Still Water (46 page)

She went on to explain the rest, much of which he’d already guessed. Her mother had suffered a stroke not long after the funeral, and after that progress towards recovery had been unnaturally slow.

“It was as if she didn’t want to live.”

Ella had always suspected her mother was troubled by something other than grief, and as the months went by and her mother’s health failed, Ella became convinced that unless she discovered what it was her mother would die. Finally she persuaded her mother to tell her the truth.

“It was too late by then to tell anyone what had happened. I couldn’t see what good it would do to put my mother through all the questions she would face, raking up the past, so I decided to move my father’s body. To bury him at sea, where he would have wanted to be. So that my mother wasn’t reminded of how he’d died every time she looked out of the kitchen window.” She paused and when she spoke again her voice was leaden. “The rest you know.”

It had grown dark. Their beers remained on the table in front of them, untouched since Ella had begun her story. Matt could no longer see her face properly in the shadows of the porch, but he knew that she was watching him, waiting to see what he would do.

He understood why she had kept silent, unwilling to risk putting her mother through the rig ours of an investigation that would have laid the secrets of their family bare. She would have destroyed her father’s name, and ultimately she would have been taking a chance that her mother’s story wouldn’t be believed, in which case her mother would have faced a prison term. Matt wondered what he would have done if she had told him all this when Bryan had first gone missing, and the answer was that he didn’t know.

His whole life had been shaped by a day a long time before when he’d almost drowned in Stillwater Cove. When Paulie had died, the character traits that had set Matt off on a mission of vengeance were already in place, and for a long time he hadn’t questioned what he was doing. If he’d heard a story like this from people he didn’t know when he’d still been working as a prosecutor he would have brought a charge of murder. Innocent people didn’t bury their husbands in the garden or dump their weighted bodies in the ocean. He still didn’t know if he had the right to make a judgment that he didn’t really believe was his to make. This was an issue that ought to be decided in a court of law, but if that happened people would be hurt regardless of the outcome, and in the end he believed things had occurred in much the way that Ella had related them.

But most important of all he wasn’t the same person he had been six months, or even two months earlier.

He knew without asking that if the same set of circumstances arose again, Ella would repeat her actions. It was her nature. Just as it was her nature to empathize with Kate Little even though she had believed Kate had killed Bryan.

“There’s no evidence of any of this to convict either you or your mother,” he said at length. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“No, you’re wrong Matt. It does matter.”

He knew what she was asking him, what he had to ask himself. Could he love her knowing all that he did about who she was?

He rose at last and wordlessly he went to turn on a light, and when he came back Ella was standing at the top of the steps. He looked at her, her face half in shadow, and thought how beautiful she was.

“It’s getting late, I think I should go,” she said.

Inside the house the phone started to ring. Matt ignored it. “Why don’t you stay awhile.”

She looked at him for a long time.

“Is that what you really want Matt?”

“It’s what I want.”

The phone was still ringing.

“Are you going to answer that?”

He hesitated, unsure if she would still be there when he came back, then he went inside. When he returned a couple of minutes later she wasn’t where he’d left her, and for a moment he thought that she had gone until he saw her leaning against the porch rail.

“That was Baxter. He wanted to tell me the result of the election. You won. Congratulations.”

He went over and put his arms around her. She leaned her head against his shoulder, and Matt knew finally that everything would be all right.

The orcas swam in close formation as they moved towards an unsuspecting minke whale in the cold waters off the coast of Nova Scotia. A male was at the front, and close by swam a female, and further back was the old bull whose body bore the scars of his long life. Behind his dorsal fin the presence of the broken shaft of a harpoon showed in the lump of scar tissue that covered it. The bull was weak. A young male and a female swam close to him, never straying far from his side. An infection had set in, the latest in a string of ailments that had troubled the bull after the pod had left the gulf, but this one was more serious. The harpoon point had worked its way further into his body towards his vital organs, and now the bull was feverish and his strength was rapidly failing. He did not take part in the hunt any longer, but relied on other members of the pod to feed him.

The minke was an adult, and almost as big as the old bull. It didn’t hear the orcas until it was too late. The animal was too big for them to kill quickly. The orcas positioned one of their number at each end of the minke. A female seized the whale’s flukes, while another held it by its long pointed snout. The minke was unable to move and knew that it was doomed. It sounded a deep moan of anguish. The lead male of the pod attacked first, swimming underneath and ripping at the minke’s genital slit, flaying open a strip of the thick blubber. An oily bloody film seeped into the surrounding water. One by one the pod attacked as the helpless whale was held fast. Each time the whale shuddered and low moans echoed in a haunting death cry through the deep waters. The orcas at fluke and snout were replaced by other members of the pod, so that they too could take their turn, and gradually the minke was stripped of its outer layer of blubber. Only after some time of this torment was enough flesh exposed that the lead male orca was able to bite into the minke’s body cavity. He ended the whale’s ordeal by seizing its great beating heart and tearing it out, spewing great clouds of blood into the surrounding water.

The old bull ate a few chunks of the rich blubber that were brought to him, but he was unable to keep the food down. When the pod continued on its way, all but the bull gorged, he swam with increasingly feeble actions, often supported by the other orcas.

During the night, the old bull dozed, and when the sun rose in the morning he was dead. The orcas all took their turn to swim alongside, rubbing close to the animal that had led them for so many years. They held him afloat for another day, reluctant to take their parting.

And then at dusk they at last released his body to continue on their way.

The dead bull slowly sank into the depths of the ocean.

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STUART HARRISON lived in New Zealand for many years, where he met his wife. They now live in Dublin with their two young sons. Stuart has worked in a variety of occupations all around the world but he is now a full-time writer.

www.fireandwater.com

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