Sad Water

by Teri Holbrook

Genres: Female Sleuths; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Nadianna Jesup, a pregnant young photographer from rural Georgia, is visiting Mayley, a village in Yorkshire, England, on an arts grant when she discovers a burned corpse floating in a river. No one, including historian Gale Grayson, Nadianna's companion on the trip, believes her, except for a local religious group that thinks she has witnessed a vision from God. Strange events surrounding the old mill that Nadianna and Gale are documenting bring to light tensions among some of the colorful inhabitants of the town, including Chalice Hibbert, a six-foot-seven mute; her employer, potter Olivia Markham; and Gerald Thornsby, a thief-turned-preacher who opposes Olivia's efforts to turn the abandoned mill into an artist's mall. In this, her latest mystery featuring Gale Grayson, Holbrook (The Grass Widow) intersperses her contemporary tale with excerpts from the tragic diary of a Luddite named Michael Dodd. This psychological mystery, although hampered at times by clich s about Americans abroad, succeeds in evoking the bleakness of the depressed mill town and in portraying the family bonds that drive the characters to acts of desperation.

Release date: October 7, 2009

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 320

Sample

Mayley was est. 1330 on the upper Calder Valley’s rugged south slope, which, due to its inhospitable conditions, was settled later than the valley’s friendlier northern terrain.
—Notes, G. GRAYSON
 
1
 
Monday
 
Nadianna Jesup tucked her dress into her underwear and thanked God for fog.
 
Back home in Georgia, her daddy had taught Nadianna and her little sister Ivy to believe many things. Open the car door politely, and Jesus will climb in beside you. Pray hard enough in church, and the Lord Himself will blast you, unharmed, from the back pew to the front. There were other lessons, too—card playing led first to gambling, then drinking, then dissoluteness; women who wore lipstick spat at God; attending a theater put one in the company of sinners who didn’t bathe. When Nadianna was nine and Ivy four, their mother ran away. As Nadianna grew up, a movie stuttered through her head of her tall, red-lipped mother throwing down cards and tossing back drinks, surrounded by a table of profligates with Good & Plenty candy stuck in their teeth.
 
Her fallen mother might approve of what Nadianna was about to do, but not her daddy. Little girls’ heinies are for sitting, not shining.
 
Five thousand miles away from him, alone in a dark West Yorkshire wood, Nadianna blushed and patted her pouffed-up rump. Beyond the trees, water hissed; the smell of a million damp leaves rose from the earth. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves, but it didn’t work. She shouldn’t be here, not by herself before dawn. Wasn’t that what her daddy’s message had truly been—don’t take too many chances? And in the end isn’t that who Jesus was—a concerned local who warned visitors away from the bad parts of town? Even her profligate mother’s sinful daughter ought to have understood that.
 
She jabbed a strand of biscuit-colored hair into her bun and, exhaling, took a tentative step forward. The hip waders she had borrowed slapped against her thighs. They were men’s boots, but given her height they made a reasonable fit. She tightened her grip on the walking stick she’d found stashed in the cottage behind a box of coal. It was a curly piece of wood, like a snake. Her daddy’s tut-tutting was mournful in her ear.
 
Whose voice are you followin’, Nadianna Sara? Ain’t no call from God. I told you before: God don’t ask His children to lean on snakes.
 
Sometimes there ain’t nowhere else to lean, she thought defiantly. Sometimes women gotta lean where they can.
 
The day three months ago when Nadianna got the letter from the Calwyn County Arts Council, she had run out the door without a glance at her daddy, over the railroad tracks that sliced through the town of Statlers Cross, and up the gravel drive to Gale Grayson’s front door. She was out of breath by the time Gale answered her knock.
 
“They accepted it,” Nadianna panted. “My Yorkshire project. They want it. Now what do I do?”
 
Gale’s smile was genuine. “As they say over yonder, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ You, ma’am, are gonna need a passport.”
 
The notion had terrified Nadianna. Once as a child she had traveled as far away as Atlanta. A storm front had come in quickly with clouds so large that she forever after thought of Atlanta as a place where huge stones bowled through the sky. She had never repeated the visit. The idea of owning a passport, of packing a suitcase … The letter had trembled in her hand. Gale slid her arm around Nadianna’s waist and, laughing, helped her into her living room. “You surprise me. What happened to that steady-eyed gal we’re used to seeing around here?”
 
What Nadianna thought but didn’t say was it’s easy being steady-eyed in a tiny place like Statlers Cross. Fear may be deep here, but at least it was narrow. You could jump it like a crack in the sidewalk.
 
She didn’t feel steady-eyed now. Last night the radio predicted the temperature to rise to sixteen degrees during the day—around sixty degrees Fahrenheit, Gale had explained, quite mild for early November in northern England—but now it couldn’t be more than forty-five, if that. Nadianna fought a chill. Her daddy would tell her to put it off, to wait until the sun was out and the water warmed. Gale would have flat forbade it. But Gale was still asleep in the cottage and her daddy was out of all reach except guilt.
 
Her photographer’s jacket, stiff and new, rested against a tree trunk. As she leaned to pick it up, she knocked over a rusting electric lantern. Light spilled across the leaf-strewn ground. Above her the trees were huge and purpled like bruised things.
 
Nadianna Sara, what kind of callin’ puts you in a place of so much hurt?
 
Go away, she told her daddy’s voice, then slid into the jacket, zipped it up, and headed for the water.
 
At the edge of the woods, the land opened out to a grassy ribbon. Past that, the bank angled sharply downward. The water before Nadianna was too narrow for a river, too wide for a creek. In parts it bubbled white over the stones before flattening. She took a second deep breath. In for a penny, in for a pound. She skidded down the bank. Then Miss Nadianna Sara Jesup, six months pregnant and far from home, held her camera high and waded into Sette Water.
 
The current wasn’t as fast as she had expected, nor as keen. The water swirled around her boots at calf level, then inched higher. She concentrated on her footing, poking the streambed with her walking stick to check the depth. Debris—a leaf, a twig—floated to her. She ignored it. Three more steps, then two … Twelve steps from the bank with the water trilling past her thighs, she stopped and turned north.
 
She had known yesterday as soon as she laid eyes on Yates Mill that this was where she would position herself for the photographs. Up close, the mill was obviously in cruel disrepair—shattered windows, boarded-up doors, busted stone stairs. And she would take photos of all that, never fear. But she knew those images would be incomplete without this special one. Before she had gone to bed last night, she had said a prayer for fog.
 
Now a heavy mist pressed on the water like thumbs. It is a marvel, she thought, how mere air can resurrect. Arrayed in the mist, Yates Mill was no longer a ruin. This was living rock.
 
She raised her camera and went to work while the light turned from plum to periwinkle to lavender. The fog was so thick, she didn’t see the parcel until it was only a few feet from her. Her first thought, oddly, was of Moses. Moses floating in his basket among the reeds. Then she saw that it wasn’t a parcel or a basket, just something humped and black in the water. She moved away. The water hurried the object to her. She took her snake stick and knocked it back.
 
Slowly, it rolled over. A strange coolness settled on her. It had no arms. It had no legs. But despite its charred and split skin, there was no mistaking the head or the angry, baked grimace of its teeth.