“We all make mistakes, and sometimes we pay a high price for them. That girl made a mistake when she tried to cross that river, she paid the highest price of all. She didn’t know how dangerous that river was, but you’ve all been told now. You just be sure that dam works, Mr. Brennon, because that river isn’t something to trifle with.”

The man beside Daddy helped him sit back down.

“Is that it?” Luckadoo asked, his eyes sweeping the room. “If so, I’m going to give the last five minutes to Ruth Kowalsky’s mother.”

Mrs. Kowalsky stepped up to the lectern. She wore a black dress that reached closer to her ankles than her knees, and I wondered if like my father she also wore funeral clothes, not for herself but for her daughter.

She was a tall slim woman, a woman who had retained her beauty into middle age, conceding only a few wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. Her hair was frosted blond, cut short and stylishly by someone very talented and no doubt very expensive. But her beauty seemed fragile as an eggshell. You could tell something had broken inside her in the halting way she walked to the lectern.

“Oh, shit,” one of the river rats sitting with Luke said. He hadn’t spoken loudly, but the room was so still his words carried like a shout.

“My name is Ellen Kowalsky, and I’m Ruth’s mother,” she began. “My husband didn’t want me to come tonight. But I had to. You didn’t know Ruth, but I’m going to tell you about her, because maybe if I can give you some sense of what she was like, you will understand why it’s so important to us to take her home, to give her a proper burial.”

Ellen Kowalsky spoke slowly, her words carefully enunciated, making each word seem tentative, difficult. She did not look at us but above and past us. Her eyes were fixed on the back wall as though she were scaling it, each word she spoke another piton.

She’ll never make it through this, I said to myself, because her eyes already glistened with tears. I thought of her diving into the pool below Wolf Cliff Falls, hands searching for her daughter as she moved along the bottom until she’d had to surface. What had she thought or said to her husband as he restrained her from entering the pool a third time? Had she begged him to let her go, tried to break free from his grasp?

I tried to imagine what it would be like to watch your child being swept away. How many nights would you wake in the dark, gasping for breath, as you thought of her trying to breathe? How often would you wonder if you’d only gone to Grandfather Mountain or Asheville your daughter would be alive now?