“Sure do.”
“It’s a map of the area. Pull it down.”
Moving next to the shelves, Clare could see the long black tube fastened to the bookcase’s uppermost molding. She pulled the cord, and a large map unrolled, smoothly as a window shade. “We had these in my classroom when I was in grade school,” she said.
“Show me the place you were talking about.”
Maps were much easier than remembering the names of roads. She found the location of the Ketchem children’s burial ground and stabbed it with her finger.
“Ah,” the man said. He flipped some more. “Yes, yes, yes yes. Here it is.” Clare looked over his shoulder. He was turning back and forth between a page showing a line drawing of what appeared to be property boundary lines and a reduced-sized, badly photocopied legal document. “Your cemetery is on its original ground. See here?” He pointed to the drawing. “It would have been at the back end of the property. That county road didn’t exist back in the twenties. The road ran down here”-he pointed to another spot-“along the Sacandaga River.”
“Was this the Ketchems’ land? Jonathon and Jane Ketchem?”
He flipped to the legal document. “Jonathon Ketchem is the last landholder.” He looked up at her. “It wasn’t customary to include the wife on land grants in those days.” He dropped his attention back down to the binder. “Bought it in 1916. They probably sold it to a land speculator in the twenties. If they didn’t, it would have been condemned in 1929.”
“Condemned?”
“Some of the small landowners turned down the river regulating board’s offer and tried to stay put. Didn’t do them any good, of course. The HRRB wasn’t a governmental agency, but it had plenty of political muscle behind it. Anyone who didn’t sell voluntarily at the board’s asking price found their land condemned by the state. Evicted.”
“Did they get any money for it?”
“Of course they did. The government can’t take land without compensation, that’s unconstitutional.” He looked up at her. “Of course, once it was condemned, it was the state that decided what would be a fair price. And how much do you think land that’s going to be at the bottom of a lake is worth?”
“So the Ketchems wouldn’t have made much money from the deal?”
“Probably not.”
“Then where did-” She stopped herself. The historical society’s librarian wasn’t going to know where Jane Ketchem got the money to send her daughter to college and pay for Allan Rouse’s medical education. Besides, that was years after she had been forced off her farm. And Mrs. Marshall had said her mother was good at investing. Maybe she bought into IBM when it was fifty cents a share. “Why did the Hudson River Regulating Board decide to dam the Sacandaga, anyway?”
“To control flooding. The Sacandaga is part of the Hudson’s watershed. It’s a natural floodplain, that’s one of the reasons it was such fertile soil.” He pulled the clipping toward him with two fingers, keeping it flat. “See the course of the river before the dams went in? All along here was the Sacandaga Vlaie.”
“The Sacandaga Fly?” Clare said.
“Vlaie. It’s an old Dutch word meaning a swamp or lowland meadow. Ours was a huge marshland, teeming with wildlife. If they tried to build this dam nowadays, the DEC would be all over them. But in those days, wetlands were something to get rid of, not something to protect.” He traced the course of the river as it meandered east toward the Hudson. “The floodwaters would overflow the Sacandaga, fill up the Hudson, and next thing you knew, you’d have people rowboating through the streets of Albany. Caused some bad breakouts of disease in towns along the way, too, with the floodwaters washing sewage out into the open. Typhoid, cholera.”
“Diphtheria?”
“I suppose so. Businesses were the moving force behind…” He was on a roll now, recounting the movement to dam the river and the formation of the regulating board, but his words flowed past Clare like the river itself. She felt the awful weight of it, the rushing of her own blood the sound of the water. The river had run through Jane and Jonathon Ketchem’s life, bringing them good rich soil and cool summer days and the disease that destroyed their family. And then it had washed them away and cast them up in the village of Millers Kill, where Jane had lived out her days, pouring her grief into her remaining child until the mother Mrs. Marshall might have been sank beneath the depth of it, ensuring no more children to be carried away, ever. And Jonathon? Clare had a sudden, piercing conviction she knew where he had gone. Not to start over again, as his daughter had grown to believe. Clare could see him, as clearly as if she had been there, driving his car far away from the town, back toward his burned, wrecked farm, back toward the road that ran by the river that had sluiced through his life. When was it Mrs. Marshall had said her father disappeared? March 29, 1930.
“When was the dam completed?” she said, cutting off the librarian’s discourse on the railroad’s suit for compensation. “When did the valley start flooding?”
“Nineteen thirty.”
“But when? What date?”
“Ah,” he said, his eyebrows knitting together. He got up again, reaching his hand out, as if the book he needed could fly off the shelves into his grasp. He pulled a narrow paperback off a shelf, flopped it open, and flicked through a few pages. “March 27, 1930.”
Two days before Mrs. Marshall’s father disappeared. He probably couldn’t have made it to that road by then. He would have known which way to head, though. He must have made the trip dozens of times in the past, between the town and the farm, so that his hands on the wheel would have known the way, even at night. Even with every landmark cut down, torn away, burned. He would have kept on driving, the water rising around his wheels, until his engine submerged and he could no longer drive. Then he would have gotten out, wading through the pitch-black, icy water, rising as he pressed on into the valley, rising as the snowmelt-swollen mass of it piled up behind the new dam, rising until he couldn’t feel his legs or his arms or his chest for the cold of it. And still she could see him walking, walking farther and farther, until he disappeared from sight forever. Heading home.
Chapter 24
Clare rested the box of one dozen of Kreemy Kakes’ finest on the counter of the nurses’ station and smiled at the woman typing away at a computer behind it. “I’m looking for Russ Van Alstyne’s room?”
“Mr. Van Alstyne.” The nurse glanced at a clipboard stretched to its limit with a sheaf of papers. “Oh, yes. The broken leg. He’s in 403.”
“Thank you.” Clare settled the box beneath her arm and made her way down the hall. The door to room 403 was closed. She knocked.
“Come in,” Russ yelled.
She sidled through the door. He was alone in the two-bed room, propped up at an angle, his injured leg slung between a pair of struts assembled at the end of the bed. His cast ran from the ball of his foot to below his knee, and was highway-department orange. It reminded Clare of one of the Tonka cranes her brothers had played with back when they were kids. He was talking on the bedside phone.
“I’m sorry, go on.” He beckoned Clare into the room. “No. No, it’s not my mom.” He glanced at Clare, and his eyes fell on the box she was holding. “It’s just someone dropping off some food,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows.
“How much extra?” he asked. He held out his hand for the doughnuts. “Six hundred bucks? For a one-way flight? That’s ridiculous! I thought it was like a fifty-dollar fee to change your departure date.”
Clare handed him the box, which he dropped in his lap. He flashed her a distracted smile, then frowned.
“Why do you have to buy a whole new ticket? That’s three times what you paid to get down there.”
Clare glanced around and spotted a boxy little chair of blond wood and fake leather in the corner. It looked as if it had been designed to discourage long bedside chats. She pulled it away from the wall.