The Weight of Water Read online

  Copyright © 1997 by Anita Shreve

  Reading group guide copyright © 2004 by Anita Shreve and Little, Brown and Company

  Excerpt from Testimony copyright © 2008 by Anita Shreve

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

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  Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, January 1997

  First eBook edition: January 1998

  Back Bay Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The Back Bay Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  ISBN 978-0-316-07351-6

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  By Anita Shreve

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2: Maren Hontvedl’s Document

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  On the Origins of The Weight of Water

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About The Author

  Look For These Other Novels By Anita Shreve

  PRAISE FOR ANITA SHREVE’S

  The Weight of Water

  “Mesmerizing… quietly spellbinding.… A kind of mystery forged of romance and danger.… Part of the book’s power is of the conventional whodunit variety.… Equally strong is Shreve’s evocative prose style.… The Weight of Water is well-crafted entertainment that also plumbs the depths.”

  — Dan Cryer, Newsday

  “Spellbinding.… Shreve’s triumph here is in creating a pace that brilliantly mimics the frenzy of one who acts in a moment of searing passion.”

  — Leah Odze Epstein, Nashville BookPage

  “It’s impossible not to keep turning the pages, as Shreve, with somber voice, leads us on.”

  — Susan Dooley, Washington Post Book World

  “Riveting… haunting.… Shreve is equally adroit at spinning a yarn and etching fine prose.”

  — Kate Callen, San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Powerful.… This taut thriller is based on the true story of the murder of two women on a small island off the coast of New Hampshire in 1873.… Shreve has fashioned together two memorable dramas into a single narrative that explores jealousy, trust, and betrayal.”

  — Barbara James Thomson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Spare, tightly plotted, and compactly written… a novel powerfully driven by plot and language.… Shreve displays an intriguing range of style and tone. It is as if an Ibsen drama had erupted in an Ann Beattie novel.”

  — Maureen McLane, Chicago Tribune

  “Both stories move slowly and surely through the dark and distorting medium of water toward tragedy.… Both stories feel primitive in their passions, as if the characters were bereft of language and necessarily reliant on gaze, gesture, and touch.… This is a powerful achievement.”

  — Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

  “Absorbing and suspenseful.… The writing is controlled and evocative, the novel mysterious and disturbing.”

  — Orlando Sentinel

  “Gripping.… The speed with which lives unravel is at the heart of both strands of Shreve’s stunning tale. There is plenty for the reader to ponder and savor in this accomplished inquiry into the ravages of love.”

  — Heller McAlpin, Los Angeles Times

  “Shreve manages to surprise — her imagination never fails her.… The Weight of Water accrues power through its sharply described detail and carefully controlled language.… It is impossible not to admire Shreve’s considerable craft.”

  — Jocelyn McClurg, Hartford Courant

  “An engrossing tale.… A cryptic long-lost narrative inside an impending family tragedy wrapped in a true-crime murder mystery framed by the aftermath of all of the above.… Ms. Shreve unravels themes of adultery, jealousy, crimes of passion, incest, negligence, and loss… ultimately creating a nearly intolerable tension.… A haunting novel.”

  — Susan Kenney, New York Times Book Review

  “Taut and chilling.… Told in exquisitely moving prose.… The sense Shreve conveys of life’s inexorability is perfectly on target.”

  — Polly Paddock, Charlotte Observer

  “It’s a literary voyage you don’t want to miss.… A stunningly realized portrait of love’s darker aspects.… Shreve’s plot line is a powerful current, the writing equally strong.”

  — Amy Waldman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Shreve manages to keep the reader’s interest at a fever pitch.… A haunting and disturbing tale.”

  — Karen Glendenning, Chattanooga Free Press

  “Shreve’s writing is spare, poetic, and completely captivating.”

  — Rae Francoeur, North Shore Magazine

  “Enthralling.… The Weight of Water sheds light as raw as that which floods the Isles of Shoals in the dark of winter.… Shreve has written the most moving book of her career so far.”

  — Rebecca Radner, San Francisco Chronicle

  BY ANITA SHREVE

  Testimony

  Body Surfing

  A Wedding in December

  Light on Snow

  All He Ever Wanted

  Sea Glass

  The Last Time They Met

  Fortune’s Rocks

  The Pilot’s Wife

  The Weight of Water

  Resistance

  Where or When

  Strange Fits of Passion

  Eden Close

  For my mother and my daughter

  Author’s Note

  DURING THE NIGHT of March 5, 1873, two women, Norwegian immigrants, were murdered on the Isles of Shoals, a group of islands ten miles off the New Hampshire coast. A third woman survived, hiding in a sea cave until dawn.

  The passages of court testimony included in this work are taken verbatim from the transcript of The State of Maine v. Louis H.F. Wagner.

  Apart from recorded historical fact, the names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this work are either the products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  The matter of who killed Anethe and Karen Christensen was settled in a court of law, but has continued to be debated for more than a century.

  I HAVE TO let this story go. It is with me all the time now, a terrible weight.

  I sit in the harbor and look across to smuttynose. A pink light, a stain, makes its way across the island. I cut the engine of the small boat I have rented and put my fingers into the water, letting the shock of the cold swallow my hand. I move my hand through the seawater, and think how the ocean, this harbor, is a repository of secrets, its own elegy.

  I was here before. A year ago. I took photographs of the island, of vegetation that had dug in against the weather: black sedge and bayberry and sheep sorrel and sea blite. The island is not barren, but it is sere and bleak. It is granite, and everywhere there are ragged reefs that cut. To have lived on Smuttynose would have required a particular
tenacity, and I imagine the people then as dug in against the elements, their roots set into the cracks of the rocks like the plants that still survive.

  The house in which the two women were murdered burned in 1885, but when I was here a year ago, I photographed the footprint of the house, the marked perimeter. I got into a boat and took pictures of the whitened ledges of Smuttynose and the black-backed gulls that swept and rose above the island in search of fish only they could see. When I was here before, there were yellow roses and blackberries.

  When I was here before, something awful was being assembled, but I didn’t know it then.

  I take my hand from the water and let the drops fall upon the papers in the carton, dampened already at the edges from the slosh. The pink light turns to violet.

  Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

  IT IS MY job to call out if I see a shape, a rocky ledge, an island. I stand at the bow and stare into the fog. Peering intently, I begin to see things that aren’t really there. First tiny moving lights, then minutely subtle gradations of gray. Was that a shadow? Was that a shape? And then, so shockingly that for a few important seconds I cannot even speak, it is all there: Appledore and Londoners and Star and Smuttynose — rocks emerging from the mist. Smuttynose, all of a piece, flat with bleached ledges, forbidding, silent.

  I call out. Land, I guess I say.

  Sometimes, on the boat, I have a sense of claustrophobia, even when alone on the bowsprit. I have not anticipated this. We are four adults and one child forced to live agreeably together in a space no bigger than a small bedroom, and that space almost always damp. The sheets are damp, my underwear is damp. Rich, who has had the boat for years, says this is always true of sailing. He gives me the impression that accepting the dampness, even taking a certain pleasure in it, is an indication of character.

  Rich has brought a new woman with him whose name is Adaline.

  Rich gives instructions. The sailboat is old, a Morgan 41, but well-tended, the teak newly varnished. Rich calls for the boat hook, shouts to Thomas to snag the buoy. Rich slows the engine, reverses it, guns it slightly, maneuvers the long, slim boat — this space that moves through water — alongside the mooring. Thomas leans over, catches the buoy. Adaline looks up from her book. It is our third day aboard the sloop: Hull, Marblehead, Annisquam, now the Isles of Shoals.

  The Isles of Shoals, an archipelago, lie in the Atlantic, ten miles southeast off the New Hampshire coast at Portsmouth. The islands measure three and a half miles north and south by one and a half miles east and west. There are nine islands at high tide, eight at low; White and Seavey are connected. The largest island looked to its first residents like a fat pig wallowing in the sea, and hence the name of Hog. Smuttynose, our destination, derived its name from a clump of seaweed on the nose of a rock extending into the ocean. It has always been an off-putting name, though the others read like poetry from a ship’s log: “We passed today the islands of Star and Malaga and Seavey and Londoners; and navigated to our success the treacherous rock of Shag and Eastern and Babb’s and Mingo.”

  In 1635, the Isles of Shoals were formally divided between the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which included Maine, and the territory subsequently to be known as New Hampshire. Duck, Hog, Malaga, Smuttynose, and Cedar went to Maine. Star, Londoners, White, and Seavey went to New Hampshire. The division has always held. In 1635, when the ordinance was first declared, nearly all of the residents of Star fled to Smuttynose, because it was still legal to drink in Maine.

  From the guidebooks, I read startling facts: On the island of Star, in 1724, a woman named Betty Moody hid herself and her three children from Indians in a cavern. She crouched near to the ground and held one of the children, an infant girl, tightly to her breast. Mrs. Moody meant to silence her baby to keep the child from giving away their location, but when the Indians had gone, she discovered that she had smothered the girl.

  Rich looks like a wrestler: He is neatly muscled and compact. His head is shaved, and he has perfect teeth. I do not think he resembles Thomas at all — an odd, genetic quirk; there are ten years between them. Rich tickles Billie unmercifully, even on the Zodiac. She squeals as if she were being tortured, and then complains when he stops. Rich walks about the Morgan with athletic grace, and he gives the impression of a man for whom nothing has ever been complicated.

  We have come only from Annisquam and arrive in the early morning. I watch Thomas bend over the stern to snag the mooring. His legs are pale with whorls of brown hair above the backs of his knees. Over his bathing suit, he has on a pink dress shirt, the cuffs rolled to the elbows. It is odd to see Thomas, my husband of fifteen years, engaged in chores upon this boat, a second mate to his younger brother. Without his pen or his books, Thomas seems disarmed, disoriented by manual labor. As I watch him, I think, as I so often do, that my husband looks too tall for his surroundings. He seems to have to stoop, even while seated. His hair, cut longish, now nearly colorless, falls forward onto his forehead, and he pushes it away with a gesture I am fond of and have seen a thousand times. Despite his seniority, or perhaps because of it, I sometimes see that Thomas is unsettled by the presence of Rich and Adaline, as a father might be in the company of a grown son and a woman.

  What does Adaline think when she observes Thomas? My husband is a poet of the first tier, already a kind of emeritus at the university, even though he is only forty-seven. Adaline is not a poet, but seems to have great admiration for Thomas’s work. I wonder if she knew Thomas’s verse before, or if she has learned it for the trip.

  When there is time, I read about the islands. I carry pounds of paper in my camera bag — guidebooks, accounts of the murders, a trial transcript — materials from Research, who seem to think that I am writing the piece. When the murders occurred, in 1873, the newspapers wrote of the crime, and later it was called in these same papers “the trial of the century.” This is a familiar turn of phrase this summer as we witness a courtroom spectacle that has all but benumbed even the most avid observers. My editor thinks there is a link between the two events: a double murder with a blade, a famous trial, circumstantial evidence that hinges on tiny factual details. As for me, I think the similarities few, but a magazine will make of something what it can. I am paid to take the pictures.

  My expense account is lavish, but Rich, who publishes technical journals, will not hear of money. I am glad that Thomas has thought of his younger brother and his boat: I would not like to be in such close quarters with a strange captain or a crew.

  How long, I wonder, has Rich been seeing Adaline?

  I read many accounts of the murders. I am struck most by the relativity of facts.

  When I think about the murders, I try to picture what might have happened that night. I imagine there would have been a gale, and that the wind from the water would have battered against the glass. Sometimes, I can hear that wind and can see the wooden house under the high cirrus of a full moon. Maren and Anethe would have lain on their backs on either side of the double bed — or could it have been that they were touching? — and in the next room, Karen would have called out suddenly with fright.

  Or was it that the dog barked first?

  Sometimes I imagine the murders to have been a thing of subtle grace and beauty, with slim arms raised in white nightgowns against the fright, white nightgowns against the snow, the rocks sharp and the gale billowing the thin linen like sheets on a line. I see an arm raised along a window, the moon etching smudges on the panes, and a woman calling to another and another, while below them, at the waterline, the waves slap fast and hard against the dory.

  I love to watch my daughter move about the boat in her bathing suit, the fabric stretched and limp, riding high over her butt, her body plump and delicious, often salty if I lick her arm. At five, Billie is entranced by the sloop, a space with lots of cubbyholes an
d clever places to store the few toys she has been allowed to bring along. She sleeps in the quarter berth beside the companionway. Adaline and Rich are in the forward cabin, the owner’s prerogative. Thomas and I have less privacy, stowed amidships as we are, in the open, on a bed that is put away each morning to become a breakfast table.

  Occasionally I find Billie’s sandy footprints down below. Sand in the fridge. Does Rich mind? I think not. Billie’s hair has lightened in the sun and curls continuously from the damp. More and more, I notice her enlarged pupils and the way they cause her eyes to appear nearly black. She has extravagantly long lashes that exaggerate every blink. The loss of her two top front teeth has widened her grin and produces a delicate lisp.

  In the mornings, I can hear Adaline and Rich in the forward cabin: a rustle of cloth, a murmur, rhythmic movements. The sounds from Adaline are surprising — guttural and sometimes frantic. I begin to anticipate the sounds and to move away from them. I go above to the cockpit in my robe. I wonder if Billie would be afraid if she awoke — afraid that Adaline were being hurt.

  I think that Evan, who was Anethe’s husband, would have moved urgently toward the door on the morning after the murders, reports of the unthinkable pushing him forward in a kind of frenzy. The high cirrus would have blown out by then, and the sun would have been on the rocks, beginning to melt the snow. Evan would have been the first man inside the door. He would have insisted.

  In 1852, Nancy Underhill, a schoolteacher, was sitting on a ledge at Star when a wave washed her into the sea. Her body was found, a week later, at Cape Neddick, in Maine.