Blackfork

Chapter One: The Wrong Face

The thing Howard Pettit could not stop seeing was not his daughter's body. It was her face.

He had been prepared for the body. Four days in fifty-one-degree water does things to a person that nobody should have to look at, and the county medical examiner, a tired woman named Dr. Frawley, had warned him twice in the corridor before she opened the door. She had said the word *identification* the way people say a word they are hiding behind. Howard had nodded and gone in, and he had looked at the swollen white shape of his daughter under the sheet, and some old engineer's part of him had gone cold and quiet and started noting details the way it used to note hairline cracks in culvert walls.

The life jacket, they had told him, was still buckled when she surfaced. All three straps. Claire had bought that vest herself at a shop in New Paltz when she was nineteen, and she had shown him the buckles like a kid showing off a bicycle. Expert paddler. Nine years on whitewater, from the Esopus to the Youghiogheny. She had run Class IV rapids in Quebec at twenty-four with a broken thumb and laughed about it afterward.

And her face was wrong.

Howard had seen dead faces before. His father's, waxy and slack in a funeral home in Poughkeepsie. His mother's, which had simply looked asleep and slightly annoyed, as she had looked most of her life. Dead faces were empty. That was the whole horror of them: the vacancy, the house with the furniture taken out.

Claire's face was not empty. It was *full*. The muscles of it were pulled taut into an expression that Howard had no name for and had never once seen on a living person. The corners of her mouth had drawn back and up, far back, farther than a smile, so that her teeth showed. The skin at her temples was stretched. Her eyebrows were high and her forehead was smooth, and the whole arrangement was so specific, so intentional, that Howard's first thought — the thought he never told anyone, not Marcy, not his brother, not the therapist he saw twice and then stopped seeing — was that Claire was *seeing something*. Right then. On the table.

It looked like ecstasy. It looked like terror. It looked like both of them fused, poured together in one mold and left to set.

Her eyes had been open. He knew that, because Dr. Frawley moved between him and the table for a moment, and when she stepped away, the eyes were closed. Marcy was still in the corridor with a state trooper's hand on her shoulder. Marcy never saw. Howard had been grateful for that once. Later he was not sure gratitude was the right thing to feel about it.

"Cold water immersion," Dr. Frawley had said afterward, in the little room with the plastic chairs. "The facial musculature can contract. Rigor sets in unevenly."

"I've never seen rigor do that."

"With respect, Mr. Pettit, you've never seen much rigor at all."

She had not been unkind. She had signed the certificate: accidental drowning, cold water incapacitation, Blackfork River, Breckton, Kelsey County. April 9, 2019. She had given him a business card he still had in his wallet and she had gone home, presumably, and eaten dinner, and slept.

Eight months later, on the second Saturday of November, Howard Pettit stood on the bank of the Blackfork River thirty miles north of Breckton and watched black water go by and could not remember what he had come here to find.

That was happening more often. He would drive up on a Friday night, check into the Pike Lodge, and wake at four in the morning already dressed, and by seven he would be walking a gravel shoulder somewhere along Route 9G with his hands in his coat pockets and no plan he could have explained to another human being.

He was sixty-three years old. He had spent thirty-one years as a civil engineer for the state and then for a private firm out of Kingston, designing drainage — storm sewers, culverts, detention basins, the unglamorous plumbing of the Hudson Valley. His specialty had been water. Where it goes when you make it go somewhere. What it does when you don't. He had built a modest career out of the single principle that water is patient and stupid and absolutely relentless, and if you do not give it a place to go, it will find one, and the place it finds will be your basement or your roadbed or your reputation.

He had retired in March. Claire died in April. People kept saying that like it meant something, as if the calendar were a kind of explanation.

The river here was maybe forty feet across, running fast and dark between banks of frost-killed goldenrod. Ice had begun to form in the shallows, thin gray plates that broke and rejoined and broke again. Upstream, out of sight around the shoulder of the ridge, there was a state boat launch where Claire had put in. Her kayak had been recovered a mile and a half below, wedged in a strainer of fallen birch, undamaged. Her paddle had never been found at all.

Howard walked. The cold got into the arthritic knuckle of his right hand and sat there.

He had, in eight months, done the following things. He had obtained the incident report, the autopsy report, the water temperature logs from the USGS gauge at Breckton, and the dam's discharge records for April 8 and 9. He had built a spreadsheet. He had calculated flow velocity at four points along the reach and confirmed what he already knew, which was that on the morning Claire died the Blackfork was running at 640 cubic feet per second, brisk but nothing that would have troubled her. He had written to the sheriff's department twice and received one reply, a single paragraph signed R. Musgrave, Sheriff, Kelsey County, expressing condolences and confirming that the investigation was closed.

He had also, on four separate occasions, driven up to Breckton and asked people questions in diners, and watched their faces do something he did not have a word for either. Not hostility. Something more like *fatigue*. Like he was the sixth person that year to ask about a thing everyone had agreed to stop discussing.

Marcy had begged him to stop. They had been divorced eleven years by then and they had gotten to the place divorced people sometimes get, a kind of low-grade fondness, and Claire's death had smashed that flat. Marcy grieved the way she did everything, thoroughly and on a schedule: therapy on Tuesdays, a support group in Rhinebeck, a memorial fund, a bench with a plaque. She had told him on the phone in July, in a voice scraped down to bare wire, *Howard, she's gone, and you are digging a hole to lie down in.*

He had said, *I know.* Which was not agreement.

He had said, *Marcy, her jacket was buckled.*

And Marcy had made a sound and hung up, and they had not spoken for six weeks.

His brother Paul called every Sunday now, at seven. Paul was fifty-eight, an accountant in Fishkill, a man whose whole personality was a well-maintained fence. He never said anything about Breckton. He asked about the car, the apartment, whether Howard was eating. Sometimes he read out loud from the sports page for a while, which Howard understood was love.

The wind came down the river channel and Howard turned his back to it and, in turning, saw the pale flat stone.

It was thirty yards downstream of where he stood, on a shelf of gravel that the summer's low water had exposed and the fall rains had not yet covered. A rock about the size of a dinner plate, gray-white, conspicuous because everything else on that shelf was rounded brown cobble and this thing was flat and square as a paving stone and set deliberately on top of the others.

Howard had walked that shelf in September. He was almost certain of it. There had been nothing there.

He went down the bank sideways, the way you do at his age, testing each foot. The gravel gave and clattered. Up close, the flat stone was limestone, not local; the local rock was shale and sandstone and old glacial junk. Limestone came out of the gorge upriver, out of the narrow canyon where the dam was.

Underneath the stone, pressed into the wet gravel, was a book.

It was a small notebook, the kind sold in three-packs at any drugstore, with a black waterproof cover and an elastic band around it. The cover was scummed with silt. The elastic had gone slack and greenish. The corners were furred and swollen.

Howard crouched with his knees screaming and looked at it for a long time before he touched it. He had a very clear thought, and the thought was: *if I pick this up, I don't get to go back.*

Then he picked it up.

The pages had swelled to twice their thickness and stuck together in a solid brick. Water ran out of the spine when he turned it. But the cover was made to be wet, and the paper inside was that cheap coated stock that repels ink and therefore, once ink has dried on it, holds ink like a grudge.

He worked the last page free with his thumbnail. It peeled with a sound like a wet bandage.

The handwriting was Claire's. He knew it instantly, the way you know a voice through a wall. She wrote in a hard, forward-leaning print, all capitals for the important words, the *a*'s open at the top so they looked like *u*'s. She had written notes to him in that hand and stuck them on the refrigerator for twenty years. *DAD — BORROWED YOUR GOOD FLASHLIGHT. WILL RETURN. PROBABLY.*

The entry was dated 4/9. Three lines.

It said that she could hear it under the dam.

It said that it knew her name.

It said she thought it had always known her name.

Howard Pettit knelt on a gravel bar in the Blackfork River with the water going past six inches from his shoes, and read those three lines eleven times, and the wind stopped mattering, and the cold stopped mattering, and something opened in the middle of his chest that had been closed since April — not relief, nothing so kind as relief. It was the feeling a man gets when a diagnosis finally comes back and the word on the paper is worse than anything he guessed, and still, still, some animal part of him says: *good. Now we know what we're fighting.*

He put the notebook inside his coat, against his shirt, and held it there with his arm the whole mile back to the car.

He did not think, then, about the fact that Claire had drowned eight months earlier, and that the flat limestone stone had been set on top of the gravel, and that the fall floods should have swept a loose notebook to the reservoir tailrace or to the Hudson or to the sea.

He did not think about who had put it there.

He would think about that later, in the room at the Pike Lodge, at two in the morning, with the notebook drying page by page on the radiator and the sound of the ice moving in the river outside, and he would get up and check the lock on the door twice.