Lost Lake House (7 page)

“Don’t worry about it!” said Maurice Vernon.
“You can handle this all right. You’ve never slipped up on any job
you’ve been given yet.” The praise stung in a way Vernon almost
certainly never suspected. “Here.” He extended his hand with the
key a little further.

Marshall took the boathouse key slowly into
his hand—a large flat key, slightly tarnished-looking and engraved
with the same entwined “LLH” that emblazoned the main doors of the
House. He looked up at Vernon, who was watching him with quirked
eyebrows, waiting for his answer. This was his chance, he
realized—if Maurice Vernon got the idea that he was scared, or
having a twinge of conscience, he might just decide he didn’t want
Marshall around here any more. Bill Harolday was still standing
there too, wearing his usual grim expression…it wouldn’t take much
to make him suspicious. If Marshall was fired, it would at least
cut the Gordian knot of guilt and indecision he had tied for
himself, and he might not regret it too much afterwards.

Maurice Vernon sounded both impatient and
amused. “What’s the matter, Marsh? Something bothering you?”

Marshall tried to smile. He glanced at the
monogrammed key and back at his employer. “No,” he said. “It’s—it’s
a big job, that’s all.”

Vernon laughed and clapped him on the
shoulder. “You’ll manage. Okay, get on to work now. And remember,
every night this week.”

Marshall left him and trudged up the hill
toward the tool sheds, a short distance above the boathouse. He
glanced up to his left, where the figures of two other men were
cresting the hill along the footpath that led to the camouflaged
access to the underground furnaces. Vernon was right—their
preparations were foolproof. Marshall had seen a police raid once
before, one of the nights he had been there. The police had found
nothing, though it was obvious they suspected the Lost Lake House
of housing
something
against Prohibition law.
Foolproof—except for the one thing Maurice Vernon never mentioned:
that a word from one man who knew the location of the secret
entrances and exits could put the police in possession of the whole
scheme at a stroke. He never said it because he had full confidence
in his ability to choose trustworthy men and see that they stayed
that way.

But wasn’t he a little over-confident? That
confidence, almost a swagger, was one of Vernon’s defining
characteristics. He obviously believed everything he said. But
there were some things Maurice Vernon didn’t know, Marshall
thought, as he took a ring of keys out of his pocket and inserted
one in the lock of the tool shed. He didn’t know how relentlessly
Marshall hated his own part in the bootlegging operation. Marshall
was past the idea of thinking that Vernon knew and played upon his
sense of obligation—Vernon simply regarded him as another good
guess and good investment.

Maybe his assurance that the police would
never get anything on them was a little precarious too?

That’s only wishful thinking
,
Marshall told himself. He twisted the boathouse key onto the ring
alongside the others, and held them tightly for a minute so the
metal bit into his fingers.
Wishful thinking
. Wishing
someone else would blast the Lake House apart so he would be
absolved from the responsibility. For as long as he worked here he
felt that responsibility as heavily as if he were to blame for the
whole thing. But not enough to make him pull free—not enough to
keep him from being dragged further down into the bootlegging
racket every time he accepted another assignment like today’s.

He collected a pair of garden rakes and
flung them down in a wheelbarrow so the tines rattled. Maybe it was
Maurice Vernon’s gin his father got somewhere those nights that
Marshall came home and found him sunk in sluggish sleep on the
couch in the front room. It didn’t matter that his father would
manage to get the stuff somewhere else, Prohibition or no
Prohibition, if Vernon’s operation were shut down tomorrow—so long
as he, Marshall, had a hand in running it, he felt as responsible
as if he had brought home the bottle and put it into his father’s
hand. You could only be answerable for your own conscience.

Outside, the morning routine of the House
was going forward. Sweeping up the rooms and preparing refreshments
ahead of time indoors, raking and trimming and maintenance of the
paths and electric lights outside; and down below, the distilleries
set in motion. The furnace chimneys were disguised in decorative
stone, running up boldly through the interior of the House, and
only emitted smoke at night or when the groundskeepers and kitchen
staff were clearly visible at their innocent tasks around the
island.

The gravel path down to the boathouse needed
attention: weeds had to be pulled and the stones raked smooth. For
a moment before he started work, Marshall paused with the rake in
his hands, looking up at the first pale gray wreaths of smoke
ascending from the chimneys against the china-blue morning sky. At
any moment—any moment he chose—he could end it all himself. He knew
the camouflaged doors and the hours of the bootlegging runs…and now
he had the boathouse key. He could walk into any police precinct in
the city and give them the information that would probably make the
chief of police leap from his chair and nearly swallow his cigar,
if the chief of police was given to smoking cigars. No decent
law-abiding person would ever blame him for splitting on a
bootlegger. He would more likely be commended.

He remembered the light, the lifting of
anxiety in his mother’s careworn face when he gave her his first
week’s wages from the Lake House. “The Lord will provide,” she had
said gently, looking at the dingy dollar bills as if they had been
delivered straight from heaven. And he had put his arms around her,
because he was taller and stronger than she was now and wished that
he could always protect her from the worry that had been a part of
their lives so long.

She had been saying “The Lord will provide”
for all of his eighteen years, and she believed it still. She had
always taught him the same. But there were some things his mother
didn’t know either, these days. She didn’t know the unboyish streak
of cynicism formed in Marshall’s mind by the knowledge that it was
Maurice Vernon’s providing and his own willful wrongdoing that was
keeping them from the poorhouse. If he told her where the money was
coming from—would she really be brave enough to turn it down, and
face again the cold uncertainty that had terrified him before?

No—Marshall made the decision as swiftly as
he always did when his thoughts reached this point. He would not
give her another burden in making the choice…even though there were
times when he ached for some sort of comfort or guidance. This was
his own affair. He would not burden her with knowing that the son
she had worked to raise with so much love and prayer was searing
his conscience to keep her and her little ones fed and secure.

The breeze ruffled through the flower-heavy
bushes of the garden, their blossoms beginning to fade and drop
with the end of summer. Marshall began, slowly, to rake the sloping
gravel path, while above him, the smoke from the chimneys, now
thick and steady, rose in narrow columns against the sky.

On that same Monday morning Dorothy Perkins
was again considering the harassing question of shoes. She had
spent Sunday morning trying to keep her feet tucked out of sight
under the pew in church so no one, least of all her father beside
her, would notice how shabby her good shoes had become. Every time
her attention became involved with the sermon, she would realize
with a start that she had unconsciously let her feet slip back into
view, and had to whisk them away again. This was
not
the
proper way to spend a church service. Before next Sunday came, she
would have to do something about it.

Dorothy’s problems loomed huge to her on the
scale of her own small life. She never considered the size and
scope of the world very much except as it affected her, and from
her point of view at this moment, nobody had ever been in such an
awful mess as she was. Curled up in a woeful ball on her bed, her
cheek resting on her hand, she reviewed it unhappily. She couldn’t
keep going to the Lake House in these shoes much longer—as a matter
of fact she couldn’t go much of
anywhere
in them much
longer—but if she asked her father for new ones it might bring the
wrath of her deception crashing down upon her.

She could always stop going to the Lake
House, so as to preserve the shoes a little longer—but no, if she
stopped going now Sloop Jackson would think it was because of him.
He’d tell the others about what had happened in the hall—her ears
burned again—and they would laugh uproariously as they did at
everything. The girls who were jealous over Sloop’s paying
attention to her would exult, and they would all laugh at her and
think she was a baby and a coward.

Dorothy sat up suddenly, surprised at her
own thoughts. Why was what the others would think the first thing
that came into her head? Wasn’t she more distressed at the thought
of losing the dancing, the music and the lights?

She pulled her knees up and folded her arms
over them and thought about it, a little disturbed. Would she
really want to go back to the Lost Lake House on her own even if
she had the new shoes? What had happened to her? Was the charm of
forbidden fruit wearing off, or was her conscience just catching up
with her? Dorothy squirmed again.

If she had the shoes, and the choice was
entirely hers, then…no. Dorothy shook her head. She thought it
fiercely: she wouldn’t be laughed at! After the way she had fussed
and complained to Kitty about her father’s unfairness and her
longing for dancing and excitement, her pride would not let her
back down and own that she didn’t like it so well after all. More
than anything she could not bear the thought of Sloop Jackson
mocking her to his friends out of revenge.

But if her father found out—if she told him,
that would qualify as “finding out”—she would be absolved; she
could be pitied but not mocked for being kept at home by the force
of authority.

That was the way out of both problems, of
course. Confess everything, take whatever rebuke or punishment came
with it—then she wouldn’t have to worry about the shoes or what her
friends thought, and life would be a little simpler. But Dorothy
quailed terribly at the thought of her father’s eyes on her, the
unbelief and then the reproach with which he would meet her
confession. He wouldn’t understand why she had gone; he didn’t know
what it was
like
to feel that Life was slipping away from
you and that you would simply
burst
if you didn’t get to try
your wings a little. And the fact that she had ended up
dissatisfied with her own transgressions after all would give him
one more thing to justly use against her.

But if she confessed, of her own free will,
it would be a little better than if he found it out
himself…wouldn’t it?

Slowly Dorothy unfolded herself and rose
from the bed. She was a little pale and had a wavery feeling in her
stomach…but she had to get it over with now. Now, before she had a
chance to think about it any more. She shook her hair out of her
eyes, tried to straighten her slim shoulders and opened her bedroom
door. Holding herself very tense, she went slowly down the carpeted
front staircase, crossed the patch of sun shining through the front
door’s leaded glass panes onto the hall floor, and went to the
library door.

She had been so intent upon her own
tenseness and upon
not
thinking ahead of time what she was
going to say that she had not been aware of voices downstairs in
the house. At the library door she paused, awakened to recognition
that there were several men talking in the room. The polished
wooden door stood open just a few inches, and Dorothy moved up
close to it, trying to see inside. She could see only a strip of
her father’s desk and the knees and shoes of two men sitting in
chairs facing it, but she could hear their voices clearly now.

“But don’t you understand how much of this
stuff is being moved under our noses while we wait? We could have
shut down half the speakeasies in the city by this time.”

“Yes, and it wouldn’t bring us a step nearer
to shutting down the supplier. As long as
they
are in
business a dozen new speakeasies will simply spring up somewhere
else for every dozen we close, and it’ll only cost the city more
time and money to locate and break them up.”

“But do you really believe letting these
ones operate will give us a lead? What customer would—”

Dorothy knew that voice of her father’s,
straight and level and indicating he had already made up his mind.
“As little as any of us likes to admit it, these are hard times for
a lot of people in the city. Money is scarce. The reward—”