Cancel the Wedding (8 page)

Elliott said, “I was a structural engineer. What about you?”

“I'm in due diligence with a construction firm in DC. I think I've grown to hate it. What made you decide to leave?”

“It just wasn't what I wanted to be doing, the work wasn't interesting anymore, and I hated the deadlines. And I was living in Chicago, so far away from my family.” He shrugged not wanting to elaborate. “I don't know. The pace of life was just wrong for me. I was miserable.” I felt like he was channeling my reality at the moment.

“But how did you just up and walk away and then do”—I waved my hands at the house that the newspaper inhabited—“something completely different?” I wasn't being polite; I really wanted to know how one did that. I was looking for a road map.

He started slowly rocking his chair. “It wasn't easy.”

We talked for over an hour sitting there rocking on his porch. Everything he said about being miserable with the deadlines and the inconsequential work hit a little too close to home. The way he hated Sundays because they were always followed by a Monday, and a job that you hate will always destroy a Sunday. The way his boss would make ridiculous demands and then never acknowledge his team when they were able, somehow, to pull it off. The way the job was intensely boring. I wondered if Ms. Missed Call was playing a role in his discontent but I managed to stop myself before asking him. I did ask him why the newspaper though. Had he always wanted to run a paper? Be a journalist?

He kind of laughed. “No. I don't see myself as a journalist. I'm just . . .” He thought for a second trying to put into words what he thought his role was. “I guess I just think a town needs a paper. A community has so many small things that happen that need to be reported and no one else will do it. Like the baseball scores. Or the club meetings, the little accomplishments, the births, and deaths, and marriages. It's important for the people of the community to feel connected to each other and that's the role I think we play. We try to broaden horizons a bit beyond just this little town too. I don't know. Maybe it gives the kids an idea of what else is out there.” He shook his head at that. “Although with the Internet it's so much easier. I don't think kids feel as isolated today as we did.”

“Plus they can access porn whenever they want.”

Elliott laughed out loud. “Literally no filter. It just falls out of your mouth.” He shook his head, amused. “So yeah, other than porn we pretty much cover the life around here. Someone had to do it. The paper had been out of print for a few years before I came back and opened it up again.”

Thinking back on all of the history in this town reminded me of something that Mrs. Chatham had said. “Do you know anyone around here named Rutledge?”

He nodded. “The Huntley Rutledges?”

“You're the second person that has referred to them as the Huntley Rutledges. What does that mean?”

“They were an old family in the area, some of the founders. There's even a Rutledge Reading Room at our club. I don't think there are any of them left, though.”

“Actually, we're back. My mom was a Rutledge.”

He ran his hand through his hair then he looked at me. “Really, now that's interesting. We love articles about the old families. Maybe I can help you dig up some family history and we could see if there's a story there.”

“You mean for the paper?”

“I wouldn't print anything without your permission, of course.”

My cell phone pinged. It was a text from Logan:
can u get me food

I showed the screen to Elliott. He said, “It drives me nuts the way they write when they're texting. All those abbreviations and lack of punctuation.”

I teased Elliott as I typed a note back to her. “Okay Grandpa. Do you have a hard time keeping those whippersnappers off your lawn too?”

Elliott tilted my rocking chair back hard and I almost fell over. “Whoa!” I laughed. “Quit it.”

Logan sent me her response:
can cu from here. STARVING! stop flirting w/E.

Elliott said, “You know I'm right. What did she write this time?” He tried to lean over to see the text but I shut the phone off quickly to hide the message from him. She was being ridiculous.

“Apparently she's starving and she can see me from the inn holding this bag of food. I better get going.” I stood up. “So, can Logan and I come back to start researching? You really don't mind?”

“I don't mind at all.” He seemed to be thinking of something. “Actually, let's meet at the library. They open at eleven and their computers are faster than mine.”

I stood up. “And your cell phone doesn't work there?”

“Something like that.”

“Sounds good. And thanks again for helping us with this.”

“You're welcome.” He looked a little guilty. “Although, I'm actually being a little selfish. Anything about the drowned town, especially involving one of the founding families, is always so interesting.” His voice took on a tone of apology. “It sells papers.”

My family, and especially my mother, were a lot of things, but interesting was never really one of them. “Well then, mutually advantageous research.” I held my hand out and he shook it.

Elliott said, “Besides, I feel responsible since I was the one who broke the news to you about the lake. You're kind of my problem now.”

I laughed. “Sorry about that. I can be a lot of trouble.”

“That's the impression that I'm getting.” He teased. “See you in a bit.”

Logan and I got to the library as soon as it opened and Elliott was already there sitting at a long table in front of a laptop computer. I set up my stash across from him and organized everything around my seat to my very specific liking. I looked up and saw that Elliott and Logan were staring at me.

“What?” I asked.

They both started laughing. It's not like I had researcher's OCD or anything. So I had a few pens and some paper? Maybe a notebook, with some pockets and dividers. I didn't pull out a label maker or anything.

Elliott poked at the pens, unsettling their straight line. “Do you ever get a wild hair and write outside the lines?”

“Oh okay, mocking from the guy who writes notes on his hand.” I lined the pens back up.

Where was the old librarian saying shush when you needed her? This particular librarian, whose name was Bitsy—yes, Bitsy, swear to God—couldn't have been older than thirty and never once told either one of them to shush. In fact, at the moment she was shouting directions about the wireless printer from her desk at the front of the room.

Logan plopped down next to me and booted up her laptop. “I think we should look for stuff about the lake first, right? I mean that's just like so weird that there's all that stuff under there. Graham said there's an old church steeple from the town that's still floating around in the lake.”

I glanced over at her. “When did you talk to Graham?” She ignored me.

Elliott shook his head. “That thing sank to the bottom years ago. It's become a bit of a local legend and ghost story. Kids on the lake say they can hear the bells ringing at night.”

I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of some haunted church steeple floating around the water ringing its bells. Or even worse, sitting at the bottom of the dark lake looking up at you through the silty, green water.

Logan and I searched the Internet for information while Elliott dug into the newspaper archives. After a few hours we had an emerging picture of the lake and its formation.

In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority as part of the New Deal. The TVA was tasked to develop solutions to problems occurring down the length of the Tennessee River valley. They were innovative in finding new ways to deal with power production, river navigation, and flood control.

The creation of man-made lakes along the river and its tributaries provided jobs in that desperate time of the Depression. The dams also provided power production and ushered a vast number of people into the modern world with electricity.

The dam at Lake Huntley was the last one built before the TVA switched their efforts to nuclear power plants. Poor Huntley, the last kill before the carnivore went vegetarian.

In 1963 the dam was approved and construction began on the diversion tunnels. There were some poignant photographs of the town of Huntley after it had been abandoned. Although to call it a town was a bit of an insult to the word. Huntley was merely a crossroads with six or seven buildings near the intersection. The largest was a hardware store, which seemed to double as the town's soda fountain and possibly the post office. There were also two churches and an old storefront that looked like a dress shop. A few other buildings rounded out the tiny town but we couldn't make out what they had been.

In the black-and-white photos the signage was being taken down, and in the foreground one of the wooden churches had been jacked up onto a flatbed truck and was in the process of being moved. In the next set of images the church was gone, carted off somewhere, and the few buildings that remained had been razed. The only proof of their existence being the concrete foundations left behind. I wondered where that other church had been, the one that wasn't torn down so that its steeple could haunt the lakefront. It wasn't in any of the pictures we found of the town.

I held up the printouts of the photos of Huntley side by side. Before and after. I hated to admit it, but there didn't seem to be much lost. Huntley wasn't much of a town.

I had a long queue of pictures spooling out of the printer and Elliott went to pick them up for me. After about the fifth print he started laughing.

“What?” I asked.

He held up the pictures, all of them black-and-white images of the dam, the diversion tunnels, the water slowly filling in the valley. “You're being kinda weird about the lake.”

I went over and snatched the papers from his hand. “I am not.” Then I hit him on the shoulder with the stack. “You have to admit it's very odd. I feel like I can't wrap my head around it, and it's so creepy.” I peered down at the pictures. “It would be so strange to watch your home being gobbled up by water.”

I held up one of the oldest photos. It was taken inside the Huntley General Store in the late 1930s. There were three men in the photo standing in front of the rows of merchandise. They had waxed mustaches and bow ties and their hair was parted and greased right down the center of their heads. One man was standing on the middle rung of a tall wooden ladder. There were rows upon rows of glass jars holding all manner of who knows what lining the walls. The way the men stood—solitary, staring into the camera—was haunting.

When I looked at the image I could imagine a wall of water exploding into the center of town, knocking the men off their feet and washing them down the length of the valley. Turning them over and over in the rapids until they could no longer stand it and they simply let go. Drowned. I imagined each parcel and jar and sack being tossed and thrown by the force of the raging water. Rushing downstream and being slammed and battered until it all came to rest at some distant location. Mismatched and wrecked. Shoes hanging from tree limbs. Grain sacks drained of their contents and lapping at the shore of the newly created lake. Broken shards of glass twinkling in the sun on the granite outcroppings in the water.

I knew that none of this had happened. I had a thirty-four-page report from the TVA listing the measures taken to clear the town of all of its people and contents. I had an article in the local newspaper describing the warning sirens that blew every fifteen minutes for half a day before they shut down the diversion tunnels and began to fill the reservoir and then continued to sound sporadically throughout the summer. I had pictures of the water very slowly and methodically climbing up the wall of the mountains over a series of eighteen months.

But when I saw the pictures of the old town of Huntley, as it was, it all appeared in my mind to happen in an instant. With no warning and no measures in place to outrun it.

Logan found some information online in a blog about recreational lake diving. There was a whole group of hobbyists who went to these man-made lakes to scuba dive on the ruins of the towns. I had no idea there were so many drowned towns out there. There were pictures of one that had an entire cemetery still intact underwater. I wondered why the people had chosen to leave it there and not move it when the water came.

The blog showed a series of pictures of the rows of tombstones, covered in moss. Seeing the fish swimming around the gravesite was a bit disturbing.

The marina on Lake Huntley even offered diving tours. There were some pictures posted of one of their dives. They were grainy images of the murky, muddy bottom of the lake. There was a shot of those same building foundations we had seen before they had been drowned. The now-underwater concrete was covered with muck and moss. It sent a chill down my spine. There was a picture of a few tree stumps and even one half-buried truck that had been abandoned. It was hard to see much in the photos. They were dark and had that distorted uniform green quality of underwater pictures. But just knowing that all of this was still sitting there—motionless, drowned under the waters of Lake Huntley—was eerie.

Elliott found photographs of the lake as it was being filled after the construction of the dam was completed. The photographer had been standing on a rise shooting images of the water as it methodically crept up the hillside. You could track the progress of the water as the hillside slowly sank beneath the surface. The images seemed to be taken over a series of months. The leaves were changing color, and then dropping from the limbs, marking the passage of time.

There was one last picture in the set. Apparently whoever was documenting the rising water had at one point turned the camera around on the crowd surrounding him. There was a large group of people gathered there, perhaps to watch the water flood the valley. There were picnickers on blankets and some were sitting on those woven vinyl patio chairs from the sixties. There were small children running around the green lawn and a huge barbeque pit was set up on one side, which trailed a steady stream of gray smoke. In the background, at the crest of the hill, was a big white house. I squinted my eyes to try and get a better view of it but it was out of the depth of field and slightly out of focus.