by Tom Bouman
Anna had not only lived that night, but awoke safe in her bed the next morning, damp bedclothes the only sign of her swim. For days, she kept silent about the drowned man and avoided the lake, until she couldn’t.
One bright day Anna put on a light, too-large dress of navy blue cotton, and brought another old one to change into. She approached the lake through the green woods, avoiding the deer trails that the fishermen took to get there. From behind a mountain laurel, she watched and waited. Sure she was alone, she slipped down a bank of red pine needles and into the water, then under.
She felt no change. She surfaced, dove again, this time forcing herself to open her eyes as she had done that night. She saw nothing but mud, rocks, roots, and pondweed. Swimming out farther, Anna took a huge breath and descended as far as she dared, just to the tops of the weeds thicketing the lake floor. She stayed there until she would either have to surface or die. She tried to breathe, couldn’t, and panicked. Her dress flowed around her, dragging. She thrashed close enough to shore to climb her way above the surface.
She waited several more days and into a night when her father passed out, his liquored breath filling the cabin. She eased out the door and walked down to the lake under a belt of stars. She stripped to a thin dress and stepped into the water, the mud squirming up between her toes. She felt leeches on her feet and floated to brush them off, then gave up and let the worms feed. Beside her on the surface was a bladder she’d blown up and cinched with twine.
At first, Anna was unaware that she’d gone under. But at some point, she felt the absence of air. The surface above her—or was it below?—filled her with peace, and though it had been some time since she’d taken a breath, she didn’t miss it. In the deep of the lake, she became aware of currents, gentle at first, fanning out in a direction she could no longer be sure of knowing. A glow near the lake’s floor. From even a short distance, it appeared as if the weeds dancing below her gave out the light, but, sinking closer, Anna found strands or locks of something very small, possibly alive, moving with some purpose, twisting in the underwater grove.
Again, she awoke safe and damp in her own bedroom, with sounds of her father stirring beyond her door in the room that worked as their kitchen, dining room, and parlor. The odor of pipe smoke and liquor would cover, she hoped, the wild rot scent of the lake.
Alone on one page, “The oceans of other worlds.”
Anna did not plan to live with her father, Bernard, forever. He was a distiller tolerated by their community, and for reasons unknown to her, he wouldn’t move from their homestead in the hills, not for anything. Anna was not tied to that spot. Though she was young and poor, and lacking in the education to cut a self-reliant figure in any kind of town, she could hunt, fish, farm, butcher, cook, sew, and read.
Anna was both drawn to and frightened of Maiden’s Grove. She knew in her body that she could live beneath its surface, and she knew in her mind that this was impossible. If her mother had been home, Anna would have found a way to see if she wasn’t alone after all. But as long as Anna had been aware of the lack of a mother, her mother had not been there. Questions about it drew only silence from her father, then suspicious glances, then threats, and one night, the beginning of a beating that Anna escaped after the first few blows. She’d walked to town, the handful of houses scattered into a valley like seed, there to seek the protection and maybe work from the tavern owner who regularly bought Bernard’s spirits and always had a kind word for Anna. But he hadn’t been there, and being a girl she was not encouraged to stay. A dark-haired stranger had followed her home and lost his life in the lake.
Anna could only guess from her own face what her mother had looked like: high cheekbones, pointed ears, and hair straight as a bolt of black silk. Men noticed Anna now, and they must have noticed her mother then. Bernard had once been a respectable farmer who had cleared one hundred acres for feed corn, wheat, a garden, and a small orchard. That would have been the least he’d need to bring a beautiful woman to his side, Anna supposed. Long ago now. Bernard had sold much of his equipment, including wagon, plow, bridles, horseshoes, scythes and other tools, and much else useful besides. To find the orchard, she had to sift through the saplings that had sprung up everywhere around it, overlaying what used to be producing fields and concealing the odd skeleton of a starved dairy cow.
Alone on another page, “EO.”
At a farm seven miles distant, a Mr. Morris did everything her father now would not, taking great yields from his two hundred acres. His herd of belted Galloways could serve as beef or dairy, and he bred his bulls throughout the county. Morris had several sons, the oldest John about her age, and he and Anna had played at romance. She hadn’t felt for him the love she’d read about in books; in her heart he was not much more than a possible future to live through. Even so, they’d met in field and forest over the past year. She recalled her wonderment, as they lay in an August field of Queen Anne’s lace, at the cock springing from his unbuttoned trousers, dense like iron under its cloak of skin, and, when she took it in her hand, wonderment at the spurt that dripped down her knuckles. He’d lain in a daze and then rose again. He wanted between her legs. Not yet, she told him.
Her father drank more and stopped wanting to eat. A pencil drawing showed Anna tending Bernard’s still fire at night, herself alone, with a moon cutting through the forest, small eraser marks making fireflies in a mist. One early autumn evening Bernard collapsed. His breathing turned shallow and he was unable to wake. She ran seven miles to the Morris farm.
What happened there, we can’t know, as the journal is silent. We return again to Maiden’s Grove, to Anna before a shining surface, otherwise surrounded by black.
“Beyond time, a new space. It was. It reached for Anna, and she reached for it.”
Next, a nude image of Anna striding up the hill, the old homestead in near-ruins, a tree growing a branch through a window and up through a hole in the roof. Beside the cabin, her father’s headstone and her own.
Penny’s notes sketch out the rest of the story: It is sixteen years since she was last seen anywhere, and she has not aged. She is disoriented, strange, naked but not weak. Anna fends off a hunter’s attack, breaks the man’s neck, and buries the body. She steals clothes under cover of night, passes herself off as a long-lost cousin and nearest living relative arriving to claim the property. But it’s no good. She returns to the lake.
PART TWO
PAT GEORGE took a final shot of bourbon, palmed a beer into his sleeve, as was his usual practice, and walked out into the cool September night. He had managed to take first place in the horseshoes tournament at the marina bar in Watkins Glen, New York, that evening. The win came with a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar prize. As the twilight glow gave way to black, he bought rounds and drank, drank until closing, and now, in the near-empty lot beside the bar, he readied himself for a drive.
Pat slid behind the wheel and turned the key, and the engine of his rattletrap Japanese sports car came to life. A middle-aged car salesman and hard drinker, Pat George was not a successful man, or lucky. He himself wouldn’t say so. But something, some sparkle in the air that afternoon, guided his hand, helped send those iron horseshoes home. He could still feel the winning throw leave his fingertips, see it float through the light, high above the watchful faces in the crowd. In that moment Pat had the odd sensation that he could have slowed down time forever as the horseshoe sailed on.
And he had left the bar that night with a woman’s number in his pocket. A taste of water after a long dry spell, that ringer clanking down. Bam!
In the safe darkness of the hills beyond, Pat drank his beer, which was already half gone. He turned west on Sugar Hill Road through the state forest. He knew it well, which was good, because he was starting to feel just a bit spinny around the head. Faster he drove, letting the night pull him. There was nobody on Sugar Hill this late; only when he connected with 23 would he have to worry and slow down. As he roared over a rise, it was too late t
o avoid the sedan pulling out of a blind, nameless road, a road that went nowhere and stopped. His left front grille struck the car’s hood with great force. Launched into motion beyond time, beyond control, his car bounced heavily across the road and into a hemlock, sending Pat through the windshield. The car rolled slowly back into the road. They believe Pat remained conscious for some time, tangled in branches overhanging a creek, before fading out and waking up days later in a hospital, permanently unable to breathe, eat, or move on his own. He signed his own advanced directive by blinking his eyes, and died that afternoon.
A late-night passerby, probably also drunk, called it in as a one-car MVA and disappeared, not seeing the other vehicle where the impact had spun it back against a tree in the shadows of the nameless road, or hearing Pat’s ragged pleas for help over the creek. So, for all intents and purposes, Schuyler County Deputy Alex Poole was first on scene. By the time he arrived, he would have driven into a scene washed in false dawn by Pat’s car, now melting into a white-hot tangle of metal, glass popping, oily flames billowing into the night. And out of the trembling shadows where the second car came to rest, a woman with purple hair lurched toward Poole, screaming through her duct-tape gag, her wrists tied behind her. The deputy didn’t know her, but we all did: she was Vicki Jelinski, mother of the late Charles Michael Heffernan’s kids.
From Deputy Poole’s tape, Jelinksi’s account, and the examination, we can reconstruct some of what happened. When the little sedan bounced off of Pat’s speeding car and slammed into the tree, it broke the trunk’s latch. The trunk was lined in plastic sheeting, and contained nothing but Vicki, a spool of vinyl-coated steel wire, two jugs of drain cleaner, a shovel, and several cinder blocks. On impact, Jelinski briefly lost consciousness. When she came to, she realized the trunk was open a crack and she could kick free. She was afraid at first. Then she recognized the red-and-blue pulse of police lights, and knew it was then or never.
Seven minutes passed between Deputy Poole’s arrival and that of the next emergency vehicle. We know the trooper reported on scene at 1:17 a.m., and at 1:20 we have the first mention of Vicki Jelinski, the sedan in the woods, and an urgent request for backup. Jelinski begged Poole to stay with her in the patrol car, to get her away and safe. He couldn’t leave the scene as it was, and locked her in his vehicle’s cage. Weapon drawn, scanning the trees, he approached the sedan and found no sign of the driver.
Poole stepped in front of Pat George’s burning car, which hid him from Jelinski’s view. Had he not done this, he might have lived. She heard a bang and assumed it was a gunshot. It wasn’t: a gas-filled shock absorber in the car’s front bumper had become superheated. It exploded with the power of a fifty-millimeter field gun, passing through Poole’s left leg below the knee, pulverizing bones and leaving just a narrow strip of skin attaching lower limb to thigh. Jelinski heard the deputy’s scream, then saw the man who had taken her crawl from the woods and move across the road. The screams stopped. Poole died quickly, his throat opened with a fishing knife.
As her abductor approached the patrol car, he gave Vicki Jelinski her first direct look at him. He was wearing a ponytail and was thin-faced, almost handsome if not for an overbite, though pain contorted his features and exposed his large upper teeth. He walked clutching his side. She curled up on the floor. With Poole’s service weapon he shot out the window glass. I don’t know why he didn’t finish her right there and then, I guess he had planned it differently. He pointed the .44 at her and told her to get out.
This was when Mrs. Alice Campbell arrived in the ambulance, which was also carrying two volunteer EMTs. A seventy-seven-year-old great-grandmother, Campbell braked to a crawl, not quite believing what she was seeing. But when the man turned the gun on her, she floored it and ran him over.
Orange 2, a fire engine, screamed down the valley. County sheriff’s cars and state troopers followed close behind, but not quickly enough. In the distraction of the fire engine’s arrival, the man somehow made it to his car, which still ran, and drove away. Alice Campbell thought about following him, but instead turned her attention to the scene.
Five county sheriffs’ departments, six municipalities, three townships, and New York State police cast a wide net that night, but the man found a hole and got through. No hospital for three hundred miles in any direction reported anyone like him. Several days later, they’d found the car, a 1989 Cadillac de Ville with VIN numbers removed and New Jersey plates last belonging to a 1994 Honda Accord whose registration had lapsed, abandoned near Wolcott, New York. It suggested a path in the direction of Canada. A reward of ten thousand dollars was offered for information leading to the man’s capture, and still he was nowhere.
Vicki Jelinski herself had never seen the man before. He’d struck her, bagged her head from behind, and thrown her in the trunk of his car, her with her youngest still inside the house in Johnson City. The first and last she’d ever seen his face was as he was shooting out the glass of the PSP patrol car. She had no idea why anyone would want to hurt her.
HELICOPTERS THUDDED over my head and gone as I took slow steps through a field in Wayne County, New York, one link in a search line near where the kidnapper’s car had been found. There was about thirty of us—state troopers, local police, and volunteers—hunting the wounded animal among the farms and country homes south of Lake Ontario. Wayne County was well north of us and autumn had taken over there, firing the land with gold and red. Cars on a nearby road pulled over to watch our progress.
Sheriff Dally and I had taken a road trip north for the search. We viewed the scene on the state forest road, looked over the sketches of the kidnapper, talked to local and state cops. Vicki Jelinski had been spirited back to Binghamton, gathered up with her family, and relocated. New York State forensic techs had crawled over the car like monkeys picking bugs. They found very little in the way of evidence, and nothing they could use to identify the driver.
By the time Dally and I had arrived, the rush of the manhunt had slightly faded into bureaucracy and scheduled shifts of New York state troopers. We were not much use, and we knew it.
Back home in Holebrook County, we filled a spare sheriff’s department office with criminal complaints, records, and court documents. Police sketches of the man had been pinned to the wall—narrow-faced, toothy, long-haired but thinning on top. I’d gotten copies to Jennie Lyn Stiobhard and Andy Swales, but they didn’t know him. Swales had communicated through a Binghamton lawyer.
Kevin O’Keeffe had been shipped off from SCI Dallas to SCI Mahanoy in Frackville back in July. One afternoon in September I sat across from him in a private interview room in the prison. His face had hollowed and grown mean in just a couple months. He regarded the sketches with no hint of emotion, finally giving the slightest shake of his head no and leaving without a word.
THE DAWN AIR was cold and heavy and gave up its water to the earth. I lay camouflaged in the tall grass. When it was still dark I had parked my patrol truck up a logging road and walked the unposted triangle of swampland where three roads met at the tip of an arrowhead, including Hurrier Lane, where Sage Buckles lived. His place looked like a junk heap, yeah, but you had to know what that meant—it wasn’t that he couldn’t get to the dump with his broken washing machine, kitchen stove, old bicycles, lawn mowers, blue barrels, pallets, and so on. To a capable hill person, these were elements, and their usefulness would emerge with a need. I’d grown up in a backyard like his. We never had new things because there was always some fool who didn’t know the value of his old things.
Since the summer, Buckles had been doing D&A outpatient treatment in Fitzmorris. Showing up to the center had kept him out of jail, or I highly doubt he’d have come within a hundred feet of the alley off Main Street, where the county’s misfortunate young, middle-aged, and old addicts waited for their partners, waited for rides, ran down job placements, kept their kids from drifting away for one more month. The first time, I’d watched Buckles take the door of the treatment center,
and after, reviewed his report. Neither good nor bad. He’d sworn up and down that he never touched the hard stuff anymore, meaning methamphetamine or heroin, I supposed. But he’d dug in his heels over the bottle, until his caseworker had threatened to send me to his house. For support, he’d listed Hope Martinek as his “live in wife.” The next appointment, Hope had come with Sage, and the report got a little more rosy. He’d passed all his urinalysis in that first month, so the county hadn’t seen the need for a SCRAM anklet. I’d let up, only driving by his place or Grace Services every couple weeks but not making contact.
This morning Sage Buckles was home, or at least his brown sedan was. I saw no sign of Hope’s purple car. Just before eight a.m., the front door swung open and Buckles emerged. I made myself low to the ground. He stomped down the front steps with a cooler in his hand, got in his car, and drove away. I waited to see what would happen once he was gone: for twenty minutes, nothing. I stood, slipped out of the tree line, and walked to the driveway, where I wouldn’t leave a trail. From there, I paced around the house, trying to get a look inside the windows darkened by blinds. So far as I could tell, he was the only one using the place.
I headed back to the woods and took another glance at the topo map I’d brought with me. An ATV trail ran along the edge of the scrub, leading north. On the far side of the hill, out of sight, was the Ton L parcel, twenty-five acres climbing the ridge north and over. Joe Blaine had come and gone there all summer. The southeast corner of the plot kissed the northern edge of six acres belonging to Buckles. The connection surprised me at first. I took the trail.
On the Ton L parcel was a large modern home built into a steep slope. It had four entrances: the front door on the east side of the house, which nobody seemed to use; the kitchen door to the north and out of my line of sight; the sliding double doors to the deck facing south; and the basement door of metal. I slipped through the trees and crouched in some cover to the east. Nothing stirred. I moved down the slope toward the corrugated steel garage, to within sight of the rear of the house, the kitchen door, and the aboveground pool. No cars were in the driveway, and the place looked shut up for the season. I watched it for some time, then headed for my truck and a day of writing speeding tickets.