“But how do you know? How do you know she’s in the river?” Louise asked. She didn’t want to believe Florence was dead but she found herself trying to remember the last time she had seen her sister. She tried to smile but her lower lip quivered, she was already crying.

“Louise,” her grandmother gripped her hands, “we know. Now we have to get her.”

Louise did not understand what her grandmother was saying to her. The world seemed suddenly more than she could comprehend, her problems with Baptiste small, understandable. She pulled away from her grandmother and stepped out on the porch as if she could wake herself up in the bright afternoon light. She could see the green edge of the Flathead River in the near distance. The water looked thin. She could see the chalky slump of hills that crowned the banks, the tall pine trees that shadowed the water. All this time, she thought, she had been talking to her grandmother, and her sister was in the river.

“Your dad’s gone for Charlie Kicking Woman,” Louise heard her grandmother say. “They’re going to drag the river.” Several years ago a rancher had drowned in the river. She remembered the dragline, the large snag hook entering the water, the man cleaved by the brutal hook. Her grandmother stood behind her. She glimpsed the heaviness in the old woman’s shoulders, remembered how clumsy her grandmother’s hands were after her mother’s death, the painstaking weave of her grandmother’s fingers as she braided Florence’s hair. She saw the burden of her grandmother’s grief. She saw the scarlet willows that dipped down to the distant water and began to feel the quivering weight of her sister’s death. There was no way to avoid grief.

Louise wondered if she could pull Florence from the river. She knew any foolish action would only cause her grandmother more pain, but she couldn’t let Charlie drag the river. She looked toward the road. She didn’t tell her grandmother what she was planning. She wasn’t sure it would work or if Jules Bart would agree to help them. But if anyone could pull her sister from the river without a hook, it was him. She left her grandmother standing beside the house and fought the urge to look back. Instead Louise looked far away to the watery light at the end of the long highway, the wavering pure light she could not reach, and wished this story was like that tricking light, something that appeared to be real but was only a dream.

Charlie Kicking Woman THE STILL RIVER PLACE