The Summer We Lost Alice (24 page)

Cat decided that all she needed to make it a perfect meal was one less miscarriage in her history, one less disreputable cousin, a little sister who hadn't vanished under mysterious circumstances, and a few tons less guilt over the part she'd played in the tragedy.

All that, and the bastard who kidnapped Willy Proost hung up by the cojones.

"RECOGNIZE
the place?" Ethan said.

He and Heather sat on the
shore of White Deer Lake. Around them, the trees whispered. Dry leaves, yellow and brown, tumbled and twisted in the dusty air.

"Sort of," Heather said. "There's a feeling in my chest.
A swelling, a kind of magnetic tug. An ache. The lake, the woods—they're familiar, but distant. I feel like an intruder, like I'm here in disguise."

"Which direction is the nursing home?"

Heather pointed. She didn't hesitate, as if Ethan had asked her which way was "up."

"Over there."

"Is that your final answer?"

"Don't be an ass. I'm not guessing. I know. It's that way. There's a graveyard. You never told me about the graveyard, did you?"

"I don't remember. Maybe I did."

"You didn't."

She poked at the water with a stick, watched the mud swirl as she stirred it.

"I'm afraid, Ethan. I'm afraid of losing myself. Alice—she's a strong personality. I mean, she's me, or I'm her, whatever. But I don't
... I don't feel like myself here. I feel like her. Or maybe I'm learning how much of her I really am. I don't know. I'm just being stupid."

Ethan placed his hand on hers. He'd have put his arm around her shoulders but they were both perched a little precariously on the roots of a tree that overhung the water. No snuggling possible.

"You aren't," he said. "You nailed it. The nursing home's exactly where you said. And yes, there's a graveyard."

"So you think it's possible that I died all those years ago—and now, I'm her?"

"It doesn't fit with my worldview."

"Maybe your worldview needs glasses."

"Maybe."

Heather looked out at the lake.

"It isn't even a lake, really, is it? I mean, in most parts of the world they'd call it a pond."

"It's a lake. You get out into the middle and it's pretty deep. You couldn't walk across."

"That's the difference? You'd think there would be a measurement of some kind. So many gallons and it's a lake, less than that and it's a pond. 'You can't walk across it' seems kind of arbitrary. Maybe a basketball player could walk across it and a horse jockey couldn't, so what is it then? Then there's the Jesus thing. Everything would be a pond to Jesus."

She noticed that Ethan was looking at her. His jaw was hanging loose.

"What?" she said.

"That was so—Alice," he said.

"I wonder about things like that all the time. I've learned to keep my mouth shut with most people."

"You're saying I'm not 'most
people.'"

"Not by a long shot. Maybe you wish you were."

Ethan tossed a rock into the water. When the ripples had died out, he stood up and stretched.

"Come on," he said. "Let's go for a walk."

* * *

Very few people driving between Missouri and Colorado would consider themselves lucky for the chance to travel through Kansas. It takes a practiced eye to discern the beauty in the Kansas landscape in anything more than an abstract, painterly manner. Waves of wheat, blue sky dappled with billowy clouds, the occasional quaint old barn—only an artist or a native Kansan finds comfort in such relentless minimalism.

For most travelers the trip is an endless succession of billboards announcing Denny's, McDonald's, The World's Largest Prairie Dog or The World's Deepest Hand-dug Well. One squat little city after another, smutty grain silos, pre-fabricated houses in the middle of patches of dirt where fenced horses bake in the noonday sun. Dry, fallow fields. Cows, cows, and more cows.

White Deer Lake was too far off the beaten path to be a tourist destination, even if all you required was a spot of water and a patch of shade for a roadside picnic. Motorboats were forbidden. The wind scattered paper plates and napkins and cooler lids with abandon
. When the wind died, the mosquitoes and the tiny, biting flies came out. There wasn't enough DEET in the world to keep them at bay.

And yet, because of these features—not to mention the bitter Kansas winters and the region's general lack of economic activity—the lake had been spared any sort of planned exploitation. Fish swam in water free of poison from chemically maintained lawns
. The air buzzed only with insects and not the noxious complaint of jet skis. The few houses in the vicinity were modest and eclectic. Some were nothing more than trailers that had blown in and taken root in the woods. The people who lived in them did their best to remain out of sight and out of mind, and that's how everyone liked it.

It was easy enough to walk around the lake and talk of trivialities
. According to Ethan, autumn was the best time to do so.

"As long as you aren't sensitive to ragweed," Ethan said.

"I think it's beautiful," Heather said. "I love the colors. It's like the whole world's one big, crazy quilt."

"Oh, no question.
Between late summer and the first frost, most travel guides rate the Midwest as generally habitable."

"Southern California's for
wusses. The rest of the world has real weather, and those things—what do you call them? Seasons."

"L.A. has seasons. Earthquake, mudslide, riot—"

"And Oscar."

"Awards season, yes. The annual migration of limousines to their spawning grounds in Hollywood."

"You'd kill for an Emmy."

"Yes, but only network executives. I have my scruples."

She leaned her head briefly on his shoulder.

"Oh, Ethan, what are we doing here? What do we hope to accomplish? We aren't detectives. Unless deep down you do believe you have a
gift, or that I'm your old girlfriend, reborn—"

"Alice wasn't my girlfriend."

"She would have been, if she'd lived. If you'd have let her. She would have shown up on your doorstep ten years later with some stringy-haired boy she'd dump in a minute if you so much as remembered her name."

"You're fantasizing."

"And what's wrong with fantasizing?"

"Nothing, if you keep it in its place. That's my problem. I look back on that summer and I don't know what was real and what
was make-believe. I was just a kid, a crazy kid. Now I'm a crazy adult looking back and trying to make sense of it all."

"And maybe keep other children from being kidnapped.
Or worse."

"We should go home, spend a few weeks in bed. Once you realize what a piece of work I am, you can leave me and get on with your life.
Your
life, not Alice's."

"Can't."

"Why not?"

"Because of your nose."

"Ah, yes, my nose."

"The nose knows."

"Or, it's simply defective and leaks blood from time to time."

"You don't believe that. Willy
Proost's disappearance is connected to Alice's. You know it—"

"I don't know it!"

"You know it because there's a spiritual connection!"

"I don't believe in spiritual connections!"

Heather stopped. She exhaled deeply and then drew in an equally long breath as if sucking in forbearance from the air around her.

"You don't know what you believe," she said. "You're too blinded by what you
think
."

Ethan rubbed his forehead. His head did not hurt, but he pretended that it did to buy some time. If there was anything to what she
said, anything at all, then reason and faith would find a way to come together. Evidence would become manifest. Not the evidence of intuition, but the evidence of facts. Observable phenomena. Something he could see and touch that could not be explained in any way but by the workings of supernatural forces. So far he hadn't seen anything that would pass the most superficial scientific scrutiny.

Okay, she knew the direction of the nursing home. What were the chances? They'd come from
due east, so that left three choices—west, north, or south. She'd chosen correctly, a one-in-three chance. Well, one-in-seven, maybe. She'd nailed it pretty well.

That she was aware of the graveyard puzzled him, but he wasn't entirely sure he'd never mentioned it in passing
. Maybe she'd heard about it somewhere else, or it could have been a guess that happened to be true. The place could've been on
The History Channel
for all he knew, on some cheesy unsolved mystery program.

He noticed Heather looking around anxiously.

"Where's the restroom?" she said.

"Other side of the lake.
You should know that."

"Yeah.
Right. I'll be back."

"I'll go with you."

"You stay here."

"Really, I don't mind—"

She gave him a look that said, "Don't be a dope." He got it. She wasn't going any further than the nearest stand of brush.

"Oh," he said.
Heather traipsed off out of sight. That gave him time to evaluate his situation.

He considered packing everything in, flying back to L.A.
, and checking himself into a nice hotel by the beach with masseuses, margaritas, and hot and cold running barmaids. Then his mind called up a vision of Aunt Flo and replayed her words, delivered with such conviction: "More children are going to die." She was sure of it, deep in her bones. That imposed an obligation on him—a
moral imperative
—to keep it from happening. He tried to look at the situation logically—what were the possible consequences to him and others if there were indeed more disappearances?

Two more children (if the pattern held true) would be ripped from their families
. They would vanish from the face of the earth.

Possibly they would be sexually molested, tortured, and killed.

Maybe Cat's children would be among the victims.

Maybe Ethan would get blamed.

Maybe Aunt Flo's fears weren't a reason to stay, but the best reason in the world to leave.

Which brought him back where he began.
The smartest thing to do might be to get the hell out of Dodge. At least one local sheriff would support the idea.

A voice boomed at him from the trees.

"Go home!" it said.

Former sheriff Sam Morse Sr. was walking towards him.
Twenty-five years older, fifty percent heavier, red faced and pot-gutted. But still, the man who shot old Boo.

"It is you, isn't it?" Morse said. "Ethan
Opochensky. Ethan Opos, my hairy, fat ass."

"Sheriff Morse," Ethan said.

"Former. My boy's sheriff around here now. Swept every election like a twister."

Morse was breathing hard from the walk. The years and the booze and the cigarettes and the pie at Mina's had not been kind to him. The malice in the big man's eyes was unmistakable.

"It's no secret, you know," Ethan said, "about my name. I didn't change it to hide from the law."

"What brings you
back here, as if I didn't know," Morse said.

"Family visit."

"That right." Morse had a way of inflecting questions that stripped them of all sense of inquiry. "Seems you were here on a 'family visit' twenty-five years ago, and three innocent kids went missing. Now here you are again, and we've got a missing boy." He stepped closer to Ethan. "What is it about you that makes kids disappear?"

"I wasn't here when Willy
Proost disappeared. I was in Los Angeles."

"Is that a
fact."

"It is."

The former sheriff circled Ethan. He reminded Ethan of a bear huffing over a knapsack, sniffing for any reason to rip it apart.

"Easy enough for my boy to check.
If you're lying, you're as good as hung. You'll wish you'd stayed far away from Meddersville, that's for sure."

"I've tried to do just that," Ethan said.

"I never did believe that crock story you told about a witch," Morse said.

"I know. These days, I don't much believe it myself."

Morse
hmphed
.

"You've talked to him, have you?" Morse said.

"Your son? Yes, Sammy and I had a nice chat at the café."

"No, not my son.
You know who I mean. The Proost boy. Little Willy Proost. You talked to him on the other side?"

"No."

"Why the hell not, if you want to know who killed him? Unless you already know."