Dreamcatcher(185)

Not good public relations at all.

10

Her name is either Ilena or Elaina Timarova  -  no one seems sure which. She turns up in Ware in the early fall of 1995 in a Ford Escort with a discreet yellow Hertz sticker on the windshield. The car turns out to be stolen, and a story makes the rounds  -  unsubstantiated but juicy  -  that she obtained it at Logan Airport, swapping sex for a set of car keys. Who knows, it could have happened that way.

However it happens, she is clearly disoriented, not quite right in the head. Someone remembers the bruise on the side of her face, someone else the fact that her blouse is buttoned wrong. Her English is poor, but good enough for her to get across what she wants: directions to the Quabbin Reservoir. These she writes down (in Russian) on a slip of paper. That evening, when the road across the Winsor Dam is closed, the Escort is found, abandoned, in the picnic area at Goodnough Dike. When the car is still there the next morning, two Water Authority guys (who knows, perhaps Lorrington was one of them) and two Forest Service rangers start looking for her.

Two miles up East Street, they find her shoes. Two miles farther up, where East Street goes to dirt (it winds through the wilderness on the east shore of the Reservoir and is really not a street at all but a Massachusetts version of the Deep Cut Road) they find her shirt . . . oh-oh. Two miles beyond the abandoned shirt, East Street ends, and a rutty logging stripe  -  Fitzpatrick Road  -  leads away from the lake. The searchers are about to go this way when one of them sees something pink hangin from a tree-limb down by the water.

It proves to be the lady's bra.

The ground here is damp  -  not quite marshy  -  and they can follow both her tracks and the broken branches through which she has pushed, doing damage they don't like to think of to her bare skin. Yet the evidence of the damage is there, and they must see it, like it or not  -  the blood on the branches and then on the rocks is part of her trail.

A mile from where East Street ends, they come to a stone building which stands on an outcropping. It looks across the East Branch at Mount Pomery. This building houses Shaft 12, and is accessible by car only from the north. Why Ilena or Elaina did not just start from the north is a question that will never be answered.

The water-bearing aqueduct which begins at the Quabbin runs sixty-five miles dead east to Boston, picking up more water from the Wachusett and Sudbury Reservoirs as it goes (the latter two sources are smaller and not quite so pure). There are no pumps; the aqueduct-pipe, thirteen feet high and eleven feet wide, needs none to do its job. Boston's water supply is provided by simple gravity feed, a technique used by the Egyptians thirty-five centuries before. Twelve vertical shafts run between the ground and the aqueduct. These serve as vents and pressure-regulation points. They also serve as points of access, should the aqueduct become clogged. Shaft 12, the one closest to the Reservoir, is also known as the Intake Shaft. Water purity is tested there, and female virtue has often been tested there, as well (the stone building isn't locked, and is a frequent stopping place for lovers in canoes).

On the lowest of the eight steps leading up to the door, they find the woman's jeans, neatly folded. On the top step is a pair of plain white cotton underpants. The door is open. The men look at each other, but no one speaks. They have a good idea of what they're going to find inside: one dead Russian lady, hold the clothes.

But they don't. The circular iron cover over the top of Shaft 12 has been moved just enough to create a crescent moon of darkness on the Reservoir side. Beyond it is the crowbar the woman used to shift the lid  -  it would have been leaning behind the door, where there are a few other tools. And beyond the crowbar is the Russian woman's purse. On top of it is her billfold, open to show her identification card. On top of the billfold  -  the apex of the pyramid, so to speak  -  is her passport. Poking out of it is a slip of paper, covered with chicken-scratches that have to be Russian, or Cyrillic, or whatever they call it. The men believe it is a suicide note, but upon translation it proves to be nothing but the Russian woman's directions. At the very bottom she has written When road ends, walk along shore. And so she did, disrobing as she went, unmindful of the branches which poked and the bushes which scratched.

The men stand around the partially covered shaft-head, scratching their heads and listening to the babble of the water as it starts on its way to the taps and faucets and fountains and back-yard hoses of Boston. The sound is hollow, somehow dank, and there's good reason for that: Shaft 12 is a hundred and twenty-five feet deep. The men cannot understand why she chose to do it the way she did, but they can see what she did all too clearly, can see her sitting on the stone floor with her feet dangling; she looks like a nakedy version of the girl on the White Rock labels. She takes a final look over her shoulder, perhaps, to make sure her billfold and her passport are still where she put them. She wants someone to know who passed this way, and there is something hideously, unassuageably sad about that. One look back, and then she slips into the eclipse between the partially dislodged cover and the side of the shaft. Perhaps she held her nose, like a kid cannonballing into the community swimming pool. Perhaps not. Either way, she is gone in less than a second. Hello darkness my old friend.

11

Old Mr Beckwith's final words on the subject before driving on down the road in his mail-truck had been these: Way I heard it, the folks in Boston'll be drinking her in their morning coffee tight around Valentine's Day. Then he'd given Jonesy a grin. I don't drink the water myself, I stick to beer.