Six Hours Missing

Chapter One: The Fourth Day

The pumps had been running four days when the quarry gave up the wrong body.

I was up on the north rim at six in the morning, sitting on the warm hood of my father's old truck, which I drove now because he mostly didn't drive anything anymore. From up there you could see the whole pit. Nash Brothers Quarry Number Four, cut into the limestone in 1911, worked until 1978, then left to fill with rain and groundwater until it was a green-black lake ninety feet deep with a road of stone stairs cut down one wall like a staircase into a church basement.

The state had come in June with four diesel pumps the size of school buses. Redwater was going to have a reservoir. Nine hundred acres, boat ramp, a picnic shelter with a plaque. Everything below the tree line — the pit, the pump house, the low farmland out past the Nash place, the two dead barns and the road that served them — was going under. The pumps were only running now so the engineers could inspect the pit walls and the divers could sweep the bottom before they let it all fill for good. When the pumps stopped, the sluice at the west end would open and the creek would be turned into the hole, and in six or seven weeks there'd be sixty feet of new water over everything.

Eleven days. That was the schedule taped up in the window of the county building where my aunt worked. Pumps off on the twenty-fourth. Sluice open at noon.

I came up to the rim most mornings before my summer class. I told myself it was because the light was good. That was a lie I let myself keep.

The truth was that the water was going down four feet a day and I wanted to see what was under it.

Everyone in Redwater wanted to see what was under it. They just wouldn't sit on a hood in plain view to do it. They drove past slow with their windows down.

I had a name in that town. Piper Bartlett, the girl who forgot.

Five years back, on the second Saturday of July, my cousin Elsie went to a party at this quarry and never came home. She was sixteen. I was twelve, and I was not supposed to be there, and nobody could ever say for sure whether I had been. At four in the morning a trucker named Dill Somers found me walking the white line of State Road 60, two miles east, soaked to the skin, barefoot on one foot, with a knot on the back of my head the size of a plum and my cousin's sandal in my right hand. I didn't know my own address. I threw up in the cab of his truck and then in the emergency room in Lyman, and when I woke up the next afternoon the last thing I could remember was standing in Aunt Maxine's kitchen at eight o'clock the night before, eating a peach over the sink.

Eight at night to four in the morning. Everything in between was gone. Not blurry. Gone, like a room with the door bricked over.

The county searched the quarry for nine days. They dragged and they dove and they lowered cameras and they found a beer cooler, a bicycle, and a 1962 Chevrolet. They never found Elsie. The coroner signed it as presumed drowning, accidental, and the sheriff's office wrote up my six hours as head trauma and shock, and that should have been that.

But Redwater doesn't let a story go once it starts telling it. If Elsie drowned, they said, where's Elsie? And if Piper was there, they said, how does a girl end up two miles down the highway? And a twelve-year-old with a concussion becomes, over five slow years, a seventeen-year-old who knows something. You could feel it at the gas pumps. You could feel it in the second pew.

I'd stopped trying to explain. When people asked, I went quiet. That made it worse and I did it anyway.

So I sat on the hood in the gray light and watched the water go down.

At about ten past seven the dive truck came up the haul road with its light bar going, no siren, which was strange, and it stopped hard at the pump house and three people got out fast.

I stood up on the bumper.

The divers had been working the deep end for two days. There was a barge with a crane on it, tethered to the east wall, and a red buoy that they'd been circling since Tuesday. Now there were two men in the water at the buoy and one on the barge with his arms crossed over his head, making the signal you make when you want everything to stop.

My phone had one bar up there. I didn't call anybody. I didn't have anybody to call.

I watched for two hours.

By nine there were eleven vehicles on the quarry floor and a tent going up and the road blocked at the county line with a cruiser parked crosswise. By nine-thirty a Sheriff's deputy named Amos Rill drove up the rim road and told me to move along and, when he recognized me, looked at me the way people did — a fast blink, a settling of the mouth — and said, "Piper. You need to go on home, honey."

"Is it her?"

He didn't answer for a second too long.

"Go home," he said.

I drove down the rim road with my hands shaking on the wheel. I missed the turn to my summer class and drove past the high school and past the Marathon station and past the corner where the Redwater Farm & Home sat with its doors open and Tanya Peralta out front hosing the sidewalk, and she stood up straight when she saw my truck and I kept going.

What I felt was not grief. I want to be honest about that. What I felt was a hard bright hope, so sharp it was almost ugly. If they had found Elsie, then it was over. Then there would be an answer, a body, a funeral, a stone with a date, and the town could stop needing me to be the reason.

I drove home to my aunt's house on Ridge Chapel Road, and I sat in Elsie's bedroom, which was my bedroom, with Elsie's water stains on Elsie's ceiling, and I waited.

At four in the afternoon Aunt Maxine came home from the county building. She came in the back door the way she always did, set her keys in the dish, put a foil-covered pan on the counter for the Ostrom family whose grandfather was dying, and only then came to the bottom of the stairs.

"Piper."

I came down. She had her reading glasses pushed up in her hair, which was the sign she'd been at the copier all day. Aunt Maxine was fifty-four and had been the Redwater County Clerk for nineteen years and the treasurer at First Christian for eleven, and she was the kind of woman who kept a laminated list of every family in the church with a chronic illness. She had taken me in the fall after Elsie died, when my dad stopped getting out of his chair. She had fed me and clothed me and driven me to counseling in Lyman every Thursday for two years. I owed her more than I could carry.

"They found a body in the pit," she said.

I put my hand on the newel post. "Elsie."

"No." Her face did something I didn't have a name for. It was there and then it wasn't. "No, sweetheart. It's a man."

"A man."

"They haven't said. Ricky Doan's wife works dispatch and she says it's a man, and he was down at the deep end, and he was—" She stopped. She reached past me and straightened a picture frame on the wall that was not crooked. "He was chained to a barrel."

The kitchen clock ticked. Outside, a long way off, four diesel engines went on pulling the water out of the ground.

"Chained," I said.

"Piper." Aunt Maxine took my face in both hands, and her palms were cool and dry, and she looked straight at me the way she had looked at me a thousand times across five years, and she said, "This has nothing to do with you."

I believed her for about forty hours.