“You can open your eyes now, Miss Windsor.”
Briony blinked. It seemed like only a moment since she had put her head on the pillow and stretched out on the seat. But the bland morning light had warmed to the glow of mid-afternoon, and even lying down she could see the lacy pattern of newborn leaves casting shadows in that light.
She sat up rapidly.
All around her trees towered up to a sky that burned blue, waving their arms in the brisk wind. The familiar sight of multicolored ridged mountains in the near distance, some still streaked with patches of snow, caused her throat to tighten in memory.
“I remember the first day I came to pick you up from here,” Ed said, adjusting his visor. “It was later in spring, almost summer—June, I think.”
“Yes,” Briony said. The word caught in her tight throat. “My dad said I couldn’t leave until I’d finished my junior year of high school. Dulce Cheiro had a photo shoot scheduled in Paris for the launch of the Christmas campaign, and Caliente needed me in Istanbul for a catalog layout. I had to be ready for the spring/summer fashion week in Milan that September, so management insisted I be in runway boot camp as soon as possible, given that I couldn’t even walk in heels then. So I finished my last Regents exam, cleaned out my locker, and got into your car. Missed all my older friends’ graduation parties that year.”
Ed nodded silently.
Briony touched the button on the door’s arm, and the window opened silently. A blast of fresh wind and sun blew over her face, rippling her shirt.
“So glad to be back,” she said softly.
“We’re about four miles out of Lake Obergrande, according to the GPS,” Ed said, glancing to the right at his dashboard that looked like the control system of an airplane. “Where would you like to go first?”
“What time is it?” Briony asked.
“Just after five.”
“To the southwestern corner of the lake, then. No point in getting there when Dad still has customers.” She arranged her bangs, looking in the side view mirror, then began folding the blanket. “We may have to walk a bit—I’ve never been there on anything but a bike before.”
“Wish I’d brought mine,” Ed said. “Looks like there’s some great paths up here.”
“There are, but there are way more hiking trails. Not sure if the biking paths would impress a guy who rode across the United States on his bike at the age of sixty.”
“Any path I get to ride is a good path. I’m not fussy.” Ed slowed the car at the exit for Lake Obergrande and turned off the main road. He followed Briony’s directions over a series of small hills as the long, sparkling lake came into view, and parked along the road.
She was out of the car and crossing the road so fast that he had to hurry to catch up with her, grabbing her sweater on the way out of the car.
“Hey—put this on,” he said, puffing to keep pace with her. “It’s sunny, but it’s cold.”
Briony complied, laughing. “I can tell you didn’t grow up around here, Ed—fifty five degrees? This is downright balmy for April.”
The older man shook his head. “The weather’s not the only thing that’s balmy here, if you take my meaning.”
He followed her along a wooded path to the lake that had been carefully maintained, discovering signs for a fish hatchery at the end. Briony turned and continued left until she came to the water.
Unlike any lake Ed had ever seen, however, there was no beach, no shore or land’s edge, but rather a long, low concrete wall ending in a corner that formed a right angle. The water of this side of the lake was well below the concrete wall, which disappeared into that water.
“What’s this?”
“Part of the old dam; the real one is farther north. Can you see it in the distance over there?”
Ed squinted. “Yes. So where’s Lake Obergrande from here?”
“Right in front of you.”
“I mean the city—er, town.”
“Obergrande is the city, Lake Obergrande is just the lake. And it counts as a city; it has a courthouse, and a historical society, and school, and everything. It’s just a really little city. Most everyone refers to it as a town or even a village. And it’s over there.” She pointed away from the lake to the west, then walked closer to the wall at what seemed to be the lake’s corner.
Ed watched in mild distress as she sat down on the low wall at the juncture.
Then sighed and came over until he stood beside her.
“Is it safe to do this?” he asked nervously.
“Oh, yes,” Briony said reassuringly. “I’ve done it a million times.”
“If you say so.”
“What—are you worried?”
“No,” Ed said, looking around. “But these concrete walls can be slipperier than snot on a doorknob when they’re wet.”
Briony chuckled. “They’re dry.”
“Well, I hope so,” Ed said. He looked across the glistening water of the lake while Briony lapsed into a thoughtful silence.
“I used to come here when I was a teenager,” she said eventually, staring down at the water lapping at the concrete corner walls fifteen feet below them. “This was about halfway home for me, between work and our apartment. It was a nice stop to sit and rest and look at the lake.”
Ed nodded and sat carefully down on the low wall beside her.
“Adolescence—a time of melancholy,” Briony mused. “I remember staring down at that water below us and thinking that if I fell in here, I would definitely die, because I could never climb back up these sheer concrete walls, and I didn’t think I’d be able to make it to the other side of the lake swimming. I was an athlete, but never a strong swimmer.”
Her driver patted her hand comfortingly, then closed his own over hers.
Briony smiled.
“You don’t have to worry, Ed; I’m not planning to jump in.”
“Never thought you would.”
“So you just suddenly had the urge to hold my hand?”
“Why not? I’ve done it before.”
The smile faded from Briony’s face, and she nodded.
“Yes, you have,” she said. “And I’m forever grateful.”
Ed squeezed her hand but didn’t let go.
“No need to be,” he said breezily. “It made me the envy of every man in the world with a pulse, even if none of ’em knew it.”
The smile returned and Briony sighed, lost in thought. Finally she spoke again.
“I told the school librarian once that I used to sit here and look at the lake. It had a pull on me I couldn’t figure out; it seems very peaceful, like almost all the other lakes in the Adirondacks, but it also has a strange, kind of eerie vibe. And then she told me its story.”
Ed stretched his legs and released her hand. Briony folded her arms and stared off across the rippling water, the breeze billowing her hair.
“She told me that Obergrande, the town, was actually a drowned city.”
“Drowned city?”
“Yes. The Adirondack region is full of millions of streams, thousands of ponds and dozens of lakes, some small, some enormous. All of that forms a watershed that’s the source of some of the biggest rivers in the country, like the Hudson. And those rivers—the Mohawk that we passed back in Schenectady, the Sacandaga, the Seneca, the Saranac, the Cold River, the Black River, and many others, mostly with Native American or French names, all pose flooding dangers in the Adirondacks and the cities downstream. Albany and New York City are at the end of some of those river lines.”
Ed nodded thoughtfully.
“So back in the late 1800s, towns and cities along rivers and lakes began talking about making reservoirs by building dams to manage flooding and provide public water. Only problem is sometimes expanding lakes drowned existing towns. Or parts of them.
“All sorts of studies were undertaken and ‘public benefit corporations’ were formed, and, as you can imagine, it was pretty contentious. People who had property away from the rivers were often more than happy to see those other parts of the towns drowned, because it made their own land more valuable. Lots of land speculation and the like.”
“Politics,” Ed grumbled. “Truly the last of the Great Plagues of Egypt. Wish the Angel of Death had taken all the politicians instead of the first-born sons.”
Briony chuckled. “Some places went about making a reservoir through decades of planning, but Obergrande was a holdout. It’s an interesting town, divided mostly between what was known then as West Obergrande, the wealthy west side, away from the river, and East Obergrande, the more common, working-class east side, where the sawmills and furniture factories were.
“And while the Sacandaga dam and some of the other reservoirs were built around 1930, Obergrande didn’t get around to building theirs until 1992, after a huge flood and fire took out a good deal of the east side of town, the river side, in 1991.”
She closed her eyes and let the sunlight flicker over her face.
Ed exhaled. “You must have been a little kid in those days.”
“Yes. I was five.”
“Do you remember that time?”
“Very little of it. I don’t remember the intentional drowning of the town, but I do remember the flood. I was in kindergarten, and the flood waters came right through the school while we were in there. Four of my friends and I got separated from our class and had to be rescued by the National Guard.” Briony pulled her sweater a little closer around her. “I still have nightmares about it, though they’re really hazy.
“But that’s not what haunted me about this place. Until the librarian told me about the drowned city, I had no idea that there was anything under the lake water but a silt bottom. After that, every time I came here and looked at it, I imagined houses and buildings down there, underwater streets and parks with trees, their leaves floating in the water the way they wave in the wind in the dry world. One night in my dreams I saw a playground with one of those, those—metal things that spin—those—”
“Roundabouts?”
“Is that what they’re called?”
“I believe so. At least that’s what we called ’em, back in my childhood days, before the Civil War.”
“Ha ha. Well, anyway, I dreamt about a roundabout under the water on a playground I remembered. Ghostly mermaid-like people were riding it around, while others were swinging on the underwater swings. I can still see it in my mind.”
Ed rubbed his arm vigorously but said nothing.
“In high school I did a lot of research about the drowning of Obergrande. I discovered that, after the flood went through in the spring of 1991, there were people who still wanted to rebuild that devastated area, while others thought it was unsalvageable. While they were arguing about it, a huge fire broke out a day later and burned most of what was left to the ground.”
“How about that part? Do you remember the fire?”
“Only vaguely. It happened at night. My dad left—he was a volunteer fire fighter back then, a chief, actually, so the siren sounded and he took off. I didn’t see him until dinner the next evening. He smelled awful, a poisonous smell, not like a fireplace fire, or a campfire, but like death and devastation.
“I remember looking out a window in my bedroom right after he left and seeing the sky lit up with pulsing orange light, but I didn’t know what was happening. We lived near the center of town, on the east side, so the fire wasn’t that far from our house. We were evacuated, and we never went home. We lost everything, I guess.”
Ed shook his head. “Awful. You never told me this before.”
Briony stood and brushed the dead leaves and dirt from her jeans. Ed followed her up, a little more slowly.
“I don’t think about it that much. When I was modeling, I tried not to think about Obergrande at all, for fear I might say something about it and give away my greatest secret—where I came from.
“Anyway, after the fire, the town decided to go ahead with the reservoir. Some of the houses that survived the fire apparently got hoisted up on big trucks and transported to other parts of town or nearby villages. I learned later that everything that hadn’t burned in the fire or been moved afterwards was burned intentionally this time. We stayed with my grandparents for a few days, then moved into the apartment my dad still lives in.”
She pointed to walls of concrete and metal in the distance on the far side of the lake from them.
“When the new dam was finished, they opened those flood gates, and the water rushed in, drowning what was left of East Obergrande, including the house I barely remember living in, the school I was trapped in during the flood, the library, the mill where my grandfather had worked, and most everything else I knew. But I was little, Ed, I hardly remember any of that.”
“Not surprising.”
“So now, there’s no longer a West Obergrande, except in the memories of some of the town’s elite founding families, or an East Obergrande, where the common people lived and worked. There’s just Obergrande, the town on Lake Obergrande, whose water rests above nothing but concrete basements and the remains of streets. I don’t think there’s anything interesting down there; Great Sacandaga Lake is said to have an old antique train rusting at the bottom, still standing on its tracks.”
“You never know,” said Ed. “I bet there are ghostly mermaids down there. I expect they will be swimming through my dreams tonight, thank you very much.”
“Sorry,” Briony said, smiling. “You know, for a long time after the disaster, there were still people who believed it was an act of God—as if God could be angry at this beautiful town. A lot of conspiracy theories apparently went around as well, especially since the town had recently voted overwhelmingly not to drown East Obergrande, and yet there were still people who were pushing for the reservoir.
“To some people it seemed a little too convenient—convenient enough to disregard the combination of almost twice as much snowfall as normal years, heavier-than-normal rains, and the freak occurrence of a hurricane’s edge making it all the way inland.
“Anyway, people argued about it for years. In the end, I think after ten or so had passed, everyone finally just accepted that it was our turn in the barrel, as sailors used to say. The conspiracy theories faded, and everyone mourned and moved on.”
Ed nodded soberly.
“There are some things that just seem too unfair to accept,” he said. “Even if you have no other choice than to do so.”
Briony exhaled and squeezed his hand again, remembering doing so at his wife’s funeral ten or so years before.
“So, shall we get going? The garden center closes at six. It’s usually pretty clear of customers within a few minutes after that.”
“You ready, then?”
She exhaled. “Yep. Can’t put it off any longer. Time to get back to the place and the people I love.”
Ed consulted his watch. “Yes, we had best get moving. It’ll be nice to see your dad again.”
Briony’s smile widened, and for a moment Ed saw the exquisite Face of Dulce Cheiro once again.
“That it will,” she said. “Come on—race you back to the car!”
Ed shook his head quickly.
“No, no, thank you,” he said, catching her arm. “Have pity on a poor old man, Miss Windsor. Let’s just stroll back and enjoy the scenery. I think that’s best for both of us.”
The smile faded quickly from Briony’s face, but she just nodded.
She laced her arm through the crook of his and together they ambled back to where the sedan was waiting for them.