Chapter 3
— A Cottage Above the River
I woke to the smell of bread and woodsmoke, and for a moment I did not know where I was. The ceiling above me was low and beamed, and the window beside the bed showed a pale morning sky over the river, and a blanket, heavy and woollen, was tucked around me. My body ached in places I had forgotten I owned, my throat was raw, and my hands were stiff when I tried to flex them. Then I remembered the cold, and the hands, and the fire, and I sat up slowly, and Kieran was there in the doorway with a tray, looking relieved in a way he tried to hide by fussing with the cups.
He set the tray on the table and told me I had slept through the night, and most of the morning. He had made soup, and bread, and tea, and he watched me eat as if he were counting each spoonful. I ate slowly, because my stomach was tender, but I ate everything, and the warmth spread through me, and with it came a steadiness I had not felt since the deck of the Danube Empress. Outside, the river moved past the lock, grey-green in the morning light. It was an ordinary morning, and that ordinariness felt like a gift.
When I had finished, I told him the rest. I told him my full name, and the name of the company, and that the boat I had fallen from was my own, on its sixtieth anniversary cruise. I told him my son Landon had pushed me, and I watched his face as I said it, because I needed to see whether he believed me. He did not flinch. He did not look away. He listened the way a man listens when he is being told something terrible and true, his hands still around his mug, his eyes steady on mine. When I finished, he was quiet for a long time, and then he said, quite simply, that he believed me. He said he had seen the way I had gone into the water, carried by the current from upstream, and that no one falls like that by accident.
I asked him what he thought I should do, and he said the police, and I shook my head. I understood why he said it. It was the sensible thing, the right thing, and on any other day I would have agreed. But I knew my son, and I knew the company, and I knew what would happen if I walked into a police station now with nothing but my word and a wet dress. Landon would say I was confused. He would say I had fallen. He would say I was an old woman who had become muddled, and that the river had frightened me into imagining things. He had the board behind him, or at least the chairman did, and he had the company's money, and he had a story ready. I had nothing yet but the truth, and the truth, without proof, is only a story too.
I explained it to Kieran, slowly, because I was still finding the words myself. I had discovered that money was leaving the company for repairs that had never happened, paid to a firm called Alpen Trade. I had been about to call for an independent audit when we reached Vienna. That was why Landon had pushed me. He had not pushed me in anger. He had pushed me to stop the audit, to stop the questions, to make me disappear before the numbers could be examined. If I went to the police now, he would have time to destroy the records, to rewrite the story, to make me look like a confused old woman who had imagined a crime. I needed proof first. I needed the papers, the records, the witnesses. Then I would go to the police, and to the hearing, and I would stand in front of everyone and tell them what had happened.
Kieran listened, and then he asked a practical question, which is why I began to trust him completely. He asked where the proof was, and who could help me get it. I told him about my grandson Wesley, who pilots boats on the Danube and knows the river the way I know the company. I told him about my handwritten logbook, forty years of entries recording every real repair on every boat, which would show that the repairs on the invoices had never happened. I told him about the locked cabinet in the company's archive, and the key I carried, and the papers inside it. He nodded at each thing, as if he were marking them on a map, and then he said I could stay in his cottage for as long as I needed, and that no one would look for me here.
I stayed two more days, resting, eating, walking a little in the garden above the river when my legs would allow it. Kieran gave me a telephone, and I sat with it in my hands for a long time before I used it, thinking about who to call first, and what to say. In the end, there was only one person I trusted enough to call. My grandson. I would call Wesley. But first, I needed to be sure of my own story, from the beginning, from the day Nelson and I had founded the company, so that when I told it, I would tell it whole. I sat by the fire that evening, with the river below and the hills darkening outside, and I began to remember.