The Sleepwalker(56)

But eventually, the gases win out. The currents win out. My mother was dragged in death nearly three miles along the Gale River, sometimes along the bottom and sometimes along the surface. Her body would most often drift in that classic pose known as the dead man’s float, a lowercase n, because that is how dead bodies move in the water: her fingers and forehead and knees showed the expected abrasions from scraping against pebbles and sludge.

Some days, her body would remain where it was, her leg lodged beneath the trunk of a dead tree that had rolled underwater, or beneath the lip of a boulder. Snails and crayfish and brookies would gnaw at her. The animals would eat the juiciest parts.

What would propel it farther downriver? Either the current or the accumulation of the gases would trump the tree or the rock: it would glide or it would rise. In either case, it would move. It would carry with it the muck and the growth from the river bottom. My mother would wear algae like jewelry and body armor.

And in its movement, her body would be pummeled further, the integrity of its frame and its shell further violated. No: savaged. There were, in addition to the ineluctable deterioration that occurs because a body is dead, the rock surfaces that would grate the epidermis like cheese, peeling the skin from my mother’s thighs and breasts and the right side of her face; there was—and here, in truth, I am conjecturing—the rusting wrought-iron gate that had been lodged into the silt for decades that tore off her left arm, and the hubcaps, the metal mangled now into jagged throwing stars, that sliced off great swatches of tissue from her lower back; and, of course, there were the innumerable rocks and dead branches that battered all of her body as the waters dragged it over and upon and into them.

By the time it reached the intake grate at the penstock for the small, long-dormant hydroelectric plant near Atkins Falls, it was but a mephitic bag of jelly and goo, jostling around bone. The navy-blue nightshirt was history. Her tendons and skull were exposed to the world with pornographic cruelty. The power plant was an antique from the early part of the twentieth century; the remnants existed almost entirely underwater now. The powerhouse with its generator and transformers was long gone. But the turbines, primitive though they were, were still there. So were the scaffolding and the stanchions.

The body’s last great movement had been over the falls that neared the plant. Imagine a kayak taking on the white water there. Whether it had careened over the cascades days or weeks after disappearing into the water was anyone’s guess, though the search teams assumed it was days. They believed they would have found it near the LPS—the last point seen, a dot on the map selected from a strip of a nightshirt—had it remained upstream for any length of time.

And, of course, they didn’t find it. A dog did. And mostly she smelled it. She was a great, leaping, playful mutt that was part yellow lab named Lola. She belonged to a photographer from across the lake in Au Sable Forks who was in Bartlett, Vermont, to chronicle the fall foliage. And he was artistically relentless. Unstoppable and talented. And he was so entranced by the colors of the trees that he waded into the chilly waters of the Gale to capture a copse of red maples in their death throes from a very specific angle. Lola joined him and was drawn to the ripe stink of the corpse. Went right to it, splashing and dog-paddling her way there, sixty-plus pounds of canine exuberance and wonder and joy.

Would she have seen it without the drought? Would she have smelled it?

Unlikely.

Certainly the photographer would have missed it. But the days and then weeks without rain had dropped the water to its lowest level in years. In decades.

Still, without Lola he most likely would have captured the shot of the trees and climbed back up the steep bank from the water. A body that has been in a river or lake that long is difficult to see. My mother was hard to distinguish from the slime that enshrouded her. But Lola was adamant, and there my mother was: all that was left of Annalee Ahlberg, half submerged in the shallow current, bobbing like rotting wood against the penstock grate. Had there not been a drought, had the reeking cadaver not been spotted by Lola, it is likely that eventually the body would have oozed through the bars like apples through a cider press, disappearing in pieces into the turbine, and then through the outflow and back into the Gale.

But there was a drought. And so, in the end, my mother’s body was found. It was recovered and gently laid inside a mesh bag (for drainage) and then a zippered body bag, and transported to the morgue at the hospital in Burlington—where it was given its own cooler, one reserved specifically for bodies that pungent.

My mother’s dental records were already at the morgue: they had been there for weeks, in the event that her body was discovered after hours and no one could reach her dentist. There it was autopsied.

And it was from there that the Vermont state medical examiner, a trim physician with a graying beard who biked to and from the morgue when the weather cooperated, surprised us all by announcing that the cause of death was not likely the Gale River. It was not likely that Annalee Ahlberg had drowned.

Which is where this story would begin anew.





PART TWO





ON MAY 23, 1987, Kenneth Parks—husband and father of a five-month-old infant—rose from his bed and drove fourteen miles to his in-laws’ home. There he stabbed his mother-in-law to death and nearly killed his father-in-law with a tire iron. Then he drove to the police station and turned himself in. He was acquitted of both crimes because the jury agreed he was sleepwalking.