Wildwood Creek

by Wingate, Lisa

  “Kind of strange, isn’t it?” He motioned toward a passing boat.

  “Back to the future.”

  “Temporarily.” The group of lakegoers toasted us with their beers as they went by. “Not getting tempted by the dudes with the luxury yacht there, are you?”

  I shook my head, bracing my arms and leaning back, enjoying the sunshine. “Pppfff!” The kids on the boat looked about seventeen or eighteen, maybe. Too young to be turned loose on a party barge like that one. “Hardly. Why?”

  He shrugged, looked out at the water. “You’re kind of quiet this afternoon. Thought maybe you were considering making a run for it while you could.”

  I considered his observation. I was the one who was quiet this afternoon? Far away? Maybe it was me. On top of everything else, or maybe because of it, I couldn’t stop thinking about Kim, and the fact that I was lying, and that this whole situation had the feeling of a snowball rolling downhill. This business with the cell phone, with doing something that could cause problems for Blake and trouble between the two of us, had to end here. I wasn’t letting this happen again, no matter how desperate Kim was to see Jake. Something inside me had turned a corner this afternoon by the spring creek. If there really was a chance of something for Blake and me, I was going to invest myself in it, no matter how shaky I was. It wouldn’t help to build it on an undercurrent of lies.

  Maybe I should just tell him the truth now. Get it all out in the clear . . .

  I opened my mouth to do it, then lost my courage and diverted the subject instead. “So what about you? What comes next, assuming we make it through this long, hot summer in Wildwood?” I couldn’t help picturing him after the docudrama finally aired, fielding offers for the next season of The Bachelor. “Do you go straight to another job for Rav Singh, or on to doing security for someone else?”

  “Depends on what my buddy and his wife pick up for us. Kevin and Leah pretty much take care of that end of the business. It’s really Kevin’s baby, even though we’re partners.” He plucked a little purple wildflower that was growing from a fissure in the rock, studied it. “The security business was his idea after we finished our last deployment and got out of the army. He had some contacts in Hollywood. He sets things up with the clients. I just look at logistics once I know what kind of a job we’re taking on and where—calculate how many people we’ll have to hire, what kinds of vehicles we’ll need, what we can do to stymie the paparazzi if it’s an event like a wedding or an awards show. Logistics is more my thing. Kevin and Leah like the PR end of it, so it works.”

  We’d suddenly stumbled into an area I’d wanted to ask about but been afraid to. “Is that what you did in Afghanistan? Logistics?” Was I overstepping by asking? Dredging up something that was hard to revisit? But I needed to know him. I needed to learn more about what made him tick. About who he really was inside.

  He waited a minute to answer. “In a way. Security. Not always as well as I would’ve liked. It’s a crazy world over there. When you don’t get it right and things go bad, it’s not just the tabloids leaking some wedding photo or a creepy fan getting a little too close for comfort—it’s soldiers’ lives. Little kids’ moms and dads, people’s sons and daughters. Someone’s husband. Someone’s wife. You don’t stay one step ahead . . .” He let the sentence go unfinished.

  “Is that what you’re thinking about when. . . . I’ve seen you on the porch at night.” I blurted it out, then immediately wished I hadn’t. “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business.”

  He handed the flower to me, our fingers brushing as a speedboat rushed by, three kids squealing in an orange inner tube. “It’s okay. It’s not something I talk about much anymore, but it’s not something you just leave behind either. Any soldier who’s been there can tell you that you don’t come home the same. There’s stuff in your head. A lot of guys didn’t come back, or they didn’t come back in one piece. The questions you ask yourself can drive you crazy—why couldn’t you have done just one thing different on some certain day. Why couldn’t you have made the difference? Why’s another guy gone and you’re still here? Why does God let things happen the way they do? Sometimes, the only option you’ve got is to just get quiet and ask. Just let it all go, you know?”

  I did know, in a way. I understood that kind of regret. I’d always thought, if I’d gotten up and gone with my dad the day he died, maybe I could’ve kept the accident from happening. Maybe I would’ve been watching, seen the truck jackknifed in the road ahead. Maybe I would’ve begged him to stop off for doughnuts, and he wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  If only could drive you crazy.

  “I know.” It seemed strange to admit it after all these years, especially to a person I’d met such a short time ago, but somehow I knew he’d understand it. “It’s hard to get past the idea that you can just . . . alter things. I did that for years after my dad died. I’d rewrite it all as I was falling asleep, and in the morning before I opened my eyes I’d tell myself that if I believed hard enough, it’d come true.” I’d never told anyone about those desperate morning wishes before, not even my grandmother. “It was kind of a secret I kept, but Grandma Rita figured it out. When I was with her in Texas, in the summers, she’d take me to the church where my dad grew up and show me the murals he’d helped paint in the children’s building. She’d tell me that, as pretty as they were, they weren’t anything compared to what Dad and Grandpa John were seeing now in heaven. It helped me let go some.”

  Blake’s hand found mine, his fingers a warm circle of flesh over flesh. “My granddaddy was an army chaplain in Korea,” he said, “so he always understood. I don’t think I knew how much the things he taught me really meant until I left home and went into the army. You end up in a situation where you might meet your Maker anytime, you think a whole lot about what you believe.”

  Our fingers intertwined, and suddenly I felt very . . . okay. Strangely vulnerable about something I had always kept inside, but okay. Not an oddball anymore. There was someone else who really got it.

  We fell silent, and that seemed natural too. I’ve never been with anybody that way. Okay to just be my confused, tangled, conflicted self, still struggling to figure out God and my own life. No longer feeling the need to hide behind a mask. I’d never spent a day so completely comfortable with where I was.

  The afternoon was waning by the time we walked the girls down a path to see the tombstones that had begun to emerge about twenty feet offshore in a grassy cove. Moss-covered, tilted, and forlorn, their rounded marble tips protruded from the water, hinting at names and stories.

  “Eeewww! Can we wade out there and look?” Wren was fascinated.

  Blake pointed to a thin brownish snake swirling its way through the water. “Depends on how you feel about sharing the water with that guy.”

  The other girls backed a few steps further from the bank, squealing about the snake, but Wren held her ground, fascinated by the stones. “I’m not afraid of him. He doesn’t even have a viper head—he’s a striped water snake. We learned that in safety class. He’s probably more afraid of me than I am of him.”

  “Yeah, I bet he is,” Alexis piped up, and Blake laughed.

  “If he’s got half a brain he is.” Laying a hand on Wren’s curly head, he checked his watch. “But, no, you can’t go out there. We need to head back so I can catch Alexis’s ghost-man tonight.”

  Alexis huffed and braced her hands on her hips, her long, slim arms still glistening with drying beads of water. “Don’t even start with me.”

  Blake used Wren’s head to turn her around and steer her toward Wildwood. “Okay, everybody’s had a look. Now we need to get home before the bears come out looking for an easy meal.”

  “There aren’t any bears around here, and bears aren’t nocturnal,” Wren argued.

  “She’s got a point there,” I teased, bumping Blake with my shoulder as we started back down the lakeshore.

  “She’s too smart for her own go
od,” he joked. “You know what they say about curiosity and the cat.”

  “Funny.” Wren cast a longing look over her shoulder toward the tombstones. “But are any of those from Wildwood?”

  Blake shook his head. “Nah, they’re newer. I talked to a couple of local fishermen about it when I was down here patrolling the other day. They said that’s what was left of the original Mennonite settlement of Gnadenfeld. The Corps of Engineers flooded it when they built the lake.”

  A shiver slid over me. It had nothing to do with the heat of the day finally fading. “And they just left the people’s graves?”

  “Guess so.” Blake took my hand, and I contemplated the tombstones as we walked. In the end, it makes little difference what’s printed in granite when you’re gone. It’s what you do while you’re here that matters.

  By the time we reached Wildwood, evening was settling in. On the ridge above, there was no sign of the faint glow of lights coming on in the crew camp.

  “Looks like the power’s still out,” Blake observed as we stopped at the schoolhouse. “Hard to believe they haven’t gotten it back by now. I’ll walk the kids up the hill. I’m on shift tonight, so I want to do some recon and see if there’s anything to Alexis’s man in the woods. It’d be easier if we weren’t dealing with a power failure and all of our security cams down. Not that they’ve been doing much good. We keep realigning the cams, but if this guy does exist, we can’t catch him.”

  He left me then, he and the three girls angling toward the Delevan house and crew camp, and me returning to the school, the warm comfort of the afternoon slowly fading into an evening that felt shadow-filled and strange. The nagging worry that had been circling all day came back, and it didn’t take long to identify the source. Kim, of course. I should’ve checked on her before now and retrieved the cell phone.

  The light was slipping toward evening as I hurried to Bathhouse Row. Kim’s roommate was down at the spring, but she hadn’t seen Kim since earlier in the day. “Everybody’s everywhere, since we’re off schedule. Last thing I heard, the power company had some kind of massive software problem, they thought. But then I also heard that some farmer with a tractor plowed through the power lines coming onto the property here. So I don’t really know what’s true. Anyway, some of the girls went up to crew camp to play cards and eat normal food, since it’ll spoil with no power for the refrigerators, anyway. She’s probably there.”

  I thanked her and started up the hill toward the trailers to look for Kim. I’d just made it to the parking lot when one of the grips spotted me and hurried my way, looking slightly breathless and wide-eyed.

  He gave my capris and T-shirt a quizzical look. “Please tell me you know where Kim is.” Squeezing his clipboard against his chest, he grimaced. “Mr. Singh wants us to make sure everyone is accounted for and back in place, in case they get the power on tonight.” No doubt this was Kim’s cell phone-charging guy. He looked like one of her usual victims: a little nerdy, a little too nice. Probably hoping that Kim would get over her fixation with Jake and decide a friendly grip just up the hill might be a better choice for a summer romance.

  Right about now he was probably weighing the implications, should Kim be discovered downstream on a secret rendezvous aided and abetted by a forbidden cell phone and a neighbor on the crew. Rav would have this poor kid’s head in about a minute and a half if word got out. Grips were expendable.

  “I haven’t seen her. I just checked the bathhouse and then came up here to look.”

  The grip mopped his forehead. “She needs to show back up. Nobody’s seen her since noon. I’ve asked.”

  A flash of neatly coiffed blond hair caught the corner of my eye, and I felt the instinctive flight response that indicated Tova was in the vicinity, even before I glanced toward the production trailer. She’d just come out the door, and she was moving in our direction at a rapid pace. I had a feeling our situation was about to go from bad to worse.

  Her eyes narrowed as she took in my street clothes. “It looks like someone is drastically out of uniform.”

  The grip sidestepped her approach, tripping over a twig and practically landing on his backside in the weeds.

  Tova ignored him. “Strange, how that could happen, when your belongings are still locked inside my trailer. Keeping a few forbidden items, are we, Allison? You might want to run back to your little schoolhouse before Rav sees you. He’s in no mood to have one of his little birdies flitting around doing her own thing.”

  I backed up, a sense of impending doom seizing me by the throat. Before the grip could move away, Tova snatched his clipboard and thumbed through the pages. “Accompany Allison down to the village and make certain that her extra clothing finds its way to my trailer, where it belongs. We wouldn’t want Rav to think she’s been taking advantage of her former position in production to break the rules, now, would we? Such a thing could reflect poorly on those of us who have actually given our best efforts toward authenticity on this project.”

  The grip’s eyes were like baseballs. For a moment, I was afraid that he was contemplating falling to his knees, confessing his crimes, and begging for mercy.

  “Yes . . . yes, ma’am.” His voice trembled like a leaf in a frigid north wind. As soon as we found Kim and the cell phone, this whole stupid business was D-O-N-E, finished. Before we ended up in any more trouble.

  But I had the nauseating feeling that trouble had already found us. Tova had scented blood.

  “Well.” She smacked her lips apart, glancing up from the clipboard. “Look who else is missing. A certain ditzy person of vaguely blond nature. How peculiar, Allison, that it would be your friend.”

  She shoved the clipboard at the grip, and he caught it in the chest with a muffled cough, quickly withering under Tova’s glare. “If you haven’t found her by dark, inform me directly. It isn’t my job to baby-sit, but Rav should be told if there is a problem.”

  “I’m sure she’s here somewhere,” I piped up. “We’ve been offline for hours. People have been down to the lake and whatnot.”

  Tova smirked at me. “And no one was supposed to be going any farther than the lakeshore, now were they? And the lakeshore has already been checked, has it not? I believe I saw a security guard on an ATV coming back from there, not fifteen minutes ago.” She swiveled toward the grip. “If she is here, you won’t have a problem turning her up. Either way, inform me.”

  She turned on her heel and walked away, leaving the two of us to writhe in the pool of acid left behind.

  “She’s gotta be here,” the grip whimpered, smacking himself in the forehead with the clipboard. “She said she’d only be gone a couple hours. She promised.”

  “Okay, okay . . . Let me think a minute.” With Kim, reality so often defied logic. Would she take off with Jake? Go AWOL on purpose? She had to know what kind of trouble the rest of us would be in.

  But she’d been so lovesick the past few weeks. She wouldn’t, would she?

  Possibilities began weaving a strange tapestry in my head. Several of them, actually. What if Kim had suffered some sort of accident on her way back to Wildwood? What if the guy that Alexis said she saw lurking in the woods was more than a figment of a teenage imagination? Someone real? Someone dangerous?

  In reality, anyone could be in these woods . . . or under the highway bridge where Kim planned to meet Jake.

  And there was one more scenario. One I didn’t even want to contemplate.

  How well did Kim really know the man she had sneaked away to meet? The headlines were full of stories of women who’d been duped by predators online. Men who hung around, looking to meet unsuspecting women on classified ad sites. Guys who seemed too good to be true.

  “I have to go find Blake.” Like it or not, there was no choice but to confess this whole thing and ask him to get on one of those four-wheelers, go down to the river, and see if he could locate Kim before it was too dark to look.

  Chapter 23

  ALLIE KIRKLAND

&n
bsp; JULY, PRESENT DAY

  Blake still hadn’t come back to his room. Tossing and turning in my bed, I listened for the night air to carry his footsteps through the screen. I wanted to talk to him, but things had been strained after he couldn’t turn up any sign of Kim. His security crew had spent hours frantically trying to make sure she wasn’t hurt or lost in the woods, even though that seemed unlikely. The river was easy to find and easy to follow.

  At this point, it looked like she’d made a spur of the moment decision that she couldn’t quite own up to. In the morning, hopefully we’d hear from her. She and Jake had probably run off to some nearby wedding chapel, and they were spending their honeymoon night at a lakeside cabin.

  I wanted that to be true, and at the same time, I wanted to kill her.

  Didn’t she care about the trouble she was causing? About breaching her contract? About breaking her promise to me? Would my best friend really just run off without saying a word? The idea stung in ways I couldn’t stand to contemplate, but even that didn’t hurt as badly as the shocked look on Blake’s face when I’d confessed.

  He’d stared at me like he didn’t know me at all. He’d looked hurt, and I didn’t have any idea how I was going to fix things.

  This was such a mess, and it was my fault. I was the one who’d brought the phone here in the first place, who just had to chase after the story of Bonnie Rose, to hang on a little longer and see what else Stewart could come up with. Once again, letting my mind get lost in a daydream had produced a monumental screw-up in real life.

  I just wanted Kim to be okay. Please, please, let her check in tomorrow morning. . . .

  A wildcat screamed somewhere in the hills, the sound splitting the night air, slicing through the screen, sitting me upright in bed. Shuddering, I rose, dipped a cup of water from the pot on my stove, took a sip. It tasted tinny and strange, but I drank it anyway, then stood at the window watching for Blake and listening to the cat’s cry. Resting my head on the sash, I swallowed the prickly lump in my throat, and my mouth felt dry again.