In the Lonely Backwater Read online

  Contents

  Praise for In the Lonely Backwater

  In the Lonely Backwater

  Copyright © 2022 Valerie Nieman. All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  PART I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  PART II

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  PART III

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  16

  57

  58

  59

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for In the Lonely Backwater

  “Maggie Warshauer, the intelligent, conflicted and often inscrutable narrator of Valerie Nieman’s In the Lonely Backwater has, against all odds, managed to carve out a life living on a rundown houseboat with her alcoholic father who she helps with his duties as marina manager. With an absent mother and few friends, Maggie turns to the natural world for solace and constancy. She’s most at home sailing her little sailboat, exploring islands and the wildlife she finds there. The marina is a sort of village where everybody knows everybody, and where a murder, like a stone dropped in a pond, sends out unsettling repercussions. Maggie’s heightened awareness of this insular world and its occupants gives the novel a powerful grounding as well as deep emotional resonance. I love this beautiful novel for everything Maggie tells us and for everything we sense she’s keeping to herself.”

  –Tommy Hays, author of What I Came to Tell You and The Pleasure Was Mine

  “When Maggie’s cousin goes missing after prom night, then turns up dead at the marina where she and her ne’er-do-well father live, Maggie knows something about it but not enough to solve the case, or does she? She’s really just trying to survive as a smart and non-gender-performing girl whose mother is AWOL while her father drinks himself to death. To make sense of her world, she classifies: animals, plants, humans. And maybe she spins a yarn or two and escapes to her imagination. In this realist/Gothic hybrid coming-of-age novel, Nieman achieves a suspenseful narrative full of compassion, haunting, and desire, and instruction about the power of storytelling.”

  –Elaine Neil Orr, author of Swimming Between Worlds

  “In the Lonely Backwater is not only a page-turning thriller but also a complex psychological portrait of a young woman dealing with guilt, betrayal, and secrecy. Equally compelling is Nieman’s deep sense of the wonderment of the natural world.”

  –Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

  “Valerie Nieman’s Backwater is a page-turning psychological thriller.”

  –Jessica Handler, author of The Magnetic Girl

  In the Lonely Backwater

  Valerie Nieman

  Fitzroy Books

  Copyright © 2022 Valerie Nieman. All rights reserved.

  Published by Fitzroy Books

  An imprint of

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  Raleigh, NC 27612

  All rights reserved

  https://fitzroybooks.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646031795

  ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646031801

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

  Interior layout by Lafayette & Greene

  Cover images © by C. B. Royal

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  https://regalhousepublishing.com

  The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.

  Dedication

  For all my teachers, and for absent friends.

  PART I

  “It would have been wiser, it would have been safer, to classify (if classify we must) upon the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing, rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do.”

  Edgar Allen Poe, The Imp of the Perverse

  1

  This is how I remembered it.

  2

  There wasn’t anything wrong between Charisse Swicegood and me except that she was her and I was me, and with the family history and all it was just natural.

  She won the genetic lottery—tall but not too tall, good boobs, smart but not too much, green eyes and blond hair, and all that. Played volleyball, played flute, sang soprano. And her family owned more land than God and always seemed to know what to do with it. Grow cotton when prices were high, grow tobacco when an allotment was pure gold, grow square footage in second homes when the lake went in and they were suddenly blessed with water views along the acreage they’d left in piney woods. The Swicegoods went back to the Carolina settlement, like the Cobles and the Alfords. My so-called mother was an Alford, so Charisse was related, but we were like the Black Penders and the white Penders, all one big happy family in the phone book but anyone local knew the code of who was white or Black by the address after the name. Of course, Charisse and me looked about as like each other as those two branches of Penders.

  So, here I am, Maggie Warshauer (what I call myself even if I’m legally Lenore), with, I guess, not all that much going for me except a real good brain and a strong body. If you turn back the yearbook page from Charisse you’ll find my picture at the end of the junior class, and it’s the way I really look, straight, short brown hair and a chin that wouldn’t look so big except I have a little pug nose that is maybe all I got from my as-they-say biological mother. Track and Field (discus, javelin), Ecology Club, Scribblers Club. There’s no place to list my real work.

  Charisse and me were pretty much okay with each other, a few squabbles—it’s not like she was one of the idiot flag girls or something—but we had another fight in school the week before she disappeared, a big one, and then I wrote that stupid thing on Facebook. You know how it goes. Finally she mes
saged, “I hope that we can talk this out sometime.” And now she was missing, and the yokel cops were looking for something because they didn’t know anything.

  I was outside the principal’s office, not a place I’d spent much time, waiting in the lineup on the hard wooden chairs along the wall. The police were using Miss McGehee’s office, so she was bouncing off the walls. More than usual. The woman has no tolerance for change—any little thing gets her off track and she spins out of control. At the moment she was haranguing the secretary about whether the student files were sufficiently secure, and how the cops weren’t going through her students’ lives without a warrant, or a lot of warrants. Miss McGehee has a voice like Vin Diesel going through a sex change and the attitude to match, but she’s like five-feet-nothing, and a puff of wind would blow her flat against the wall. She has good hair but keeps it cut butch-short. No nonsense, that’s how she would describe herself.

  The door to her office opened and Garrett Yancey slid out. He went past me without a word, hands pushed down deep in the pockets of his baggy jeans.

  “Next?”

  I went in and sat down in the too-small chair provided for students who had crossed Miss McGehee. The deep, padded wooden chairs stayed against the walls for adults, and the cops hadn’t changed the setup. In a strange way, I felt less intimidated than if Miss McGehee had been behind the desk. This guy from the sheriff’s department had thin hair and the owly glasses and too-big Adam’s apple of the classic nerd.

  “Good morning.” He looked up from the papers in front of him. “Miss Warshauer?” He said it without the Rs, Washaw, like they do over East. “I’m Drexel Vann, a detective for the London County Sheriff’s Department. I appreciate you giving me some time away from your studies.”

  I nodded. I didn’t expect a detective to look like my dentist.

  He waited, watching me like an underfed hound. If I were going to place him in the marina, I’d say he was a fishing boat. A small one, from Sears, not on a slip but parked on the monthly lot. Plain aluminum johnboat with a little outboard.

  “We’re asking for your help, everyone’s help, in trying to find Miss Swicegood,” he said. “She hasn’t been seen since Saturday night, after the prom, but I imagine you know most everything already.”

  “I know what I hear around school.”

  “That’s why we’re here. There’s more information passed around in the cafeteria at lunch hour than we could get in a week of talking with the adults.” He half smiled, in a shy way, not a threatening one.

  “So you want me to tell you when I saw her last, and what she was doing, and all that.”

  “Yeah, all that.”

  He wasn’t going to tell me what he already knew. I pretty much had an idea what the other guys had told him, Hulky and Nat. Especially Nat.

  “Well, it was prom, you know that.”

  “And you went?”

  I gave what I expected was a withering look. “As if.”

  He waited.

  Miss McGehee’s voice clawed under the thick wooden door.

  “It’s not like I even wanted to go, that whole pink dress and flowers deal. And a lame DJ from maybe, Hartner, if they were lucky. I mean, for most of the kids around here, it’s great.”

  “Did you stay home?”

  Home on the houseboat, watching Dad drink, sure. “Me and these other guys went to the Pizza Annex. It’s the only place you can sit down and order, unless you go to Norlington.”

  “What time was that?”

  “About ten. I had to help in the store and then do the pump readings and rotate the cooler stock. And Nat closes up at the Pic ’n’ Pay at nine. We met up and got a pizza together.” Like he didn’t know this already.

  “And this was you and Nathanael Johnson and David Priddy?”

  David, right. No one ever called Hulky by his real name except for teachers. And cops.

  “Yeah.”

  He waited. I guess that was his best feature.

  “So we ate and played some video games. And then we hung out.”

  “At the gas station. The pizza place is beside the gas station.”

  “Yeah, playing the games. For a while.”

  He opened a little red notebook and started to flip the pages. It had a spiral on the top, so the pages went up and over, up and over.

  “Some of the students said…” Flip, flip. “Some of them said that after the prom they were going to go bowling.”

  “I heard that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The ones with the limos were going into Hartner for the moonlight bowling, and then they were going to go to Denny’s for breakfast.”

  “That would be Night-Owl Lanes? Where they have the balls that glow in the dark?”

  I nodded.

  “Was Charisse one of them?” I noticed he wasn’t calling her “Miss Swicegood” now.

  “Charisse didn’t mess around with bowling and a bunch of kids and a chaperone.” I could hear Miss McGehee again, her outbursts punctuated by the slam of metal file drawers.

  Mr. Vann—Detective Vann—smiled. He had one dimple, odd. “I’m glad I didn’t have her as a principal.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So Charisse didn’t hang with the main crowd?”

  “She was way above that. She had a college guy for a date. Some guy from VCU.”

  “Did you meet him?”

  He was getting around to it, to asking what we did while the rest of the junior and senior students were dancing or bowling or whatever. “No, she ditched him. I guess you know that from Hulky—from David.”

  “The three of you stayed together after the pizza place closed.”

  “Yeah. The Three Musketeers.” That’s what we were called: Aimless, Portly and Asshole. Portly was Hulky, of course, heavyweight wrestler with a heart of gold. Nat was the eternal outsider artist type, gloomy and sarcastic. I was Aimless, which could have been a lot worse. Girls weren’t supposed to hang with guys, so I guess those in charge of making up nasty nicknames didn’t know quite how to categorize me. “We hooked a jug of dago red and went over to the OT to finish the evening off in style.”

  Vann looked at me over the top of his little red notebook. Crime noted.

  “Old Trinity. The church graveyard. It’s not like anyone was buried there recently, or anything. It’s just a place to go where no one messes with us.” Sometimes we left the cans or bottles there. I don’t think the sexton had ever complained, but maybe he had. Nat’s dad was going to have a cow when he found out, being as he was a deacon in a church where speaking in tongues not only happened but was expected.

  “I see. Trinity Church is pretty close to Charisse’s house. She wasn’t with her date when she joined you?”

  I shook my head. “She said she had to ditch him. Her words, he was, ‘Like, a jerk.’”

  “And she never said his name, or where she met him?”

  “She met him at King’s Dominion, that’s all she told anyone. And that he was a college student. And he ripped her dress and she dumped him.” She was wasted when she found us, and Moms and Daddy were going to be plenty pissed off at their daughter driving the Jag in that condition, much less being perceived as damaged goods for the upscale marriage market.

  He glanced up, like Go on, but didn’t say it. He flipped back in his book and sucked in his cheeks. The fourth-period bell rang. I didn’t mind missing Trig, but literature was different.

  “She wandered into the graveyard and sat with us. With Hulky and me, mostly. Nat was walking around talking to the dead. He does that. Anyway, we killed the bottle, and I went home.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Not much.”

  “About the dress?”

  I shrugged.

  “The two boys and Charisse were still in the churchyard when you walked hom
e.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Alone.” He let that lie there, like something in the road. “Aren’t you afraid to be walking around late at night?”

  “Seems safer than painting up and going to the prom with a college guy.” I realized how smartass that sounded, but it was too late. “I’m not afraid of anything that lives out in these woods.” (Not true. I worry about rabid foxes, rabid skunks, rabid whatever.) “There’s a trail over the hill to the marina. So what have you found out about Charisse?”

  He didn’t seem to like being the one asked the questions. He flipped the notebook closed and stuck it in his jacket pocket. “We know she didn’t make it home. We towed in her parents’ Jaguar from the road near the churchyard entrance.”

  I wondered if they had gone over it inch by inch for evidence, like on TV. Hairs and skin flakes and body fluids. Probably just poked around under the seats and took some fingerprints. I sat forward on the chair.

  “You live with your parents at the marina? Do you have a house there?”

  I sat back. This guy was not going to let me get to English class. “I live with my dad. He’s the marina manager. Not exactly a house—we live on a houseboat.”

  Vann looked at me as though I’d finally told him something he didn’t already know. “That sounds—unusual.”

  “It’s different.” He must not have heard about my dad.

  “Must get pretty lonely there in the off-season.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “So, the other night—prom night—was the moon out?”

  This guy veered around like a water strider.

  “At first.” The sky had been deep blue, with big puffy clouds moving along on a wind that didn’t show on the ground. The stars were washed out by the three-quarters moon. Later, the clouds lowered. Later, the storm.