Chapter 8 - The Dark Water
The canal was twenty feet wide, cut through the cranberry bog forty years ago to flood the beds during harvest season. The water was black as ink, stained with cedar tannin and thick with submerged stumps.
At the edge of the wooden bulkhead, Victor was standing in the stern of a small aluminum jon boat. He had managed to pull-start the five-horsepower outboard. The small two-stroke engine screamed like a chainsaw as the propeller churned the black water into a frothy, sulfurous wake.
He was fleeing south, deeper into the uninhabited wilderness where no patrol car could follow.
“He’s getting away!” Lena cried, stumbling to the edge of the bulkhead, holding her bruised face. “Mom, the documents are in his briefcase! If he gets to the coast, we’ll never prove what he did!”
I handed Ellie to Lena. “Take Maggie’s car. Take the keys from her pocket. Get on Route 563 and don't stop until you reach the state police barracks in Red Lion.”
“Nora, what are you doing?” Maggie shouted, dragging the handcuffed Gary toward the cedar post.
I didn't answer.
Beside the bulkhead sat a second craft—an old, olive-drab fiberglass canoe that the cranberry workers used to clear irrigation gates. It was half-full of rainwater, but the aluminum paddle was still wedged beneath the center thwart.
I dumped the water out with one violent heave, slid the canoe into the black canal, and dropped into the stern.
“Nora, no! You don't know those channels!” Maggie yelled, her voice fading as the current caught the light boat.
“Daniel taught me!” I roared back.
Daniel had grown up hunting mallards in these exact bogs. For thirty years, while Victor was learning how to shuffle shell corporations in Manhattan skyscrapers, Daniel had spent his Novembers paddling these identical cedar ditches with a thermos of black coffee and a canvas coat.
The water was cold. A spray of black mist hit my face as I dug the aluminum paddle into the current.
The canoe shot forward. A fiberglass hull with a single, furious woman weighs less than an aluminum boat carrying a two-hundred-pound man and an outboard motor that was choking on forty-year-old silt.
Ahead of me, fifty yards down the canal, the wake of Victor’s boat glowed faintly in the moonlight.
The trees leaned over the ditch like skeletal fingers, their bare branches clawing at my jacket as I paddled. The smell of cedar and iron was overwhelming. The current was fast here, pulled toward the main river sluice gate where the water dropped twelve feet over an old concrete weir into the lower reservoir.
Victor heard the splash of my paddle.
He turned around in the stern, his face illuminated by the moonlight. His hair was wild, his glasses were gone, and his expensive white shirt was soaked in bog water and black mud.
He pulled a small, silver revolver from his ankle holster.
*A backup gun.*
“Stay back, you crazy old bitch!” he screamed over the roar of the outboard.
He fired.
The shot was wild. The bullet clipped a cedar branch three feet above my head, showering pine needles onto my lap. In an aluminum boat moving across choppy canal water, with an outboard vibrating through his arm, he had as much chance of hitting me as he did of winning the lottery twice.
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“You’re out of ammunition, Victor!” I yelled, digging the paddle deep on the left side, closing the distance to thirty feet. “And you’re heading for the weir!”
***
