Slackwater

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Cost

Debts get called. The line followed Maren home and would not be put down.

She did not sleep. Down in the Bywater the August night went on without her: a freight train somewhere along the river, a dog, the wet warm dark pressing at the screen.

She lay in the too-big bed above the shut studio with the mark quiet over her heart and the old woman's three words turning in the dark, settling lower and lower, a stone going down through still water that never finds a bottom.

By the gray of the morning she had decided she could not go on living inside a sentence like that without knowing the whole of it, and she drove back to Tremé before the shop was rightly open, and stood on the step until Odette unlocked the door and looked at her and sighed.

"I knew you'd be back before I'd had my coffee," Odette said, and let her in.

She made the coffee first, two cups, and would not say a word until Maren had a hot cup in her hands she did not want, and that small enforced ordinariness steadied Maren more than anything either of them said after.

Then Odette sat on her stool and clasped her hands and told her what a debt was, in the plainest terms she would spend on it.

"That thing in the water doesn't take," she said.

"It lends. That's the part nobody understands, and the part that makes it patient.

It gives, and then it owns, and then one day the tide turns and it collects what it's owed, with everything that's grown on the loan in between.

" She looked at Maren steadily. "Your girl's soul is what's owed.

They killed her into you, and now she's held.

Collateral, you'd call it, if it were a bank.

Held against the debt until the debt's answered. "

"Answered how."

And there Odette stopped.

She looked at Maren a long moment, and Maren watched her decide something, watched the same careful weighing from the day before, the scale coming level in a back room no stranger was let into.

"No," Odette said at last, gently. "Not from me.

I can tell you a debt's owed and a debt gets called, because that much I've watched from the bank my whole life.

But how the paying works, the inside of it, the exact shape of what they do and what it costs the one who does it.

That's their knowing, not mine, and I have spent sixty years making sure it stayed not mine.

" She set her cup down. "And I'll be honest, because you've earned honest. There's a kindness in not being the one to tell you.

Once a person hears the shape of that particular bill, they don't get to un-hear it, and I've buried enough this lifetime without watching it land on you across my own counter. "

"Then who tells me."

"Somebody who stood in that water and crawled back out.

" Odette's eyes did not leave her. "Not a churchwoman who spent her life on the dry bank keeping clear.

One who went under and got loose, who knows the inside of it because the inside of it near kept her.

You find one of those, and they can tell you the whole bill, God help them, because they paid a piece of it themselves.

" A pause. "They're not easy to find. Not many get loose. "

Maren's hand went to her pocket before she had decided to move it.

The torn corner of a field notebook had been in there a week, gone soft at the fold, a name and a number on it in a small square hand.

When that thing in your chest starts walking you somewhere you won't walk back out of, you call before you get there. Not after.

"I have one," she said.

Something crossed Odette's face that was almost relief and almost its opposite. She got up and went to a shelf and took down a small square of red flannel tied off with thread, and she pressed it into Maren's free hand and closed Maren's fingers over it with both of hers.

"This is mine, and it's clean, and it's all I'll give you," she said.

"It is not a weapon. I don't make weapons.

It's protection, plain and old, to keep you yourself a little longer than you'd be without it.

You keep it on you, against the skin, and not the same side as that mark.

" Her grip tightened once. "And whatever your one who got out tells you today, you hold on to this much: it was a person who loved you that set that thing in your skin to be near you, and a thing that is not a person that's keeping her there.

Don't let the bill confuse the two." She let go.

"Now get gone. I've a shop to open, and you've a call ahead of you you'll hate making. "

?

She made it from the truck, parked nowhere, because she could not make it in the apartment where Lark was in everything.

Rowan answered on the second ring, which meant she'd had the phone in her hand, which Maren filed away and did not examine. "Keele."

"It's the girl from the red water. Two weeks back. You gave me a number and told me to call before, not after." Her voice came out rougher than she meant.

A silence on the line, not an empty one. "I remember." Then, careful, like talking someone down off a ledge: "Are you before, or after?"

"I don't know yet." It was the truest thing she'd said all day. "I found out there's a debt. A woman in Tremé told me there's a debt on me, and that it gets called, and then she wouldn't tell me the rest. She said find somebody who got out." Maren shut her eyes. "You got out."

The breath Rowan let go was long and quiet. "Yeah," she said. "I got out." A pause. "You shouldn't hear this on a phone. Where are you?"

?

They met at a coffee place on St. Claude loud enough to be private, which only a loud place can be, and Rowan was already there when Maren came in, a back booth, field jacket on, two coffees in front of her she hadn't touched, watching the door.

The place was all clatter and steam and a ceiling fan losing to the August heat, the door propped to a St. Claude evening going blue and loud with traffic.

Out of the marsh and the waders she looked less like a thing the weather had made and more like a tired woman not yet thirty, and Maren resented how that landed, the small unwilling tug of it, with Lark not three weeks in the ground and warm against her ribs.

Rowan watched her sit. She did not do the soft voice. She did not ask how Maren was holding up. She pushed one of the coffees across and said, "Tell me exactly what the woman in Tremé told you. Word for word, if you can. I need to know how much you already carry before I add to it."

So Maren told her. The binding, the routing, the held soul, the debt, debts get called.

Rowan listened with her hands around her cup and her face very still, and when Maren reached the part where Odette stopped, where she would not say how the debt was answered, Rowan briefly closed her eyes, as though she'd been hoping the woman in Tremé would have done this part for her.

"She was being kind, leaving it," Rowan said.

"I can't be that kind, because you need to know it, and you came to me to be told.

" She turned the cup a half-turn on the table.

"All right. Here it is. The bind held her the second she died, you have that part.

She couldn't pass. She got poured down into you instead, and that's where she is, and that is the wrong of it.

A soul out of its place, owed back to the water that's owed for it.

" She looked up. "It doesn't hold forever.

It can't. A debt like that keeps the soul only until the wrong gets answered.

Until the thing that severed her is named, and brought to account, and the wrong set right.

You do that, you answer it, and the bind lets go of her.

" A beat. "She's released. She passes on.

She goes where she should have gone the night they killed her. "

Maren sat with the loud room going on around her and waited for the catch, because there is always a catch, and then she felt it land in her own chest before Rowan had to say it, and the floor went out from under the morning.

"She goes," Maren said slowly. "If I answer it. If I find who did this, and name them, and set it right." She was not asking. She was watching the shape of it come together in front of her, clean and terrible. "Then she's gone."

"Then she's free," Rowan said quietly. "Which is the same thing. Yes."

"That's the only way to free her. Solving it."

"Yes."

"And solving it is the only way she leaves me."

"Yes." Rowan held her eyes and did not look away from what she was doing to her, which was its own kind of mercy and did not feel like one.

"There's no version where you keep her and free her both.

The thing that's keeping her here is the thing that's hurting her.

The longer she stays, the more of her wears down, the more of what's left is just the hook wearing her face.

If you love her, the kindest thing you could do for her is the one thing that takes her away from you.

And if you can't do it, she stays, and she rots in your skin, and the thing that owns her gets everything it wanted from the start. "

Maren looked down at the coffee she had not touched.

The hunt had been the one thing keeping her on her feet, and Rowan had reached across the table and turned it over and shown her the underside of it, where it had been a countdown the whole time.

She had thought she was chasing a way to hold on to some last piece of Lark.

She had been walking toward the end of her since the first night, with the ink leaning into every step of it, patient, eager, glad to go.

"You sound like you've done it." Maren said it half cruel, because cruel was easier than the thing under it. "Sat where I'm sitting."

For a second something moved in Rowan's face, deep down, like the marsh moved when something turned over far below the grass.

Then she put it away. "I had someone," she said, even and final.

"That's the only part of it that helps you.

The rest doesn't, so I'll keep it." She drank the cold coffee to close the sentence.

"What matters is you don't go answering anything until you know which way the answering can be done.

There's a wrong way, the way they'll want you to take it, and it doesn't free her, it just makes you theirs.

But that's further down the road than you are today.

Today you only need the one thing." She set the cup down.

"You came hunting a killer to get her justice.

I'm telling you the justice is the loss. Same hand, same motion."

Maren thought of the Vaudry water, and the drained mark on the morgue table, and the old woman with scars laddered up both arms, and she heard herself say "Vesper Calder" before she'd decided to, watching Rowan to see it land.

It landed wrong. Rowan went still again, careful. "What about her."

"She married us. She set this on me. I'm going to find her, and when I do, I answer it."

"You don't have the first idea what you're saying.

" There was something near alarm under the flat of it, and Maren clocked it and filed it with everything else she didn't trust about this woman who knew too much and seemed to be guarding the wrong people.

"Vesper Calder is not your killer. You go at her like she is, you'll get it all wrong, you'll waste her, and people will die who didn't have to.

Promise me you'll talk to me before you go near her. "

"Why do you care what happens to her."

Rowan didn't answer that. Which was, Maren thought, an answer of its own.

?

She drove home with the red flannel against her left hip, the wrong side from the mark, the way Odette had set it, and the whole shape of the thing rode in the cab with her like a passenger she couldn't put out.

She had spent three weeks held together by one thing, and it had not been hope and it had not quite been grief.

It had been a job. Find who did this. Hunt the thing that took Lark, follow the ink, name the killer, make somebody answer.

It was the only thing that had got her out of the bed and across the city and into a root shop and a loud cafe.

It was the thing the ink itself seemed to want, leaning her toward the water night after night, warming when she got it right.

A purpose, when she had nothing else left over.

The hunt had been the last thing she and Lark were doing together.

And the hunt was how she would lose her.

She got it, finally, at a red light on St. Claude with the engine ticking under her, all the way down to the floor of herself.

Every step toward the killer took Lark further out of her skin and out of the world.

The investigation and the goodbye were the same act.

To find the truth was to lose her, and there was no door in the whole house that did not open onto the same dark water.

And it was not nothing she would be giving up.

That was the part she could not get past. Three weeks of the worst grief of her life, and threaded the whole way through it, this: that Lark was not entirely gone.

That on the nights she would have drowned in, she could lie in the dark and feel a small warmth turn over against her ribs, and know she was not, quite, alone in her own skin.

It was a haunting and it was a horror, and Odette was right that it was wearing them both down, and it was also the only thing standing between Maren and a silence she did not believe she could live in.

To answer the debt meant walking into that silence on purpose.

It meant choosing to be more alone than she had ever been.

"To save her is to lose her," Maren said, out loud, in the empty cab, just to hear how it stood up in the air.

It stood up fine. It stood up like a thing that had always been true and had only been waiting for her to say it.

And over her heart, slow and deliberate and unbearably gentle, the mark moved.

Not the pull toward the water. Not the cold flinch of a warning.

It curled, soft and inward, gathering itself close around her heart and settling there, warm, the way Lark used to fit herself into the curve of Maren's back in the night without ever waking.

As if it already knew. As if it had known the whole time, and had only been waiting, like the sentence, for Maren to catch up.