Lost Lake House (10 page)

“My father,” said Dorothy with another
muffled but still mournful sob. “He doesn’t know I’m here. I’ve
been sneaking out. I’m just crazy for dancing, and he won’t let
me—he won’t even let me go to nice respectable parties. He’s so
terribly strict…I came here because Kitty said it was the only
place I could go to dance without his knowing. But now my shoes are
spoiled and he’ll find out and it’ll be horrible. I don’t know what
I’m going to do.”

The boat had been drifting silently deeper
into the inlet, closer to the rushes, and now Marshall took up the
oars and began rowing it slowly back. There was no sound for a
minute except for the very slight ripple of the oar-blades as they
slipped in and out of the water. “It’s horrible,” murmured Dorothy,
her tears almost subsided. Her voice still trembled. “And I’ll
never be able to go back, either.”

“You were running away from it pretty fast a
while ago.”

“Well, of course I was! You’d run too if the
police were after you!” said Dorothy, sitting up a little
straighter, completely unconscious of the application of her
speech.

“So it still matters to you that much?”

“What does?”

Marshall jerked his head in the general
direction of the island. “Going
there
. You like it?”

There was a small silence before Dorothy
answered. “I liked it a lot at first,” she said. She smudged tears
from her cheeks and made a futile swipe under her nose. “I thought
it was splendid. It was like an adventure—do you know? The island,
and the lights, and all the people dressed up, and the secret of
it. But after a while…I didn’t like it quite so well as at first. I
don’t know why. I didn’t like the people so much, or the way they
acted.”

There was a dry note in Marshall’s voice.
“If you weren’t such a nice girl, you’d have known they acted that
way because most of them are loaded to the gills on Maurice
Vernon’s gin.”

“Well, I didn’t,” said Dorothy.

“You might have guessed. You’re not a
dunce.”

Contradicting him did not seem to be just
the way to retort, so Dorothy remained silent. But she moved
uneasily on her seat. She’d always known the rumors about the
speakeasy; she had just pushed them conveniently to the back of her
head. Because conscience interfered with what she wanted?

The boat was drawing nearer to the
willow-draped mouth of the inlet. By the faint filtering moonlight
Marshall scrutinized her, and there was an unaccountable sharpness
in his voice when he said, “So why are you so upset now? If you
knew you were getting in over your head, why’d you bother?
You
could have quit anytime you liked. You didn’t even have
to get into it.”

“Oh, you don’t understand!” said Dorothy
helplessly. “I
had
to go, at least at first. I was going
crazy. I felt like I was going to burst if I didn’t find some way
to dance. Do you know what that’s like? Don’t you know what it’s
like to feel trapped?”

“Maybe.” His voice was guarded.

“No, you don’t. You couldn’t. You haven’t
got the least idea what I’m talking about. You—oh, don’t
you
like dancing?”

“I never exactly had a chance to find out,”
said Marshall, rather more tartly than before.

“Well, if you did maybe you’d understand why
I like it more than anything in the world. And Dad can’t abide it
in any way! I only wish I could make him see it’s harmless.”

“I guess that depends on who you’re dancing
with.”

“But it was only friends; they were only
school friends,” protested Dorothy impatiently.

“I thought you didn’t like them.”

“I mean before,” said Dorothy, a little
annoyed that he had such a good memory.

She added, “Oh, I know I’ve been foolish. I
always plump into things head-first without thinking—”

“Including nightclubs.”

“Will you let me finish?” she demanded with
dignity.

“All right. Only you sounded like you were
about to wander from the point.”

“And who exactly appointed you to hold me to
a point?”

“Nobody,” said Marshall. He looked down into
the dark water alongside the rowboat. “I just know I wouldn’t want
any sister of mine mixing with Sloop Jackson’s crowd. I know a lot
about him that you don’t. And I wouldn’t blame your father for
being upset when he finds out you’ve been sneaking out past him to
come here.”

It was on the tip of Dorothy’s tongue to
retort, “It’s none of your business what he thinks of what I do!”
Then she remembered, with a swift humbling realization, that it had
just as easily been none of Marshall’s business to interfere that
night Sloop Jackson had cornered her in the hall. She was
silent.

But only for a few seconds. It was hard to
keep Dorothy down for long. “I know all that,” she resumed in a
much less confident voice than before. “But—it all looked different
at the beginning. It’s hard to explain. All of it—coming here, even
deceiving Dad—it just didn’t seem like very much at first—”

The rowboat gave a lurch forward through the
water, as if Marshall had given the oars a tweak unwarranted by
circumstances. Dorothy chose to interpret this as disapproval, and
a little anger came back into her voice. “And anyway, what are
you
doing here? Since you seem to disapprove of it so
much—”

Marshall shipped the oars, not looking at
her. “I’m earning a living,” he said. “And I hate it ‘more than
anything in the world.’”

“Well, why don’t
you
get out of it,
then? You make it sound so easy for me.”

“Do you know what it took for me to get this
job?” said Marshall abruptly. “Do you know how many meals my family
had to scrimp on when I wasn’t working? My father can’t be counted
on. He drinks—you don’t know anything about that, do you. And when
he lost a job we didn’t eat. And there’s five of us—the rest are
younger than me.”

Dorothy opened her mouth to speak, but for
once Marshall had got fairly started and would not be interrupted.
“You won’t get a rise out of me. I’m even more to blame than you
are, because I should’ve known better in the first place. You rush
into things and don’t think because you just don’t know much about
life—but I should’ve known from the first that if I took this job
I’d get in deeper trouble.” His eyes met hers, and his voice was
harsh. “You pegged me all right. I could tell you knew from the
beginning. I’m a bootlegger, like all the rest of them on the
island.”

“I figured,” said Dorothy, less electrified
by this statement than she could ever have pictured herself being
before this evening. She added, “But not quite like the rest of
them, if you want out of it.”

Marshall said sarcastically, “Oh, yes. The
soft-hearted member of the gang, who pleads for the hostages’ lives
and is always whining to the others about reforming—”

“Stop that!” said Dorothy with a sharpness
that surprised both of them. “Don’t be a fake.
You
can’t be
funny about something you hate. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Oh, doesn’t it?”

“No,” said Dorothy. And then, with one of
her occasional peculiar flashes of intuition, she added, “You’ll
stop hating it after a while, if you laugh at it enough. And you’ll
only go on to worse things, because you’ll tell yourself none of it
really matters any more.”

“You make me sound like some kind of
pirate,” said Marshall, only half amused.

“Hmph. You’re a pretty decent lake-pirate
already.”

“Thanks.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny!” snapped
Dorothy.

“You lecture pretty good for a speakeasy
flapper!”

“As well as you do for a bootlegger!” she
shot back.

Marshall choked back whatever retort he had
been about to make, with an effort. “All right. I’ve got no right
to lecture you, and you’ve got no right to lecture me. That makes
us even.”

Dorothy folded her arms and tilted her chin
up a little. “It doesn’t make either of us right.”

“Then why don’t you do something about it?
Go home to your father and own up about where you’ve been.

She let her arms fall in despair and leaned
forward. “Because I’m
afraid
, can’t you understand? I’m
afraid of my father.”

Marshall Kendrick lashed back at her with
sudden passion. “
You’re afraid!
Yes, you are. That’s how
much you know. What are you afraid of, that he’ll send you to your
room without your supper? How would you like to be afraid your
little sisters won’t have any supper for weeks? You’re
afraid
he’ll keep you shut up in the house, maybe. How’d you
like to be
afraid
of being out in the street without a roof
over your head? You ever go without shoes? No, but you sit there
and cry because you spoiled some perfectly good ones sneaking into
trouble.”

Dorothy heard with a queer wild pounding of
her heart in her ears, a hot, prickling feeling in her throat. She
felt as if she had been shaken out of a safe shelter into a
thunderstorm. She gripped the edge of the wooden seat. But she
still had just enough spirit left to respond. “Does it make it
right—what you’ve done? What if you were stealing to feed them? You
couldn’t make any excuse for that.”

“Is your excuse any good?” said
Marshall.

It silenced her. His voice had dropped to an
even level again, as if he had never lost control, but the question
hit her like a blow. She sat still a moment, her lips parted—and
then slowly, numbly, dropped her head, eyes falling unseeingly to
the bottom of the rowboat.

How selfish, how blind she had been. Even if
their wrongdoing was equal…hers had been all for pleasure, all for
herself…all to gratify her own impatience and stubbornness.
Marshall Kendrick had done wrong for the best of reasons…she did
not have even a wholesome motive to mitigate her guilt.

For what seemed like a long time she sat
there, hearing the faint ripple of the dark water under the reeds
and the sharp singing of insects, and feeling the sharper pangs of
conviction. Marshall did not say anything more. Dorothy did not
look at him; she could not.

Then, after a moment, he moved, and shifted
the oars back into the water.

“We can probably start back now,” he said.
“It’s been long enough.”

Dorothy did not look up. She felt the motion
of the boat moving forward, and heard the dip of the oars, and in a
moment trailing willow leaves lightly flicked her hair and the
gunwale of the boat beside her as they moved out through the mouth
of the inlet. All along the shore was still in darkness, though the
moonlight had shifted a little so that more of the lake now lay
exposed in shimmering, silver-blue light.

Marshall kept to a course along the shore,
in the shadow, for several strokes of the oars. Then he ceased
rowing, and let the boat glide while he sat still, not seeming to
care that it gradually slowed.

“If you’ll go home and own up to your
father,” he said, with just a little difficulty, “I’ll give it
up—I’ll quit—and inform to the police about the bootlegging.”

Dorothy lifted her head—her lips parted
slightly. “What?”

“You heard me,” said Marshall—but he said it
quietly, without anger.

Dorothy stared at him. His face was partly
averted—she saw his hand tight around the oar, so that even though
she could not tell in the moonlight she knew the knuckles must be
whitened. Yet his voice had been calm. A quiet, restrained resolve,
in the face of his greatest dread.

The tears came to her eyes before she could
think about stopping them. Much to her dismay, it took her a moment
to bring them under control—she dropped her head hastily and gave a
few shaky sniffs. “You—you make me so awfully ashamed of myself,”
she said.

There was a slight, dismayed pause before
Marshall managed to speak—awkwardly, sounding both troubled and
remorseful. “Don’t…please don’t. I didn’t mean to be so hard on
you.”

“You weren’t a bit harder on me than I
deserve!” said Dorothy, wiping her eyes with the back of her
hand.

“No, but—” He paused. “I—I don’t even know
your name.”

“Dorothy Perkins.” She gave one great, final
sniff. “I
am
selfish—and I’m a coward too. But I’m going to
do something about it. I’ll go home and confess…if you will.”

“I said I would,” said Marshall. He lifted
his eyes from the oarlock and looked straight across at her. “It’s
a bargain, then?”

Dorothy nodded.

“There’s a reward, you know,” she said,
after a second’s thought. “They were going to make it five hundred
dollars this week. Didn’t you think about that before?”

Marshall shook his head. “I don’t want any
part of that,” he said. “It’d be like blood money. Maybe you
wouldn’t understand, but…after all the money I’ve taken from
Maurice Vernon…I couldn’t take that money. I’ll go to the police,
because I know I should, but I don’t want any reward.”

“That’ll make the committee happy,” Dorothy
observed with a touch of her old mischief.

Marshall glanced across at her again. “If
they would just help me get an honest job somewhere, that’d be more
than enough.”

“Why, I’m sure they would! Dad could help
you get a job, I’m sure. There’s city jobs…and he’s good friends
with Mr. Dalrymple who owns the glass factory. I’ll bet Dad could
talk to him and get you a job there.”

She heard him catch his breath slightly, a
small unchecked sound that gave her a queer feeling in the pit of
her stomach. “If he could do that—”

A pause, and then he took a fresh grip on
the oars and began to row again. Dorothy clasped her hands over one
knee and glanced around the lake—she shivered a little; she had
forgotten just how wet her feet were in her sodden shoes. “Where
are we going?” she said.

“Over on the north shore. I’ve got a flivver
parked in the woods there—anyway it’s not mine, but I’ve got the
use of it.”