacle. She wrapped her arms around herself and shook. I will never be warm again.
“You found it, darlin’.” He straightened, pulled her into a tight embrace, chafed her back. “Steps. It’s a high bulkhead door, which means it may not be underwater. You ready to check it out?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“Good girl.” He released her.
She shuffled forward until her boots struck something hard beneath the water. She stepped up. “Take my hand,” she said. He interlaced his fingers with hers, and she steadied him as he mounted the first step. Stretching out one arm in front of her, she took a second step. The third was above the water. “It’s right here,” she said, thumping a wooden door with her knee. Russ stepped up beside her and she let go of his hand. Stretching up and down, she made out two crossbeams, bracing the vertical planks. “It must go right up to the ceiling.”
She heard his fingers tapping several inches above her reach. “It does,” he said.
The wood was soft and pulpy. Reaching left, she found out why. Water was rolling through the crack between the door and the jamb, running in swift rivulets down to the stone step below. “This thing is leaking,” she said. “There’s water backed up on the other side.”
“Not at the top. Lets see how high it goes.”
She traced the edge of the door upward, past one set of hinges, until her fingers moved past the running water onto damp, flaky wood. “It’s about as high as my neck,” she said.
“I figure there are two possibilities,” he said. “It could be water’s collected in the well created by the outside stairs. In that case, when we open the door, we’ll be hit with a gush. But we’ll be able to walk out once it’s drained.”
“And the second possibility?”
“The river’s risen above its banks here.”
“So when we open the door-”
“It floods the cellar. Right up to your neck.”
She didn’t point out that she was standing on steps that raised her a foot and a half above the floor. If the cellar flooded, it would be well above her neck.
“If that’s the case,” he went on, “the best thing we can do is hang on to the door until the water levels have equalized. Then we can pull ourselves out and hopefully hang on to the building. Once we’ve got our footing, we’ll just walk out of the water to the end of the street.”
“Sure thing. No sweat.”
“Look, I’ll be more than happy if you want to get back up on the top of the stairs and wait. You’ll be above the water there.”
“We’ve already been through that.” She reached to her right and hit his arm. “How do we open the door?”
“There are two wooden bars resting in brackets. Maybe eight inches long, two inches high. One above the door handle, one below.” He shifted. “They’re swollen with all the water. So they’re going to be hard to move.” He stood, silent. She let him think it through. “This is how we’ll do it. I’m going to kick the lower one out of its bracket.”
“How are you going to do that with a broken leg? Maybe that should be my job.”
“Your job is going to be standing behind me and hanging on as tight as you can. The only place we can get a grip and not be washed away to the back wall is the door handle here. I’m going to hold that and you’re going to hold me. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“All right, get underneath my arm here and help me balance myself.”
She ducked beneath his shoulder and took as much of his weight as she could, while he drew his uninjured foot off the floor. His breath hissed between his teeth, and she winced for what he must be feeling.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! He tilted forward and stood on his good leg again.
“Did you get it?”
“I think so.” He bent over, feeling for the bar. “Yeah. The door is bowing out down here. Whatev
er’s behind it, it’s got plenty of force. So hang on.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist and clasped her hands over her wrists. “I’m ready.”
He sidled closer to the door, until his chest was against the planks and she could feel the spongy wood against the backs of her hands. He bent his arm.
Whump! Whump! Whump!
“Shit,” he hissed.
“Stuck?”
He blew his breath out in frustration. “I wish I had my work gloves.”
She could feel his muscles tensing, his whole body weighing in behind the palm of his hand as he beat against the stubborn bar. Whump! Whump! He grunted.
“Anything?”
“Yeah. It gave some. Hang on tight, this next one may do it.”
He brought his arm down a final time, clipping her shoulder, then struck the bar. She felt a shudder, and the door exploded open.
Clare and Russ were flung backward and to the side as the pent-up water crashed through the bulkhead doorway into the cellar. The freezing water battered her, yanking her away from Russ, who was swinging one-handed in the torrent, clawing for the door handle. She dug her fingers into her wrists, locking herself around his waist. A wave slapped her face, leaving her blind and choking, and before she had the chance to hack the water from her mouth another one broke around her, and her head was underwater. She scrabbled at Russ’s shirt, dragging herself up his body. She broke through to the air and gasped.
“-around my neck,” Russ was shouting, and she flung one arm, then the other, around his neck and pushed herself up until her head was level with his. She wrapped her legs around his waist and hung on as they tossed in the torrent hurtling through the confines of the doorway. They pitched from side to side, water sluicing over their faces, floating higher and higher as the river sought its level. She felt Russ’s arms straining downward against the flood tide, clinging to the door handle that had been their lifeline, but now threatened to anchor them under the rising water.
“It’s too low!” she shouted in his ear. “You have to let go!”
“Hang on!” he shouted. She tightened her arms and legs and felt a jolt as he let go one hand and the water tried to sweep them away. He whacked his free hand against the door, fingers scratching for some purchase. His back shifted, he heaved his other hand forward, and they were head and shoulders above the water again. His arms were trembling with the effort of tethering them to the door.
She blinked the water out of her eyes and looked through the doorway, where a patch of steel-wool sky threw off just enough light to limn the bricks of the outer wall and the white froth of the river gushing over the rocky embankment and whirlpooling through the doorway. Russ held them fast through the suck and slop of the water crescendoing in dark currents between the stone walls. They bobbed higher. The cascade eased, from a dam spill to a millrace to a stream. The flow from the river outside eddied around them.
“Hold on,” Russ said. “I’m gonna try to get us out of here.” He released his hold and pulled them, hand over hand, along the upper edge of the door. They were floating so close to the ceiling that Clare bumped her head when Russ hauled forward.
They reached the edge of the bulkhead door. Russ jammed his fingers between the door and its frame. “I’m not going to try to swim across this. The cold. It’s making it hard to move.”
She jerked her head in a nod. From here, the bulkhead opening looked to be a mile wide. Her arms and legs felt heavy, detached. Her hands, clasped around her wrists, seemed to belong to another person. She had stopped shivering, stopped hurting. Instead, she felt numb. Numb and exhausted. And she hadn’t even been working, like Russ had. She had just clung on like a limpet.
“I’m going overhand along the top of the door frame,” he said. “Once we’re out of the bulkhead, I think we’ll be able to walk through the water toward the higher ground.”
She nodded again.
“You okay?”
“Cold.”
He rolled over, facing upward, and reached for the frame. Clare clung to his back, her hair trailing in the water, her face tipped high so she could breathe. Hand by hand, he carried them across the current. Her head bumped against something solid.
“Wall,” she said.
He turned, plunging his hands in the water, feeling for the top of the bulkhead’s outer wall. “Got it,” he said. His voice was thin. Tired. “I’m holding on to it. Climb over my back up onto the bank. It’s only about a foot underwater there. Keep to the building.”
Clare had to flex her hands to get them to unlock. Her muscles were cramped and unwieldy. She could barely control her arms and legs as she splashed and floundered over Russ. For a second, reaching down past his head and feeling only more water, she panicked, until she struck the rubble that made up the narrow strip of land between the riverbed and the chandlery. She crawled onto it, turned to face Russ, and collapsed. The water came to her chest. “Give me your hands,” she said. “I’ll pull you over.”
His flesh had all the warmth of a dead fish. She tightened her grip on his hands, braced her unfeeling feet against the edge of the bulkhead’s stone wall, and, pushing and pulling, hauled him out of the pool that was the entrance to the cellar.
He flailed his way onto the submerged embankment and sagged against her, panting. “We gotta get out of here,” he said when he had caught his breath.
Leaning on each other, they lurched to their feet. Standing, the water was up to her shins. Russ steered her toward the side of the building, and pressed to the wet bricks for balance, they staggered over the uneven, moss-slick stones of the embankment. Her clothes were so sodden, and her legs so deadened, that she didn’t realize they were walking out of the river’s overflow until she noticed that the slosh-slap of her steps had changed to a squish-squelch of boots on rock. She moved away from the wall. “Let me help you,” she said, shouldering beneath his arm to act as his crutch. They stumbled over garbage and up the eroded slope to the road, and she could see Margy Van Alstyne’s car, and it was the most welcome sight in the world.
They crossed the road like zombies. Russ popped open the driver’s door, and Clare staggered around to the other side. They fell in at the same time, clunking the doors shut behind them. It took Russ three tries to get the keys out of his pants pocket, and when he finally started the engine and they were hit with the first blast of hot air from the vents, Clare went boneless. They sat in silence.
After a minute, she noticed his cell phone, dangling from the car charger. She tugged on the curly cord, fishing the phone off the floor. “Look,” she said. “You’re still connected to my phone.” Which was lying somewhere at the bottom of the submarine cellar.
Russ didn’t open his eyes. “Hear anything?”
She pressed the phone to her ear. “Glug, glug,” she said. He rolled his head to look at her. She started to laugh. He blinked, then started to laugh as well. They laughed and laughed until their bodies shook and the Camry rocked and tears rolled down their cheeks.
Eventually, they wound down to gasps and sighs. She pressed the off button, hanging up on the river, and handed him the phone. He stared at it as if he was having a problem remembering what it was for. He looked at her. “If you were Allan Rouse, where would you be right now?”
“Home with my wife.”
“That’s my guess, too.” He punched in a number.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m going to send two cars over there. I’m going to have one of ’em stop at the station for some dry clothes. And I’m going to drive to Rouse’s house and nail that son of a bitch to the wall.”
Chapter 38
NOW
They pulled up behind a black-and-white already parked outside the Rouses’ home. Butted up against Russ, supporting him as he limped to the door, Clare felt like a half-drowned cat returning home to the man who had stuffed her in a sack and tossed her in the river. The cold rain was a misery on her just-thawing skin. She thought the e
vening had inured her to further shock, but she blinked in surprise when the door was opened by Mrs. Marshall.
“Good God.” Mrs. Marshall stepped aside, wrinkling her nose at the smell. They limped into the entrance hall. “What on earth happened to you?”
Clare could hear a drone of voices from the living room. “It’s a long story,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
Through the archway, she could see Renee Rouse, hovering over Officer Mark Durkee, who was reading the Miranda warning from a laminated card to a crumpled, raggedy figure curled up in the recliner. “Do you understand these rights as I have told them to you?” Durkee said.
“I…” Allan Rouse looked past him to Russ and Clare. He gaped. “I…”
“You tell him what the charges are yet?” Russ asked.
“We’re starting with breaking and entering, resisting arrest, false imprisonment and attempted homicide.” Durkee said.
“No!” Mrs. Rouse said.
Russ looked at her. “The good doctor here locked me and Reverend Fergusson into a flooding cellar. If we hadn’t managed to break out, officer Durkee would be fishing for our corpses tomorrow.”
“But-I didn’t-” Rouse’s face crumpled in on itself. “I never meant to hurt anybody!” He burst into sloppy sobs, burying his face in his hands.
Russ squelched into the barrel chair that Clare had so delicately perched on about a million years ago. He looked around the tastefully decorated room, stopping when his eyes fell on Mrs. Marshall. “Ma’am, what are you doing here? Did you know about Dr. Rouse’s reappearance?”
Mrs. Marshall stood as far away from the rest of them as she could while still being in the room. “I did not. I arrived here a few minutes ago and was as surprised as you to see Allan back home.”
“What brought you here in such lousy weather?”
“Renee called. She sounded distraught. She asked me to please come over.” She looked at Clare, dripping onto the Aubusson carpet, at Dr. Rouse in his homeless-man disguise, and at Officer Durkee, snapping cuffs on the doctor. Her spine stiffened. “So far, this whole day has been an extraordinary and unpleasant novelty.”
Out Of The Deep I Cry Page 36