No, normalcy is taken for granted until it’s gone.
The first sign of trouble was the car parked at Pine Point. It was a maroon Ford with big white wheels, and she did not recognize it. She peered inside, wondering if Jacob was possibly driving it—but if so, where was he? The interior was dark red leather, the long seat littered with boxes of Cracker Jack, newspapers, and a big paper bag.
She paced, kicking at pebbles, looking up at the sun making its slow way across the blue morning sky. Later she would learn that Jacob’s mother had fouled up the time, her name, the entire message. But during that oversensitive half hour, she was caught between assuming the worst—that he did not want to see her—and wondering if he had somehow expected to meet her at the pond. Maybe he had indeed driven the maroon Ford, and was at the dam, waiting. So in she went.
The forest was dark and cool and smelled of pine. Walking along the gnarled root path, she heard nothing except birds and the peaceful buzz of insects, the faint roar of the falls. When she entered the Secret Pond clearing, there was no sign of Jacob, yet something somehow felt amiss.
Dez had often wondered whether there were other senses besides the established five—so far unnamed but existing all the same. How else to explain that she knew something was wrong? Some instinct sent her around the pine thicket, where she climbed the embankment and looked down the other side.
Water calmly slapped the grassy bank, and her mind flashed with quick relief because all seemed normal, yet in the same instant she realized no, there was something brown and lumpy at the bottom of the dam that the lucid part of her immediately understood was a person, a man, lying facedown in the water. She knew that brown suit, that hat so tight it did not fall off when its owner tumbled into the water.
She heard herself cry out, felt herself scrambling down the dam to get to him with the panic of emergency, but up close she could see he was clearly beyond help. His skin had already turned a translucent, mottled blue, a swarm of small flies buzzed around the back of his neck, and his ankle twisted away from his leg at an unnatural angle.
She wasn’t conscious, later, of how long she stood rooted, horrified. He must have fallen into the channel, she realized, then caught his foot among the jagged stones as he tried to twist his way out. Mothers warn children they can drown in an inch of water, and here was terrible proof. Had he fallen from the dam? She couldn’t be sure.
From Pine Point, he must have walked westward along the shore path. The dam was in no way visible from the shore, nor was the brook, so what had encouraged him to leave the path?
A bird shrieked overhead, accusatory. She had told him that there were invisible inlets along the river that diverted water, but he had been distracted, seemingly more intent on lunch than on what she’d been saying. He hadn’t been paying attention—or had he?
She realized that she was shaking, that her hair and neck were slick with sweat. She began to run, back into the woods toward the shortest path to town, and caught her dress in a patch of brambles. She yanked it, the prickles tearing the gauzy cloth up the middle and scratching her arms. The forest seemed to be an entirely different place than the benign, bird-whistling place of peace she had perceived it to be just minutes earlier. Now she was reminded that the forest was the source of the howling she heard on dark winter nights. It was the home of fisher cats and screech owls.
She saw that there was a Dez who lived on River Road, whose husband was working in the drugstore and had no idea that there was this other Dez who suddenly had so much to hide.
She didn’t want to be two people. She would go to town and tell Dwight and Wendell what she had found. She would face whatever had to be faced. She would forget about Jacob. If she was looking for a sign, then here was a sign, and it was staring her square in the face.
At home, she ran water over the blood-beaded scratches on her arms. Her hands shook as she buttoned into a new dress. She was heading out the back door when she saw what she had missed in her rush to get changed—a folded sheet of paper that had been slipped through the mail slot and which lay on the entry floor.
She recognized Jacob’s graceful scrawl and her heart dropped in a way that was elation but felt exactly like fright. She looked at it with dread, as if it were poison, as if picking it up would taint her, make her renege on her resolve. But what could she do? Leave it? No. Throw it away without reading it? Of course not.
She carried the letter into the kitchen. The white creamer and sugar bowl sat atop the red-flecked Formica, bathed in light like subjects for a still life. Normal, everyday objects that emphasized that normalcy had gone out the window. With little shocks she apprehended all that had happened in the space of such a short time, the sounds of settling ice from within the icebox like vague mutterings.
Best not to phone my mother’s house. Her English is poor and she gets confused. I’m not quite sure what you wanted—the message said something about “the Point” but I passed by Pine Point and didn’t see you, so I’ll head off. I’m due in Amherst by noon. I can check in with you on Saturday night when I deliver the last truckload to Al. Can we meet late, say seven, maybe at the playhouse?
23
Her intentions were good. She headed straight to Town Hall to the police station, entering through the side door and then down the stairs. But the big mahogany door was locked, the brass knob unmoving.
Back up on the sidewalk, she came face-to-face with Jimmy. “You hear about the water man?” he asked, disorienting and startling her.
Jimmy shifted his weight, slinging his mailbag onto his other shoulder. “Ella Mayhew says he never showed up for supper last night, and he was a no-show at breakfast. His room hadn’t been slept in. So she called up Dwight, and Dwight got in touch with people in the water office and they called the state police. They’re over there talking to Mrs. Mayhew right now.”
At the hotel, two dozen people who had heard of the missing man, had seen the police car, and had nothing better to do were gathered outside around the old iron hitching post in front of the hotel’s broad front steps. The group’s main interest—entertainment—made itself clear as soon as Dez approached. Stan was a man few of them had laid eyes on. Of course they cared about the fellow, but here was Dez Spaulding, and they cared, too, about what she had to say, wanting to know what was next for The American Sunday Standard.
Dez described the postcard set that would be out soon, one eye on the hotel, ready to excuse herself as soon as the state policemen appeared. Minutes went by and finally Mrs. Mayhew emerged with an air of importance. A state policeman was going through Stan’s room, she said, launching into the story she would likely tell for days: how yesterday afternoon Stan ate two portions of meat loaf for lunch, then went back to his room. At precisely two o’clock—which Mrs. Mayhew remembered because the bells were chiming down at the Round Church when she glanced out the window—she saw him drive off in his maroon Ford. “He was headed to Al Stein’s first, he told me at lunch, to get a frame for that drawing you done of him, Dez.”
Dez remembered the paper bag on the front seat of the Ford at Pine Point. He must have wandered into the woods not long after she and Jacob left Secret Pond. He could so easily have come upon them. Maybe he had.
“He’s leaving,” someone said.
The long blue police car emerged from behind the hotel and rolled down Chestnut Street. “Oh,” Mrs. Mayhew said wistfully. “He left out the back.”
The car was going too fast to run after it. Already it was turning right on Spruce Street, crossing over Main Street, heading in the direction of the boys’ camp.
She vacillated, gripping the hitching post. The longer she waited, the odder it would seem that she stood there talking about the Standard when she knew all along that Stan was dead, that she knew where his body was. She decided to tell Asa. She would tell him she was out for a walk and happened upon him. Then they could take the Buick to look for the policemen.
At the drugstore, lunch hour was in full swing, every s
tool taken, grill sizzling, mixers whirring, the counter lined with Black Cows and Tin Roof sundaes and double-frank plates and ice-cream sodas. Mrs. Raymond and Billy, the after-school helper, barely glanced up. Asa was the same in the back room, bent over his table, holding up one finger when she knocked, his concentration steady as he measured liquid from a beaker into a bottle. He screwed the cap on tight and fixed a label to the front before looking up.
Billy popped his head in. “Zeke’s here to see you, Asa. Says it’s real important.”
And then it was all too late. Asa carried the bottle out to Mrs. Raymond to ring up. Then he turned to Zeke, who stood by the tobacco counter, bent over the blue flame that emitted from the Turkish cigar-lighter, puffing on his cigar to get it going. “You hear about that missing water man?” Zeke asked.
“I have. What’s going on?”
“Dwight and Wendell found his car quick enough, out at Pine Point, and I guess they found the poor fellow, too, drowned.”
“Oh!” Dez said, choking on the word. They’d found him so easily.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Asa said. “Very sorry. What can I get you, Zeke?”
“Wendell called in. He tried to call you direct but I guess no one’s answering your phone.”
“We’ve been backed up.”
“They’re bringing in the doctor from Bath to do the coroner’s report here before they send him up to the funeral parlor in Athol. The doc needs me to deliver a few things for him for an autopsy. Wendell gave me a list.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket.
Asa said that he was out of a few things since he’d put off his Hartford trip. But he adjusted his spectacles and scanned the list and said, “No, we’re in luck, all set.” He began to lead Zeke into the back room, then paused to turn to Dez. “Did you need me?”
But she shook her head no. It was too late to tell now. Or rather, there was no reason to tell.
At home, she sat down with her sketchpad at her worktable. The card depicting the bustling Cascade street scene needed finishing but she had no idea how she would manage to focus on it. She wondered what was going on in town, what kind of conclusions were being drawn by the people investigating the drowning.
Maybe her remarks had set him to exploring when he might otherwise have never walked the river at all.
Still. An accident was an accident. And certainly part of his job would have been to walk the river, inspect the area.
“Focus,” she said aloud. The hardest work was done. What was left was mindless enough, but instead she let her pen wander. Stan floating facedown, her mother as a three-year-old, pulled from that water. If her mother had died, Dez never would have been born. If Dez hadn’t told Jacob that Asa didn’t want him at the house, they never would have walked to Secret Pond and closed the dam. If Stan hadn’t caught his foot, he might have saved himself.
So many contingencies marked our destinies.
She imagined drowning to be terrifying. She was only four when the Titanic sank, but she remembered the adults talking of nothing else, and an older neighbor boy illustrating, with a stick in the dirt, how deep the ocean was, how far the ship had sunk, adding detail upon detail until Dez was sufficiently horrified to satisfy him.
She drew the awful, last image of Stan—the breathing of water into the lungs, the gasping, her pages filling with perspectives from many angles—looking down from the top of the dam, sideways, at ground level. What was it? What was she trying to discover? She wanted to grasp the fact of his death, wanted to know that it did not matter that she might have encouraged him to walk the riverbank. An unfortunate and blameless accident could happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone.
We die, we know we must die, she thought, and still we treat death as surprise, as tragedy, as punishment. It was always a drama—like in that newsreel, the one about the woman in the long black veil mourning Rudolph Valentino at his grave every year. The woman joined one of the drowning scenes, black veil flowing, a slender pale hand dropping flowers into the water: long, white, lugubrious lilies.
How many painters had seized on Shakespeare’s image of Ophelia floating among the flowers? How many maritime paintings had captured, for one transfixed moment, sailors going down at sea? People were fascinated by drowning—and here she herself had proof of that, with people from across the country responding to the mesmerizing prospect of a town drowned. A “great deluge” was part of the myth and legend of almost every culture on earth.
She assumed she would be alone until after eleven, when Asa closed the drugstore, but at eight-thirty she was bent over her postcard, inking in the final outlines, when she heard the Buick and the creak of the screen door, the sound of him walking around the kitchen—opening the icebox, running the tap.
She went out to meet him. His expression was haggard. “Swamped,” he said, “from seven a.m., and there are still customers looking for Cokes. I had to get out of there. Billy said he’d close up.”
“Is there any news of the water man? Were they able to figure out what happened?”
“I never had a chance to talk to Zeke. Simple drowning, I suppose.”
Dez realized that Asa probably did not know exactly where Stan’s body had been found. She screwed the cap onto her inking pen. “He was very big. He might have had a heart attack.”
“Maybe.” But he was too tired to pretend real concern. He was heading up to bed, he said.
Dez returned to her worktable; she had just a bit of outlining to finish. But when she picked up her pen, she stared down at the painting and pushed it away. All of it—the Standard, the job, New York—seemed remote, not quite real, and faintly distasteful.
24
They overslept, both of them, waking to full daylight, to the metal clatter of the mail slot, the harsh morning sun casting bleached light over the bedclothes. Asa kicked them off and jumped out of bed, and in her own haste, Dez forgot to take her temperature, and then it was too late—once the blood started pumping, you couldn’t be sure of an accurate reading.
She slipped into a housedress, pulled her hair back, and headed downstairs, only to be stopped short in the hallway. “Asa, come down here,” she called.
The morning mail normally consisted of an envelope or two tucked through the slot. Now there were at least twenty-five postcards and envelopes scattered on the floor.
Asa joined her and together they knelt to sift through the pile. There were mostly postcards, all addressed to Desdemona Hart, care of Doomed Cascade, Massachusetts, or Soon-to-Be-No-More Cascade, Massachusetts. Many of the cards depicted the senders’ own cities and towns. There was sympathy for Cascade and the sharing of similar stories. A virtual ghost town in Arkansas: the farms literally dried up and blew away. Big River, Washington, an entire town destroyed by fire: Everything was timber and everyone worked for the timber company. The fire burned for four days and consumed every splinter.
Asa rocked back on his heels, a broad smile spreading across his face. “My God, Dez. You really started something.”
They counted an unbelievable thirty-three pieces of mail, one of them an envelope from the Standard, which, when she opened it, contained her first check. She held it in her hands, a simple rectangle of paper that represented seventy-five dollars—a lot of money, and so much more than money. Right now there were copies of the Standard in every city, every backwater, every single town in the United States, her work duplicated over and over again. Why, right now, a man in California might be glancing over the article. A woman in Nebraska might be buying a postcard of Omaha, spurred into connecting with Dez, with Cascade, with the terrible idea of obliteration.
“And to think you’ve got another issue coming out tonight,” said Asa. “This publicity has got to help.”
Dez gathered up the cards and carried them into the kitchen while Asa went upstairs to get ready for work. There was nothing wrong with him getting his hopes up. Anyway, what would happen would happen. Her little cards didn’t have that much control. She li
t the gas and filled the coffeepot, scooped lard into the skillet, toasted bread. The response, at least, was a positive sign. She had touched people with her idea, a good thing.
She’d cracked three eggs and was beating them with a fork when she looked up, thinking she heard knocking. But there was no one on the porch when she peered through the window. She tipped the skillet back and forth to coat the surface with the fast-melting lard, and there it was again, a definite knock. She turned down the gas and wiped her hands on her apron, craning her head into the hall to look through the front-door sidelights. What she saw made her gasp. There, parked on River Road like a ghost, sat the big maroon Ford.
Her legs were quick and stiff, hand fumbling to unlatch and open the front door they never used. A haggard-looking woman wearing a black dress and black straw hat stood on the front step. Her hands were clasped close to her waist; a large pocketbook dangled from the crook of one elbow. “I’m Ethel Smith,” she said. “And I wanted to meet the lady who done that picture of Stanley.”
Dez stood back to hold the door open, stumbling over a string of condolences. “Such a terrible shock.” “I was sorry not to know him better.”
“Sit, sit,” she said in the kitchen, pouring coffee, asking Mrs. Smith how she took it, then setting out the sugar bowl, a spoon, a pitcher of milk. She tried to make conversation, but Mrs. Smith answered in simple words and phrases. “Yes,” it had been hard. “No,” her son wasn’t with her. “He’s at the hotel with my sister.”
The woman was thin, painfully so, with sharp, high cheekbones, and small blue eyes that sat deep inside bony sockets. Dez spread Asa’s toast with butter and strawberry jam and offered it. At first, she refused it, then carefully and silently devoured both slices as Dez grew increasingly uncomfortable, hoping Asa would hurry down.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Smith said, unclasping her purse and fishing out a nearly empty package of Chesterfields. She lit one and blew out a thin stream of smoke. “Stan expected trouble here, what with his job. Resentment. But you obviously befriended him, for long enough to draw that fine picture, so I wanted to talk to you, see if you have any idea what happened to him.”
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