Down in the Lake

by Shianne Minekime

  Jeanette was a small woman, frail to the point of looking sickly, but she still held herself proudly. Her bones protruded against her delicate skin and her skin was pale from too little sun and her eyes darted nervously about. Her hands fluttered aimlessly like little birds but she was articulate, even when she ranted the well-spoken and smart woman still showed through. Her gray hair still had hints of the brown that it had once been showing through and it was thick and luxurious, she obviously kept herself groomed. The lines etched deep into her face betrayed her age. Annie was a little thrown off by the contrasts in her. She could almost see the woman this pitiful little old lady had once been and it saddened her. Jeanette obviously liked visitors, especially ones that were there to listen to her, and Annie figured that she probably didn’t get very many. She talked about God and the coming Rapture. She asked Annie if she had been saved, and if she Believed and Annie was gentle and careful. She had no desire to hurt this woman who had obviously been through enough in her life. She mentioned Marie with hesitation hoping she wouldn’t set her mother off. Jeanette became animated and talked of her daughter with obvious affection. Annie realized with a sad, sick feeling that she did not realize that her girl was gone, or chose not to acknowledge it. Jeanette spoke of her daughter and Paul and their life together in the present tense. She seemed not to remember having a son so Annie made no mention of him. For Jeanette all the years had not passed, she had simply stayed in the time that made sense to her. The time before the ugliness changed their lives forever. Jeanette talked at length of her daughter, her eyes wandering back and forth between the window and Annie. It made Annie feel disoriented. The mother spoke of her daughter being a good girl, ‘a church girl’ she called her. She talked about her and her daughter going to church together every Sunday. Annie asked about her friends and Jeanette talked about girls from church. When Annie asked if she ever saw anyone hanging around with Marie, anyone that made her nervous, Jeanette looked at her blankly.

  “She’s a good girl,” she said and her voice lost some of the animation.

  “She sounds like it,” Annie agreed.

  She excused herself saying that she had an appointment. She could tell that the interview was over, clearly she had brought up memories of the questions during the time after Marie had disappeared. The flash of fear in the old woman’s eyes pulled at her heart. She had probably spent years putting up walls around her memories of that terrible time in her life and Annie wasn’t going to be the one to knock them down around her.

  “Sure, sure,” Jeanette said, looking at a point somewhere up in the corner past Annie’s head. She didn’t have much to say after that and she looked worn out. Looking back at her from the door Annie felt a rush of sadness and anger. Another person ruined by the man who had Hailey, another life ruined. He had a lot to answer for.

  She got a different cab driver back to the airport and for that she was grateful. She felt drained and worn out in spite of the nap and not up to inane chatter about cats named Dipstick or the size of their hairballs. She knew that Jeanette Jenning’s face would haunt her for some time to come. How awful to live your life as completely alone as she was, comforted only by the lives she kept alive in her mind. How long had she been like that? No matter how nice the institution was, it wasn’t a home or a family. It made Annie passionately grateful for her family and the life they had together. It also brought home yet again how fragile a sense of security really was. She slept again on the plane ride home for about an hour and jerked awake from a bad dream. The guy in the seat next to her gave her a dirty look. After that she didn’t try to sleep, just sat and looked out the window lost in her own thoughts.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Day 17

  The newspaper ran the pictures the next morning. Hailey’s picture was first. It was her school picture, the same one they had used when she first went missing.

  CHILD SERIAL KILLER ON THE LOOSE IN PATTERSON

  was the caption. There were pictures of Amanda and Susan, too, smiling their sweet innocent smiles and staring out at you. Every person reading the article felt the horror and anger that the pictures were supposed to inspire, felt the sting of the lost dreams and hopes and intentions. Many papers wound up in fireplaces or put face down on coffee tables because people didn’t want to have to look at those faces. This was especially true in the homes of the people with kids of their own to fear for. It was too much to have to imagine that it was your daughter frozen forever in that picture. Annie sat in Charley’s with her half eaten lunch congealing in front of her staring at the paper. She was glad that Marie’s picture wasn’t there. At least there was some information that hadn’t gotten out. She had slept until almost noon after the flight and subsequent drive home, in spite of the sleeping on the plane. She hadn’t realized how tired she was. When she got up she had gotten online to research the family, Jeanette’s face still haunting her. She had found a picture of Marie, a picture taken at a school play long ago and run in the newspaper. The play was Sleeping Beauty and though the picture was grainy and the color poor she was still recognizable. Annie’s hands had started to shake when she saw it. It was the little girl that had talked to her on the bench.

  You have to help her. The words echoed in her mind and she had a feeling that they would echo in her dreams for some time to come.

  Annie didn’t know what to do about the knowledge of who the little girl was so as of yet she had done nothing. The possible ramifications didn’t bear thinking about at this point, questioning her own sanity would not help at this point. If she was crazy then she was crazy, “it’ll all come out in the wash” as her great aunt used to say. She wouldn’t go to Jamison with it, even though it was crucial to share information and not to keep secrets. What would she say to him though? There was no way he would believe her and he probably wouldn’t trust her again after. His was a world of black and white, right and wrong. She sort of figured that was part of what made him a good cop. No, she wasn’t going to him with a story like that.

  ‘You have to help her.’

  It was Annie’s intention to take the copy of the picture she carried in her purse to Tina Hansen, the only other person who might recognize her. The only other person who might be a part of whatever was going on. She finished off her fourth cup of coffee and ignored the food on her plate. She tried to ignore the looks and whispers floating around. Everyone knew she was FBI. Maybe she could have passed for a reporter but for the pistol she carried on her waist. Maybe if she had a shoulder strap they wouldn’t have seen it. She didn’t like shoulder straps, it never felt smooth to her pulling her piece out of one. Her husband teased her that she liked to carry it on her waist to feel like Dirty Harry. She felt the difference in the town, too, the fear and the tension. She knew that when this were resolved, Please God it Will be resolved, the town would never be the same. Life would go on as usual but the people would never get back the blind faith that carried so many people through their whole lives. It didn’t seem a bad thing to her, you needed to be aware of the evil in the world to be able to guard against it. But you didn’t have to let it ruin your life, it required a balancing act as most things in life do. Mrs. Jenning certainly had been ruined by the ugliness, but then she had lost her child, not just faced the fear of it. What would she do if she lost her boy? It was a question that she prayed every day she would never have to answer. She couldn’t help putting herself in the shoes of every victim she came across in her job. It was always difficult, and sometimes downright painful and scary, but she believed it was a big part of why she was good at her job. Annie put down a twenty on the table and left, going to the lake house to have another conversation with two of the people she found it so difficult to distance herself from the pain and fear that they were going through.

  Tina spent the day in the house alone after James left for work. Once again she gently nudged him into going, knowing he needed it. She cleaned the house from top to bottom and talked to Jamison twice. Tina wondered if he was
always so thoughtful about keeping in touch with the people involved in his cases. Of course, he probably didn’t have a lot of cases like this either. Hopefully he didn’t have many like this at all. She gathered from their conversation that Annie didn’t really know what the outcome of the media attention might be either.

  “It could go either way,” were Jamison’s words.

  Terrifying words, they carried the weight of the world behind them.

  ‘It could go either way,’ like if it went the wrong way it didn’t mean something terrible. Like a football game could go either way, or a pie eating contest.

  The tension between them was gone mysteriously, neither one of them had a desire to mention it or to rehash any of the details. Tina figured he probably still thought she was nuts but the return of the rapport between them made her happy. He talked briefly of the problems in town and she sympathized with him, although she didn’t say much. She really didn’t know what to say. She sympathized with the people in town but looking out from the nightmare she was in, their worry seemed pretty small. She would have given anything she possessed to trade places with them. Jamison talking to her about things involving the case made it all seemed a little more bearable, like she wasn’t so alone or excluded after all.

  James called her four times before lunch. Tina told him all the details of her conversation with Jamison so he, too, could feel a part of it. After the fourth call she finally told him she was going to take a nap so he would quit worrying about her. He sounded relived and that made her feel like a child. She sighed as she hung up the phone. She realized that a nap actually did sound good, although it was barely one o’clock. Her body was feeling the effects of all the stress and worry but it seemed selfish to worry about herself. What else did she have to do anyway though? Only one van was still outside, the others had probably gone to pester Jamison and his deputies. She stretched out on the couch and fell asleep to the soft whup whup of the fan.

  He loved the media attention. It cracked him up to see the people scurrying around like rabbits, arming themselves with their stupid little locks and baseball bats and guns, as if he couldn’t take any one of them whenever he chose.

  “I’ll blow him to bits, he comes around my place,” growled old man Johnson at the hardware store. He’d probably blow his foot off before this thing was done, the blind old begger.

  Samantha Harmon was buying a pistol, a.22, and trying like crazy to talk her way out of the ten day waiting period.

  “Given the circumstances,” she was saying but the salesman just kept shaking his head.

  “It’s the law,” he said, over and over.

  He talked to them and they had no idea, no clue that he walked among them like any other.

  “Sure is a terrible thing,” he agreed over and over. He commiserated with them.

  “They’ll catch him I’m sure.”

  “Everything will be all right.”

  He laughed inside even as he wore the same expression of anxiety that he saw on the faces around him. He refused to talk to the reporters though, no point in pushing it. He even passed the FBI lady leaving Charley’s after lunch and nodded to her. She nodded back, paying him no real attention, her mind on the job at hand. One day, one day they would all know how important he was. The waitress trotted right up to him, confident of a good tip and a listening ear to gossip into. The whole thing delighted him and he stayed out most of the afternoon. He had given Hailey three sleeping pills in her juice at breakfast so he knew that she would be getting into no trouble while he was gone. He walked among the people, wearing the mask he always wore. And they never suspected, just as they never had. For over fifty years they hadn’t, ‘a pillar of the community’ one of them had once called him. Watching the seeds of doubt and fear sprout and grow, spreading out in all directions. Like a toxin that could poison the water supply, it seeped fear and distrust into every household in town. Probably not just in this town either! He felt powerful and Godlike, reveling in the fear and horror that he inspired. But in his mind he told himself that he was doing God’s work, saving these little girls from the evil of the world and giving them a chance to rise above the pollution of the souls of men and walk among the angels. He was trying to anyway, if he could only find one worthy of the gift he gave, one that wouldn’t be afraid or pull away from him. None of these people had any idea of the work he did or the purpose that lifted him so far above them. They just went about their dirty little pathetic lives, drinking and fighting and fornicating like animals. None of them had any idea what he was or what he could do.

  For there’s too much to change in your world, too

  much left of yourself to create. Always there’s a

  new mountain to climb, a new frontier to explore,

  a larger concept, a greater vision.

  Conversations With God

  Book Two

  By Neale Donald Walsch

  Chapter Nineteen

  This time Tina knew it was a dream but that didn’t really help somehow. It still had that strange feeling of reality mixed with the unreal, bad dream feeling. The sky was dark and thunder rumbled in the distance. She stood in the yard of the New Ministry Methodist church. The wind whipped her skirt and she realized that she wore a dress, for Sunday services. She realized that she hadn’t been to Sunday services in a long time but that didn’t change anything. The yard was dirt still, not the pressed gravel that it had sported for the last ten years or so. The giant droopy oak trees still stood, the careful landscaping and raised flower beds were still a thing of the future. The church was the same though, still lacking some new paint but carrying the weathered wood and the beautiful stained glass doors. The glass frames sat in the huge front doors showing doves flying over an old oak, praying hands nestled in the roots of the tree on the door. The light shining through its colors was like a rainbow within your reach. It was beautiful but Tina was terrified. Her feet moved against her will, carrying her up the steps of the church. She didn’t want to go, tried to will her feet to turn around, take her home and away from there. She wanted to go anywhere but there.

  “Please mama, I don’t want to go to church.”

  The voice echoed in her mind, the voice of a little girl, sounding not petulant as children so often do but afraid.

  “You mustn’t turn your back on God” was the stern answer, although no voice spoke it. Tina just knew that was the answer, just as she knew it was her mother that said that. But not her mother, her mother never went to church, saying that religion and faith was a private thing for her. Her feet had carried her to the doors of the church and they swung open as though by magic, a dark, fearful magic, carrying the power that only children can give it. The power of the unknown, the unseen, the fear of the dark and the boogeyman. Tina walked through the door.

  The church was empty and glowing with light that spilled over the silent pews. Her steps echoed on the floor, each one making her heart thump a little faster.

  “Please Mama, I don’t want to go to church.”

  “You mustn’t turn your back on God.”

  Tina stopped at the last row, looking up into the pulpit. The microphone sat silent on the stand, waiting for the crowd to come so it could ring again with holy zeal.

  “And the word of God shall ring out in this house of the lord, and we shall all rejoice in it and in rejoicing we shall all know the meaning of the word.”

  The voice boomed only in her head, the church remained silent and still.

  Tina turned her head and saw the little girl sitting in the front row in her pretty blue dress, ‘the dress mama ordered me from a catalog.’

  “Marie,” Tina whispered, the whisper resounding in the silence.

  Marie looked at her solemnly, her hair in a bun on the top of her head. It made her look like a little girl pretending to be grown up.

  ‘Mama liked it that way,’ and the blue of her dress made her eyes brilliant.

  “You mustn’t turn your back on God.”