Cascade (30 page)

However, those warm truths she had sketched, the truths that readers of the
Standard
wanted to see, were a fanciful product of nostalgia. The real crowd, gathered around the real bandstand, illustrated truth, and it
was dismaying to watch Dot King’s gossip spread visibly: heads turning, one to another. Groups of two becoming groups of four, then six. Mouths moving, and as the story spread, the pinched, satisfied looks of those telling the stories transferring to those who listened.

Or so she imagined.

What were they saying? She did not know. But she knew this: her small success, however applauded at first, would soon enough incite a certain amount of resentment and envy. Her eyesight blurred and it was as if she were seeing every incarnation of every public gathering on the Cascade Common. Those idyllic nights before a play, in the days when William Hart was the town’s most imposing citizen. William Hart—educated, well-traveled, and wealthy, who could have lived anywhere and chose Cascade.

She saw the November day her mother died, the way the sound of noise built on the common, not the normal noise of the town, but the sound of something momentous and important. She saw herself flinging open the front door and running out to the street with the flu mask everyone was supposed to wear, fitting it over her face. The bells in the Round Church clanged, the fire truck blew all its whistles, rang its bells. Everywhere, people were throwing off their flu masks. Dez threw hers off, too, thinking, wildly, that the flu was cured, that somehow Dr. Proulx would be able to bring her mother back. But it wasn’t the flu they were cheering about, it was the war. The war was over and one of the neighbors’ Irish maids, gleefully dancing in circles, suddenly looked down and saw Dez.
Get on home with you now!
Sickness shouldn’t be out in the streets!

And William Hart, hadn’t his luck turned, beginning with the loss of his wife and son? But he’d suffered in the Crash like so many others, and really, wasn’t that some kind of justification, a natural righting of what was wrong? Was it fair that some should have so much and others so little? And now all that was left of those Harts was the daughter who’d been overblessed with a good husband and here she was now, dallying with the traveling Jew.

That was what she imagined they were saying—or would soon be saying. Twilight deepened into true dusk, turning the air dark and soft. Lanterns were lit, strings of electric light turned on. She slipped into the dark, down the north side of the common until she was well past the crowd, searching the streets for Jacob’s truck. It was parked in front of Town Hall, engine still steaming, making crackling noises. In the basement—police headquarters—light shone through the grilled windows.

She hesitated; she couldn’t just barge in. But she had to barge in. Her mind scrambled for an excuse and came up with something lame but reasonable: she could ask Dwight if he’d happened to see Asa before he left for Connecticut.
Do you know what time he left? He mentioned he was going to stop in to see you.

She picked her way down the dimly lit stairwell. The door stood slightly ajar, casting a triangular shadow on the floor. She rapped on the frosted window, turned the knob. “Dwight? Wendell?”

Silence. Inside, the two desks were empty, but beyond them, in the holding cell, Jacob was sitting on a cot, his eyes glimmering in the dim light. He sat unmoving, the door to the cell wide open.

“What is going on?” she whispered.

He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug.

“Why are you here, Jacob? Where are Dwight and Wendell? What is going on?”

“Oh, they seem to think I may have done all manner of things.”

His voice sounded disembodied, and she stepped closer, wrapping her hands around the iron rungs. “What manner of things?”

“Oh.” He lifted one hand and looked at it as if he didn’t recognize it. He counted off on his fingers. “One. Tampering with ‘Mr. Asa Spaulding’s property.’ Thereby, two, causing the death of the water man. Shall I go on?”

She sat down gingerly, on the very edge of the cot. “What have you told them?”

He let a moment pass. “What haven’t you told me?”

“What do you mean?”

“We were on your husband’s property. You must have known.”

She was quiet. “I thought if you knew we were on Asa’s land, you’d feel morally obligated to leave.”

“Of course I would have.”

It was not the time to argue, to point out that every acre of woods out there belonged to Asa, that they would never have been able to go for that last walk. “Have they arrested you?”

“No,” he admitted. “But they did ask me—and rather politely, too, I must give them credit—to stay and answer some questions. They’re fetching a man named Lowell.”

“They can’t do this to you. You have rights.”

“Do I?”

“Of course, Jacob. What’s wrong with you?”

Why didn’t he just get angry? She couldn’t stand this part of him, this broody, self-absorbed quality.

“They wanted to know why I was back in town tonight.”

“What did you say?”

“I told them the truth, that I was here to deliver goods to Al Stein. They said why so late and I explained that Al is pretty orthodox, doesn’t work any more on the Sabbath than he must, to feed his family.”

He saw that she didn’t really understand what he was saying and added, somewhat impatiently, “Al asked me to make the delivery after sundown. And Wendell thought he caught me in some kind of lie because everyone knows the Sabbath day is Sunday. What kind of intellect am I dealing with here? No wonder I want to get the hell back to New York.”

She murmured noncommittally.

“And just today,” he said bitterly, “we got word from my cousin. Buying from Jews has been declared a ‘treason to the people.’ His own neighbors smashed his windows, the windows of his little shop. And as I was driving here, I was thinking about it, and I thought,
Well, at least I live here,
where people can say things about me, but they can’t do much more
. And then I drive into town and I’m accosted and accused, and I think,
Where is there a secure place in this world?
”

“There is no such place,” she said. Somehow she had always known that. Only, where Jacob found that truth disheartening, she found it oddly freeing. Because what was security? It was a word, an abstract idea, grasped at by people who believed they needed it, who hadn’t yet discovered their own strength. She had so wanted to believe in security that she’d married a man for all the wrong reasons. And what had her sacrifice for security gotten any one of them? A tombstone for her father two months after the marriage. A locked-in state of mind for herself and Asa. In the beginning, so unthinkingly, she had gone along with Asa’s idea of security, of what was right, as if it was carved-in-stone truth: that life was about planning children, about working, and about sticking with marriage vows. But security was an illusion. Look at the bulldozers threatening the playhouse, the house on River Road, all of Cascade, and the men in all those newspaper photos in every city in the country, standing in lines, waiting for meals, for charity.

“I guess they found some kind of chain up at Pine Point,” Jacob was saying. “Pine Point—now that’s the very same place where two hundred people picnicked two weeks ago, if I’m not mistaken, but no one thought of that. No, they automatically deduce that the chain must belong to me.”

“What kind of chain? Why do they think it’s yours?”

“A neck chain, of some sort. I gather it sports a Star of David or some symbol they consider Jewish.”

He should stand up to them, she thought, tell them they were being bigoted. Music drifted in through the small casement window. Ragtime music. “Asa himself opened that dam,” she said. “He was keeping it a secret from everyone. He hoped the altered water levels of the river would affect the state’s decision. He’s planning to tell them when he gets back from Connecticut.”

Jacob shrugged. “That doesn’t explain who closed it.”

“They’ll think it was Stan.”

“If they thought that, they wouldn’t have hauled me in here now, would they?”

She studied the floor, a speckled, gritty cement, and stole a glance at his hands, resting in his lap. Her eyes locked there for a second before looking away, a dreadful second, because looking at his lap felt wrong and embarrassing. And then she felt sad. They’d been together in the most intimate way possible yet now they sat with a gulf between them.

“You’ll just have to tell them the truth,” she said decisively, brave on the outside but inside starting to free-fall at the thought of Asa finding out. “You—
we
—closed the dam, just because we wanted to see how it worked.”

“I don’t want people talking about you, gossiping about why we were in the woods together.”

“But we can’t lie to the police.”

Still. There had to be a way out of this for both of them. Asa had said he was going to tell the police he opened the dam himself. If she told them that Asa had been working on the dam, they might just drop the matter altogether. She could tell Asa that there was no need to talk to Dwight and Wendell because she’d already told them all they needed to know.

That’s what she would say, she decided. And she would never, ever get herself tangled up in lies again. What was that line from
The Tempest
, about making a sinner of one’s own memory by crediting a lie? She’d never been a lying sort of person; she wanted to be done with lies. “There’s something I haven’t told you. I have the offer of a job in New York. With the
Standard
.”

He looked at her, wordlessly asking for explanation. She told him about the
Postcards from America
plan, how the conversation with Mr. Washburn had come about so quickly. “He asked if I could be there by August and I didn’t have time to think, I just said yes. All I know is that I want that job. I don’t belong here, I never did.”

He didn’t say anything and she couldn’t read him. “I didn’t want you to think I was chasing after you. That’s why I didn’t mention it.”

He was silent so long she began to feel impatient. Was this the man who’d said, “We belong together”?

“Are you kidding?” he said quietly. “I would love it if you were in New York.” His face so serious, such a contrast to his words. “But what about Asa?”

“Asa,” she said, pronouncing his name with all the anguish she felt. “I haven’t told him yet. I guess I was vaguely, miraculously hoping he would think about moving there if they take Cascade.” But there wasn’t really a hope that Asa would consent to a move to New York. And now he would find out about the dam and maybe about Jacob, and maybe he would want a clean slate, a chance to start fresh. A new town, new wife, the children he wanted. Wouldn’t there be some kind of relief in that for him?

She and Jacob had to go forward with a clean slate, too. “And there’s something else. It was stupid and rash but—” She had to tell him she had known, all along, the truth about the dam at Secret Pond.

There was the sound of the outside door opening, multiple footsteps pounding down the stairs. She got to her feet and spoke quickly. “Asa’s in Connecticut till late, midnight. Come by when they’re done with you.”

“If they let me go—”

“They have to, you haven’t done anything wrong,” she said as Elliot Lowell strode in, followed by Wendell and Dwight.

Dwight set two steaming cartons of something from the Brilliant on one of the desks. “Dez,” he said, almost under his breath, as if no one else could hear. “What’s going on?”

She gathered herself up, ready to make all the difference with what she had to say.

“Asa himself was working on that dam. No one else was fooling with it,” she said. She waited for the understanding that would follow her pronouncement,
but Dwight and Wendell simply exchanged raised eyebrows.

Lowell stepped forward and looked down at her with some amusement. “Your husband told me that already.” Obviously, his expression said, she didn’t share confidences with her husband. Obviously, she visited men who were not her husband as they sat in jail cells on Saturday nights. “Just this morning on his way out of town. He opened it, he said, but someone else closed it.” His eyes lifted and he regarded Jacob steadily. “What your husband did also has no bearing on why Mr. Solomon was up there two days in a row. That’s why he’s here to answer a few questions.” He nodded to Dwight and Wendell. “I will walk Mrs. Spaulding out.”

Dez tried to catch Jacob’s eye, but Wendell stood between them and she had no choice but to follow Elliot Lowell as he ushered her through the door and up the stairs.

They emerged onto the sidewalk, to a warm wind and brassy music floating down from the bandstand, wavering in intensity—now loud, now barely discernible. In the distance, electric light haloed the air over the common, but where they stood was dark and shadowy.

“I found your note,” Dez said. “What is it you want?”

“Well, I’ve got a man dead, and his widow clamoring to find out what happened to him.”

She was silent. Let him steer the conversation.

“Now everyone’s saying Stanley himself was probably trying to close up the dam, that it was an accident. And it probably was an accident. But not the way people are saying.” His languid way of speaking, and looking at her, unnerved her. “Stan would have notified others before doing anything himself. That’s the way we run our operation.”

“You know, Mr. Lowell, regardless of who closed the dam, the act of doing it didn’t necessarily cause Stan’s death.”

“I’m hearing there’s talk about you and this peddler fellow,” he said abruptly. She was glad of the night, to hide the blush she knew had spread
up her face. “And I’m guessing why you were in the woods, but I have no idea why you’d want to close up that dam.”

Did someone actually see them? Again, she didn’t respond. Let him reveal what he knew.

“Mr. Solomon didn’t want to say why he was up at Pine Point, and that got Wendell suspicious of him. Wendell’s ready to point the finger at him just to get rid of Mrs. Smith. But Dwight sensed that Mr. Solomon was only trying to protect you.”