Lost Lake House (9 page)

She flew down the dim gray gravel, between
vague shapes of shrubs and plants whose spicy wet scents told her
of the thick garden on either side, down the steep path with a
momentum that could only be stopped if she fell—panting, but unable
to think of anything but running, running away from everything that
was behind her. She did not know where she was going. It was an
island—but there must be some way—

Ahead the ghostly lightness of another path
sloping down joined hers from the left—Dorothy saw a figure move
into the juncture but had no time to check herself or even to gasp.
She collided violently with someone, bumped her nose and sprained
her wrist so that for a moment it hung stinging and useless. Her
feet skidded on the gravel—hands caught her and kept her from
falling. Dorothy gave a gasp, of combined fear and breathlessness,
and looked up, trying to see in the dark. A man—or a boy—someone
taller than her. For only an instant he held onto her as if making
a decision, and then said, “Come with me. This way!”

The voice was young, but firm and
authoritative. It was at least something sane to grasp at. Dorothy,
all her life one to act on impulse, made another breathless
instant’s decision and followed him. Anything that would take her
further away; anyone who seemed to know where they were going.

He pulled her along with him, and they went
further down the path between more shrubberies, half running, and
turned left along a high stone wall heavily overgrown with drooping
green. Here they stopped; Dorothy’s arm was released and she heard
the metallic whisk of keys on a ring as her companion unlocked an
arched door in the wall, pushed her quickly through and pulled it
closed behind them. Another quick stair-step descent on a narrow
path shelved with slabs of slate, and they emerged in the open on
what Dorothy realized was the far side of the island. Off to the
left was the boathouse, a jumble of posts and roofs in the
moonlight, with the twinkling leaves of breeze-stirred poplar trees
overhanging it. Nearer at hand a rowboat was drawn up on the
pebbled shore of a little cove. Directed by a whispered signal from
her companion, Dorothy scrambled down the beach and tried to climb
into the rowboat. She leaned too hard on the gunwale and the boat
slid a few inches down the pebbles; as it escaped her Dorothy
stumbled forward into the shallows, her shoes and stockings filling
with chilly water. The boat drifted further off, and the hem of her
skirt clung wet above her knees. But her guide’s hand gripped her
elbow from behind, helped her over the side, and let go. Dorothy
tripped over the first seat and fell into the bottom of the boat,
skinning her knee and elbow and bruising her shoulder, and for a
second the frustration, pain and humiliation was enough that she
only wanted to stay there.

She felt the boat grind off the pebbly
bottom, heard the ripple of water close by her ear, and the sound
of the boy’s boots on the floorboards as he stepped into the boat.
As he set the oars in place Dorothy managed to crawl up onto the
other seat, and sat with her hands braced on either side of her,
bedraggled and still short of breath. The first shove from shore
carried them out far and smoothly, and then, working one oar, he
turned the boat around in its own current. Dorothy looked back at
the lights of the Lost Lake House through the trees—saw the small
stabbing flickers of electric torches come into the grounds behind
it.

The boat rocked a little, and she gripped at
the side.
Down she came, and found a boat…beneath a willow left
afloat…

Where did that come from…? The poetry-book
that she had spent the last two nights curled up with in her room,
trying drearily to forget about her father—her father, and the
library, and the committee and the new shoes…only she would never
have found her own way off the island; she had been hustled off by
a surer hand in the midst of her confusion.

The oars dug deep in the water; there was no
sound from the oarlocks. The rowboat moved swiftly, cutting a
glittering, washing wake through the light cast on the lake from
the windows of the Lake House. And there was a paler light around
them now, too, that broke into ripples on the surface of the
water—Dorothy realized that it was moonlight.

There was utter silence, except for the
washing of the water and an occasional faint shout from the island.
Dorothy could hear her own uneven breathing. Her companion seemed
wholly concentrated on the task of getting away; he did not even
look at her. He took a quick glance over his shoulder, assessing
what lay ahead. Dorothy followed the glance. Across the lake, to
the left, a long headland ran out from the further shore, cutting
off the moonlight and cloaking all the shore inside it in utter
blackness. The shadow ran diagonally out across the water to nearly
touch the tip of a short promontory off the back of the island, out
on their right, and it was for this point that her companion seemed
to be making with a swiftness indicating he knew it was the
shortest way to cover. But it seemed to take forever. Dorothy
looked up at the moon almost with dread—its light had never seemed
so bright and revealing before. Under the lights of the Lake House
she had never seen it at all.

The island promontory slid past, with
maddening slowness—there were only a few yards of open moonlit
water ahead. Dorothy could feel the rowboat quicken and pull
against the water with every deep stroke of the oars, like a living
thing. Then they slipped from light into shadow; the darkness
dropped over them like a cloak of invisibility.

Her eyes adjusted slowly, and she could see
little, but she knew that her companion held the oars out of the
water, resting for a moment while the boat’s momentum carried them
forward. Then, after a moment, he began rowing again, steadily and
rhythmically, further into the dark and still giving the impression
that he knew where he was going. Dorothy stared ahead, trying to
find some recognizable shape or form in the silent lake shore. It
was still quite a ways away.

After a few minutes, a vague sense of trees,
of rushes, of trailing branches began to take shape, as her eyes
adjusted to the dark. They seemed very close to shore now; just
ahead a thick cluster of rushes whispered in a slight night-breeze,
and the chirp of a frog came from among them. But the rowboat
glided past, checked and swung to one side a little, and, moving
slower now, crept under the tips of hanging willow branches into
what she realized was a small deep inlet in the shore.

By the margin, willow-veil’d, slide the
heavy barges trail’d…

The trees closed dark around them, only the
arched opening showing a glimpse of the moon shining far out on the
lake. Here the boat turned gently, almost silently broadside, as
the boy raised one oar and let the other trail in the water, half
turned to look back over his shoulder in the direction they had
come.

Dorothy drew a breath. She too had been so
caught up in the tension of the escape that she had had no time to
think of anything else. Now the boat was still, and her thoughts
had time to move. A little apprehensively she studied her silent
companion in the boat, whose profile was turned to her as he looked
out in the direction of the island. From the little she had managed
to see of him by moonlight she could tell he was an
ordinary-looking boy, perhaps a little older than her, with curly
hair that might be brown—it was hard to tell in the dark. She could
determine little else about him except that he seemed tall, and had
strong, lean hands that gripped and pulled the oars with little
effort. But one thing had stood out curiously plain: in the brief
glimpse she had had of his face, there was a set look about it that
made an impression on her—she would have called it bitterness or
unhappiness, almost.

In the silence Dorothy was increasingly
uncomfortable. The significance of his knowing the lake and island
so well had not escaped her, nor the ring of keys that opened doors
in the Lake House grounds. She knew he must be from there, and yet
somehow she still did not feel afraid of him. After a moment, she
summoned up the few small shreds of nerve remaining to her and put
them together for speech.

She said, “Will anybody come after us?”

“No,” he said without turning his head. “We
got out of sight quick enough. You can’t see a thing of this shore
from the island at this time of night.”

He turned back to face her, letting the
other oar down into the water. “Are you all right? I thought I
stepped on you getting into the boat.”

“No—you didn’t.” Dorothy paused, and then
added, “Who are you?”

“My name’s Marshall Kendrick. I’m a
groundskeeper at the Lost Lake House.”

He offered no further information, as if
this explained everything that was necessary, but Dorothy’s mind
was full of questions—and one in particular jostled to the
forefront. “Why did you help me?”

He glanced at her. “I’ve seen you before,”
he said. “You’re a decent kind of kid—you don’t belong here. I know
what a police raid’s like—people shoved around and questioned,
newspaper photographers everywhere…so…” He shrugged. “I didn’t want
to see you get caught in that.”

“How do you know I’m decent?” said Dorothy,
turning her face partly away. She had forgotten he could probably
see little of her in the dark.

“I know you’re a far cry from the type of
girl Sloop Jackson usually spends his time on, anyway.”

The idea that even the Lake House staff had
a casual knowledge of how Sloop Jackson “spent his time” on
different girls prickled the back of Dorothy’s neck, and settled
like a lead weight into her stomach. She ought to have known. For
some reason she suddenly recalled the empty mirrored hall, leading
down to some lower reaches of the building, where Jackson had had
her cornered—until a slammed door below rescued her.

Without thinking she said aloud, “Did you
slam that door?”

“Yes.”

“Thank—you,” said Dorothy, a trifle
awkwardly.

There was no answer. Dorothy thought this
must be the strangest conversation she had ever had.

And the strangest place she had ever held
converse, too. Crickets and mosquitoes shrilled in the blackness of
unseen reeds, and high overhead she heard the flapping wings of a
roosting bird in the trees.

She shifted a little on the rowboat seat and
said, “What are we doing here? Isn’t there somewhere we can
go?”

“Well, we can’t go back to the island,
that’s for sure. Not until the police leave anyway, unless you want
to be questioned.”

“How long will that be?”

“No telling. Depends on what they find,”
muttered Marshall with a resentful inflection she did not try to
understand just then.

“But we can’t just sit here all
night
, can we?” The idea of sitting there for an
undetermined amount of time in the company of the insects and an
inscrutable companion was beginning to be dismaying.

“You didn’t have to come, you know.” He
sounded irritated for the first time.

“You didn’t give me much of a choice!”
snapped Dorothy.

“You wanted out of that, didn’t you? What
better can you expect on a lake in the middle of the night?”

“It doesn’t seem to matter very much
what
I care for,” said Dorothy, clinging precariously to
fragile dignity. Reaction was setting in, and the consciousness
that she was sitting on a very damp skirt on a rough board seat and
that her stockings were soaked through and her shoes probably
completely ruined. She now felt that she would very much like to
cry. She folded her arms and gave a petulant sniff that did not
much assuage the desire.

Marshall Kendrick did not appear to
appreciate any of the direness of her situation; he only shifted
one of the oars and made a low exasperated sound in his throat. Hot
stinging tears welled up in Dorothy’s eyes. She gave one sob—and
finding this loosened all the rest, she dropped her head into her
hands so her disarrayed curls hung into her face and wept
miserably.

Marshall seemed more alarmed by her tears
than by anything else; he sat stiffly and silently and did not seem
to know what to say or do. Dorothy paid him no attention; she was
crying in real earnest now. It had been a long time since she had
gotten crying so she could not stop, and she did not even try—she
was swept along on the tide of accumulated emotions from the whole
night.

“Just
look
at my shoes,” she sobbed.
“They’re ruined, completely ruined. I’ll
never
be able to
explain them now. He’ll know, and I’ll have to tell him, and it’ll
be a hundred times more horrible than if I’d just told him. Oh,
why” (with a gulp) “did this ever
happen?
”

“Who?” said Marshall, picking the salient
point out of this incoherence.