“You hungry?” he called. “I’ve got pizza in the oven for you if you want it.” He stuffed the tray into the oven and turned it on.

  The kitchen door swung, springs squeaking. “That would be nice.”

  Alex turned from the stove and flashed a smile.

  Lilly frowned, her eyes narrowing as she scanned him like an MRI. “What’s up?” She went to the fridge and jerked it open, her eyes falling on the lower shelf where he kept his beer. She licked her lips and pulled a half bottle of white wine from the door rack.

  “Long day?” he said.

  She didn’t look at him. “Not as long as you by the looks of it.”

  He played stupid but had no idea why. “I can’t have a beer?” he said, knowing she’d spied the ale in the living room.

  “There was a sixer in there this morning.”

  And now there’s none. She always did that to him, like she was Agatha Christie, always needing a final clue to untangle her attitude. He waited. These were treacherous waters, and any miscalculation at this point could put him over the falls without a barrel.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just I’m getting tired of cleaning other people’s shit. We’re so shorthanded I’m cleaning rooms, emptying bedpans, tossing trash, it’s nuts, and the patients deserve better,” she said.

  Anger and sorrow fought for control within him, but it was like trying to piss on an angel. On one hand his wife was right. He was jetting around on the Niagara, outside in the sun, watching the excited faces of tourists, while she worked at the DMV of death. He rolled his shoulders and got her a wine glass.

  “I know there’s nothing you can do, but I’ve got to complain to someone,” she said.

  Alex had heard so many stories about the hospital and the people who worked there that sometimes he felt like he could fill in for his wife, and all anybody would notice is that Lilly’s long blonde hair had been replaced with salt and pepper stubble. His dad had been almost bald at forty, and it looked like Alex was going to suffer the same fate.

  She poured a full glass of wine and took a pull. “Here I am bitching at you and the first thing I do, before I even pull off my scrubs…” She held up her glass.

  “No worries.” Lilly liked her pizza warm, not hot, so he pulled her slices from the stove and presented them to her on a real plate like he’d cooked a gourmet meal from scratch. He’d eaten out of the box.

  Alex retrieved his beer, and when he returned, she said, “I got a text from Ginger. Wanting to know what day is good for a BBQ?”

  “I stopped and saw Gabe on my way home,” he said.

  “So you crushed a few there, huh?”

  White-hot rage burned through him, the tips of his fingers and toes stinging with pain. He rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck, but said nothing.

  She took a bite of pizza and stared at the table. That’s what she did instead of apologizing. “How did you do today?” she asked.

  It’s all about the Benjamins. “Good. Great, actually. Every seat filled.”

  She nodded.

  “Of course, it's mid-summer and if we’re not full now…” He was constantly preparing her for the inevitable day when the river tour business no longer made economic sense for a smalltime operator like him.

  She took a long pull of wine, staring down the stem of the glass at him like she knew something he didn’t.

  “Did get a strange visit, though.” He cringed inwardly. Damn beer loosening his lips. He tried to put the paint back in the can. “Nothing special.”

  “Visitors?” She looked intrigued to hear something that didn’t involve medications or human excretions.

  He took a pull off his beer to buy time to think. He’d opened his father’s Pandora’s box, literally, and now figuratively. There was only one thing that got Lilly more pissed than his drinking and that was his father’s nutty stories.

  “I was kind of expecting this,” she said. A sly smirk slid across her face like an open wound.

  He lifted his eyebrows and waited.

  “Well, what with it being 2019 and all.”

  For the second time this night, Alex did his best dumbass impression, which was his best character. “2019?”

  Lilly’s stare cut right through him. “You’re telling me you didn’t just have your father’s box out?”

  He puffed out air and sounded like a duck crying.

  “You didn’t have his stuff out just now before I got home?”

  Alex let the beer and his anger answer. “No,” he lied. “What are you talking about?” He hated gaslighting his wife… it made him feel lower than low. But admitting he was reliving his father’s past made him feel worse.

  “So how did this get out?” She tossed the Indian head penny on the table, where it clanged and spun on its edge before wobbling over and falling still.

  Alex eyed the coin, considering whether to compound his problems by lying again, but he quickly disposed of that idea. That road was long and too dangerous to travel. He sighed and said, “I’m sorry, but after today… I really didn’t even realize what year it was… I mean, I knew what year it was, but I didn’t remember its significance.”

  “What jogged your memory?”

  Alex told her how Celeste had put him in touch with Dr. Silverfish, and about the odd geological survey readings, but left off the part about the reservoir.

  “And she came to you because of your father?”

  He nodded. “They were talking about the dewatering project in Celeste’s class, and she mentioned him.”

  “That’s what jogged your memory about the year?”

  He waited.

  “So, they know of the… legend?”

  He nodded.

  “What did they want?”

  “Just to review dad’s material. His journal, the pictures and stuff.” He picked up the penny and rolled it in his fingers.

  “What did you say?”

  “That I needed to speak with you. She wants to bring dinner over for us. Any night.”

  “You need me here?”

  “Not really, but I’d rather not do this alone.”

  “You’ve decided to meet with her then?”

  “What do you think?”

  “You know what I think,” she said. Lilly believed all his father’s evidence was anecdotal, inconsistent, and unsupported.

  He nodded. “Can’t see how it could hurt. Then she’ll leave me alone.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t think I should meet with her?”

  “The question is simple. Do you believe Dr. Silverfish is trying to help Niagara and preserve the falls?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She made a clown smile and rolled her eyes.

  “When?”

  “I’m done with mid-shifts Tuesday, so any day after that is fine.”

  He nodded.

  She finished her pizza, downed her second glass of wine, and pushed up from the table. “I’m going to take a shower.” The clock above the sink read 12:11 AM.

  He said nothing.

  “See you upstairs,” she said as she kissed him on the forehead.

  “You’ll be asleep.”

  No smartass remarks this time. Instead, she changed the subject. “You have an eleven tomorrow?”

  He nodded.

  “See you in the morning then,” she said, and left the kitchen, doors swaying on their hinges.

  Alex listened as Lilly trudged up the steps. The click of the bathroom door opening, then closing, and the rattle of the pipes as the upstairs shower was turned on. He dug into the recesses of the refrigerator, moving aside leftovers, a box filled with cans of soda, and all the way in the back he found his emergency beer. It was a sixteen-ounce Heineken. He frowned, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  He retreated to the living room and retrieved his father’s box, intending to put the penny away, but he changed his mind and dropped it in a pocket as he flopped onto the sofa. He’d indirectly decided to let the professor take a look at dad’s journal and stuff, and the unease that had been using his spine as a stepladder began to ease. He wasn’t convinced of anything—far from it—but he had some questions of his own, and he couldn’t ignore the year. It would all end this summer, one way or another.

  Lilly had asked how a creature could be so precise. Why not the sixty-seventh year, or the sixty-fifth? He’d laughed, and made some joke about getting old, but he knew his father’s answers to those questions. All one needed to do was look to the animal kingdom to find many species whose life cycles rivaled the finest Swiss watch.

  The cicada for instance—he started. That sound from the reservoir, hadn’t it sounded like a cicada mating call? The buzz was unmistakable, and the strange insects have periodical life cycles that ranged up to seventeen years, most of which were spent underground. Was it that far of a stretch to believe some strange underground beast might live on a precise schedule that could be sixty-six years long? He didn’t want to believe, and yet he was doing all the mental gymnastics necessary to believe, but couldn’t.

  Alex took a long pull off his beer and swiped through his phone until he arrived at Wahanu’s contact page. He reached into a pocket and felt the penny as he emptied his beer. His gaze shifted to the liquor cabinet, but he shook his head and got to his feet. Wahanu was of Attawandaron descent, American Indians that had lived in the area through the 1800s. There wasn’t much left of the tribe these days, and there was no reservation, but Wahanu and others like him kept their history alive.

  Wahanu could refresh his memory, help him understand, but so what? Alex was already sinking into his father’s life, as if his dad was managing things from beyond the grave, his essence still trying to sell Alex. He’d gotten closer to belief on this day than he’d ever thought possible, and he’d discovered nothing new.

  Wahanu’s shop wasn’t far out of town, and he was overdue for a visit. They’d drink tea and catch up. He hadn’t spoken with his father’s friend since the months after the funeral. Three years. Had it been that long?

  He trashed his empty, killed all the lights, and checked that the doors were locked. As a boy growing up in Niagara, they’d never locked their front door, and his father left his keys in the ignition when he went into a store. Things sure had changed, and in many ways not for the better. The Canadian side of the falls got newer and more prosperous every year, while the city of Niagara fell further into disrepair. Nurses were needed everywhere, and he could start something new. But there was his mother, Lilly’s parents, their friends. The thought of starting over both excited and depressed him.

  Moonlight streamed through the windows, cutting through the dusty darkness. The faint hum of the falls echoed through the house like a running toilet. At night the water control management folks reduced the flow of the falls by fifty percent, but the dull roar never fully subsided. Even with all the windows closed Alex thought he heard the rumble, like hearing waves in your sleep after a day at the beach or the shriek of imaginary wind after a storm.

  Alex changed in the blackness and crawled in next to his wife and was asleep in moments.

  5

  On the drive to work, Alex churned his father’s research through his logic filter, trying to come up with counterarguments. He kept coming back to the two separate cave drawings of a scorpion-like creature that had been painted almost a hundred miles and a hundred years apart. The logical side of his brain reminded him that tall tales cross generations and shape societies, but that didn’t make the stories real, or the accounts accurate. Most fables grew in the telling and the entire Attawandaron myth might have been based on one intoxicated Indian who thought he saw something in the water.

  Mondays were the second slowest day of the week, but most of the day’s tours were at near capacity. Alex lost himself as he piloted the boat through the rapids, the scream of the tourists like a song he’d heard one too many times.

  Alex was running his second tour, the midafternoon sun arcing through the mists like manna from heaven, Celeste’s voice ringing through the pilothouse, when a call squawked over the emergency channel.

  “Tourist in the river off Hornblower Landing. I repeat, tourist in the water at Hornblower Landing.”

  Alex kicked up the pumps and the boat slipped from the mists. It was a race, all agencies competing to respond to the call. Jurisdiction on the river was clear as mud, and Canadian and U.S. Border Patrol, Park Police, local PDs and fire rescue, as well as US Coast Guard surface and ariel units were all scrambling, but the Mists Edge was three minutes out.

  He picked up the comm handset and cut into Celeste’s speech about how the falls were formed. “Ladies and gentlemen, make sure you’re strapped in.” He’d decided not to tell the tourists what he was doing. They were dead weight and couldn’t do anything, so why stir the stew of hysteria?

  The boat’s pumps roared as the jetboat skipped over the Niagara River, Alex piloting the craft around outcrops of stone, vegetation, and swirling eddies and sinkholes waiting to snare the vessel like booby traps.

  Sirens wailed and the womp womp of an approaching helicopter thundered through the gorge, the boat throwing spray, the faint scent of smoke and burning rubber hanging in the air.

  He arrived on the scene to find chaos.

  People ran from the ferry terminal, their screams and cries piping across the river, the observation deck clearing as crowds squeezed through the exits like a swarm of bees escaping a hive.

  Alex dropped the electric engines into neutral, grabbed his binoculars, and bolted from the pilothouse. The vessel rocked and heaved in the turbulent river, and the binoculars pushed into his eye sockets as the boat listed and swayed.

  There was someone in the water—a man, his red rain poncho floating on the surface around him like a protective forcefield. The guy splashed and fought, trying to reach the embankment of tumbled stones that ran along the river’s edge, but the current was dragging him downstream like a leaf.

  The air was thick with a foul reek; rot mixed with the scent of moisture. A deafening hum rose above the thunder of the falls as a spike lifted from the water, a knife-like stinger hovering horizontally just above the river’s surface.

  The man in the water yelled, a wail of pain that went through Alex like bad clams. A roiling knot of whitewater engulfed the guy as he struggled, and the spike disappeared. The river cleared, and the tourist was gone, nothing left in the water but a red oil slick, blood bubbles popping as globs of fat and skin floated downstream along with a piece of the rain poncho. The cicada-like hum ceased, and the roar of the falls, and the slap and pop of the river crashing on the Mists Edge filled the horrified silence.

  Alex stood in shock, right eye twitching, mouth hanging open. Muscle memory took over as he docked at Hornblower Landing where he was questioned by Canadian police, but they didn’t appear to put much stock in his account. His heart wasn’t in it and when he mentioned the tail-like stinger hanging over the water the Mounties rolled their eyes and looked on him with pity. Other tourists had seen what Alex had, but when questioned they’d been unable to articulate exactly what they’d seen.

  Tony Lafferdy, lately of Toledo, Ohio, was pronounced missing, but the blood slick on the river was impossible to deny. The flyboys had seen it from the helicopter.

  The authorities shut down the river for the remainder of the day and Mists Edge River Tours’ last excursion was canceled, and that was fine by Alex. His past was coming back at him, his father having a cosmic laugh at his expense. Had to be that, because the alternative… was impossible, but after the day’s events on the river, he no longer knew if that was true.

  The sun was long past noon, and the rumble of the falls had faded as Alex took the left-hand interchange onto US-20. The Wrangler sputtered and bucked as he passed Lancaster and US-20 turned into Broadway, houses fleeting by on both sides of the road.

  The Niagara Trading Post had been in business in some form since 1892 when it was opened by one of Wahanu’s distant relatives to provide foodstuffs and other supplies to the wagon trains and adventurers who came to the area. The place had gone through many changes in the intervening one hundred and thirty years, but a stranger could find gas, food, and water there, along with souvenirs, and a variety of other items ranging from ammo to toy dolls.

  The lot was empty, and Alex parked right up front. The building’s red cedar façade was dull and gray, the front window dirty. If the place survived another five years, it would be a surprise. Wahanu just couldn’t compete with the multitude of coffee shops, gas station supermarkets, and a plethora of franchise souvenir stores that carried superior merchandise at cheaper prices.

  A bell rang when he stepped through the door, and he was greeted by one of Wahanu’s grandkids. Alex didn’t know the boy’s name, and with his jet-black hair and brooding brown eyes it was difficult to distinguish him from his many cousins and siblings.

  “Mr. Weston! So good to see you,” the kid said.

  “You remember me?”

  The boy chuckled. “Of course, grandpop has been expecting you. Told me to keep an eye out and half an ear.”

  “Expecting me?”

  The kid smiled and it was like a warm breeze on a sunny fall day.

  “I’m old, sorry, you’re…” He tapped his head, pretending the kid’s name might shake free.

  “Jaru… and you’re not that old.”

  Alex laughed. “Guess I’m not. Your grandfather around?”

  Jaru nodded. “In the office. Do you know where it is?”

  “I do.” Alex threaded down the center aisle toward the rear of the store, the shelves packed with paper towels, cases of water, snacks, and candy. The cooler behind the counter buzzed, its glass front fogged. The post didn’t sell alcohol, but Alex knew Wahanu would have a couple of Niagara Reds nestled in the back behind the juice and sodas.

  A puff of steam belched from a coffee pot that was the centerpiece of the shop’s caffeine universe, no barista, no rocket ship cylinder that spun milk faster than a centrifuge. The coffee urn was half full, and the urn with the orange top containing hot water was full. He poured two cups of hot water, grabbed some sugar packets, and dropped a teabag in each cup, tying the strings off on wood stirrers.