Harrow Lake

by Kat Ellis

  I didn’t know any of this. On the one hand, it seems like such a kind thing for Nolan to do, but on the other . . . if he actually cares about her, then why hasn’t he ever mentioned her to me? Why have I never met her before? For what possible reason would he maintain a secret connection to the mother of the woman who left him?

  But Grandmother has no right to throw shade on Nolan, especially if what she’s saying is true.

  “You’re lucky he bothers,” I say.

  Lorelei certainly doesn’t. The words hang in the air, unspoken.

  Grandmother’s chair rocks faster. I’ve upset her again. But I don’t care. I don’t care.

  “I’m going out,” I tell her, and head for the door.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’ve been walking for a long time, roughly following the lip of the basin the town sits in. The trees are thin here, the ground almost too rocky without proper hiking boots.

  I’m looking for the Bone Tree again. Not to return Lorelei’s jitterbug to Mister Jitters, although maybe I should. I want to try calling Nolan again, and I know there’s at least some reception near that damn tree.

  How often did Lorelei walk this same path from her home to the Bone Tree? Maybe I’m like one of the tree-people Grant told me about, my roots drawing some essence of Lorelei up through the soles of my shoes. And maybe this is the closest I’ll ever get to my mother again. Walking in her footsteps.

  “Lola, stop!”

  Cora’s brother, Carter, strides through the trees ahead of me. He’s wearing the same wrinkled shirt and pants as before, his face flushed like he’s been running.

  I instinctively take a step back, seeing the notepad clutched in his hand. “What do you want?”

  He shakes his head. “You shouldn’t be up here. We’re right next to the old quarry, and the hillside isn’t stable. A couple of kids noticed signs of ground movement farther up the slope, so my mom asked me to come up here and take some notes. You really shouldn’t wander alone out here when you don’t know where you’re going.”

  You never know what might happen . . .

  “I just came up here to see if there’s any signal—to make a call,” I say. “What kind of signs are you talking about anyway? With the ground movement? I thought you relied on screaming cockerels to let you know when there’s a problem.”

  Carter frowns for a second, then breaks out into a grin. “Oh, you heard about Mr. Bryn’s rooster? Yeah, no. This is something a little more conventional: A couple of trees came down up the hill there.”

  He’s cute when he smiles like that, I realize. Cute enough that I don’t bother to look where he’s pointing.

  I’m alone with a cute boy in the woods.

  That thought is a little thrilling. I can’t think of a time when I’ve been alone with a cute boy anywhere.

  He’s just pretending, Nolan warns me. He wants something from you, Lola. They all do.

  “Did you get through to your dad?” Carter asks, as if reading my thoughts.

  Phone call. Nolan. Hospital. All things I should be thinking about much more than how Carter’s eyes are such a pretty hazel color.

  “I keep trying to reach Nolan at the hospital, but whenever I call they say he’s asleep or with the doctor or not well enough to talk to me. And I’m supposed to be going home in a couple of days.” I’m saying too much, letting this strange boy see too much of me. It’s not Optimal at all. I clamp my mouth shut.

  “I heard about your dad,” Carter says gently. I shrug. “And I’m sorry if I was snappy yesterday. I was just annoyed with Cora is all . . . But that’s another story. Let me at least walk you back to your side of the lake, where the ground is more settled. I know a safe route.”

  We follow an invisible path through the trees, occasional flashes of the lake to our left giving me some sense of my bearings. The sun is high above us, bladelike between the branches.

  Carter is quiet. He moves in a way that says he’s at home in these woods. Content. Every time we come to a rise or a boulder in the path he leaps up onto it like he has too much leashed energy to just walk.

  “So, you live near here?” I say to the back of his head.

  “Right over there.” He points through the scrubby trees below us. “It’s the one with the red pickup out front.”

  “You have your own place?” The house he indicated is more of a log cabin, and I can’t imagine it’s big enough for a whole family.

  “Uh, no. My mom and Cora live there, too,” Carter says, then grins at me as my face burns. He must think I’m an asshole. “Come on. Mrs. McCabe won’t be pleased if I let you get caught in a rockslide and go barrel-rolling down to the lake.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure about that. I don’t think I’m her favorite person right now.” I’m probably not Carter’s, either.

  “What did you do to her?” he asks, half laughing.

  I give that some thought. “I asked too many questions.”

  Carter snorts, but keeps moving. We clamber over tree roots and rocks, Carter pausing here and there to let me catch up, his hand held out for me to take if I need it. But I don’t. Mine are clammy as hell from trekking through the woods.

  We go on like this until my feet start to burn with the promise of blisters. I fall a few steps behind again, and on another rocky cluster manage to stand on the hem of Lorelei’s skirt. The fabric tears. My phone clatters from my pocket, bouncing from stone to stone to a thorny-looking shrub a few feet away. I trudge after it. It’s only as I reach down that I hear a noise—like twigs snapping, but more muffled.

  “Lola, move!” Carter yells. I have only a moment to see him racing toward me before the ground disintegrates under my feet.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I fall so fast I can’t even scream. Daylight disappears before I hit icy water. Then I do scream, but too late. Water fills my mouth. I don’t know which way is up. Whichever way I look, I see only black water. My mind conjures a pale, bony face surging toward me. The Mister Jitters puppet come to life, free of its glass cage.

  It’s not real. It’s not real!

  I kick until my back hits a hard barrier. Using the jagged stones as a guide, I try to figure out which way is air and life. Then I see it. A tiny speck of light shimmers above me. If I can just reach it . . .

  I push away from the rocks, but something clamps around my forearm. The water swallows my scream.

  Tearing free, I kick up toward the speck of light, praying that I’m heading for the surface, not deeper into what must be an underground lake. Just as my chest is about to explode, I burst to the surface, gasping in a great big lungful of air before choking and coughing up what I inhaled on the way down. I start to sink back under.

  “Lola!”

  My name sounds like it’s coming from far away, but then an arm wraps around my waist, and I’m dragged backward.

  Mister Jitters! my panicked mind shrieks. I woke a monster . . .

  I thrash against the arm pinning me, but it won’t let go. My lungs are on fire. And then I’m on solid ground. I try to push him away, to lash out at the monster, but he’s holding me too tightly.

  “Let me go!”

  My heel connects with some part of him and there’s a hiss at my ear.

  “Jesus, Lola! Cut it out, will you?”

  Mister Jitters sounds so much like . . .

  No, I think muddily, that isn’t Mister Jitters—it’s Carter. It’s Carter.

  I turn my head slowly, just to make sure, and his wet hair brushes my cheek. I spin clumsily in his grip and wrap my arms around his neck so tightly I must be cutting off his air supply, but he doesn’t push me away.

  A rough gray circle of sky hangs above us. Clouds move past the gap in the cavern ceiling. Carter doesn’t let me go, not until we’re all the way out of the water, and then he keeps an arm around m
e so I won’t fall back in. He reaches up between us and there’s a click as a dim glow cuts a sphere out of the blackness.

  “You’re okay,” he says. “Just try to catch your breath.”

  The light comes from a pendant around Carter’s neck. It’s just like the one Ranger Crane wears, but on a leather cord instead of a silver chain. The black pool glimmers, stretching out behind us, and threads into the crevices of the rock walls.

  “Are you all right? Can you walk?” Carter asks.

  “I’m fine,” I rasp.

  “Why didn’t you stick to the path like I told you?” he says, his voice echoing. “And why were you fighting me? Are you so stubborn you’d rather drown than take my help?”

  He’s angry with me. I’m not really surprised after I kicked him. I can’t believe I just freaked out like that. That for a split second, I actually believed in Cora’s story about a monster living in the caves of Harrow Lake. I can’t even blame it on a nightmare this time.

  This is what happens when you wear the disaster dress, I tell myself. But this is not an Optimal thought.

  “We could have died just now! We still might if I can’t find a way out of here. Damn it!” Carter snaps.

  “I didn’t fall in on purpose.” I pull my arm free from where he’s still gripping me and feel a sharp pain in my forearm. I poke at it. My fingers come away bloody.

  “You’re hurt.” Carter leans closer, bringing the flashlight pendant up to inspect the wound.

  “It felt like something bit me.” I run my hands over myself, but can’t feel any more cuts or scrapes. The hard lump of the jitterbug is right there in my pocket, though. I’m somehow not surprised it’s still with me. “Maybe it was Mister Jitters,” I say. A hysterical laugh bubbles right under the words.

  “Is that who you thought I was?” Carter says as he checks the bite.

  “Of course not. I’m not a child.”

  Water droplets fall from the ceiling in a plinking rhythm. Drip, drip, drip. Like the jitterbugs, all chattering away in a mismatched rhythm in Lorelei’s room. Or those long, tapping fingers burrowing out from between the layers of wallpaper in my dream.

  “Do you hear that?” I whisper.

  “Hear what?”

  I don’t answer. Carter must already think I’m a fool who stumbles into sinkholes and freaks out about made-up monsters. “Can we just get out of here?” I say, shivering.

  He points toward a faint glow in the corner of the cavern. “Looks like there might be a way out through there. Come on, I’ll take a look at your arm outside. You must have grazed it on the way down.”

  We set off toward what turns out to be a very narrow gap in the rock. We squeeze through, Carter leading the way with his flashlight pendant, and the tunnel opens into a small chamber, the roof so low we both have to stoop. The glow is coming from a hole around knee-height, where delicious, glorious daylight bleeds in. But it’s tiny—barely bigger than my clenched fist. There’s no way either of us could fit through it.

  “We’re trapped,” I whisper.

  He got trapped underground for a really long while . . .

  But Carter is already pushing against the edges of the hole with his hands, shoving stones and dirt outward, slowly making it bigger. Once it’s large enough to fit through, he gestures for me to go first, and I practically shove past him. My wet clothes drag against dry dirt. I feel the darkness watching me as I scramble through.

  And then I’m free, drinking in the cloud-filtered light. Carter clambers out of the hole behind me. His clothes are glued to his body and smeared with mud, just like my dress.

  “Take a seat and I’ll check your arm,” he says, pointing to a flat rock.

  I sit, trembling, and roll my sleeve back to reveal a red gash a couple of inches above my wrist. I’m so glad Nolan’s not here to see how freaked out I was.

  What the hell am I thinking? I’m not glad he’s not here!

  I’d feel better if I could write this all down and hide it.

  “That came in pretty handy,” I say between chattering teeth, tapping Carter’s pendant with one finger.

  “Oh, yeah. My mom gave it to me.”

  It takes me a moment to connect the dots. “Ranger Crane is your mom?”

  “You’ve met her? Guess I shouldn’t be surprised in this town. But yeah, I’m not supposed to wear the flashlight during festival week, seeing as it’s not 1920s-authentic,” he says.

  I picture Carter next to the woman I met by the Bone Tree, with her nice smile and the way she seemed completely at ease in the forest. I should have guessed they were related.

  “She gave it to me when I decided to become a trainee ranger,” Carter adds.

  “You’re going to be a ranger like her?” I ask. I know what it means to have a parent you look up to, and to want to make them proud.

  But Carter’s face clouds over. “That was the plan. But Mom didn’t sign the endorsement for my application in time, so they turned me down.”

  “That sucks. I bet she felt awful about it.”

  “You’d think,” Carter says flatly. “It doesn’t matter. I can always try again next year.” His stiffness tells me it’s a sore subject. He stands and brushes dirt from his damp knees. It doesn’t really help. “We’d better head back to my house.”

  In spite of everything that’s just happened and the fact I must now look like a drowned rat, my pulse quickens at his suggestion. “Your house? Why?”

  “Because there’s something in that cut and I need tweezers to get it out. And we’re right by my place.”

  “Something in it?” I snatch my arm away and feel around the cut myself. It stings like hell, but I ignore the pain. He’s right—there’s something hard inside the wound. Something in me. “Get it out. Get it out!”

  He takes hold of me by my shoulders. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll take care of it . . .”

  But I can’t just leave it in there. I squeeze my flesh hard, forcing the lump up toward the cut. It hurts so much tears flood down my cheeks, but I need to finish this, get it out and—

  Something white pokes through my skin. I dig it out with my nails. My hand is covered in my own blood, but I instantly feel better. Then I see what I’m holding between my thumb and index finger. A tooth.

  There was a tooth in my arm.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I’ll grab my first aid kit,” Carter says, leading me inside his house. If I thought my grandmother’s house was like a museum exhibit, Carter’s makes me feel like a time traveler. The single-story log cabin perches on the hillside, with a crooked chimney and myopic windows. I’m not even sure it has electricity. Walls, floors, and ceilings are all bare timber, and the sparse furnishings look handmade with wood and raw animal hide. It’s the kind of place New Yorkers go to escape the modern world for a weekend, not the kind of place I’ve ever imagined people living.

  I follow him into a tiny room that turns out to be his bedroom. I almost back right out of there when I realize. But I’m being ridiculous. We’re here for a first aid kit, that’s all.

  Carter’s room isn’t even half the size of my bathroom in New York. He keeps it neat, though. On the wall near the window is a mural carved right into the wooden panel, of birds nesting in a treetop, and there’s another one of a coiled snake surrounded by leaves. They’re simple and beautiful. I start to weave the story of the snake and the birds. Don’t linger too long in one place, or your hatchlings will get swallowed whole.

  Shit. I’m starting to sound like a local.

  Our apartment in New York doesn’t have any permanent marks like those murals. If you took out all of our things, it would be an empty shell. In a year’s time, when we’re in another city, or another country, nobody would be able to tell I ever lived there.

  Above Carter’s bed there are several sheets of paper tacked to the wall.
They’re sketches, all done with light, swift strokes that make me imagine him rushing to capture the details and nuances before his subjects could vanish. The first is a drawing of the Ferris wheel in the fairground, and the next is an angled view of Main Street. The third shows the ruins of a church. I recognize it as the one in Nightjar, where Little Bird is murdered.

  “I haven’t seen the church yet,” I say.

  “You won’t, either,” Carter says. “It’s at the bottom of a sinkhole you can only reach by going through the caves, and the entrance was blocked off as soon as they finished filming.” I’m about to say it makes no sense for one of the key filming sites to be hidden away from Nightjar tourists, when he puts his hands on my shoulders and says, “Sit.”

  I’m deliberately slow about it, but I sink into the chair next to the window. I shiver with cold, despite the blanket wrapped around me like a woolen toga. Only my hurt arm is exposed. It’s the one with the faint ink tracks still showing on it. Carter must wonder what they mean, but he doesn’t ask. He rolls back my sleeve. My breath catches at the sudden warmth of his hands.

  Nolan would flip out if he knew how close Carter’s lips were to my cheek right now, how I can feel his breath on my neck. But he’s not here to notice, is he?

  I jump as a squawk sounds from the corner of the room. There’s a cage on top of Carter’s dresser, with a small black bird in it. It squawks again, its beak too big for such a small creature.

  Shrugging Carter off, I go over to it. I’ve never seen a wild bird this close before. Its feathers are pure black, sleek over the wings, and a little fluffy around its chest. Baby feathers, I guess. It’s beautiful.

  “You have a pet bird?”

  “Well, she’s not exactly a pet, but yeah. Her name is Caw,” Carter says. “Short for Cora, if you ask my sister. She’s a raven chick. Caw is, I mean. Not Cora.” He smiles. For the first time, I see his resemblance to Cora, too. His teeth are like hers, with those turned incisors. An imperfection, Nolan would say. It suits Carter. “I always seem to find critters like her out in the woods. It drives my mom nuts.”