Slackwater

CHAPTER NINE

Read the Water

Rowan came to get her in the flatbed truck that smelled of brackish water and bug spray, and the first thing she said, before Maren had the door pulled shut, was that she couldn't read minds.

"I want that clear before we start. I'm not a psychic.

I don't get feelings about people." She pulled out from the curb without checking whether Maren was ready, which Maren found she preferred to being fussed over.

"What I can do is read that thing on you.

I grew up around binds. I know what they do, the small tells, how they move.

You're the one who's wired into it. I'm just the one who can tell you what the wiring's saying.

" A glance sideways, gray-green and level.

"You're the instrument. I read the dial.

That's the whole of the partnership, so don't go expecting more out of me than that. "

"I wasn't," Maren said, which was true, and she heard how it landed, blunt and a little hard, and did not soften it.

She had not wanted to make the call. She'd sat with the torn notebook corner the better part of a day after the cafe, turning it over, before she understood that the alternative to phoning Rowan was going back out to that water alone and putting questions to people who answered questions with drownings, and that she was not quite ready to die yet, only most of the way.

So she had called, and Rowan had said meet me at first light, and here they were, two people who trusted each other not at all, driving east into the country that had killed Lark, each holding a piece of a thing the other needed and neither of them glad of it.

They drove with the windows down because the truck's AC had died years before, and Maren sat with her arm out the window and was aware, the whole way, of the woman beside her in a manner she resented down to the floor of herself.

It was nothing Rowan did. She drove with one wrist over the wheel and said little and kept her eyes on the road, and that was somehow worse, because there was nothing to push against, only the plain fact of a living body warm in the seat beside her while the dead one lay quiet over her heart.

Three weeks. Maren counted it like a debt of her own.

Three weeks since the morgue, and here she was noticing the worked muscle of a forearm against the wheel, and hating the noticing, and not stopping it.

Over her heart the mark gave a small cold tick, there and gone, the same one it had given out at the red water. Maren put her hand flat over it before she thought, and saw Rowan clock the movement, and clock what it meant, and say nothing, which was its own kind of mercy and did not feel like one.

"It does that around you," Maren said, because the silence had got too loud to leave in the cab. "Goes cold. I can't tell if it's warning me off you or jealous of you."

"No," Rowan said. "You can't. That's the design.

" She did not seem stung by it, or surprised.

"It won't ever let you be sure of me. Or of itself.

That's the cruelest piece of how they're built, the not-knowing.

Don't go trusting it about people. It's got its own reasons, and they aren't always yours.

" A beat, her eyes on the road. "Where we're going is the better question. "

"You tell me. You're driving."

"To see a woman who'll lie to us." Rowan said it without heat. "Old girl runs a bait stand out past Chef Menteur Pass, been there sixty years, knows every family that ever bought water out this way. She'll tell us she's never heard of a one of them. That's where you come in."

?

The bait stand was a leaning shed on stilts at the edge of a launch, screen door, hand-painted cooler signs, a radio going low.

The woman behind the counter was eighty if she was a day, brown and folded and sharp-eyed, working a church fan that did nothing against the heat.

She knew Rowan. That much was plain in the half-second before she decided not to.

"Haven't seen you out this way in a while, baby," she said to Rowan, and her eyes went over Maren once, head to foot, and filed her somewhere. "What can I get you. Got shrimp, got crickets, got cold drinks."

Rowan bought two cold drinks they didn't want and laid the money down and asked her question plain, because there was no version of the asking the old woman wouldn't see coming.

The families that owned the still water out toward the Rigolets.

The ones whose land the red bloom gathered on.

She was trying to find who had been out at the Vaudry backwater the night a girl drowned there three weeks back.

The fan stopped. Then it started again.

"Don't know anything about that," the old woman said, easy, friendly, looking right at her. "People drown out here. Sad thing. Water's dangerous if you don't know it."

And over Maren's heart the mark went cold.

This was a different cold. It pulled back, a flinch, a small disgusted shrinking, the same flinch it had given in the bar at the sound of the Vaudry name, except now it was answering a lie.

Maren felt it withdraw from the old woman's easy face like a hand off something gone bad, and she understood, with a small electric jolt, what Rowan had brought her here to be.

She caught Rowan's eye and gave the smallest nod. Rowan's face did not change, but something in her settled.

"Try again," Rowan said to the old woman, gentle. "We've got all afternoon."

The old woman tried again. She was good at it, better than anyone Maren had ever watched lie, sixty years of practice behind a smile that gave nothing away, and to a stranger she would have been a kind grandmother who genuinely could not help.

But Maren had stopped looking at her face.

She had gone quiet inside, the way she went quiet over a piece of work, all her attention dropped down into the thing on her ribs, reading the cold.

She learned its grammar fast, because she had to.

A small social lie, the kind everyone tells, drew a flat even chill, there and gone.

But when the old woman skated near something real and lied to keep her off it, the cold sharpened and bit, a clean hard edge to it, and the edge was a door. Maren started walking at the doors.

She named the bloom, and got the same chill.

She named the Slackwater, and the old woman said she was Baptist, thank you kindly, and the cold barely moved.

Then Maren named the night itself, the still backwater and the red on it and the girl they'd pulled out at first light, and watched the old woman say once more that she didn't know a thing about it, and felt the mark bite down hard and cold as creek water in January.

"You knew them," Maren said. Not the dead girl. The ones who did it. "You knew them, and you're sitting there protecting them with your face like that. Smiling at me."

The fan didn't stop this time. The old woman's eyes just came up off the counter and met Maren's, and the kindness had gone out of them into somewhere old and tired and not without sympathy, which was worse than if it had gone to spite.

So Maren started saying names. The ones from the bar, from Lark's notebook in her memory, from the brittle death notices in the library.

Most of them did nothing, drew nothing, were nobody, and the old woman watched her run through them with that tired patience, a woman waiting out a squall.

Then Maren said one, a name half-remembered off a yellowed page, and the mark, instead of recoiling, warmed.

It warmed and it leaned, the compass-pull, toward the door, toward the east, toward the water.

It was so sure of the way that Maren took half a step toward the door before she knew she had.

The old woman's fan stopped a second time and did not start again, and something crossed her face that Maren had not got from her yet, which was fear.

"Leave that one be," she said, very low, all the friendly stripped clean out of her.

"Whatever you are. You especially." Her eyes dropped, once, to Maren's chest, the same as Odette's had, the same as the woman's at the coroner's.

"You go home, child, and you scrub that thing off you if it'll come off, and you forget the name you just said out loud in my shop.

That water is spoken for. It does not give back, and it does not forgive being come looking for. "

?

They left her the cold drinks and walked out into the white glare, and the mark leaned the whole way to the truck, sure and warm, pointing them on east.

"You felt that," Maren said, once they were moving. "At the end. You went still."

"I felt you find it." Rowan's hands were easy on the wheel and her voice was not.

"I've watched a lot of people try to read a bind.

I never watched one do it like they were born to.

You scared her. You scared me a little." She said it without unkindness.

"That name meant something. Hold where it's pointing. Don't lose it."

Maren held it. She sat with her hand loose over her heart and called the headings as they came, warmer here, gone cold, back, left at the dead cypress, and Rowan drove to them without a word of argument, the competent woman taking her bearings off the dead girl in Maren's skin.

It should have been grotesque, and it was, a little.

But there was a rhythm building between them as the miles ran out, a wordless back-and-forth of call and turn, call and turn, that felt like work done right, and Maren understood with a low sick lurch that she had not moved through the world in step with another person like this since the studio.

Since Lark in the next chair. Since a life that ended three weeks ago and got buried in Metairie by people who would not let her stand at the grave.

Her body had missed it. Her body had no business missing anything.

They came to a four-way stop with nothing at it but marsh in every direction, and Rowan let the engine idle, and looked over, and for once did not look away.

"You don't have to hate yourself for it," she said.

"For what."

"For sitting in a truck with a stranger and feeling halfway like a person for an afternoon.

I watched it cross your face back there, the second it stopped being only grief and turned into a thing you were good at.

And I watched you punish yourself for it inside of a breath.

" Her voice stayed level, careful, the voice of someone who had walked this exact ground and left markers on it.

"She's still on you. Nobody's asking you to put her down.

But you're allowed to be alive in the same hour you grieve her.

The two don't cancel. They just have to learn to share the room. "

Maren did not answer, because the true answer was that the mark had gone cold the instant Rowan turned to look at her, cold with that edge to it, and she could not have said, with Odette's warning still fresh, whether it was Lark in there hurting, or the thing wearing Lark's face deciding it did not care for this living woman, or only her own guilt given a temperature.

Three readings, and she was not allowed to know which, and the not-knowing sat in her chest beside the unwelcome warmth and the colder thing, all of it tangled into the one small square of skin over her heart.

"Go straight," she said. "It's close."

Rowan went straight. She let the rest of it lie, the way she let everything lie that Maren wasn't ready to carry into the open, and Maren was grateful and could not say so, and the truck rolled on east into the trapped green heat with the both of them pretending the cab held only two.

?

The warmth took them off the highway and down a shell road into one of the old marsh settlements, a scatter of houses on a spit of higher ground caught between two waters, the live oaks hanging low and the heat trapped under them.

Most of them were lived in, ordinary: a dog on a chain, a boat under a tarp, a child's bike dropped on its side in a yard.

The ink led them past every one, patient, warming, to the last house on the road, where the high ground gave out into the reeds.

It was shuttered. A low Creole cottage gone gray with weather, the windows boarded from the inside, the yard grown up to the porch, and a stillness on it that was not the stillness of empty.

No dog. No bird in the live oak that leaned over the roof.

The marsh that had screamed with insects the whole drive went quiet around it, a held-breath quiet, and Maren's own dread of still places came up the back of her throat though there was no water in sight.

As the truck rolled the last of the way up, the mark over her heart stopped leaning and pressed.

It pressed flat and hard against the inside of her ribs, over her heart, as it had pressed the night Lark died, the press it gave only when it had arrived at the thing it was hunting.

Maren gasped and got her hand to her chest. They were close.

Whatever the ink had walked them all this way to find was here, behind those boarded windows, and the mark knew it like a needle knows north.

"This is it," she got out. "This is the house. It's screaming."

But Rowan had gone still in the driver's seat, both hands frozen on the wheel, staring at the gray shuttered cottage with every drop of color gone out of her face.

She knew it. Maren watched her know it. Rowan was looking at the house with the look you give a thing out of your own worst dream walked up on in daylight, and her voice when it came was barely a voice at all.

"No," Rowan said. "No. Not this one. Anyone on this whole coast but this one."

"Rowan. Whose house is it."

Rowan did not take her eyes off it. When she spoke it was very quiet, and not really to Maren at all.

"I used to be afraid of this house when I was small," she said.

"They sent the little ones out here. To the back room.

To learn to hold our breath." Her knuckles stood white on the wheel.

"The woman who lives in there is one of the Drowned.

She was one of them twenty years ago, the day she held my head under, and she is one of them now, and your girl's ink just walked us straight up her road.

" She finally looked at Maren, and the fear in her was an old, childhood fear, the kind that does not care how grown you get.

"Which means they already know exactly where you are. "