Down in the Lake

by Shianne Minekime

Remember you are never alone

  I will never really leave you

  Even when I am gone

  I will be but a thin curtain away

  Walking in the quiet gray

  I will never really leave you

  Even when I am gone

  In the still and quiet, when you feel loved

  That is me, holding you in my heart

  The memories of life, the ones we love

  We get to take with us when we cross the curtain

  Death is but one door

  In a house full of rooms.

  ‘Never gone’

  Shianne Minekime

  Chapter Eleven

  The rain was falling when they pulled into the yard. The droplets made an endless pattern on the placid expanse of water as they struck the lake. The day was slipping slowly into night, shadows gathering under the trees and in the corners of the house. Whispering merrily their secret plans for the coming night. Tina waited under the porch awning watching them pull in. She saw the woman with him and wondered briefly before remembering his mention of the FBI. Her hands shook a little at the thought and she clasped them around her cup of cocoa. It had gone cold but it comforted her to have something to hold onto.

  James stepped out the door behind her. “FBI, you think?” He asked, pulling the thought seemingly from her mind. He had always had a knack for knowing what she was thinking. He stood behind her putting one hand on the small of her back.

  She set the cup down on the porch rail to trade it for his hand. “I imagine,” she said quietly.

  The woman looked calm and capable and was beautiful in a quiet sort of way. Her dark hair was pulled back showing her clear skin and delicate features and she wore a navy jacket and jeans. She was small but looked strong and completely capable of handling herself. Jamison came up the steps with the woman at his heels. He introduced her and she shook hands with Tina and then James. Her gaze was direct and her handshake was firm and Tina tried to stop her’s from shaking. Detective Meyers took James’ left hand because Tina didn’t let go of his right. There was a second of awkward pause then she smoothly offered her other hand. Tina led the way into the house, still holding onto her husband’s hand. Jamison showed no sign of his earlier anger, although Tina thought he seemed a little distant, a little coolly professional. A game, he called it before he stormed out. Well, now she could show him it wasn’t a game. She cursed him for thinking she would play around like that at a time like this. Although she couldn’t really blame him, she guessed most people wouldn’t have believed her. She had hoped that he would somehow recognize the truth for what it was but she realized that that was probably naive. She wondered what the FBI lady would think and was afraid that her reaction would probably be even worse than Jamison’s was, she was FBI after all. Facts had to be what she dealt in.

  They all sat in the living room. Jamison shook his head at the offer of something to drink but Annie accepted iced tea, mostly because the mother looked like she needed something to do with her hands. Or maybe she needed a stiff drink herself. Annie studied the pictures on the wall while they waited. Jamison sat stiffly on the couch, perched as though he might run at any second. Discomfort showed in every line of his body but his face was carefully neutral. Too neutral for a scared and grieving family, she thought. She wondered at his discomfort. Had something happened between him and the family? She hoped there was no personal connection or history there, that would be an unnecessary complication and pain in the butt that she did not need. It was either that though, or he was not as good a cop as she had thought at first. If he could not be objective she would have to handle the investigation mostly on her own and she really didn’t want that. Cutting him out would require a justification and would probably get him in trouble. Tina came back in and set a tall glass in front of Annie. The ice cubes jingled briefly and then floated quietly. Tina sat calm and straight and proud. Jamison noticed the stance and winced inwardly. Here we go, he thought, gonna dump another load of nonsense on us. And the FBI lady is going to think she’s a whack job that probably killed her own daughter. Don’t say it, he thought as she opened her mouth to speak, just don’t. He still didn’t believe she hurt her daughter and he was surprised that he felt a little protective of her. He didn’t want Detective Meyers to think she was a loon, even if he might think that himself.

  “We found another little girl,” Tina said, looking at Jamison.

  He heard the hint of ‘I told you so’ in her words.

  “Another victim?” Annie asked.

  Tina nodded. “I think so,” she said heavily. Her triumph in being proven not crazy buried under the word ‘victim’. ‘Another victim’ as in, another one like her daughter. As in, her baby was a victim, too. Tears welled up in her eyes and panic gripped her by the chest so tight she could hardly breathe for a second. Annie sat quietly and watched the play of emotions crossing the mother’s face. It certainly seemed real, but she knew first hand that people could be extraordinarily adept at lying. Jamison watched Tina as well and understood that the thought of her daughter as the victim of a violent crime was going through her head. He felt like a jerk for doubting her. What did it matter to her what his beliefs were? If she felt she were helping her daughter then that would be all that mattered to her. James took Tina’s hand and held it tight and the panic eased a bit. Anger rode hard on its heels and Tina turned to Jamison, her eyes glittering with the anger and tears.

  “Another victim,” she said flatly. “Another little girl, one that lived here in this house just like I told you.”

  Jamison met her gaze straight on but she saw that she had thrown him. The anger went out of her in a whoosh, like a popped balloon.

  “She went missing thirty eight years ago,” she said quietly.

  “Thirty eight years,” Jamison said incredulously.

  “Like I told you?” Annie said questioningly.

  James looked back and forth between the three of them, looking lost and helpless and out of his depth. He obviously did not want to jump into this conversation.

  Annie looked at Jamison for an explanation and he sighed.

  “Yeah,” he said resignedly. “She, um Mrs. Hansen, told me she thought that there was a little girl that might have gone missing from this house at some point.”

  Annie’s expression didn’t change but her eyes went a little hard and he thought that she must be pretty good at interrogation.

  “You didn’t mention that,” she said calmly.

  “She said she got her information from,” he paused, unsure of how to word it. A part of him wanted to say it flat out. “Yep boys, she talks to ghosts, loonier than a bedbug this one.” But he didn’t say it. The proud way Hailey’s mother sat and looked at him as though defying him to ridicule her stopped him. And her words stopped him too.

  “Umm, from…different sources,” he finished lamely.

  Annie cocked one eyebrow at him, managing to look pissed off, annoyed and disdainful all at the same time. Good trick, it was almost the same look that Susan used on him when he got under her skin. Maybe mothers sat their daughters down at some age and showed them how to do that look, just to mess with men.

  “I saw the little girl that died here,” Tina said clearly, putting an end to the dilemma of tip toeing around the subject.

  No one said anything for a long uncomfortable moment. Tina took papers off the bookshelf and handed them to Annie. Not to him, Jamison noticed. He figured he was not her favorite person at the moment.

  “This is what we found when we did some research on the computer about this house and the people who’ve lived here, Miss Meyers” Tina said.

  Annie took it and read it quietly and the silence built up in the room and gathered weight until Jamison swore he could feel it sitting on him. He stared out the window until Annie finished the first page and wordlessly handed it to him to read while she read the second. The second was only about half a page long, no pictures he noticed. After they finished reading they al
l sat quietly for a moment, thinking of the little girl that may have been here at the start of it all so long ago.

  Chapter Twelve

  1963

  The Jennings were the second owners of the lake house. The original owners were an older couple who built the house but lived there only briefly. They moved to the city after the quiet and the distance from town became too much for them. Paul and Jeanette Jenning moved in in the fall of 1961 with their ten year old daughter, Marie. They had been married for ten years but told everyone eleven, not wanting to admit their daughter had come along a little before she should have. In those days it was still frowned on, although not as much as it once had been. They moved from Seattle, wanting to get out of the city. They were tired of the city life and were looking to put down more roots for their daughter. A year after they moved in to the lake house Jeanette found out she was pregnant. With no signs of any more children coming since Marie was born, Jeanette declared it a miracle from God. Paul, being of a more practical nature, just figured it was the fresh lake air coupled with the fact that their bedroom was far enough away from their daughter’s to allow for a little privacy. He kept his thoughts to himself though, his wife had always been a little touchy, especially when it came to religious matters. He was happy enough when his son was born to have gone along with her if she had said it was the blessing of little green men in pink tutus, he didn’t really care. He was crazy about his daughter but a man likes to have a son, too. He likes to know that he would carry on his dad’s bloodline along with his name, to be able to teach him the perfect way to cast a pole. To help him pick out his first car and fix it up. The baby was born in the last year of his sister’s life, in 1963. They named him Joseph. Marie was crazy about the chubby little guy, carried him on her hip the way her mom did. Until the day Marie went missing everything was pretty much perfect. To be honest Jeanette was never really a completely balanced person but she was a good mom and a good wife. She didn’t really lose it until after Marie disappeared. Marie’s disappearance was not called a murder, not considered a crime. Most people assumed she swam out too far in the lake and drowned, even her mom and Dad assumed that. In those days murder wasn’t the common thing that it is today. You didn’t read about several grisly and horrible things every morning in the paper while you drank your coffee. Sure, people killed each other people are people after all and human nature still had its ugliness even then. Arnold Jacobs killed his wife in the spring of that year and killed the man he caught her in bed with, too. Knowing her history of bed hopping no one was really surprised. Sure they were shocked but ‘an eye for an eye’ was a popular saying back then. But people didn’t come and take children from their homes to do God knows what to them. It just didn’t happen. As time went on people slowly came to accept the bad things that happen and to understand that they could happen anywhere, even in small peaceful towns where you knew everyone’s name. Some people never accepted it anyway, some people never will no matter what the TV shows or the newspaper prints. So no one thought that Marie Jenning was a victim of anything worse than a tragic accident. They searched for her for two weeks but no trace was ever found. It was too much for her mother. The terribleness was in not knowing, not getting to say goodbye. She buried her head in a religious fog and found comfort in it. She started subscribing to every religious mailing she could find, even the outlandish ones. Some claimed God was returning in the form of an Animal, capital A of course. A quite popular one declared that God was living on another planet and would be coming to claim his faithful followers in a spaceship, ‘In his little green man form no less.’ It was way too much for Paul, who had his hands full trying to grieve for his little girl and care for his baby boy. He finally took her to live with her mother, figuring that maybe the woman who gave birth to her could talk some sense into her. Poor Jeanette wound up in a state institution after a few years with her mother, her mother couldn’t tolerate her ranting either and became afraid she might decide to try to fly or something. It was actually a real possibility, if one of her mailings had suggested that leaping off a roof was a test of faith she probably would have. Paul couldn’t stand the lake house any more with half his family gone and eventually moved to a small town in Oregon with his son. He faithfully visited his wife until he finally realized that he was actually doing her more harm than good. He was a reminder of the little girl she had lost and it took her days to recover from his visits. And honestly, she was a reminder for him, too, of the loss of his daughter and his wife. As time passed he stopped going and after more time passed he met a good woman who made him a great wife and a mother for Joseph. Marie stayed on in the house, trapped there at first by her parent’s grief and her worry for her mother. Even after they were gone she stayed on not really knowing where or how to go. When the next murder happened the tethers became even stronger, along with her need to stop him, to stop the man that took her from her family. She knew that she could play a part in putting an end to his reign of terror if only she could be Known. She eventually got her chance first in Hailey and then in Hailey’s mother and her ability to see her.

  She got hope of having a chance anyway.

  The brief details pulled off the Internet did not tell the people living today all the details of poor Marie’s life, just the bare bones of her disappearance. It didn’t tell that she was taken from her family by violence, but they guessed it. It didn’t tell about the pain her family went through but they knew too well about that. It certainly didn’t tell them that Marie had remained there all those years trying to right the wrong living still in the man that took her. Only Tina really knew that for sure. There was no picture of Marie or her parents in the old article, only a picture of the lake house looking sad and alone in its stark black and white. Annie would have recognized her had there been a picture of the pretty little girl with the clear blue eyes that had seen too much. Recognized her from the bench at the library where she had reached out to try to warn her. But Annie suspected anyway. Circumstances in her life led her to be far more open minded than Jamison could ever be. Before she had become an FBI agent she had been a detective in Canton, making detective early on because of her keen instinct and attention to detail. One of the youngest detectives in their force and a woman to boot. A kidnapping and assault case had led to a cross country chase and a killing spree that had changed her life and had ultimately led her into the FBI. Although the people responsible had been brought to account for their actions she had lost people she cared about as well. Evan and Jeannie’s story was one she would never forget and left no room for doubt in the possibility of life after death or the incredible power of love. Her son was named for Evan and there wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t think of him and Jeannie. But very few people ever get to witness something that extraordinary and very few people believe in it, or even want to believe. People who don’t believe simply cannot see what they don’t want to.

  “You want to tell them or should I?” James asked his wife gently. He figured that she had been through enough telling them all she had. Clearly Jamison didn’t believe a word of it although he was being respectful with his disbelief. James was a little shocked by the FBI lady’s lack of disbelief. He wondered if she was just humoring them and thought them crazy after all. ‘Please God don’t let her think we hurt our daughter,’ he prayed. She didn’t act like she thought they were crazy but he bet she had one tough poker face so who really knew what she thought.

  James took his wife’s silence as assent and told the two cops of Hailey’s childhood friend.

  When Hailey was about five years old she had all the energy of a normal five year old. She was always lanky and tall for her age and her favorite pastime was climbing the trees that stood around the house. She started with the little ones and slowly the trees she chose got bigger and bigger. One beautiful fall day she climbed one of the biggest that her parents would let her climb. About halfway up her foot slipped off and down she went the ten or so feet to the ground. Tina was out
by the porch and saw her fall. She fell silently without a holler or squeak, just a thump when she hit the ground. It was a sickening thump noise and Tina’s heart did a stutter step like a novice learning the jitterbug. Hailey knocked herself out cold, for one awful second Tina thought she was dead she was so still and quiet. She wasn’t though and Tina and James spent a truly terrifying couple of minutes trying to wake her up. The ambulance was called but Hailey was awake again before it even got there, although very quiet, she seemed herself. After the trip to the doctor to have the knot on the back of her head examined, she was fine. The usual resiliency of children. She was back to climbing trees as soon as her mother would let her, which was quite a while. About three days after the fall was when she started talking about her new friend, one that apparently only Hailey could see. Having already been reassured that she was physically fine Tina and James didn’t worry too much about it. Lots of kids had invisible friends. Hailey talked about her friend off and on for the next couple of years. The talk ended when friends of theirs brought their son to dinner with them one night. He had been over there before but on this visit he caught wind of Hailey’s imaginary friend and asked her about it. Children can be relentlessly cruel and when Hailey innocently told him about her friend he began to ridicule her. He called her Looney Hailey and mocked talking to people that weren’t there whenever he was around her, until she settled the argument by balling up her little seven year old fist and punching him square in the nuts. Lots of tree climbing made her pretty strong and the end result was that he steered clear of her forever after that. But she stopped talking about her friend soon after that, the innocent friendship tainted by the mockery. The innocence of children is the looking glass through which they see the world and they see the things that adults have trained themselves not to see. There are some things that adults are not comfortable enough to see or to believe in. This looking glass is available to all children from the day they are born and is simply pure magic. It opens the door to all kinds of wonder and possibility but it is easily smudged by things like ridicule and doubt. It’s a gift that we are born with but one which most of us lose early on. The end result of the teasing and thoughtless cruelty was that Hailey’s faith was shaken enough that she could no longer see her friend, or that she told herself that she couldn’t see her enough times that she actually came to believe it. Her parents assumed that she had simply outgrown it and didn’t think anything else of her little imaginary friend that she had called Marie.