The souls of lost lake, p.27
The Souls of Lost Lake, page 27
“Mom often seemed just out of reach,” Wren admitted. It was why she’d gravitated so toward Patty.
Grandma was silent for a long moment, and then Wren heard her sigh. “I know she was. Something in those years after Pippin was born and before you came along . . . well, it changed her. She wasn’t ever the same again. But I always figured that’s what the loss of six babies will do to a woman.”
38
Ava
She hadn’t been the same since the night Noah had awakened her from her nightmare. But then neither had he. Looking each other in the eyes was simply not going to happen. But it wasn’t just the brewing between her and Noah, it was the remembering. The remembering had left Ava huddled in the parsonage like a scared little girl all over again. She was both petrified and angry simultaneously. How she could recall her parents’ and her brothers’ mutilated bodies, but not their killer, was infuriating. Remembering the terror that soaked into the marrow of her bones as a child and settled there was another factor that left Ava paralyzed.
She sat on her bed, her back against the wall, her knees pulled up to her chest. Across the room, perched on her dresser, was the doll. Her doll. Retrieving it from the cellar, Ava had expected to be comforted in its return. The girl doll in the purple dress with the head of human hair twisted into a little tail at the back of its head. But what once had been an imaginary friend in a reclusive life was now a demon taunting her.
Dead, dead, they’re all dead.
Came today and chopped off their heads.
Put them in pieces, in bits and in blood.
Laid them in death in a pile in the mud.
The limericks played over and over in Ava’s mind. Subliminal. Traveling the space between them in the bedroom. Floating across the air, over the whitewashed wood floors, brushing the patchwork quilt on the bed, and settling in every nerve of Ava’s body. She swore the doll smiled. The corner of its porcelain lips twisting into an evil mockery.
There is the lake, so bury them there.
Keep it a secret, your personal terror.
But I will know, and I will hide,
the fact that as a child you lied.
Ava grabbed her pillow and launched it at the doll. It hit her, sending it toppling to the floor. Yet she remained unshattered. Her face only cracked into more thin spidery lines. Her eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling, much like Ava’s mother’s had, and the doll’s mouth remained turned in its tiny contorted smile.
Lied. She hadn’t lied. She just couldn’t remember. Not when she was thirteen, and not now. Ava slid off the bed and retrieved the pillow, tossing it back in its place. She bent to pick up the doll, then paused. Something in her mind was hiding from her. Just in the shadows. Of course, it was the owner of those boots. The ones that had clomped down the cellar ladder. The body that had stood there, contemplating. Debating whether to kill Ava? In retrospect, Ava knew she couldn’t have truly been hidden out of sight from the killer. He had spared her. Why?
She retrieved the doll, its body soft under her grasp. They stared at each other. One questioning, the other accusing.
There was a knock, then the doorknob on her bedroom door rattled. She spun toward it, holding the doll against her chest as if it would protect her while simultaneously imagining the doll gnawing at her flesh with its wicked face.
“Ava?”
It was Noah.
Ava crossed the room, doll still against her, pressed into the pleated front of her green dress. She missed her overalls. Hanny had whisked them off to her house on the pretense of washing them. She’d not returned them but instead had brought the green dress. Ava supposed washing heavier denim was difficult for the old woman. She should help Hanny . . .
Ava pulled the door open. She directed her gaze to the tip of his nose. Avoiding his eyes. She didn’t really know what she felt. Not with him. Not with her memories. Not with anything.
Noah shifted his weight on his feet. “Jipsy’s funeral is this afternoon.”
“I know.”
“I figured you may entertain thoughts of trying to attend in the shadows, but I wanted to request that you don’t. I know you’re not keen on how things are right now, but—”
“I’m not comin’.” Ava put Noah’s fears to rest. She wasn’t planning on doing anything today that made her susceptible to that creeper hiding in the forest. Her fingers touched her cheek. Noah’s eyes followed her movement.
He nodded. “Good. I’m hoping, once she’s laid to rest, things will settle down a bit.”
Ava scoffed at him with a laugh. “Tempter’s Creek will never let nothin’ rest.”
Noah looked down at his feet. The man was a bottled-up jar of nitroglycerin waiting to explode, but dressed under the guise of a preacher.
He lifted his eyes.
Ava refused to look at him.
“Ava,” Noah began, “we’re going to need to come up with a plan. You can’t stay here, not forever—not . . . like this.” Alone. That was what he meant. Alone with the potential of more moments like the other night. Where the warmth in the room was caused by more than just a summer’s night.
She knew that. But today she was afraid. Her confidence, her reckless nature, was squashed by the potency of her memories.
Noah cleared his throat. “I think if you go back—”
Ava snapped her head up. “I’m not goin’ back to that lake.”
Noah weighed his words. “Now that you remember so much . . .” He hesitated. “Well, going back to your family’s home—to the lake—it might look different to you now. Maybe you’ll see something that helps you remember who killed your family.”
“I’m not going back.” Ava half hid behind her door, holding on to it for support. She had been so disassociated from her family’s deaths. But with the memories came the emotions, along with the fear and the horror of it all.
“I’d go with you,” he offered.
Ava glared at him. “You think it’s ’cause I’m afraid to go alone? No. I’m afraid to go, period.” She cursed the tears that burned her eyes. “I don’t need to see—I don’t need to see nothin’ to remember more’n what I already do.” Least of which, the killer’s face. God help her if she remembered his face. Ava was terrified it would imprint on her mind and never go away. For the rest of her life, she would see the killer’s eyes, watch in a replay his fingers adjust on the handle of the ax . . . the contemplation . . . kill the teenage girl?
“You’ll never be free of this.” Noah’s declaration was harsh to Ava’s ears, even if his tone was gentle.
Ava grimaced and looked away. She adjusted her hold on her doll, feeling the doll’s hair tickle the back of her hand. Turning back to Noah, she nodded in agreement. “I’ll never be free of it if I remember more. It’ll haunt me.” Ava swallowed as anxiety crept up her throat with its stranglehold. “An’ I don’t like ghosts. Never did. Never will.”
“Come away from the window, child.” Hanny’s calming voice made Ava allow the curtain to fall back into place. The old woman had visited shortly before Noah departed that morning. She’d brought a pan of baked goods in case she was spotted, and so no one would ask questions about the amount of visits to the parsonage. But that she stayed and Noah left? Well, Hanny said she was banking on the fact that people were preoccupied with Jipsy’s funeral. She was right. They were. It seemed as if all of Tempter’s Creek had turned out.
Ava covertly hid behind the curtain, observing. The little cemetery behind Noah’s church would become the resting place for Jipsy. “I wonder if they’re really comin’ ’cause they care about Jipsy, or if’n they’re snooping around in business that ain’t theirs?”
“Probably both.” Hanny patted the sofa. “Come. Sit.”
Ava paced across the front room to the picture of Jesus. She stared at Him. He looked busy today. Probably preoccupied trying to make sure Noah did a good job with the eulogy and trying to withhold His fiery judgment on Widower Frisk. Ava knew the old man would smuggle a bottle of whiskey in his inside coat pocket. Drinking at Jipsy’s funeral? It was just something the widower would do. He had to survive somehow. Him without Jipsy was like a saloon without patrons.
“Funerals are a miserable thing,” Hanny observed. “When my Kendrick passed away, I was utterly beside myself. Of course, that was thirty years ago now, but still. I prefer to avoid funerals. Sorrow is a bitter memory and a dreadful companion.”
Ava glanced down at Hanny. The woman was embroidering. Her stitches were small and impressively delicate for someone whose hand had the tremor of old age in it.
“I never had a funeral for my family.” Ava stated it as a realization. There was a vague recollection of the lake. Smoke hovering over the earth, making young Ava choke. The lake had been the place she’d hefted, and pulled, and tugged, and labored four times over to bring her family to an illusion of safety. Safety from the fire meant the lake became their coffin. How long had their bodies floated in the lake before sinking to its depths? Ava knew she couldn’t have possibly gotten any of her family very far into the lake. The wind and the waves would have had them drifting into the deep, but eventually death would’ve made them float slowly back to the surface.
“How long does a body float?” Ava voiced her morbid thought to avoid the swift violence of her own sorrow. Distance. She needed to distance herself from the feeling. Shocking herself with black, offensive facts about death brought her family’s murders into a clinical perspective.
Hanny clucked her tongue. “What an awful thing to consider.”
Ava met Jesus’ eyes. “A few hours? Days? Once I saw a bloated dead dog floatin’ in old Nipper’s pond. He told me the dog had been dead quite a while, disappeared under, then came back on top all puffy. Guess somethin’ inside him made him float.”
“You do beat all, child.” Hanny bit the embroidery thread after tying it off.
Ava thought about the dog. Considered the way it had almost doubled in size, it seemed. “’Course, Nipper left him out in the middle, and not long after the dog sank again. Never did come back up.”
Hanny brushed her hand across her embroidery. “Praise be,” she mumbled.
“Do you think that’s what happened to my folks?” Ava asked Jesus more than she asked Hanny. But neither of them answered her. It was that awful silence where no one really wanted to say anything. Only the clock ticked. A hypnotic ticktock, ticktock that made Ava’s eyes heavy. But she didn’t want to close them. Didn’t want to think anymore. No more. No more thoughts of bodies, of the lake, of her family . . .
“I’m goin’ to go take a nap,” Ava announced, though she wasn’t sure she’d ever napped a day in her life before. It was the only way she could think of to make the thoughts go away. To still the whirling in her mind, the awful sensation in her gut that this time she wasn’t going to be able to forget. That her family’s murders were following her with a vengeance that required restitution.
“You do that, dear.”
Ava took Hanny’s encouragement, and with a last glance at Jesus, she hurried from the room. Jesus had looked, for a moment, as if He shared her sorrow. Her pain. But it was just a painting.
She took a quick detour into the kitchen. A glass of water would be good. Quench her thirst. Still her spirit. Do something to—
The back door was ajar. Ava stared at it as if the door were going to open further. But it didn’t. Its gap was wide enough for a cat to squeeze through. A ray of sunshine followed the path of the imaginary cat, stretching across the floor and resting on the leg of the kitchen table. Ava looked around the kitchen in a swift gesture. Stove. Icebox. Sink. Table. Nothing was moved or upset. A dish towel hung over the back of one of the chairs. The curtains over the sink were still drawn.
Ava made quick work of crossing the kitchen. She grasped the doorknob with her left hand and moved to shut the door. But something kept it from closing. Ava looked down and noticed a shiny object leaning against the doorframe. Cautiously, Ava bent, daring a peek out the door to see if anyone stood there. There was no one. Nothing. Only the backyard that stretched into the woods. A honeybee buzzing across the back step. A crack in the cement boasting one lonely violet.
She turned her attention to the item wedged in the doorway. Reaching for it, Ava realized what it was, and she snatched her hand back.
I will hunt you.
The hissing voice of her attacker filled her. Ava could feel his arms around her again. This time she could smell his raunchy breath. Her ear throbbed. He had made that vow, that promise. He was playing a deadly, wicked hunting game.
Ava pulled the heavy iron ax-head into the parsonage and slammed the door shut. Staring at the offensive item, she could no longer stifle the growing terror and agony inside her. She reached for what resembled the weapon that had been used to murder her parents—to kill Matthew Hubbard—and with a wild scream, Ava launched it through the kitchen window.
39
Wren
Eddie edged past Wren as she entered the camp kitchen. His white canvas apron was stained with water droplets from his position at the industrial-sized sink. It was piled with stainless-steel pans that needed a good hot scrub to get off the baked-on remnants of cookie bars.
“Eddie.” Wren tried to capture his attention, but he was focused. He’d been this way since Patty had died. An intensity surrounded him with an air of standoffishness. She couldn’t be frustrated with him, but she ached for him to let her in. It seemed ever since his moment of vulnerability, he’d withdrawn. Selfishly, she wanted to bounce off her conversation with her grandma and get Eddie’s opinion. She wanted to draw him into the unsettled trepidation that was growing within her. She wanted his opinion on the search of Lost Lake—whether he thought they’d ever find anything there. Not that he would know more than the experts, but . . . well, it was Eddie. They’d always shared everything. Now, in the wake of his mother’s death, it seemed to be driving them apart.
He lifted the sprayer from its holder and sent scalding water splashing against the dirty pans. The spray misted into the air. A few of the kitchen staff remained, high schoolers volunteering their time at the camp for the week. They hovered behind Eddie. He seemed aware of them if he wasn’t aware of her.
“You guys can head out if all the dishes are being run through the dishwasher,” he called over his shoulder.
“Yeah, they are!” one of the guys responded. He glanced at Wren, who offered him a smile.
“Thanks, guys. Good job on getting the place cleaned up.” Eddie’s consistent encouragement kept these teenagers engaged in menial work. Getting a few hundred campers and staff through one meal could be strenuous work, but three meals a day was nothing short of monumental.
The kids scampered from the kitchen, tossing their aprons into a five-gallon bucket that housekeeping would later snatch, take to the laundry, and return.
Eddie grabbed a scrub pad and put some serious elbow grease into cleaning a pan.
“Eddie,” Wren tried again. She was only a few feet away from him in the doorway. There were four big sinks, and he was at the third farthest from her.
He gave her a quick glance. “Hey.”
Wren hesitated. He wasn’t unfriendly. He was just . . . she’d never experienced awkwardness with Eddie before. Ever.
“What’s up?” He hefted the scrubbed pan into sink number four, which was filled with sudsy water.
“Do you want help?” she offered.
“Sure.” He managed a lopsided smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
Wren rolled up her sleeves and headed for the last sink. Plunging her hands into the hot water, she fished around for a dishrag. “I missed you at lunch today,” she managed. She intended to follow it up with a comment about how she’d been at her dad’s house, and Pippin was helping her look up her birth records in California. But that would require filling Eddie in on a lot more details than just that. He didn’t seem ready for that type of conversation.
“I was working in the kitchen,” he explained.
Of course he was. Wren wasn’t surprised, just—well, often he’d come out and eat with her while the rest of the experienced staff managed the trail of hungry campers.
“Are you okay?” She gripped the edge of the sink and went in for the jugular. Eddie was never one to mince words, and Wren wasn’t sure she could take this continued distance between them. This undefined arm’s-length thing.
Eddie nodded. “Sure.” He continued to scrub at an especially black part of the burnt batter.
Wren cocked her head. “Really?”
Eddie scrubbed harder. “What do you want me to say, Wren? Mom just died a few days ago. Sure. I’m ready for Disney World. When do we leave?”
“That’s not fair.” Wren instantly battled tears of hurt.
Eddie dropped the scrub pad in the dirty water and turned to her, his hands dripping. “Wren. Just—I need space.”
“Why are you withdrawing from me? Now of all times.” She couldn’t help the tear that rolled down her cheek. It betrayed her. Betrayed how much reliance she had on Eddie and had never really realized.
He closed his eyes as if to gather his own emotions. When he opened them, he worked his jaw back and forth. “I’m not withdrawing, Wren, I’m just—we both are hurting and—”
“And we could help each other through this!”
“No. Wren . . .” Eddie held up his hands. “Just let it go.”
“Let what go? The fact that we both lost someone we loved? That the last several days have been traumatic?”
“That you can’t keep coming to me,” Eddie snapped. He grabbed the towel from over his shoulder and wiped his hands on it. His sandals squeaked on the wet tile floor as he brushed past her and tossed the towel onto the stainless-steel counter.
“What are you talking about?” Wren demanded. Now her tears were because she was frustrated. Hurt. Angry. “That’s the dumbest thing I—”
