Yes, the River Knows - Chapter 1 The river flowed through Wynnton, South Carolina, like some muddy antediluvian, inching its way towards the millennium on feet mired in the past. I loved that river. The defining moments of my life had occurred there, well most of them. I mean, I wasn't born on the river bank, or thrown into it in a boat of bulrushes or anything like that. But I'd left my virginity behind on its grassy knoll, and more times than I could count, promised myself while sitting beside it that I'd find a way out of Wynnton. I had. I’m Talbot Jefferson, formerly of a big city law firm partnership, now scratching by on traffic cases and small wills and trusts in a sleepy little town that could still be used for a movie set for the 1950s. But like the river that pulled the clay from the shores, I found my way back to the town I'd left like some crazed road freak, hell-bent on living hard, flying fast, burning like some comet into the stratosphere of the real world outside its narrow Southern confines. I'd come home to Wynnton a woman with no self-respect and very little interest in anything that wasn't distilled in Kentucky. The river pulled me to it today like some old lover who still has the cutest butt in town. I'd been dragged back into the practice of law by Crystal Walker, a girl I'd known since grade school. While I'd fallen into representing other clients, albeit with some trepidation like an alcoholic who's not sure she can walk by a bar without giving into temptation, I hadn't yet decided to give my life and soul to these people who seemed to think I could straighten out their tangled legal problems. I'd made that mistake only once, but then, it had been too late. Parnell Moses had already faced that needle laced with drugs that stopped his heart like a second baseman making a lightening-fast double play. The flotsam of Wynnton's finer folks drifted by - a plastic webbed lawn chair caught in some sticks, the top to a styrofoam cooler, probably lost by some fisherman, a red sock. I got a kick out of wondering how these twentieth century artifacts fell into their watery graves. Would they someday become layered in sediment, sandstone fossils to be discovered hundreds of years from now, revered for sacred objects of a long-dead people? Or would the microbes of the river, polluted still despite the best efforts of the EPA, chew them down to size, leaving nothing but future food for the pfiesteria that left welts on fish and oozing sores on human flesh? "Hey there." I just about tumbled off the river bank into the mud. "God bless, Travis, you scared me out of a year's growth." Folding himself onto his haunches like some Middle Eastern guru, Travis Whitlock looked like an extinct crane settling onto a nest. Like me, Travis had come home to roost after a foray into the big, bad world. Unlike me, he'd been successful. "Didn't mean to. Thought for sure you heard me trampin' through the brush like an elephant." His freckled face split wide with a grin that hadn't grown up. "Been thinking." I always liked Travis. He'd been one of those open-faced boys I could read, and there'd been no harm in him. We'd been through school together, but never in the same crowd. Travis Whitlock, even back then, set himself apart. No midnight raids on the corner convenience store to buy beer, no deer season license. Sketchbook in hand, he drew and painted, smudged and frowned at his work whenever he wasn't forced to go to class. I'd admired his complete self-knowledge at sixteen, that elusive air of knowing what he'd been created to do in life. But I didn't know him, not the boy nor the man. He'd never made a move on me, never written my name on a bathroom wall, so he was beyond my early years of contempt for most adolescent males. "Bad thing to do. Leads to trouble for sure." He frowned at the river. "Looks particularly lethal today. You weren't planning a swim, were you?" I laughed. "I'm not suicidal, if that's what you're thinking." Rocking back on his heels, Travis studied me as if I were one of his subjects. He'd painted portraits all over the world, sought out by the rich and famous who wanted to be preserved in oils as if they'd been John Singer Sargent subjects. I'd seen some of Travis' work in an Atlanta art gallery once, and he was good. No matter how lavish the clothing, how rich the colors he used, the sitter's soul poured out of his eyes like a dirty little secret. I wondered how many of his wealthy clients really understood what Travis had done when he'd immortalized their likenesses on canvas. He didn't answer me. Growing uncomfortable under his scrutiny, I turned my face to the river. "Why're you here, Travis? Can't say as you've said two words to me since I've been back." I was being truthful. We'd said hello at Becky's Cafe', nothing more. Just a nodding acquaintance with an old classmate. "June said I could find you here." She would. June, my secretary and a future lawyer, disapproved of what she called my wool-gathering. Entrusted by Henry Rolfe, her cousin's husband and my oldest friend, to keep me away from the bottle, she had her spies everywhere. Using someone like Travis to do her spying wasn't her usual technique, however. "She did, did she?" Mentally trying to knock some of the chips off my shoulder, I forced myself to be more pleasant. "So what can I do for you, Travis?" He had a face like a crane, I realized. Beak-nosed, long in the jaw, fading red hair swept away from his forehead like some aging hippie, he wasn't a handsome man. But his blue eyes, truly an aquamarine, could mesmerize. He focused them full-bore at me. "I want to paint you." The laugh roared out of me before I could shut my mouth. "You've gotta be kidding." "Nope. Just finished a particularly lucrative commission, want to do something for myself for a change. I've always wanted to do you." If he'd blown on my back, I'd have tumbled into the river. "The bloom of youth is long gone, Travis, and I wasn't exactly a beauty in my prime. What on God's green earth do you want to paint me for?" The whole idea of sitting still and posing made me more than uncomfortable. Enforced idleness was what made prison the hell it was, and I knew I'd kill before I'd sit still for hours on end. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted my skinny face and wild hair immortalized in oil paints. "I just want to. You've your grandmother's cheekbones, you know. Now Miss Ena, I wish I'd been able to capture her..." Staring at the river, he wasn't seeing the murky water. With surprise, I realized he was seeing my dead grandmother. "So what do you say?" Turning the full charm of those eyes back to me, Travis smiled like a cat about to feast on the fish bowl. "I've got just a few more bits to finish on my Epps portrait, then I'd like to get right on it with you. Preliminary sketches, that sort of thing. You don't mind wearing a costume I've chosen, do you?" Shaking my head, I was amazed he never considered the possibility I'd say no. "I have a life, Travis, in case you didn't notice. A house to renovate, a law practice, the whole nine yards." "June told me you weren't especially busy. Said she could carry what you couldn't while you sat for me." Wiggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, he forced a smile from me. "June has a big mouth and someday, I'm going to stuff a sock in it." June had been right. I wasn't busy because I didn't want to be. We were doing some wills and trusts work, sent over mostly from the bank where I still owned inherited stock from Miss Ena. I did traffic cases on Monday mornings, some DUIs and the occasional shoplifter. My biggest client was former Judge Linwood Jordan. Him, I was representing before the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission as well as the State Bar on ethics charges. I knew quite a bit about ethics, most of it from personal failings. "So, what do you say?" He brushed his long, paint-stained fingers through the wild tangles of his hair, impatient to get my commitment, impatient with my reluctance. I liked that. I sensed that if I said no, he'd hound me like a dog after a raccoon. Self-interest asserted itself. "I'll do it, on one condition. You tell me why you came back to Wynnton." He didn't smile this time. "Drive a hard bargain, Tal." "That I do. I was known as a killer shark of a lawyer at one time." I wasn't exaggerating, and he knew it. "Okay, but while I'm painting you. Not until then." He was deadly serious. Spitting in his palm, he held it out to me in the time-honored tradition of kids making an oath. I slapped my palm to his. "Deal. But no nude posing. The boobs have drooped too much." Waving my spit-marked hand at the front of my shirt, I laughed. "Oh, I think you'll be happy with what I've picked out for you to wear." Again, he had that faraway look that said he was seeing something I couldn't imagine. "As soon as I saw it, I knew you were the one to wear it for your portrait." I groaned. "You and June. Why can't the two of you leave me to my jeans?" Touching my shoulder gently, he used his single finger to balance himself as he unfolded like an origami. "Because there's more to you, my lovely model." With a light kiss on the top of my head, he started to leave me. "Travis," I called after him, not knowing what I wanted to say, loathe to be left alone, "wait a sec, I'll come with you." Reaching back with his hand to pull me up, he suddenly jerked his fingers from mine. Startled, I looked up to see him frowning past my shoulder. "Good God," he muttered, sliding past me down the embankment. "Travis," I called after him, annoyed that he'd broken off his attentions to me. Hussy, I chided myself. You're flattered he's noticed you after all these years, and you're already miffed he's found something more interesting. "What're you doing?" "Don't you see it?" His feet sunk in the silt at the river's edge, Travis grabbed a water-soaked stick and jabbed. I followed his gesture. Something bobbed in the water's edge, caught in the debris that had snarled around a half-submerged stump. Dark and ball-like, it was snagged. "It's nothing, just some junk. Leave it be." I didn't want any dirty trash from the Wynnton landing at my feet. "Tal, come here," Travis commanded. "Hold onto me." "Travis," I protested, sliding down the embankment to stand beside him, "don't be an idiot. You'll catch all manner of diseases from this sewer." "But I saw something. Look, there." Ignoring me, Travis fastened my hands onto his belt and leaned over, scooping up the ball. Water flew in clay-colored spirals and I instinctively recoiled. I wouldn't dare swim in the river now, though I'd done it often when I was a kid. "Oh God." Travis turned to me, holding the ball in his hands as if he wanted nothing more than to drop it back into the river, but it had fused itself into his flesh and he couldn't. "It's what I saw, a face." The water had added a waxy, opalescent glow to the skin, but Travis was right. The eyeballs had been eaten by something, I didn't want to think what, and the lips and ears were severely nibbled. The hair, however, was cut short and tightly curled. A black man, I thought. Definitely African-American, with a raggedly chopped neck. My mind was as clear as it had been in weeks. "Put it down carefully, Travis." I scrambled to pull off my shirt. I was wearing a sports bra underneath, more decent than a bikini top. He dropped it like a lead weight, his face pale, freckles standing out like liver spots. "I didn't really think I'd seen it, thought I was just imagining things." The confident, smooth voice I'd heard a minute ago was gone. He was frightened, deeply so. Painting society portraits didn't prepare you to stare into the face of violent death. "Did you drive down here, Travis?" He wasn't looking at me, but at the severed head. "Travis," I shook his arm like a rat terrier, "listen to me." Like a gawker at a horrific accident site, he could barely pull his eyes away to notice me. "Get in your car, drive to the sheriff's office, have them get out here. I'll stay with...it." I swallowed hard. He was still staring at me as if I'd jumped off the moon and landed in his lap. "Travis, go now." I didn't relish being left alone with this grisly bit of jetsam, but Travis wasn't up to it, that much was sure. "Go!" I commanded. "Okay," he finally mumbled. "Get the sheriff." "Yes, Travis," I prodded him away, my finger poking him in the small of the back. "I'll stay here." "I thought it was something else," he mumbled. "Thought my eyes were playing tricks on me." I wanted to tell him that an artist's eyes didn't play tricks. I envied him his acuity of vision, his perception, the clarity that let him see death where I'd seen lawn chairs. But I didn't think he'd appreciate it at the moment. Travis Whitlock had just risen in my estimation. He finally started jogging for wherever he'd parked, swearing he'd be right back with the authorities. I settled down to swat biting flies away from the head, figuring it was the least I could do to show my respect for the dead. Death held little horror for me. The coils and tangles of the living are what terrify me. Not a good reaction for a lawyer to possess, I admit. But sitting guard beside the head of a man who'd met his end violently, I half-envied him. He didn't have to go through the farce of existence any longer. I wondered who he was, how he ended up in the Wynnton River, and how I was going to explain all this to June without sounding mentally deranged. My own thoughts kept me company as I knelt in the clay and did my best to preserve the evidence. I should have known the dead man claimed me that day, like a devil tapping me on the shoulder and whispering in wily tones, "I choose you, Talbot Jefferson." I should have known I have more affinity for the dead than the living. To read reviews, click here.

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