Excerpt from THE LAKE OF LIVING WATER
A novel
by Kevin Macneil Brown
Chapter One
It was at least a hundred years ago, and probably more, that winter mud had first frozen hard around these scattered bones here. And for just as many years, spring melt had come to soften that silt, the lake level rising, the old brown and yellow sedges falling back to let new green blades rise toward the returning sun.
But now the dark waters of the dirty Pine Street Barge Canal seemed on this afternoon a few days before yet another season of frost and ice to welcome the westering sun as it scattered bright veins of cool light across the broad dozen miles of Lake Champlain.
Vermont State Police Detective Tom Durham looked down from his silent and rapt meditations and stared again at the hard, cream-colored, stone-like human tibia, the shattered eggshell of skull, all those bones laid out like a workman’s tools on the small, ridged, beige sand bar that had appeared here just two days earlier.
Moving upward, Tom Durham’s eyes and thoughts found for just a moment the blue Adirondack Mountains of New York State across the lake.
“Thank God,” he said to himself, “Old bones. And whomever’s heart was broken by these deaths is gone, their own hurt healed by time and…”
Cutting off Tom’s thoughts, and blocking for a moment the sun, a flight of geese passed over. Maybe ten or twelve of them–Tom lost count as they passed over. They flew low enough so that he could hear the little singing of air through their black-tipped wing feathers.
And that whiteness…He looked up at a dazzling radiance that seemed almost impossible in this cold, thin air of northern New England autumn. These were snow geese. ‘What a gift to behold,’ he thought, ‘and what a long journey they’ve taken.’
Then, shaking off a sudden chill, willing himself to believe that his wool sweater was perhaps a bit thicker that it really was, he rubbed his hands together for warmth. He reached down into the little satchel propped up against the rust-colored rocks near those bones, pulled out the little box camera that would document this find, pulled out the notebook and pen that were the tools necessary for the making of his official report.
Ancient remains, these were. Probably no need, then, for a State Police investigation, once the medical examiner, Sorensen, signed off. Tom Durham set the camera on a nearby flat-topped rock, and then sat down with his back to the concrete storm wall. It was unpleasantly cold against his body. A few yards away an ancient, battered iron drawbridge, its massive toothed gears rusted motionless now, cast hard brown shadows on the dirty water of the canal.
He leaned forward, opened the notebook and began to write, starting, as he always did, with the date and place.
October 29, 1979. Burlington, Vermont. Entrance to abandoned Pine Street Barge Canal, Lake Champlain.
***
Megan Ridler was no way going to pitch her little army pup tent down behind the sedges near the Barge Canal anymore. Not after those skeleton bones had shown themselves at the water’s edge, right down where the old broken iron railroad bridge bled thick red-black rust into the dark water.
Guys on the beach with wine and pot and empty eyes were one thing. She had the gun–the little Ruger–that she knew she was tough enough to never have to use. And she knew with all her heart that her prayers to Jesus and her pre-dawn contemplations with the Buddha who shared her road would be more than enough to protect her from the few bad apples that had fallen from the paradise tree in a world otherwise full of wonderful, shining, loving human beings. This confidence imbued her travels, powered her adventures; it filled her days, and filled the little blue-covered sketchbooks she carried in the big side pocket of her ancient navy pea-coat.
But bones and spirits were another thing altogether. It wasn’t that those bones gave off bad vibes; she’d understood right away, the moment she’d realized just what it was that she had poked with her walking stick in that new shelf of rippled sand where cold lake water had recently receded.
No, those bones did not give off evil energy. It was something that was, to her, much worse: They gave off no energy, no vibes at all.
She’d stood thinking all this on that little beach. And then her eyes had caught something like a dull shimmering, finding, along with the scatter of bones and stones, that one small object resting partly buried in the hard ridged sand. A half circle, metallic and silver-gray.
She had reached down and pulled it free. A bracelet of some kind was what it seemed to be. Tarnished, dirty. Strangely soft to the touch. Lead, or pewter maybe. To her own, almost, surprise, she had slipped it into the hip pocket of her faded blue jeans.
It had been only an hour after her grim discovery of the bones, her guilty compulsion to pocket the bracelet, that she had taken down the little tent she’d been living in since August, in that peaceful spot behind the shelter of the tall grasses. Packed it up and strapped it onto the Kelty frame along with her pack. Tied back her long, sun- and- wind- and rain-cured brown hair with a rawhide thong–the way she always did when it was time to hit the road again.
***
For Malcombe Caulwell there was nothing better than the afternoon light of October on the big lake. The chores of an inn-keeper had brief hiatus, just at the starkly uplifting time of year when that beautiful web-work of silver light began to form across the water.
No better time, then, to climb, cup of strong tea at hand, the stairs of the squat red-stone turret that had once, long ago, held the Cedar Cove Light. No need to bring book or paperwork: this would be an hour of watching, silently, happily.
The evening stew, thick with cubed beef and sweet parsnips and starch-laden Green Mountain potatoes, simmered in the kitchen downstairs; today’s bread, fresh from the oven, sat cooling on the black marble counter. So Malcombe had leisure now to let his empty mind go out over the waters. Only a couple of sails out there today. And the big slow ferry you could set your clock by, looking tiny now, not quite half-way out from Port Kent, New York. The ugly, scrappy little oil tanker barge from Plattsburgh just beyond the breakwater and headed south past the old Barge Canal.
Malcombe liked to let his thoughts follow the boats while he sipped his afternoon tea. At times he felt–strange though it was–that he almost became the history, the memory of the place itself, that his own consciousness slipped from its human stays and fell somehow into the timeless flow of water, sky, shore…
But today that wouldn’t happen. Instead, a not very peaceful or comforting thought kept nagging at Malcombe’s respite time. A state police detective as a guest: that was the thought that kept breaking into his lake-watching reverie. A solid, pleasant man, that Tom Durham. Should be no problem–as long as he was gone within a day or two.
Malcombe lost sight of the ferry in the glim and glare off the water at just the same time as he surrendered his moment of peace to the reality before him. If the detective did not leave soon, well, there was a phone call that would have to be made...
Malcombe shrugged his shoulders. But he could not shrug off the fear that was building up in his gut at the thought of what all this might mean to his quiet, pleasant life as the keeper of the Cedar Cove Inn.
Chapter Two
Coffee cup full and warming her ice-cold, rope-and-line-calloused right hand, Grace Furrow, captain of the Lake Champlain ferry COLCHESTER climbed the seven steps to the westward-facing pilot room.
“Morning, Grace,” mumbled first mate Porter Willy, his hands on the wheel, eyes on the dock that was moving closer as the 130-foot long, three-decked vessel churned slowly toward it.
Ashore, a few cars glittered in the sun while their drivers idled engines, waiting at Port Kent to board. Grace smiled, said hello back. Though she had just turned thirty, Grace found that the presence of Willy, with his ragged ponytail hanging down his back, his white, epaulet-ed uniform shirt clean-but-rumpled, always made her feel somehow older. She liked Willy, had gone to bat for him with the owners more than a few times. “The kid’s a skilled and careful pilot, despite the hippie hair.” she’d said one time, “Someday he’ll be the best on the lake.”
Today was the last day of the season, and this the second to last run. She was going to let Porter take the next crossing, too, settle herself into this pilot room, finish up her paperwork, sign off on the logbook for the year. Porter would descend the seven steps and, while the deckhands boarded those few late-season cars waiting in line on the asphalt, walk across the deck and climb another seven steps up to the eastern pilot cabin. This was a two-ended ferry, and as such, it seldom had to turn around, as there were big propeller screws to power it through the water at either end.
“Wicked glare today, Grace,” said Porter, as he made his way out of the little cabin.
Grace knew all about the glare, and all about the little crinkles the years of it had made around her green-gray eyes. I’m feeling old again, she thought, which went against the grain of how she usually felt about herself. Often out late drinking and dancing, but always–always–rising early to do the chores and make the drive to the waterfront. Pulling up to park near the piers, grabbing her first coffee, she could always feel the farm girl strength in her muscles, the life-force energy that surged through her. And that energy only increased as the day went on, and she soaked up the open sky, the wide lake waters, the rumble of power in the massive diesels down below the car deck.
But today was it for the season. She’d miss the lake for a few months, she knew. But she also welcomed the quiet winter ahead in McKinley’s Gore, tucked up under the rock-summited high-mountain shadows of Camel’s Hump.
Adjoining two acres of abandoned orchard was the little house, the last one on the Gore Road before it faded into what the locals called the ancient highway: an overgrown, eroded, un-cared-for jeep road now. The house was full of projects, things to fix and improve. The roads were too rugged to let her go out and party every night in winter, so there would be that winter change in her habits–and, really, she always welcomed that change, welcomed the arrival of all that slow, quiet time to pass.
Nice and clear, she thought. The wind light, so the water smooth, and as faded blue-gray-clear as old glass. The last run later this evening would be gorgeous. She looked forward to that final eastward cruise, the early dusk, the slate-colored twilight sky as background for the first bright stars and planets, the ink-dark, broken-domed silhouette of Camel’s Hump, her mountain–her home–rock-solid and rising from the distant shore with, maybe, a quarter moon above.
Putting down her coffee mug and then opening, at the desk, the log book, Grace heard the blast of the boat’s departing horn, felt the tug of the vessel beginning to move out from the dock. Grace thought, wrote, turned pages, wrote some more. The voyage passed smoothly, as usual, the boat within a half hour reaching the middle of the passage to the Vermont shore.
But then Grace noticed that something, suddenly, sounded—no, not sounded, felt—strange, a little pull to the movement of the boat that she’d never experienced before. She knew by heart the rhythms and pulses of the big twin 6-cylinder Atlas Imperial engines that had been installed four years back; something just wasn’t right…
Leaving the logbook open on the little steel desk, Grace moved quickly down the stairs, building up speed as reached the car deck, bounding between parked cars, passing a knot of sight-seeing passengers. She was actually running by the time she reached the rear of the boat. The COLCHESTER was moving just fine now, but the engine still sounded and felt wrong: catching a bit, somehow off-rhythm.
Reaching the end of the deck, looking below toward the boat’s wake, Grace registered with disbelief what she saw. That wake was churning red–like blood–and there were little bits of something– clothing? garbage?...she couldn’t quite tell what they were–boiling around in that frothing red wake. She thought, for a moment, that she saw somebody’s arm, a sleeve that was a red far brighter than that of the foam that held it, reaching up.
She fought off the nausea rising like a swell from her center. Made her way–holding back a yell, a scream–to the front pilot cabin.
Running hard now, she bounded up the stairs.
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