Cascade (26 page)

“Oh,” she said, through a feeling like wind in her chest.

“With Ruth.”

Ruth. She’d assumed he was all done with Ruth. Maybe he was simply saying good-bye. Dez herself was married, for goodness sake. What kind of man would Jacob be if he had no woman in his life?

“Will he be long?” That question also misunderstood, so she shouted, enunciating each syllable: “DO-YOU-HAVE-A-PENCIL?”

The woman put down the phone with a grunt and returned a moment later. “Ah-kay, go.”

Dez didn’t quite trust that she really had a pencil, but she had no choice but to speak slowly, to deliver the message: that Jacob needed to meet Dez at the Pine Point parking area tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.

“For what you want?”

Dez was taken aback. “Because—I’m the painter he meets with? In Cascade? I’m sure he’s mentioned me.”

In reply, Mrs. Solomon said something that Dez did not understand, then hung up.

She was rattled. A mess of emotion. Mixed up. What would he think when he got that message? How was he spending his evening? Time was excruciating. It would not pass. Every minute watched another minute make its way around the face of the kitchen clock. Too early to go to bed. Asa would not be home for hours. She still had to finish the other half of the postcard set—one depicting Cascade as a lively community in contrast to the sleepiness of Whistling Falls. She forced herself back to work, blocking out a busy scene that showed children streaming out of school, Main Street bustling with pedestrians, the milk truck, the ice truck, the police car, Jimmy delivering the post.

Later, she heated milk on the stove and sipped a full cup—anything to make herself sleepy, to end the night and bring on morning.

Asa arrived home at eleven, carrying a softening brick of vanilla ice cream. He scooped Dez a sweet bowlful that tasted of guilt. Guilt was a useless emotion, she knew, her tongue on the cold spoon. Guilt was self-indulgent penance that made you feel like you were suffering for what you didn’t want or plan to change; guilt didn’t resolve a thing.

Asa filled her in on the day’s news. Caseworkers from the county relief board had showed up at Bud’s house, he said, to see if the Fosters really qualified. “It’s terrible. I guess they inspect your icebox, your closets, your
cupboards, everything. They walk around calculating just how poor you are and you’ve no choice but to accept it.”

Dez agreed, thinking it was amazing, really, how people could partition themselves, how Jacob could exist in a distinct and separate part of her that had nothing to do with anything else.

T
here had been other such days—the long-ago morning her mother took sick, the afternoon the telegram spelled out the fact of her father’s first heart attack. At the ends of those days, Dez had looked back through the blur of hours to the innocent mornings, which started so normally. An egg, a piece of buttered toast, plans for this or that. And if those days had stayed normal, if the flu had passed through her mother’s body, through her brother, Timon’s, if her father’s heart had not seized, there would be no marveling at the day’s normalcy, no reeling from being blindsided.

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?

H
er 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.