The Clown Who Lives in the Water

Chapter 1: Music

The first strange thing I found in the apartment was a brass button beneath my daughter’s bedroom window.

It was green around the edges and stamped with the face of a smiling moon. The moon had long eyelashes, round cheeks, and a tiny pointed hat.

My daughter, Lucy, was five then. She took the button from my hand and rubbed it against her shirt.

“It came from a clown,” she said.

I laughed because children say things like that.

“What clown?”

“The one who lives in the water.”

Outside her window, Bellweather Creek moved quietly beneath the trees.

It was hardly a creek in summer. Most days, it was a narrow ribbon of brown water slipping over pale stones. Plastic bags caught in the reeds. Dragonflies hovered above the surface. At night, frogs called from the mud, and raccoons sometimes climbed onto our deck to investigate the garbage cans.

There was nothing magical about it.