by Blythe Baker
I let him lead me back up to the Lodge, and the more I walked, the less frightened I became.
“Thank you,” I said, my teeth nearly chattering from the cold, water still dripping from the ends of my hair.
“You’re welcome,” he said with a small chuckle. “I saw you out there, happily paddling away. And I turned my back for one second to pick up the phone in the office. By the time I came back out, I saw the canoe had tipped.”
We walked inside, and Mr. Terrance looked up from the computer at the front desk. His eyes widened as they fell on me and my soaked state.
“Hey, any chance you know where Candace is?” Paul asked.
“In the laundry room,” he said. “I’ll go fetch some more towels if you go find her.”
“Got it,” Paul said, and he hurried away at the same time that Mr. Terrance walked back into the back room.
I felt a swish of a tail against my shin, and looked down to see Athena staring up at me.
What happened? She asked.
“Something…or someone pushed my canoe over,” I said. “And then tried to drown me.”
Athena blinked slowly up at me. Maybe Annie didn’t fall off the cliff…
I glanced over my shoulder, back out through the door toward the lake. “That’s kind of what I’m thinking, too.”
I swallowed hard.
“And I think it’s safe to mark Paul off my list now…” I said. “Unless he played hero to avert suspicion.”
It’s possible, Athena said.
Footsteps up ahead caused her to scurry underneath one of the benches in the lobby.
And the terrified face of Aunt Candace greeted me as she hurried around the corner toward me.
11
“Drink your tea, dear,” Aunt Candace said, glaring at me from the other side of the kitchen island. Her eyes were like blue stones, hard and sharp, as she regarded me, arms folded in front of herself. “Now, please.”
Mrs. Warren was at the stove, steam roiling out of the pot in front of her, a mouth watering garlic aroma floating into the air. She glanced at me over her shoulder. “And your soup will be ready in a few minutes, too.”
“I’m fine, really,” I said, wringing out my freshly washed hair in a clean towel. “That shower really helped me feel better.”
“I’d believe you if you weren’t barking like a seal,” Aunt Candace said. “Now drink your tea.”
I picked up the hot cup, and had to admit that the heat felt good in my sore fingers. It sank down deep into the muscles, relaxing and soothing them.
As soon as my aunt had seen me, she whisked me away to her bathroom, which was state of the art and ultra-luxurious. First she turned on the shower for me, not too hot so I wouldn’t go into shock or anything. Then she instructed me to hop into the shower. She left me alone, so I peeled off all my wet clothes – again – grateful that I wasn’t changing in some cave like I had to last time. I got in the shower, and as soon as I did, Aunt Candace came back in and started to draw a bath in her large, jet tub.
“When you’re clean in there, just hop in the tub and soak for a bit, okay?” she said. “Just give your muscles a chance to relax.”
I hadn’t argued. Once she left again, I finished washing my hair, twice to be sure it was definitely clean, and turned the shower off before sliding into the tub.
She’d thrown some scented bath salts in, and tiny pieces of rose and lavender were floating on the surface.
Sitting in the bathtub up to my neck in water, I could almost believe I’d imagined being pulled down into the lake.
I lifted my leg out of the water and examined my ankle. There wasn’t any sign of something grabbing me, but the memory of it still lingered. I gently touched my skin, and wrapped my own fingers around it.
That’s what it had felt like. A human hand.
I didn’t stay in the tub much longer after that.
I’d met Aunt Candace again on the stairs, and she had been coming to get me, thinking she’d check on me. She brought me down to the kitchen and was all but force-feeding me tea and soup as a way to stave off illness from being in the lake.
“I’m surprised you even wanted to take a canoe out this time of year,” Mrs. Warren said, tossing some salt into the soup, and giving it a good stir. “It’s absolutely too cold to be on the water, for the very reason that you experienced.”
“How did you fall in, anyway?” Aunt Candace asked.
“Something tipped my boat over,” I said, blowing on the edge of my mug; the tea was still too hot to drink. Or I was still too cold and too sensitive to it.
“There were some good gusts of wind earlier,” Mrs. Warren said.
I shook my head. “It wasn’t the wind. It was too forceful.”
“Did you see anyone out there?” Aunt Candace asked.
“Well, no,” I said. “But it had to have been someone, because as soon as I fell in the water, someone tried to drag me under.”
“Honey, there isn’t anyone in their right mind who’d be out there in the water like that,” Mrs. Warren said with a chuckle.
“I’m serious,” I said. “It felt like someone’s hand wrapping around my ankle, and they pulled me down under the water – I think they were trying to drown me.”
Aunt Candace’s face contorted with concern. “Drown you? Sweetheart, why in the world would you think that?”
I swallowed hard, wondering how to answer that question with Mrs. Warren in the room.
Aunt Candace shook her head. “What is more likely is that your ankle got tangled in some of the seaweed that grows at the bottom of the lake,” she said.
“That’s true,” Mrs. Warren said. “That stuff is strong, and it grows all the way to the surface in the summer. I wouldn’t be surprised if in your shock at tipping out of the boat, your leg got all caught up in it, and it made you feel like someone had grabbed onto you.”
I stared down into my teacup, not wanting to argue with them.
Even I have to admit that it sounds crazy that someone tried to pull me under…I said to Athena who’d crawled up into her nest beside the window again.
I don’t think it’s crazy, Athena said. I may not have been with you when everything happened, but I could feel the things you felt, and caught glimpses of your thoughts. Even then, you felt like it was someone, not something.
“Oh, that’ll be Steven,” Mrs. Warren said as her phone began to ring on the counter beside her. “Excuse me for just a second, okay?”
“Sure,” Aunt Candace said.
She hurried from the kitchen, pressing her phone to her ear as she went.
As soon as she left, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“There’s something else bothering you, isn’t there?” Aunt Candace asked. “And you didn’t want to talk about it with Mrs. Warren in the room.”
“Yeah…” I said. I set my teacup down and looked up at her. “How well do you know Paul Chase?” I asked.
Her brow furrowed. “That’s an odd question,” she said. “Where did this come from?”
I bit down on my tongue, wondering if I should say anything in the first place.
If he was the one that hurt Annie, we should say something…do you want this to happen again to someone else? Athena asked.
I glanced over at her. No. You’re right. I just hope I’m not needlessly ruining someone’s reputation…
I took a deep breath and looked back up at Aunt Candace. “I’ve been talking to some of Annie’s friends. Checking in on them, making sure they’re doing okay. And all the ones I’ve spoken with made sure to tell me that Paul Chase had been making inappropriate advances toward Annie.”
Aunt Candace’s face lost some color. “What kind of inappropriate advances?”
“Two of the girls told me that they overheard him say that she reminded him of his daughter. That wasn’t the problem, though. It was all the attention he kept giving her. Apparently, Annie was very uncomfortable with him talking to her and looking at her like he was,
and she’d considered coming and talking to you about it,” I said.
Aunt Candace sighed heavily, and it was as if someone had pricked her, and she was deflating. She set a hand down on the counter as if she needed it for support. “She never said anything to me,” she said. “Although, there was a moment the night before she died where she gave me this look…and it made me wonder. I asked her if everything was okay, and she said that yes, she was fine…” She reached up and raked her fingers down her cheek in distress. “I should have pursued that. If I’d known…”
“Greg, her boyfriend, also seemed angry with Paul when I talked to him,” I said. “He said Annie had a tendency to attract a lot of unwanted attention.”
“I can understand why,” Aunt Candace said, her eyes fixed on something in the distance. “She was such a pretty thing…” She pinched her eyelids shut. “Oh, Marianne…it’s just not fair what happened to her.”
“I know…” I said. “But honestly, I’m not entirely sure it was Paul.”
She gave me a pointed look. “But you just said – ”
“I said what they said,” I said. “But I went and talked to him, and – ”
“You did what?” Aunt Candace said, her eyes widening. “Sweetheart, I understand you want to help people, but don’t you think it’s dangerous getting involved like this?”
“I wanted to see if there was anything going on that might be related to someone who’s Gifted,” I said. “Before calling Sheriff Garland and getting him involved.”
Aunt Candace’s jaw clenched, and she folded her arms again. She hated me being in the middle of things like this…which was why Bliss and I often left her out. I didn’t like making her worry. “Alright,” she said. “And what’d you find?”
“He seems totally normal to me,” I said. “Even he admitted, without my prompting, that Annie had an uncanny resemblance to his daughter who was the same age. He seemed saddened by her death, and I think he was genuine. In my mind, why would he talk about it so openly if he was the one that killed her?”
“Oh, don’t say it like that…” Aunt Candace said, wrapping her arms around herself, frowning. “I hate to think of it like that…”
“Well, it’s something we need to seriously think about,” I said. “But like I said…he was more than willing to talk about it with me. He even felt somewhat sheepish about how much he thought Annie looked like his daughter. Peggy’s her name, right?”
Aunt Candace pursed her lips. “I’ve only met her a handful of times…but now that you say it, she does have a similar build to Annie…”
My heart skipped. “So maybe he was telling me the truth then?”
Aunt Candace sighed. “I don’t know…I’ve never had a complaint against him, but that doesn’t mean that he’s innocent, does it?”
“No…” I said. “But he did come out to rescue me when the canoe tipped.”
“That’s true…” Aunt Candace said. She picked up a dish towel off the island and wiped her hands off with it. “Oh, I don’t know what to do, Marianne…what should I do?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She huffed, shaking her head. “I guess I’ll just have to buck up and look into how he behaved toward her. I’d hate to get the police involved before they came to any sort of conclusion themselves…but I think that poor girl and her friends deserve it. I’ll make a fair evaluation of whether or not he should be dismissed.”
I nodded. “I think that’s the best you can do. In the meantime…I need to figure out what in the world it was that grabbed me under the water.”
“Honey, I know that you want to find an answer for everything, but I really think that this was just some of that seaweed,” she said. “I promise, I’ve had it happen to me about a thousand times since I was a kid. Bliss would say the same, I’m sure.”
She’s not going to believe me, is she? I asked Athena. Even after all the weird things I’ve seen around here…
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said with a tight smile. I stood up and drained the rest of my tea, which was now pretty much room temperature. “I should go lie down. All the excitement today has me worn out.”
“No problem, dear,” Aunt Candace said. “Go ahead and I’ll take care of getting the laundry distributed to the rooms, alright?”
“I can do that,” I said. “I’ll take a stack on my way up to my room.”
She smiled at me. “Sounds great, sweetheart. I’ll have Mr. Terrance bring you some warm milk before he goes to bed, alright?”
“Thanks,” I said with a smile.
Athena hopped down out of her nest as I left the room.
As soon as we were out in the lobby, away from possible eavesdroppers, I let my shoulders sag. “That went about as well as I thought it would,” I said, my heart heavy.
It’s good that you were honest with her, Athena said. As much as you don’t want to upset her, it’s more important that the truth is out in the open, right?
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “I’m still not convinced it was Paul.”
He didn’t seem the sort, no…Athena said.
“Well…one thing’s for sure, I know it wasn’t Paul Chase that pulled me down into the lake,” I said. “He couldn’t have been out on the shore and down in the water at the same time. Unless he has some weird duplication power. But I don’t think he’s Gifted, either. At least I didn’t get that sense.”
He doesn’t give off the feeling that he’s Gifted, Athena said. And I think you’re right that it could very well have been a Gifted person to grab you out in the water like that. That is what you’re thinking…right?
“Yeah, it is,” I said. “Because it definitely wasn’t seaweed or whatever Aunt Candace seemed determined to make me believe. It was a hand closing around my ankle. There were fingers. It squeezed me, whatever it was.”
We made our way through the foyer and up the staircase to the upper floors. I was exhausted. I’d been through near death experiences before, but they never got any easier.
…Not that I really wanted to get used to them in the first place, of course.
“I just don’t see why everyone seems so convinced it was a fish or just my imagination making me think I was getting pulled under,” I said as I pushed open the door to Bliss’s bedroom. “I’m not crazy. Aunt Candace of all people should know that.”
But wouldn’t it hurt her business if there was something out in the lake that could hurt people? Athena asked, hopping up onto the bed. She walked in a circle a few times, winding her tail around herself, before settling down on the duvet, her dark eyes fixed on me.
“So she’d remain in denial just to make a few extra bucks?” I asked. I shook my head. “I don’t know…”
She’s lost a lot recently, Athena said. Her daughter moved away –
I frowned. “She didn’t move permanently. She’s just…away for a little while.” I knew that I just didn’t want it to be true any more than Aunt Candace did.
Athena blinked up at me. Her daughter left, for an unspecified length of time, and her niece was attacked in her home just down the lake from here. There have been a long string of murders around here in the last few months, and the most recent one happened right outside her front door. She must certainly be stressing about all of this impacting her home. She’s likely lost sleep over it, and –
“Okay…” I said, holding up my hands in defeat. “I get it. You’re right. She has enough on her plate…”
I started to pace around the room, scratching my chin while I did.
“So this is just my problem now. Something in that lake grabbed my ankle and tried to drown me. Whatever it was, it had to have come from the water itself. I didn’t see anyone following me out there to the water. Which makes me wonder if whoever, or whatever, they are, if they can breathe underwater?” I glanced over my shoulder at Athena. “Have you ever heard of anything like that?”
No, she said. But there have been stranger things in Faerywood Falls, haven’
t there?
“The only thing I can think of is a mermaid,” I said. “But that just seems – ”
And then it struck me. How could a mermaid be any more ridiculous than a faery, and I was one of those?
“And another thing, I didn’t see anyone getting out of the water after Paul came out and rescued me,” I said.
Well, you wouldn’t have seen them if they were Gifted with water abilities of some sort, Athena said.
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s even more proof that whatever attacked me wasn’t just human. They had to be Gifted.”
I stopped and stared out the window; the late afternoon sun had painted the sky outside with lovely pink clouds against the pale blue sky. They streaked across the open expanse above like strokes from a paintbrush.
“I can’t really go back to the Hollow and see Zara, can I?” I asked. “Though having access to that library would be pretty amazing right now…”
Didn’t she say that you’d get in trouble if you went back? Athena asked.
“Yeah…” I said. “There’s got to be someone else in town I can talk to.”
My heart sank as I realized that a lot of the people I would’ve gone to with questions weren’t speaking to me right now. Or I wasn’t speaking to them.
This wasn’t good. I needed help, needed advice…
“But I’m all alone…” I murmured, sinking down onto the bed beside Athena.
You’re not alone…she said, nuzzling my elbow with her snout. I’m here.
I reached out and stroked the fur behind her ears, and she began to purr with happiness. But the knots in my chest remained.
“Whoever it was that tried to grab me had to have been the one to kill Annie,” I said. “The autopsy showed she was drowned. There weren’t any obvious marks on the body. She was bloated like she’d been in the water for hours.”
Now we just need to figure out who it was, Athena said.
I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose with my free hand. “Poor Sheriff Garland. If only he knew the truth about all these cases.”
It’s best that he never finds out. For his own sake, Athena said.
