Chapter 9 - The House on the Bluff
Peoria sits forty miles north of Springfield, where the river widens into a long, grey lake between two hundred feet of timbered shale bluffs.
The house on Moss Avenue was not a split-level.
It was an eighteen-ninety Queen Anne with three round towers, five chimneys made of red St. Louis pressed brick, and a wide, wrap-around porch that had twenty-two turned balusters between every square post. It had been painted white with dark green sashes forty years ago, and the yard had four massive bur oaks that had been saplings when Abraham Lincoln was still carrying a surveyor’s compass through New Salem.
It was June—the third Tuesday.
The heat had come up from the south, but on the bluff the air was five degrees cooler, moving through the wild plum trees along the ravine with that clean, dry rattle that leaves make when the dew has dried by nine.
Daniel Harris sat on the third step of the porch.
He was wearing his civilian trousers—grey wool trousers from the shop on Adams Street—and a short-sleeved white linen shirt that showed his forearms, pale and hairless where the duty cuffs had rubbed them for thirty years.
Beside him sat Clara Hughes.
She was forty-six, eight years younger than her dead sister, with the same round, grey eyes and the heavy, dark hair that she kept pinned behind her neck with a pair of tortoiseshell combs. She had three small flour stains on the front of her denim apron, and her fingers smelled of lemon peel and lard.
"She’s in the garden," Clara said.
She didn't point. She tilted her chin toward the lower terrace, where the old brick retaining wall held twenty feet of black river loam against the drop of the bluff.
Emily was standing between two rows of sugar snap peas.
She was ten now. She had grown three inches in the twenty months since the night on Maplewood; her legs were long, her shins brown from three months of running through the clover without socks, and she wore a pair of blue canvas sneakers with red laces that she had double-knotted at the tongue.
Her right arm was out of the cast.
The skin was pale where the fiberglass had been, and across the inside of the forearm, two inches above the wrist, two circular, white scars sat like two small silver dimes against the tan. They weren't purple anymore; they were flat, soft, and moved with the tendon when she opened her hand to catch a yellow cabbage butterfly that was fluttering over the pea blossoms.
She didn't catch the butterfly.
She let her fingers stay open, her palm flat to the sky, watching the insect clear the cedar trellis and disappear into the elderberries along the fence.
"Does she talk about it?" Daniel asked.
"No," Clara said. She took a pea pod from a wooden bowl between her knees, split the seam with her thumbnail, and scraped six green pearls into her palm with a clean, rhythmic click. "She talks about the river. She talks about the tugboats that come down from Chicago with the sand barges. She knows all their names. The City of Peoria. The Prairie State. The Robert L."
"Does she sleep?"
"With the window open," Clara said. "Three inches. She likes to hear the water on the shale."
From the bottom of the terrace steps, Emily turned.
She had seen the Crown Victoria in the drive—she knew the car, even without the light bar on the roof—and she stood with her hands in the pockets of her denim shorts, her weight shifted onto her left hip, looking up at the two people on the porch.
She didn't run. She walked up the brick risers with that slow, measured, country stride that doesn't waste energy when the sun is high.
"Mr. Harris," she said.
Her voice had changed. The thin, whistling reed from the telephone line was gone; it had the clear, low bell of her mother’s family—the sound that carries across fifty yards of corn ground when the dinner horn blows from the kitchen porch.
"Emily," Daniel said. He didn't stand up. He kept his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging between his shins.
"You got a new car?"
"Old car," Daniel smiled. "Just took the radio out. Doesn't have the siren anymore."
She sat down on the second step, one riser below him, her back against the green post.
She reached out with her right hand—the hand with the two silver dimes on the wrist—and picked up an oak leaf that had fallen from the branch above the gutter. It was dry, brown, curled like an old shoe sole from the winter under the snow.
She turned it over twice in her fingers.
"The man at the zoo sent me a letter," she said.
Daniel looked at her profile. Her cheek had filled out; the sharp, white line of her jaw had softened into the round, firm curve of an eleven-year-old who had eaten four meals a day of pot roast and garden potatoes.
"Dr. Vance?"
"He said she shed her skin," Emily said. She didn't look at Daniel; she looked through the balusters at the grey expanse of the river two miles below. "He said she shed it in one piece, from the nose to the tail, like an old sock you pull off when you come in from the rain."
"Did he?"
"He said he has it hanging on the wall in the office behind the snake house. He said it’s ten feet long now."
She laid the dry oak leaf on the concrete step, smoothed it with the flat of her palm until the dry veins crackled against the grit, and then let the wind take it over the edge into the spirea bushes.
"I don't have to see it," she said.
"No," Daniel said. "You don't."
She looked at her sneakers—at the red laces that were knotted so tight they’d have to be cut with a paring knife when she outgrew the canvas.
"Claire came up on the bus," she said softly.
Daniel turned his head. "When?"
"Last month. On a Saturday. We went down to the landing and had lemon ice from the truck by the bridge."
"Did she talk to you about the call?"
"She told me the machine broke," Emily said. Her small, brown hand came down on Daniel’s wrist—not the belt, not the holster, but the bare skin above his watch where the pulse was ticking eighty times a minute in the June heat. "She said the computer in Springfield got too full of numbers and dropped the whole tape into the river."
Daniel looked down at her fingers.
The skin was warm. It smelled of green pea vines, cold well water, and the brown river mud that never really leaves your knuckles if you live within a mile of the bluff.
"She’s an operator, Emily," Daniel said, his voice dropping into that quiet, gravelly cadence that had settled three thousand domestic calls in thirty years. "She knows how to clean the line."
Emily stood up.
She didn't say goodbye; she had seen three sparrows land in the sweet clover by the pump house, and she went down the steps two at a time, her sneakers hitting the brick with a clean, dry thud-thud-thud that didn't make a single timber in the big house creak.
Clara Hughes watched her go until the blue sneakers were lost in the green of the orchard.
"She’s going to Dubois Middle School in the fall," Clara said, scraping another pod into the bowl. "They have an orchestra. She wants to play the cello."
"The big one?" Daniel asked.
"The one you hold between your knees," Clara said. "The one that makes the floorboards shake when you pull the horsehair across the thick string."
Daniel Harris stood up from the porch step.
His hip clicked—the old joint from nineteen-eighty-five that always told him when the rain was coming over the river from Iowa.
May you like
"That's good," Daniel said. He took his Carhartt cap from his pocket and pulled it down over his grey hair until the brim shaded his eyes from the glare off the water. "That's a good sound for a house."
He walked down the crushed stone driveway toward the Crown Victoria, his boots making a dry, rhythmic crunch in the gravel, leaving the two women on the bluff with the river, the peas, and forty miles of clean, open prairie running out to the west where there wasn't a lock on a door for twelve miles in any direction.
