Once Upon a River

• Chapter Thirteen •


When Margo arrived at the marijuana house, the midnight crickets were screaming. On her twelve-hour, thirty-some-mile trip downstream she had passed swampy places croaking with bullfrogs, but here the tree frogs chirped like insects. Margo pulled her boat onto the sand and climbed up the bank. The place was overgrown, spooky in its neglect. The dock was pulled out of the water, and grass and weeds poked up through the slats. Plywood was nailed over several of the windows, and glass shards in the dirt reflected moonlight. Both doors had padlocks on them. She lit the kerosene lantern she’d swiped from Brian’s cabin before heading down the river. She held the lantern up and read the signs posted on both doors: KEEP OUT NO TRESPASSING, with THIS MEANS YOU spray-painted beneath. Junior’s pot leaf had been painted over. When neither of the uncovered windows would budge, she began to pry at one of the pieces of plywood.

Before coming down the river, she had hung around downstream from Michael’s house for a few days, but did not see any police. She knew they would eventually find Paul, and they’d almost certainly investigate the cabin on stilts. She’d slipped inside the cabin to procure a few items for her journey: the lantern, a small folding military shovel that she was now using to pry at the plywood, a fishing pole, a bottle of bug dope, and a jug of water. She had wiped clean all the surfaces that might contain fingerprints, but if the police brought drug-sniffing dogs, they would smell her. She hoped that Michael had not contacted the authorities. She was sorry to have hurt him.

She worked at the quarter-inch plywood for a long time, pulling out one nail after another, until eventually it was loosened enough that she could slip beneath it and through the empty window frame. She carried the lantern inside with her. The kitchen area was the same as before, with candles melted onto the Formica tabletop. The mattress on which Junior and his friends used to sit to smoke pot in the main room had been replaced by a plaid fold-out couch. She peeked in the bedroom and found it a mess, with bits of mattress stuffing spread across the floor along with wood scraps. Only splintered pieces remained of the wooden bed frame on which Margo had first fooled around with a boy. She closed the door.

She searched the empty cupboards. Inside a bread box she found a boxed brownie mix, and in the drawer beneath the oven, a tin pie pan. She collected paper and wood in a bag to use for starting a fire and carried them outside through the window. She ventured a little downstream until she found the Slocums’ garden. Margo knew that if she took vegetables, it was stealing, but she remembered how her father had done favors for the Slocums, once fixing a space heater that had gone out on a cold night, and she picked four tomatoes and a big handful of beans. She built a fire just upstream from where her boat was hidden. She stirred water into the brownie mix and balanced the pie tin of batter above the fire on three rocks, and while it cooked, she munched the raw vegetables. The brownies burned on the bottom, but still tasted sweet and good.

When her belly was full for the first time in days, she noticed the moon was full, too. Being back in Murrayville gave her a way of thinking about the last year and a half, her journey up the river and back. Traveling upstream had taken her no closer to her mother, but she had gotten Luanne’s address and a response. Margo was not yet ready to think about Paul, and she pushed those thoughts away. She would focus for now on surviving each day, figuring out where to hide if the police came and where to go so her mother could contact her. Also, she wanted to find Junior. Maybe with him she could talk through everything that had happened. Junior would have graduated from high school last month, and so she figured she’d see him hanging around.

Margo wiped on more bug dope. She lay on her back on her father’s old army sleeping bag, listening to crickets and looking at the stars. Three in a row would make up a man’s belt, according to her grand-father, but she couldn’t find them. He had said she could navigate by the stars, but who needed that? The river had just two directions, upstream and down. A screech owl whinnied, and Margo whinnied back with a sound so mournful she spooked herself.

Junior didn’t come around the next day, and a week passed and he still didn’t come. Once she thought she saw him driving down the road toward her, but Joanna was in the passenger seat, so Margo stayed hidden in the ditch behind the black-eyed Susans. If Junior or his friends showed up at the marijuana house, she’d offer to cook fish for them or catch a snapping turtle and fry up the meat. How nice it would be to feed somebody, to have some company. After the second week, she decided that if Junior didn’t show up soon, she would go to the Murray house and throw rocks at his bedroom window.

Margo stole enough food to feed herself, never too much from any one garden, and drank water from the spring. She saw a few of the Slocum kids, including Julie, come to the spring to fill their jugs and buckets. Margo would have liked to talk to Julie, but if she was still the tattler she always had been, she would tell everyone Margo was there. She wished she had made the effort to talk to Julie during the last year in Murrayville, but back then she’d been unable to shake her anger at her cousin for telling Crane what she’d seen in the shed.

As July melted into August, Margo listened to gangs of newly fledged robins picking at the underbrush in such numbers that the woods floor seemed alive. She watched nuthatches spiral down trees headfirst to the ground and back up again. She watched turkey vultures spiral high above, searching by scent for those creatures that had not survived the summer. And Margo still did not see police boats searching the river for her.

She rediscovered her favorite old mossy places in the Murray woods, where there grew lichens, fiddlehead ferns, and toadstools—some of them brightly colored. She searched for giant puffball mushrooms and chicken-of-the-woods, and each evening at dusk she watched thousands of fireflies charge and discharge. She kept herself hidden as best she could, and was happily surprised that nobody came around to investigate the modest fire she burned each evening and put out each morning. She kept her belongings in the boat, which she covered with her old green tarp and branches. Unless it was raining, she stayed outside. She collected pine needles to create a soft bed beside her campfire, and she gathered mattress stuffing into a plastic bag to make a soft pillow. She found that on the nights when she felt safe and comfortable under the stars, on the nights when she had fed herself well, that was when she felt particularly lonely. Loving a person the way she had loved Michael was something she couldn’t shake off or be done with when it was over. Even having lost Brian saddened her; she had come to know him so well and had learned so much from him, and now the part of her that had been Brian’s companion was of no use.

Michael had given her a regional map with Lake Lynne on it, and they’d discovered that her mother’s road ran alongside the big lake, which was almost a mile across and five miles long. Maybe there was a way to get there by water, if only Margo could get her heavy boat around the dam at Confluence. If only she weren’t, in her grandfather’s words, stuck on the Stark. Margo usually kept the map in her Annie Oakley book, but one night, while sitting at her fire, she tore out the portion of the map surrounding her mother’s place and put it in her wallet so she’d always have it close at hand.

After dark, if the weather was mild, Margo rowed the several miles downstream into town, stood on the unlit iron walking bridge over the waterfall in the park, where a dammed pond flowed into a little stream that led to the river. She walked past the small brick high school she had been so eager to leave every day, and she wondered if she should have tried harder to be more like other kids. She couldn’t see herself ever being very much different than she was, but maybe when she had a chance to make friends in the future she would try harder.

Margo sometimes ate leftover pizza slices from the dumpster behind the Murrayville pizza shop. One night she was sitting on the high curb there reading discarded newspapers by the streetlight, and she came across a news story from Heart of Pines. It detailed how gunshot victim Paul Daniel Ledoux was discovered in a pontoon boat that was found parked in Heart of Pines two weeks after he was shot. A shotgun was found beside the body, under a tarp. The only fingerprints on the gun were the victim’s, but officials did not think the death was a suicide. The boat was found to contain a gallon jug of some raw material for making an amphetamine that was capturing the attention of law enforcement. The killing was assumed to be drug related. There was no mention of the cabin or the drum of liquid or a riverside informant. The victim left behind a wife and three children, ages five, seven, and nine. Margo put her mushroom-and-sausage slice back in the pizza box. She read the last paragraph again. She had not thought of Paul’s wife when she pulled the trigger, or of their three children, who would now grow up without a father.




From the dark river, she sometimes watched her daddy’s house and the stranger living there, a tall, stoop-shouldered, gray-haired woman Margo had seen at a Thanksgiving party a few years before. The woman smoked a pipe the way a man would. Margo saw her toss things into a big hole someone had dug behind the house. Margo didn’t dare approach because the woman kept a white pit bull chained to the swing set frame Margo had used for stringing up her bucks. It occurred to Margo that two years ago she had been gutting and skinning her deer in the most obvious place, so that all the Murrays must have known about her kills. Her daddy had been right that she was reckless. She felt sorry for the white dog for being chained up, but the one time she approached, it barked a high-pitched, manic rhythm and strained against its tether as though wanting to attack her. The old woman came out with a pistol in her hand and shouted into the darkness, “Who’s out there?” but Margo was already on the water, rowing away.

The following midday, Margo was poking around in the woods upstream when she saw a white Murray Metal Fabricating truck pull into the driveway of the marijuana house. Out of it toppled a tall man, who leaned against the truck’s door pillar until he could get hold of forearm crutches. Margo was too far away to make out features, but she knew who he was. He unlocked the door and entered the little building. Margo hoped she’d left the plywood flush against the window so he wouldn’t notice it had been messed with. A few minutes later a dark-haired girl came running to the door, and she looked both ways before entering. Julie Slocum. Margo did not approach the house, but headed upstream to her camp. She had been foolish and unkind to ever be angry with poor Julie.

Margo returned to the Murray place that night and climbed the riverbank to investigate the barn beside which she had shot clay disks with Billy and Junior. A lone pig snorted under a corrugated metal hut. Grandpa had always kept the barn painted, but now the red was peeling all along the side by the river. The whitewashed shed was padlocked from the outside. The golden light of incandescent bulbs showed in the windows of the big house, giving the impression of safety and warmth. Margo was wary of setting off the beagles, but when she got up her nerve to come close to the house, she heard no barking. The kennel was empty. Moe was nowhere to be seen, either. Margo stood beneath Junior’s bedroom window, listening to the squeaks of flying squirrels. She was readying to toss a rock when she saw the figure of a younger kid, Toby or Tommy, looking out. She considered knocking on the kitchen door, but chickened out and instead went behind the house and stole pole beans and Brandywine tomatoes from the garden. More beans were toughening on the vines than usual, and more tomatoes had been left to rot, suggesting Joanna was behind on her canning.

Margo returned the following night and circled the house, trying to get a glimpse inside. The house was built on concrete block footings that raised it above the hundred-year flood level, so in order to see into the living room at close range, she pulled herself up into an old apple tree. She saw Joanna sitting in her chair sewing only a few feet away. She was wearing a blue print dress, and as always her hair was pulled back in a knot. Her shoulders looked a little more stooped, her face slightly more lined, her hands a bit more arthritic than a year and a half ago, but Cal, sitting beyond her, looked very different. He was gray-haired now, though he couldn’t have been much more than forty years old, and his face looked pinched and stern. His arms and shoulders were bigger than before, maybe from working wheelchair wheels and those crutches that lay on the floor beside him. His legs were straight out in front of him on a footstool, covered with a blanket. His gaze was trained on the TV. A sleeping figure that Margo took to be Junior lay on his back on the floor, his body impossibly long, his arms folded under his head, on which he wore headphones. Robert Murray, who must have been eleven years old by now, sat cross-legged on the couch and was watching TV intently. Toby and Tommy, aged seven, sat with their backs to her. What shocked Margo was the stillness of the room, apart from the movements of Joanna’s hands working needle and thread. So different from the lively old river paradise they had once all been a part of.

She leaned out of the tree, closer to the window, figuring she was well hidden by the foliage and darkness. She wished she could somehow get Junior’s attention. Then Joanna looked out the window. Her face was so sad that Margo had to swallow hard. She’d been naive to imagine that, after all they’d been through, the Murrays would have been the same family she’d known, full of fun, stories of their escapades, and plans for hunting trips. Margo wondered if Joanna ever worried about her. Joanna had plenty of other things to worry about, Billy, of course, and Cal especially. Margo understood the sadness and exhaustion in Joanna’s face. Margo had to shake that same sadness out of her joints in order to get up every morning and work up the energy to hunt for food to eat that day.

A white-bellied flying squirrel flashed above her—her grandpa had referred to them as sprites when he glimpsed them at night, the same as he’d sometimes called her. Margo was shifting her weight, and she slipped a little. She caught herself by grabbing a branch, and when she looked back into the room, Joanna was looking out at her. Margo slowly raised her hand to wave, but instead made a gesture of peace the Indian hunter from Michael’s book might have made when he was trying to hide his wolverine heart. Joanna glanced toward Cal and her sons. She laid aside her mending—it was Junior’s jacket with the pot leaf stitched on the back. Margo slid down the tree, followed Joanna from outside the house, climbed the wooden steps, and waited among the mosquitoes at the riverside kitchen door. She slid the Marlin off her shoulder and leaned it against the house where Joanna wouldn’t see it. Joanna opened the door and then took hold of the knob to steady herself.

“Margaret?” Joanna whispered. “Is that you?”

Margo nodded.

“What are you doing here?”

Margo took a breath, tried to speak, but nothing came out. Maybe Joanna was reading the pain in her face, because her tone softened.

“You look thin. And your hair. Your pretty hair. It’s . . .”

Margo reached up and touched her hair, brushed away some pine needles. She had not washed her hair since she’d left Michael’s three weeks ago.

“I need a shower,” she said.

“Oh, Sprite, it is you, isn’t it?” Joanna leaned toward Margo as though she wanted to hug her or inspect her, but then pulled back and glanced behind her at the door leading to the living room. “Oh, dear. Are you all right?”

“I’m okay. I was just in the woods. Looking for mushrooms.” Margo whispered because Joanna was whispering. She could smell the cinnamon bread Joanna must have made for the next day’s breakfast, and also some greasy meat.

“I thought you were with your mama, Sprite. You left us that note. Your uncle Cal was angry at you. He still is.”

“I know.” Hearing Joanna use her old nickname made her feel acutely all she’d lost.

“You stole his most valuable rifle.”

Margo nodded and glanced at the Marlin leaning against the wall. She would have liked to ask if she could come inside, clean up, sit quietly in the kitchen for a few minutes, but she only choked out, “Could I . . . ?” and stopped.

“What do you want from us?” Joanna was crying, and Margo found she was, too.

“To come back for a while,” she said, “until I can go to my mom’s.” Annie Oakley had begged her mother to let her return.

“Oh, Margaret. God knows I could use your helpful hands in this house.” Joanna glanced again at the door to the living room. She said, “I don’t want anyone to hear us. You knew that man who broke your uncle Cal’s legs? He told everyone in the courtroom he was doing it for what Cal did to ‘a certain young girl.’ That was a hard time for Cal, with everyone thinking the worst of him.”

“I didn’t want him to hurt Uncle Cal,” Margo said. She looked down at Joanna’s bare shins and at her feet, clad in the worn leather shoes Margo remembered. Joanna was blessedly the same. Margo felt mosquitoes bothering her face, but she didn’t move to slap them. One landed on Joanna’s cheek, and Margo hoped Joanna wouldn’t shut the door yet.

“Cal’s started walking with the crutches. We’re very hopeful.”

“I saw him,” Margo said. “With Julie.”

Joanna squeezed her eyes shut.

Margo recognized Joanna’s homemade dress. The blue-flowered fabric was more faded than when Margo had last seen it. Margo had never loved a dress more than she loved Joanna’s dress now. Joanna opened her eyes and shook her head. “You know, a strong marriage is a strange thing. It makes you have faith in your husband regardless of how things appear.”

Margo kept looking at Joanna’s exhausted face. Joanna, in return, seemed to be studying Margo for a clue to what had happened to all of them. Joanna had always been the opposite of Margo’s mother, strict where Luanne was permissive, plain while her mother was pretty, hardworking while her mother was bone-lazy, modest and religious while her mother was egotistical and dramatic. They were as different as Brian and Michael.

“I blame your mama,” Joanna said. “She should have taken you with her. I’m sorry if I had something to do with her going away.”

Margo didn’t know what she meant.

“Where are you staying? With friends?”

Margo hesitated, but because of the concerned look on Joanna’s face, she nodded and said, “With a friend.”

“Cal had someone on the school board look for you at all the schools in the county, and you’re not enrolled. This is no way to grow up, with no schooling, sneaking around at night. Let me think about this. Let me try to figure out whether there’s any way for you to live here until we find your mama.”

Margo did not want to disagree with anything Joanna might say, not about her mother, not about where she would be staying, not about going to school. She wondered if it would be easier to go to school now that she’d missed two years. She’d be with all new kids, younger kids. She’d heard of kids going to school part-time.

“I’ve got her address,” Margo said. “She wrote to me. Said she wasn’t ready for me to come yet.”

“I don’t know how much you know, but things aren’t going well for your uncle Cal and the company.” Joanna glanced behind her.

Margo nodded.

“If anybody comes in the kitchen, don’t let them see you. Billy will make a big fuss if he sees you. He’s still mad about his grandfather’s boat, you know.”

“Billy’s not locked up?” Margo felt her heart sink.

“Of course not. I mean, he had a little trouble, but he’s out now. Did you hear about that?”

“The police took him after he shot my dad.”

“Yes, for questioning and evaluation.” Joanna was looking at her strangely. “That was all. It was self-defense, defense of his papa. You and Billy both told the police that. So did your uncle Cal.”

“Oh.” Margo felt confused. “I wish I could say hi to Junior.”

“Junior’s in Alaska.”

“Alaska? With Loring?”

“He graduated from the military school. He was living back at home, and he and Cal were fighting all the time, so he went up there with a school friend. Now he’s working on a fishing boat. He says he loves it.” Joanna smiled.

“But I just saw him in the living room. You were sewing on his jacket.”

“You saw Billy. He’s gotten taller than Junior or his papa. The doctors put him on medication that helps him with his moods and his temper. Junior asked me to mail him his jacket, and I’m trying to put a flannel lining in it to surprise him. Now wait here a minute.” When Joanna returned less than a minute later, she stuffed a paper grocery bag into Margo’s arms. “Here’s some slices of my bread that you always loved and a little jar of your favorite peach jam. You can share it with your friend.”

“Thank you,” Margo said. The bag was warm and smelled of cinnamon. She glanced inside to see that Joanna had given her about a third of the cinnamon swirl breakfast loaf. Some of the boys would have to eat plain bread tomorrow.

“Are you sure you have a place to stay?” Joanna asked. “You could sleep in the barn if you needed to. Some of the kids had a sleepover out there last week. There’s probably still blankets out there.”

Margo would not take a chance on staying in the barn, so far away from where she could hide her boat. And so long as it wasn’t raining, she preferred to sleep outside, where she’d hear someone coming and be able to run.

From inside, upstairs, Margo heard a wail.

“Randy’s crying,” Joanna said.

Margo must have looked confused.

“You don’t know?” Joanna said, and her eyes spilled over. “Of course. How could you know? I had a baby.”

“A baby? Congratulations.” Margo hoped it was the right thing to say. What Margo had done to Cal, then, had not stopped him from making another baby. It had been exactly what she had intended to do—not damage him permanently, but only make him hurt. Her revenge had been just right, and yet it had all gone so wrong.

“A boy?”

“A boy. Yes.” Joanna’s voice cracked. “I was so sure it would be a girl this time. I was going to name her Rachel, after my sister.”

“What’s he like? I wish I could see him.”

“Your new cousin has Down syndrome,” Joanna said and swallowed as though she dreaded explaining. “That’s why we had to get rid of the dogs. The barking made him scream and cry. Down syndrome is what they say now, not Mongoloid.”

“Down syndrome,” Margo said and nodded.

Joanna shook her head. “I love him, but I’m so tired. I paid Julie to help me for a while, but . . . Oh, Nymph, you were the only one of the kids who was ever really helpful.”

“I always loved helping,” she whispered.

“You know, Cal was furious when you disappeared and left that note. Why didn’t you stay for the burial?”

“What burial? Daddy was cremated.”

“But we interred his box of ashes in the cemetery, on the north edge. Cal made all the boys go along.”

“I didn’t know they put ashes in a cemetery.” Margo had thought that when a person was cremated, he was simply gone. “Did Billy go?”

Joanna nodded. “For three months, your uncle Cal wouldn’t tell the police you were gone. Not until they needed your signature. Then he told them you’d gone to your mother’s, out of the state.”

Margo shook her head. She had been living with Brian at that time.

“They looked for your mother,” Joanna said, “but said they couldn’t find her. How did you find her?”

“I asked around and sent letters,” Margo said. She wished she could have been at her father’s funeral, despite Billy’s being there. Margo’s heart started to feel squeezed when she thought about Billy living comfortably with his family, as though he’d done nothing wrong.

“I hear somebody coming. Come back and talk to me tomorrow morning if you can. The boys’ll be at day camp, and Billy’s in summer school. I’ll make you something nice to eat.” Joanna closed the door.