Riding the Flume (3 page)

Francie pulled her own chair next to her mother's and sat down. She clasped her hands in her lap. “He's angry that I'm helping Mr. Court,” she whispered.

“He's worried about you,” her mother said. “Can't you see that?”

“He's punishing me for Carrie's mistake,” Francie retorted. “He can't hear a word said against her.”

Her mother looked at Francie. “If you only knew how much you're growing to look like Carrie,” she said, and her voice was soft. “How much you sound like her. Even when you argue with your father, you sound like her.” Her mother looked away and a small smile came to her lips. She looked back at Francie. “Especially when you argue with your father,” she added. “Don't you remember?”

Francie swallowed. “I remember,” she whispered. She closed her eyes. Every time she looked in the mirror she remembered. It was why she'd cut her front hair in bangs and wore her back hair loose. It would have been so much
more convenient to put it up in a bun like Carrie had worn her hair. But she couldn't stand the startled glances of her neighbors or the pain that crossed her father's face when he looked at her. She wiped away her tears with a corner of her napkin. Would she be forever in Carrie's shadow? In death as well as in life?

Her mother touched her cheek. “You would have been quite a pair, you know,” she said. The words hung in the air for a long moment. Then Francie's mother pushed back her chair and stood up. “Josie?” she called to the young woman they'd hired to help around the house and the hotel. “Is the water hot?” She began collecting plates and cups and stacking them on the tray.

“Yes, ma'am,” said Josie, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a towel in her hand. Francie's mother handed her the tray, and the two of them went into the kitchen.

It was Francie's job to put the rest of the tableware back on the sideboard and fold the napkins into their rings for the next meal. She did it absently, thinking about her mother's words. “Quite a pair,” she'd said. Somehow Francie had never imagined herself and her sister as a “pair.” How could they have ever been a pair, she thought. Carrie had been so much older—fifteen when she died, and Francie only nine. If Carrie had lived she'd be . . . Francie figured it out. Carrie would have been twenty-one. A woman grown. And Francie herself was only just fifteen now. How could she ever have caught up?

She threw the napkins into the basket with the others on the sideboard. She arranged the everyday salt and pepper shakers on the shelf with the ones for formal occasions and banged the cupboard door shut with more force than was necessary. “No,” she said aloud. “I'll always be running behind her. Even now when she's dead.”

She stomped up the stairs and plopped down in the chair by her vanity, carefully avoiding the oval mirror on the wall beside her. Her eyes fell instead on the framed photograph of the family, taken perhaps a year before the landslide. Father, sitting in the leather armchair in the parlor with the women gathered around him. Mother, in a dark dress with white buttons down the front and with an unfamiliar formal look on her face, her hand on her husband's shoulder. Francie, leaning against her father's knee. And Carrie, her long chestnut hair wound about her head in a complicated twist, was standing on Father's other side looking as if she wanted to laugh out loud.

Francie stared at the photograph, realizing again that anyone who didn't know the family might have taken Carrie for Francie. There was her sister, caught forever inside the little frame. And quietly, without thinking about it, the scrawny eight-year-old who had been leaning against her father's leg was, indeed, catching up. “In fact,” she said aloud, finally looking at herself in the mirror, “I have caught up. I'm fifteen now, older than Carrie was then. She gathered her hair, twisted it, and wound it
around her head, but immediately let it go. It was uncanny how much she looked like her sister.

“I wonder what it would have been like,” she asked aloud, “if we'd been the same age.” She picked up the deep blue cologne bottle on her vanity that used to be Carrie's and ran her fingers over the bumpy surface. She pulled the glass stopper out of the top and sniffed—the bottle had been empty for years. Carrie had given it to her long before the landslide. But the spicy smell of the cologne still lingered. “Would you have been my friend, Carrie?” she asked the picture. Carrie seemed to be looking out of the frame right into Francie's eyes. Her mouth held its almost smile. But the only answer was silence.

T
he only safety is in secrecy.
The words hung in the air and Francie sat straight up in bed. She'd been dreaming. In the dream Francie had been standing at the bottom of the tallest part of the lumber flume, watching her sister climb up to the top. The night breeze fluttered Carrie's white nightgown and made Francie shiver. “Don't do it!” Francie called. She could feel her heart beating furiously in her chest. Something terrible was going to happen. “Please,” Francie cried. “Please stop!”

Carrie looked down, hanging onto the wooden crosspiece with one hand. Her laugh was the same rippling musical sound that Francie had always loved. “I'm going to ride the flume,” she called back, and kept climbing, step by step, to the top. Her arms and legs moved together in the easy, fluid movements that characterized everything Carrie did.

Now she had reached the top of the flume, so far away that she looked like a tiny white bird standing on the edge of the wooden track. She stretched her arms out wide, as if to embrace the star-studded sky. Her long hair streamed out behind her. Francie saw her climb into the flume boat and crouch down, gripping the sides with white fingers. Then the little wooden raft started to move, slowly at first. Francie sucked in her breath as it picked up speed, racing faster and faster down the track. Water splashed out on either side, cascading down the structure like a waterfall of sparkling diamonds.

“No!” Francie shouted. She tried to follow it, running below the little flume boat as it sped down the track. It was coming to the first sharp curve. If she could only get ahead, climb up, stop it somehow. . . .

She looked up as the boat hit the turn, bounced off the track, and went flying into the air. The scream stuck in her throat as she saw Carrie hold out her hands. “Remember,” Carrie cried, “the only safety is in secrecy!”

Now, with the darkness engulfing her and her heart pounding, Francie wasn't sure if the words were in her dream or if she'd actually heard them spoken aloud. She fumbled with the matches and finally lit the candle she kept on her nightstand. She watched as the flickering light slowly brought the furniture into focus—the spindles flanking the foot of her bed, the wardrobe in the corner, the washstand and the white pitcher. Comforted by the light, she leaned
back against her pillows. It was a stupid dream. Not even Carrie would have tried to ride the lumber flume—the thirty-mile track that floated the lumber out of the woods and down into the town of St. Joseph. It was too dangerous. She shook her head. A year ago Sean O'Brien and Buck Murphy, two of the biggest daredevils in the logging camp, had ridden it into St. Joseph—people had talked about it for months afterward. But Carrie would never have tried it.

But while the substance of the dream quickly faded, the feeling of guilt, of something she needed most urgently to do, lingered on. She couldn't remember the exact words of the message she'd found in the tree, except that part about the only safety being secrecy, but she thought it had communicated the same urgency. Something terrible about to happen, something someone had to stop.

But that had been six years ago. Who had the message been for? Who would have been meeting Carrie at Turkey Fork? Francie snuggled down under the covers. The answer to that, at least, was easy. If the note had not been meant for her cousin, Charlie, he would probably know who it
was
meant for. Carrie and Charlie had been best friends, even though Carrie had been two years older. If Charlie didn't know what Carrie had been talking about, then nobody would.

• • •

The raucous chorus of birds calling woke Francie just as the sky was beginning to turn pink. Summer was short in
the high Sierras, and the birds didn't waste a moment of daylight. Francie's eyes still burned, and she was already tired, but she made herself get up. She didn't intend to waste any of the day, either. Her mother needed her in the hotel kitchen, but first she would talk to Charlie.

She pulled on an old dress, tied her apron over it, and tiptoed down the stairs. The house was silent—Mama and Father must still be in bed, she thought. Slowly she lifted the latch and opened the heavy front door—it moved smoothly on its hinges without even one squeak—and then she was out in the chilly dawn.

Across the narrow side street, her father's hotel loomed up twice as tall as any building around it. When they'd first moved to Connorsville, when Carrie was a baby, the family had actually lived in the hotel along with the guests, but when Francie was born, Mama had put her foot down and insisted they move to a real house.

Francie's old shoes made no sound in the dirt as she ran along the street. She turned the corner onto Main and glanced up, wishing as she often did that she could have a room on the top floor of the hotel. She would have a bird's-eye view of the whole town and the woods beyond; it would be almost like a tree house. But she knew better than to suggest it—she had heard her mother say often enough that owning a hotel was one thing; living in it was quite another.

She hurried down Main Street past the general store,
the post office, and the hospital and doctor's office. Lamps were being lit in the buildings now, and she could hear the rumble of voices and the clatter of pots and pans in the dining hall where the loggers were eating breakfast. They were at work by six o'clock, so they were up even earlier than the birds.

“Hey, Francie!”

She looked up to see Charlie take off his hat and wave from the dining hall porch. He crossed the street in three big strides and stopped in front of her, blocking her path. “Where are you headed so early, pretty lady? Looking for me, I hope?” He flashed her his famous winning smile, but he put his hands on her shoulders as if she were his little sister.

Francie blushed anyway. Her cousin, Charlie Spencer, was nineteen and so handsome he could have his pick of any girl in town. He was dressed for work—Francie recognized his red plaid flannel shirt and saw that it still had a hole in the elbow. “Hi, Charlie,” she said. She knew he was being nice to her only because of Carrie, but she really was glad to see him. “I'd heard you made it back for another season after all. We thought you'd given up logging altogether when you didn't show up last week.”

“No chance of that,” he said. “This is the year I'm going to ride the flume!”

Francie laughed. “You say that every year.”

Charlie winked at her and ran his fingers through his curly hair, making it stick up even more than usual.
“Actually, I'm headed out to Camp Four this morning—that's where we're working now. I'm just glad they were willing to hire me back on.”

Francie chuckled. “Who else would they get to be chute rider?” She shook her head. “You probably could ride the flume. You're the only one who actually enjoys risking your life like that.”

“Not the only one,” Charlie said, grinning. He clapped his hat back on his head. “Where are you headed so early in the morning?” he asked again. “May I walk with you?” He offered her his arm.

She took a breath. “Actually, I was looking for you.”

“I knew it!” Charlie crowed, and the two loggers who had followed him out of the dining hall grinned and poked each other.

Again, he proffered his crooked elbow and Francie rested her hand lightly on his arm. “It's not what you think,” she said. “It's about Carrie.”

Charlie's face turned sober. “Carrie?” He gave her an uneasy glance. “She's haunting me.” Francie didn't know she'd said it out loud until she saw Charlie's startled face.

“What?” She saw his Adam's apple go up and down as he swallowed.

“Never mind. I'm just being silly.” She took Charlie's arm again and they began to walk back in the direction of the hotel. “I have to ask you a question. But you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

“Fire away,” Charlie said, his eyes sparkling again. “I won't tell.” He pushed on his hat brim so his hat perched on the back of his head.

Quickly she told him about the message in the old sequoia stump. “Was it for you? Did you and Carrie leave messages in that old tree hole?”

Charlie's eyes had a faraway look. “I'd forgotten about that,” he said. “Carrie called it the post office. She liked it that we could say we were going to the post office and nobody would know what we meant. We were each supposed to check there every day, just the way people check their post office boxes.” He looked down at Francie, and a slow smile touched his lips. “I used to get mad at her because she'd write messages about things she could just as well have told me in person. But that was your sister all over. Anything to make life more mysterious. What did it say again?”

Francie shook her head. “I only got a quick look before Mama came. Something about meeting at Turkey Fork. And then it said, ‘The only safety is in secrecy.' That part I do remember. You mean you never got it?”

Charlie shook his head. “After the landslide . . .” He looked almost angry. “Well, what would have been the point? It busted me up enough as it was.”

Francie nodded. “That means I was the first one to see it.” They were almost to the hotel. She could see lights in the lobby, and Mama moving about in the kitchen across
the street. She tugged on Charlie's arm until he stopped walking. “What do you think it means?”