Cradle Lake (11 page)

“Either way,” Hank said after a moment, “I don't say another word to Owen. He shuffles by me, one shoulder dragging along the brick alley wall, until he reaches the
mouth of the alley where it spills onto Market Street. He pauses there and cranes his neck.
Please don't smile. Please don't smile,
I'm thinking, mentally crossing my fingers. Thankfully, he doesn't. He just peers at the roof of the building and screws his face all up, as if lost in contemplation.

“‘You didn't see it?' he asks me. I shake my head and this seems to suffice, because he rolls his shoulders in return—oddly casual, I remember thinking—and hobbles back to his old Duster and drives home. That was three days before Landry followed Sophie out of the house and about a week before Owen killed her.”

“How'd he do it?” Alan said, the words nearly sticking to his throat.

“Put the barrel of a pump-action Winchester to the center of Sophie's forehead and spread her brains along the front hallway of their home. She'd come from visiting her sister in West Virginia and had just walked through the door to find him standing there with his scattergun. One single trigger pull and Owen was a widower. Then he dragged her body down the hall and up the stairs into the bedroom. A few nights later, over some beers at The Moxie, Sheriff Landry said there was a glistening path of blood trailing through the house and up the stairs that reminded him of those red carpets they roll out for movie stars on their way to the big premiere.”

“Jesus.”

“Owen hoists her onto their bed and crawls in next to her. Then he pumps another shell into the chamber and sticks the barrel of the shotgun under his own chin. Sheriff Landry said Owen had taken off his shoes and socks and
had his big toe stuck in the trigger guard when they found him, so that's probably how he managed to fire the shot.”

Hank leaned over and snatched another beer. Passively he stared at the label and didn't open the bottle. “Of course, neighbors heard the shots and the police were called. It was without a doubt the messiest crime scene old Hearn Landry and his two bumbling deputies had ever come across. Landry said it looked like someone had smeared cherry pie all over the bedroom wall. And it only got worse two days later when the firehouse kid never showed up for his shift. Again, Sheriff Landry went out on the hunt and found the kid in his kitchen, blown to bits by the same gun.”

Alan ran a shaking hand through his hair. His ulcer was bucking in his stomach like an angry bronco. Either the beer or Hank's story—or the combination of the two—had agitated it.

“Kolpeck was the medical examiner. He did the autopsies on all three bodies. Sophie Moreland was forty-eight or so when she died. Kolpeck said he couldn't believe it. He said she was as fit and youthful as someone half that age.” Hank cranked the cap off his beer and took a swig.

While Alan wasn't paying attention, they'd finished the entire six-pack and, judging by the repositioning of the moon in the night sky, had been out here talking in the yard for quite some time.

“So you see, the lake is not something to be used carelessly. It takes just as much as it gives. There is a price to pay, and there have been those who have paid dearly. You and your wife are young and healthy. There's no need to go down the wrong path, so to speak.” The timbre of Hank's
voice lowered. “My suggestion is to stay away from the lake.”

A light came on at the far end of the house: the bedroom window.

“You said at first you assumed Sophie had found the lake from hiking through the woods,” Alan said, turning back to Hank. “But you don't think that now, do you?”

Hank sighed and seemed to genuinely consider the question. When he spoke, his voice was lower. “I honestly don't know. Maybe they
did
accidentally stumble upon it while out walking through the woods, maybe looking for a good spot to have a picnic.”

Alan could tell Hank was only talking in half-truths now. “No,” he said. “You don't believe that.”

Hank chuckled and rubbed his bad knee. “Let's just say I've come to believe in a lot of things, all right? Things about man … and things about nature. Maybe sometimes nature has a way of intervening. Maybe that lake wanted the Morelands to find it because just like it
gives
it also needs to
take.”

“You're telling me the lake … what? Called out to them? Summoned them?”

“I don't know what I'm saying.”

“This is getting harder and harder to swallow. Seriously.”

“I'm not asking you to swallow anything. I'm only asking you to heed my warning and forget about what's on the other end of that dirt path. Might be a time when you'll find that it's worth the gamble, just like with the Morris boy. But for now, live your life and forget about it.”

Alan glanced at the lighted bedroom window again. Briefly, Heather's silhouette washed across the shade.

“Do you have a few more minutes?” Hank said.

“I guess so. What's up?”

“Come with me,” Hank said, standing. “I want to show you something.”

Alan let Jerry Lee into the house, then followed Hank across the street. A light rain had started to fall, and periodic flashes of silvery lightning fractured the sky. He expected to see Sheriff Landry's cruiser parked up the street, masked in darkness, but the street was empty, the pavement a milky blue in the pale moonlight. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

They went around to the back of the Gerski house. All the lights were off except for the flickering blue strobe of a television in one of the upstairs windows. There were the porch steps leading to the kitchen and, below them, the concrete stairs to the basement door. He followed Hank down the concrete steps to the basement.

“Just be quiet,” Hank said before opening the basement door. “Catherine's asleep.”

Inside, Hank ran one hand along the wall and flicked on the lights. His Orioles paraphernalia came to life. Hank
crossed over to a set of wicker doors in the far wall. He opened them, exposing a black, rectangular maw. Instantly, Alan smelled mildew and water damage. Hank rubbed one finger beneath his nose, then dipped into the darkness of the room.

Alan followed a few steps behind and winced as Hank tugged on an exposed bulb housed in the ceiling. Harsh light threw shadows in every direction.

It was an unfinished room, the walls gray cinder blocks, the floor a slab of unpainted concrete. A heating unit stood in one cobwebbed corner, surrounded by pyramids of cardboard boxes, folded aluminum beach chairs, plastic yellow recycling bins, a ten-gallon fish tank with a lightning bolt crack across one panel of glass, and a pair of enormous stereo speakers circa 1975. A picnic table umbrella was propped at an angle like a makeshift lean-to.

“It's like the Batcave,” Alan muttered.

Hank crouched down before another mound of cardboard boxes and slid them away from the wall. Folded up behind the boxes and leaning against the cinder blocks was a wheelchair—a relic left over from Hank's old leg injury, Alan surmised. Hanging behind the wheelchair from a peg in the wall was Hank's old Orioles uniform, zipped up in an airtight bag.

Hank sifted through the contents of one of the boxes. When he found what he was looking for, he withdrew it from the box. It was a vinyl-covered photo album with some sparkly unicorn stickers on the front cover. Hank pulled it into his lap, sat down with some difficulty due, Alan assumed, to his bum leg, and scooted against the wall.
“Here,” Hank said. “Come have a look.”

Alan sat beside him on the floor and peered at the album in Hank's lap as he opened it.

Alan's first thought was that Hank and Lydia had had a second child who died of some horrible childhood illness. The child in the photographs, whose sex was indeterminable due to a lack of hair and whose attire consisted solely of white linen hospital gowns, stared out of one photograph with large, beseeching, doe-like eyes. A network of tubes streamed from one of the child's arms and vanished out of frame. Alan noticed a slightly out of focus dialysis machine in the background. It had been taken in a hospital room.

As Hank flipped through the pages, the photographs became more and more depressing. Alan silently prayed he'd stop before reaching the end of the album, because who knew what the final pictures would show? After all, this child was no longer with them …

“Leukemia,” Hank said. His voice was sober, his hand turning the pages of the album admirably steady.

It was a little girl, Alan realized. In one photo she was propped up in a hospital bed, her pale, hairless scalp covered in a pink straw hat adorned with silk flowers. Her smile was heart-wrenchingly beautiful.

“Hank, I'm sorry.” His voice was inconsequential. “I'm so, so sorry. She was … beautiful. What was her name?”

His hand paused in the middle of turning one of the pages. “That's Catherine.”

Alan felt the world waver and tremble all around him.

“She was diagnosed with childhood leukemia when she was a baby. These pictures were taken in Baltimore before
we came here. She suffered for years. We
all
suffered.”

Another picture showed Catherine in a wheelchair—the very same wheelchair that was now leaning against the wall beneath Hank's baseball uniform. She was clutching a fistful of balloons and grinning at the camera. It was the same toothy grin her father had. Something folded in half inside Alan's chest.

“Got a whole box of pictures,” Hank said, jerking a thumb at the open cardboard box but not pulling his gaze from the photo album. “I told you I'd been in that lake exactly seven times, including today with the Morris kid. Those six other times were with Catherine.” He traced one of the photos. “Just like you, I didn't believe at first. And just like you, they wanted to keep it a secret from us when we first moved here. But I guess Catherine stole a couple of hearts—you know how kids are good at that, right?—and the next thing I know, Don is having a few beers on my back porch with me one night, same as I was having them with you tonight. He says, ‘Let's go for a walk,' and I follow him across your yard—your uncle was living there at the time—and into the woods.

“We go down that path, those strange white stones seeming to light the way, and by the time we get to the lake he's told me pretty much what I've told you tonight. All of it. Of course, that was before what happened with the Morelands, so there was less concern and less understanding of what the lake could do—both good
and
bad.” A teardrop fell on one of the photos. Hank wiped it away with his thumb.

“The Morris kid was fixed right up—one, two, three,”
Hank said. “It was different with Catherine. It took six trips to the lake over a three-month period. It was no different than a regular medical treatment, actually. No different than the chemotherapy. The healing was slower with Catherine. Like I said, there's no explanation for why it works the way it does.” His voice had deepened, his eyes lost in reverie. “Guess there doesn't need to be an explanation.” He closed the photo album and leaned his head against the cinder-block wall.

Alan remained motionless beside him. His mind was suddenly racing; he couldn't erase the images in the photographs from his head, couldn't shake them loose. He couldn't stop thinking of Heather, either, and the two dead babies they'd left behind.

“I'm showing you this because it's important you believe. And it's important you respect the lake's power.” Hank swiveled his head toward Alan. Their noses were practically touching. Alan could smell Hank's aftershave and the cigarettes he'd smoked on his breath. “Stay away from the lake, Alan. For every story like Catherine's, there's a story like the Morelands'. It's not good for everyone. And it's best just to stay away.”

Alan crept through the dark hallway and turned on the night-light in the bathroom. It was barely enough light by which to brush his teeth and wash his face. His ulcer was working overtime now, ever since he'd left Hank's house, and he leaned against the sink basin and held his breath for several seconds. One-handed, he located his antacid tablets
in the medicine cabinet and dry-swallowed three of them.

Trembling, he staggered into the hallway to the bedroom. Heather was snoring gently and buried beneath a mound of blankets despite the heat. Alan stripped out of his clothes and climbed in beside her. She did not move, did not make a sound. Rolling over, he embraced her and slid closer to her back.

He could not shake the photographs of Catherine Gerski from his mind. Whenever he closed his eyes, her smiling, hairless moon face would look up at him from a wheelchair or hospital bed. And as he drifted off into restless sleep, he swore he could actually
smell
the clinical, medicinal staleness of empty hospital corridors, soured bed linen, and the fetid odor of inevitable death. Overhead lights fizzing and popping in their fixtures. A steel sink basin speckled with pinkish spatters of vomit. Each empty mattress—

(blood there's blood on the mattress there's blood)

—still bearing the impression of the person who'd died on it. People vanishing into death. All of a sudden, he was snuggling into Heather's soft, soap-smelling hair in their tiny bed in their tiny Manhattan apartment, whispering into her ear,
They'll always be here. They'll always be with us. Both of them. The mermaid and the sailor.
So foolish in his consolation.

Babies. Dead babies. What was a baby? How could babies die?
They don't die; they just get lost.
Stupid, inconsequential, inconsolable words. They called it
losing the baby,
so where were they now? To where have their material parts dispersed? Had they returned to the earth, their physical bodies the topsoil of fresh flower beds, their essence in the
bloom of a new rose? Or had their spirit and essence retreated inside Heather? Or perhaps they had simply dispersed into the atmosphere. And they would always be running with the bulls in Pamplona and in the passion of young lovers and in the shrill of guitar solos and in the magnetic ebb and flow of the tides and the nerve-damaged throb of every old man's headache.