Under Water

by Casey Barrett

  “Steven was diagnosed about a month after that picture was taken,” said Margaret from the doorway. She walked toward me and took it from my hands and placed it precisely where it had been on the dresser. She looked down at it. “Another lifetime,” she said.

  “She was close to her dad, wasn’t she?”

  “Adored him. He walked on water. Now, of course, he’s forever sainted in her mind. She believes all the problems she’s had since are due to his early death—and my failings as a mother.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  She gave me a look that said if I only knew. Then she began to circle the room as if it were a lost artifact, a space only recently uncovered by archeologists. “As you can see, Madeline hasn’t spent much time here over the last few years. I was very surprised when Charlie said she’d been here. I can’t remember the last time she came up.” She examined the bulletin board of pictures and frowned in remembrance at photos she’d likely taken. “Around the time she turned thirteen, she lost interest, but Maddie used to love coming here. For a time, it was every weekend, and entire summers, just the two of us. After Steven passed away, and Charlie was off in school, or swimming all over the world, Maddie and I used to come here and just hunker in and eat junk food and watch movie after movie. When she was ten, we almost moved here full-time, leaving the city behind. I’d enrolled her at Rhinebeck Day, and we were prepared to begin a new life in the country.” She looked out of Madeline’s window, at her reflection in the darkness. “Now, of course, I wish I’d gone through with it.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Her swimming,” sighed Margaret. “Maddie was starting to show promise, and of course, she was the sister of the great Charlie McKay, Olympic champion, so big things were expected of her. When I told Teddy we were considering the move, his heart about stopped. He was really the one who convinced us to stay in the city. He was sure Maddie would follow in her brother’s footsteps.”

  I tried the lock on the chest at the foot of her bed. “I’m sure the key is around here somewhere,” she said without turning. “If not, you’re more than welcome to break it off.” She turned and looked down at it like it held the secrets of the lost ark. “I fear I’ve given my daughter too much privacy over these years. I always tried to respect her space, tried not to pry, and look where it’s gotten us.”

  “Mrs. McKay, if it’s all right with you, would you mind if I had a look around Madeline’s room in private?”

  She stiffened at the suggestion and crossed her arms beneath her high chest.

  “It’s just that I know her room stirs up so many memories for you. I might be able to make more progress if I could look through things alone.”

  “Very well,” she said. “Please close the door on your way out. When you’re finished, Teddy said he’d like to have a word with you in the study.”

  She left the bedroom on unsteady legs. I suspected she’d taken something to go with the wine when she’d left the table. Her manner since had been slightly out of focus, her speech a little less crisp than usual. I wondered if there was a way to sneak a peak at her medicine cabinet.

  Alone in the room, I felt Madeline’s unhappy presence lingering, a shadow just out of sight. Her closet contained clothes that would no longer fit, shoes meant for a preteen. Her dresser was full of t-shirts and cotton underwear and long-dry swimsuits. On her bedside table rested a worn copy of Pride and Prejudice, beneath it an unopened journal of empty white pages. I inspected the pictures on the bulletin board, recognized Lucy Townes in a few shots. The rest of the kids were strangers, forgotten friends from the forgotten days before puberty. I made a cursory attempt to locate the key to the chest, and not finding it in the obvious places, I lifted my knee and kicked loose the lock. There were a few picture albums, a few tattered notebooks. The albums contained more photos of family and friends. There were beach vacations, trips to Radio City to see the Rockettes, birthdays, swim meet shots of girls and boys in caps and goggles, huddled on pool decks with towels wrapped around bare shoulders. The notebooks contained the drawings of a talented young artist: steady-handed sketches of dolphin and whales and mermaids and underwater worlds. Further inspection revealed the artist’s growth, as the pages turned to still-lifes and landscapes and, finally, portraits of her young friends. Based on the age of her posing models, the drawings appeared to stop around age twelve. Around the same age this house and this room were left behind, frozen in happier times.

  I closed the chest and made one more pass around the room. I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. More discarded swim bags, some pink leather luggage made for a little girl. I was pushing myself to my feet when I noticed a short white cord beneath the dresser. I crawled over, reached under, and retrieved it. It was a USB cable, the sort used to connect cameras to laptops. I pushed it down my jeans pocket, finished my search, and found nothing else of interest.

  I walked downstairs wondering about the cable, when it was lost beneath the dresser. I was feeling rattled and too in touch with her lost innocence. A lot of kids get angry as they enter their teenage years, tossing aside their talents with clueless disrespect. A lot of city kids go a little crazy and choose drugs and partying instead of the prosperous path. And a few unlucky ones also get to deal with the loss of a parent on top of it all. Sad and tragic, but plenty typical. Yet there was something else there with Madeline. Something had dragged her down into the abyss, and she was still somewhere deep beneath the surface. If that something had been her coach, I intended to make him pay.

  I found him in a darkened study at the end of a long, dim hall. The floorboards creaked in the stillness. The hall was lined with small Flemish paintings in ornate frames. Portraits of long-dead gentry, domestic scenes rich with symbolism, studies of fruits and flora—Madeline hadn’t had to look far for inspiration. There was a faint light beneath the high, heavy door to the study. I knocked twice and heard his baritone from within. “C’mon in.”

  He was seated with legs crossed on a deep leather couch, holding a whiskey in cut crystal. “Have a seat, Duck,” he said. “The bar’s over there; pour yourself a drink.” The room had an unsettling similarity to his apartment. The same landscape art, the same masculine furniture of dark woods and leather, even the marble bar felt like it must have been salvaged and restored from the same old hotel. Margaret had ensconced him in a replica of her dead husband’s most personal space. She had taste, I had to hand her that. Though I was starting to wonder about her taste in men. I poured myself a whiskey from a heavy decanter with an engraved spade on its side.

  “It’s Hirsch, twenty-year,” he said from the couch. “You’ll like it.”

  I tasted it and did. I raised the glass in his direction and found a seat in a Stickley rocker across from the couch.

  “So,” I said.

  Marks didn’t reply. He sat there looking past me at the rows of books on the far wall. He sipped his bourbon, wiping his mustache after each tip. Off at the other end of the house, I heard a door open and shut. Must be Nina headed home for the night. I stared over at him, waited for him to speak.

  “I never touched that girl,” he said finally.

  “Then why do you think Charlie would say such a thing?”

  “I have no . . . it feels like a betrayal of the deepest sort.” He looked down into his glass for answers, shook his head at the rich amber.

  “How do you think he could have gotten that idea?” I asked. “He said he saw something at a meet, the way you spoke to her after a race or something.”

  “On deck at a meet? Hell!” His voice broke through the quiet like shattered glass. “What does that boy think he saw?”

  “You tell me. He seemed awfully convinced.”

  “Duck, as you might remember, coaching is a highly personal profession. I am closer to these kids than most of their parents. I see them every day. I know their dreams and their fears. I know what makes them tick. Whatever he thinks he saw . . .”

&n
bsp; “Coach, Charlie mentioned that there were others. That everyone knew there were other girls on the team, through the years.”

  He pushed himself up from the couch on old knees and walked over to the books. He set his whiskey on a shelf, stared at the spines of hardcovers. “Unbelievable,” he muttered. “Un-fucking-believable.”

  “You’re saying there’s no truth to those rumors?”

  He shook his head, took down a book from the shelf, and opened it. Then, he slammed it shut and slid it back in place. “Duck, I was twenty-eight years old when I started Marks Aquatics, back in the eighties. I’d done five years in the SEALs, right out of college. Saw action in Grenada, spent time in Afghanistan, Albania. Experienced some heavy shit at a young age. But when I got out, I was still a kid. I was a big, strong warrior, but I didn’t have a clue about life. I went straight from a swimming pool to the SEALs, where they took discipline to a whole new level. You have no idea. They made us into well-programmed machines, but where does that leave you when you enter the real world—in New York City, of all places? I’ve never been sure why I chose the city. Ego, I guess. You can make it here, you can make it anywhere and all. I was a clueless kid who thought he knew something. I had the All-American honors to prove it, had the old SEAL stamp of approval. So, I set up shop in that dungeon pool, and I convinced some kids to work hard for me. But I wasn’t prepared for the girls, Duck. I wasn’t prepared for them at all.”

  I could hear his breathing close behind me. He was pacing the dark room, stirring up the buried memories, muddying the long still waters. I resisted the urge to turn and watch him.

  “Age is a funny thing, don’t you think? Those linear numbers are highly subjective. The number of days you’ve been on this earth says so little about one’s true emotional age. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I didn’t answer, didn’t suspect he wanted one.

  “I think of myself, just starting out, a clueless veteran in his late twenties, all bluster and empty leadership. The boys were impressed by the SEAL stuff; they knew I used to be pretty fast myself. It didn’t take much to get them on board. And they were willing to put in the work. Not like nowadays. Back then, I give a sixteen-year-old kid a ten-thousand-yard fly set, he just nods and cranks it out. But the girls? They saw right through me. They saw me as a peer—as a catch. Take a seventeen-year-old girl born and raised in Manhattan; then take a late-twenties kid from upstate New York. Who do you think has the power?”

  I heard him refilling his glass at the bar. He set down the heavy decanter with a clumsy crash, and I could tell he’d been hitting the whiskey hard.

  “Ah, hell, Duck. You know where I’m going with this. It was a different time. You ask me about the rumors? Well, there you go. Way back then, in those circumstances I just described? Yeah, I crossed the line a few times. With some girls, sixteen, seventeen, pretty high school girls who wrapped me right around their pretty little fingers. I can’t say I felt much guilt at the time. I certainly wasn’t in control of the situations. But you know, as one gets a little older, those girls, they stayed the same age. Wasn’t that in a movie? Anyway, by the time I’m pushing thirty, getting a bit of city wisdom under the belt, starting to have some real relationships with women my own age, all that stuff just went away. Had no interest in them any longer. I guess I saw them for what they’d always been: kids just playing grown-up. It’s been twenty-five years since I even looked twice at a swimmer on my team. That’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “So you think those old affairs have followed you all these years? That’s the source of these rumors?”

  “What else could it be? Kids talk, pass things down; embellish it as they go. But I certainly never thought Charlie believed that stuff. And for him to think I had any intentions with his younger sister? It’s almost too much to digest.”

  “Tell me about Fred, Coach.”

  “What about him?”

  “Why is a Navy SEAL sitting out front of the pool whenever you’re on deck? Seems a little overqualified for that detail.”

  “Man’s fallen on some hard times. He’s grateful for the work. I told you, things were getting stolen from the lockers. The school doesn’t give a damn, so I asked Fred to help us out.”

  “You were doing so well with the truth serum,” I said. I got up and went to the bar and helped myself to a refill. The wine and the feast and the whiskey were cutting through the hangover like a fine Ginsu knife. Marks had stopped pacing. He was standing in front of the window, looking at his reflection in the night glass. Standing in a dead man’s study, sleeping with his widow, living in décor so close to the dead, so deeply entwined in the lives of the man’s children .. . He looked lost in that well-dressed reflection, unable to comprehend how he’d consumed this other man’s family.

  “I’m being blackmailed,” he said.

  “For how long?”

  “Couple of months.”

  “What do they have on you?”

  “What do you think?” He cast a look over his shoulder. “That ancient nonsense. It appears some of the girls, all grown up and jaded now, want to dredge up the old flings. They’ve seen the scandals with other swim coaches in the news. They see a chance to cash in on past indiscretions. Playing the virginal teen victim . . .”

  “Why not just go to the press, hire lawyers like the others?”

  “That would mean coming forward, out of the shadows. They’re too cowardly for that. These women are likely married with kids by now. They don’t want their names and faces splashed all over the news. They just want the end result: money.”

  “Then why not call their bluff? Refuse to pay.”

  “Duck, in case you haven’t noticed, my profession is being compared to pervert priests and Boy Scout leaders these days. Coaches are everyone’s favorite suspected pederast, thanks to a few true sickos out there. There’s no such thing as innocent until proven guilty with this stuff. All it takes is one public accusation and you’re finished. My life’s work, my team, all of our accomplishments—ruined. I’ve never held another job in my life, never wanted one. One whiff of an accusation, even an anonymous one, and I’d be banned from the sport for life.”

  “So you’ve been paying them off quietly for how long now?”

  “Since the spring, but now they’re asking for more money than I have left. I haven’t been able to meet their demands.”

  “Any idea who’s behind it?”

  “I have my suspicions, but I’ve only dealt with a ‘representative. ’ He calls from blocked numbers, emails from untraceable accounts, with instructions on the next payment. Always a wire transfer to a numbered offshore account.”

  “I meant the girls, how many were there? Who are they?”

  “I can’t remember how many. It was decades ago. It was a few. A handful, hell, I don’t know the number. But I was told that if I tried to reach out to any of these women, anyone I might have had any relationship with at all, then the information would be made public that same day. I chose to believe him. So, I’ve been paying ever since. Or at least I was until I ran out of funds.”

  “Ever wonder if it could be a scam?” I asked. “Someone playing you for the old rumors? Maybe these women aren’t even involved.”

  “Possible, I suppose. But I’m not exactly in a position to call a bluff. Like I said, all it takes is one public accusation. The truth of things is pointless.”

  “This representative, any clue who it could be? You recognize the voice?”

  “He uses one of those voice manipulators when he calls. Believe me, I’ve taped the calls and tried to study the voice. It’s no use. The emails can’t be tracked either. It goes back to an anonymous IP address in the Philippines. You’d think a Navy SEAL could track down anyone. Hell, our boys caught Bin Laden. But, Duck, I haven’t got a clue about this stuff. I hardly know where to begin.”

  Marks returned from the window and sat down heavily on the couch. He placed his whiskey on the coffee table before us and leaned
forward with his elbows on his knees. “And now, with Madeline missing. That murder. Not to mention poor Lucy Townes. I can’t help thinking this is all connected to the blackmail.”

  “Don’t forget the two little visits they paid me,” I reminded him.

  “Jesus, that too.” He reached for his drink and swallowed down the rest. Then he fell back into the leather and stared up at the dark ceiling. “What the fuck is going on?” he muttered.

  “Coach, getting back to Fred, your SEAL buddy. How does he fit into this?”

  He continued staring up into the darkness as he spoke. “When I failed to pay the last few times, I was told there would be consequences. There were. At first it was just some theft and vandalism in the lockers. A computer was stolen from a locked locker, some iPhones, a few wallets, that sort of thing. Then, one of our swimmers had an accident on the way to the pool. He was pushed down a flight of subway stairs, broke his arm. Out for the season. The kid’s a junior, starting to get recruited by the big schools. The worst possible timing. Then, last week, another swimmer, a fifteen-year-old girl this time, was mugged on her way home from practice one night. She was thrown onto the sidewalk, broke her hand on the way down. They took her purse, but it was found a few blocks away—with everything still in it. That wasn’t the point. Duck, no one gets mugged in Manhattan any more. Christ, the girl lives on the Upper East Side. They were sending me a message. If I don’t pay, they take it out on my swimmers.” He sat up and looked me straight in the eye for the first time since I’d entered the study. “They know that if they came at me, I’d kill them,” he said. “I’ve been out of the SEALs a long time, but some things you don’t forget. Whoever it is, he knows better than to tangle with me. So, instead, the spineless bastard wants to take it out on my swimmers. Innocent teenagers—with dreams and talent.” He shook his head at the cowardice.