Daughters of the Lake

by Wendy Webb

  She slipped her bare feet into the shoes that were bolted onto the push board, put her oars in the water, and used one of them to ease herself away from the dock.

  Legs bent, arms extended, oars as far back in the water as she could reach, the blades were ready to slice into the water at a perfect angle. Kate sat there motionless for a time, feeling the boat bob and sway, breathing in time with the water’s heartbeat. When she and the lake were breathing as one, she found her center, her perfect balance. Kate pushed off hard with her legs, pulling the oars to her chest at the same time, then, skimming the flat blades against the water’s surface, back to their ready position. And again, and again. The rhythm of it, the sameness of the movement, the communion with the lake hypnotized her.

  Kate’s memories of the morning’s events were skimming away along the surface of the water. She felt less panicked now, safer here on the water, as she always did. She noticed a deer making its way to the shoreline for a drink. Kate hoped she wouldn’t startle it too much as she passed. It didn’t seem to notice her. Kate always saw wildlife when she rowed; it was one of the things she loved best about the sport. When she reached the end of the bay, where the water streamed into the vastness of the lake, she stopped for a moment to catch her breath before turning the boat around with the awkward circular oar motion that always reminded Kate of the legs of a crab that has been caught on its back.

  Kate pulled the oars toward her again, slowly and more methodically this time. She wasn’t in a hurry to get back to the dock. She was enjoying being out here on the water on such a blue, bright day. But suddenly, inexplicably, the weather changed, as it often did on this lake. A mist began to rise out of the water, a delicate fog. It settled like a cloud just above the water’s surface, giving the landscape an eerie feeling. A couple of mallards materialized out of the fog and floated toward Kate; an island in the distance seemed to be hovering just inches above the water’s surface.

  She looked down and, through the mist, stared into the water. She was caught by the sight of her own hazy, wispy reflection. Brown-haired, mousy Kate. As her oar glided over the surface of the water, Kate caught sight of something beneath, or thought she did. She skimmed to a stop. It was floating to the surface, rising like a diver out of the deep. A fish? Kate leaned over the side of the boat and squinted to get a better look. She took a quick breath in when she recognized that other woman’s face, the dead woman’s face, floating within her own reflection. Their two faces were entwined—Kate’s eyes opened, the other woman’s eyes closed. Kate stared as the two faces became one.

  The eyes of the dead woman’s reflection shot open, those intense, violet eyes staring directly at Kate, her mouth moving, as if trying to speak. The sight of it startled Kate so much that she lost her balance and capsized, gulping a mouthful of water as the lake came into contact with her own gasping face.

  On the other side of town, Johnny Stratton was talking to the coroner, Janet Green.

  “Drowning, then?” he asked.

  Janet nodded. “But that’s not all. She has several stab wounds in the back. My guess is that somebody stabbed her and threw her in the water, or she fell in shortly thereafter, before she was dead.”

  “Had she not gone in the water—”

  “She’d have bled out without immediate care. There’s no question about the fact that this lady was murdered. But I can tell you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She had recently given birth.”

  “And the baby?”

  Janet sighed. Children were always the worst. It took months for their faces to fade from her memory. Sometimes much longer than that. “There’s no water in the lungs,” she said. “The baby didn’t drown. And there’s no obvious signs of trauma.”

  “The baby was born dead, then, or died shortly after?”

  “It’s inconclusive at this point,” Janet said. “Although if you gave birth to a baby that didn’t make it, why would you dress her? The baby had a nightgown on.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Great Bay, 1894

  Marie didn’t explain to any of her neighbors why she had gone down to the lake to give birth that day. She thought it best not to tell folks about the strange music she had heard, how it had beckoned her to the shore. She certainly didn’t tell anyone that the lake itself had called to her, saying that it alone could keep her baby safe in its watery embrace, protect her from the evil fog. Fog will take your baby, the lake seemed to say to Marie. It will spirit her away, and she will be gone forever when the mist lifts and the sun shines on the shore once again.

  She didn’t tell folks how she had heeded the lake’s call and crept down to the water’s edge or how she had waded into the water. It had felt warm and velvety, despite the coldness of the air. It was soothing to Marie, and so she had waded into the shallows, walking farther and farther still, until she was standing waist deep in the Great Lake. She had lain down then and floated, enveloped in the lake’s embrace, and her baby had glided into this world easily, like a glistening, pink fish.

  The next thing Marie knew, she was opening her eyes in her own bed. At first she’d thought it was all a dream, until she saw the people crowded around her, their concerned faces, their comforting words.

  Marie often found her thoughts drifting back to an old family legend Marie’s grandmother had told her when she was a child—tales about the lake and spirits and curses and love. Could they possibly be true? No, she told herself that morning, shaking her head as if to shake away those thoughts. After her grandmother died when Marie was just a child, Marie’s mother had forbidden any talk of the old stories, and she had obeyed. As she grew up, the tales had faded further and further into the past until she could barely remember them anymore.

  But as her own daughter grew, the memory of those tales nagged at Marie, nudging her, creeping bit by bit out of the abyss of denial where Marie had banished them all those years ago. Every time she saw Addie in the water, the stories came closer to the surface. Marie couldn’t deny the fact that, as soon as the girl could move on her own, she crawled and toddled and tumbled and ran toward the lake. Whenever Marie would turn and find Addie gone, she knew just where to look for her.

  One blustery November afternoon when Addie was no more than three years old, Marie wrapped herself in a shawl and walked down to the lakeshore (yet again) to retrieve her wayward daughter. She thought she’d find the girl immersed in her favorite activity, playing by the water’s edge. But this time Addie was nearly submerged in the dark and angry water, whitecaps rising over her head and falling with the wind.

  During the month of November, this inland sea, which on the best of days was unpredictable and fierce, became a veritable graveyard for the unlucky fishermen who ventured out onto its waters. It was said that in November, the lake became sly and murderous. On days that seemed placid and calm, its glassy waters would beckon ships to set sail. Yet, at a moment’s notice, the lake would churn up monster storms with wind, sleet, and hail, entrapping and engulfing even the largest of vessels that had been fooled into leaving the safety of port. Indeed, enormous steel tankers had found their way to the bottom of the lake in an instant, with all hands aboard, in that deadly month.

  That November day, Marie dropped her shawl and ran into the waves toward her child. “Addie!” she cried as she scooped her daughter into her arms. “You’ll catch your death! What were you thinking?”

  “I was just playing, Mama,” Addie cooed, unsure what all the fuss was about. Back on shore, when Marie draped the shawl around her tiny daughter, she felt that the girl’s body was radiating heat. It was as though she had been sitting in a hot bath.

  Marie hurried up the hill to the house with her child in her arms, hoping the neighbors had not seen this peculiar display. The God-fearing people who populated the town were none too tolerant of differences, especially those of a rather strange and otherworldly variety. But surely her own neighbors would never turn on Marie and her family the way they h
ad turned on her grandmother when Marie was just a child. Not again. Not here.

  Still. There was no harm in being careful. Marie did everything she could to hide Addie’s peculiarities. That the girl loved to splash and swim in the water in any sort of weather was evident—nobody could miss it. While other swimmers cried that the cold water stung their skin even on the hottest of August days, it was always silky and warm where Addie swam. The girl would watch people brace themselves on shore and run into the waves, shrieking with laughter as they surfaced, while she floated on her back. Addie thought them all mad for behaving in such an odd fashion. The townsfolk shook their heads, not knowing what to make of this girl.

  But Marie laughed it off. “My Addie loves the water,” she would say, shaking her head. “But then again, she was born there, wasn’t she?”

  This made a kind of sense to the people of Great Bay. They thought Addie’s immunity to the cold of the lake was some odd by-product of the circumstances of her birth. None among them ever wondered exactly why that might have been.

  Neither did anyone wonder why Marie’s husband, Marcus, always caught the most fish in his nets, or how he seemed to be drawn to the biggest schools time and time again, or why he never had so much as a close call out on the lake while others risked life and limb daily. They all simply thought of Marcus as an excellent fisherman, someone with a natural talent for the waves and whatever lay beneath them. Marie had thought as much, too, until Addie was born and the old legends began swirling around in her mind once again.

  The year Addie turned five years old, Jess Stewart came into the yard. Addie was playing beneath a tent of her mother’s clean, white sheets hanging on the line in the back of the house. She loved the way the sheets smelled when they hung out there, fresh and alive with lake scent. Ten-year-old Jess lifted one of the sheets and looked at the girl, sitting there in the summer sun.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Addie said to Jess. They were the first words ever spoken between them.

  “I know,” he replied. “I’ve been waiting for you, too. Shall we go fishing?”

  Up she stood, then, taking his hand. When skin met skin, young Addie knew she would live the rest of her life with this boy. As their fingers laced together for the first time, the years passed in that instant, a lifetime lived right there. Addie saw her future in a flash, the way some people’s lives pass before their eyes at the moment of their deaths. She saw visions of a bicycle, letters composed on a small writing desk in her room, and a wedding in the snow. She saw arms intertwined. She felt love. She saw a baby, and tears. She heard a woman’s voice issuing a stern warning. She saw men shouting and heard a gunshot that echoed into the depths of her being. She saw the lake then, big and bold and comforting. She did not know what to make of all this, being only five years old. It all happened so fast, in an instant, right before her eyes.

  And then it was over. The day just as normal as it had been before. The cicadas buzzing just as they had been, the sun beating down upon her just as before, the sky the same shade of robin’s-egg blue. But when she looked into the eyes of Jess Stewart and he looked back at her, she knew something had changed. They had lived a lifetime together already.

  Addie didn’t know it then, she never knew it, but Jess felt the same thing that day when they first held hands. But the pictures that flashed before his eyes were a good deal more disturbing than those seen by the little girl. He shook them out of his head and led Addie into the life that fate had created for them.

  Marie saw what was happening between the two children and wasn’t surprised, on Addie’s first day of school, to open the door and find Jess Stewart standing there, scrubbed and ready for the day, his unruly hair combed into neat submission.

  “I thought I’d walk Addie to school,” the boy announced. “I’ll get her settled, show her the ropes. I’ll bring her home, too, at the end of the day.”

  Marie folded her arms and looked the boy up and down, squinting.

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Cassatt,” Jess said. “I’ll take good care of her.”

  Marie remembered the morning of Addie’s birth, how Jess was the one who found her. She nodded, knowing she was powerless over what had been put in motion that day five years earlier.

  “Come right home after school, do you hear?” she warned him, wagging her finger. “I don’t want to be worrying about where you are.”

  But watching her daughter walk down the lane, hand in hand with Jess Stewart, Marie knew she had nothing to fear.

  It was then she remembered the book.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Night had fallen by the time Kate and Alaska pulled into Wharton, a tiny portside community an hour down the shoreline from her home. Best known for its quaint, New England–like atmosphere and stunning views of the islands just offshore, Wharton was home to expensive yachts, small galleries featuring the work of local artisans, gourmet restaurants, and several mom-and-pop operations like ice cream shops and smoked-fish stands that gave the town its personality. More than any other place on the lake, Wharton had always been a tourist mecca. But that’s not what Kate loved about it. For Kate, and for many locals who knew its history, Wharton was a magical place.

  The town had sprung up in the wilderness, far from any other city, in the 1700s, when fur trappers, missionaries, explorers, and later, wealthy businessmen learned to appreciate its oddly temperate climate and unsettlingly warm winds. Street after street was filled with grand homes boasting enormous front porches, well-manicured lawns, and flourishing gardens. In this harsh northern land where it was winter much of the year, the air in Wharton was so warm that magnolia trees grew.

  Scientists postulated that the oddly warm weather had something to do with the rocky cliffs that surrounded the town on three sides. Others argued it was the presence of several islands just offshore to buffer the cold winds that blew across the lake. Legend had it that Wharton was blessed with its temperate climate by the spirit of the lake itself, because this was where it had found its true love centuries before. But in modern times, people didn’t think too much of that mythical hogwash. Wharton’s climate was what it was. And what it was was a tourist draw.

  Many of Wharton’s grandest old houses were now bed-and-breakfast inns, catering to tourists who came to shop for local artwork, to explore the islands by ferry, to kayak or row out to the “sea caves” hewn into the rocky cliffs, or to simply wander hand in hand through town with one’s beloved, marveling at the romance of this charming village, set in the middle of nowhere. Visitors said the town radiated a sense of peace unlike anything they’d ever experienced. Kate came here often because of it.

  As Kate pulled into town, summer tourist season was rapidly evaporating with the falling temperatures. Which was not to say that Wharton was closed up tight with the coming of winter. On the contrary. The town’s unusually warm climate drew people all year long, and although tourists couldn’t enjoy the lake itself in the winter, they came for quiet weekends at the inns, long walks in the temperate air, and hours of sitting outside under a blanket with a book and a glass of wine, grateful for the odd respite from the harsh winter that surrounded the town but somehow didn’t penetrate it.

  Kate loved this quaint harbor village. By design, no building was taller than two stories—with the exception of the grand old mansions that lined the residential streets. Visitors were always surprised to find no fast food restaurants, no big department stores, no discount retailers, no strip malls. Unlike the downtown areas of many small communities, which had devolved into ghost towns, Wharton’s downtown was still thriving with the everyday business of people’s lives. Residents visited their family doctor in her office on Main Street and got their prescriptions filled at the local pharmacy two doors down. They bought everything from light bulbs to window cleaner at Frank’s Hardware, which had been owned and operated by the same family for three generations. They got their fresh produce at the market across the street, exchanged town gossip at the diner, and congregate
d at the coffee shop, all of which were located within three blocks of each other.

  The myriad upscale galleries and shops surrounding those core businesses existed mainly for tourists, but everyone, tourist and local alike, loved the restaurants, which were welcoming the first of their dinner guests for the evening as Kate drove through town. She passed Antonio’s, which served Italian fare. Just down the block was the Flamingo, an eclectic place with a long mahogany bar serving fine wines and microbrews and a decidedly American menu including big salads and burgers. Kate saw a crowd gathering at The Dock, located right on the water and offering local specialties like lake trout, wild rice, and Cornish pasty, and the best lake view in town.

  Kate turned from the main street and made her way up the hill toward her destination, one of the grandest old homes in town. The building had begun its life more than a century earlier as the home of Harrison Connor, a young, self-made millionaire who had been savvy enough to position himself in the right place at the right time during the shipping boom at the turn of the last century. The history of the place always swam in Kate’s mind whenever she came here. It was her own family history, after all.

  She knew that Harrison’s opulent lifestyle in Wharton was a far cry from his upbringing as a farm boy. His father, Claus, a German immigrant, had built a farm—forced it into being with the sheer power of his determination—out of a rocky, windswept field near the border of North and South Dakota. His land wasn’t filled with the rich soil that turned the region into the breadbasket of the world and, as such, it didn’t take well to the wheat and sunflowers he grew, but he owned it outright, along with a few cows, chickens, and pigs.