The Girls of Tonsil Lake

by Liz Flaherty

  “Let’s stop and see Rosie on the way in, shall we?” said Jean.

  She pulled between the wrought iron gates of the tiny cemetery that sat at the edge of Hendersons’ woods. We used to pass it going to Sunday school and we always made Andie walk on the inside because she was fearless.

  It wasn’t hard to remember where Rosie’s grave was. Although the church membership hadn’t denied her access to consecrated ground, they’d made sure she was at the back, close to the barrels where the mowing crew threw the old flower arrangements.

  But we’d taken care of her as well as we could over the years. Her stone was large and shiny, both of which she would have appreciated, with a rose etched artfully in the center above the name Rose Hart Bennett. A small white picket fence surrounded the site, and even in Indiana’s blustery winters, greenery filled the urn that sat on one end of the tombstone’s base. It held a small Christmas tree now, bristling with little suet-and-birdseed bells tied on with red velvet bows.

  We took turns taking care of it, and the kids said the grave always looked best during Suzanne’s years. But over time, others had joined us in looking after Rosie. Flowers besides those we ordered often filled the urn; the fence was painted annually and at one point had been replaced without our knowledge; someone had built an enclosure around the barrels. It was nothing more than four panels of privacy fencing, but it was painted white and looked a hell of a lot better than other people’s dead flowers.

  “Who’s doing it?” Andie had asked Scott Parrish, the minister who used to pick us up in his Plymouth for services if it was raining. He’d been young then, and Jean had had a terrible crush on him.

  “I don’t know,” he answered Andie, and added carefully. “Your aunt had many…admirers.”

  We didn’t speak when we reached the site, just stood with our arms wrapped around ourselves against the cold, and grieved again.

  “Maybe a bench,” said Suzanne finally. She breathed in and out, very deep.

  So did the rest of us, in unison. None of us wanted to blubber over Rosie now. Enough time had passed that we should be laughing gently at the good memories she’d given us, not weeping over her loss.

  “Good idea,” said Andie. “I’d like to sit and talk to her sometimes.” She raised her head as though startled. “Good God, did I just say that? I swear, Rosie, I’ve just been around Jean too long.” Her voice was a thin and shaky sketch of pain.

  Jean put one arm around Andie. “I’ve done my best, Rosie, but she still swears in inappropriate places and blames me for everything.”

  “And complains.” Suzanne stepped to Andie’s other side. “What was it you used to say to us, Rosie? Oh, yeah, ‘you’d complain if you were hung with a new rope.’ She’s got that part down.”

  “Nah.” I stood next to Suzanne. “You’d be proud of her, Rosie. You’d be proud of all of us. The last two years haven’t been so great, but we’re still here and we’re doing all right.” I laid my hand flat on the rose on the stone, feeling the indentation of the etching on my palm. “We miss you.”

  “We think so much about what we didn’t have,” said Suzanne. “My mother being crazy, my father only stopping in long enough to get a little, take the money, and move on. Your parents being like they were and Andie not having any. But we all had Rosie. We were better off than we knew.”

  “She saved our lives,” said Jean.

  “She definitely did that.” Andie looked over at the lake, choppy and gray under the clouds, with ice starting around its edges. “I wonder if they ever found the gun.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Andie

  We’d been sleeping outside because the trailers were like small, dirty ovens in summer. We’d done it enough that we’d established our own little campground under the willow and sycamore trees that kept anyone from putting trailers on the south end of the lake.

  We had a ring of stones where we built fires and an old cooler we’d rescued from the junk pile that we used for food and drink. It didn’t keep things cold, but it protected our Kool-Aid and bologna and cheese from animals and bugs. Our sleeping bags were ones Rosie had gotten us at the Salvation Army store. We kept them stuffed under my bed when we weren’t using them.

  On this particular night, Vin wasn’t with us. The welfare caseworker had made her rounds today, leaving Vin’s mother in a pissed-off mood. Even if Chuck Hardesty hadn’t been around in several weeks, she was still married in their eyes, and they weren’t going to increase her allotment. So she’d kept Vin home, packing up Hardesty’s stuff and setting it in a pile at the end of the strip of mud that counted for a driveway beside their trailer.

  Vin had complained. “What’s the point, Mother? You’re going to let him come back anyway.”

  That had earned her a crack across the face that left her cheek red and puffy.

  We were just waking up when Hardesty’s car pulled in. The sun was starting to creep up behind the woods, but it was still pretty dark. We stayed in our sleeping bags, giggling because he ran over his own clothes.

  “Serves the drunk old bastard right,” Suzanne muttered.

  “That’s for damned sure,” I said.

  We’d recently learned that swearing didn’t send us to hell—at least not instantly—and we practiced it a lot. Except for Jean, who had the hots for the preacher.

  “Let’s move up closer,” said Suzanne. “If Vin needs out of there in a hurry, one of us can grab her and another one can go for Rosie.”

  “Whoa, Rosie will love that. She’s got company.” But I followed Jean’s shorty-pajama-clad butt toward the Hardesty trailer. “The mosquitoes are the size of hummingbirds,” I mumbled, scratching. “I’d love to see them chomp down on Hardesty’s ass.”

  “There are other parts I’d like to see them get,” Jean said primly, and we giggled again.

  Then Vin’s scream split the darkness and there was a mighty crash from inside the trailer. “Get Rosie,” Jean yelled, “and haul ass!”

  Suzanne ran the fastest, which really irritated me in phys ed class, so she sprinted toward our trailer. Jean and I moved toward Vin’s. We were almost there when the door flew open and Vin ran out. Her pajama shirt was in shreds, exposing the buds of her twelve-year-old breasts.

  Jean called, “Here we are. Come on.”

  Vin started in our direction, but before she could get to us, Hardesty was on her.

  “Let her go, you piece of shit,” I yelled.

  Jean jumped on his back and I grabbed his arm, but he swatted us away like we were a couple of flies. We went back like we were on rubber band bungees, beating him any way we could even though he was holding off all three of us with one arm.

  Rosie’s voice rang through the early morning quiet. “Let them go, Hardesty.”

  There she stood, an avenging angel in red satin. She adopted a pose, one hand on her hip, her bosom trying like anything to escape from her bodice. “They’re babies, Chuck. Leave ’em be.”

  “All right. I’d rather have a piece of you anyway. You been putting me off ever since I came here. Reckon you’re coming around now, huh?” He lurched toward her, releasing us so suddenly that we fell together like puppies in the dirt.

  “No,” I said, pushing myself to my feet. “You leave Rosie alone, too.”

  Suzanne was running from our trailer, something in her hand.

  Hardesty grabbed Rosie’s arm, pulling her to him. With his other hand, he ripped straight down the front of her gown.

  “Let…her…go,” panted Suzanne, reaching us.

  “It’s all right, kids,” said Rosie, her voice shaky. “You go on back to your campground. It’ll be okay.”

  “No, ma’am,” said Jean politely. “Please let her go, Mr. Hardesty. We don’t want to hurt you.”

  Hardesty laughed and twisted Rosie’s arm. When she cried out, Suzanne raised the gun. Her arm wobbled so much that I braced it with my own. Jean and Vin crowded in, putting their hands with Suzanne’s. “Let her go,” said Vin,
her voice strangely calm, “or we’ll fix it so you never hurt anyone again.”

  He came toward us dragging Rosie in his wake.

  And the gun went off.

  ****

  Hendersons’ bed and breakfast was as nice as Lo and Sarah had said. The bedrooms were big and light, with little bathrooms tucked into unobtrusive places. There was a hot tub in a Florida room that had been added on the back, a sauna in a shed near the closed swimming pool.

  The whole thing, including the farm it sat on, was for sale.

  “If it’s successful,” I said skeptically, as we sat down to Eggs Benedict, “why are they selling it?”

  Jenny Henderson Arthur, who had married the oldest son of the man who’d been sheriff when we were kids, came through the swinging door from the kitchen with more coffee. “You left here. You’ve seen things,” she pointed out. “I’ve lived on this farm since the day I was born. I raised my kids here. Now my husband has an iffy heart, I’ve had a hip replacement that makes climbing these stairs a little hell all its own, and I’m ready to live somewhere else once I’ve traveled around and seen everything I want to.”

  We invited her to join us, and she did. We caught up on mutual acquaintances, heard the staggering asking price of the property, and laughed a whole lot.

  “Do you know,” I asked, “who helps take care of Rosie’s grave?”

  “I do,” she said, “because she came along one day when Cindy Hathaway was beating the tar out of me. She told Cindy to leave me the hell alone or she’d be sorry. Since there was something mysterious and vaguely wicked about Rosie, Cindy was scared of her and left me and my sister alone after that.”

  “She never did that for me,” I said, mildly offended. “She told me to keep trying until I had Cindy as scared of me as everyone else was.”

  “She knew you’d have to fight harder for what you wanted, I expect,” said Jenny, “and that I wouldn’t. I suppose I’m embarrassed by that, but we were as aware of the differences between the Tonsil Lake kids and the rest of us as you were.”

  I nodded. She was right.

  “But I’m not the only one who cares for her grave. My husband does, for reasons of his own that I think have to do with his father. Reverend Parrish does. Your husbands, at least some of them, came one day in the past year and put the fence around the barrels.”

  After breakfast, we walked around the lake, bundled against the cold, and Vin told us she owned one end of it, the end that abutted the Henderson farm. “It was my safety net,” she said, standing under a huge sycamore and staring up through its branches. “You and Rosie made this place safe for me, at least in my own mind, so as soon as lots went up for sale, I bought them. I want to build a house here—a jumbled-up Victorian like the one on the island. One that feels like home.”

  Suzanne looked thoughtful, and there was a spark of interest in her eyes that hadn’t been there since Tommy’s death. “You know, the bed and breakfast would be a great place for a spa. Not a rich-bitch one like they write up in magazines with slick pages, but one for women who are just tired. They’d like to have their hair done, someone to tell them what makeup to wear, dinner on the table without having to decide what to fix. They’d like to sit in a hot tub and dream, in a sauna and think sexy thoughts, on a back porch and read the latest Jean O’Toole book with a glass of wine and no kids interrupting them. And they’d like to do it without breaking the bank.”

  “There may not be another Jean O’Toole book for them to read,” said Jean, though she didn’t look upset about it.

  “Yes, there will,” said Vin.

  Jean

  We never knew who pulled the trigger. We were all standing together, all of us touching the gun. Chuck Hardesty got this ghastly look of surprise on his face and staggered to his car. Rosie hurried over to the four of us, and we watched in silent and stunned horror as Hardesty drove right over his possessions lying there and into the lake.

  The screaming started then. Mrs. Hardesty came stumbling out of her trailer and other trailer doors flew open. Rosie stood in front of the four of us, holding her gown together. She half-turned, giving us a shooing motion, and we retreated to the campground to sit on the bank and watch.

  Sheriff Arthur got there first, very quickly, followed in minutes by Reverend Parrish. Then we saw them talking to Rosie and Mrs. Hardesty, looking over at us occasionally. The ambulance came next, followed by a wrecker and another police car that held other guys, real divers with all kinds of equipment.

  On the bank of the lake, we moved closer together, sitting with our shoulders touching. We said little.

  When they removed Hardesty’s body from the car, I thought I was going to be sick. A sidewise look at the other girls showed me they didn’t feel much better.

  “I wonder,” said Suzanne, “if we’ll have to go to jail.”

  Andie gave her a withering look. “Rosie will take care of it.”

  Vin nodded. “She always has.”

  The back doors of the ambulance slammed and my mother and Suzanne’s walked Mrs. Hardesty toward her trailer. Rosie looked over at us, then went to speak to the sheriff again.

  I took a deep breath. Maybe I wouldn’t throw up, after all. “I think we should make a pact.”

  ****

  The pact had worked out well, I thought. I parked myself on a tree root and watched the other three. I listened to Suzanne’s trill of laughter, Andie’s deep-throated guffaw, and the musical whoop that was Vin’s, and wondered what joke I was missing.

  “Question of the day,” Suzanne called. “Andie just asked it and it wasn’t even her turn.”

  I sat up straight. “What is it?”

  “Where did we hide the time capsule?”

  Suzanne

  How could we have forgotten about the time capsule? Not just one but all of us. Now that Andie had said, right out of the blue, “Where in the hell did we put that time capsule?” I remembered the day we assembled it, sitting around the table in Rosie’s tiny dining area before we left for college.

  “What was it in?” Vin said. “Wasn’t it one of the cracker tins that you got if you paid a little extra.”

  Andie’s brows knit as she frowned. “Couldn’t have been. We used the really, really cheap crackers, the ones that tasted just like the cardboard box they came in only they weren’t near as crisp.”

  “That’s right,” I said, and turned to Jean as she approached. “What was it in?”

  “Oh, shoot.” She stopped a few feet away. “The ammo box!”

  “The what?”

  “It was an army surplus ammo box. It belonged to Chuck Hardesty. It was just lying there after…after everything, and we took it. God knows why. You probably kept part of your makeup in it, Suzanne. But I’m sure it’s what we used for the time capsule. We put…Lord, what did we put in it?”

  “A BeeGees bubblegum card, a copy of one of your stories, Jean, a newspaper clipping from the hostage situation in Iran, four locks of hair, a few other things that would have mattered to adolescents in the late nineteen-seventies. There was a letter, too, identifying you all and telling the finder what you hoped to achieve with your lives.” The voice came from behind a tree, and Reverend Scott Parrish followed it around. He smiled at us. “The hair, as I remember it, didn’t exactly match the colors I see on you today.”

  We all murmured greetings, exchanging embarrassed looks.

  “Was there anything else in the box?” asked Andie.

  “Yes, there was.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “I do.” He nodded toward the farmhouse. “The Arthurs have left. Their daughter is in labor with her first child. Would you like me to meet you there and bring you the contents of the box?”

  “Yes,” said Vin quietly. “Thank you.”

  The Arthurs had left us a note urging us to make ourselves at home. If they were not back before we left on Sunday afternoon, they added, please lock the doors and feed the cat. They hoped we enjoyed our stay and
would come back soon.

  We made coffee and rustled cookies out of Jenny’s well-stocked pantry. By the time we’d placed the refreshments on the table, the minister was at the door. We looked at each other.

  “I’m scared,” I said. “It took me so long to lose that girl from the lake. I don’t want to find her again.”

  “Suzanne, try not to be such a ninny,” said Andie. Her voice was as wilting as ever, but she didn’t look too comfortable, either.

  Vin stretched out her hand and we all laid ours on it for a moment. “There are things,” Andie reminded us, “that we’ll never tell anyone.”

  Jean opened the door to the waiting minister. One look at his face and the ammo box in his hands let us know we didn’t have to worry about telling him anything.

  Because he already knew.

  Vin

  I felt a sudden, unreasonable urge to bolt the back door and run out the front one, but Jean’s car was parked in the back, so if we went out the front our only option for escape would be the lake. We could row out to the center in the bed and breakfast’s rowboat and just stay there until the world opted to leave us alone, but it would be really cold out there. I opened the door.

  “Reverend Parrish,” I said. “Thank you for coming.”

  He stepped inside. “Call me Scott. We’re all grownups now, I think.”

  Suzanne took his coat, Jean ushered him to a seat, and Andie poured the coffee. I stood with one hand on the doorknob, not at all sure we shouldn’t have prepared for a quick escape. I regretted that we hadn’t allowed the men in our lives along on this trip. They’d have taken care of us, would have kept the past from rising up to…

  What was I thinking? We could take care of ourselves. I let go of the doorknob.

  The ammo box sat on a newspaper in the middle of the table. “Didn’t we bury it?” I said.

  “No, we gave it to Rosie.” Andie looked over at me. “We’d trusted her with everything else.”

  “It was wintertime, our senior year in high school,” Jean recalled. “We couldn’t bury it because the ground was frozen.”

  How was it that everyone could remember all these details so well now after we’d forgotten the damned time capsule’s very existence for thirty-some years?