The Siren That Never Was

Find out quick. June's words rode home with him, and they wouldn't let him alone, and on Monday Danny did a thing he had never done in his life: he took his lunch break to a county records office and started asking a clerk for thirty-two-year-old paperwork.

It turned out a single question (was the warning siren working?) was the kind of thread that, once you start pulling, doesn't stop.

He was clumsy at first. He didn't know what to ask for or who kept it. But Danny laid floors for a living, which meant he knew how to follow a job step by step and not skip a row, and he brought that to it. He found that the county had the old inquiry on file. He found that the regional library had the newspapers on microfilm. He found that the fire department, which had done the recoveries that week, kept its own logs, and that the man who'd been the volunteer fire chief in 1994, a man named Earl Voss, was still alive and still in the county, and was, it turned out, the father of the Voss kids June said Sam had saved.

Earl Voss was the one who cracked it open.

Danny went to see him on a Saturday. Earl was in his late seventies, slow now, but his memory of that week was carved as deep as anything, the way a man's worst week always is. And when Danny (careful, not leading him) asked whether the river-road warning siren had been working the night of the flood, Earl Voss looked at him like he'd asked whether the sun came up in the east.

"That siren hadn't worked in two years," Earl said. "Everybody knew. It was a standing joke, if you can call it that. The first-of-the-month test, it'd give this sick little groan and quit. We wrote it up. The department wrote it up to the power company more than once, because it was their pole, their system, their responsibility. The dam ran the warning for the whole valley, that was the deal, they held the water back and in exchange they were supposed to warn us if they ever had to let it go." His jaw worked. "And they never fixed it. Said it was scheduled. Said it was in the budget for next year. Two years running it was in the budget for next year. A siren costs money and a dead siren costs nothing, until the night it costs you thirty-four people."

Danny sat very still. "You're sure," he said. "You're sure it wasn't working before that night. Not just that night. Before."

"Son, I filed the paper myself." Earl got up, slow, and went to a cabinet, and came back, and Danny's heart nearly stopped, because the old man was carrying a folder. "I'm a fire chief. We keep things. I kept everything from that year because I knew, I knew in my gut something was crooked about how it all came down on one fella, and I figured someday somebody'd come asking." He laid it on the table. "Took thirty-two years for somebody to come asking."

Inside were carbon copies, gone soft and brown, of letters on fire-department letterhead, dated more than a year before the flood, and a year before that, addressed to Tarn Valley Power & Light. Re: River Road Public Warning Siren, Non-Functional. This is the third notice… We must again stress the danger to the public should a release become necessary… And clipped to them, the part that made Danny's hands go cold: a reply. One reply, on the power company's good letterhead, signed by a district engineer named Raymond Cobb. Thank you for your concern. The matter has been logged and is scheduled within the capital maintenance plan. We consider the existing margin of safety adequate.

The existing margin of safety adequate. A year and a half before the river came down in the dark and drowned a valley that no siren would wake.

"They knew," Danny said. He could barely get it out. "Before it ever happened. They knew the siren was dead and they knew the danger and they wrote back that it was fine."

"They knew," Earl said.

"Then how..." Danny's mind was racing now, laying the rows. "Then how did they turn around afterward and blame my father for the siren? For not sounding it? There wasn't a working siren in the whole valley. It was theirs, not his, and it was dead, and they knew it was dead. How do you put that on a dead night watchman?"

Earl Voss smiled, and it was not a nice smile, it was the smile of an old man who has watched the powerful win for a long time. "Now you're asking the right question," he said. "Here's how. They didn't say the siren failed. Read your inquiry close, son, the actual report, the words. They never once admit the siren was broke. They wrote it so it sounds like there was a warning system and the man on duty failed to operate it in time. 'The warning was sounded too late or not at all due to the negligence of the watchman on duty.' You read that and you picture a drunk asleep next to a button he never pushed. You don't picture a system the company let rot for two years. They hid a dead siren behind a dead man. He couldn't say a word back. Perfect, ain't it. The one man who could've explained was at the bottom of the river."

Danny looked at the soft brown carbons, the margin of safety adequate, and he understood that he was no longer looking at a tragedy. He was looking at a decision. Somewhere, after thirty-four people died, men in a room had looked at the fact that the company had let the warning system die (a thing that could ruin them) and they had found a way to make it the fault of a man who couldn't argue. They had taken the most blameless person in the whole disaster, the one local who'd actually run into the water, and made him the villain, precisely because he was dead and local and convenient and his being guilty made everyone else innocent.

His father hadn't just been failed by the truth. He'd been chosen.

"Can I copy these," Danny said. His voice didn't sound like his own.

"You can have them," Earl said. "I've been keeping them for you. Whoever you turned out to be." He pushed the folder across. "But Daniel, copies of old letters won't do it. I tried, years back, in my own small way. Wrote to the paper. Nobody printed it. The company that did all this don't even exist anymore by that name. Tarn Valley got bought and bought again, it's Meridian now, big outfit, and you can't shame a company that's three owners removed and ten times the size. The men that decided it are mostly dead. Cobb's dead." He tapped the signature, Raymond Cobb. "What you've got here proves the siren was dead and they knew. It does not prove what actually happened up at that dam the night the water came. For that you'd need somebody who was in the room. And I never could find one that'd talk. They closed ranks like a fist."

Danny held the folder against his chest, this dead man's evidence handed down to him by an old fire chief who'd kept it for three decades on faith.

"Somebody in the room," he repeated.

"The control room. Up at Black Tarn. The night crew that worked the dam itself." Earl's eyes were steady on him. "Find one of them still living, and willing. And you'll know what really came down that river. Till then, all you and me have got is a dead siren and a bad feeling." He nodded at the folder. "It's a start, though. It's more than anybody's had. You go on up to that dam, son, and you find out who was in the room."