The Reservoir (3 page)

As he turns up the cedar-lined drive, he sees a girl in a white dress scurrying in front of him and disappearing through a break in the trees. He almost calls out for her. Then his heart leaps. He was going to call “Lillie” because that’s who she looked like, her brown ringlets bouncing off her shoulders when she came to live with them—when? Has it been seven years already? He tries to remember. She was almost fourteen, he sixteen, and when she got used to him she would jump out and scare him or try to get him to chase her up the drive. If he refused, she would laugh and say he was an old grump—she poked her lower lip out and stumped along, hands in pockets, mocking him. He hated her making fun of him. But it was worse when she ignored him, even when she did it to get his attention.

Now he hears high laughter, and it is so like Lillie’s he feels the hair on his neck stand. He darts through the trees looking for the child. “You there! Come out! Come on out now, I won’t hurt you.” He looks around, goes over to a clump of English boxwoods, and peers in. No sign of anyone.

He heads back to the drive, keeps walking, then turns around suddenly. He had thought perhaps to catch her this way, but no one is there. He hurries up to the porch and goes in, calling out for Aunt Jane.

As he expected, Mr. Lucas is ordered by Mr. Meade to drain the reservoir so that no one can complain about the sanitation of the water. “Foolishness,” Mr. Lucas says to himself as he turns the valves in the pump house. “I’ve found more dead animals in there than anybody wants to know about, but never mind that. Water’s so low, won’t take but ten or twelve hours to empty.” In the meantime Mr. Lucas goes back up to the embankment and down to the picket fence surrounding the water. He lowers a pole to measure the water level; in an hour he’ll check to make sure it’s dropping. The mid-afternoon sun feels good on his back. Police officers have come and departed, and now most people have gone home to their dinners. A few curiosity-seekers are strolling the embankment, pointing out where they think a body was found. They stay respectfully at the top, and Lucas is thankful he does not have to answer any more questions.

He heads back up the slope to the top of the embankment. He’s not sure why he walks on the grass instead of the steps, nor why he keeps his eyes down, unless it’s that he might find something belonging to the girl—some token of her last night alive that he might take for a souvenir. It’s not likely, the police having thoroughly searched every inch of the place and turned up a glove and a piece of shoelace on the walkway, a matching glove and a veil outside the reservoir grounds, and a hat in the deadhouse.

Now he heads down the other side and to the hole in the outer fence. He lifts the loose board and pokes his head through, imagining the girl crawling in on her hands and knees, poor little thing. He goes out, so that he can come back in just as she did. The sun is winking through the trees at the verge of the smallpox cemetery, casting the fence in sharp relief. As he lifts the loose board again, the sun angles in and a yellow glint catches his eye. He hurries through, reaches into the thick wire grass, and pulls out an inch-long watch key. The tube-shaped key has fancy little curlicues around its bulging middle and an open heart for a crown, attached to which is a metal loop, presumably for a watch chain. The loop is somewhat sprung out.

Lucas looks around. No one appears to have noticed him. He pockets the key and continues his search of the grounds. After a while he goes back and finds that the water level is dropping apace. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the key. Could it have been hers? She had no watch that he could remember. And yet he feels that it must be hers. Perhaps she caught it somehow going through the fence. But then it would have been on the other side. Ah well, he tells himself, it could still be hers—maybe it fell out of her pocket.

In the evening he walks back to his little row house in Oregon Hill. His mother lived with him for ten years until she died; for the past six years he has lived alone. He never married and doesn’t expect he will now, he supposes because of his funny jug-ears and his clumsy way around women. He has his work, and in his off hours he takes long walks and does odd jobs for the neighbors, mostly plumbing, and if they can’t pay him—and most can’t—he happily accepts a meal. Now he does something strange. He takes the key out and puts it in his mouth. He closes his eyes and pictures the girl; in his mind she is holding the key in her hand shortly before she died. It’s a comfort to him having something that she owned and touched, though he wishes he had a piece of clothing or a lock of hair. The key will have to do, and since it’s not necessarily an article belonging to a woman, there’s no need to tell anyone of his discovery. He takes it out of his mouth and attaches it to a cord, loops the cord around his neck, and tucks it into his undershirt.

In the morning Mr. Lucas heads back early to the reservoir so that he can refill it. In the terra-cotta muck at the bottom he spies some old cans and long-buried stones. He’s inclined to go down in there and start looking around to see what wonders might be revealed. But he would have a hard time explaining to Mr. Meade why he was knee deep in mud when he was only supposed to open the supply valves. Reluctantly, he heads back to the pump house and turns on the water.

On the same Sunday morning Mr. Richardson arises at nine, dresses for church, and after breakfast heads over to Grace Street Baptist with his family. Reverend Hatcher is preaching on Malachi 3:6, “For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.” The constancy of the Lord is soothing, but on the other hand there’s the refiner’s fire, and the Lord will be a swift witness against sorcerers, adulterers, false swearers, and those that oppress hirelings and widows. There is but a narrow path one can tread on the way to righteousness and thus to heaven. Strange how meek and friendly Hatcher seems man-to-man, while up on the pulpit he’s God’s own scourge. He can make you remember every bad thing you’ve ever done, said, or thought, and wish you could take them back. Richardson tugs at his collar and pats his wife’s knee; she ignores him.

His mind goes away from the sermon and out to the reservoir, where a pregnant girl was found yesterday. It was odd. Why would she go out there on a cold night to kill herself? There has never even been a drowning there that he knows of. Plenty of suicides all over town during his time—hangings, shootings, a few train-track messes, a couple of poisonings, lots of drinkings-to-death, and even a self-inflicted stabbing. And there have been drownings, accidental and on purpose, but they were all in the river. God may be unchanging, as Hatcher was saying, but the human heart is mutable and unfathomable. He wants to keep sitting here with his family, but something tells him he needs to pay a visit to Dr. Taylor. After the sermon he excuses himself and slips out the back.

The city almshouse stands not quite a mile away. Richardson heads up toward Shockoe Hill Cemetery, across from which rises an imposing triple-bayed brick building that, like so many others, was a Civil War hospital. At sixty-four, he moves with almost the same alacrity as he did as a naval captain. Losing his young wife to a brain fever just before the war, he joined up early, not caring what happened to him so long as he could forget. After the war, he married again; the present Mrs. Richardson had given him standing in society, two lovely daughters, and several years of wedded bliss. You couldn’t ask for much more than that.

Inside the almshouse, Richardson is directed down a long white-brick corridor, past large rooms in which indigents with various maladies lie on narrow beds, voicing their dismal humanity in outraged utterings and feckless garbled complaints, pierced here and there with the bitter laughter of final comprehension. He finds his way to the examination room at the end of the hall; Dr. Taylor’s assistant tells him to come in. The odor of formaldehyde punches him in the nose. Taylor is just finishing the autopsy. The girl is splayed open from sternum to pubis, her glistening organs neatly arranged beside her. Gullies on the sides of the steel table channel blood to buckets on the floor. Richardson glances at the viscera, then focuses on Taylor, who is slick to his elbows in blood and yellow-gray slime. His young student towels him off as he addresses Richardson. “Almost finished here. Four foot eleven female, one hundred twenty-five pounds. About twenty years old, approximately eight months pregnant. Fetus was female.” He taps a purple mass in a ceramic bowl on an adjacent table, but Richardson only nods, keeping his attention on Taylor’s wide-set eyes, one of which strays off as though examining something on a shelf. He imagines Taylor is about his same age, but unlike himself Taylor still seems to enjoy his work.

“Strangely small amount of water in the lungs. But you see”—and here he squeezes some lung tissue—“that froth indicates death by drowning. As does the serene look. About a handful of food in her stomach, partially digested. I’d say she ate about four to six hours before she died. Death occurred between ten o’clock Friday night and two o’clock Saturday morning. The air was around the freezing point that night, the water temperature about forty-five, which may have played a role. But the interesting thing is the marks on her head.”

Now Richardson looks. There is a pinkish knot an inch or so in diameter, above and to the right of her right eye. “The swelling,” Dr. Taylor says, “is from an extravasation of broken blood vessels beneath the skin. It appears to have come from a light blow.”

“A blow?” Richardson raises his eyebrows.

“Could have been. It’s possible she hit her head on the bricks when she went in, but I don’t see how.”

“Could she have struck it on something when she was pulled out?”

“Not to leave a mark like that. Besides, she was face up. Women usually float face up—pregnant women always do.”

Richardson nods. “What about this bruise on her lip?”

“Curious, isn’t it? It was not so noticeable yesterday. But bruises darken like that after the body begins decomposing.” He lowers his hand toward her mouth, then goes around behind Richardson and does the same. “A hand held tightly could leave a mark like that.”

“Suppressing a scream?”

“It’s possible.”

Richardson points to a line of stitches in her scalp. “Your handiwork, I assume?”

Taylor smiles for the first time. “I lack the undertaker’s artistry. Yes, I examined the brain. Would you like me to reopen the skull?”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

“I found a small infusion of blood on the surface beneath the upper left side of her forehead.”

“Another blow?”

“Possibly, but since there was no corresponding mark on her forehead, I’m inclined to believe it was a counterstroke of blood settling opposite to where the original blow was struck, above her eye. These other little nicks and abrasions on her face don’t indicate anything in particular. They could have occurred during a struggle or well before.”

Richardson stands by while Taylor directs his assistant to detach the viscera for temporary storage and begin sewing the body back up. The young man carefully places the organs into glass jars that he has labeled “Reservoir drowning.” An air pocket pops as the large intestine sloshes into the jar, and Richardson turns to glance at the fetus—a fully formed little baby, its hand at its mouth and its eyes closed.

“So you’ve changed your mind about the suicide?” he asks Taylor.

“I believe so. The marks on her forehead could indicate a blow that might render her unconscious. I would say she died from drowning preceded by partial or complete insensibility.”

“What was used to make the blow?”

“I couldn’t say. Possibly a fist, or some blunt object.”

“And you think someone threw her in?”

“I think I’m going to have to convene an inquest jury.”

Richardson nods. A sad affair, a working girl and her lover. There would be an investigation. Probably Jack Wren was already digging—possibly it was Wren who got Taylor thinking murder instead of suicide in the first place. Richardson almost wishes Taylor had just stuck with suicide. But justice had to be served—if there was a guilty man at large, he had to be brought in. Anyway, in a week, perhaps two, it would all be over.

• CHAPTER THREE •

T
HE MORNING
T
OMMIE RETURNS FROM
R
ICHMOND
, Willie is out cutting timber down near the river. For some time now he has had his eye on the trees that have grown up in the empty fields all around since the war. Owners will like as not let you take the trees just for the service of clearing the field, and plenty of them are good enough size to float down to the sawmills. At the moment he and a short colored man named Biggs are wrestling a felled and roped black gum around a stubborn little pine. The horse stands switching its tail, waiting for them to finish.

“Snagged a fair,” Biggs observes, “mought have to chop it.”

Willie pulls his hatchet from a belt loop and begins chipping downward into the pine’s trunk. Biggs turns his back on the proceedings, having lost over the years half a finger to a steam-powered mill saw and one eye to a flying splinter. Willie follows the cuts with several quick cross strokes, and within half a minute the obstruction is out of the way. Biggs slaps the horse’s side, hollers “Gow,” and the animal, its ears twitching, strains against the harness and continues dragging the black gum.

“You member that time we tucks yo brother out to cut wood?” Biggs says. He is graying at the temples and fond of reminiscing. Willie can work all day without saying more than it takes to get the job done, but he understands that there are people who work better if they have something to think about and that some people think better out loud.

“Last summer was it?” Willie replies.

“Yep, and we do just like dat. We chaup de trees outen de way. And dat Tommie,” and here Biggs gives way to a belly-deep, low-pitched laugh while continuing to lead the horse, “dat Tommie cussed dat little tree so it liked to fall over daid. You member what he say?”

“Not exactly,” Willie says. “What did he say?”

“He say, ‘ ’Fyou don move out de way, I’mon chop yo damn haid off.’ ” Biggs laughs again, his blind eye tearing up. “Den he tuck de broadax and smack dat tree right in de middle. I jump outen de way, and the tree just bend over. Didn’t do nuffin. Den Tommie gets good and fired up, and he strike dat tree down in three strokes, growlin’ at it like a wolf. I never saw de beat. Den he tuck a hol of it and hoist it over his haid and start in singin’ bout how he a mighty woodchopper. Dat Tommie’s a sight.”

“He does like to sing,” Willie says. “His teacher said he could be a professional singer.” Ahead, Biggs shakes his head as though Willie is missing the point, yet Willie won’t concede to Biggs or anybody else that his brother is strange in any way other than in smartness. To Willie, it’s just his little brother acting his normal half-crazy, or, as Aunt Jane puts it, “eccentric,” self. When a schoolmate mocked Tommie’s highfalutin speech after Tommie had spent the previous day with his nose in
Gulliver’s Travels
, Willie took the opportunity to let him and everyone else in the schoolhouse understand that to pick on his little brother was to risk getting a bruised cheek.

Since the death of their youngest brother, Willie has looked out for Tommie, though he probably would have done so anyway. It is in his nature to protect what he feels to be his own. At home he could beat his little brother up, but in public an insult to Tommie was an insult to himself. As they grew older, they fought less and less—Tommie could almost always win with words, and Willie could hammer Tommie to a whimpering jelly. There were, however, times when a few quiet words could beat Tommie’s crafted argument; then the tables turned and Tommie, his temper gone, would try for a quick tackle, pin, and sock in the gut. If a rock were handy, he might throw that as well, though he would inevitably miss and then have to endure Willie’s wise and patient remarks on the value of keeping one’s temper.

Willie Cluverius was the one whose ambitions lay all around him, in the land that his forebears had worked for generations. While Tommie dreamed of wider fields for his many talents, Willie saw himself as the kind of man his father had fallen short of being—a farmer and landowner who would take the measure of himself not just by how much land he held but by how well he cultivated it. His ambition did not gnaw at him the way his brother’s seemed to. His brother’s book-learning was a source of great pride to Willie, but he could see that Tommie’s striving to be a person of substance was often a trouble to his mind.

Hauling timber now with Biggs, Willie thinks back to that day last summer. It seemed that they finally were not competing anymore, that Tommie was on his own path as a country lawyer and that his struggles were with the world rather than with his brother and his own self. That they had been in love with the same woman seemed a thing of the past. He does not remember Tommie singing that day, but he can picture it after Biggs’s story, and he laughs quietly.

“Now you recollects it,” Biggs says, laughing as well.

“Yes, I think I do,” Willie agrees.

When Tommie comes downstairs in the late afternoon, his aunt is in the parlor with a teapot and a plate of Maria’s almond cookies. She pretends to be reading instead of waiting for him. “Oh, Tommie,” she says, “were you able to sleep at all? You looked so tired, you poor dear. Come sit down. You’re working yourself to the bone.” Once a great beauty, she still has bright eyes that go into crescents when she smiles, but despite high cheekbones, her face sags in a sad way. Her hair is still a lustrous gold, and she keeps it long and piled up the way her husband always liked it. She likes to use her hands when she talks, and the way they float like a dancer’s hands has always fascinated Tommie.

He helps himself to a cookie, though he has no appetite. He has only been gone two nights, but he has to leave again on Monday for business. His brother is away at least as often, which means Jane is alone much of the time and on an unpredictable basis. Her companion, Rosa Hillyard, who divides her time between Jane and two nieces, is currently away. “I’ll go take a cookie out to Willie,” Tommie says.

“Oh, he’s liable to be way off by the river now. He’s looking at some woods to buy. Time he gets through he’ll’ve chopped down every tree in the county. Are you sure something’s not troubling you?”

Tommie says no. He stands, scratches the back of his neck, and goes to the window to see if Willie is coming.

“There was an article in the paper about a man in California found with his head chopped off,” Jane tells him. “Two Indians did it for eight dollars apiece and buried the head seventy-five miles away. And there was another one about a man right up in Richmond who hanged himself and went to change his mind, but his daughter couldn’t get him down in time—”

“Thanks, Jane, I’m not in the mood for news right now.”

She chuckles. “I was only trying to get your mind off your problems. Maybe you need to hear something more cheerful.”

Again, he envisions concentric ripples on the water. “I think I’ll go for a walk. Did you see a girl in a white dress out in the front yard before I came in?”

Jane says she didn’t, but that it could be one of the neighbor’s cousins, visiting from Gloucester. He goes outside and walks along the cornfield, shielding his eyes with his hurt hand and scanning the long afternoon shadows for what he can see.

When he gets to the Trace and looks down the road that leads to the river, his brother appears on horseback, as if summoned. They wave to each other, and for a moment Tommie feels safe again. He stands there waiting while Willie’s bay takes its time. After he crosses the road, Willie dismounts and they walk together to the house. “You just get home?”

Tommie nods. “A little while ago.”

Willie is taller and broader in the shoulders than his brother, his skin more tanned. Tommie’s features are the more delicate and symmetrical, his lips the envy of many a girl. Willie’s thin line of a mouth barely hides a snaggletooth, yet his rugged good looks have served him plenty well. He wears a wide-brimmed straw hat and dirty boots; a spear of meadowsweet hangs from his mouth. His eyes are dark and deep set and he pauses to think before he speaks. “Find any business up there?”

“I looked into that acreage for sale in the bankrupt court out near Oakwood Cemetery for Mr. Bray.”

Willie strokes his horse but doesn’t say anything.

“You remember I told you about that,” Tommie says.

“Yeah, you find any good timber up there, let me know. If it’s cheap.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Not a thing in the world, brother.” They walk a few more steps in silence. “You’re seeing somebody up there, aren’t you?” Now a sly smile creases Willie’s face.

“What makes you say that?” Tommie sighs in relief. Then he has the distinct feeling that he is being watched by someone.

“You seemed all nervous and flustered before you left. I had to lend you a collar—how often has that happened? And you went off unshaven.”

“I got a shave in Richmond.”

“And you come back looking like a cat got you.” At first Tommie doesn’t understand; Willie has not even appeared to glance at him.

“You mean the hand? It’s nothing. An eruption of some kind.”

“Well I hope whoever it is is worth the trouble. You’ve been in a botheration for I don’t know how long. She’s not married is she?”

Tommie snorts. “The only women I see in Richmond are at Lizzie Banks’s house, and I haven’t been there in months.”

“You’re not still keen on Lillie are you?”

“Lillie Madison?”

“You know who I mean. Yes, cousin Lillie.”

Tommie waits but Willie says nothing, and the sound of high laughter comes so clearly from behind that Tommie jerks around. All he can see is the sun glinting through the tall pines across the road and a lone osprey winging toward the river. It feels colder than when he started out. “No, I’m not keen on her,” says Tommie. “Why?”

“Her father was asking about you.”

“Her father? When?”

“I saw him over in King William, market day. He thought I was you, or else he got our names mixed up. He said, ‘You been shunning me, Tommie?’ And I said I’m Willie, the older brother. Tommie’s the ugly one. But he’s not much on funnin’—he just gave me a squint-eyed kind of look and said, ‘Well, you tell your brother he’s mighty high on his horse. If he thinks he’s too good for me and my daughter, he’s wrong. It’s the other way around.’ ”

“That old coot. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I haven’t seen her since, gosh, it must’ve been last fall, before she went off to Bath.”

Sunlight glances off the sides of their faces as they walk up the field, their lungs filled with the smells of manure fertilizer and freshly turned earth. “But you’ve heard from her,” Willie asks.

“Nothing more than the letters she sends to Aunt Jane. Honestly, I don’t know anything more about her than you do. You know I was sweet on her for a while there after you and she … but nothing came of it. Nothing at all, and then she went off up to the mountains. I don’t know what her father means. Maybe she wrote him something, but she never says boo to him. You know that.” Why now, Tommie thinks, when they never talk about her?

Willie shields his eyes with his hat brim, trying to see into his brother’s eyes. “Shad are running,” he says, just to say something, though doubting he’ll get much interest.

“Maybe I’ll go out with you,” Tommie says. The brothers walk on together, Willie talking about how he’s gotten all his beets and carrots and potatoes planted but hasn’t quite finished the oats yet on account of a bent harrow. All around, the cultivated fields running to the lines of woods have a serenity and a timeless feel that give strength and confidence to Willie—the solid ground underfoot is reassuring in its promise of work and food. A barred owl makes a scratchy echo out in the distant woods, and clouds are gathering from the west.

“What is it?” Willie says, looking at his brother. “Goose fly over your grave?”

“No, that owl gives me the shivers.”

Willie laughs, slapping his brother in the shoulder. “Four years of college and you’re more superstitious than I ever was.”

In the morning Tommie takes Aunt Jane’s dappled gray to Upper Oaks to call on the Brays. It doesn’t seem so long ago when he rode along here in Lillie’s company, before he was engaged to Nola Bray. He was going up there to court Nola, and Lillie was still living at Aunt Jane’s. She was heading off to her tutoring when Tommie overtook her in the road. He had just returned from law school and Lillie was saucy with him, not nearly as respectful and awestruck as the girls at church for instance. Of course, by then she was almost like a sister, but she could annoy him in ways he thought no sister could have. He does not remember what she said now, only that he seemed to have offended her in some way and that as she, flush-faced, trotted away from him he noticed how her blouse stuck with sweat to a spot on her back and the ribbon on her hat bobbed as she posted. While visiting Nola that time he could not stop thinking about Lillie, the spot on the small of her back and the curve of her calf visible through her skirt.

Now he lets himself in the front gate and rides up the horseshoe drive, past the white pillared portico, where the stableboy takes his horse. And he beholds again the finest house remaining in the lower part of the county, its Georgian symmetry and grace a statement of aristocratic refinement since well before the war. The Brays’ butler ushers Tommie back to Mr. Bray’s study, where Tommie dutifully reports that the land is available for two dollars an acre but he may be able to get it cheaper if he waits. Mr. Bray asks if he’s going to church with them, and Tommie tells him that, no, he’s off to Tappahannock in the morning and wanted to see Nola before he left. He goes out to wait for her in the garden. Presently she comes, wearing an overcoat. She has put on some weight in the last few years, giving her a less severe appearance. “You’re really very lovely,” he says to her.