Where the Water Waits

There was an old quarry a few miles down the road from where I grew up. It was filled with water, and somewhere along one edge of it there was an equipment junkyard—or at least that's how I remember it. The kind of place kids were warned about without ever being given quite enough information to satisfy their curiosity.

We were told to stay away. More importantly, we were told never, never go into the water. Naturally, that meant kids went into the water.

There were stories that kids had drowned there. More than once. Nobody ever seemed to have the whole story, though. You heard things. Somebody knew somebody. Somebody's cousin had seen something. Somebody's older brother had gone there and come back with a story that was just frightening enough to be repeated.

I never went near the edge where the water was. But I thought about it. A lot. Because there is something about a forbidden place when you're a kid. If adults tell you something is dangerous but don't explain exactly why, your imagination takes over and starts filling in the blanks. The place becomes larger in your mind than it probably ever was in real life.

And I wondered. Were the stories true? I still don't know. That uncertainty stayed with me, and when I started thinking about this story, I realized I didn't want to make the quarry into some obviously haunted place. I didn't want a monster rising out of the water or a ghost waiting beneath the surface. I wanted something much closer to the feeling I remembered. A place everybody knew about. A place kids weren't supposed to go. A place with stories attached to it that nobody could quite prove.

And then I wondered what might happen if one of those stories actually was true. What if the old warnings weren't just the usual adult attempts to keep teenagers from doing stupid things? What if somebody really had disappeared there? What if the reason nobody ever knew exactly what happened wasn't because there was nothing to know, but because somebody had worked very hard to make sure nobody found out?

That became the beginning of Where the Water Waits. The quarry in the story is dangerous in all the obvious ways. It's deep. It's cold. It's unforgiving. But the deeper Claire goes, the more she realizes the real danger isn't necessarily the water. It's the silence around it. That's what interested me most. Small towns are very good at remembering things.

They're also very good at agreeing not to remember them. A story gets told often enough that eventually everybody knows the version they're supposed to know. An accident. A tragedy. Bad judgment. Nothing more to see here. And sometimes that version is true. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the truth is sitting at the bottom of the water, waiting.

I think that's why that old quarry stayed in my imagination all these years. I never knew whether the stories were true, and maybe that's exactly why I never stopped wondering. Because there are some places you don't have to enter to be haunted by them. Sometimes it's enough to stand safely back from the edge, look at the dark water, and wonder what might be underneath.

And whether it's been waiting there all along.