Keep the Count

Chapter One: Eleven Feet Down

The drought had a sound, and it was the sound of Tonya Beeler's tires on the rim road: a fine gritty hiss, like something being sanded down to nothing.

She drove it twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, six-forty in the morning before the heat came up off the clay and made the air shimmer like bad glass. Ledge County Water District paid her eleven dollars an hour to read the staff gauge at Bethel Reservoir, log the number, radio it in, and go home. It had been an easy job for nine years. Now it was a job like watching a slow surgery.

Eleven feet since spring. She had written the numbers in the same spiral notebook since 2011, one line per reading, and if you flipped the pages fast you could see the lake dying in flipbook.

The old boat ramp ended in air now. Concrete ran down the slope and simply stopped, forty vertical feet above the water, its lower edge crusted with dead zebra mussels that crunched like breakfast cereal when she walked on them. Below that, mud. Not the polite mud of a riverbank. Gray clay, cracked into plates the size of dinner tables, curling at the edges, and out beyond that a quarter mile of what had been the bottom of a lake since before her mother was married.

And in the middle of it, a town.

Tonya parked the truck at the turnout, killed the engine, and sat with her hands on the wheel a minute the way she always did now, because the town made her stomach go sideways and she had learned to give it that minute.

Fence lines first. Barbed wire that had been under water for seventy years, still strung, still on its posts, the wire furred with rust and the posts leaning east all together, all in the same direction, like men listening to one man talk. Then the streets — not paved, just wheel ruts a foot deep that had refused to fill in. Then foundations, one after another, laid out on a grid a surveyor had drawn in 1889: stone footings, brick chimney stubs, and root cellars standing open, black rectangles cut into the mud, hot air breathing out of them.

The church footing was the biggest thing out there, a limestone rectangle with a stump of steeple still upright at the north end, six feet of stone the water had never gotten around to knocking down. Somebody in town had already put a Facebook post about it. Somebody always did.

And south of the church, alone in what had been a yard, the icehouse.

Squat. Concrete. Walls two feet thick, roof domed low like a bread loaf, half-buried so that only the top four feet and the door stood clear of the clay. The 1948 county map, which Tonya had a photocopy of folded in her glovebox because she was the kind of woman who kept things, labeled it COLD HOUSE in a draftsman's small careful capitals. Not ice house. Cold house.

The door was iron. It should have been a lace of rust after seventy years underwater. It wasn't. It was dark and dull and whole, and the hinges — she had put the binoculars on them three separate mornings now — the hinges looked greased. Wet-black, clean, the clay wiped away from them in little arcs, the way a door's swing wipes a floor.

"You're seeing what you want to see," she told herself out loud, in the truck, at six-forty-two in the morning, which was a sentence she had said a lot in her life and had never once believed.

She got out and read the gauge.

The staff gauge was a steel post with enamel numbers on it, and it had been driven at the old marina in 1971 when the water came up to the sixteen-foot mark. She had to walk two hundred yards down the exposed slope now to reach the waterline at all. The lake had pulled back into the deepest part of the old river channel, brown and low and utterly still, and the smell coming off it was hot mineral and dead fish and something under that, sweetish, like a cellar.

1.4 feet.

She wrote it down. Then she stood there a second longer than the job required, because from down here she was level with the town, eye-level with the drowned streets, and she could see all the way up Bethel's main road to the church footing, and the perspective did something to her that the view from the rim did not. From up on the rim it was ruins. From down here it was a place. You could walk up that street. You could turn left at the second foundation and go knock on a door that wasn't there.

Her brother was in that water somewhere. Had been for twenty-three years.

That was the arithmetic Tonya did every Tuesday and Friday and hated doing. Clint had gone into the lake on the sixth of July, 1996, off the intake tower, and had never come out, not that summer, not the next, not when the divers came, not when the county dragged the channel with a beam trawl and brought up a lawn chair and eleven tires and part of a hog panel. He was sixteen. He had been sixteen for twenty-three years, in a way that her mother had made into a kind of religion.

Tonya was thirty-nine. She had a son who was fifteen, a mortgage on a house with a bad roof, an ex-husband in Missouri, and a mother who still set a plate for Clint on Sundays.

She walked back to the truck. Halfway up, she stopped and looked out at the cold house again, and the thing that happened next she would think about for the rest of her life, which was not going to be a long one.

A sound came off the flat. Nine notes.

Not music. Not a bird. A voice, low, unhurried, saying nine somethings in a row, and the flat clay carried it the way flat land carries the sound of a distant train, thinned and slightly wrong. She could not have said whether it was a man or a woman or a child. It finished, and there was a pause of exactly the length a person needs to take a breath, and it started again.

Tonya stood on the boat ramp with her notebook in her hand and every hair on her arms up.

"Hey!" she shouted.

The nine notes went on. They did not answer, did not stop, did not change, and there was nobody out there — a quarter mile of bare cracked clay with the sun coming up over it and not one living thing standing on it, not a cow, not a coyote, not a man.

The sound stopped mid-pattern, at what she would later be sure was the sixth note, the way a radio stops when somebody puts a hand on the knob.

She got in the truck. She drove up the rim road faster than the ruts wanted. At the top she pulled over by the cattle guard and sat with the air conditioner blasting her wet face and told herself it had been an engine, a pump, a compressor at the Krebs place, sound carrying funny in the heat inversion, and she wrote in the notebook under the 1.4:

heard something. nothing there.

She did not tell anyone. That was a habit too. Later she would try to figure out where all this actually started, and she would not land on the icehouse or the video or the first body. She would land on this: a woman on a boat ramp deciding not to say a thing out loud, on the third of August, at ten minutes to seven in the morning, twelve hours before her son went down into the basin.

—

The house was on Sedge Street, two blocks off the highway in the town of Cabot Springs, population nine hundred and sixty and falling, and the swamp cooler had been losing to August since the middle of June.

Toby was on the couch when she came in, which meant he had gotten up at noon. Fifteen years old, six foot already, all wrist and neck, his hair grown into his eyes so he had something to look out from behind. He had a bowl of cereal balanced on his knee and his phone in his hand and he did not look up.

"Water's down another two inches," Tonya said, because she had learned to open with facts.

"Cool."

"You eat anything but that today?"

"It's got milk in it."

She put her keys in the dish. She looked at the back of her son's head and felt the particular helplessness of a woman who has been outgrown in every dimension at once. Two years ago he had been a kid who wanted to show her things. Now he was a locked room with a boy inside it.

"Cody working today?" she said.

"Cody got fired."

"From the co-op?"

"He took a fan." Toby's thumb kept moving. "It was a broken fan."

"Well, then."

"It was broken, Mom."

"I said well, then."

There was a beat where they could have gone either way, and she took the other way, which was the wrong one, which she knew even as she took it. "You're not going out to the lake tonight."

Now he looked up. He had his father's eyes and her chin, and the combination in one face was like a joke somebody was telling at her expense. "Why?"

"Because I said so, and because that basin is not solid. That mud out there looks like a parking lot and it's got soft spots in it that'll take you to your hips. Perry Duffield's uncle lost a four-wheeler out there in '02 and it is still out there."

"We don't go out on the mud," Toby said, with the flatness of a boy who had gone out on the mud eleven times.

"Toby."

"We sit on the rocks and drink Cody's brother's beer and Shauna makes videos. That's it. That is the entire thing." He said it like a man in a deposition. "There's nothing to do here. There's literally nothing. The pool closed. The theater in Ludlow closed. You want me to sit in this house at ninety-one degrees."

"I want you not to die," Tonya said.

And he laughed. Not cruelly. That was the thing that would eat her later — he wasn't being cruel, he was fifteen, and he laughed because his mother had said something enormous about a beer on a rock, and he said, "Jesus, Mom," and went back to his phone.

She stood in her own front room with her arms hanging.

"There was a noise out there this morning," she said. "Out in the basin."

"What kind of noise."

And this was the second place it started. She could have said it. She could have said, a voice counting, nine notes, and no one there, and there was every chance in the world that her son would have said something about a podcast, and the two of them would have had a conversation, and he would have thought about it later, out on the rim, in the dark, when Cody Rickert put a hand on the icehouse door.

"Machinery," Tonya said. "Somebody's irrigation pump."

"Okay," Toby said.

She went and took a shower and stood in it until the water ran cold, which in August took a while.

—

That evening she drove out to her mother's because it was the third, and the third of the month was when Wanda Beeler let her daughter fill out the Medicare paperwork.

Wanda lived on nine acres northwest of town with a stock tank, a windbreak of dying cedars, and a house that had been white in 1988. She was sixty-six and moved like she was eighty, and she had a way of holding her mouth that made every room feel like the room after a funeral.

There were three plates on the table. There always were. Wanda's, Tonya's when she came, and Clint's, which got a fork and a knife and a paper napkin folded in a triangle, and sometimes food, and always got cleared.

Tonya had stopped fighting it in about 2004.

"Water's down eleven feet since March," she said, filling in a box that asked for a phone number.

"I heard the church is up."

"The footing's up. And the little bit of the steeple."

"Mm." Wanda was working at a jar of green beans she'd canned in a better year. "They shouldn't have flooded it."

"That was 1953, Mama."

"I know what year it was." Wanda set the jar down. Her hands were bad; the lid had beaten her. "My aunt Berta was raised in Bethel. She said the whole congregation just signed. Every one of them took the government's money and signed and moved to Ludlow and never said a word about it after. My mother wouldn't drive the rim road. Not once, not ever, not to save fifteen minutes."

"Why?"

Wanda picked the jar up again. "Because it was a graveyard," she said, "and you don't picnic on a graveyard." She got the lid off with a pop like a knuckle. "That's all. Superstitious old woman."

"They moved the cemetery," Tonya said. "It's up at Ludlow. Nine hundred and something graves, they moved every one."

"Then it's not a graveyard," Wanda said. "Then I'm wrong. Fine." And she got up and dished green beans onto three plates.

Tonya went home at nine. Toby's bike was gone from the porch.

She sat up until midnight with the TV on and the sound off, and then she went to bed and did not sleep so much as lie in the heat and wait, which is a thing mothers do that has no name.

What she did not know, and would learn later in pieces, some from Toby and some from a phone video and some from a voice on the other side of an iron door, was that at eleven-fifty that night four kids left their bikes at the top of the boat ramp and started walking out across a quarter mile of cracked gray clay under a moon two days past full, and that one of them was already being counted.