Beneath Still Waters Read online

  stores to be left.

  Dan took a sip of his drink.

  Nothing much exciting here, he thought. There was a

  funny story of a cow that ate some dynamite, and then later

  a story about how two workers died when the concrete base

  was being poured.

  (And where were they now? he wondered. Part of the

  cement bedrock of the dam?)

  He finished the first notebook, feeling that Billy

  Leeper’s magnum opus might not have any great secret to

  reveal.

  b e n e a t h s t i l l w a t e r s

  177

  But that feeling all changed when he opened the second

  notebook.

  It contained jottings from Leeper—written in a scraggly

  hand. There were comments in the margins and written

  underneath the clippings.

  Now all the material was taken from the years before

  the dam was built. Pictures and stories from Gouldens

  Falls in its salad days. There was a picture of the Lakeview

  Hotel, a squat pillbox of a building with an elegant front

  porch and stairs leading down to a dirt road. The church,

  with its elegant steeple. A firehouse on a hill overlooking

  the town. A photo of Main Street with its mixture of cars

  and carriages. But Leeper had circled someone standing in

  one of the pictures, right next to a roadster parked beside

  the hotel.

  There was a name scribbled in the margin. “Thomas

  Raine,” Dan said, reading aloud.

  Then he flipped to another yellowed page from the pa-

  per. Jonathan Reynolds was announcing the annual Octo-

  ber Harvest Festival. Behind him there was a stack of

  pumpkins that stood over ten feet tall.

  Mighty big pumpkins.

  Who are these people? Dan wondered. Why had Leeper

  tracked down their photos?

  Then a doctor, holding twins. Dr. Samuel Hustis, beam-

  ing as he cradled the twins, one in each arm. And a store-

  keeper, personal photo here. A curling black-and-white

  Kodak print of Mr. Wallace Pfister, who stood smiling be-

  hind the counter of a store that looked like it sold every-

  thing from sausages to sneakers.

  He turned another page.

  There was a space for another clipping, but it apparently

  had come loose . . . slipped away.

  “Probably in the box somewhere,” Dan said to himself.

  He reached over and tipped in a few more fingers’ worth of

  the Kentucky bourbon.

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  m a t t h e w j . c o s t e l l o

  And underneath the space, scrawled twice as big as any

  of the names, was a large question mark and a circle.

  A question mark. Four names. Five photos. One ques-

  tion mark.

  He was thinking about this, as well as he could after a

  couple of belts, when the phone rang. He shook, startled

  by the brash ring.

  It rang one more time and he picked it up.

  F I F T E E N

  She so hated being alone.

  Even with the TV on in both the bedroom and living

  room, Sharon Benny felt abandoned by her husband. Of

  course, she never let Bob know that. She supported him

  completely, doing her best to keep their modern, split-level

  home running along smoothly. The last thing he needed

  was her getting all fidgety about being by herself two or

  three times a month.

  To be sure, she trusted him totally. He just wasn’t the

  type to use his jaunts for affairs. And he always came home

  all worked up (“hot and bothered,” she called it), eager to

  get the kids to sleep and spend time alone with her.

  She guessed she was happy.

  This seemed to be everything she wanted out of life. A

  beautiful home overlooking the lake (even if they never

  could get close to it), two reasonably well-behaved chil-

  dren, no more obnoxious than the other kids she saw her

  friends coping with. A devoted husband— something of a

  rarity, to hear her friends talking. Still, sitting in the living 180

  m a t t h e w j . c o s t e l l o

  room, just cleaned today by Esther (another find!), she

  couldn’t help feeling oddly dissatisfied.

  Dissatisfied and disturbed.

  She thought she’d like this house, all off to itself, sur-

  rounded by heavy oak trees, well away from any neighbors.

  But on a night like this, with Bob in California, she felt

  a prisoner. The kids slept peacefully, but she tended to stay

  up late—too late—tossing, turning, listening to the breeze

  from the lake rustling the willow trees, an eerie whoosh.

  More than once she was tempted to go to Dr. Rheinman

  and ask for a sleeping-pill prescription ( just like her

  mother, she thought, who progressed to regular doses of

  Valium “for my nerves” until the medicine cabinet looked

  a display at a pharmaceutical museum of horrors).

  So she just roughed it out . . . like she would tonight.

  She pushed the remote-control button and the picture

  tube blinked off, leaving the filmy afterglow of a sandy-

  blond newscaster.

  She left the living room light on.

  It’s worth the fifty cents or so of electricity, she thought.

  She turned on the security system, first for the downstairs,

  and, when she had reached the bedroom, for the upstairs.

  It should have made her feel better—more protected.

  But it didn’t.

  “Slow down,” Dan said on the phone. Susan sounded ex-

  cited, overwrought. He looked at his watch. It was nearly

  eleven p.m. “Now, what happened?”

  “Allan, my editor, called about an hour ago. The divers are

  gone, Dan. gone! They were supposed to finish their search,

  but they went down a second time and never came up.”

  Dan looked at the notebook on his bed—open to the page

  with the missing photo and the question mark. He thought

  of the divers—Ed, a tight-lipped Clint Eastwood type who

  b e n e a t h s t i l l w a t e r s

  181

  seemed totally unflappable; and Tom, who seemed to have

  been developing a rocky set of nerves.

  And now they were gone.

  (What’s going on here?)

  “What do the police know?” he asked.

  “According to Allan, nothing. The guy in the boat . . .”

  “Russo.”

  “Yeah. Well, he stayed out there, going back and forth

  for hours, calling for them on the radio. He had to be or-

  dered to come in. Maybe they got hung up on something,

  maybe one of the old buildings collapsed on them—”

  Wrong. There was no way that two divers with their

  experience could have let that happen.

  “So what’s everyone doing?”

  “The police aren’t saying anything, though Allan said

  that the New York police were notified. State troopers are

  already here. Another diving team might be on the way, but

  it’s just speculation. I’ll know by tomorrow.”

  “Oh . . . how will you know tomorrow?”

  “Allan said I’m to can everything else and just stay on

  this story—the dam, the missing people. It’s the biggest

  story to h
it Ellerton since—”

  Dan turned toward the door. He thought he heard some-

  one walk by outside it. Footsteps on the poured concrete.

  He could have sworn they paused a minute, and then

  moved on.

  Easy, boy, he thought. Wouldn’t do getting all paranoid.

  “Susan, I don’t think that’s a good idea. You don’t know

  what’s going on there. I—”

  “C’mon, Dan. I’m a reporter, a writer like you. It’s a

  story, a big one, too, and I’m not going to go diving.” She

  paused, her irritation at his concern obvious. “I’m a big girl,

  and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t cover this story.”

  He tried to put his feelings into words, to find an argu-

  ment to convince her to stay away.

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  m a t t h e w j . c o s t e l l o

  “Don’t go there,” he said. “Just don’t go anywhere near

  the dam and the reservoir.”

  She was cool now, her voice turning flat and profes-

  sional. “I have my job to do. I just called ’cause I thought

  you’d be interested. I’m sorry you’re not. I have to get

  some sleep. It’s going to be an early morning. Bye.”

  Susan’s receiver clicked rudely in his ear.

  So much for that blossoming relationship.

  But as he went back to the open notebook, something

  seemed to stick in his mind.

  The picture of Claire walking into her house.

  It’s almost as if she knew the bad news first . . . before

  anyone.

  He looked over at his diving gear, sprawled on the floor

  around the squat dresser that he hadn’t used, preferring to

  live out of his two suitcases.

  The air tanks were all filled, ready for a nice dive into

  the Kenicut Reservoir.

  Except suddenly he wasn’t so eager to take that dive.

  Sharon Benny had been asleep.

  She was sure of it.

  But then something woke her up.

  She looked around her bedroom. The digital clock read

  12:01. She listened. She heard her own breathing, irregu-

  lar, as if she were taking random gasps of air. The pillow

  rustled noisily in her ears as she turned her head from side

  to side.

  No sound now. It’s okay, she thought. I can go back to sleep.

  ( Try to go back to sleep.)

  She curled around, hugging Bob’s pillow close, hating

  him now for not being here. She closed her eyes tight, mak-

  ing an iridescent pattern of crisscrossed lines appear before

  her eyes.

  b e n e a t h s t i l l w a t e r s

  183

  She heard something.

  A sound from downstairs, down near the family room.

  At first she knew, just knew, it couldn’t be anything

  wrong. The security system was the best money could buy.

  Any attempt at entering from the outside would trigger the

  motion detectors.

  Alarms all over, and a gaggle of rent-’em cops ready to

  come to her home within minutes.

  (She knew that because they had tried it out. “Just a mis-

  take,” Bob had explained to them. But it really had been an

  experiment. The system was worth its yearly maintenance

  fee of two thousand dollars.)

  She sat up a bit, again trying to listen. Mice, maybe? (If

  she wasn’t so allergic to fur, they would have invested in a

  cat a long time ago.)

  No. It sounded like—

  (Her heart started a strange tattoo. Gooseflesh—always

  quick to rise on her—popped out.)

  The sliding door being opened.

  But why no alarm? Unless . . .

  If it’s opened from the inside, it automatically neutral-

  izes the alarm. (“Keeps your kids and pets from driving

  you crazy,” the sleazoid salesman had explained.) She sat

  up quickly, pausing just another second before making the

  inevitable decision.

  She got out of bed, ignoring her robe, and whirled into

  Samantha’s room. Her daughter was asleep, curled up near

  the top of her bed like she always was, her arm around her

  Alf.

  She started to feel a bit relieved. Samantha sometimes

  got up, took a pee, and decided to dig around for some

  goodies to eat in the middle of the night. Joshua, though,

  was dead to the world until sunrise (at which point he al-

  ways found some reason to wake everyone up).

  She went into Joshua’s room.

  For a moment she saw him there, wrapped up in his tangle

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  m a t t h e w j . c o s t e l l o

  of sheets and blankets. But the room was dark, and she

  looked more closely. He wasn’t there. She patted the sheet,

  the blanket, the pillow, groaning as her hand felt only the

  softness, and no little boy’s hard and bony body.

  “Oh, God,” she said, and she ran out of the room, throw-

  ing the hall light on, already creating explanations for

  where he was.

  He woke up . . . went and got a cookie . . . maybe tried

  to find some cartoons on TV, sure, that’s all—except she

  had heard the heavy door slide open.

  She went down the stairs quickly and reached for the

  light.

  The family room was empty.

  The red light—indicating that the security system was

  on—was dark. Shut off.

  And the sliding door was open to the moonlit night.

  A pattern began to emerge.

  But Dan hadn’t the foggiest clue as to what it had to do

  with the reservoir.

  There was one whole notebook filled with “human-

  interest” newspaper clippings from Gouldens Falls. The

  Johnson baby’s remarkable recovery from a horrible ill-

  ness. Despite the drought of 1935, Mr. Patterson reported a

  bumper crop of corn. (“We did some irrigating,” Patterson

  was quoted as saying, a big smile on his face.) Donnelly’s

  Hardware—most of its stock destroyed in a fire a month

  earlier—reopened with a gala celebration, and an even

  large selection of items. (“The insurance really helped,”

  Joe Donnelly told reporters.)

  Page after page, until it looked like Gouldens Falls had

  become the garden spot of the world, a place where only

  good things happened to nice, God-fearing people. The rest

  of the country might have been in the middle of a hellish

  b e n e a t h s t i l l w a t e r s

  185

  depression, but Gouldens Falls was prospering mighty

  nicely, thank you.

  He finished the notebook, seeing that the only thing

  Leeper had written down was the names of the people in

  the stories.

  “Like some sort of scorecard,” Dan said aloud. He be-

  gan to think that Leeper had done more than just bang his

  head on that rock that day.

  He started the next notebook.

  It began in 1936, and now all of a sudden there were

  different stories . . . tragic stories. Patterson’s prizewin-

  ning mare falls down dead—a heart attack, the vet said.

  And a toddler—little Annie Martin—falls victim to a par-

  ticular nasty strain of the flu. The parents move away. A

  house burns down. A young man has a stro
ke, falling into a

  coma.

  Again, there was a list of names in Leeper’s hand. And

  Dan sensed what should have been obvious. Some of the

  names are the same. It was as if they’d had a stroke of

  some incredibly good luck, and then, later, something went

  wrong. Not to all of them. But according to Leeper’s rec-

  ords, many of the names were the same.

  He poured himself a drink.

  He rubbed his eyes. Eight notebooks left, and who the

  hell knew what kind of story was coming out. He was

  tempted to look at the last one.

  He reached over and fingered its shiny metal spine.

  He heard a car outside. No, he thought, listening, not a

  car . . . a deeper rumble from its engine. From a pickup, or

  maybe a small truck.

  It entered the lot slowly, and Dan heard it pause by his

  room, as if someone were checking out the numbers. Prob-

  ably some guy four sheets to the wind trying to make the

  room numbers stop going double on him.

  I know that feeling, Dan thought.

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  m a t t h e w j . c o s t e l l o

  He picked up the next notebook. And he thought it was

  a mistake. More clippings, of course, with the dates circled

  and the locations written in by Leeper. But they were from

  all over.

  Missing people. From nearby New York City. From

  upstate. From Boston, Philadelphia.

  There were copies of announcements—brown and hope-

  less with age, all faded—asking if anyone “knew the where-

  abouts of,” and then a name. Dozens of them. From 1936,

  1937, and 1938. Why were they in this book? As if Leeper

  had tracked down every missing person from those years.

  Every unsolved missing person.

  He stood up, letting the notebook slide to the bed. He

  shook his head. What is this? What’s going on here? And

  maybe it’s time I got out of it.

  He looked at his AMF diving suit—not the most mod-

  ern, easily out-of-date by a good five years—hanging in

  the closet. His knife, a mean, jagged-edged item that he

  kept razor-sharp, was draped over the coatrack.

  He thought of Tom and Ed.

  (Supposedly it’s not so bad dying by drowning. The air

  gives out, and you start sucking your own carbon monox-

  ide back in. Your head starts to spin. You black out. Not so

  bad. Supposedly.)

  If that’s what had happened to them . . . if somehow

  they’d been pinned under the water.

  (But Dan remembered being trapped in his car, feeling

  the icy water shooting in, sitting there watching it fill the