The Weight of Water
Read The Weight of Water Online
Authors: Anita Shreve
Tags: #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Adult, #Historical, #Mystery
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
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
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
Chapter 2: Maren Hontvedl’s Document
On the Origins of The Weight of Water
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Look For These Other Novels By Anita Shreve
A
NITA
S
HREVE’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
Y
A
NITA
S
HREVE
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
D
URING 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.
I
T 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.