The story was on the evening news as well. I watched it with James. By then more bones had been found, so the piece was extended, but it still featured the same interview with Betty and Terry Chambers.
I watched James as Betty Chambers once again declared the findings to be a mystery.
“No, it isn’t,” he said. I watched his expression change as everything he understood about the world—and about engineering—collapsed around him.
Without another word, he leaped from his seat and left the house. I followed as he raced across the garden and into the copse. When I came out from the other side of the trees, I saw him in the graveyard, holding up a skull, Hamlet-like. I’d never noticed before that he would make quite a dashing, if overaged, Hamlet.
He marched to where the mausoleum door had been and looked inside, presumably looking for Lennie.
He turned and saw me. “What in the name of fuckety-fuck has happened?” he shouted. “Daisy, where is that fucking surveyor’s report?”
I stopped and pretended I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He flung the skull away from him and marched toward me. “Did you hear me? Where is that fucking surveyor’s report?”
“I don’t think it ever came,” I said.
He stared at me.
“Do you want me to give them a ring in the morning?” I asked.
Well, no, James did not want me to give them a ring in the morning. He made me aware, in no uncertain terms, that he did not want the surveyors anywhere near the place now.
“That report has suddenly dropped right down our list of priorities, don’t you think?” he asked me. But it was good that he still believed there was a report.
“Help me look!” he said, and he marched along the riverbank on the same pilgrimage I had already made several times that day, looking for Lennie. I followed, wondering whether or not to tell him Lennie wasn’t there. But James stopped, looking down into the water.
There was Lennie. Apparently, he had either broken loose from whatever had been holding him under or reached the optimum stage of decomposition to have risen to the surface. He looked rather different to the last time I had seen him; the fine weather we had been having had certainly done its work. James stood, hands on his hips, surveying the scene as if it were a minor spillage. I looked at Lennie again, took in the full state of him, eyes missing, holes in his skin. I thought I could smell the decay, although I was a fair way away from him. I began to gag.
“Don’t,” James said. I walked away from the riverbank and took deep breaths of fresh air. I waited for James to tell me what to do, because I was certain there would be something.
Sure enough. “We’re going to have to move him,” he said.
I turned. “How are we going to get him out?” I asked. And out in one piece? He looked to be delicately held together and we didn’t want an errant arm floating off on its own.
“We don’t have to get him out. We just have to get him away from this area.”
I returned to the riverbank, where James was picking fallen branches from the ground and discarding them. There was little that was much more than a twig. He reached up and pulled at a branch, then let it go.
“Wait here,” he said to me. “Don’t let anyone come past.” And I watched him walking back to the house, wondering how I was meant to stop anyone coming past.
Luckily, no one did and a few minutes later, James reappeared with a spade and a rake from Mr. Billings’s tool shed. “Which do you want?” he asked me.
Not being sure what they were to be used for, I chose the rake, as raking seemed to be a less labor-intensive job, but it turned out it didn’t matter, the plan was to use them to push Lennie’s body out, away from the riverbank, so that the current would catch it and float him off and away, far from our land. Perfect. I had to give James credit for a good plan there.
And so we began, gently prodding the body free of the reeds and out to where we could see the water moving. Lennie swirled for a moment, then began bobbing gracefully away from us.
We followed with our implements. Now and then James would give Lennie a little poke to stop him catching on some shrubbery on our side, or I would reach over and rake him back in toward us if he floated too far toward the other bank. We kept an eye out for walkers approaching, but it was a quiet evening on the public rights-of-way.
From a distance, we must have looked like a couple of country bumpkins carrying out some country chore, as our ancestors had done for centuries before us. And so we made our bucolic way along, the birds singing, the breeze rustling the leaves on the trees, and the river running alongside us, carrying its gruesome cargo. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” popped into my head, and I sang it as we went along. So well was it all going, James didn’t even tell me to “shut the fuck up.”
Then we came to the end of the field, where the road went over the river and on the other side the Newmans’ farm began.
“Is this far enough?” I asked. After all, once it was under the bridge, it was, technically, off our property. In a manner of speaking, the Newmans’ farm was our property, them being tenant farmers—for now at least, the dispute over selling it for warehouses notwithstanding.
“It’s not far enough,” he said. “We need to get him well onto the Newmans’ land. Otherwise, it’s obvious where he came from.”
I took his point, but I wasn’t keen on going much farther.
Lennie floated under the bridge and stopped. The water was quite shallow there, and he seemed to have caught on a rock. James sighed and waded in. He pulled at Lennie until he moved a little farther but no more.
