Chapter 15
Dock Number Four
Lake Alder at midnight in the last week of September smelled of wet leaves and two-stroke oil and, faintly, of cut grass from a lawn on the far shore, which was the only smell in the world that still made her stomach turn over.
She had come by the old logging road. She had left the Camry two miles back, in a gravel turnout under a pine, and walked the rest, in dark clothes and rubber-soled shoes, with a flashlight in her jacket that she did not use. There was a moon, three-quarters, low over the water. It laid a long pale track across the lake to the far side, where the lights of the big houses made a broken string.
She was not afraid. She noticed that, the way you notice you have stopped limping. She was walking along a pine-needle path in the dark toward a thing she had decided to do, and her heart was going at the slow, even, mechanical pace it went when she was counting, and she thought, quite clearly: I should be afraid. Why am I not afraid?
The answer, when it came, was not comforting.
Because you've already done it. You did it in your head, a hundred times. This is just the part where it happens.
The dock was at the end of the path.
It was a long narrow wooden pier, running out into the water about forty feet, with a canvas-roofed boat slip at the end and a weathered number on a post: 4. It belonged to a rental lot owned by Owen Maddox's father, which he used as a private fishing spot. There was a cooler on the boards. There was a camp chair, a tackle box, a thermos. And in the chair, with a rod in one hand and a can of beer in the other, in a camouflage jacket and a baseball cap, sat a man with his back to her, humming.
She stopped at the end of the path, in the shadow of the pines.
She had watched him for four Saturdays. She knew the habit, the cap, the cooler, the exact angle at which he sat, leaning back, with one boot braced on a piling. She knew he came at ten and left at one. She knew, because she had followed him once to the bar afterwards, that he drank eleven beers a night, and that he did not often finish the twelfth.
He was humming a song she knew. It was a country song about a truck.
She stood quite still. She was aware, in the tight, bright, hyper-attentive way of a person who has stepped off the edge of a known world, of everything: the lap of water, the creak of the boards, the croak of a frog in the reeds, the long thin shriek of a distant owl. She was aware of her own breath. She was aware that she could, at this moment, turn around.
She did not think it. She noticed it, as she noticed the frog.
You could turn around.
She walked out onto the dock.
He heard her at about thirty feet. The boards were old, and her weight made them speak. He turned his head, with a half-drunk, friendly curiosity, the way a man turns when a friend arrives at the end of a long evening.
"That you, Tee?"
She said nothing.
"You're late." He laughed. "I told you ten. I'm on my, hey." The cap tipped back. In the moonlight his face was broad and sunburned and loose. He peered at her. "Who's that?"
She came to the edge of the light cast by the lantern on the boat slip, a small black iron lantern on a hook. She had not known it would be there. She had not noticed on her visits, because she had never come this close. It was an ordinary thing. It was lit.
She stood under it.
"It's Corinne," she said.
There was a pause.
"Who?"
"Corinne Bellamy."
He sat very still. She watched his face. She had waited for this, for four years, without admitting it, and she observed it with a curious detachment, as a person observes a thing she has read about. First, nothing. Then a flicker of the eyes. Then a small, slow, comprehending slackness of the mouth.
"Oh, shit," said Owen Maddox.
And then he laughed.
It was not, she saw, a laugh of mirth. It was a sort of cough. It broke out of him, and he put his hand over his mouth as if to stop it, and it came out between the fingers anyway, high and wheezing.
"Jesus," he said. "Oh, Jesus. You scared me. I thought, hell. I thought it was somebody. Look at you. Corrie. God, it's been, what, three, four years? How are you?"
"I'm fine."
"You look good." He was breathing fast. "You look, you've gotten thin. Are you okay? You, what're you doing out here? It's midnight."
"I came to talk to you."
"About what?"
"You know what."
"Hey. Hey, now." He set down the beer. He did it carefully, with both hands, as a man sets down a thing he has just realized could be used as a weapon. "Now, look. I know it's been a hard, I know you've been through, a lot. And I'm sorry. I mean that. I am. But it's over, okay? It's been over a long time. They dropped it. A judge said so. We can't, I mean, it's not like there's anything—"
"Say it again."
"What?"
"What you told the woman on the phone. In May."
"What woman?"
"Rebecca."
She saw it happen. She watched the whole of it cross his face: the incomprehension, the arithmetic, the dawning. His eyes went wide. His mouth moved, once, as if tasting something unpleasant.
"That was you," he said.
"Yes."
"You recorded me."
"Yes."
"That's, that's illegal, that's, you can't—" He half rose. He swayed. He had been drinking since eight, and his knees were not quite his. He caught the arm of the camp chair. "You know what that is? That's entrapment. I'll call my lawyer. I'll call Hollis. He'll eat you."
"Say it again, Owen."
"No."
"She was begging."
"No, I'm not going to, I'm not going to say a damn—"
"She wanted attention."
"Shut up."
"Well, she got it."
"I said shut up."
It rang across the water. A bird went up from the reeds. And in the silence that followed, in the light of the iron lantern, a large frightened man in a camouflage jacket stood on the end of a pier, and breathed, and looked at the woman in front of him, who had not raised her voice once.
"What do you want?" he said.
"I want you to tell me what happened."
"You know what happened."
"I know what I remember. I want you to tell me what you remember. I want you to say it. Out loud. In order." She took a step. "I want it said by one of you. Once. By somebody who was there. And then I'll know it's true."
"It was true. It's in your, they had the whole, they said."
"They said I was mistaken."
"So what?"
"So say it," said Corinne. "Say what you did."
He stared at her. He licked his lips. In the thin yellow light she could see a bead of sweat sliding down the side of his face, past the old white scar on his lip.
"I didn't do anything," he said.
"Owen."
"I didn't. I swear to God. It was Grant. It was, he, Grant was the, he said, he said we'd all, it was a party. It was his house. It was what we, it's what they did, you don't understand, it's, there's a thing. It's a thing the guys do. Dale had done it. Grant's dad's friends had done it. It's like a, you know, like a rite. You've got to, to be in. I never wanted to. I just, you didn't say no. You didn't say anything. I thought you were fine."
"I was drugged."
"No."
"You handed me a cup."
"It was a seltzer."
"With what in it?"
He did not answer.
"With what in it, Owen?"
"It was a, it was something Dale gave me." The words came tumbling now, in a rush, as if the dam had broken and he could not stop. "He'd brought it. A little bottle. He said it'd relax you. He said, she's tense, she needs to loosen up. He said it was safe. He said it wore off. He said a girl wouldn't remember. And then, afterwards, he came, he was the one who, he took everything. He cleaned the whole house. He took our phones. Mine, Tee's. He wiped them. He took the, there was a camera, on the dock, a security, he said it was handled. And then Grant's dad came. At four. With the sheriff. And they stood in the kitchen and Grant's dad said, in this quiet voice, he said, None of this happened. Do you understand? It never happened. And Hoyt, the sheriff, he just stood there. He had a donut."
"A donut."
"A donut. I'll never forget." He was weeping, she saw. He did not seem to know it. The tears ran down his cheeks and into the stubble of his chin. "It's not me. I didn't plan it. I'm just, I was there. They've all got money. They've got people. I'm just, my dad runs a bar."
"You said I was begging."
"I was scared."
"You said it in a chat room. You said it on the phone. You said it for four years."
"I was scared. I was, you don't understand what it's like, I've been looking over my shoulder, for four years, and every time I see a girl with brown hair, I—" His voice cracked. "I'm sorry. Okay? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't, any of it. I'll say it. I'll go to the police. I'll tell them everything. Dale, Grant's dad, I'll tell. I'll testify. Whatever you want. Just don't."
"Don't what?"
He looked at her hands.
They were empty. They hung at her sides. In the jacket pocket, there was nothing but a flashlight. She had not brought a weapon. She had not, she realized with a small cold shock, even decided what she would do.
I have not decided.
That was the thing she would have to tell herself, afterwards, in the bright dull hours before dawn. She had come to the dock with no plan beyond the walking and the talking. She had come to hear it. And she had heard it. She had heard the whole of it, in the voice of a man who was begging, at the end of a pier, for his life.
Please, he had said.
Please. Don't.
She had said that, too. Once. A long time ago.
She stood there for what seemed a long time. She counted. She counted the planks. There were nineteen between her feet and the edge. She heard her own breath. She heard the water. She heard, from a long way off, from some deep corner of herself, a very small clear voice, which she recognized, after a moment, as a girl's, saying: Don't count. Just go home.
She would think afterwards that she might have. She might have turned. She might have walked back along the path in the moonlight and driven to the turnout and gone home and cried until she was sick and gone on, as the woman in the hardware store had gone on, as Marcia Lenoir had told her to, living as well as she could.
She might have.
"You're going to testify," she said.
"Yes. I swear."
"Against all of them."
"Yes."
"On the record."
"Yes. Anything. Anything you want."
"And Hollis Crane will let you?"
He stopped.
It was a small thing. It was the smallest thing. A man on the end of a pier, with tears on his face, said yes, and then, as the question went in, understood it, and in the understanding something in his expression changed. A shutter came down. A faint, calculating, familiar look, the one she had seen on the faces of the men in the courtroom, passed across his eyes.
It lasted perhaps a second.
"I mean," said Owen Maddox, "I'd try."
"Try."
"I mean, I'd have to talk to him first."
"I see."
"It's only, you know, there's procedure. I can't just, there are lawyers." His voice steadied. He was already, she saw, repairing himself, piece by piece, as a man repairs a wall. "I'd have to, they'd tell me what to say. They always do. I'm sure you understand."
"Yes," she said. "I do."
He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He drew a breath. "Look. I'm, I'll be honest. I'm sorry for what happened. I'd say that to anyone. But I'd want to, I have to think about my own, my father. His heart. You see that. I can't, I mean, I can't volunteer. I've got, a lot to lose."
"A lot to lose."
"Yes."
"More than I did."
"I didn't say that."
"No," said Corinne. "You didn't."
She had known it. She knew, with that bleak, level, passionless clarity, that he would say it, that it was the answer, that he had been going to say it from the moment she stepped into the light. She had come to the dock to hear a confession. She had heard one. And in the same breath, in the same dry, apologetic, unhurried voice, she had heard him take it back.
I'd have to talk to him first.
It was the last thing she needed to hear.
It was not rage. She had thought it would be. It was something much quieter, and much worse. It was the settling of a long account. It was the sensation of a column of figures, which she had added and re-added for four years, finally coming out to a sum.
She stepped forward.
What happened next took, in the end, less than a minute.
She would try to remember it, afterwards, in the order it happened, as she had been trained to, and she would fail. She would have it in pieces: the plank under her left foot, the sudden rush of Owen's breath, the camp chair going over with a clatter. His hand. His hand coming up, to push her away, and the strange, light, sliding sensation of her own palm against the front of his jacket. His boot slipping on a wet board. His eyes.
His eyes, very wide, in the lantern light, looking into hers.
She had not meant to push him.
She would say that to herself over and over, in the years to come, and she would never be certain whether it was true. She had put out her hand. He had moved. The edge was there. It had happened in the way that things happen when two people stand too close at the end of a pier: not as a decision, but as a collision of small events that cannot be un-made.
He went in backwards.
It made a sound like a dropped sack. A white splash, and a spreading ring, and the little rod, still held in one hand, spinning away across the surface. His cap came off and floated. For a moment, he was a shape under the water, a pale smear in the moonlight, kicking.
Then his head came up.
He gasped. He coughed. He shouted, a hoarse, wet, shapeless sound. He had gone down at the deep end, where the lake was twelve feet, and he was a heavy man in heavy boots, with eleven beers in him, and a jacket that had begun to fill. His arms beat at the surface. His face was white. He looked up, at the dock, at the lantern, at the figure standing over him at the edge of the boards.
"Help," he said.
She did not move.
"Help me, help me, Corrie, I can't, I can't swim, I—"
There was a ladder at the end of the pier. It was a few feet to her left. A small rusted ladder with four rungs, and a rope. All she had to do was kneel, and reach, and take the rope, and throw it. She had learned that at fourteen, at a swim camp, in a red cotton one-piece, from a teenage lifeguard with a whistle.
She looked at the rope.
One, she thought. Two.
"Please," said Owen Maddox.
Three.
"I'm, I swear, I'll, I'll tell, I'll tell everything—"
Four.
She would never be able to say what she was thinking. She would try, in the long years afterward, to find the sentence. She would write it down on a hundred pages and tear them up. She would say it to a priest, and a psychiatrist, and a courtroom of strangers, and not one of them would be satisfied, because the truth was that she was thinking nothing. She was counting. It was the only thing her mind could do. It was the thing it had always done when something too large had come, and it did it now, on the end of a pier in the moonlight, in the sound of a man drowning, and it did it with perfect, terrible, patient accuracy, all the way to forty.
At forty, the water was still.
She sat on the dock for a long time.
She was sitting on the boards, with her back against a piling and her knees drawn up, and her arms wrapped round them. The lantern burned on its hook above her head. The lake lay quite flat. A faint breeze was moving the reeds. Somewhere out in the dark a fish jumped, with a small flat slap.
The camp chair lay on its side. The beer can had rolled to the edge and stopped. The thermos was upright. On the boards beside it lay a small black phone, face up, with a cracked screen.
She picked it up.
It was unlocked. She did not know why. She thought, absurdly, of how foolish it was, a man who locked his front door, and left his phone open on a dock. She looked at it. The wallpaper was a photograph of a dog. The time was 12:41. There were nine unread messages, from a group called LureTalk, and one from a contact called D.
Sat nite fishin? Meet 1am. Got something to show u.
It had been sent at 11:30.
She read it twice.
D.
Dale.
She stared at the screen. Beyond the dock, on the far shore, a light came on in a window, yellow and distant, and went off again.
He was expecting somebody.
Not me.
Dale was coming.
She stood up. Her legs were stiff. She put the phone in her pocket. She looked down the length of the pier, to the end of the path and the black wall of the pines, and she understood, in a small cold flash, that if she stayed another ten minutes, she would meet the man in the tan uniform on his way down.
She walked.
She did not run. She went along the path, in the dark, with her flashlight off and her hands at her sides, and she did not look back. At the top of the rise, where the pines opened onto the logging road, she stopped, and turned, and looked at the lake. The lantern on the dock was a single small yellow point. It looked, from here, like any other light. It looked as if someone were waiting up.
She said, aloud, in the flat clear voice of the lawyer she had once meant to be:
"The record will show."
She did not know what she meant by it. She did not finish the sentence.
She was sick in the gravel turnout, beside the Camry, on her hands and knees, in the dark. It went on for some time. Afterwards she sat in the driver's seat with the door open, with a half-empty water bottle in her hand, and shook. It started in her hands and went up her arms and into her teeth, so that she had to clamp her jaw to keep it from rattling.
She did not cry.
It was four o'clock when she reached the house on Dellwood Street. She turned off the car, and sat. She did not go in. She sat in the driveway, with the engine ticking, and watched the grey come up over the roofs. A dog barked. A light came on across the street. And on the corner, in the thin morning, the streetlight went off, with a small click, because the sun was rising.
She looked at it.
I did that, she thought.
It was not quite a thought. It was something that arrived in her all at once, entire, like a stone dropped into a well, and went down and down and did not hit bottom.
I did that. I stood there and I counted.
She went inside. She took off her clothes and put them in a plastic bag. She showered until the hot water ran out. She put on her pyjamas. She sat on the edge of the bed, in the grey light, with her hair wet, and looked at her hands.
They were steady.
That was the thing she would never be able to explain, in any of the rooms in which she would be asked. She had expected, at the very least, a kind of horror, a retching, a conscience. She had been brought up in a house in which one said grace, and her mother had cried over a dead sparrow. She had expected to feel what she was.
She felt a great quiet.
It was not peace. She knew that, even then. It was the quiet of a room in which a loud noise has stopped. It was relief, small and mean and dry, like the relief of a tooth that has been pulled. It was a sort of dull amazement that the world had not ended. It was a kind of, she hesitated over the word, lightness.
And under it, much deeper, she could feel something else. It was very faint. It was a small dark shape moving in the water of herself, a long way down.
She would think about that shape for a great many years.
She did not yet know its name.
On Sunday morning the Ledger ran it on page three.
LOCAL BAR MANAGER DROWNS IN APPARENT FISHING ACCIDENT. Owen Maddox, 31, manager of the Hollow Log, was found dead early Sunday near a private dock on Lake Alder. Authorities said that Mr. Maddox appeared to have fallen from the pier while fishing and was believed to have been intoxicated. Foul play is not suspected.
Mr. Maddox was a lifelong resident of Calloway and is survived by his father, William "Bud" Maddox, and a sister. In 2019, he was among five men charged in a high-profile sexual assault case that was later dismissed.
She read it at the kitchen table, standing, with her coffee. She read it twice. She read it a third time, aloud, in a whisper.
Foul play is not suspected.
On the table in front of her, in the black-and-white notebook, in the column headed OWEN, under a line that read Sat. nights, May–Sept., she picked up her pen.
She did not cross out his name. She did not write the date. She sat with the point of the pen above the paper, and the coffee going cold, and a faint white light coming through the window from the street.
Then, in a small, steady, shaking hand, she wrote a single word beside it, in the margin.
Dale.
And she drew a circle around it.