Down
In The Lake
THE PAST BECOMES DEADLY
FOR A SMALL TOWN MURDERER
SHIANNE
MINEKIME
PO Box 221974 Anchorage, Alaska 99522-1974
[email protected]—www.publicationconsultants.com
ISBN 978-1-59433-434-4
eISBN 978-1-59433-435-1
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2013-957436
Copyright 2013 Shianne Minekime
All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in any form, or by any mechanical
or electronic means including photocopying or
recording, or by any information storage or
retrieval system, in whole or in part in any
form, and in any case not without the
written permission of the author and publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
This book is dedicated to my mother, for inspiring me to write and for inspiring me to try to be the kind of person that she is. It is in appreciation of many years of love, guidance, and good example.
I do not know where I am going
Only that I don’t walk alone
I do not know where I am going
Only that I am going home
I do not know which road to take
Which one is the right one
I’m scared it’s the wrong choice I make
But I’ll be all right when this is done
As long as you’re still beside me at the end.
‘The long road home’
Shianne Minekime
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter One
Day 1
That Saturday dawned bright and clear. The sunshine filtered through the tops of the spruce trees and cast their shadows in distorted little shapes on the ground. The August morning mist that lovingly hugged the lake every morning gave way reluctantly to the sun’s warmth and dissipated into the air. After pushing the snooze button for the fourth time, Tina sighed and rolled reluctantly out of bed. Coffee ranked higher than clothes and she stood on the porch barefoot in her pajamas drinking it and watching the mist clear off of the lake. The cabin, if you can call a four bedroom, 3,200 square foot log house a cabin, faced the lake as it had for almost eighty years now. It had been cared for lovingly and it retained its appeal as it gained the grace of time. It stood about thirty feet back from the water’s edge, with the wooden dock leading from the porch and protruding out over the water. The dock was new, an addition they had added about a year after they moved there. Same with the dark brown shutters and trim. The porch felt cold and damp under her bare feet and the breeze off the water ruffled the ends of her long brown hair. She was a small woman, slim and only five feet three inches. At thirty her face was still mostly unlined except for the a few smile lines, the small feathery lines on her forehead, and those by her brown eyes that had been acquired from squinting in the sun. She had lived in this house for over eight years, spent her honeymoon here, brought their daughter here when she was three years old, loved and laughed and fought inside the cabin’s four walls. Thousands of memories lived here. The nearby town of Patterson was fairly small but nice, and the cabin was home. James came up behind her and slid his arms around her waist. She leaned back against her husband and rested her head against his shoulder and they stood like that for a long time, watching the activity pick up around the lake. A boat motor sputtered to life and then roared in the distance. For that moment in time everything was all right.
Tina kissed James goodbye as he went off to work his Saturday overtime, more money for the vacation fund. Three years ago they went to Lake Meade and rented a little house boat for a few days. This time they were saving for Disney World (Hailey’s request of course); so it was going to take quite a lot of overtime hours to fund that adventure. Hailey was up when she came back in, sitting at the counter with a glass of juice, already dressed with her hair brushed. Since she was about five she had dressed and groomed herself as soon as she woke, unusual but nice. She wore blue jeans and an Old Navy tee, her usual summer attire. During school she would wear dresses occasionally and dressier shirts and fix her hair up, sometimes she would ask her mom to braid it for her since the French braid was about the only style she had not mastered yet. Tina ordered her a book of hair styles for Christmas when she was nine and it had come with all sorts of scrunchies and hair ties and ribbons. At eleven she reached her mom’s forehead, full of the promise to be taller than her when she was grown. She had also inherited her mother’s brown hair and her Dad’s light blue eyes. Tina kissed the back of her head and went to the stove. Cracking eggs into the pan (it was always eggs and toast on Saturdays) she glanced at her daughter.
“Did you sleep good, Baby?”
“Um hm,” Hailey murmured.
“How come you’re up so early,” Tina asked, “did you forget it’s Saturday?”
“Nope.” Hailey said. “I just woke up.”
They ate at the counter together, refilling Tina’s coffee and Hailey’s juice. Tina put the dishes in the sink.
“I’m going to work for a while,” she said as she rinsed her coffee cup and set it by the stove.
“Okay,” Hailey said.
“What are you going to do Baby?”
“I’m going to see if there are any ducks around.” Hailey said with her usual quiet decisiveness.
“Take the bread crusts, they’re on the microwave.”
“Okay.”
Tina brushed a kiss over her daughter’s hair as she walked past. In the days to come she would be haunted by the sweet smell of her strawberry shampoo. She headed down the hall to the computer room to get to work.
Four hours later…
Tina sat on the couch shivering with her arms wrapped around herself. She was hunched as though expecting a blow, but the blow had already come. She was cold but somehow still sweating. The police officer sitting across from her looked at her with concern.
“Are you all right, Ms. Hanson?” He asked for the third time.
She looked at him blankly and he dropped his eyes at the stupidity of his repeated question. Three more police officers were in the room, standing or sitting uncomfortably. No one seemed to know what to say. Four hours ago she had been making eggs as though everything were all right. The image of the tennis shoe popped into her head and she felt a wave of nausea.
“Ms. Hanson?” the police officer said, loud enough so she knew that he must have said it a few times.
“What?” She asked, with her voice surprisingly level but sounding to her ears as though it came from far away.
“Can you go through it one more time?” he asked kindly.
“Just for the other officers to hear, too?”
No, her mind cried, if you don’t talk about it, it won’t be real, just a bad dream. She nodded.
She had worked for a while and th
en the silence of the house caught her attention. The story had a hold of her so she wrote a couple more pages.
“What cha doin, Baby?” She called, loudly so that her voice would carry down the hallway. Hailey should have been back in by now. Had she heard her come in? She couldn’t remember, when she wrote she was immersed and lost in the world she created. Finally, she pushed back her chair with a sigh of regret. The story would have to wait a little while. It was the last time she wrote on that story.
The house was empty. She went outside and looked around the empty yard.
“Hailey,” she bellowed.
There was not a sound except the distant drone of an airplane. Their nearest neighbor was almost a quarter of a mile away and woods spread thick between them. The woods were silent and watchful. Standing in the yard she was just barely beginning to worry, just getting a little tense. She walked down toward the dock. The grass prickled her bare feet. She walked out onto the dock and she saw the shoe floating in the water. One of the little flat pink tennis shoes she had bought at Walmart about a month before. That was when Tina really panicked.
Tina finished her third telling of the story and the officer still watched her. He looked uncomfortable, as though he didn’t really believe her or else he had no idea what to say. She wasn’t at all sure which it was. He was young, probably in his early twenties with a moustache that made him look like a little boy dressed up. He thought it made him look older and more professional. The other officers went back outside to rejoin the people out searching. James was out searching with them, he had gotten there before they had made her come in to give a statement. She had flat out refused to stop looking until she had seen that James was too panicked to come in so she had relented. The amber alert had gone out almost immediately and people had come out of the woodwork, many whom she didn’t even know. There were over thirty people out there altogether, combing the woods and calling her daughter’s name over and over. The voices overlapped like a strange, distorted echo.
“Mrs. Hanson?”
Tina looked blankly at the cop, Detective Samuels, or Smithson…something like that. She could see that he was concerned about her; but she couldn’t care. She felt strange and disconnected, everything was unreal.
More people kept coming and when the woods were exhausted the search was widened to all the roads in the six miles to town. It spread in all directions. Dogs were brought in and given clothes to smell. They wandered in circles and then sat by the water and howled. ‘I don’t know what to do’ they seemed to be saying. Upon hearing the chilling and mournful sound they made, Tina went in and threw up in the toilet. Their neighbor, a sweet blonde haired woman named Eddie, held her hair back and then sat beside her and rubbed her back. She was quiet and Tina was grateful. Eddie and her husband were their closest neighbors and they were on friendly terms but Eddie and Trey had only lived there about a year. Tina was a little surprised to see the tears that ran down Eddie’s face. Trey spent most of the time that he was around them staring at his boots but he searched tirelessly.
Two boats came and dragged the lake. For fourteen more hours they lived in fear of what might come up from the murky depths. They found nothing except cans and an old rusty bicycle near the end of the dock. Each time that someone would holler that they found something, James and Tina would be gripped in a paralyzing fear and stand down by the water holding tight to each other’s hands. Each time it turned out to be nothing and they were left limp and shaky with relief.
As dusk fell, people came and brought covered dishes of food that slowly piled up on the table. Some of the people they hardly knew at all. The couple that ran the grocery store came with boxes of doughnuts (not the day old ones either), and they stayed to wander the woods that had already been searched over and over. The Reverend McCallister from the church in town came out in spite of the fact that they hardly ever went to church. He stood and prayed with them and held Tina’s hand in his right and James’ in his left. A crowd gathered around to pray with them and Tina had a strange feeling of unreality, as though the director would yell “Cut” at any moment or the Reverend would suddenly bellow “You are Healed” into the silence. The Reverend’s very somberness made Tina’s heart hurt and her stomach knot and she was relieved when he left. The mechanic from Sampson Automotive came, Ralph his name was. He had picked up Tina and Hailey in the tow truck when they broke down the winter before and she remembered that he had given Hailey a tootsie pop on the ride to the shop.
Neither Tina nor James was interested in eating. Eddie laid out plates and forks and the searchers came in in twos and threes to eat. By the time the tortuous lake dragging was finally done, it was dark and slowly the people left. They stood around uncomfortably for long moments and no one seemed to know what to say. Most of them stuck with “be back tomorrow” or “let me know if there is anything I can do.” No one wanted to admit the ugly possibilities by offering condolences. Finally they were down to Tina, Eddie, James and two of the policemen. Eddie cleaned up quietly and then gave both Tina and James a fierce hug and left. She didn’t try to find the right words, the hug meant more than words and Tina clung to her for a second. Detective Sanders stood by the door with Jamison, the other, older officer.
“We’ll start looking again at first light.” Jamison said.
Tina nodded. She felt incapable of words.
Jamison nodded and turned to go. Tina wondered at his few words. What did it mean that he had so little to say? The sympathy in his eyes had scared her, too. The door closed behind them and she and James were alone. They sat silently on the couch and James leaned over and put his head in her lap and started to cry. Tina held him as he cried. She did not cry, she still did not feel that her daughter was gone. She would know if she had lost her, a part of her would be ripped out. Wouldn’t it?
Chapter Two
Day 4
The ground search was called off on day three. There was just nowhere else to look. The long hours had somehow became days and restless nights.
“If she was in the lake, we would have found her.” Tina insisted.
Jamison shook his head. “Possibly not, it’s a big lake.”
An amber alert was put out all over the state but there was not a single report. Pictures were shown on all the news stations. It was her school picture, in a blue T-shirt that made her eyes so blue, and with a sweet smile on her face. Tina cried from wanting to hold her so badly and from longing to touch her face. The news lady said that she was lost and suspected of drowning. That night James told her he wanted them to go stay with his mom and dad for a while. He was sitting on the edge of their bed staring at his feet. His shoulders were slumped and beaten. He was tall and lean with broad shoulders and blonde hair that had darkened almost too brown over his thirty three years. He was a handsome man by anyone’s standards. His usual calm, quiet strength was gone.
“I think we should go to Mom and Dad’s for a while,” he said so quietly it was almost a whisper.
Tina stood by the window where she had been staring blindly out into the darkness wondering where Hailey was at that moment, was she in pain or hungry or…. She had stopped wondering because she couldn’t bear all the things that she could imagine. She turned and looked at her husband in disbelief.
“We can’t leave.” she said.
“It’s only a couple of hours away,” he said. “There isn’t anything we can do here that we can’t do there.”
“There isn’t anything we can do anywhere!” Tina said bitterly and she felt like a bitch when James flinched. She walked over and put her arms around him and he wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his face in her shirt. She stroked his head softly and he looked up at her.
“I can’t be here!” he pleaded. “I just can’t be here right now, without her here.”
Tina nodded, looking at her husband and her heart ached for him. But lying in bed that night listening to the even breathing that told her that he was finally asleep; she couldn’t help but
feel like she was running off on her daughter.
The feeling of unreality only got worse at his parents’ house. She loved her in-laws and had always felt welcome there. But somehow the comfortable old ranch house felt strange. Her perception of the world had changed and she knew that she had changed as well. The quietness of the car on the trip down was strange and unnerving without Hailey’s usual chatter and constant request for stops. Tina leaned her head back against the seat rest and closed her eyes, pretending for a brief moment that Hailey was there. That this was another road trip. She concentrated so hard that for a second it felt real. Then she lost it. The drive was actually about an hour and half but it seemed like forever. They arrived in Edgewood in the early afternoon. The city was only about forty five minutes further. While carrying in their few belongings and returning Ellie’s hug, she still felt alone. Then she saw the comfort James got from his family and was glad after all that they had come. She put their bag in the bedroom but did not unpack it. Ellie put them in the guest bedroom at the end of the hall. It was a cozy room with a big queen bed with the same lighthouse quilt that had been there the last few times that they had stayed there, and there was the same lighthouse clock on the wall. Everything was the same but completely different.
They ate dinner together at the table—she and James and Ellie and Travis. Ellie was a small woman with brown hair that was shot with gray. She had sweet brown eyes, was plump and curvy, and had an easy smile that was gone today. They had been out of town when their granddaughter went missing and had gotten the news the night before. Tina had stood outside the bedroom at home with her arms crossed over her belly and the tears pooling in the corner of her eyes while she listened to James giving his mom and dad the bad news and telling Ellie not to cry. He told them that they would find Hailey, that they would not give up until they did.
Travis was tall and skinny with laugh lines around his mouth. His usual jokes and belly laughs were gone. James got his height and his light blue eyes from his dad and his dark hair from his mom. Tina scraped the uneaten spaghetti off her plate into the garbage when no one was looking. That night she took her first drink in a long time. The feeling of escape that the whisky brought was worth its bitter burn. That should have been a warning, but right then she didn’t have the energy to care. That night, for the first time, Tina dreamed about the girl….
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