The same year her body was discovered, Carl’s son Caspar drowned in a lake on the opposite side of the world, in northern Ontario, where he owned a summer cottage that rose from the granite like a mountain, on land that was to have remained wild. The construction of the cottage had cost two men their lives after each fell, just days apart, onto the boulders below. Caspar’s body had a softer landing in the water by the dock. Like his father, alcohol was mentioned, but in this case, the woman who found him was his own wife, who always wore long sleeves and never went in the water, although on that day the cuffs of her linen shirt were damp when the police arrived. She said she had tried to pull him out, but his body was too heavy, bloated from years of excess, so she tied his wrist to the dock and let him float until they arrived.
Christian, Caspar’s only son, died in a lake in Switzerland twenty years after that. He had lost his grip on a ferry gate that came unlatched and from which he dangled until slipping into the cold water. There weren’t many passengers left on the ferry at that point and all of them were below in the little room that smelled of oil. The crew heard nothing until the driver of a speedboat radioed that he’d found a body floating toward shore and scooped it up. There was no mention of alcohol, but Christian’s girlfriend Maud had a hazy look, as if something toxic hadn’t left her, yet. Christian couldn’t swim, but he liked the water well enough, she told the officer who came to investigate, having spent his summers at the family cottage in northern Ontario.
“Canada,” she added, since the officer seemed confused.
He didn’t look as if he traveled, rather like someone content to stay where he had been put, like Maud’s grandmother Eleanor had been. She doubted her grandmother could have located Switzerland on a map any faster than this man would northern Ontario.
One of the reasons Maud had been so attracted to Christian in the beginning was how easily place names fell from his lips, money having made travel as common to him as looking for bargains at the grocery store was to her. He had family still in London and Vienna. He would take her to Europe.
She doubted he thought he would die in Europe, but Christian never thought anything bad would happen — to him.
“Toronto,” the officer said, pulling the name from somewhere in his head and smiling.
“Three hours north,” she said and he nodded as if a map had suddenly materialized on the desk between them and the location of the dead man’s summers had been pinpointed.
Earlier in the summer, before Christian took Maud to Europe, he’d taken her to the cottage to meet his mother whose skin was as white as the sweater and trousers she wore. The woman’s black heels made a staccato sound along the granite floor before stopping in front of a sofa in the living room. She motioned for Maud to sit on a chair across from her and tea was brought out.
His mother’s blonde hair was a helmet that didn’t move, but her red fingernails tapped the side of her cup at a pace that made it jump on its saucer. She stared at Maud, whose own fingers caught in her cup’s handle, spilling tea into her lap.
“You’re very pretty,” the woman said, watching Maud press the napkin into the pool of milky tea.
“I’m studying history at university,” Maud said, looking up from her lap and then staring at Christian. For once she wished he would interrupt her like he usually did and tell his mother that they met at a lecture and not some bar, which the woman obviously thought, but he stared out the window at the dock and the shining lake.
“We met at school, at a talk on Queen Anne that a professor from Oxford was giving. She had seventeen pregnancies but no children survived her,” Maud said, and heard Christian sigh.
“Queen Anne or the professor?”
This time Maud sighed. “Well, I mean Queen Anne.”
His mother stood up. “Aristocratic blood gets so polluted with all that inbreeding. We should have a light lunch before you leave.”
“I’m sorry,” Maud said, focusing again on the officer’s mouth. “What were we doing in Zurich? Like I told you, we were waiting for the evening train to Vienna. We were going to visit his uncle. Albrecht. He is a banker.”
“Christopher Albrecht?” The officer suddenly straightened in his chair.
“Yes. Do you know him?”
He chuckled. “I know of him. They say he will become Austria’s president in a few years.”
Maud’s shoulders heaved. She was still dehydrated, despite the water they’d given her at the police station. Neither she nor Christian drank much water all those hours on the ferry. He brought a single bottle with him, saying that since it was a tour boat there would be a canteen. Even when it turned out the boat was a ferry and there was no canteen, Maud had only a few sips of the water. By mid afternoon she told the officer, her head was so thick that she had to focus on every movement.
Right foot.
Left foot.
Walking had become as exacting as marching.
Everything felt so heavy, she said, and he nodded.
Now her feet fluttered up from the floor beneath her chair although he couldn’t see them from where he sat. Besides, he had returned to staring at the shiny red spot at the base of her throat, the size of a thumbprint, although he hadn’t yet asked about it.
When she’d seen the spot this morning, it reminded her of a bull’s-eye. The other marks, almost lacy on her collarbone, down across her breasts and the sides of her body mapped out movements she was still trying to recall. Everything had been easily hidden by her sweater and jeans, but having thrown all her scarves in the garbage after seeing the marks on her wrists, she had nothing to cover up the bull’s-eye. It bothered Christian to see it and she was glad, then, that she hadn’t made any effort to hide it.
The officer had said something again, she suspected, because he knit his fingers together the way he did every time he waited for an answer. They reminded her of that game her grandmother played at the kitchen table when Maud was eating her snack before bed.
This is the church, this is the steeple. Open the doors, there’re all the people.
In another version, her grandmother kept all her fingers straight, as the officer did now, and asked, “Where’re all the people?”
Maud would open her own church doors and wiggle her fingers. “There they are.”
The two of them always laughed.
Now Maud’s fingers were stretched out, quiet in her lap.
The officer looked at her with something that might be concern, but she understood now that people’s expressions were as malleable as Plasticine and as easily refashioned. Her own didn’t betray the fear she felt, not that she would be blamed for Christian’s death but that she was starting to remember what happened to her, and once she did, no amount of water would wash that away.
Maud told the officer that by mid afternoon the ferry had already stopped five times to let off people with bags of vegetables and books pressed against their chests and she and Christian realized that this was not a tour boat, as they’d been promised, but a ferry.
She didn’t say that the sun pounded into them and the water, which from shore looked that beautiful teal blue, was black as she bent over the railing, waiting to throw up. For a moment she wondered how cold the water was and whether she was a strong enough swimmer to get to shore, any shore.