Chapter One

confluence, n.
con·flu·ence \ˈkän-ˌflü-ən(t)s\
a coming or flowing together; meeting or gathering at one point.
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Lucy

_____

Lucy Marin’s life was broken, and there was nothing for it but to grit her teeth and trudge on.

Once, on a solo backpacking trip in her twenties, she’d fractured her ankle and had managed to hike out on her own power. A day and a half to the trailhead. She would have welcomed rescue—who wouldn’t? —but she’d been on her own, so she soldiered on. Broken ankle, broken life—you soldier on. First Gary, and now this.

Lucy sighed. There was no possibility of taking an Uber in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, apparently. She stood on the sidewalk outside the airport terminal, jabbing uselessly at her phone, but the nearest dot remained an hour away, refusing to budge. Her fellow passengers flowed past her into the crisp October air, welcomed with hugs and warm shouts of greeting. Others, in business attire, tightened coats and darted toward the parking lot. Lucy found herself, quite suddenly, alone outside the terminal of an upper midwestern town she had never visited and had never planned to. She glanced up and down the front drive and half expected tumbleweeds and crickets. As if on cue, a brisk wind blew in across a patch of prairie grasses and ruffled her graying hair.

Pondering her next step—this would not have been a problem at SeaTac—she was relieved when a battered taxi pulled up before her. Drives-a-lot Dot: Serving Dunn, Eau Claire, and Chippewa Counties. The passenger window rolled down, and the driver—a heavyset woman with tight gray curls, seventies—leaned across the seat.

“Hiya! Need a ride?”

At Lucy’s nod, the driver hopped out, surprisingly spy for a woman of her age. Before Lucy could protest, the woman had picked up her rollaway suitcase and tossed it in the trunk.

“Welcome to Eau Claire. I’m Dot. Where to?”

Lucy consulted the scrap of paper in her hand. She had it on her phone as well, but had written the note just to be safe.

“100 Confluence Avenue. Do you know it?”

“Oh ya. Everyone knows The Confluence Building. Hop on in, and we’ll get ya there in two shakes.”

Lucy slid into the back seat, avoiding a suspicious stain on the cushion. The day was fine, the sky impossibly blue, and everywhere she looked, oaks and maples were tongues of flame licking the crisp October air.

Dot wound the cab away from the airport and merged onto a highway. “So, what brings you here?” she asked.

Lucy felt the weight of story build up in her throat, but bit down on it. “I’m here to settle my husband’s—my late husband’s—aunt’s estate.”

Dot’s blue eyes caught hers in the rear view mirror. “Not Calliope?”

Lucy startled. “Yes. Did you know her?”

“Oh honey, everyone knows Calliope. You must be Lucy then. Terrible business. Terrible!” Dot made a clicking sound with her tongue. “And, Gary. We were all so sorry when we heard.”

“You know—knew Gary too?” She judged Dot to be in her mid seventies, so a good twenty years older than she and Gary. The idea that, halfway across the country, there were strangers who knew her husband as a child and would still mourn him as a middle-aged man—people she had never met or heard of—should not astonish her. Gary had been a sunbeam, shining his light and warmth on anyone he met.

“You betcha. Had him in my Biology class. Refused to dissect his frog. Made a big stink about it, too. I used to teach up at the high school, ya know. This here’s my retirement gig.” She gestured at the dashboard. “He was a good boy, your Gary. Doesn’t seem fair, if  you ask me.”

No, Lucy thought. No, it wasn’t fair that Gary—laughing, kind-hearted Gary—should have been blinked out of her existence without a warning.

“What’s it been,” Dot asked. “A year now?”

“Nine months.”

“Ski accident, I heard?”

“Snowboarding.” Head first into a tree well. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear John, Gary’s best friend, snuffling back tears on the phone call, made from his car as he followed the ambulance down the mountain. It’s Gary. One minute he was there, and then, he wasn’t.

One minute he was there, and then, he wasn’t.

Dot interrupted the well-worn record of Lucy’s thoughts. “I went to high school with Calliope, would you believe it? She was something else again back the the day. This your first time back, since…” The watery blue eyes flicked toward Lucy. “Well, since?”

Lucy shifted on the vinyl seat, vanilla air freshener masking layers of other, less savory odors. Her unease must have shown, as Dorothy Kowalski—her name was emblazoned on the dash in glittering Brush Script—interrupted her own question. “Hey, I hope it’s not too bad back there. I did what I could, but—college town—the students are back, you know?”

Lucy didn’t know, but also didn’t want to offend.

“It’s fine,” She had surreptitiously swiped the door handle with a wet wipe before they left the airport. Golden fields of corn flashed by the window, punctuated by bluffs that exploded in every color of autumn’s palette. “This is my first visit to Wisconsin, actually. Gary always wanted me to come back with him, but work made it hard to get away.”

He forgave her, of course—he always did—but she wished, now, that she had bothered to do him this one kindness. This was her life now, she supposed, on the infinite stretch of blasted earth that was his absence—perpetually picking up the pebbles of her own little meannesses and turning them over in her hands.

Dot focused on the road, a small line drawn between her brow, as if trying to orient herself to the existence of a person who had never been to Wisconsin. The silence was short-lived. “Where ya staying, then?”

Lucy lifted her shoulders. “Calliope’s place, I guess?”

“But honey, you can’t just…”

A semi-truck of dairy cattle roared past them on the left, and Lucy caught a single soulful brown eye peering out through one of the holes, reaffirming her recent veganism.

“…I mean, after all that…Why don’t I take you to the Oxbow instead? That’s a real nice hotel, only a few blocks away, and you’ll have no trouble—”

“I’d better go to The Confluence first. I’ve got to pick up the key before six.” What she didn’t say was that, yes, she would love to stay anywhere other than the apartment of her recently-deceased husband’s even-more-recently-deceased aunt who she had met only twice, but that she could not afford it. She’d started the school season—teaching English at Bellingham High School—but had been found weeping in the ladies room no less than five times in the first three days of the school year. She was on bereavement leave, in theory, but she knew, deep down, that this would be an early retirement.

Drives-a-lot Dot said little after that, keeping her mouth set in a straight line, the mirror of her mothers’s when she had announced her decision to make the journey—an expression that broadcast Lucy’s right to make her own mistakes and her own right to have an opinion about them. Lucy pressed her head against the window and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass. She looked as she felt, the dark circles under her eyes like oyster shells. She hadn’t slept properly in nine months. This was not her mother’s reflection—shocking enough when it had first appeared twenty years earlier—but her grandmother’s.

She looked away and tried to understand what direction they were traveling. Without mountains or sea to guide her, the expanse of open blue sky created the unsettling sensation she might be flung upward like an errant balloon and float away into the void.

Dot turned off the highway, passing a converted factory, and into a quaint downtown with bustling eateries and—thank goodness—a food co-op. Lucy wouldn’t starve, at least. She had endured Gary’s hot dish cooking over the years and had imagined the whole place as a greasy mess of cheese and bratwurst.

Confluence Avenue ran parallel to a broad river and came to an end where another body of water joined the first. Dot parked before an old brick building with limestone foundations that squatted across an entire city block.

“Whelp. Here we are. The Confluence.”

Lucy cracked the door, but Dot had turned in her seat to look at her.

“So listen. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happens to you, and I didn’t say anything.” 

“What do you mean?” Suddenly alert, Lucy paused.

“I’ve known Tom Sather my whole life. We were all in school together—me, Tom, Calliope. He came back from Nam a few screws short, no mistake. And he was on the sauce for most of his life. I’m not denying that. But I will swear on my life, there’s no way he could kill a fly. No sir. The police are just shooting does at the salt lick, pointing the finger at Tom.”

Lucy blinked, trying to make sense of the jumbled images in her head: police, deer hunting, Vietnam. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you need to be careful. We all know the police don’t have the right guy, so it stands to reason he’s still out there somewhere.”

“I…I don’t...” A finger of dread scratched the back of Lucy’s neck. “What are you talking about?”

Dot peered at her a moment, then the blue eyes opened wide. “Oh! Oh, you really don’t know, do ya?”

Did she even want to know?

“I’m sorry to be the one who has to say it, Hon, but Calliope was murdered. Right here at The Confluence.”