Dark Water by J.S. Cook

Author:J.S. Cook [Cook, J.S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery/suspense
ISBN: 978-1-64405-915-9
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Why can’t you let me

Not fair

Gemma said her mam is going to

A note, written in purple ballpoint pen and then discarded. Lily was uncomfortable discussing things with him in person, preferring the anonymity of text messages or the telephone’s imposed aural distance. He’d once told her she could talk to him about anything, but that wasn’t true, and they both knew it. Yvonne had given her the necessary information about boys, sex, and her period, not him. Tadhg couldn’t imagine how he’d even begin to broach the subject. When she was little, it was so much easier—when she asked about why the sky was blue and how did birds know where to go when it got cold in autumn.

He got up and sat in Lily’s chair. The desk was scaled for a young girl, the chair so absurdly low his knees were almost dragging on the floor. She’d left her laptop on, the cover not quite closed. Her desktop wallpaper was a photo she took herself, the year before when they’d gone to Gros Morne, a selfie of him and Lily with the mountains at their back. They had driven up to Norstead, the recreated Viking village at the very tip of the peninsula. Lily wasn’t interested in the wooden church or the longhouse, or the knarr Snorri, meticulously handcrafted by a master boat builder. Instead she’d wandered down to the beach alone, watching as the evening sky darkened to the wan glow of the blue hour. “You go away, Dad,” she said, waving him off. But he stayed close enough to see her silhouette as the day bled into the Atlantic, and then…

“Dad. Oh my God, Dad! You have to… come and see this!” And she’d hauled him by both hands down to the beach, heedless of the darkness and the rocks, intent on one thing. “Look up.”

The Northern Lights. Yes, he’d seen them before, but Lily never had, so he held his tongue while the aurora unfurled itself, hissing and snapping above their heads. Some of the Norstead actors, still in Viking costume, came down to the beach in little groups. No one spoke above a murmur. The band of light undulated lazily in the night sky, changing through green to red and purple, vanishing and reappearing, seeming almost to move towards them. She backed herself into him, and they stood for a long time together, his hands on her shoulders while the aurora consumed the sky.

“Is it real, Dad?” Lily had asked. “How can it be so real?”

Tadhg clicked through the various document and photo folders, finding the usual stuff—pictures with her friends, school assignments, music she downloaded off the internet. He found one subfolder labeled ‘Recipes’ and clicked on it out of curiosity. If Lily had developed any sudden fascination with cooking, this was the first he’d heard of it. Even before the cancer, she had little interest in food, subsisting on the bare minimum, feeding herself with tiny bits of things like carrot sticks and wands of stringy celery dipped in thick Icelandic yogurt.

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