My grandmother gave mixtures to Mary because the girl had night tremors and panics, and God knows what else. She was a morphine addict, but she hid it, even from Grandmother, which was devious. The last time my grandmother saw her, Mary confessed, but by then it was too late. The mixture Grandmother had been giving her for years should never have ever been used with an opiate. It can cause deadly nerve damage and depression that might lead anyone to take their own life.
This may be where all the darkness started for my family and Bill’s. I don’t know. But now someone else knows of the mistake, so at least my conscience is relieved of the weight of secrecy.
Lydia’s mind raced. Her gaze flew around the small motel room, then she got under the covers and pulled them tightly around herself. She read Theresa Evans’s note again. Mary, a morphine addict? How many times had Frank insisted this was not the case? That it was impossible for that rumor to be true without references to the addiction showing up in her journals? It was a good question…but Mary Walker’s weird behavior had begged for a better explanation than they’d ever come up with. And what about the frequent gaps in the journals?
Lydia had always struggled with these issues, while Frank assumed they were caused by Mary’s fear of her husband. It was true that Mary had written countless anxiety-riddled journal entries about Bernard’s violence and regular violation of her privacy, but to Lydia it had always seemed that an important part of the story was still missing.
Morphine. Addiction. These were like wild cards in the puzzle of Mary’s life. They changed the picture. Yet Lydia was willing to bet that Frank would never consider them as the significant realities they apparently were. Not even in the face of this letter.
“Oh, Professor Carroll,” Lydia whispered into the stuffy air, her eyes wide open toward the ceiling. “Your Mary and my Mary are so different.”
Half an hour later, Lydia accepted that there would be no sleeping for her. Not now. Not here. The Sunday schedule of events at the folk arts festival would not begin for six or seven more hours, and Lydia’s mood had darkened to the point that she wondered why it had ever occurred to her to drive all this way alone for a festival. Had the days of having the lighthearted companionship of a husband and child come to an end so soon?
Okay, she was shaken up, tired, and suddenly maudlin. Time to get out of here. She hurriedly dressed and packed, and drove as fast as she could away from Misquers, Michigan, and toward home.
But before returning to her house, Lydia drove to the lighthouse and pier where Mary had last been seen so long ago. She turned the Jeep off, wrapped a blanket around herself, and watched the water rise and fall against the jetty. For a long time, she stared at its flow from the channel, until it rolled at last from black to mercury silver in the morning light. Fishermen came and went, and seagulls cried.
She stared so long and so intently that she felt herself standing on that pier, wind whipping, rain lashing, desperation and morphine racing through her veins. It was all too easy to imagine a domineering husband bearing down on her. To feel the reckless desire to escape. One thing that suicide had going for it was that death left no open doors from this world.
• • •
Nicholas made a point of rising early to leave the house that morning before his father awoke. He walked the mile to the lake, then along the shoreline until he found an old orchard that he had never seen before. Sitting down with his sketchbook and pencils, he worked for almost three hours.
When a cloudburst swelled from the woolly gray on the southwest horizon, he stuffed his sketchbook under his T-shirt, grabbed his backpack, and ran for cover, dashing through the trees toward two buildings he could barely make out in the downpour, one of which turned out to be a barn. He stood under the overhang of the roof. Ten minutes later, the cold, pelting rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and Nicholas stepped onto the wet path covered with brown pine needles to walk home. He opened his sketchbook to the last piece he’d done. Not bad. Not finished, but not bad.
A screen door on the house thirty feet away whined open, then slammed, and Nicholas turned to see a man walking slowly from the doorway, watching him. He appeared to be about Nicholas’s mother’s age, his face freckled, his hair slightly curly and the color of wet sand. When he spoke, his voice was clear and dry.
“Hey there, buddy.” The man lifted a tangle of rope from the concrete pad outside his back door and wound it in a loop over his palm and elbow. “Visiting the lakeshore?”
“No, I live near town,” Nicholas said quickly. “I was born here.”
“I see. Me, too.” The man hooked the circle of rope onto one of several nails by the door and stepped toward Nicholas, right hand outstretched. “Jack Kenilworth.”
Nicholas extended his own thin arm. “Nick Carroll.”
Jack Kenilworth studied his face for a few seconds, then scanned to Nicholas’s feet and back. He reached into the breast pocket of his faded-orange denim shirt, pulled out a pack of Camel cigarettes, and lit one, inhaling and blowing smoke off to the side as he gazed toward the lake, then back at Nicholas.
“I knew your mother a little bit when she was about your age. High school.” His eyes seemed to smile, then he glanced at the sketchbook. “Doing homework out here?”
“Just… I draw.”
“Let’s see what you got.” Jack slid his hands into worn jeans pockets and waited.
Nicholas was startled. “Okay.” As he stood next to the man and flipped from the unfinished piece to his completed sketch of a damaged sailboat half buried in the sand not far from the Kenilworth house, he could feel Jack’s interest rise immediately.
“Good eye,” he said, looking into Nicholas’s face. “Excellent detail and proportions.” He pointed to fancy letters along the side of the boat, a faint smile visible. “Who’s Chelsea?”
Nicholas felt his face grow instantly hot, but he forced himself to look Jack in the eye and just shrug. Jack cleared his throat and gestured toward the barn. “Say, do you have time to come into the workshop? I run my business out of this barn here, and I think it might interest you. Got a minute?”
Nicholas looked at the man’s open expression and found it surprisingly easy to imagine him as a kid at White Hill High School. He wondered what sort of job Jack Kenilworth did by himself up here in the woods, and curiosity answered the invitation for him. “Sure, that’d be cool.”
Nicholas slid the sketchbook into his backpack and followed Jack into the vast building. Unlike the Carrolls’ barn, this one was well preserved and finished off with drywall and long bars of track lights mounted into the rafters. Instead of dirt, the floor was painted planks, and a long pine worktable was built into the far wall. Shelves full of books and rolled paper stood at each end of the table, and a pegboard above it held a variety of measurement tools.
“This is a studio, of sorts,” Jack said, gazing around the space along with Nicholas. “But I’m not much of an artist when it comes to pencils and paper. I do what I have to for my projects, but it ain’t always pretty.”
Nicholas nodded, confused. Then he noticed three enlarged photos of a single sailboat from different angles, along with correlating sketches, pinned to a corkboard. “You draw boats?” he asked.
“I build boats,” Jack said, walking toward the table. Nicholas followed him. “Mostly I purchase plans that have been built before. But once in a while I have to loft one of them. This is where I do it, and for me it’s damn tedious.” He shook his head at Nicholas and seemed to expect a comment. “I don’t have much of an eye for two-dimensional forms, and my math comes slow. All in all, lofting takes me forever. As I said, the results are rough. But usually they suffice.” He gave a short laugh. “Usually.”
Nicholas raised his eyebrows and pushed his glasses up, still unable to make any kind of intelligent remark.
“You know. When boat plans are new, you loft them—draw them fu
ll scale here on the floor. To make sure there aren’t any errors, so you build the boat right.”
Nicholas looked down. “On the floor? Wow. How do you do that?”
“Measure and then measure again, and then again. That’s most of it. Math. Then the drawing, of course. Takes patience. I do better with the 3-D part—the wood, nails, glue, the process of making the actual boat.”
It seemed magnificent to Nicholas. Drawings as large as ships, drawings that filled a barn. His eyes searched the floorboards for ghost boats.
“I start with this.” Jack pulled out a blueprint that was about two feet by three and spread it on the worktable. “The blueprints of the designs I choose usually arrive by mail—a bunch of sheets containing the plans. One drawing is three views of the boat’s shape, and those are called the lines.
“First you draw the baseline—with great care—and everything else will be derived from that,” Jack said. “Like this.” He tapped a small nail into the floor, walked several measured paces and tapped in another, stringing a wire between them. “Under this wire you put strong marks about every two and a half feet with chalk, then use the yardstick there to connect them. Here, give it a try.”
“I don’t know…”
“Don’t worry about it. Just focus on making that one line as straight as you can.”
Nicholas felt Jack watching him as he concentrated and then stooped down to make the line.
“That’s right,” Jack said encouragingly as Nicholas marked off several dashes and drew a careful line through them all. “See, we’ve made the baseline twenty feet long. Leaves plenty of room above it for the seventeen-foot boat, right?”
“Right.”
“Then, you must look from both ends of the base to make sure it’s true, because like I said, everything’s going to be built off it.” Jack walked to the worktable and picked up the top sheet of plans. “There’s so much here to do. And I can see you’ve handled pencils for many hours. Am I right?”
“Definitely,” Nicholas said, nodding. The man’s interest encouraged him to talk. “I’ve copied the road maps of every county in Michigan. When I was younger, I used to imitate the signatures and drawings of famous people.”
“Mmm, how useful.” Jack looked amused. “Famous people like your parents? Got yourself out of class once in a while?”
Nicholas laughed, avoiding Jack’s eyes. “Well, maybe. It feels like drawing is sort of—I don’t know—where I live.”
“I bet.” When Nicholas glanced up, the man’s eyes were resting on him with a studious look. “So…you want a job?”
Nicholas chuckled, but the man’s expression didn’t change.
“A job? Really? Well, I actually do need one.” He tried to think of the proper thing to say. He was absolutely sure that he wanted some kind of change in his life. “But I don’t know if I can do…serious drawing.”
“We can give it a go, see if it works out. If you want to. Nothing to lose for either of us, right?”
Nicholas considered this and all that it might mean for his freedom. He would have somewhere else to go besides school and home. And he could save every penny he earned to buy a car for a long, long trip. Or maybe a boat. He smiled.
7
White Hill, Michigan—September 1933
Our heaven will not come to us again…
~ Mildred Amelia Barker, “Not Again”
The father of the bride sat on the back steps of the church, gazing across the arid depressions of former tide pools and holding an unlit, hand-rolled cigarette between two fingers. A widower for half his life and a loner for most of it before that, Leonard Walker knew that he was expected to walk his daughter down the aisle, but he didn’t care for socializing and was uncomfortable around his future son-in-law, so he’d fled the crowd to wait until she came for him.
Mary stood near an arbor covered with wild roses as her three bridesmaids adjusted her hair and veil with fastidious attention that filled her with gratitude. She watched their fingers, lips, and eyes around her face as they fussed over details.
“It will be all right, Mary, whatever you do,” Ruth said in the intelligent, cool voice Mary had learned to rely on. “You’re so beautiful that no one and nothing in this world can harm you.”
“So beautiful,” Helen echoed, shaking her head with a smile, her own delicate features lit with excitement. “Bernard is lucky, Mary, even if people might think you’re the fortunate one. The fact is, he couldn’t possibly do better.”
Helen’s smile crumpled into tears, and she put a hand on Mary’s cheek. “You have to take good care of yourself, Mary. He isn’t the kind of man who will understand everything you need.”
“Helen,” Ruth said. “Mary knows what kind of man she’s marrying. And frankly, no man understands everything a woman needs.”
Josephine laughed and stepped back, hands clasped together at her chest. “I hope I look so perfect when I’m a bride! Let me get the photographer!”
“But I think it’s almost time for the ceremony, isn’t it?” Mary asked as she spotted a boy entering the bell tower to pull the ropes. Then it occurred to her: Where was her father? She had hugged him an hour or more ago when he’d arrived, but she had not seen him since. Where had he gone? With the wariness she’d developed as a young child, she squinted toward the windows of the church. Had he gone inside? She scanned the lawn. He should be here. He should not make her worry today. It would be mortifying if he’d walked down the beach and gotten too far away, or if he’d gone into one of his disturbing trances and ended up—
“Ruth!” Mary’s worry made her breathless. “Would you please help me look for my father?”
The desperate note in Mary’s voice brought Ruth quickly, and she laid a hand on Mary’s shoulder.
“Of course, dear! Where do you think he might be?”
Mary could not explain how to look for her father. Someone searching would have to walk slowly, trying to think from his point of view, while watching for sights that might have drawn his attention and lured him away.
“Oh, I’ll just have to go myself because I don’t know how to explain his crazy mind,” she muttered. “Ruth, please do get the photographer to come over here, and I will hurry back!”
Surely he would not go far on such an important occasion, Mary thought, fuming. She wrapped her fingers into the thick, white fabric of her wedding dress to lift it and run around behind the church toward the woods and dunes. It was a cool September day, and wind gusted in from the lake, but the sunlight was warm. About a hundred feet behind the church, the beach stretched for empty miles in both directions. Suspecting her father had gone wandering too far away to hear her voice, Mary stood in the wind and searched the shore. But then she heard him call her name. She turned. He was just there, on the back steps of the church, and he stood up and walked toward her.
“Daddy, what are you doing?” Relief and frustration poured out in her voice, but when his eyes widened with alarm, she tried to lighten her tone to banter. “I am getting married, don’t you know?”
She forced a laugh, and her father attempted a smile. She could feel his gaze taking in the bridal image of her, but she couldn’t tell if the tenderness in his eyes was for her or for some distant, tender moment that wasn’t even part of her life.
“Mary,” he said, tossing aside what was left of his cigarette and brushing his hands together, his face pensive. She wondered if he was going to announce that he just couldn’t do it, couldn’t endure the attention to his “old bones” long enough to walk her down the aisle. He was the only member of her family in attendance, and she did not think she could bear the shame of such a refusal. His silence continued, and her fists clenched more fiercely around the white satin of her skirt.
“What, Daddy? What?” She wanted to scream at him to be stronger, to pay attention to time, to other people, to the world around them
both that would swallow them whole if they didn’t assert at least a modicum of strength. The first set of invitational church bells rang, but still Leonard did not speak. “Daddy.”
His gaze rose quickly to hers, and at last he focused. She knew her expression was angry, but she no longer cared.
“I had a thought last night, my dear,” he said carefully, and his mind appeared to follow that thought down winding corridors, again losing track of the moment at hand. “And I find myself fearing that I missed some important moments along the way.”
Mary set her jaw in a warning that he did not seem to perceive.
“Along what way, Daddy?” she said evenly. “What—”
“Your life. I think there may have been points when I could have…better prepared you for”—he searched her eyes, his own glittering with tears—“for whatever comes. I will always try to save you from wrongdoing, but—”
“Daddy,” Mary said with all the patience she could muster. She felt bitter resentment at hearing him speak of saving her, when for as long as she could remember in their actual lives, she had saved him—from sadness, from distraction, from malnutrition, from mistakes, from dropping out of life altogether. She did not want to hear about his fears for her. “I don’t think it’s the right time to talk about this.”
He looked into her eyes for a moment, and then his intention receded. “Right,” he said quietly. “I don’t suppose it is.”
Mary caught sight of Bernard’s powerful form in a dark suit that added class to his raw masculine appeal, and her spirits rose. Bernard Evans—with his beautiful, strong body, free laugh, and cerulean-blue eyes full of vitality—was the ship that would take her away from the foggy, dangerous waters that her father inhabited.
“It’s a journey, Daddy.” She forced a smile and reached for his hand to urge him toward the church doors. “That’s all it ever is. A journey. You can’t save me from that, and I wouldn’t want you to.”
The Lake and the Lost Girl Page 7
