The Drowned Woman

I saw her three days later, at the end of the dock, in the hour before sunset when the lake goes flat and the still water takes the sky.

I had walked down to the boathouse with Fern, who wanted to check her stones. The dock is long, wooden, with a bench at the end, and when we came out of the boathouse I saw that there was a woman sitting on the bench. She was facing the water, away from us, and she was dressed in black — a dark dress, dark stockings, no coat, which was wrong for the evening, because the air off the lake was cold even in June. She was sitting very straight, the way people sit when they are waiting for news.

I stopped. Fern stopped beside me and went still, the way she did when she was listening to something. I looked at her, and she was not looking at the woman. She was looking at the water, at the place where the woman's reflection would have been, and there was nothing there.

I said, “Fern. Who is that?”

She did not answer. She did not seem to hear me. She was watching the empty water with a calm that was older than her eight years, and I felt the first real fear I had felt at Stillwater — not the jumpy fear of the man in the trees, but a colder thing, the fear of a door that opens inward.

“Fern,” I said again, and I took her hand, and I walked us back to the house without looking at the dock again. She came with me without a word, and when we were inside I knelt in front of her and took her face in my hands.

“Who was that woman?” I said. “Have you seen her before?”

Fern looked at me with her calm, flat eyes, and she said, “I don't know what you're talking about.”

That night I asked Ada, and this time I did not describe. I said, “There is a woman who sits at the end of the dock in the evening, in black. Fern saw her too. Tell me who she is.”

Ada was chopping onions. She kept chopping for a long moment, and then she said, without turning around, “That would be Sara Voss. She drowned where the dock is. They found her floating under the boathouse in June, in the still water, with her hair spread out around her. She was twenty-four years old.”

“And the children?”

“The children loved her.” Ada's knife went on, steady, one-two-one-two. “She was here for two years. She was the one who taught Fern to swim. She and Mr. Vance, they were close. Too close, some said. And then he died in the winter, and she went strange, and in June she walked into the lake in her good dress.” She put the knife down and turned to face me, and her face was bare in a way I had not seen before. “They were not bad people, miss. They were young, and they made mistakes, and they died. That's all. That's the whole story. There is no more to it than that.”

“Then why did Fern see her?”

“Fern is eight,” Ada said. “She sees what she sees.”

I went up to bed that night with the children's doors open, mine and theirs, so that any sound in the hall would reach me. I lay awake for a long time in the dark, and I heard the house settle, and I heard the water slap the dock, and I heard, once, very softly, the sound of a door closing in the empty wing at the end of the hall, where nobody had slept in years. I told myself it was the wind. The wind was not blowing.