Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers

by JeanNicole Rivers

  “Terrible about Lola,” Lawson began, obviously sensing the reason that they were here before they had a chance to express it.

  “Yes. Actually I was just stopping by to see if you guys had been able to get any more information on what happened,” Regina asked.

  Lawson scratched his forehead. “Well, Regina I’m not really supposed to say anything with it being official police business and all.” Lawson spoke shyly, but with a sweet distracted grin that told Regina that she needed only to push a little more to get what she wanted. Lawson had always been a sweet boy, but was plagued with an incredibly shy personality that labeled him as somewhat of an outcast. He was a little younger than Regina and for some reason she had taken a liking to his affable manner in school and befriended him. Due to the influence of his lumbering older stepbrother, his reporter cousin and his sheriff father, Lawson Handow was never bullied, but was still shunned. Regina was not the most popular girl in school, but bolstered enough influence to bring Lawson into a realm of social comfort that allowed his time in school to be much more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise. She offered the gentle tutelage of an older, confident sister.

  “Can’t you tell us anything?” she pleaded, pursing her puffy glossed lips.

  “Well,” he said in a long dragged-out groan as he went through all of the pros and cons of revealing any of the secret information in his head.

  “Just the people that I wanted to see!” a hearty voice thundered behind them. Both Regina and Barron were startled by the words as they turned to see Sheriff Handow coming into the door of the police station with his barreling stepson, Cliff.

  “You wanted to see us?” Regina asked gesturing to herself.

  “You mind following me back into my office?” he asked, pushing open the small swinging door that led to the back of the station and holding out one hand as if leading the way. Butterflies began to play tag inside of her stomach.

  What was he going to tell them?

  Barron sighed as the two walked back into the square office that belonged to the sheriff. The floor was dusty and the room had three, floor-to-ceiling windows acting as walls. Barron and Regina sat down in the two chairs that faced the wooden desk. Sheriff Handow closed the door behind him and he moved around the desk, took a seat in the chair and leaned back to get comfortable in a sequence of purposeful maneuvers.

  “Sheriff, I was actually coming to talk to you. I wanted to know if you had found any new evidence,” Regina started before he could begin.

  “Everyone seems to be convinced that DeFrank did it since she was found on his property, but not you?” he asked, his eyes carefully fishing through her expressions.

  “I don’t know. I just want to know the truth.”

  “So do I, so do I.” Handow sang his words into the air as if he was not talking to the two people in the room at all.

  “So did you find anything?” she asked desperately.

  “I can’t really go into details until we complete our investigation,” he answered.

  “So why did you want to see us?” Barron wanted to know.

  “Just ask a few questions. Nothing to worry about, I am just going over the facts again with everyone who saw her that night,” he said.

  “But we didn’t see her that night. We were at a party and she was at the library studying for her final,” Regina told him.

  “Ah, that’s right. When was the last time you saw her?” Sheriff Handow asked.

  “I saw her the previous day at school,” Regina said and Barron agreed to the same last sighting.

  “I spoke to her on the phone the day she disappeared, about the party and she said that she had to study. She had to pass her exam or her parents would be angry. I went to the party, Lola went to the library, and that was the last thing I heard from her.” Regina felt her breath getting shorter as she recounted the story.

  Sheriff Handow’s features softened.

  “Do you know of anyone who would have wanted to hurt her? Did she ever mention that someone was bothering her? Following her? Anything like that?” He asked his questions in rapid succession. Regina shook her head back and forth feverishly.

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  Barron reached over to hold Regina’s hand.

  “I just want to know what happened to her. I just need to know.” Regina cried.

  Sheriff Handow sighed and turned his gaze to Barron.

  “Do you have anything to add?” he asked.

  “No, sir” he answered.

  “You knew Glen DeFrank, didn’t you?” Sheriff Handow asked.

  “Yes,” she stammered, almost unable to get the word out.

  “He gave piano lessons. He gave us all piano lessons, me, Nikki, Natalie, and Lola,” she answered.

  “Did he seem, to you, like the type that would have killed her?” Sheriff Handow asked, leaning forward and intently staring at Regina. It seemed like all of the air in the room had been sucked into a vacuum as they all waited on the words that lingered at the tip of her tongue.

  “No.” She finally sighed. “He was afraid of her.” Her mouth added words that her mind had not approved. Barron shot her a confused look.

  “What?” Sheriff Handow asked leaning forward in his chair and settling his forearms into the desk.

  Desperately, Regina tried to fish the tangled words out of the air of the room. The words echoed repeatedly, but it was too late. The words were spoken; therefore, they had been heard and could not be unheard and she cursed the metaphysical certainties that God had placed inside of the world.

  “He paraded her.” Regina had never been more unsure of herself. “She was the best at piano and he lauded her all of the time to us girls. I don’t think he would have killed her.”

  “That’s not what you said, Regina,” Sheriff Handow said sternly.

  “What did I say?” Regina cursed herself for asking this question because she did not care to hear the mistake made spoken into reality yet again, but her mouth was too many steps ahead of her brain and she fought to slow it down, but had thus far been losing the battle.

  “You said that he was afraid of her,” Sheriff Handow repeated.

  “Oh,” Regina said; a stall tactic she was implementing, as she tried to sync her mouth with her brain. “Why would he be afraid of her?” she asked out loud.

  “Well, I don’t know, Regina, you tell me,” Sheriff Handow pressed.

  “I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I meant to say parade, not afraid,” she confirmed.

  The sheriff narrowed his eyes at the girl and settled back into his seat. He leaned back in his chair still not taking his intent gaze off the girl as he rubbed his hands one over the other in front of him, his hands mimicking the tumbling of the thoughts in his head. Barron noticed that Regina was trembling.

  “Is there anything else?” Barron asked impatiently.

  “Nope, not just now. If I think of anything, I will give you guys a call or stop by,” Sheriff Handow assured them. Barron gave Regina a slight nudge, prompting her from the chair. Regina grabbed her purse off the floor and headed toward the door of the office.

  “Regina,” Sheriff Handow called to her. She turned to face the policeman who had risen from his squeaky chair.

  “I’m sorry you lost your best friend. I’m going to do my best to figure out who did this,” he told her. Regina nodded her head and croaked a thank you before passing through the door of the office.

  Sheriff Handow opened the manila file on his desk, and flipped through the pictures of the remains thoughtfully.

  As they headed toward the front door of the station, Regina noticed a red piece of paper tacked to a bulletin board.

  “Regina,” Barron called. She did not acknowledge Barron, but instead, studied all the missing person posters attached to the board and, for the first time, realized just how many people in and around Black Water had gone missing.

  Regina wondered how she had never noticed before that Lola had not been the only missing lo
ved one in Black Water.

  Ann Princess Ivey, 5, Missing

  Regina swept her fingers across the little girl’s smiling face, noticing the block letters under the photograph indicating that she had disappeared two years before Lola.

  “Ann Ivey. Did you know her?” Lawson asked.

  “No,” Regina said not taking her eyes off the picture. “What happened to her?”

  “That’s a good question,” Lawson said. “Her mother was Marion McGee. Did you know her?” Lawson asked.

  “No. I don’t think so,” Regina responded.

  “Marion’s father, Daniel McGee was the preacher at First Baptist Holy Church out on Magnolia Road.”

  Regina continued to study the photo. The church name rang a bell, she had not known them personally, but she remembered driving by the church several times as a young child on their way out to pick seasonal fruits at Fairfield Farm.

  “Well Marion got into all kinds of trouble as a girl and had Ann by some no-good from Edgarton, who had been in and out of prison. Right before Ann went missing, Marion was trying to put herself back together and get that guy out of her life. She had gone to court to try to keep him from seeing Ann. Shortly after that, Ann went missing while playing in the front yard. Marion said that she had left her for only a second. After that, she never saw her daughter or the girl’s father again. He had family in another country though. I think he might have taken her there, but we just don’t know,” Lawson finished his story.

  “That’s no good.” Barron said.

  “And her …” Regina caressed the unsmiling one-dimensional face of another young girl, a girl that she knew. In the photograph that appeared to have been taken while she sat outside on a blanket. The girl in the photograph was unhappy.

  “Cynthia Tolah,” Barron read the name. “She went to high school with us.”

  Regina’s interested eyes caught Barron’s. “She did?”

  “Yes.” Lawson jumped into the conversation. “She was new in town; she had been in school only for a year.”

  “I don’t remember her,” Regina admitted reluctantly.

  “She kept to herself,” Cliff added.

  Regina closed her eyes, thinking hard to drudge up some memory of this forgotten girl. Cynthia’s face looked familiar, but Regina scolded herself for not being able to solidify one good memory of the melancholy girl.

  “She didn’t take to the move very well. One day her parents woke up and she was gone, just missing from her bed. It was odd; they didn’t even make a really big fuss out of it. She was most likely a runaway,” Lawson explained.

  “Who are her parents?” Regina asked

  Lawson appeared to be in deep thought.

  “Bev and Thomas Tolah.” The four looked up to see Sheriff Handow had come striding into the room. “They stayed in Black Water for about a year after she ran away and then they moved. Don’t know where to, though,” he added.

  “This was weeks after Lola. How come we never heard what happened?” Regina asked.

  “Well, there is not a whole lot of searching that goes into seventeen-year-old runaways. She hated it here, everyone knew that and she would have been eighteen a couple of months after her disappearance; therefore, we didn’t want to make much ado about nothing.”

  Regina peered back at the photo one last time before dashing out of the station without a good-bye.

  A gale wind glided up the sidewalk and ruffled everything in its path including Regina. She pulled her sweater tighter around her body, trying to nullify the effects of the oncoming wintry weather that was attacking her from the outside, but there was no relief for the arctic cold that was breeding deep inside. Before she opened the door of the truck, she turned to look up and down the street unable to shake the feeling of eyes burning into her, watching her.

  12

  Under the cover of thick sweaters, people bustled up and down Main Street. Regina scrutinized the storefronts, observing the mannequins inside, their dull eyes helplessly watching the lively movements of the people just on the other side of the glass. Regina looked at the unending darkness that lurked just behind the life-size dolls and she wondered. That wonder turned quickly to thought, and it turned again until she was in a trancelike state of contemplation fixated on what was just beyond the threshold of darkness.

  The Coffee House was only a couple of blocks from the police station in an area of Black Water that everyone referred to as Middleton. It was the perfect hideaway for Barron and her to shelter themselves against the stinging gusts of cool wind with a blazing fireplace. The brick building had sat in this spot for as long as Regina could remember, but during her childhood, coffee was just a routine part of any restaurant menu and had not carried enough importance to have its own trendy building. The place that was now the Coffee House in simpler times had been a gas station. The aroma of burnt coffee and an obnoxious sense of intellectual superiority greeted them as they entered.

  “Grab a seat and I will get us something. Let me guess. Large coffee, three creams, four sweeteners, whipped cream on top?” Barron asked her.

  “Hmm …” Regina pondered, the description of her high school coffee order, barely able to tame her excitement at the fact that he remembered.

  “… And a coffee cake. I left the house without eating breakfast.” She now remembered since her stomach was emitting a sonorous growl. Regina found a small table near the fireplace and allowed herself to relish in the momentary peace that she felt. She looked around at all of the smiling, chattering faces and wished that her life could be as charmed as theirs appeared, but her life likely appeared the same to them. People always assume that the grass is greener on the other side, and sometimes it is, but who cares about the grass when it’s the house that is important? It’s the house one should be looking at because no matter how green the grass is on the outside and no matter how shiny and clean the panels on the house, it’s what lies beneath that is determinant. What people should have considered was what happened when dusk settled over the lawns and everyone went inside and closed the doors behind them. Despite the ivory paint that disguised the outside of the house, what happened inside of those four walls was not greener, not brighter, not better, just bad.

  After her talk with Sheriff Handow, deleterious memories of that night kept trying to creep into her head and she made a conscious effort to chase them out every time. She wondered with whom else Sheriff Handow had spoken and if he had uncovered any new evidence. They would probably never figure out what happened to Lola, and Regina would probably never know the whole story herself.

  “Coffee and coffee cake,” Barron announced as he set the plate and mug down in front of her. He jogged back to the counter to grab another porcelain black mug and plate, which he then sat down on the table in front of himself. Regina looked into his smoldering brown eyes and was glad that he had come back.

  “I would offer up a toast, but in light of everything I guess we don’t have that much to be happy about right now,” he said, his eyes dulling a bit.

  “I don’t know about that.” Regina smiled. “I’m glad that you came back. You’re probably the only thing that is making me feel sane right now.” She placed her hand on top of his and sipped her drink. Barron grinned and made a motion with his finger letting her know that she had a dollop of whipped cream on her nose. Regina rubbed her nose and they both laughed.

  “I never stopped thinking about you after we all went off to college. I called your parents a few times and they always said that they would have you call me, but I never got the call.” He sounded disappointed.

  “I’m sorry, Barron. I just couldn’t figure out a way to deal with my grief and I ended up hurting a lot of people in the process. I never meant to hurt you or anyone else for that matter.” Regina shrugged helplessly. “Can you forgive me?” she asked, her mood suddenly as shy as her manner flirty.

  “Of course,” he said, leaning into the wooden table, lacing his fingers into hers. Regina’s heart jumped, jolti
ng her brain and she begin to feel guilty about the fact that her first priority should have been her friend’s murder, but here she was initiating some Harlequin romance in a coffee shop. In only a couple of days Black Water and everything in it would be a distant memory once again; she struggled to understand her motivation for even hinting at an attachment and she could not understand his either. Regina settled on the idea that she was just a lonely woman in an awful situation and needed someone to be there for her and he probably needed the same. Quickly, she dismissed any thoughts of a long-term affair and her mind found Lola once again buried far down under her thoughts of this romantic interlude and the distraction must have been written all over her face.

  “Go ahead.” He sighed playfully, almost reading her mind.

  “I apologize, Barron, it’s just so hard to get her out of my head.”

  “It’s OK. What’s on your mind?” He grinned lovingly.

  “I just feel like I have to know what happened. I have to know and if Sheriff Handow can’t figure it out, maybe I can.” She insisted. Barron’s face twisted with anxiety as he regained memory of his ex-girlfriend’s insistent personality.

  “How are you going to do that?” he asked. He seemed excited to see what kind of plan she had cooked up.

  “Well, I will just do my own investigation!” She told him with a false confidence. “I will start by going to Glen DeFrank’s house myself and taking a look around.”

  “… And what exactly are you hoping to find?” he asked, still unconvinced about the merit of her proposed emprise.

  Regina took a deep involuntary inhale and her eyes widened as if his question had filled her with more problems than she could possibly solve until she finally spit, “I don’t know. Something, anything, nothing, I have no idea. I will just be looking.”

  Barron’s eyes sat heavily on her, unmoved by her unimaginative, but truthful answer.

  “You going to the burial site too?” Barron asked.

  Regina reeled back in disgust. “I don’t think that I can quite handle that just yet, but if he did do it maybe he left something behind…in the house.”