The Waters & The Wild is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by DeSales Harrison
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Harrison, DeSales, author.
Title: The waters & the wild : a novel / DeSales Harrison.
Other titles: Waters and the wild
Description: New York : Random House, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008173| ISBN 9780812989540 | ISBN 9780812989564 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysts—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. | Psychotherapist and patient—Fiction. | Fathers and daughters—Fiction. | Life change events—France—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.A78342 W38 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008173
Ebook ISBN 9780812989564
Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Laura Klynstra
v5.2
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: October 2008
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Spurlock: 11:57 P.M.
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Spurlock: 1:07 A.M.
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Spurlock: 3:41 A.M.
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
April 2016
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PROLOGUE October 2008
Had you a nightscope, or the eye of a night bird staring down from the rafters of the church, you could make him out, the priest: supine, sunk in darkness, wide-awake.
He had not seen her come in, the girl. How long ago had that been, Father Spurlock wondered, lying on the shelter cot, his gaze lost above him in the groined and vaulting shadows of the church. Three weeks, he counted, three weeks since she appeared, occupying the café table as though she had always been there, her profile still and grave as a figure cut in bas-relief. The table she had chosen in the church café was the small one beneath the Noah window, and the stained-glass eye of Noah’s crow scrutinized her, or rather the sheet of paper she’d unfolded in front of her, as though the crow had perched on the gunwale of the ark for that purpose alone. That day she had approached him, shown him the paper, and abruptly departed, leaving him with nothing save the name Clementine Abend scrawled on the palm of his hand.
How long had she been sitting there, staring out at the evening rush-hour traffic? Or rather through the traffic, he thought, as one might stare through a clear stream to its streambed. Had she been there when he’d tied his apron on over his clericals and assumed the five P.M. shift behind the café counter? And at what moment had she changed, imperceptibly and without moving, from anyone into someone, from someone into that girl?
But no, she wasn’t a girl anymore. Even from where he stood he could sense that. Eighteen? Possible, though she seemed older. Twenty? No, younger than that. Something in her bearing, in the unmoved abstraction of her gaze, had convinced him that she expected no one, that no one would arrive to join her. The volume of huge darkness pressed down on his chest, like a book of stone.
Yes, he remembered, she had chosen the table under the Noah window, the crow over her shoulder hunched up and pitch-black against the glassy expanse of the floodwaters. If the crow had been visible when she had come in, he thought, if the rest of the window had yet to go dark, then she had arrived before sunset. She had remained into the evening, even after Luis, the custodian, had stacked the last chairs and herded the tables together, chaining everything to an eyebolt he’d sunk in the church facade. “Buenas noches, Padre—” Luis had said as he always said, closing the doors on the setting sun as he left. “Que duerma bien.” Then the girl had been alone in the closed shop.
It was Father Spurlock’s custom, since the café had first opened eight months ago in what had once been the Lady Chapel, to intone a mock dismissal, filling the space with his ringing, ecclesial baritone: “Hallowed Grounds is closing now. Go in peace! We’re here every day, even Sundays,” before adding with hambone emphasis, “Especially on Sundays.” Now, however, he didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t—she wasn’t hoping to stay in the church, was she? The “overnight visitors” (as they were known with varying degrees of irony by the vestry) knew to approach the church after dark, to stash their carts behind the alley dumpsters before making their way through the service door. Surely she was not one of them. Even if there was something vagabond about her (she’d propped a worn backpack in the seat facing her), her bearing shared nothing with the unreachable, untouchable abjection of the visitors. Untying his apron, he had resolved then to revert to his pastoral approach and greet her as he would greet any tourist or passerby from the avenue. Welcome to the Incarnation, miss, he would say. I’m Father Spurlock. What brings you here today? He regretted now, as he never did otherwise, that he had let his beard, heavy and lion-gold, grow long enough to hide his priest’s collar.
Three weeks later, staring up from his cot into the dimensionless darkness of the church, he saw it again as though she had never left, her profile against the wall beneath the Noah window. The “custodian man” (she had said) had told her to wait until the coffee shop had closed. Padre Spurlock, Luis had said, would be able to see her then.
—
So, Father Spurlock thought, I have Luis to thank for this as well. “We’ve got Luis to thank for this!” Mrs. Nickerson, his helmet-haired secretary, never tired of proclaiming, whether in amazement, or gratitude, or exasperation. Luis: whom the church payroll listed as sexton; Luis, who referred to himself—even after forty years and
