The Secrets of Lake Road (27 page)

She hid behind the tree in the back of the cabin, when she heard the screen door open and voices coming from the front porch. Two women were talking. Their conversation was stilted at first and then turned into a hushed silence. Caroline imagined them hugging when one of them sobbed. The screen door banged shut, muffling their voices now that they were inside.

She slid down the trunk and sat at the base of the tree. She’d have to wait it out. She picked up a twig and poked some leaves on the ground. Then she made circles in the dirt. She spelled her name and then wiped it away. When she looked up from the ground, she noticed the old fire pit and the rock with the painted initials
J
+
B
.

She threw the twig at the rock. She hated Billy for reasons she didn’t fully understand and she couldn’t properly explain. It wasn’t nice hating someone who was dead, but she did hate him. She thought about the old
Lake Reporter
:
Sixteen-year-old local boy William J. Hawke disappeared.
Her father said he wasn’t friends with him, but the article in the paper said otherwise. She wondered if maybe her father didn’t like Billy either, since he was once her mother’s old boyfriend. It was possible. Maybe that was why she had such strong feelings about not liking him too.

“William J.,” she said to herself. A disturbing thought crossed her mind. Could the
J
stand for “John?” William John Hawke. And if it did, could Johnny be named after Billy? Was that the big secret? She did the math, figuring the date Billy died and the month Johnny was born. And then there were the similarities between Johnny and Chris, their smile, their swagger.

Her stomach took a slow roll.

The possibility that Johnny was Billy’s son and not her father’s left her breathless. She sprung to her feet, gasping for air. How could her mother lie to her and her father? Or did her father know Johnny wasn’t his? Then again, maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was working herself up for no reason. But she felt so much rage inside her.

She picked up a large branch and struck the rock with her mother’s and Billy’s initials over and over until the branch snapped. She searched the ground, grabbing rocks and throwing them at random into the woods. She picked up more stones. One of them sliced her palm with its sharp edge. The cut was small, but deep enough for blood to drip down the side of her arm.

I hate you,
she said about her mother. With all her might, she lifted the rock with the stupid initials and flipped it over so she didn’t ever have to look at it again.
I hate you.

She pulled the baseball cap off her head, covered her face with it, and cried.

Everything felt like a lie. Her family was a lie.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Dee Dee opened the screen door to find a strange woman on her front porch. The woman’s clothes were rumpled, her sandaled feet dirty. The wide-rimmed sun hat cast shadows across her face, and yet there was something familiar about her.

“Can I help you?” She leaned against the doorjamb, holding the door open with her bare foot. She crossed her arms. She had been home for a total of ten minutes, her body exhausted after pulling a double shift. And after sitting in the sheriff’s office the last hour, her emotions were just as worn, cast, and dragged like grappling hooks, sharp with anger but also filled with hope now that the bones were in fact Billy’s and the case was officially reopened. She didn’t have the energy to humor this woman who was holding a small stuffed doll in one hand and extending the other for her to shake. She looked at the woman’s hand, the nails bitten down to the cuticles. She kept her arms folded.

“It’s me.” The woman clearly was on edge, and her voice had a desperate pleading quality.

“I’m sorry. Do I know you?” The second the question came out, she recognized her as the woman whose little girl had drowned.

“Yes, you do,” the woman said, and launched herself at Dee Dee, wrapping her thin arms around Dee Dee’s neck. She laid her head on Dee Dee’s shoulder, letting the sun hat fall to the porch floor, and sobbed. Her breath smelled like coffee. Her hair was greasy. She was filthy, and she was on the verge of coming undone.

Dee Dee wasn’t the type to offer comfort. Years of nursing had a way of desensitizing her. She considered herself tough, thick-skinned, detached. But she wasn’t unkind. It was just that life on the lake had hardened her. But she understood the woman’s anguish whether she wanted to admit it or not. The woman had lost her child, and Dee Dee knew all about loss.

“There, there,” she said, and patted the woman’s back. The woman collapsed farther into her arms, and it was all she could do to hold the two of them up. The woman continued to burrow in close, wanting the kind of affection a child seeks from a parent.

“Okay, okay,” Dee Dee said. It was then she recognized the scent of the lake on the woman’s skin, an odd mix of earthiness and sunshine and whatever was rotten on the bottom. It was the identifying factor of anyone who had spent any time here, anyone who the lake had claimed as its own.

“Come inside.” She led the woman into the kitchen, where she helped her into a chair. She set a cold glass of lake water she had pumped from the well onto the table. “Drink,” she said.

The woman gulped the water down. When she finished, she wiped her eyes with the doll. “It’s me, Pattie,” she said, and choked back a sob. “Pattie Dugan. You used to babysit me.”

Dee Dee’s hand flew to her chest, surprised at hearing the name of the little girl she had babysat all those summers ago.

“It’s Patricia now. Patricia Starr. My daughter, Sara…” She shook her head, unable to continue.

Dee Dee ran her fingers through her hair, trying to get ahold of the situation. It took a second or two for the shock to wear off, but once it did, something that had gripped her chest all these years loosened. She gazed into the woman’s blue eyes and saw the child she used to be. The guard she kept in front of her heart had lowered just enough for her to reach out to Pattie, Patricia, and hug her tight. It was the most affection she had shown anyone in quite some time.

“I always wondered what happened to you,” she said. She had babysat Pattie every summer since she was three years old. It was as though she were seeing her long-lost daughter for the first time after an unwanted, painful separation.

Dee Dee had so many unanswered questions, she wasn’t sure where to start. She pulled back and collected herself. She had waited a long time, a lifetime, for Pattie to return, and now she wanted answers. She put a pot of coffee on and sat across from her.

“Start from the beginning,” she said. Patricia told her about her parents, their divorce, and later, her awful marriage to Kyle, his affair, how she was alone, how she had no place to go, how she ended up back at the lake after all these years.

“It never left me,” Patricia said. “This place. The lake. It lived inside of me and became a part of me if that makes any sense. I thought by coming here, I would be saved from everything wrong in my life. I believed me and Sara would finally be happy if I could just get us back to the one place I always felt safe.”

Dee Dee understood better than anyone what the lake could do to you, how it could take ahold of you like a lover, drowning you with its beauty, how the mountains could blind you until you could no longer see that there was a whole other world out there, waiting for you, but by then it was too late, and you were too far gone to notice. No, it wasn’t safe at all.

“Why did you wait so long to come to me?” she asked.

“I had planned on coming our first night here. I was going to bake a pie. But Sara…” She broke off. “I swear, I only turned my back for a second,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. Everything happened so quickly.”

Dee Dee reached for Patricia’s hand. “It’s not your fault. A second is all it takes for accidents to happen around here.” She sat quietly for awhile, letting Patricia cry.

When Patricia was able to collect herself, she lifted her head and started talking about Sara. She told Dee Dee about her pregnancy, how Sara had been an easy baby and an even sweeter child. She told her stories about Sara’s determination to tie her own shoes, how she loved bedtime stories and drawing pictures. She talked about Sara’s wild imagination and Sugar, the imaginary Doberman that lived in their attic. “One time during a snowstorm—you know the kind of storm you get around here in the mountains with a foot of snow—well, Sara insisted Sugar got out. She had me driving all over the neighborhood in the middle of the storm looking for her imaginary dog. And I did it. I did it for her. I’d do anything for her.”

She continued telling Dee Dee story after story about her daughter, their adventures, until Dee Dee felt as though she knew everything there was to know about the child. Hours later, when Patricia was talked out, clearly drained, Dee Dee suggested she lie down.

When she was sure Patricia was asleep, Dee Dee lit a cigarette and stepped onto the front porch. She stared out at the water. And for the first time in a long time, she let herself cry.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Caroline stormed into
The Pop-Inn
. Her heart was pounding, and she was out of breath. Her shirt was soaked with sweat, and she was pretty sure so was the pad between her legs. The thought made her queasy. She wasn’t ready for her period, not now, not with everything else making her life so miserable.

The screened-in porch was empty. She tore through the family room and found both Gram and her mother at the kitchen table. They looked up when Caroline barged in.

“What happened to you?” her mother asked.

Gram shot her mother a dirty look and rushed to Caroline’s side. “Your hand is bleeding,” Gram said. “And why are you so sweaty? What happened?” She removed the baseball cap and felt Caroline’s forehead with the back of her hand.

Caroline turned her head away. “I’m fine,” she said.

“No, you’re not. You’re overheated and you’re bleeding.” Gram pulled her by the arm and stuck her hand underneath the faucet at the kitchen sink. Once the dirt was washed away, she inspected the cut on her palm. “It doesn’t look too bad. You won’t need stitches.”

Gram poured a glass of lake water from the jug and handed it to her, which she gratefully accepted. She stared at her mother over the rim and gulped the water down in defiance, remembering her mother’s agitation the last time she filled the jug from the well. When the glass was empty, she wiped her mouth with the back of her arm and said, “Mom, I have something to ask you.”

Her mother eyed her. “What’s going on?”

“You should sit down,” Gram said to Caroline.

“No, I want to stand.” She turned toward her mother.

“But you’re burning up,” Gram said.

She ignored Gram and stared at her mother. “Is Johnny named after Billy?”

Gram was the one who sat down. Her mother’s face paled, the dark shadows in the hollows of her cheeks growing darker, blacker, like the look in her eyes.

“Sit down, Caroline,” her mother said.

The tone of her mother’s voice normally would’ve made Caroline do whatever it was she was asking, but not this time. She crossed her arms. “Answer my question. Is Johnny named after Billy? His
real
father.”

Gram gasped.

“He is, isn’t he?” she asked her mother. She turned to Gram. “And you knew this entire time,” she said. “You were supposed to be on my side.”

“Oh, Caroline,” Gram said. “It’s not about taking sides.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” her mother said.

A small part of her couldn’t believe her mother wasn’t jumping all over her, shouting,
Of course not! Johnny is your father’s son
. But she wasn’t doing that, and something inside of Caroline shattered. She heard Pop’s saying again:
Be careful what you wish for
.

“Please, sit down,” her mother said. “Let’s talk about this calmly.”

“I can’t believe you.” Caroline stomped her foot like she used to do when she was three, throwing a tantrum whenever she didn’t get her way. “Gram?” she asked. “Is he or isn’t he my brother?”

“Of course he’s your brother,” Gram said, and glanced at Caroline’s mother.

Her head felt fuzzy and the room was spinning. She blinked several times to make it stop. She refused to pass out, not until she had heard the truth from her mother. She concentrated on standing upright. “So what, is he like my half-brother then?”

Gram stood and touched Caroline’s arms. “Honey, you don’t look so good. Come sit down.”

She threw Gram’s hands off of her. “No.” She had never lashed out at Gram—ever. She didn’t talk back to her or roll her eyes at her or push her away. But she wasn’t herself. She didn’t know who she was, uncomfortable in her own skin, her changing body.

Her mother slid from the bench seat of the picnic table, taking her time in a cool casual way, remaining in control no matter the circumstances.

It pissed Caroline off even more. Black spots raced across her vision. The angrier she got, the faster they darted past. “Answer me, Mom!” she shouted. “Why won’t you just answer the question?”

“I will when you calm down.” Her mother stepped toward her, reaching for her.

Caroline held her arms out, warning her not to come any closer. For a second the request struck her as funny. All the times she wanted her mother’s arms around her, comforting her, loving her. Right now she couldn’t stand the thought of her mother touching her.

“Is he or isn’t he Billy’s son?”

“Billy had a son?” Johnny asked.

Caroline whipped around to find Johnny standing in the doorway. She hadn’t known he was home. He must’ve still been sleeping. His hair was sticking up in the back and his long bangs were matted to his forehead. He was wearing boxer shorts. His chest was bare where two days ago there had been hair. He must’ve shaved his chest hair. It made his pectorals look more defined and his shoulders broader. He scratched his butt and reached for the refrigerator door, pulling it open.

Her mother hadn’t taken her eyes off Caroline. Gram stared at her mother. No one said anything. Johnny pulled out a jug of lake water and drank from the container without bothering to get a glass. When he finished, he looked at the three of them. “What?”