Lake People

by Abi Maxwell

  The mansions were nearly all deserted, as they always are in winter. Our headlights created a strong but limited path, and in their tunnel I had a quiet feeling that a man would emerge like a ghost from the woods, causing us to slip on the ice and slide down the ledge and break through the frozen water. No such thing came to pass, and it was as we were headed back to the bridge that I glimpsed the letters on mailbox number 24.

  “Stop,” I told him. “Back up.”

  Why did he do that without question? The snow was falling so carefully, as though some invisible hand were guiding each flake down to the place of its eventual disappearance. That hand kept all snow from the name on the mailbox. Devnet R. Sawyer.

  My husband drove us off the point. It wasn’t until we were back on mainland that he asked me who lived there, if it was someone from the case.

  Devnet Ricker her name had been. Surely this would be the same Devnet.

  “Yes,” I said to my husband, but only after the word was out did I realize that that might not be a lie, that not only had there been a Sawyer girl up on the stand, but there also had been that glamorously dressed woman with a long white cigarette waiting in the lot every single day. Her face had seemed vaguely familiar, but she had always fixed her gaze elsewhere, and quickly, when I appeared.

  About a week after the drive with my husband, I returned to that mansion. I had expected to find Devnet standing at the great metal sink filled with lobsters, as though it were still that childhood day. Instead I found no answer at the front door, so I put it out of my mind, convincing myself that this was only a summer home, in spite of the fact that the walkway had been shoveled. It wasn’t but three days later, when I went to a little shop to buy some Christmas presents, that there she stood, providing me with the sense of destiny fulfilled. She would not have spoken to me had I not spoken to her first. But we were in a small shop, I said her name, and she was cornered.

  “Look at you!” she said. She flashed a large diamond my way and patted her curled bangs. A young daughter tugged at her arm and Devnet scornfully handed her a credit card. To the counter that daughter went, where she met her brother. The two of them had a heap of gifts. “I don’t even know what they’re buying!” Devnet said to me. “Probably all junk.” She shook herself out and then leaned in and took my hand and said, “What are we, sisters? Second cousins or something? My daughter has your ears! Lacey, get over here, meet your aunt!”

  As the kids bought their gifts, Devnet told me that she had just moved back to Kettleborough, that she went through a rough divorce but it was good to get out of Florida all the same, and look, she got to keep the ring!

  “King’s Point is where all my best memories are,” she said. “Won’t you come to our house? Please? For family’s sake?”

  The strangest part was that after the initial article of George Collins’s mysterious death, the papers, too, deemed it a suicide. Apparently the police had received a phone call from a man who had known George Collins well. The man described George as depressed, said he spoke frequently of suicide, had had some trouble with his father, and had not left behind a note but had told the man before he went for the weekend at the lake that they would not ever see each other again. Back then it never did occur to me just who could have been behind that phone call.

  Andrew Collins, the father, was reported to have said that his son had had a hard time of it lately, yes, very difficult.

  A search for the driver? There was a note at the bottom of each article—contact the police if you have any information. There were only three articles. Our town is small. I never heard another word about it.

  Yet I have followed Andrew Collins a bit. He worked his entire adult life as a history professor at the state university. Now he is retired, but he continues to keep an office on campus. After the accident of more than two decades ago he divorced and lost the other children to his wife, who moved out west, and he never married again. Just the way you would imagine an old professor, he walks down the hall with a hunch in his back and a finger to his mouth. He dresses in a V-neck sweater, and he always has a patch of hair in the hollow of his cheek, which he missed in his morning shave.

  Though I had made a definitive plan to go to dinner at Devnet’s house on Sunday, I appeared one day too early, in the late afternoon, because I couldn’t bear the thought of an entire meal with her and her children. Devnet did not seem surprised. In fact, she was calmer than I knew she could be. She had a gift for me—a silver pendant with a moonstone at its center. She had made bergamot tea and as she poured she began to speak of the way her life in Florida had been filled with girlfriends. I tried asking her a few times if she had a teenage daughter but she plowed right over every word I said.

  “Amanda Sawyer,” I finally pushed. “This past fall on the bridge. That was your daughter?”

  Devnet took her ring off then. She set it on the granite countertop. The large windows of the house face westward over the lake, and a beam of afternoon light fell upon that ring and sent it glittering throughout the room. Devnet pulled back her thick, curly hair and tied it in a knot at the base of her neck. Her skin had a look of too many hours in the sun. Silence, from her, was something profoundly sad.

  “I saw you,” she finally said. At the trials—I understood this much. She said she had also followed my articles. Since the trials, they had made a decision about the driver. An anonymous tip had come in, a man who claimed to have seen the driver. The boy denied the charge, but when he refused to offer another name in place of his own, he had been sent away. I had expressed misgivings about his guilt. I don’t know why. I hadn’t had the grounds for it and it had not been appreciated, not by the town or by the others at the paper.

  Devnet began to make a low, faint sound, like the hum of a fishing boat.

  One time I mustered the courage to speak to the father of George Collins. He was quiet and clear. He spoke precisely about the option of history as a major.

  “My son,” he’d answered, when I’d shamelessly asked who was in the photo on his wall. His son a hawk soaring toward that car, flying away nothing but a broken body.

  “That man believes his son killed himself,” I said now.

  “Who?” Devnet asked. “I don’t know who you mean.” She retrieved her energy then, returned to the Devnet I knew. She said they’d thought of buying a condo up north, a place to ski and get away.

  Yes, Devnet had been the first to claim suicide. But had she not thought of that, wouldn’t her father have come up with it?

  When she finished speaking of the condo she went to the refrigerator and filled a glass with crushed ice. That glass became her companion. She thrust it to her lips and bounced it, filled her mouth with ice and chomped, and then repeated the pattern again. In record time that glass was empty, at which point I said her name pleadingly.

  She did not look at me. That faint sound returned, now so weak it could have been the dying squeal of an infant mouse. “Please,” she finally said. It was a word that seemed to take all her strength.

  Her daughter—of course it had been. I understood. I picked up the box with the pendant and then put it back on the counter. Though it’s a small point, on the drive home I lost my way and felt certain, for a time, that I had been drugged. Round and round that point I drove with no sign of the bridge or the house where I had just been. When a black car with tinted windows passed slowly by me I began to shiver. How far did the power of Devnet’s father reach? Finally I pulled over to the side of the road and breathed deeply, wiped the sweat from my brow. I was at a high spot and could see the open lake below. I got out of the car and stood in that biting wind and looked on at the vast, frozen water, waiting for a hawk to impossibly rise. I would end it now; I would track down Andrew Collins and tell him what I knew. For I could see it all: Thomas had said they’d seen the monster of the lake that day. My husband and I have not had children, and I am not sure we will. Because look, it is terrifying that the secret Devnet lived with had to get passed down t
o her daughter in this awful way. Terrifying, and just as unlikely as life sprouting up from only one infinitesimal seed, a drop of water, and our great sun.

  Secret

  1972

  AT SCHOOL ALICE met a boy named Gerald Hughes and this boy came to the fence behind her house. She put her hands on the rungs and he put his atop hers. It was a plain and bold gesture. There were rhododendrons that grew thick behind the fence, and Alice and Gerald crawled into them. They were fourteen years old and she ran her hands over his soft chest and they pushed their tongues into each other’s mouths and they went to the woods and lay on a boulder that had been placed there one thousand years ago so that one day Alice could come to it and learn what it was to be a woman with a man.

  “Have you ever—” she asked one day, and he interrupted her to say that she had to come to his house for dinner before they could go all the way.

  All the way, is that what she had meant to ask? Anyway, this was honor, Gerald Hughes meant for Alice to be his girlfriend.

  His family lived in a railcar down by the river. Alice had known this before and that is why she did not sit with him at school lunch. To do so would be to cross a line that Alice understood should not be crossed in public. Gerald sat at the table of boys who stacked their trays high with food and drank carton after carton of milk and who may or may not have known that soon every last one of them would quit school.

  Gerald Hughes’s father had lost all his fingers, that’s what they said. At school they said a lot of things about Gerald Hughes. The story was that Mr. Hughes had got drunk on his own creation and cut his fingers off at the sawmill and that Gerald’s older brother had to quit school to hold the towel over his father’s bleeding hands. Also that his father had found a canoe at the dump and driven his sons to Boston and put them, along with a case of beer, into the boat to paddle to their homeland. They ran out of beer not a mile from shore, the boat sprang a leak, and here in Kettleborough the family remained.

  Alice had not expected him to have a mother, since there were no stories of her. But here she stood with a tray of gumdrop cookies. “I seen you in the papers,” she said to Alice as she held the cookies forward. For skiing, she meant. Alice was on the local ski team and though she had never won first place, she had come in second or third a few times over the years, and this had occasionally put her on the front page of the paper. She took a cookie and smiled politely, and then, as she bit in, Mrs. Hughes looked her up and down and said, “Aren’t you fancy.” The cookie went dry in Alice’s mouth and she did not know the full effect of the statement but she knew enough to want to flee.

  His father had all his fingers, Alice saw that at dinner. The meal was warm and delicious, meatloaf and sweet cabbage and a pudding after, and at the table Gerald announced with pride and glee that his brothers had no chance at finding a wife but look at this, Gerald himself had already found a woman, a good woman for life. He sat up straight and his smile gleamed.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, son,” his father said.

  “This girl don’t even know where she comes from,” Mrs. Hughes said. She had not known, before Alice walked through her door, just who the girl would be. She had not asked. But she could see it now; even without the name her face said it clear as day. The Wickholms’ little secret that everyone was meant to keep. Let those Wickholms sit up on their big hill in their big house with the view of their big lake and we down here will pretend we don’t even know our own family. Not my family, Mrs. Hughes thought, not exactly, but might as well be. Valerie Hill had been her closest friend for life and if it weren’t for what those Wickholms had done to Valerie, if it weren’t for what they’d said, well. Val sat alone over in her big, empty house and here this grandbaby was and Mrs. Hughes had a mind to call her friend right up. Her husband saw it quick enough. He shot her a look and she stood and flattened her apron against her bosom and she began to stack the dishes as she said, “Don’t you go having my son’s babies. I don’t care who you think you are and how good you think you are, my best friend, Val, had her baby at sixteen and that baby Jennifer disappeared but not before you showed up so I know what runs in your blood, don’t you go having my son’s babies.”

  Outside this small house the big dirty river lumbered down toward the lake. The evening light that bounced upon the water blinded Alice and there she sat, naked and revealed, that delicious hunger running through her blood. She and Gerald, all they had done together on the pine forest floor and all they had planned to do, none of it had contained an ounce of shame or love. Alice believed Gerald’s mother had seen right through her. With this woman’s eyes on her there was nowhere to tuck away that awful, shameful lust, or the real secrets, the ones Devnet had planted there. Those ones sat on her shoulder and whispered in her ear that she was wicked and that to her own father she did not belong. Keeping her eyes cast downward, Alice found her coat and with only one arm in it she fled from that small house.

  Too good for my family, Gerald Hughes would think, for his mother’s words would send Alice barreling so very far from his definite future. And isn’t that what Mrs. Hughes had meant to have happen? She knew what it was to give her life over to this small place. Her boys would do the same but she would not wish it upon them. So there Alice went, out the door, good.

  Lake People

  1974

  THEY WERE ON a dirt road, the only sort her father liked to take. By way of dirt roads he frequently turned what may have been a fifteen-minute trip into one that took over an hour. As an adult Alice could describe these trips—in fact she did describe them—as her father’s small attempt to awaken that man he had wanted to become. Freer, maybe that was it. Her mother had left when she was still a baby and he had always been alone in raising her and if he’d done a bad job of it at least he had done it, she could always say that. She reached up and turned the overhead light on and then shuffled through her pack and pulled out her math book.

  “Do you know what the cops would think if they saw that light on? They’d think I put my daughter up to rolling a doobie.” He laughed a small, self-conscious laugh, cleared his throat, and reached for the bottle that Alice knew he kept by the stick shift, under the papers and folders and empty clipboards. For a time when he’d had a girlfriend he had kept a bottle of wine there, along with plastic glasses. But never before had he grabbed the alcohol while Alice was in the truck, and he didn’t now, either. Only touched it. Then he cracked his window and rolled it up once more. Heat blasted from the dashboard and the scent of her father tumbled about. Something quick—eucalyptus, or lemon—along with that sweet smell that she would soon learn to identify as bourbon.

  This was their first trip to the Shaws’ house—a grand old New England colonial that stood there like the dead end of a dirt road. But it wasn’t the end—just before the house the road curved sharply eastward and continued down toward the lake. Yet situated as it was, and still is, it always looked as if the cars were headed straight for that house. And the house itself—if you were the driver, it looked as if that old house was coming toward you. It was not a feeling of terror the house cast but one of unrest. The house had stood for more than two hundred years, it had watched so very many carriages and cars lumber directly its way, and now that house felt as though it had taken in too much, and since it could not speak it could only emanate a distinct sense of mystery. Or at least that is how Alice felt in the days when she was sixteen and would go there with her father.

  On that first trip, her father came upon the house too fast and had to jerk the wheel and turn the corner. That bottle slipped then and landed between his feet. He leaned forward and retrieved it, put it in his lap, and put the truck in reverse.

  “Bad spot for a house,” he said, and backed up.

  They were parked backward in the driveway, and Alice looked out the back window, up the bed of the truck, and watched as the silhouette of a man emerged from the barn. In less than ten years that man would shoot himself in the head, and Alice would rec
eive a note from her father to tell her as much, and even then, all those years later, it would still be this first image of him to come to her mind: Mike Shaw, skis set on his shoulder, walking definitively forward in the night. Her father opened the door of the truck and pushed his stiff body out.

  “Don’t just sit there,” he said to Alice.

  “Mike Shaw,” he said to the man, and extended his own hand. Mike Shaw—at this point Alice hadn’t figured that out. But she knew just who he was, everyone did. As a young man he’d gone west to ski, and then he’d gone on to the Olympics, where he’d won a silver medal. Practically the town hero, he was. The Kettleborough Museum had even hung a plaque in his honor, and Alice herself kept a picture of him in her dresser drawer, something torn from an old ski magazine.

  He lowered the skis from his shoulder, handed them to the girl, and then said, “Hear you’re quite the skier.”

  Alice nodded. A wet snow began to fall and sounds of a piano drifted about—June inside, playing a waltz on a winter’s night. The men spoke for some time while Alice held those skis. Good equipment she had never known. The lining of her boots was torn and the buckles had been rigged together with wire. The bindings were always popping loose and though Alice was taller than most of the girls on the ski team, the other girls all had longer, faster skis. Her father took an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to Mike Shaw.