The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (39 page)

“Or that.”

“But
Hannah
, goddammit!” Pat hollered. I winced, tired of all the yelling. I had had enough of raised voices and shouting matches.

“Hannah’s dead, Patricia.”

“Jesus . . .”

“And Jennifer needs your help.”

Jennifer’s head bobbed. She looked even worse in the daylight than she had in the dimly lit basement. Her eyes were glassy and bloodshot and her innumerable cuts were already bleeding through my work shirt. I must have torn some of the scabs hauling her up the steps.

“But who is she?” Pat asked. “What the hell is going on here?”

“She’s what turned my marriage bad,” I said with a lopsided smile.

Neither of them seemed to get it.

But hell,
I
laughed.

FROM
West Branch

L
ABOR DAY
. W
E
could hear the bellow and grind from the Route 19 overpass. Below, the river gleamed like a flaw in metal. Leaving the parking lot behind, we billy-goated down the fisherman’s trail, one by one, the way all mountain people do. Loud clumps of bees clustered in the fireweed and boneset, and the trail crunched underfoot with cans, condom wrappers, worm containers. A half-buried coal bucket rose from the dirt with a galvanized grin. The laurel hell wove itself into a tunnel, hazy with gnats. There, a busted railroad spike. The smell of river water filled our noses.

Finally sun spilled through the trees, and we saw Pillow Rock rise as big as a church from the waters. A gaudy lichen of beach towels and bikini tops coated it over. Local women shouted our names. “Happy Labor Day!” When we set foot upon it, the granite seemed to curve to our bare soles, radiating an animal heat. Wolf spiders raced off. We made the top, where Pillow Rock flattened. The river nipped at its base. So much water. The Army Corps of Engineers had uncorked the dam below Summersville Lake. The water churned and gouged at the canyon walls. The Gauley had the reputation of a drowning river, even before the Army Corps wrestled it out of God’s control and gave it power.

Upriver, scraps of neon: rafters. Dyes like that don’t appear in nature. Their paddles flashed like pikes in the sun.

Rafting brings in millions of taxable dollars a year. The commissioner says it’s the best thing to happen to Nicholas County since the coal severance tax. “Coal was king,” he says. “Coal
was
king.” Men in their twenties and thirties and forties shouldn’t stand idle. We who’d lost our mining jobs would work in whitewater, plow that wet furrow. Nice thoughts. Invigorating lies. For our bread, we worked filling stations, timber outfits, hospice care, county schools. The two big successes among us, Chet Mason and Reed Judy, started a welding outfit out of Reed’s old echoing barn. The rafting operators—from Pennsylvania, Oregon, Croatia—brought their own people and did little hiring, until Kelly Bischoff started Class Five. He hired locals. The papers gushed over Kelly. He’d graduated from Panther Creek High School. One of us. Ex-miner. He looked rugged-good and dusky on a brochure, glossy and smiling, holding a paddle. His mother’s from Gad.

On Pillow Rock, men and women spoke to one another, casual and cunning. Someone fiddled with a portable radio: white jags of static, the silver keen of a steel guitar. We pried open prescription bottles that carried names other than our own.

Too late for trout fishing, too early for squirrel season—time to sun ourselves like happy rattlesnakes and watch the frolic. Five weeks running in the fall, we did, every Saturday, every Sunday. Opening day was always best. Every few minutes another raft tumbled over Sweet’s Falls and crashed in the shredding whirlpool. After a tense moment, the raft popped up like a cork in a sudsy bucket of beer. We cheered. Agonized faces glanced back, blooming with smiles. They loved us, or the sight of us. They held paddles aloft in pale white arms and their orange helmets shined. Some claim we don’t care about those people, we just take their commerce. Not true. We wonder about their jobs, their towns, their faces, their names.

Kelly Bischoff swore he heard a cash register chime every time they tipped over the falls.
I love clientele
, he said. Kelly moved between the two worlds, sleek as an otter. He knew us. He knew the rafters. Their names, their faces. He had everything you could want.

“Look, that one’s so scared he keeps paddling, not even hitting the water.”

Laugher tumbled down the rock. “What a jackass.”

“A happy jackass.”

“Would you do that?” Chet Mason asked a woman. “Go over the falls?”

“I’d love to scream like that. I never scream like that.”

“You hear that, Jason? Sounds like you’re not taking care of your husbandly duties.”

Reed Judy said, “You pay big money to holler like that. Old Kelly gets two hundred dollars a head. You got to come with a full raft too. He got
plenty
of rafts.”

“How many heads is that?”

“One, two . . . six in that one, not counting the guide,” Chet Mason said. “Slick as a hound’s tooth, Kelly is. Course, fall’s got to pay for winter, spring, and summer—that’s awful heavy math. There he is. That’s Class Five, that’s Kelly’s.”

The forty-seventh raft that day. Class Five River-Runners had blue-and-yellow rafts, same colors as the Mountaineers’ football team. We were proud of Kelly. After they sealed the Haymaker Mine, he took out a mortgage to start his outfit. Kelly punched out Mayor Cline last year at the festival. Wasn’t even drunk.

“Hey, Kelly boy!” We cupped hands around our mouths. “Hey, Kelly!”

But he didn’t wave back, riding closer on the careening swell. The raft hit at a bad angle. Rocks scraped the wet, blubbery rubber. As it made the lip of the falls—in our bellies, we felt a feathery sympathetic tickle—the raft toppled and shook out bodies.

Quiet. Then the screaming.

We bounded down to the water’s jagged edge, we tried to tally them, keep the numbers right. Neon tumbling in that gullet of foam, and one frail arm. We reached and missed and cussed ourselves. Reed managed to hook a belt and flopped a man onto the rock.

One disappeared under a boulder for a few sickening moments and shot out the other side. His mouth a hard circle.

With a strong crawl, Kelly led some into a backwater that bristled with logjams and lost paddles. Their heads broke the surface. The current sucked them back.

Kelly and the girl reached up at the same time. Chet Mason was closest. He had one set of hands. He hesitated for a millisecond. He reached for Kelly. “Got you.”

A sharp little yelp cut the noise. The girl’s helmet disappeared downriver. She was gone.

Young boys slid off the rocks like seals. Tethered with rope, they felt for corpses with their feet; we fished for the dead and walked the living—Kelly and four rafters—up Pillow Rock.

Like nothing had happened, a raft came tippling over the falls. The rafters looked surprised when no one waved. Supplicants, we circled the rock with track cell phones raised in hand, trying for the best of reception. Soon an ambulance squalled onto the overpass.

The rescued were quiet now. Hard to believe they’d been wailing, keening, moaning. Flogged by the water, they looked haggard—pilgrims who’d been turned back from the country of the drowned. We sat them on beach towels and tried to give them sandwiches. They wore mere bruises and abrasions, but the paramedics nursed them just the same. One kept trying to slip a blood pressure cuff onto them. A blond woman with a tank top and a little too much sun wept and cussed in alternating jags. She did this while wringing water from her hair. She had a stiff shocked look, like a cat you just threw in a rain barrel.

The survivors sat a ways from Kelly Bischoff. He shivered under a towel, smoking a damp cigarette. He’d stripped off his life jacket and spread it in the sun to dry. His hair, gone gray in patches, had grown out like a hippie’s. “Of all the goddamn things,” he kept saying.

“How many times you been over the falls?” Reed Judy asked him.

“Three hundred and thirty-one.”

“How many times you roll it over on you?”

“Three,” he said, pulling on the cigarette. “This was the third. My line was right.”

“Looked like you hit it funny.”

“My line was right. They let out thirty-eight hundred cfs today. Too much river. That,” Kelly said, “is God’s honest truth.” He pressed his ear against the warm granite to draw out the water. He was shaking.

Deputies arrived. They were locals, Hunter Sales and Austin Cogar, young, crew-cut, sweating from the hike. Austin stood by the survivors and jotted on a pad. “How old you say she was?”

“I don’t know exactly,” a rafter said. He was half of a whisper-thin couple who were holding hands on the rock. “She’s my friend’s daughter. She’s in high school.”

“Her name’s Amanda,” Kelly cried. It was sudden, like the fury of a wasp.

Everyone turned to him. Hunter took his arm and tried to lead him aside.

“I know all my clients,” Kelly said. He liked calling them by their names. It set things in motion, the tumbling of keys in locks. It made us feel unprivileged.

Hunter asked, “How you doing, Kelly?”

“I been better.”

“Turn a boat over, did you?”

“Looks like.” Kelly flicked the cigarette into the waters.

“Got good insurance?”

“Damn good. The best.”

Hunter told us to give them some room. He lowered his voice and began to question.

“I had one beer,” Kelly said, more loudly than he should have. “Washed down my sandwich at lunch. Ask anybody.”

The blond woman who’d been wringing her hair spoke up. “You drank three of them,” she said, putting a nice little snap on her words. “You put them away fast.” She turned to Austin. “He had at least two. Then he sneaked off at lunch with them and—”

Kelly said, “Christina, this is between me and the police. You’ll get your turn.”

We blushed at the mention of her name, like they’d admitted something sexual. Austin’s pen quit scratching—it made you blush twice.

The blond woman walked over to Kelly. “I have something to say and it’s my right.”

“Aw shut up.” Then he called her something that made us cringe, even the deputies.

“I’d like to speak to you in private,” Austin told her. “All you people go. Come on, get.”

She spoke in low tones, her hands fluttering in a crippled dove dance.

Slowly we folded our towels but didn’t stray too far. Kelly sat off to the side like the condemned. Austin talked into a radio pinned on his shirt. “Blond teenager, female, fifteen years of age. Male, forty-three years of age, scar through his eyebrow.”

The sun weakened. As the temperature fell, the air began to smell like rain. Deputies said go on home, they didn’t need no more statements, though we’d have been proud to give them. The coolers pissed final streams of meltwater and we made our exodus, one by one. A drizzle fell. Kelly sat in the back of a Crown Vic cruiser on the overpass, head bowed against the seat in front of him. The drizzle turned to nickel-hard rain and we heard the blades whapping long before we saw. The helicopter dipped into view. Pterodactyl-ugly, it switched on a searchlight and circled many times. Then it swooped away, called back wherever it came from. The rain turned to roaring curtains. Faintly, the music of rescue disappeared over the ridge.

We found the dead girl wrapped around a bridge abutment at the mouth of Meadow Creek. Her skin was bleached canvas-white by the waters, her eyes pressed shut. For that we were thankful. This stretch of river the rafters aren’t supposed to see. It’s a world away from Pillow Rock. Here, Meadow Creek sloughed mine acid into the Gauley after any good rain. It streaked rocks orange and sent a cadmium ribbon of yellowboy unspooling downriver. No fish, no life. The sight of it could make you cry.

“You guys ought to pull on gloves.”

We waved off the sheriff and waded in. Hadn’t we been raised to treat our hands like tools, our tools like hands? Blue jeans drank up water and darkened.

We built a chain of ourselves, then pulled her from the shallows, her hair tangling like eelgrass around hands and arms, refusing to let go. On the green table of pasture we laid the dead girl’s body: coltish, young, trim as a cliff diver’s. An athlete. Her hair twisted into a wet question mark. One leg tucked under her at a funny angle. We pulled down her shirt where it had ridden over her small breasts. Leaves in her hair. “Walnut leaves,” someone said.

She looked okay for someone who’d been traveling all night. We wrapped her in plastic and carried her to the road. Sheriff said, “Sure glad Kelly ain’t here to see this.”

Everyone nodded. It was a solemn occasion. It felt almost holy, to carry a visitor’s body in the morning light. None of us had touched one before.

The dead girl’s picture found its way into the newspaper, pixelated and gray. She was a high schooler from Bethesda, Maryland, her father a minor executive at the federal Department of Labor. The mother an ex-wife. Her father was Greg Stallings. We never found his body. We learned the things we did not know. Amanda.

You couldn’t have gotten all the leaves out of the dead girl’s hair. Not even if you’d sheared it off.

With her death, life changed, a little. Insurance payments were made, rumor and accusation leveled, a dram of ink spilled in the papers. Kelly Bischoff sold his company to a fellow from Connellsville, Pennsylvania, who owned a northern operation on the Youghiogheny and the Cheat. Seventeen of Kelly’s people went on unemployment and COBRA, drawing as long as they could. Connellsville had his own guys. No one made big lawsuit money off her death; rafters sign risk papers beforehand, absolving companies of blame. So earth turned, bears scouted their dens, the Army Corps eased their levers down. The river returned to its bed.

We have a tenth of the mining jobs our fathers had.

But Kelly had connections. He found work running a dozer at a strip mine—a fitting job, where he dumped blasted rock into the valley, stanching creeks and gullies with tons of shattered mountaintop. He crafted a featureless flatland where the governor promised malls, industrial parks, golf, chain restaurants. A new round of permits cleared the EPA.