False Compass

The river had dropped six feet since Sunday.

Silas Vance stood on the slick, black-granite shelf beneath the spillway, the heels of his leather work boots jammed into a fissure filled with wet pine needles. Rain fell in thin, icy needles, straight down, clicking against the hood of his oiled canvas coat. Across the basin, the tree line rose steep and dark, the spruce trees crowding the ridge like spectator silhouettes against a flat grey sky.

Down here, near the water, it smelled of rotting moss, cold mud and ancient timber.

Three yards away, Dr. Aris Thorne knelt beside the body, her rubberized posture motionless against the dark riverbed. Her yellow slicker was smeared with grey silt around the knees. She hadn't spoken in ten minutes, not since Silas had walked down from the gravel access road, leaving the cruiser's red light sweeping uselessly through the fog above.

"The frost hasn't touched him yet," Aris said, her voice dry, barely carrying over the dull, steady roar of the dam headwaters a mile upriver. She didn't look up. She was using a small silver probe to separate the dead man's lapels. "Body temperature is almost ambient. Water was cold enough to slow down initial stiffening, but he wasn't underwater long. Maybe three hours."

Silas didn't answer. He adjusted his grip on his heavy flashlight, keeping the beam focused entirely on the dead man's sternum.

The corpse lay flat on its back, arms resting straight down along it's sides, palms pressed flat into the cold silt. Julian Croft had been forty-two, a lumber grader at the local mill who lived alone in a drafty cedar cabin three miles past the township line. His face was pale, almost bluish-white, scrubbed clean by the river current. His hair was thin, sandy and receded at his temples, it was plastered against his forehead in neat, parallel lines, as if someone had combed it back with water before leaving him on the rock.

He wasn't dressed like a man who had fallen out of a boat or slipped off the embankment while night-fishing. He wore a crisp, ironed wool coat over a heavy flannel shirt, dark work trousers and leather boots that were laced tightly all the way to the top hook.

"Look at the wrists," Aris muttered, shifting her weight.

Silas lowered the flashlight beam. Around both of Croft's wrists were faint, grey bands of dried sludge, the kind that accumulated in quiet eddys where the current stalled. But beneath the dirt, the skin was untouched. No rope burn. No bruising. No defense marks.

"He was laid out," Silas said. His own voice sounded thick to his ears, raspy from two decades of cheap cigarettes and cold damp air. "Someone carried him out onto this shelf and put him down like a plank."

"Not carried," Aris corrected. She reached her tool roll, pulled out a pair of long, blunt-noses tweezers and tapped the granite near Croft's left hip. "Look at the parallel tracks from the lower gravel bank to here. He was dragged by his shoulders. Gently, if there is such a thing. They didn't bump his head."

Silas squatted down on his launches, his knee joints popping sharp in the cold. The rain was getting heavier, running off the brim of his hat in a steady trickle that hit his boot toe. He reached out with a gloved hand, then hesitated, his fingers hovering an inch above Croft's coat pocket.

"What is that?" Silas asked.

"I haven't touched it yet," Aris said, stepping back to give him room. "I waited for you."

Tucked into the left breast pocket of Croft's wool jacket was a heavy, antique brass casing. It was larger than a pocket watch, round, with a heavy hinge at the top. It didn't belong to Croft; the timber grader carried a plastic-cased Timex and a rusty folding knife.

Silas pinched the edge of the brass with two leather-gloved fingers and pulled it free.

The metal was wet, slick with a fine film of grey river sediment. It had weight to it, solid brass, pitted with tiny spots of verdigris along the seam. The glass face was intact, though foggy with interior condensation. Inside, suspended over a faded ivory card marked with cardinal directions, was a thick steel needle.

The needle didn't move. It was frozen fast, pointing fixed toward the top rim of the casing.

"Is it broken?" Aris asked, leaning over his shoulder. Her coat rustled softly, smelling of alcohol rub and cold damp vinyl.

"No," Silas said.

He tilted his hand thirty degrees to the left. The needle remained immobile, welded in place. Silas turned the casing over. The backplate had been scratched deeply with a sharp steel scribe, revealing bright yellow brass beneath the dark patina. Two sets of numbers had been etched there in crude, blocky figure:

45°12'04"N

69°31'18"W

Silas felt a familiar, cold knot tighten in his gut~a sharp, sudden drop in pressure behind his temples that always came when his mind tried to bridge a gap that wasn't there.

"Coordinates," Aris observed, her voice flat. "That's not the river. That's further west."

"It's the reservoir," Silas said quietly.

He didn't need a map. He knew those numbers. He had seen them stamped on county surveyor plats, on old timber company deeds, on the legal filings that had cleared out the valley thirty years ago. They marked the center of the old basin—the deepest point of the lake, right where the main intersection of Old Blackwater had sat before the sluice gates were dropped in August 1996.

He held the compass level in his palm. The frozen needle didn't point North. It pointed West-Southwest—directly upriver, straight toward the dam wall, and past it, toward eighty feet of black water covering the flooded village.

"There's something else," Aris said. She reached into Croft’s right coat pocket, her fingers pulling out a small, rectangular plastic object wrapped tightly in a zip-top freezer bag.

She held it under the light of Silas’s flashlight.

It was a microcassette tape—a small, dark grey 1990s dictation tape, the kind used in old answering machines and handheld recorders. The magnetic tape inside was wound fully onto the left spool. On the white paper label glued to the front, written in faded, water-damaged blue ink, was a single word:

AUGUST 12

Silas didn't reach for the bag. He couldn't. His breath caught in his throat, tight and dry, despite the damp air filling his lungs.

August 12, 1996.

The day the emergency sirens had blown across the valley. The day the county turned the wheels to flood the basin, two weeks ahead of schedule, because of the rising rain and the cracks in the old wooden cofferdam. The day his nine-year-old sister, Clara, had walked out the back door of their house near the sawyer’s bridge and never come back.

"Silas?" Aris was watching him now. Her pale eyes were sharp, reflecting the yellow beam of his flashlight. "You alright?"

"I'm fine," he said automatically. He straightened up, his legs stiff from crouching. He took a slow step back, putting a foot of wet rock between himself and the corpse. "Bag the tape. Don't play it here. We don't have a deck that works in the wet anyway."

"Miller’s going to want to hear it right away," she said.

"Miller isn't down here," Silas said, turning his face toward the river.

The current was moving fast, swollen with the autumn runoff, churning grey and white around the granite outcrops. Out in the middle of the channel, twenty yards out, something lifted out of the dark water—a long, grey log, stripped of its bark, turning lazily in the eddy before sinking back under the surface like a heavy spine.

The drought was pulling the river down, revealing what had been buried under the silt for three decades. And somewhere upriver, past the spillway, the water was retreating from the old foundations of Blackwater Creek, inch by icy inch.

Silas touched his right coat pocket, feeling the hard outline of his own notebook.

He didn't remember Julian Croft. He knew the man’s face from town—he’d seen him buying tobacco at the gas station, seen him walking along the shoulder of Route 9 with a canvas tool bag—but he couldn't remember a single conversation they had ever had. He couldn't remember if Croft had been in the valley in 1996. He couldn't remember what he himself had been doing between six o'clock and midnight on the night the water rose.

His memory was a room with the lights turned off, filled with heavy shapes he kept bumping into in the dark.

"Help me get him on the board," Aris said, unrolling a black canvas stretcher onto the silt. "Before the tide from the spillway comes back up."

Silas took Croft by the ankles. The cold of the dead man’s boots seeped through his gloves, heavy and final.