Drowning Ruth (39 page)

“Yes!” Ruth said impatiently. “Yes, of course, but that's got nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, Ruth, you're not a mother yet. When you're a mother, you'll understand.”

In exasperation, Ruth pushed her cup away so roughly that the coffee slopped onto the table.

“Tch.” Amanda clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You're upset now, Ruth, but try to see it my way.” She rose to get the dishrag. “Think of Imogene,” she said, mopping the spill. “Think, Ruth, how you feel, knowing this. Just imagine how it would be for her—everything good ruined. Everything she believes in, spoiled for her. You love Imogene. Do you really want to tell her that this is how she came into the world? You have to think of what's right, Ruth.”

“Like you did?” The words rang through the kitchen like gunshots.

Amanda had been standing at the sink, holding the rag under the rushing water. Now, suddenly, she bent over, as if tortured by cramp, and slipped down until she was pressing her forehead against the cupboard door beneath the sink. “I can't have her hate me, Ruth,” she gasped through her tears. “I can't.”

“Shh,” Ruth said, crouching beside her, trying to pull her to her feet. “We'll tell Arthur, then, or Mr. Owens. They can find some other reason for breaking it off.”

“But she'll find out, Ruth, if they know. She's bound to.” Amanda wiped her face with the dishcloth. Breathing in its sour odors, she prepared to use her last resort. “We all make mistakes, you know,” she said, rising with her back to Ruth. When she turned around, she squared her shoulders but held tight with one hand to the sink behind her. She made her voice sound hard. “Even you, Ruth, made a mistake.”

“What do you mean?” Ruth remembered his fingers on her forehead, and her face burned.

“Your mother was going to raise Imogene for me. You would have been sisters then. You would have liked that, wouldn't you? But when I told you to get off the ice, no.” She shook her head. “You wouldn't. You just kept on running. And then …” She cast her eyes down for a moment and then raised them again, staring firmly at Ruth. “Your mother died, and I had to let my baby go.”

Ruth stepped back, crossing her arms over her chest. But Amanda's words bore into her. “No, I …” she began. But her breathing quickened, because she knew she had run. Even now, standing on the soft wood of the kitchen floor, she could feel her feet sliding out from under her, as they scrambled for a purchase on the slick blackness, and remembered that she could not go fast enough, no matter how she tried.

Amanda reached to touch the back of Ruth's neck with her fingertips. Gently, she drew the girl toward her, until she could tuck Ruth's bowed head under her chin. “It's all right,” she crooned, swaying slightly back and forth. “You were only a baby. You didn't know any better. But you see”—her voice brightened with pride—“I gave up everything for you. Everything. If I hadn't had to take your mother's place, don't you think I could've gone back to work, or had a family of my own? Instead, I took care of you. Now, Ruth,” she sighed, almost happily, “now, don't you think I have the right to ask you to do something for me?”

Moonlight bullied its way into Ruth's room, and she shifted restlessly in its cool glow. She tried to let the idea that she was to blame sink in or, more accurately, that she had unwittingly tugged the first thread, which made her family unravel. Why had she tried to run across that black space? What had she been running from? The kitchen clock seemed to be ticking mercilessly inches from her head. She sat up in bed and threw her pillow against the wall that
separated her room from Amanda's. It whacked loudly against the plaster but summoned no answer.

She slid out of bed and dressed, making no effort to keep her movements quiet. On her way out of the house she slipped her father's old jacket off its hook near the door.

The moonshine was nothing like the light of day, and Ruth had trouble keeping her footing as she made her way down the path through the woods. Step after step, she had the sense of the ground falling away, as when she miscounted stairs in the dark and stepped off the last one unexpectedly. She wasn't sure why she was going to the lake; she only felt compelled to be out of the house in the open air, to shake free of the burden of Amanda's secrets.

Ruth held her face up to meet the night breeze as she worked her way around the rowboat, untying the tarp. Then she slid the boat into the water and began to row.

She'd gone only ten strokes or so when she noticed that her feet were getting wet. She'd forgotten to put the plug in. She leaned into the stern, plunging her fingers into the inch of water that sloshed around the bottom, and easily found the rubber stopper. But something was blocking the hole.

It was a silver box, she found when she plucked it up, the cover decorated in a bold, Art Deco style. Balancing the box on one palm, she released the clasp to reveal tiny pills, like coins in a miniature treasure chest. Ruth floated awhile without rowing, polishing the box with her cuff, as she speculated about who might have left it there. Probably some tramp had used the boat as a bed. They did that once in a while, although they usually left the stench of old sweat and tobacco and an empty bottle behind, not silver boxes.

There was a time, Ruth thought, when she would have half imagined such a charming object to be a gift from her mother, somehow forged at the bottom of the lake and tossed up to land exactly where Ruth would be sure to find it. There was a time when
she would have run to present her discovery to Amanda, as she'd given her the arrowheads and the bird's eggs and the fossils she'd come across, and together they'd have built a little cardboard ship for the pirates who'd have stolen the teeny treasure, and perhaps drawn a map and buried the box under the lilac hedge. There was a time when she'd have squirreled it away in the pocket of her dress to share with Imogene, and they would have told each other about the young man, ill with some romantic disease like tuberculosis, cast out by his wealthy family and condemned to wander the earth alone, because he'd dared to love the wrong girl. They would have studied the faces of the tramps who sometimes sat on the back steps in the evenings, eating their suppers, to find and rescue the boy who had lost his silver box of pills.

All of those times, Ruth knew, as she sponged the water from the bottom of the boat, were past. She could barely remember her mother, and Amanda had given her own daughter away, and Imo-gene loved a man she couldn't marry. Was it really all her fault? She twisted the sponge hard. She'd been only three, after all. “Why didn't anyone stop me?” she shouted fiercely into the darkness. Somewhere along the shore, a dog began to bark.

“Shut up!” a man yelled from the dark shore.

The dog kept barking, but Ruth didn't dare make any more noise. She slipped the box into her pocket and rowed on.

The key to the island house was hooked on a nail under the low eaves, where she'd left it the last time she added new postcards from her father to her collection. Still, she hesitated at the door, and then quietly walked all the way around the house, peeking between the boards that now only half covered the windows. Only when she'd identified each dark lump as a bed or a dresser or a chair did she unlock the door and go in.

In the bedroom her mother's smell, which she now recognized as lavender, still clung faithfully to the insides of the dresser drawers. She lay on the floor, on the green braided rug, and looked under
the bed. It looked too small to be the place where she'd hidden, listening to the baby being born. Listening to Imogene.

Ruth curled on the bare mattress and pulled her father's big jacket tight around her. If she and her mother had fallen through the ice, she thought as she drifted into sleep, and her mother had drowned, but she had not, who had saved her? And why hadn't she saved Mathilda?

A day and a night had passed since Clement Owens had gone to take his morning swim and hadn't come home again.

“It's that he's gone without his car,” Theresa Owens kept saying. “That's what worries me. He wouldn't go anywhere without his car.” She repeated this conviction to each of her children several times. She said it to Ellen and to Anna, the cook, and to Augie, who took care of the yard and the cars. “Are you sure there's no car missing?” she asked him, more than once.

The question offended him. She knew as well as he did that the Owenses possessed three cars, all of which were safely in the garage. But he answered patiently each time, “No, Mrs. Owens, there ain't no car missing. Not this time.”

She explained her concern to the sheriff, although even without a missing car, Sheriff Kuhtz didn't rule out the possibility that
Owens had disappeared intentionally. You saw a fair amount of that when you were the sheriff.

But this fellow hadn't taken a suit of clothes or a pair of shoes out of the closet, at least according to the wife—and you could generally count on the wife to know things like that. It was unusual for a man to go off without his clothes, unless he wanted people to think he was dead. Sheriff Kuhtz had heard of such cases.

On the other hand, it was best, he'd found, to start with the obvious. Although, if Owens had been taken by cramp, it was odd that the bathrobe the maid had sworn he was wearing wasn't on the pier.

On the third day they searched the lake. It was a matter of routine, really; it was difficult to overlook such an obvious culprit when it yawned right in front of them. The family was relieved when nothing turned up, but the sheriff knew bodies were often slow to surface in Nagawaukee Lake. People had been dumping trees and tractors, whole fleets of boats, even houses, down there for decades. A corpse could get hung up in all that junk.

Imogene telephoned Ruth nearly every hour with the latest bulletin. Since no one knew anything, she had few facts to report, but there was still plenty to talk about. The cook had a theory that Mr. Owens had gotten himself mixed up with Chicago gangsters. Mrs. Owens had noticed that his heart pills were missing from the medicine chest. Augie, the driver, suspected a vengeful husband—this last Imogene whispered into the phone.

Of course, she was staying at the house. None of them would have eaten a bite or gotten a wink of sleep if it hadn't been for her. Mrs. Owens had hardly liked her to go home even for her toothbrush and, obviously, Arthur needed her. The sister had come and the older brother. All of them had taken to her right away, and the sister had even invited her to share her bedroom.

“Arthur says he's done this before, gone off for a few days, not
come home when they expected him to,” Imogene said the day after the search.

“So he'll turn up.”

“But Arthur says this is different. Those other times they saw him off. They knew at least he was going somewhere, even if they weren't always sure where and for how long. He waved goodbye—he didn't just disappear into thin air.”

After she hung up the telephone, Ruth opened the drawer of her nightstand and looked at the silver box she'd found. Gingerly, she touched one finger to the lid. What did it mean?

Had Clement Owens slept in the boat like a tramp? Or had Amanda taken his pills? But why leave them in the bottom of the boat? Had he been in the boat with her? In the boat and now vanished into thin air. Or into thick water. As Ruth's mother had vanished. As Ruth had almost vanished herself.

“Ruth!” Amanda's voice flew up from the bottom of the stairs. Ruth could imagine her clearly, standing there with one hand firmly grasping the newel post so that her knuckles stood out. “What did Imogene say?”

Ruth opened her mouth. She felt choked and cleared her throat. “Nothing,” she called weakly, and tried again. “Nothing new.”

I didn't know what to think exactly, only that Aunt Mandy had probably been with Arthur's father sometime since I'd last used the boat, which was weeks and weeks ago. Although that was less surprising than it might have been, now that I knew they'd been acquainted with each other. Still, I didn't think anyone else, not even Imogene, should find that out, at least until Mr. Owens turned up with a reasonable explanation for where he'd been. Thinking about
it gave me the funny idea Aunt Mandy might be hiding him somewhere on the farm, and I started to look over my shoulder once in a while, when I was in the barn or the root cellar. I was afraid she had secrets she'd not yet told me, and I didn't want to stumble onto them unaware.

Even less did I want to join her in one, so I assured her that Arthur and Imogene were in no danger of marrying as long as Mr. Owens was missing. We could postpone her plan.

“I thought you told me Imogene was staying at the house day and night. Day and night,” she repeated, and I had to admit this was true.

Once Aunt Mandy had decided what she wanted to do, she wouldn't leave it alone. That night she came into my bedroom waving the folded pages I'd brought home from the Owenses' in my pocketbook. She must have fished them out of the garbage.

“Where did you get these?” she demanded.

“From Mrs. Owens. I made mistakes.”

“They're perfect. She'll know the paper, don't you think?” She held a page to the light, squinting at the watermark.