The Woman from the River

By Peter Clement

During the darkest winter, two disparate lives intersect through the mysterious woman in the river.

In 1975, Montreal is changing. Dr. James McKnight, wunderkind of the ER in a prestigious hospital, is finding it difficult to play well with others. He works hard at delivering medical miracles. When a beautiful suicide ends up in his morgue, things start to spiral out of control, for him and her only friend Benny, a mentally ill recluse.

Benny holds the key to the identity of the woman, and the two men must trust each other to stop a crooked cop, a brutal gang, and the evil voices inside Benny, before they both lose everything.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Belgrave House
• Release date: Apr 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781947812468

Book preview

MONTREAL 1975

1

Coke Bottle Eyes

Strolling slowly under the trees that lined his street, he liked how the frosty nights had gradually skinned the green off leaves and left them scarlet red.

The crisp ones that had already fallen to the sidewalk rustled playfully around his shoes.

But then his voices started in on him.

Spanking red, said the scary-one. Stinging scarlet!

It hissed the words the way it always did when taking over. That’s how bad things turn out. Bad things like you. You’ll be spanking red.

Spanking red! Spanking red! added the deep-rumbling gargle-throat that often piled on once the scary-one had started to taunt him. Then we’ll rub you raw.

Rub you raw! Rub you raw! they chanted in unison.

He picked up his pace but knew he could never outrun them. Even when he held his hands over his ears the taunts continued to swirl through his head.

Rub you raw!

Spanking red!

Rub you raw!

People stared at him.

His cheeks began to burn, and he felt ashamed. How could anyone walking near him not hear the tumult within his skull?

Then her voice interrupted. No one will hurt you, she said. The words emerged from the harsh onslaught of the others like a soothing caress.

He hoped she would stay and make them shut up. Make them go away.

Look, the colors of the leaves are lovely, she continued. See how the sunlight dances on the reds and golds. None of this can hurt you.

But he could only see a million glittering pieces, like broken glass with sharp cutting edges from a rock-shattered church window. He’d get in trouble again. Stinging-red trouble. Rubbed-raw trouble.

No, you’ve done nothing bad this time, she said. Nothing’s wrong. They are only leaves. Her mellifluous tone began to blunt the jagged fear that Scary-one and Gargle-throat had set off. Simply enjoy your walk. Continue on to the doctors’ house. You like all the doctors you’ve seen there, and they like you. One of them is waiting for you. Nurse Annie too. She always gives you a big smile when you walk into the office. Calls you by name when it’s your turn. Lets you see the pretty tattoos that coil up her legs. You like that, don’t you? You’re safe there. Scary-one, Gargle-throat, and all the rest, they feel too frightened to come out there. They hate all those doctors. They hate Annie. Because all the doctors and Annie like you. Bad voices can’t come out when people like you.

Overriding Scary-one and Gargle-throat, her words continued to comfort him, and, slowing his pace to a walk, he began to relax under the flickering warmth of the leaf-filtered light. He stopped walking and closed his eyes for a few seconds. The inside skin of his lids transformed into a million flecks of crimson and gold.

Calmer, he resumed walking, but still worried about how the normals perceived him.

A block later, an entrance to the cave loomed. Morning travelers streamed in and out of its orifice as though they were being ingested and regurgitated at the same time. He hated the cave, but he had to take the metro seven stops before he got off near the doctor’s house.

You can do this, her voice soothed.

He entered the stream of people and let them carry him through the doors, the pneumatic hiss adding to his impression of being swallowed down a serpent’s gullet. The smells of tacos, hamburgers, onions, hot dogs, and fries swooped up from the caverns below, causing him to gag as he descended on the long escalator. He clutched the rubber handrail so tightly he feared his uncut fingernails would embed themselves in its hard surface. Reaching the bottom he pushed through the metro turnstile that ate his exact change, stepped onto the platform, and hurried to the far end where there were fewer people. The scuffling noises made by the shoes of passengers scurrying to and from the exits reminded him of noises the rats made behind the rotting walls in his apartment.

He pressed himself against a tiled pillar, leaning as far back from the tracks as possible.

Afraid? said Scary-one.

Might jump? said Gargle-throat.

Do it! Do it! Do it! they commanded, the urgency of their cry scalding his brain like steam.

Pushing his back harder against the tiles, he braced against the impulse to throw himself forward. He could feel the sweat forming between his shoulder blades. Some of it trickled down to the small of his back. It would show through his shirt. Doctor and Nurse would see it when he took off his coat. Would smell it. Would ask him about it.

Coke bottle eyes! Coke bottle eyes! Gargle-throat chanted.

Scary-one chimed in.

Coke bottle eyes! Coke bottle eyes!

It was a taunt from his childhood.

The children at school had labeled him with it on account of his poor eyesight and thick glasses. He endured it at the time.

The voices had not yet begun to plague him back then, and he had been able to do well in class.

The other pupils are just jealous because you’re so smart, his mother had reassured him, folding him into her arms where the feel of her breasts, the steady beat of her heart, and the mild, familiar fragrance of her—a lingering scent of soap on her skin—would calm him. Don’t listen to them. That fine brain of yours will be the envy of all when you grow up.

That fine brain of his turned on him when he was nineteen and the voices came.

Don’t tell! Scary-one and Gargle-throat had warned from the beginning.

You do, and they will lock you up.

Lock you up! Lock you up! became their familiar refrain.

He’d kept them secret for twenty-five years.

Lived alone.

Couldn’t keep a job.

Avoided people.

Survived on welfare.

After the death of his mother, he had only the voices for company.

In the distance, from far down the subway track, came the crescendoing whine of a high-powered, electric turbine and a rush of air pushed out of the tunnel, racing by him like a ghost version of the oncoming train.

The breeze felt good on his perspiring face.

Jump! Jump! Jump! Scary-one prompted at a shout.

Coke bottle eyes! Gargle-throat screamed.

The noise of the approaching engine grew louder and drowned out their taunts.

Then a lone woman wandered out from the crowd and stood near the platform’s edge, closer to the track than she should have.

He’d seen her before. She sometimes worked at the clinic. Was probably headed there now.

Push her! whispered a new voice, neither male nor female. It was simply a breath that seemed to breathe into his ear.

Push her! it repeated, overwhelming all the other noises with its soft imperative.

Time slowed.

This hadn’t happened any of the other times he’d seen her. True, she didn’t like him the way Annie liked him. Didn’t even notice him when he was in the waiting room.

Push her hard, repeated this new voice.

The woman was looking in the direction of the tunnel. Her body profile was slender. A cherry-red trench coat cinched tight by a wide matching belt highlighted her narrow waist and modest contours of her hips and breasts.

Though she herself was not tall, her neck was elegantly long, and her well-proportioned straight-lined nose, cheekbones, and jaw were in sharp contrast with the soft delicate curve of her lips. She also possessed thick black hair swept back from a smooth, high forehead. Viewed from the side, she reminded him of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, whose portrait he’d once seen while visiting a mummy exhibit at the Musée des Beaux-Arts because Scary-one had dared him to look at dead people.

Push her! the whisper continued, more insistent now.

The whine of the train’s lead car rose to a peak, its arrival imminent.

He stepped toward her.

She showed no awareness of his presence behind her.

He raised his hand level with her shoulder.

Now! came the barely audible sigh, all the more insistent for its quietness.

He hesitated.

The lead car burst out of the tunnel and swept by her, creating an even more turbulent stream of air that caused her coat to flap around her legs and her hair to ruffle in its wake.

She turned her back to the blast as the rest of the cars flashed by and squinted to protect her eyes from a cloud of stirred-up debris. Instinctively putting out a hand to steady herself against the force of the gust, she inadvertently pressed her palm against the front of his chest.

Why thank you, sir, she said, smiling up at him. If you hadn’t been there, I might have blown over.

Her voice had the warmth of sunshine.

He stood motionless, too surprised to reply or react, his own hair tousled and coat whipping around him like a cape.

The cars slowed to a stop.

She turned toward them.

He continued to stand behind her as the car doors opened with a hiss and the passengers began to exit.

Too late, said the whisper.

She stepped quickly aboard, took a seat, and busied herself flipping through a notebook she’d pulled out of her purse. He followed her into the car and stood at its opposite end, watching her.

Next time. whispered the voice.

2

The Lady from the River

She was tall.

I estimate that barefoot she would have stood five foot eleven.

Under the OR lamp, her wet black hair contrasts sharply with that eggshell white of her brow and cheeks, the skin so flawless it provokes disbelief that such perfection could exist. I can imagine how, in public, it might have invited closer scrutiny, the catty kind that would be intent on exposing her complexion as a cosmetically induced artifice.

Slightly parted lips create the illusion she is about to speak.

Her slender neck, delicate shoulders and long torso are equally free from blemishes or unseemly marks and scars. Her breasts, though full and firm, have not been surgically augmented, a procedure sometimes associated with poor self image and an increased risk of suicide. Their areolar pigment is a very faint shade of beige and the nipples are small, most likely never having suckled a child. Her abdomen immediately below the ribcage is concave, but lower down, the anterior contour is slightly mounded, its convexity easily cupped in the palm of my hand. Her thin waist flares into a pair of buttocks as rounded as any on a marble sculpture of the goddess Diana. Her mature pubis supports a growth of thick black curls. Her legs are long and muscular yet sleek.

Nowhere on her body is there so much as a crease of excess fat, but her figure is healthily proportioned, free from the overly thin extremism that professional models often inflict on themselves.

I’d already estimated her age to have been anywhere from late teens to early thirties.

She would grow no older.

Tonight, somewhere on the shores of Montreal Harbour, she took off all her clothes, entered the black, winter waters of the Saint Lawrence River, and drowned herself.

Why?

She could have been the belle of any ball, perfectly suited to fit in the arms of any reasonably tall man, or woman for that matter, who might have requested she be his or her dance partner, escort, or lover. And she definitely would have received such offers. All eyes had to have been drawn to her when she entered a room, descended a staircase, emerged from a vehicle, walked down a street, or simply stood at a pedestrian crosswalk waiting for the light to change.

You would think the life of such a woman ought to be full of promise and a potential for joy.

Instead I find myself imagining her final moments. Did she hesitate on the snowy banks, shivering in the cold, struggling with her own fear? Or did she plunge toward death, swim out to it until exhaustion and cold overcame her and slipped her into unconsciousness? Or did she slowly but resolutely wade toward it, tentatively, perhaps even contemplating a change of mind, entertaining the possibility it was not too late, that she could still turn back, yet steadfastly stepping forward until the icy waters swallowed her?

And who was in her last thoughts?

Who had hurt her so?

Do you want to turn her, Dr. McKnight? says Kim, the nurse working with me.

Her query jolts me back to the job at hand.

Pronouncing her dead is my formal function. She’d been a floater, fished out of the water by the police after three hours of trying to get their boats through the ice floes and near enough to grab her. Protocol demands they deliver her to the nearest ER for the official ceremony. As a result, midst the frenzy of an overcrowded ER and caring for the sick and injured who still struggle to live, I am officially bound to make time for the dead.

Yeah. Grab the head and shoulders, I say, slipping my own hands under the hips.

The feel of a corpse is something I’ve never gotten used to. Even through the barrier of latex gloves, grasping the cold, firm texture of dead flesh bears an all-too-powerful similarity to selecting meat at a grocery store.

You’re not dead until you are warm and dead, I tell the residents when teaching them how to deal with near-drownings. Cold lowers the oxygen requirements of cells in their vital organs and thereby prevents them from dying. But hypothermia gives a pretty good simulation of death. The heartbeat can be so slow and sluggish you won’t hear it, and breathing is so subdued you won’t see it. So the best way to avoid sending a live one to the morgue by mistake is, check their skin. If you can pull it into peaks that hold their shape the way you moulded plasticine as a kid, then you have a patient who might be resuscitated through life support and slow rewarming of their core.

No such luck here. Over three hours in the water had put her beyond any hope of revival. Ninety minutes is the world record for an ice-water submersion that was successfully brought back to life.

Kim and I roll her on her side. We examine the back of her torso, hips, and legs.

They are as pristine as the rest of her, the strong currents of the Saint Lawrence having washed her clean of human waste that spills from bladder and bowels in the moment of death.

Any internal signs of recent sexual activity I leave to the forensic pathologists to find. All I can declare with certainty is that there are no external perivaginal or perianal abrasions to indicate forceful entry.

We gently roll her back to lying face upwards.

Her limbs, head, and neck still flop about freely, rigour mortis not having set in, thereby consistent with her having been dead less than nine hours.

Have the police notified her family? I ask, dreading that I’ll have to take on the task of delivering the worst kind of news.

No. She hasn’t even been identified yet. The police found nothing where she left her clothing—no ID, no note.

Odd. To whatever degree acts of suicide are fuelled by pain that the sufferers can no longer endure, be it from self-loathing, guilt, loss, loneliness, shame, illness, or fear, there is often, buried deep in the chaos of their reasons, someone they secretly, or not so secretly, want to punish. To remove all evidence that might lead us to that someone is unusual.

Do you need me for anything else, Doctor?

No, I’ll finish up here alone. And call me James. All the other nurses do.

Oh, she says, and the slightest flush creeps into her cheeks.

Christ, she thinks I’m coming on to her. I quickly set her straight. Down here in the pit, when things start happening fast and orders fly, we don’t have time for formalities. It’s first names all around to save seconds and avoid confusion over who’s to do what.

She nods, opens the examining-room door, and slips into the tumult of sounds filling the corridors of an overwhelmed emergency department.

A new hire, young and inexperienced, she has a quiet calm about her that I find attractive and a pleasure to work with, professionally speaking of course. The sine qua non of keeping one’s private life private at Saint Christopher’s is, don’t date the nurses.

The door swings shut behind her, restoring the eerie quiet of being alone with a dead body.

It is no ordinary stillness.

It is the absence of life.

So completely unnatural is this void that sometimes my imagination rebels against the emptiness and provides what is missing, fabricates minimal movements of the chest, an ever-so-slight whisper of gentle breathing, a rise and fall of the breasts. I know it is not real, yet the failure to detect vital signs of any sort creates such an egregious lack, such a violation of what should be present, it invites the mind to rebel, to not accept the obscenity of death.

I place my stethoscope over the usual landmarks for auscultating the heart.

I might as well be listening to the silence of the universe.

I hastily fill out the death certificate.

Pronounce her dead is the vernacular.

Such a peculiar term for a ceremony that is as old as time, once performed by Druid priests or witch doctors and now MDs. It’s a kind of knighting, this granting of entry into the netherworld. You cannot pass the boatman without the official stamp.

These days we even have a billing code for it.

Signing my name on the last line of the form, I take a final look at her. She seems still vulnerable in death, lying naked and giving off an appearance of softness among the gleaming stainless steel countertops and glass-fronted equipment cases.

Their polished surfaces reflect the fluorescent illumination from sconces in the ceiling the way a scalpel blade flashes when it catches the light. Soon she will go under that blade,

Reviews for The Woman from the River

[Gillian Booth · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Categorized as a medical thriller, the tension of the story is beautifully sustained throughout The Woman from the River. The characters emerge as people with whom the reader identifies strongly. Only one who has experienced the life of a physician and the workings of a hospital and clinic could have grounded the narrative in such an enthralling and believable way. Clement’s writing is complex and articulate. His compelling stories totally engage the reader. I recommend Clement’s work with enthusiasm!