Lost Lake House (3 page)

She glanced toward the hall, and sat up a
little straighter, something like an agitated butterfly fluttering
up in her chest for a moment. Sloop Jackson was approaching, his
hands in his trousers pockets, wearing his usual smile of calm
assurance that he would find everything the way he wanted it. The
smile flickered into one of subtle amusement as his eyes fell on
Dorothy, and she turned her head back toward the others and folded
her hands in her lap. She was never sure what Sloop Jackson thought
about her that it should always bring that provoking smile to his
face.

He bore casually down upon the group around
the sofa, tossed about off-hand greetings with one nod of his
smooth black head, and immediately assumed the position of the
center of attention. He was used to it. Sloop Jackson was a Lost
Lake House fixture, a dapper, “fast” young man whose occupation was
spending inherited money with as little exertion as possible. He
was undoubtedly the best-dressed man there, with tailored evening
clothes and real gold cufflinks and collar studs and his jet-black
hair slicked back with brilliantine. He gave the impression of
being on familiar terms with the management of the House and knew
everyone on the dance floor. Kitty and Ida and all the others were
crazy about him, but Dorothy had not quite made up her mind yet.
The first time he had asked her to dance it was a great sensation,
to know the other girls were eaten up with envy…and he was an
excellent dancer, gliding smoothly across the floor…but there was
something that irked her about those subtly amused black eyes in
the clean-shaven face oddly white for a man so dark-haired. He
seemed to know she edged away from him, and to amuse himself in
getting closer to her.

Sadie appropriated him quickly. “Sloop, did
you see Em Hooper’s bracelet? Is it true that it’s real?”

“Personally, I think it’s ridiculous,” said
Ida loftily.

Sloop Jackson leaned an elbow on the stand
of a potted fern, looking not unlike a figure in a tailor’s
advertisement. “Well, it’s true that she’s wearing a bracelet, at
the very least. Didn’t you see it?”

The girls chastised his sense of humor in an
indignant clamor. “But are the
diamonds
real…and who gave it
to her? Charlie said you’d know.”

“Charlie’s an ape,” said Jackson, smiling as
if he were delivering a compliment, and looked over their heads at
their attached young men. “Any of you coming downstairs later?”

“I can’t afford it if I’ve got to buy Ida
diamonds,” said one of them, and more hilarity ensued.

Under cover of it, Sloop Jackson leaned
forward over the sofa a little. “How about the next dance,
Dolly?”

Dorothy rather liked it when the girls
called her Dolly, but it bothered her when Sloop Jackson said it.
It was at these moments that she rather thought she disliked
him.

“I think I’m going to have a headache,” she
said, and was annoyed when the others treated it as another
witticism and went off into squeals of laughter.

“Music’s good for headaches, you know. Just
put your head on my shoulder and try it,” said Jackson, dropping
his voice to that low tone that the other girls would have died to
have directed at them, and which Dorothy never could figure out how
to answer.

“It isn’t
that
bad a headache,” she
said, and when Jackson grinned she didn’t know whether it was in
appreciation or whether he was laughing at her again.

The band began to play again—an impudent
little jazz waltz that Dorothy loved. She began to tap her foot
lightly in time with it, forgetting that the others were there. She
leaned to look past them and watched the musicians among the ferns,
who seemed embowered in their own rhythmic world, swaying their
shoulders slightly or tapping their own feet in time as clarinet
and saxophone winked beneath the lights.

Sloop Jackson slid around and leaned his arm
on the back of the velvet sofa, stretching over it like a
self-satisfied panther. “I guess your headache has changed its
mind?”

“Oh, be
quiet
—how you people can
ignore that music to gossip about diamonds I’ll never know,” said
Dorothy, half laughing but distracted. She was trying to hum
along.

“Come and dance to it, then. Invitation
open—excursion trains leaving at all hours.” Jackson straightened
himself and swung round the end of the sofa, extending his
hand.

There was an easy grace about everything he
did that was intoxicating somehow—perhaps it was his air of being
so sure of himself that made you feel he must be right after all.
The mellow champagne-sound of saxophones swept down the ballroom;
it wanted to spin her into the dance, and Dorothy wanted to
come.

“All right,” she said, and gave him her
hand.

As her feet found the tripping rhythm of the
dance steps she tipped her head up a little, watching the
glittering lamps and gilt mirror-frames of the ballroom circle
past, the flashing colors of the dancers’ attire reflected in the
mirrors. This was what she came for; it was what she wanted, after
all, and she was going to enjoy it to the full. While the music
played, the scramble out of a window and sneaking through the dark
all seemed worth it, for if she were at home with no prospect of
coming back it would be awful…

Sloop Jackson was laughing a little in her
ear. He crooked his encircling arm a little closer about her in a
way that made him impossible to wholly ignore, as they took a turn
near the edge of the dance floor. “You’re a peach, Dorothy,” he
said. “Give you credit for one thing—you know what you want and you
go after it. Never any questions with you.”

Dorothy felt a sudden little sinking of her
heart, which was not the sort of feeling that should come with a
compliment. She flashed a half-puzzled, half-defensive glance at
her partner. “Gosh, I’m not
that
bad!”

“Who calls it bad?” said Jackson. “I’m the
same way myself. It simplifies things. I know what I want…and so it
comes easy.”

He smiled again, as if including her in some
secret. “I like those big eyes of yours, Dolly. They look like they
could swallow the whole glittering world at a gaze. You like seeing
the world, don’t you? You’re not one to sit still…you’re ready to
dance through it.”

Dorothy’s cheeks warmed a little as the
words fluttered past her ears—light, gilded, as champagne-like as
the electric lights in the night and the music. She smiled shyly at
him, as they took another turn with the smoothness of spun silk. He
really was a marvelous dancer.

It was at these moments that Dorothy rather
thought she liked him.

It was a chill, gray morning, and the wind
drove the waters of the lake in choppy little waves against the
pebbled shore. Marshall Kendrick stared up from the narrow island
beach at the shape of the Lost Lake House against the tossing trees
and cloudy sky. He hated the place—hated it more in daylight, when
it stood empty and stripped of the illusions that lit it to glamor
at night. In daylight its jumble of architecture was plain, the
faintly graceful original villa with square modern excrescences
piled on at all corners, the rows of empty French windows hollowly
reflecting the slate-gray weather. It needed the dark and the
strings of sparkling lights and the people, the women’s silken
frocks flitting up and down the paths like colored night-moths, to
conjure its patented atmosphere.

The wind came down the lake again, and
Marshall lowered his head against it, tucking his chin against his
sweater, and bent again to his work on the beach. These lonely
mornings, clearing seaweed and bits of driftwood from the pebbled
shore and raking up the litter of paper and cigarette stubs around
the ferry landing, were the part of his job that seemed to accord
most with what he really thought of it. Out here, alone, chilled
and bad-tempered, he was free to nurse the resentment that was
partly against the Lake House and partly against himself.

There was a sound of footsteps at a little
distance, and Maurice Vernon appeared around the curve of the shore
from the direction of the ferry, walking toward him with a steady
crunch of pebbles underfoot. Vernon was a stocky man, not tall,
with a crisp-tailored gray suit squaring his thick shoulders, a
flash of silk at tie and pocket-handkerchief the discreet
proclamation of expensiveness about him. He had an unlit cigar in
his mouth, and as he drew near to Marshall he gave a nod and tilted
it up in his teeth like a salute. Marshall straightened up, wiping
his wet hands on his trousers, his expression changing little.

“That was a good run last night,” said
Maurice Vernon as he came to a halt. “Pitch dark all the way, and
not even a twig scraping the boat. You’re doing good work,
Marsh.”

He pushed some loosely folded bills into
Marshall’s hand, a gesture at once confidential, yet unregarded and
matter-of-fact with him. Marshall looked down at the pebbles
underfoot, and fingered the bills in his half-closed hand before
slowly sliding them into his pocket.

Vernon took the cigar from his mouth, spit
casually, and then nodded up toward the Lake House, though not much
could be seen in that direction from where they stood but the roof
and the grove of trees that sheltered the rear gardens. “Expect
another run next week,” he said. “Production’s running smooth, and
demand is up. If it’s a moonlit night we’ll take it, same as
before.” He nudged Marshall’s elbow while the boy’s hand was still
in his pocket. “You’ll put yourself in the way to earn more of
that. I never sneeze at a good clean run, no matter how
routine.”

Marshall just barely smiled, briefly—he knew
Vernon was used to his silences. It took all kinds to run the
operation Maurice Vernon had going here, from the gliding
white-coated waiters at the doors, to the tough, wary men who
worked in the cellars and the boathouse, to a boy who could handle
a boat and knew the shores and currents of Lost Lake well…and could
keep his mouth shut.

“City’s giving itself apoplexy trying to get
after us,” said Maurice Vernon almost with satisfaction, with a
glance at the House and another at his cigar. “Perkins has got the
board of aldermen to offer a hundred-dollar reward for information
that leads to a bust. As it stands now they can’t prove a thing, so
they’re welcome to all the suspicions they want. They couldn’t even
try to prove it unless they patrol the whole lake, and the board
would yowl their heads off at that kind of expense. We’ll be
operating out of here till kingdom come.”

He turned on the heel of one polished shoe,
pebbles crunching beneath it again. “Got to be going. But you’ll be
ready again next week, Marsh, same place, same time. Plenty of
grease on all the oarlocks.”

“Yes sir.”

Marshall stared after the receding figure of
his employer, jaunty and solid and incongruous on the damp lake
shore. Even now he could not bring himself to dislike Maurice
Vernon outright, even when repulsed by such confidences as he had
just heard. Perhaps it had been honest kindness that had led Vernon
to help him at first—and then again perhaps it was just opportunism
that was willing to see somebody else profit as long as Vernon did
too. Either way the debt was there.

Marshall felt the crackle of the bills in
his pocket as he leaned over to toss another wet, stringing clump
of seaweed onto the half-heaped wheelbarrow. A tip like that meant
food and shoes for the children and money to pay the week’s rent—it
meant lessening of the anxious lines that were always in his
mother’s forehead, though she never said a word of worry. It was
more than his father had brought home in two months together for
the past year.

The stark irony bit him yet again—his
father, fired from position after position, never able to hold down
a job more than a few weeks because of drunkenness; and last night
his son had witnessed crates of enough illegal liquor to float the
Baltic
smuggled out in the dark into rowboats and across the
lake to supply the city’s speakeasies.