Lost Lake House

Lost Lake House: A Novella

By Elisabeth Grace Foley

Cover design by
Historical
Editorial

Formatting by Second Sentence Press

Photo credits

Ad Meskens | Wikimedia (Singer Castle, Thousand
Islands)

ccaetano | 123RF Stock Photo (sky)

Pavlo Vakhrushev | Dollar Photo Club (lake)

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Copyright © 2016 Elisabeth Grace Foley

Table of Contents

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

An excerpt from
Corral Nocturne

About the Author

Dorothy lay on her stomach across her bed
and looked disconsolately at the worn shoe dangling from her hand.
It was one from her best pair of shoes and it was beginning to look
decidedly shabby. But how in the world could she ask her father for
the money to buy another pair of shoes? These were the second pair
she had had in six months. He might begin to be suspicious.

She swung the shoe back and forth on her
fingertip and regarded it with aggravation. Dorothy was, to use her
own expression, murder on shoes, without knowing in the least how.
She wrinkled up her nose despairingly at the scuffed heel and toe
and the thin sole that was beginning to split away from the upper
on one side. How on earth did she
manage
it? It had been an
unanswerable puzzle ever since she grew old enough to take an
interest in what kind of shoes were on her feet, and the situation
had only grown worse since she had discovered a passion for
dancing.

Dorothy writhed, inwardly, and the emotion
found expression in a frustrated wriggle across the white
embroidered coverlet of her bed. It just
had
to be that her
father looked upon her darling pastime with the same grim suspicion
with which he regarded burglary, bootlegging and tax fraud in his
capacity as city alderman. In vain Dorothy had attempted to plead
that the act of simply kicking up one’s heels in time to lively
music was neither a crime nor a sin—Alderman Perkins would not be
moved. He wouldn’t even let her attend schoolmates’ parties where
there was dancing, not even respectable country-club affairs with
plenty of mothers and chaperones appended. He couldn’t be convinced
they were respectable, because he never took the trouble to go and
see for himself. He was always too busy with city affairs.

Dorothy’s slight little eyebrows contracted
into a rather hurt frown, as they always did when she thought about
her father. A tall, black-haired man with a handsomely-carved face
that seemed like it could claim kinship with granite, he was
incomprehensible to her in his unbending edicts and unwillingness
to admit argument. It had never occurred to Dorothy that the lively
streak of stubbornness in her own nature was an inheritance from
him, though her face resembled the fair, pretty mother who had died
when she was a little girl.

Dorothy started and looked at the clock, and
dropped the worn-out shoe. Hastily she hung herself upside-down
over the edge of the bed to retrieve it, hoping the sound of its
fall was not noticeable downstairs. At this hour her father would
be in his library, with the curtains drawn and the single lamp on
his desk glowing on his bent black head and the mass of papers on
the blotter, and drawing faint glints from the red and brown
leather bindings of the books that lined the wall behind him—all
those books that he hardly touched nowadays. He would be there till
ten o’clock, most likely, unless some strange noise from upstairs
drew him out to investigate; and Dorothy was usually careful enough
to avoid that.

She sat up cross-legged on the bed, shook
her unruly bobbed curls out of her eyes, and inspected the shoe one
more time. At least the splitting sole was on the inside of her
foot where no one would see it. But sooner or later it would come
apart completely, and then she would
have
to ask her father
for new shoes. And wouldn’t he think she was wearing them out
awfully fast even by Dorothy’s standards? He’d wonder how—

Life was getting more complicated with each
evening she sneaked out of the house…

Dorothy shook the thought away and scrambled
off her bed. It was past eight o’clock and growing dark. She
brought her pale-green party frock from the closet and changed into
it. The light fabric fell straight from her shoulders to the
dropped waist, where she tied the loose sash, and the short skirt
brushed her knees in little filmy pleats. She added a long string
of silvery beads around her neck and buckled on the shoes—pausing
with one foot up on the ruffled stool by her dresser, she licked
her finger and vainly attempted to rub out some of the scuffs on
the toe so they would be less noticeable. The scuffs, however, were
adamant.

Dorothy sat down on the stool and gave her
hair a quick brushing, eyeing herself critically in the mirror. It
was a little irksome to her that she could never achieve the sleek
and slinky sort of elegance she observed on other women and girls
at the Lost Lake House. She looked neat and pretty, she knew, but
still incurably girlish. Her springy light-brown curls could never
be coaxed into anything resembling the straight bold curve of Kitty
Lawrence’s black bob against her cheek, or the lacquered-looking
shingle of Sadie Penniman’s red hair. Dorothy could never look
older and sophisticated as they, with made-up faces, managed to do;
her wide-awake eyes and youthful features always gave her away. She
had tried lip-rouge borrowed from Kitty once, but the too-vivid
streak of color on her mouth was all wrong; it made her feel like a
clown or a badly-made-up actress.

At eight-thirty Dorothy turned out the light
in her bedroom and put on her hat and coat. If her room was dark
and her father had not heard an outside door shut he never came to
look in on her, but assumed she was asleep. She had learned his
routine carefully, lying awake and listening on the nights she was
at home. Still she had lately taken to rumpling up her bed and
putting pillows under the coverlet, just in case—her conscience,
recovering from the sulkiness that had set her on this path, was
beginning to be jumpy. Then she climbed out the window onto the
sloping back porch roof, slithered down an ivy-covered trellis and
ran through the dark backyard to the side street. Their house was a
big old-fashioned brick with a mansard roof, with the boughs of
stately old oak trees brushing the upper story; situated at the
corner of a block, its yard rimmed with hedges. There was an
opening at the side for the path where the milkman and the grocer’s
boy came to the back door, and Dorothy slipped through this and
darted across the street in the dim light from the lamp on the next
corner.

By quarter to nine she had reached the
street corner where a group of girls and young men were waiting,
milling about and laughing and teasing each other under the street
lamp by a drugstore. Dorothy joined them, and they walked a few
blocks to where some of the young men had cars waiting. They piled
in and drove out the winding roads through the outskirts of town
toward the lake, a little too fast once they were out of the part
of the city more regularly patrolled by the police. Dorothy had at
first been exhilarated by this ride, later a little alarmed by it,
and then shamed into saying nothing by the nonchalant way in which
the other girls took the whirling speed amid careless banter with
the drivers. She laughed with the others, but kept a tight grip on
the inner door-handle.

The dock for the Lost Lake ferry was at the
bottom of a steep hill—cars were parked up above in an empty lot
off the road that was supposed to be secret but which everyone knew
about. Standing a little back from the dock, on the trodden
gravelly shore, Dorothy stared across the water. On cloudy nights
like this the lake and sky and island all melted into a uniform
invisible black, so the blazing golden windows of the Lost Lake
House seemed suspended in the middle of the lake like a floating
fairy palace. The lighted ferryboat, which had left on one of its
trips before her party reached the landing, inched across the lake
like a little glowing caterpillar swimming toward it.

Dorothy shoved her hands deep in her coat
pockets and suppressed a little shiver. It seemed they always
arrived when the ferry was halfway across the lake to the island,
and had to wait for its return. She could never entirely escape the
chill of nervousness in her stomach while waiting, almost as bad as
it had been the first time she crossed. It had not taken her long
to hear the whispers about the Lost Lake House—that there was a
hidden speakeasy inside—that there had been police raids before,
and that it might happen again. Every time she had to wait in the
half-dark by the ferry, near a little group of girls and men still
teasing and laughing in half-whispers—by habit rather than fear
with them—her jangling nerves expected at any moment the white
glare of headlamps on police cars would pour down from the bank
above and pin them in their blinding beams, branding them all as
criminals and exposing their secret expeditions to the world. (Oh,
wouldn’t her father be furious then!)

The ferry was coming back now, the strings
of little Japanese lanterns that ornamented it bobbing above the
black water. Dorothy’s breath came quicker as it always did at this
moment, when the lighted ferryboat drew closer and the fear of the
police began to recede. This was the moment—as the ferry bumped
against the lower dock, and she followed the others down the wooden
steps—the moment she tried to hug to herself, to savor the magic of
as she stepped under the string of lanterns, fixed her eyes on the
shining house across the lake, and felt the little lurch of the
ferry carrying them out from the shore. She tried not to hear the
chatter of the other passengers and the chug of the motor; she was
busy making the Lost Lake House into fairyland.

The island in the middle of Lost Lake had
once been owned by a wealthy family who had a summer villa there.
When their fortunes failed, the villa sat empty and fell into
disrepair, until Maurice Vernon bought it and set about
transforming it into the glittering, half-legendary island
nightclub. No one knew exactly where Maurice Vernon got all his
money. He was almost certainly a bootlegger; he was involved in
gambling; there were even more subdued murmurs that he was a
gangster, though this was far from proven. There were no bursts of
machine-gun fire on the street corners of this city, but whatever
form of organized crime was going on behind the scenes, Maurice
Vernon was sure to be in it.

As the ferry drew nearer, the island itself
began to take shape, the outlines of its shores and of the big
trees that overhung the Lake House pricked out by the light from
the windows and doors. Strings of electric lights looped from tree
branches lit the stone-bordered path from the ferry landing up to
the wide-open front doors. Along the front of the house a row of
twenty French windows blazed onto a slate terrace overlooking the
lake, a zigzag path falling from it to another narrower terrace a
few yards below. Whiffs of jazz music drifted out over the water;
couples moved up and down the path and along the terraces with a
glitter and shine from the women’s bright-colored frocks and
headdresses; the sounds of laughter rose and fell, occasionally so
unrestrained as to be shrill. Dorothy took another quick deep
breath, and squeezed her clenched fingers tight inside her coat
pockets. This was the moment she wished she could make last
forever.