A Fountain Filled With Blood

“What’s this going to be? Is this the main building?” She strode briskly around the edge of a rectangular excavation, trying to think of an intelligent question to ask. What do you think you’re going to find here? was the only one that came to mind. Russ’s voice, his face last night, seemed fixed in her consciousness. “Your version of the truth,” he had said. Maybe he was right. Maybe she wanted him to be right.

“Look,” Ray said, catching up with her. He gave an exasperated sigh, which she ignored. “Okay, I’ll show you around. But the rules say you gotta have a hard hat. So just stay there, okay? Just stay there while I get you one.”

“Absolutely. Anything you say.”

He dashed back to the trailer, banged inside, and emerged a few seconds later with an orange hard hat, which she dutifully strapped on. It made her hotter, but it wasn’t as bad as walking around a tarmac in a flight helmet, so she couldn’t complain. Then, true to his word, Ray showed her the site.

It wasn’t much to see, a bunch of half-finished foundations and trenches laid with pipes. Ray pointed out where the main lodge was going to be, the guest wings and the health club. She tried to envision the lawns and gardens as Ray described the layout, but it was hard to see anything except the raw gash in the forest. Ray was very fond of numbers, so she heard about the tons of cement, the gallons of sewage, the meters of piping, the square footage of the buildings. She listened and made appropriate comments, all the time waiting for something that would reveal more of Bill Ingraham to her, trying not to analyze the impulse that had made her jump on Peggy Landry for this chance to see the man’s last work in this world. Thinking too hard about her impulses always made them seem a little stupid. Better just to trust in her unconscious—or whoever it was directing her inner voice—and go with the flow.

Ray was going on about the inflow and the outflow to the whirlpools when she realized she hadn’t seen something she would have expected. “Where’s the pool?” she said. “I mean, they’re not just going to have hot tubs, are they? On a day like today, you’d really want to be outside, soaking up the sun.”

Ray pointed toward one of the openings cut into the forest. “That way.” They went up the earthen ramp linking one terrace to the next and walked out of the heat and into the coolness of the trees. “The pool for this place is something else. Bill designed it around the quarry. You come here as a guest in the summer, you’re going to feel like you’re back at the ole swimming hole”—he grinned at her—“except the ole swimming hole didn’t have a bar.” The road, two ruts of bald dirt sunk between overgrown grass and delicately stemmed wildflowers, curved and headed slightly downhill. “Best thing about it is, we’re killing two birds with one stone. Right now, the quarry’s set up as our cement works; plus, we’re getting all our stone for the paving and the walls out of it. So we’re digging out the pool just by working there. When we don’t need it anymore, we cement in the bottom, tile it, and there you go, just like the real thing, only better.”

“Wasn’t Mr. Ingraham”—she caught herself—“isn’t he worried about the PCBs? I assume this is the same quarry that was used for storage back in the seventies.”

The road opened up to a breathtaking view. They were at the upper end of the quarry, to one side of a curving cliff of pale rock that fell dramatically to the working quarry below. It sloped as it reached the lowest point and was riddled with ledges and dotted everywhere with stubbornly surviving plants. A narrow crevasse split the cliff, and Clare was delighted to see a thin waterfall pouring out of it, splashing over the scree and filling a wide, dark pool. “Water from the cleft,” she said, grinning at Ray. “Very biblical. Is that going to flow into the swimming pool?”

“Naw. That stream comes from up the mountain, and it’s too unreliable. When we started, it was gushing so fierce, you wouldn’t want to go near it, but by the end of July, it’ll just be a damp spot. Besides, there’s no way to guarantee the quality of the water. We’re gonna build a catch basin and channel it off the property. Put a screening wall of natural stone in front of it, so the guests can still see the water falling. It’ll be real pretty.”

Below, in the work pit, a rock crusher and a cement mixer squatted amid a tumble of rocks and enough bags of sand and chalk to stop a flood. The road Ray and Clare were standing on wound down in a curve to an earthen staging ground plowed out between the quarry and the trees. Three dump trucks, idle now, sat on the dirt, flanked by an excavator and someone’s Jeep. She took off her helmet to let the breeze cool her head. Ray was right: It would be pretty. If you didn’t worry about carcinogenic chemicals floating around with you, that is.