Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers (30 page)

Voices of sorrow and words of comfort died into a swell of whispers that surged through the room and left behind only silence. Regina sat in the second row behind the Rusher family. Leo Rusher held his son in his lap. The room smelled sterile, but dusty. Mrs. Rusher’s eyes were swollen, stained with the tracks of tears and red from the constant friction with tissue paper. Mrs. Dean put a loving hand on Mrs. Rusher’s shoulder, which caused the grieving mother to moan even louder. Guilt rose up in Regina’s throat as the scent of Mrs. Rusher’s perfume sailed into her nostrils making her feel the urge to vomit, she put her fist to her lips in an attempt to fight back the puke. Regina felt a slight palpitation in her heart, and sensing something, she turned in her chair. Nikki was sitting on the other side of the aisle a couple of rows back, her father sat next to her holding her hand. Nikki was watching Regina and their eyes met when Regina turned in her seat to scrutinize the dismal room. The girl gave a weak smile and held her palm up to Regina, wiggling her fingers weakly. Regina returned
no gesture of greeting to Nikki, she just lay her hand on the pocket of her dress where the torn photograph lay hidden. Regina turned farther back to glance at the audience once more and saw Natalie standing against the far wall of the room. Regina’s eyes widened in disbelief, she assumed that Natalie’s insensitive words on the subject of Lola’s death were a sure sign that she would not be paying her respects, but obviously, she had been mistaken. Natalie’s eyes met Regina’s and she shifted them snappily, training her focus back on the preacher at the front of the room. Prayer began the ceremony and it went on at length, encompassing Lola’s vibrant life, the snuffing out of her youthful light, the hopes that the evil person that committed this crime would be caught and the wish for peace for all of her family and friends. It was several seconds after the prayer ended that Regina was able to lift her head, she noticed the vibrancy of the flowers, bouquets and wreaths that speckled the room, colors of crimson and violet with bursts of yellow and orange that seemed so out of place among the faces of the dejected. Inside of the funeral home it was spring, a season of life and color and awakening, despite the dreadful fall that was a reality outside in the real world filled with brown and stiff dying leaves and naked, fragile easily broken trees.

A wake, Regina thought, was an absolutely miserable ceremony to have to be subjected to after the death of a loved one; it was like having two funerals, a pre-funeral and then the final funeral, two heartbreaks, two floggings, when one was enough.

“Dad?” She whispered. “Why do people have wakes?” Regina asked her father under the resounding voice of the fat lady in a maroon colored suit that was now singing. Her father reacted with surprise, no one had ever asked him that question before and she would have not even thought to ask it if this experience had not been so wretched to endure.

“Well,” he started, scrunching his face, deepening all of the wrinkles that were activated when he was thinking. “Long time ago medical science was nowhere near what it is today and when a person was thought to be dead they would lay the body out so that people could come and view the body to be sure. Loved ones
would take turns sitting with the body all hours of the day and night to watch and wait.” He explained.

“… for what?” Regina asked with a genuine cluelessness.

“Wait for the body to wake…to get up and walk again.”

“What?” She scowled.

“They had to be sure that the person was not just unconscious with fever, in a coma or anything like that. If after a few days the person was still unconscious they figured it was OK to bury them. People came to a wake in hopes that person would wake up and walk again. Now it’s just an obsolete, but endearing tradition.” Her father looked at her to make sure that she had been satisfied with the answer. Regina was sure that his answer was a clever medium between truth and fiction as most of the historical and scientific explanations that he had given her since she was a child tended to be. No one knew everything, but her father was good at pretending that he did. Regina’s curiosity had been more than quenched by his answer. Of all of the reasons that she had suspected a wake was a relevant part of the ceremony of death the explanation that her father had just given her, despite the obviousness of the name, had never occurred to her or played any part in the possible explanations that she had recounted to herself. Her father’s definition of a wake did not make the ceremony any less miserable, but did give her new hope for the outcome. Regina glued her eyes to the gleaming black casket and waited.

Clouds passed over the sun that gave light, but offered no warmth and a grim shadow filtered through the windows of the house of the dead. Her dream from last night had been too active, too vivid and she felt as if she had not slept at all. Regina leaned her head on her father’s shoulder; he wrapped his arm around her.

Violent shaking in the room startled the dozing young woman. A deep lumbering wail plowed through the funeral home and everyone looked to the pastor for guidance, he looked to the sky for his direction, but no knowledge rained down. Regina’s heart swelled as the locks on the black casket snapped open with a raucous clank. The lid of the casket opened slowly and a pale hand, half eaten away by time and other life forms, with a spiny almost
skeletal finger crept over the side of the casket as a brace to lift the lifeless body out of the death bed. The air around them was whipping like an angry tornado. Regina’s body was compelled to stand, and she was drawn toward the aisle. Carefully, she stepped over people who looked on seeming to no longer notice their surroundings and were just lifeless place markers in timeless space. There was no other movement in the room until Regina saw that two figures suddenly walked at her side. Nikki and Natalie were summoned as well. Three helpless girls marched toward the casket. None of them wanting to go, but called and resolved to obey their obligation. The trembling girls were pulled to their knees in front of the casket by the spirit that controlled them. Lola moved with rigid jerks, but still methodical and with precise intent. The stiff corpse placed one foot on the carpeted floor and then the other and pushed itself until it was fully free from the casket that contained it. Lola laboriously moved one foot in front of the other until she was standing before the girls who were kneeling before her in some perverse allegiance to the soul that they had sacrificed. Lola gasped hoarse breaths through the mouth that was chewed away at some parts of the lips. The girls recoiled at the full sight of the thing and person that they most loved and feared. The dead thing made an attempt at a scream with a strained wheezing through the rotted mouth and the whirlwind became stronger and faster and she lunged forward on top of Natalie, toppling her effortlessly.

Regina was bucked into consciousness by Natalie’s screech, which tore through the room like a butcher knife ripping violently through silk. Everyone’s head snapped back to see her tumbling out of the doorway onto the floor. Natalie was scrambling backward on her legs and the palms of her hands. Regina stood to see the bath of terror that stormed Natalie’s delicate features. The terrified girl got her feet beneath her in a series of clumsy moves and sprinted down the hall. The room collapsed into frantic whispers of horror. Mr. Rusher stood up; his concerned eyes meeting Regina’s at once.

“I’ll go after her,” she said.

“Is she OK?” Mr. Rusher asked

“She’ll be fine,” Regina replied.

“Do you need me?” Regina’s mother asked as Regina stumbled over the people in her row and into the aisle.

“No, stay!” She instructed, barely looking back. Regina caught a glimpse of Nikki on the edge of her seat as she sprinted after Natalie.

The strong chill of cold air hit Regina hard as she burst out the front doors of the funeral home.

“Natalie!” Regina yelled to the woman who was already slamming her car door and starting the engine.

“Natalie, please.” She hollered into the early afternoon of the gray fall. Regina dashed into the parking lot, but it was no use; Natalie burned out on screeching tires. The entire incident knocked the wind from Regina and she took a minute to regain her proper breathing before turning to go back into the funeral home. Nikki had followed her and was standing outside of the glass entry doors. At the sight of Nikki a bubble of frustration inside of Regina burst and anger began pulsing through her veins as efficiently as if an IV of the emotion had been inserted directly into her arm. Gears switched from one unexplainable incident to the next and Regina charged toward the timid looking woman pulling the ripped photograph out of the pocket of her dress and holding it up directly in front of Nikki’s face.

“What the hell is this?” She asked unexpectedly breathless again. It took Nikki only a second to recognize the photo and she recalled the full spread of it even though the only part that remained held up between Regina’s fingers was an image of herself. Nikki swallowed hard trying to get the golf ball out of her throat. Before Nikki could offer a word, Regina spoke again while backing Nikki into the glass.

“You told me that you had not seen him since we were kids, but here you are taking pictures with him. Why did you lie?”

“I can explain,” Nikki said in a weak voice as if she was about to faint.

“I’m…listening,” Regina growled.

“I saw him only that one time,” Nikki said. Skepticism dimmed Regina’s face.

“I swear,” Nikki added.

“Why, Nikki? Why did you need to see him at all?” Regina asked, feeling her patience slipping from under her in a way that she had never experienced before.

“I don’t know,” Nikki exploded. “I just needed to talk to him. I needed to know why, Regina. All of the disgusting things that happened to us, all of the times I had to come home and push my underwear down to the bottom of the trash so that my father would not see them, I needed answers!” Nikki pleaded.

Regina’s anger dissolved like air from a popped balloon, she stood next to Nikki with her back against the glass while Nikki continued.

“Sometimes even now, when I feel the anxiety creeping up inside of me, when it begins permeating every orifice of my body and I can no longer stand to be inside of the skin that contains me and the alcohol isn’t enough; I get a pair of my underwear and shove them deep down to the bottom of the garbage, where no one can see them; only I know that they’re there. It’s the only thing besides the liquor that gives me even the tiniest relief. It makes me feel like it is over for the day or maybe even for the week and I can sleep.”

“Oh, Nikki.” Regina sighed.

“Not including him, I’m still a virgin,” Nikki revealed. “I know I talk a lot, but it’s all just talk, you know?”

Silence ruled while the knots of the shared misery made themselves known in the stomachs of both women.

“I just can’t do it. Then after what happened to Lola…I lost everything, EVERYTHING because of him and I just wanted to know why, Regina?” She was beginning to disintegrate into an emotional mess like an ice cream cone in summer, under the harsh rays of sunlight, slipping through the fingers that held it, drip by drip.

“Was he sick? Was it done to him? Was he bullied? Did he enjoy it? Could he control it? All of these questions with no answers until one day I just had to know so I called him. We met at the fair
because I couldn’t stand the thought of being alone with him. I asked him and do you know what he said?” Nikki looked to Regina.

“No,” Regina said in a low voice filled with the guilt of having ever suspected Nikki of anything so horrible as all of the things that she had suspected when she saw the photo.

“No, I don’t know,” she repeated. Nikki’s smile warned Regina that the words that were about to pour forth from her mouth would be as vexing as her Mona Lisa grin. Nikki reached into her purse and pulled out a mini bottle of vodka, opened it and took a gulp before holding it out in front of Regina. Regina grabbed the bottle and finished its contents. “He denied it,” she stated solemnly. Regina recoiled with involuntary exaggeration.

“Yup!” Nikki laughed in an attempt to hold back the tears.

“Never happened. We were young and he was our teacher. Naturally we had a crush on him, imagined such scenarios so much until we convinced ourselves they were true.”
Nikki imitated.

“What?” Regina said unable to hide her sheer disgust.

“One of the people from the fair just happened to come by and snap that picture, they sell them.” She finished the explanation. “I guess he bought it later. Where’d you find it?”

“Yesterday, I went to the DeFrank estate.” Regina told her friend.

“Alone?” Nikki asked.

“Yes. I know that I shouldn’t have, but it’s just like you said, the questions that I had just could not wait any longer. I found this picture of you and him on a bookcase in the old study. It got ripped”

“There’s still stuff there?”

“Not much, but some. Someone attacked me while I was there.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, Nikki. I didn’t see them. They hit me from behind. Yesterday night when I went to the parade someone lured me into Clark’s sculpture store and I was attacked again.”

“By the same person?”

“I would assume so, but I don’t know. They were wearing some type of cape.”

“A brown one?” Nikki asked.

“Yes, you saw them?” Regina was relieved at the thought that she was not alone, that she was not crazy; someone else was seeing the same thing.

“I noticed someone at the parade last night with a long blowy cape-like thing, I saw them several times, but I didn’t think much about it.”

“You were at the parade?”

“Yeah, I looked for you, but I couldn’t find you. Someone was following me?” Nikki asked.

“I don’t know, but I doubt it was just a coincidence.”

“Do you think that it has to do with Lola?” Nikki asked.

“It must. Why else would someone want to hurt me and watch you?” Regina asked her friend whom she could see was becoming more nervous by the moment.

“But no one else knows what happened,” Nikki argued. “I didn’t tell anyone.”