Come Helen High Water Read online

  Bernie squished his eyes closed. A picture filled his head, of the only kitchen he remembered. It had floral-patterned linoleum, a red Formica table and chairs, a gingham skirt on the porcelain sink, and his mother with her cropped blond hair and pale eyes, offering him a warm chocolate chip cookie.

  He opened his eyes and looked around him. He realized this wasn’t that place. This wasn’t any place he knew, was it? It was all stainless steel, white cabinets, and granite, as sterile as a hospital. Was that where he was? Was he in a hospital?

  “Where’s Mother?” he asked.

  “Do you mean my mother or your mother?”

  He squirmed, gaze darting about.

  “My wife, she drove me here,” he muttered to himself. “She was with me today, visiting the mines. I need to be resting. I’m worn out . . . I need to go home.”

  “That does sound tiring,” the woman said, and Bernie refocused on her. The anxiety in her face seemed to disappear, and she smiled sympathetically. “So Mom went with you to the mines today, did she?” she asked and crouched low so they were eye to eye.

  Bernie blinked. “My wife was with me. She drove me all over the state.”

  “But now Mom’s outside talking to Sawyer while Matt grills our burgers. You did say you wanted a cheeseburger, right?”

  “Mom?” he repeated, and he put his hands on either side of his face. “Who is Mom?”

  “My mother, the person who gave me life,” the woman told him, speaking slowly and very loudly, as though he were hearing impaired. “She’s your wife, Betty Winston.”

  Bernie dropped his hands to his lap. “Yes, of course, Betty’s my wife.” He sighed, suddenly hearing a murmur of voices beyond the French doors, but he didn’t move from the chair. He didn’t always know which end was up—or who was who—but he knew hot from cold. Outside felt like an oven. Inside, cool air surrounded him. He didn’t feel like moving.

  He squinted at the woman, trying to place her. She reminded him of someone, but he wasn’t sure who.

  “I drove all over the state today, inspecting mines.” He rubbed a hand over his brow. “Whew, and it was hot.”

  “Yes, you told me about that already,” the woman said softly. “Sure I can’t interest you in some iced tea, Dad?” She crouched before him, and there were tears in her eyes. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll get it.”

  “No, thank you, I’m fine.” He waved her off as she peered at him, waiting. He could tell she was a sweet lady, genuinely caring. He was certain he knew her, but her name escaped him. They were related somehow, weren’t they? Was she his sister, or his niece, perhaps? That idea that she wasn’t a stranger made him relax. He nodded at some photographs on the wall of a girl with a gap-toothed grin and braids.

  “She’s a lovely child,” he said, trying to make conversation. He was pretty good at that for an engineer.

  “She’s smart, too, like her grandpa.” The woman put a hand on his knee.

  “So she’s yours?” he asked.

  “Yes, she’s mine,” the woman replied. “Her name is Sawyer. She’s your granddaughter.”

  “Hmm,” Bernie said because nothing else came to him. He felt no connection to the smiling girl in the photographs. He stared at the woman. He could see in her face that she wanted more from him, expected more. But it just wasn’t there. “Where’s your family from?” he asked.

  “I’m from where you’re from,” she said, not without irritation. She cocked her head, and her eyes got that worried look again. “You’re my father. I’m Ellen, your favorite daughter, remember?” She laughed but it sounded forced. Her voice tightened as she told him, “I’m your only child.”

  “My child?” he repeated and pursed his lips because he didn’t think that was possible. “No, that can’t be.”

  “Yes, it can.” The skin between her eyebrows pleated. “Why do you think I keep calling you Dad?”

  “Hmm,” he said, not sure of the answer.

  Her mouth came open, like she wanted to speak again, but she pursed her lips instead. Finally, she said, “All right. I need to finish fixing dinner.” Then she patted his knee before getting up and walking away.

  She ended up back at the sink, where she picked up an ear of corn to shuck and rinse. As the water ran, she began nattering on, about taking Sawyer into St. Louis to the Science Center for an exhibit about robots and did he want to come with them?

  But Bernie didn’t register the words she spoke, only the noise of her chatter, which buzzed in his head like voices at a cocktail party. He felt a shift in his awareness, and the reality of the situation hit him like a bolt of lightning. Of course, he thought and slapped his knees, knowing exactly where he was: at a company dinner in Coal City, his boss awarding him for a job well done.

  He smiled across the way at the chattering woman with the ponytail and wondered who would take her home. He hadn’t seen her arrive with anyone. Was she a secretary for one of the VPs? Bernie was sure he’d glimpsed her around the office before.

  No matter, Bernie mused and rose to his feet. Time to work the room, he told himself, starting toward the French doors.

  “Where are you going?” the woman called to him. “Supper’s almost ready, and it’s a scorcher out there.”

  “I’m sure the caterers will ring a bell or something when it’s time to eat,” he said, waving a hand at her dismissively. “In the meantime, I need to find my girl. I’ll bet she’s outside with Jim Barbieri’s wife, yakking up a storm.”

  “Who’s Jim Barbieri?” The woman looked at him, puzzled.

  Clearly she hadn’t met good ol’ Jim’s better half yet, he thought and laughed quietly, figuring the night was still young. The pretty ponytailed gal would likely get an earful before it was over.

  “Don’t you worry . . . I’ll take care of things.” He gave her a wink, shuffling toward the doors. There he paused, glancing back. “Oh, and if you came alone to this shindig, my wife won’t mind if we give you a lift home. If you haven’t met Betty yet, you’ll love her,” he said, picturing his young bride with her teased blond hair and pink lipstick. “She’s got a heart of gold.”

  Ellen stared at him, speechless.

  Bernie grinned to himself and hobbled outside.

  Chapter 3

  Monday

  Helen Evans started at the sound of the creaking screen door.

  She wasn’t expecting company.

  “Hello?” she called out and quickly put aside her mop when no one answered.

  Poking her head around the opened French doors that led from the cottage interior to the screened porch, she caught Amber nudging the door wide and padding inside.

  Well, for goodness’ sake!

  “Where on earth have you been?” she grilled him, noticing the trail of water the cat was leaving in his wake. The green-patterned linoleum that she’d mopped only a half hour before was newly shiny with paw tracks.

  He put his pink nose in the air and skulked past her.

  “Oh, Amber, you know I cleaned house this morning,” she said with a sigh. “Couldn’t you have waited at least until tomorrow to muddy up the floor? Where’d you get such wet feet, anyhow, you old tom?” she asked as she trotted after him toward the kitchen, desperate to grab a few paper towels to wipe him off before he jumped on the furniture. “Were you after the frogs in the creek and took a dip?”

  Amber’s response was a stiff swish of his fat yellow tail, which looked a bit damp at the tip.

  Grumbling at her four-footed charge, Helen ripped paper towels from the roll as the cat ducked his head into his food bowl and noisily began gobbling the dry nuggets.

  “If you caught a frog, you didn’t eat it, that’s for sure,” she said and squatted down beside him. “You act like you’re starving to death.”

  Amber tried to shake away Helen’s hands as she picked up his soggy left front paw and followed suit with the right, doing her best to dry him.

  “I wish you’d waited until this afternoon to track in water
from the creek. You’re going to make me late for an engagement,” she explained, chattering on as though he understood her every word. “Yes, I’m due to meet Clara at the Historical Society in ten minutes. She’s twisted my arm into volunteering to sort through decades of photographs. She said that Luann Dupree has boxes and boxes of moldy pictures that no one’s looked at for generations.”

  Amber kept eating but let out a growl low in his throat as Helen dabbed at his back feet with the paper towel.

  She sighed. “Yes, I know, I’m allergic to dust, which is why I made sure to take a Claritin already. I probably should have told Clara no, but she’s been acting so uncharacteristically droopy lately that I didn’t have the heart to turn her down. I wonder if her arthritis is acting up again, or maybe it has to do with her brother-in-law. Word is that Bernie’s Alzheimer’s is getting worse by the week.”

  With a snort, Amber stopped eating and turned yellow eyes upon her in the fiercest glare, as if to warn, Leave me alone if you want to keep that hand.

  “There, I’m done,” Helen said and stood, her knees creaking like the old pine boards beneath her feet. She dumped the soggy towels in the trash can, shaking a finger at Amber as she scolded, “No more playing near the water, capisce? I’d hate to have the sheriff call someday to tell me you’d been fished out of the harbor.”

  Because that was where all creeks led in River Bend, Illinois: to the harbor and out to the muddy Mississippi, or was it the other way around?

  Whatever, Helen mused, something her granddaughter would say.

  The cat finished eating and stared at Helen with an unblinking gaze the color of amber, the reason Joe had chosen the moniker, even though it sounded more like a girl’s name than a boy’s. But Amber was the first feline her husband had agreed to let her keep in all their years of marriage. Helen wasn’t about to tell Joe that he couldn’t name the cat, even if she knew in her heart the old tom would be teased mercilessly by his chums. Meow, meow, you’ve got a girl’s name!

  Ha! She chuckled at her silly thoughts.

  It was good to be able to laugh easily again. After Joe had passed suddenly three years ago from a heart attack, Helen felt for a long while like she’d forgotten how.

  Amber clearly didn’t share her amusement. He scowled at her like Grumpy Cat.

  “What? You don’t like to be nagged?” she asked him and shrugged. “Well, that’s too bad. I’m your mother. I worry.”

  Though nary a mew escaped his pink-gummed mouth, Amber’s tail shot straight up in the air and began to twitch. Then he sauntered off toward her bedroom, where he’d doubtless take a nice long post-frog-hunting nap atop the handmade quilt on her bed.

  Kids, Helen mused with a shake of her head. Four-legged or two-footed, it didn’t matter. They still didn’t listen.

  She grabbed the mop from where she’d leaned it against the fridge. As it was slightly damp from its earlier use, she gave the floors a quick pass. Once done, she wrung it out, set it outside to dry, and washed her hands, figuring she was good to go. Amber would likely conk out for the next few hours, so she wouldn’t have to worry about anything he might track in—or drag in, for that matter—until she was home.

  “I’ll be back before you’re awake,” Helen called out as she patted the pockets of her warm-up jacket, making sure she’d tucked in cash for lunch. She planned to grab something from the diner once her session at the Historical Society was up.

  She paused by the dining room mirror to give her short ’do a pat. She squinted at the grooves that dissected a face that had long ago helped earn her the title of Engineering Queen at Washington University. Maybe a little powder, she thought before shrugging. There wasn’t much she could do with her wrinkles, despite all the potions and lotions that lined the drugstore shelves meant to fight them.

  Ah, well. She figured it was better to look rumpled than too tight, like she’d had her face pressed with a hot iron. Besides, she’d earned every fault line on her seventy-five-year-old puss, along with the steel gray of her hair. She’d seen too many attractive older women who’d let society’s ideals of staying eternally youthful turn them into caricatures of themselves.

  Better to leave things alone than tamper with perfection, eh?

  “Ha!” Helen let loose another laugh, smiling as she swiped lip balm across her mouth. Then she headed out, letting the screen door slap closed behind her.

  A cardinal twittered from the oak across the street, and she looked up as she went down her porch steps. But it wasn’t the birdcall that made her stop in her tracks.

  “Oh, dear,” she said as she gazed across Jersey Avenue. She realized the reason for Amber’s wet feet, and it had nothing to do with chasing amphibians.

  The water beneath the bridge that crossed to Springfield had risen overnight and its surface bubbled like witches’ brew. The swollen creek seemed ready to crest its banks. Indeed, it had breached a crack in the concrete wall at a spot near the cluster of bushes where Amber liked to stalk mice. Doubtless that was where he’d gotten those damp paws and tail. On an average day the creek babbled in a whisper. Now the noisy gurgle and swirl filled her ears as the rushing water carried twigs and leaves on its current.

  Seeing no cars on the graveled road, Helen crossed toward the bridge and put her hands on the railing. From this vantage point, she could spy where the creek curved behind a clapboard cottage across the way, the waters spilling into her neighbor’s backyard.

  “It’s rising fast and soon to crest,” she said and pursed her lips, knowing that was bad news for all of River Bend and every other town within the Mississippi Valley.

  It used to be that spring floods happened once every decade. In recent years they had become annual events, sometimes lasting well into summer, and it had little to do with too much rain and more to do with the increasingly wet winter weather to the north. When all that snow and ice melted upriver, it had nowhere to go but down.

  Was this climate change in action? she wondered.

  If it was, she didn’t like it one little bit.

  Should the creek continue rising at this rate, Helen would soon have to keep Amber sequestered inside the cottage. He’d have to play with toy mice instead of real ones and use his litter box and not the dirt (things he loathed and had resisted to such a degree that she’d given up on making him an indoor cat).

  She figured it wouldn’t be long before most of the sidewalks and roads disappeared altogether beneath the murky river water. One saving grace: her house and most all of the residences in River Bend had long ago raised their foundations, wrapping latticework to hide the piers. Any homes that hadn’t been jacked up since the Great Flood of 1993 either were situated on higher ground, like those on the incline of Bluff Street, or suffered the consequences.

  “How do, Helen,” a raspy voice said from behind her. “Not a pretty sight, eh?”

  She turned to find Agnes March, owner of the local antiques store, smiling tightly, her finely lined skin reminding Helen of crinkled parchment paper.

  “Hello, Agnes,” she said. “It’s disheartening, isn’t it?”

  “It looks like we’ll need a rowboat soon to get around.”

  “Oh, I sincerely hope not.” Helen sighed.

  Agnes fiddled with the pearls at her collar. “I just ran home to check on Sweetum,” she said, and Helen nodded, knowing Sweetum referred to her Westie rather than a significant other, although Agnes probably considered the pooch exactly that. “I glanced out back and nearly had a panic attack. The creek had gotten high enough to swallow a pair of Adirondack chairs I had down on the lawn.”

  “I hope this isn’t going to be another Great Flood,” Helen replied.

  Back in ’93 she’d been afraid even her home’s distance from the river and the piles that lifted it an extra three feet off the ground wouldn’t be enough. At the lowest point in the valley the water had gotten as high as twenty feet. That record elevation had been marked on an old oak near the boardwalk so folks would never forget,
as if they ever could. Businesses had been shuttered, houses had ended up full of mud—and fish and snakes—and anything not moved to higher ground had been lost or damaged. It was as though River Bend had drowned only to be revived and resurrected by its people, who would not give up.

  But every spring when the forecasters warned of rising waters, the citizens of River Bend collectively held their breath.

  “I’d better get back to the shop,” Agnes said in her gritty tone. “I need to peddle what I can now, before the River Road’s submerged and the tourists can’t get here without wending their way into town via the back roads, which most won’t take the time to do.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” Helen said, since she was heading that direction. She fell into step beside the other woman, ambling toward the downtown.

  Agnes prattled on about selling a vintage tome on Native American arts and artifacts to a history buff in Alton and attending a weekend estate sale in Clifton Terrace where she’d scooped up a sixty-piece collection of Blue Willow–pattern china. Helen murmured appropriate “ohs” and “uh-huhs” while sporadically casting her gaze toward the flooded creek that twisted through River Bend. When her glances between the homes and buildings they passed revealed water spilling into the backyards, her chest clenched.

  How long before it reached Main Street? A couple days? A week?

  They were approaching the row of storefronts across from the diner with the Cut ’n’ Curl, the sheriff’s office, and Agnes’s antiques store, when Agnes grabbed Helen’s arm and stopped.

  “I think I’ll detour and grab a coffee at the diner before I get back to work,” she said, her dark eyes focused on a pair of women standing in front of the Historical Society building about a block up.

  Helen spotted her dear friend Clara Foley, a heavyset woman with a fondness for floral muumuus, in the thick of conversation with lanky Sarah Biddle, the sheriff’s wife. Sarah was a good twenty years younger than Helen and Clara, but she was a decent bridge player and quite an adept conversationalist, to put it mildly. Sarah and Clara were both a part of Helen’s regular Monday-night bridge crowd and were, some said, the town’s biggest gossips. Clearly Agnes didn’t want to risk getting drawn into a gabfest on the sidewalk.