Stony River

STONY RIVER

ALSO BY TRICIA DOWER

Silent Girl

TRICIA DOWER

STONY RIVER

PENGUIN

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Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2012

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © Tricia Dower, 2012

Map created by Patricia Geernaert

Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists, 94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

Several scenes in
Stony River
first appeared in story form in
Silent Girl
(Inanna, 2008) and
The Malahat Review
(2010). Parts of
Stony River
were inspired by the crimes of Robert Zarinsky, as documented by Robin Gaby Fisher and Judith Lucas in
Deadly Secrets
(
Newark Star-Ledger
, 2008).

Page 348 is an extension of this copyright page.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-14-318247-4

Visit the Penguin Canada website at
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FOR MY SISTER

We're home, Lillian
.

How brilliant to have come by this house at road's end. Only the river's liquid eyes on us.

—JAMES HAGGERTY, MAY 12, 1944

ONE

JUNE 22, 1955
. The river crooked its finger at her.

Linda Wise crabwalked down the squishy bank, taking care not to slip. She didn't dare show up at home with mud on her behind. Even the call of a tree frog or a fluttering swallowtail made her jump. Strides ahead, her new friend Tereza Dobra—a regular Marco Polo—carved a path through tall, hairy milkweed.

The Stony River meandered for miles through a dozen New Jersey towns like Linda's. Her geography teacher said the river passed through woodlands and wetlands, salt marshes and tidal flats, and once upon a time had harbored creatures with astonishing names like diamondback terrapin, alewife and cormorant. Now you were more likely to find rusty car fenders and stinky chemical foam.

Daddy told of swimming in the river when he was a boy, of the whole town turning out for canoe races past bridges decorated with paper lanterns. Mother told of lying awake at night after Pearl Harbor, sick with worry that the Japanese would skulk up the river, signaling each other with jars of lightning bugs. She also told of two boys who'd drowned when Linda was a baby, the ice breaking as they slid across the river, their frozen bodies found with sad little arms outstretched. Linda was forbidden to go anywhere near the river.

Honor thy father and thy mother
. If caught, she'd be banished to her room without dinner. And there'd be one more black mark against
her on Judgment Day. Nonetheless, on that hot, sticky afternoon, when Tereza said “Let's go smoke punks at the river, it'll be cooler there,” Linda had said “Sure.”

It wasn't fair. Tereza seemed to do whatever she wanted. Maybe because she was thirteen and Linda two months shy of twelve. Or maybe because, as Mother said, “There's more than a little gypsy in that girl.” All Linda knew of gypsies was that they got to play tambourines and trek around exotic lands in painted wagons strung with pots and pans. Tereza's family had rumbled into the neighborhood two weeks ago in a rusting blue truck chock-a-block with boxes, mattresses, a bicycle and furniture odds and sods. They'd lugged it all into the ground-floor apartment of a two-story building across the street and two doors down from Linda. The corner of the building held a store to which Mother sent Linda when they ran out of bread and milk. Mother didn't like going there herself because it was “seedy.” Daddy said it had just been neglected. Linda tried not to feel superior to Tereza for living in a tidy bungalow with green siding and its own yard.
Judge not, that ye be not judged
.

What Tereza called punks were cattail flowers that looked like fat cigars. To get to where they grew, the girls had scampered down a narrow road past Crazy Haggerty's house, the biggest and creepiest in the neighborhood, its once white paint weathered to gray. It sat high above the water with no other houses around. The drapes were drawn tight, not a window open to catch a breeze. Linda wondered if Haggerty was in there watching. She'd only ever seen him on her way home from school; he'd be heading toward town, weaving back and forth, always wearing the same red shoes and satiny black suit with sequins. He'd scowl if you gawked, tell you to get lost. Mother had said to steer clear of him. Daddy said the poor man seemed “tortured.”

Reaching the river's edge without a tumble, Linda released a breath and lifted her gaze from her feet to brown water as sluggish as
the air. Globs of bright green slime lazed on the surface. She couldn't picture Daddy swimming in that.

Tereza held her nose. “Smells like sweaty socks, don't it?”

When the wind was right, Linda would catch whiffs of the river on her way to school. The sometimes sweet, sometimes rotten smell of mystery lurked behind houses grander than hers with plush green backyards leading to wooden docks and rowboats. But this close to the water, she found the smell almost indecent, more like soiled underpants than sweaty socks.

Tereza pulled a penknife from her pocket and cut a couple of punks, leaving short stems. She produced a small box of wooden matches, too. The punks weren't dry enough to flame up and she wasted a couple of matches before they caught and smoldered. “Mmm,” she said, waving her punk under her nose, “I'd walk a mile for a Camel.”