Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 63, No. 11 & 12, November/December 2018

Leah by Julie Tollefson

Four days.

This was her fourth day, perched on the hard cane seat in the bow of the canoe, every stroke of the paddle bringing her closer to the decision she should have made a month ago.

The river, wide and calm, flowed through acres of flat, monotonous farmland. On each side, thousands of plowed acres stretched away from the water’s edge, as if giant hands cradled the stream with dusty, lifeless fingers. Brilliant sunshine danced atop the water, a sparkly layer of diamonds that hid the mud and silt and God knows what else the river carried just under its surface.

“This is the life, babe.” Joe rested his paddle across the gunnels and dug another beer out of the ice chest at his feet. “No boss bitchin’ about deadlines. No bills. No neighbors. Nothing but sunshine and beer and you and me with the whole world to ourselves.”

A shadow skittered across the water. Mother Nature laughed at him. She squinted at the sky to join the joke and saw not a cloud but a vulture. The huge, black bird glided far out over the field in a lazy circle, then swept low over their heads as it set a course straight down the river.

She dipped her paddle in the water and pulled. The paddle — when she called it an oar on day one, Joe corrected her — was a work of art. Strips of alternating light and dark wood joined together and finished with a hard shine. Joe made it himself, every detail — from the length of the strong, straight shaft to the curve of the grip — custom made for her. He’d made the canoe, too, the product of months of piecing and molding and sanding. His patience and attention to detail enthralled her. A man that sensitive, who created works of such practical beauty, would be the perfect boyfriend.

She had never been so wrong.

She plunged her paddle in the water again and pulled, harder than the last stroke. The boat listed toward the right bank, like a tipsy college girl walking home from the bar. She paddled on the other side to correct their course.

“You’re really getting the hang of this, babe.”

She heard aluminum crumple in his hand, then a thud as he dropped the can beside the ice chest and the whirring chck-chck sound of his camera. She gritted her teeth and stroked again. She’d come to understand this trip in a way he never would: as a metaphor for their relationship. She rode in front, alert for rocks and obstacles, powering forward, unable to see him without turning around. He drifted with the current, content, his view of the future blocked by her back.

Last night, at their campground, he’d flipped through the photos he’d taken to document their trip. Dozens of shots of the back of her head and not one of her face or the two of them together.

“If I stop paddling, we’re both adrift,” she said. “On a path to nowhere.”

The vulture, or maybe its cousin, circled overhead again.

She knew Joe heard her. If she looked back, she’d see him puzzling out her meaning. She didn’t turn around. Instead, she tried to pinpoint when their relationship failed, where her fantasy of their future together collided with reality and fell in pieces at her feet.

“You’re not still mad, are you?” Joe said after awhile.

She hadn’t expected him to see the bigger picture. He knew nature, the grain of wood, football, art. But he would never understand her. That’s why this trip — a week in the wilderness conceived as a last-ditch attempt to salvage their relationship — had been a mistake. No matter how fast or how hard they paddled, she would always be the one with the clear vision of what lay ahead.

“The guy didn’t know what he was talking about, babe. He was just trying to scare us. If you buy his ghost story, you play right into his hands.”

Two vultures circled over a cluster of trees that marked a bend in the river, the beginning of a stretch the bait shop owner they’d met this morning called deceptive and treacherous. “The river’s wide open here, yeah,” he’d said when they stopped to refill the beer and ice at the last outpost before they entered the final, truly desolate stage of their trip. “Downstream? It twists around on itself. The flood of ’93 cut new passages. Most folks stick to the main channel.”

She pulled her paddle out of the water and twisted in her seat. “I’m not scared. I’m not angry. I’m done.”

“Aw, c’mon. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“No, not this, Joe.” She waved at the river. “This. You and me and everything.”

As she swept both arms wide to take in the two of them, the sky, the river, the barren fields, the trees in the distance, and the vultures, a sound like wet sandpaper on plastic vibrated under her feet and the canoe ground to a stop.

Perfect. The metaphor struck again.

They sat in the stalled canoe atop a sandbar. The perfect spring day crackled with anger. She felt like a prisoner, her soul crushed and held for ransom. And she had no one to blame but herself. The river, a few inches deep, crept over the sandbar and slipped past them.

“I thought we were having a good time,” Joe said, his face as rigid as the paddle he clutched.

“You were having a good time,” she said. She was being unfair, petty. The truth was, she’d enjoyed the first two days of their trip, through pretty, tree-lined parkland. But the long days on the water gave her plenty of time for introspection, and introspection led to a clarity as sharp as the landscape’s transition from park to farm.

“Is this about marriage?” He didn’t look at her, his eyes caught on a far-off grain silo that rose from the farmland, a bump on the otherwise featureless horizon. “Because you know, babe, I—”

She threw her legs over the gunnel and splashed into ankle-deep water. Bits of dirty foam of unknown origin brushed her legs as it floated downstream. The sand shifted under her canvas high-top shoes. She stared at the same silo and tried to summon rage but managed only a lukewarm apathy. “You don’t understand me at all.”

She sloshed away from him across the sandbar. It was wide, maybe thirty feet. They would have to drag the canoe, heavy with camping gear and Joe’s beer chest and expensive camera equipment, to the deeper water on the other side.

A couple dozen steps to the left, the river’s channel carved a loop around the sandbar. If they hadn’t been fighting, if she’d done her bow-paddler’s job and kept a look out for obstacles, if Joe had put down his beer long enough to steer the boat, they could have avoided running aground.

Joe’s approach pushed a ripple of water over her hightops. His long fingers encircled her upper arm. The first time he touched her, when she purchased one of his sculptures at the holiday art market months ago and their fingers brushed against each other, she’d thrilled to the touch.

She shrugged away from him.

Joe stuffed both hands into the pockets of his shorts. He had the body language of a little boy and a beer-buzzed belligerence. “What do you want from me?”

What did she want? Someone she could really talk to, who would listen to her hopes and fears, no matter how trivial.

Someone who didn’t think every damn problem could be solved with a beer and a joke.

Someone who whispered her name when they were making love.

“I want air conditioning,” she said. “I want call-out pizza on paper plates and Law and Order reruns on TV. I want to sleep in my own bed tonight. I want this to end.”

“Come on, babe. Don’t be like this.”

She shoved the bow of the canoe into the deeper water and climbed back into her seat.

“My name is Leah.”

In this flat, featureless land, distances deceived. They both paddled with wooden efficiency and no discernable progress for another hour. Then, in a matter of minutes, the open, slow, lazy river became a dark tunnel, where undergrowth thick with spines and pocked leaves pushed against them. Vines crawled the banks and twined over and around every shrub and gnarled cottonwood until it was impossible to distinguish one plant from another. Leaves of three, let it be. Except no one could count leaves in this mass of vegetation. The water flowed faster, as if to race through this unpleasantness on its way back to sunshine and fresh air.

The two vultures from earlier became five. They swung low over the water between trees that almost touched, wings back, yellow beaks down, so close she could see their ugly red heads, bald and wrinkled, with a gaping hole where nostrils should be.

She shivered. “I don’t like the way they’re circling us.”

“Relax.” Joe managed to make the first word he’d spoken since the sandbar sound like an insult, his tone full of scorn and hurt feelings. “It’s not like they’re stalking us. We paddled under them. They’re scavengers. There’s probably a DOA raccoon or fish back in the trees.”

She leaned in to her next stroke. The canoe lurched forward in response with a satisfying burst of speed. One of the basic truths of two-person canoe travel, one she failed to grasp before, is that once launched, the canoe becomes a floating island, its inhabitants totally dependent on each other. On the water, the world shrinks — to just the two of them, the sixteen-foot boat, the water, and a band of land a few feet wide on either side of the river. At the same time, the experience of exploring unfamiliar territory from a new perspective under only their own power creates an illusion that they traveled a much greater distance, more exotic, more adventurous. For three days, their island floated through a physical and emotional paradise. Now, though, she’d come to think of their canoe as more akin to Alcatraz than Fiji.

Joe stabbed his paddle into the water and executed a complicated, hostile stroke that spun the boat toward the edge of the river. The canoe nosed through a passage between two trees, and they emerged into yet another world. Dark. Dank. Stagnant.

Instinctively, she back paddled to reverse course. “The guy said to stay on the main channel.”

“The guy said most people stay on the main channel. We’re not most people. Babe.”

Joe’s strength overpowered her reverse strokes and they moved deeper into a sort of riverside cul-de-sac lined with cattails and marsh marigold. Unlike the channel, though, the water in the center of the oxbow lake was clear. Every dip of the paddle stirred up a tiny whirlpool of silty mud, and unfamiliar water plants reached feathery arms toward their boat as they slid over the glasslike surface.

She pulled her paddle from the water. The quiet was unlike anything she’d experienced before. No shh-shhing of wind through trees. No ripple of water over rocks. Not even a songbird. A silence so complete it was as if a sound-damping force field surrounded the little oxbow.

Then a long, low train whistle sounded in the distance, faint and mournful, and a disturbance rustled through the treetops. She looked up for the first time.

“Joe—”

Vultures, dozens of them, on every branch in every tree. Everywhere she looked, the monstrous black birds watched them, followed their progress as their boat drifted across the stale, flat water.

“Joe, let’s go back. I want to go. Now.” Her fingers crushed the grip of her paddle, but every other muscle in her body seized tight, as if her most primitive reptilian brain believed one movement, one turn of the paddle, one twist on the seat to make Joe see what she saw, risked bringing the whole mass of feathered malevolence down on them.

They’re scavengers, Joe’s voice in her head reminded her. On the open water, when only one of the huge birds flashed across the sun overhead, she’d accepted his reassurance. But here, in this dark chamber, surrounded by dozens, she sensed different rules applied.

Joe’s camera clicked and whirred. “I don’t know why you came on this trip,” he said, his voice muffled by the camera. “This is the coolest thing we’ve seen in three days, babe. I bet no more than a handful of people even know this place exists.”

Slowly, she turned to face him. He had his camera trained on a piece of moss-covered driftwood on the shore. He hadn’t looked up yet.

“Joe, seriously. I want out of here now.”

He pretended not to hear her and kept his camera pressed to his eye, as if the metal body itself blocked the sounds coming from the front of the canoe.

She faced forward again and, with a wary eye on the treetops, lifted her paddle off the gunnels. The nearest vultures shifted on their perches, a tiny sidestep, a slight lift to their wings. She edged the paddle toward the water. One vulture dropped from its branch, its wings stretched a full six feet, and traced a lazy figure eight over the oxbow. It dipped low and skimmed the water a dozen yards ahead of the canoe.

She hazarded a glance back at Joe. His camera still clicked, now focused on the marsh marigold far to port and still oblivious to the birds. She closed her eyes and tried to recapture the sense of romance and adventure she’d felt when Joe proposed this trip. “Just the two of us, babe. Seven days. No TV. No roads. No crowds. Just you and me surrounded by nature in all her glory.”

They were surrounded by nature, all right, none of it glorious, and right now she would give her condo and her dream job and her outrageous salary for a single lane road out of here.

On the far side of the oxbow, the twisted remains of an ancient cottonwood, stripped of bark and leaves, glowed white in the gloom. Five of the largest vultures hunched on its branches like a panel of supreme court justices poised to pass judgment on their fate.

“Whoa.” Joe’s camera clicked back to life with renewed energy. “Look at them. How cool is that?”

He’d finally noticed the birds. She tried to see through his eyes. The secluded oxbow. The wake of vultures. The isolation. But fear cast veils of evil over even the most harmless plant and rock in the pond. Trees leaned closer, their branches outstretched, wanting. The water plants, denser now than near the channel, grabbed the underside of the boat, their fluttering scrapes on the hull like fingers. A flash of gray among the green shimmered like the apparition of a long-lost traveler, then dissolved into so much flotsam.

She leaned to the right to get a better look and squinted to see past her reflection. The ghostly image reformed and solidified into a face among the weeds. As the canoe drifted forward, the water revealed a whole body.

She screamed. Her muscles convulsed in full flight mode, a second ahead of her brain’s understanding that she had nowhere to flee. The canoe rocked precariously.

“Hey, enough with the drama, babe.” Joe’s camera stopped clicking. “You’re going to dump—”

His voice dropped to a whisper. “What the hell.”

They drifted past the body. The first body. From his post in the back, Joe couldn’t see what she could — a trail of bodies under the crystal clear water, laid out in two rows like lights on a runway. Their fingers reached up. Their eyes gone.

Cold water splashed over her shoulders. Joe plunged his paddle in the water again and sent another spray over her head, his haste erasing any trace of his usual control and finesse.

He spun the canoe around and stopped. Vultures waited among the trees like sentinels. Staring. Stalking. Two or three dropped from their perches and slowly circled the boat before resuming their restless watch. Then, as one, they lifted, a great beating of wings as dozens of heavy birds took flight at the same time.

A new sound, a different kind of rustling, moved through the trees at the edge of the pond. Deliberate. Mocking. Joe heard it too and for once he didn’t try to explain it away.

“Let’s get out of here, babe.”

Their paddles slapped the water. She tried to concentrate on form and efficiency the way Joe taught her, but the canoe’s response was lethargic, as if it slogged through gelatin.

Something whistled past her head and landed behind her with a thunk that shook the canoe. She glimpsed a fishhook attached to a heavy line and embedded in the boat’s rib. The line tightened and the boat moved sideways, toward the bodies.

She paddled harder, eyes on the far edge where they’d entered this hell. Where she thought they’d entered this hell. The twists and spikes of vines and unidentifiable undergrowth among the gnarled trees formed a solid wall that completely encircled the oxbow. She could no longer see the way out. Behind her, Joe swatted at the fishing line with his paddle until the hook broke and they were free.

She stifled a scream when her paddle struck the soft, still form of one of the bodies. It slithered sideways, its empty eye sockets wide in horror, its arms reaching. Behind her, the kerchunk of something big and heavy hit the water. At the same time, the stern of the boat lifted higher in the water. Joe?

She couldn’t look back.

She had to look back.

Fear of not knowing won. She gripped her paddle like a club and swung around to confront... whatever stalked them.

Joe, still seated, still alive, maneuvered the ice chest onto the gunnels and shoved it overboard. The canoe lurched sideways then righted itself. The chest joined his camera bag at the bottom of the lake.

“What—?”

“Getting rid of weight, lighten the load so we can move faster.”

A chill settled over their two-person floating island, as if evil itself blotted the sun. The Joe she’d followed into the wilderness had vanished, replaced by a grim, fatalistic version that scared her as much as the vultures and whatever lurked in the trees.

She stashed her paddle beside her feet and helped him jettison their packs and all their camping gear. The canoe stopped moving and drifted back toward the underwater burial ground, as if pulled by an invisible force. By mutual, silent accord, they picked up their paddles. She dug hard, channeling every ounce of strength into the stroke to give them the power to escape this nightmare. As soon as they saw the main channel again, as soon as she felt the sunshine on her shoulders, she would walk across miles of plowed land to civilization and never set foot in a canoe again.

The next fishhook sailed by on a puff of air and found its mark with a soft, wet thud, muffled by the weight of this cold, silent place. Joe grunted. She turned. Joe’s eyes mirrored the terror in hers. A single drop of blood trailed from the treble hook embedded in his shin, trickled past his ankle in slow motion, and dripped into the hull. His face melted. He didn’t attempt to reassure her with a stupid joke. He’d already sacrificed his beer and his camera. He didn’t think they were going to get out of this.

Joe thought they were going to die.

He’d already given up.

Before she turned away, another fishhook caught his eye and jerked his head backward.

She didn’t wait another second. She stroked harder, shifting her paddle from one side of the boat to the other to keep a true course toward what she could only hope was the way back to the main channel, to sunshine, to the future she’d planned.

She refused to look back, even when the back of the boat lifted again, suddenly free. If she didn’t look back, Joe would still be there. They’d get back to the river, to safety. They’d cut their trip short, check into a cheap motel, order pizza and laugh about what they thought they saw, what they thought they experienced in a harmless little riverine cul-de-sac.

A vulture glided a foot off the port side. Another hovered overhead. Sentinels. Escorts.

She focused on the tree line and the passage that led back to her old life. It had to be there. The fatigue in her shoulders and the ache in her back meant nothing. A few more strokes. All she had to do was shoot through those trees back to the main branch of the river and she’d be safe. She’d get help. Rescuers would find Joe, wet and mad that she left him behind, but otherwise whole.

Thunk.

She paddled harder, but the canoe barely moved, as if she paddled against a gale force wind in this windless hell.

Thunk.

The canoe crept through the water now, almost as if she drifted in reverse. She choked down a sob and focused. One stroke. Two.

Thunk.

Three. A few more strokes to safety.

Thunk.

Just a few more.

Thunk.

“Leah.” A hiccup of a sob caught in her throat. “My name is Leah.”