Beneath her feet, the earth shifted.
She read the line out loud. “Tell me how you knew about Black River.”
“It’s a song,” Theo said. “It’s not a reference to the place, it’s—”
“I know what it is,” Miriam said. The world was turning black, the darkness closing in too fast for her to push it back. She opened her mouth but she could draw no air into her lungs; her muscles weren’t working, not her diaphragm nor the muscles in her legs or her arms. She was trembling violently, her vision gone almost altogether; the last thing she saw before she collapsed was Theo Myerson’s startled face.
* * *
“It was on in the car, on the radio. The song. I remember him fiddling with the tuner, he was trying to change the station, but Lorraine asked him not to. She was singing. She was singing, and she said, don’t you like this one? ‘Black River.’？”
Myerson set a glass of water down on her bedside table and then stood awkwardly, looking down at her. It should have been embarrassing, Theo Myerson helping her up from where she’d collapsed on the towpath, the two of them shuffling like an old couple back to the boat, where he put her to bed, like a child. Like an invalid. Miriam would have been mortified if she’d been capable of feeling mortification, if she’d been capable of feeling anything other than a sort of bewildered terror. She lay on her back, her eyes trained on the wooden slats of the ceiling, trying to concentrate on her breathing, in and out, trying to concentrate on the here, on the now, but she couldn’t, not with him there.
“Who else did you show it to?” he asked. “Your . . . uh, your manuscript. Who else read it?”
“I never showed it to anyone else,” Miriam said. “Except for Laura Kilbride, but that was only very recently, and according to the newspapers she’s not in a fit state to write anyone any letters. I never showed it to anyone else.”
“That can’t be true! You showed it to a lawyer, didn’t you?” Theo said, towering over her, rubbing his big balding head. “You must have done! You showed it to my lawyer, certainly, when you made your, uh, your complaint.” He shifted from one foot to another. “Your claim.”
Miriam closed her eyes. “I didn’t send anyone the whole manuscript. I selected a number of pages, I pointed to various similarities. I never mentioned the singing, even though it was . . . even though it was perhaps the clearest evidence of your theft.” Theo grimaced. He looked as though he wanted to say something but thought better of it. “I didn’t want to mention her singing, I didn’t even want to think about it, about the last time I heard her voice like that, the last time I heard her happy, carefree. The last time I heard her unafraid.”
“Jesus.” Theo exhaled slowly. “Do you mind?” He indicated the bed, and for a startling moment Miriam wasn’t sure what he was asking. He sat, perching his large bottom on the corner of the bunk, an inch or two from Miriam’s feet. “It can’t be, Miriam. He’s dead. Jeremy is dead, you said so, the police said so.”
“I wished him so, and the police made an assumption. People said they saw him, in all sorts of places—Essex, Scotland. Morocco. The police followed up, or at least they said they did, I don’t know how seriously they took any of it. . . . But you know all this, don’t you? It was in the book.”
Theo winced. “There was something about a foot?” he ventured, his face flushing.
Miriam nodded. “Some kids playing on a beach near Hastings found a human foot a few weeks after Jeremy went missing. It was the right size and the right color, it had the right blood type. This was all pre-DNA, so there was no way of checking for sure, but it was assumed that it was him. They thought maybe he’d been dashed against the rocks somewhere, or caught up in a boat propeller. That was the end of it, in any case. They stopped looking.”
“But . . .” Theo was shaking his head. “Think about it. If somehow he’d got away, faked his own death, changed his identity, there would have been others, wouldn’t there? Other girls, I mean, other women. A man like that, a man capable of doing what he did to you, to your friend, he doesn’t just do it once and then stop, does he?
“Maybe he does,” Miriam said. “Where is it written that they all get a taste for it? Maybe he tried it and he didn’t really like it. Maybe it frightened him. Maybe it didn’t satisfy him in the way he thought it would. Or maybe . . .” The boat rocked in some other vehicle’s wake, and Miriam opened her eyes to focus on the ceiling once more. “Maybe he didn’t do it just once. Maybe he did it again and again, and people just didn’t make the connections. It was easier, back then, wasn’t it, for men like him to just keep going, to move around, to exist on the margins, to drift, to carry on for years? He could have gone abroad, he could have changed his name, he could be”—her voice faltered—“anywhere.”