Echo Lake: A Novel (9 page)

Shannon Dawkins was found four days later. She was a loner, a little strange, people said, and had been missing from work for three days before anyone came out to see how she was. She lived in the country, far out even for Heartshorne, and her parents were used to not hearing from her for long stretches of time. She’d had trouble with drugs when she was a teenager, and she hadn’t been quite right since then. But she was quiet and kept to herself and worked at the Dollar Tree fifty hours a week from Monday through Saturday.

The sheriff found her in the front yard of her trailer. He had to shoo away the birds, who’d ripped holes in the thin white fabric of her nightdress and had pecked holes into her scalp, leaving her hair scattered across the lawn.

By the time her body was found, John and his friends had cleared out. Billy had seen blood underneath his fingernails when he woke that morning.

Fuck, he said. How much did I drink?

John laughed. You had your share.

I think I must have scratched myself in my sleep, he said. Or maybe that girl, Judy or Claire or whoever, the one I was sleeping next to.

He remembered dreaming of a woman in white who had led him down to the edge of Echo Lake and had tried to drown him in yellow, soupy water.

8

Emily repainted the walls a softer white than the bright bluish white they’d been before and had the carpet torn up, revealing real wood floors that needed only to be polished and finished. When the carpets were gone, Frannie seemed gone, or at least the image of her death had faded. Emily was glad she had never met the woman—it would have been that much more difficult to live in the house if she’d had a face to match with the name.

She had called the police station and inquired about Frannie’s death. It was unsolved, but deemed a random act of violence, unrelatd to any of the other recent deaths.

The other ones are probably drug-related, the woman who had covered the case said. And Ms. Collins’ death could be related to drugs, too, though not by any fault of her own; sometimes meth heads, looking for money or drugs or simply out of their minds, do things like this. It isn’t common, but I’d get your locks re-done, your windows secured, all of that. Otherwise, I’d say you are in no more danger than anyone else.

The news didn’t comfort Emily, but at least she knew what to do about it. She had the windows reinforced, the locks changed. Every night, she shut the house up tight except for her second-floor bedroom window.

Despite what had happened there, the house was becoming hers. And she had to make it hers, had to stay, because she had nowhere else to go. She’d considered leaving after the church meeting, had told herself that she’d just go back to Columbus, where at least she had friends from work, or more accurately acquaintances that she had once called friends. Maybe she could get her old job back if the position hadn’t been filled already. She imagined herself going back to the office after buying a new black skirt and button-up shirt from the thrift store, explaining that she’d been wrong to leave, that it was an error, that she’d had nothing waiting for her where she’d gone and that she wanted nothing more than to slip back into the life that she’d abandoned.

But it wasn’t possible. She had only a small amount of money saved to tide her over until she found a job. Having no rent helped, but she was still running out of money—food, gas, home repairs, and electric bills were slowly picking away at her savings. She had enough for four months, tops. She couldn’t make the two-day trip back to Columbus with no place to go, no job secured. Renting an apartment and paying the first month plus deposit would take out the equivalent of four months food budget here in Heartshorne. She was here for good, despite her fear after learning of how Frannie had died, despite the fact that (she had to face this, it was true) she didn’t feel much in common with the people she had met here so far, at least not the ones at the church meeting.

She felt unkind to even think it, but there was a gap between her and the people she’d met so far. She’d been to college, she had lived in a city, she had lived with a man for almost ten years, yet had no children with him—these were all relatively rare things in Heartshorne. She had realized that at the church service, where questions about her job, her children, her family, had all fallen flat. So Emily was a rare and strange creature, somebody that they didn’t know how to categorize, exactly. And she, too, didn’t know where she fit.

For now, being alone was a welcome change: she could walk around in her underwear and lie on the floor to read in the middle of the day, nowhere to go and no-one to please, but she could already feel that the freedom would soon weigh on her. Too much of nothing to do had never suited her well, and she knew she’d grow tired of it and look for something—a job, a friend, a lover—to create those limits and edges that would push her into some shape. She’d looked in the Heartshorne Gazette for jobs, hoping for something administrative. She could file and type and answer phones, at least until something better came along. But there was nothing administrative, which made sense—there were few offices in the area until you reached Keno, and the people who already had desk jobs probably held on tightly to them. She circled jobs that she never would have imagined herself taking: car hop at Sonic, waitress at the Keno Kitchen diner, stocker at Wal-Mart.

Though objectively she understood that she’d have to take some kind of job—and soon—it didn’t feel urgent. She had lost the drive that she’d had her whole life, the feeling that she had to be doing something, anything, no matter how little she liked it or how little she understood its purpose. Now, she found herself satisfied to do nothing, and it frightened her. She woke up in the mornings and ate her breakfast at the kitchen table, the windows opened out into the damp backyard, trees and underbrush rustling with the movement of animals she couldn’t see. She’d waste hours just listening to how the house filled with sound as soon as she opened a door or window into the outdoors: the cricket-filled silence after dark and the daylight sounds of faraway car noises and the damp stickiness of her legs against the vinyl of her kitchen chairs or her feet slapping against the newly revealed living room floor. In Columbus, she’d been afraid of being still, of not moving forward, not moving forward was a kind of death. But how had she been moving forward while supporting Eric, moving up slowly in the ranks of a job she could hardly remember just a month after leaving it? She sometimes tried to think back to the steps she’d had to take every morning for four years at her previous job, which had involved typing new information about clients into computer accounts. She’d done this thousands of times, but she now she could only remember clearly two things: the blue border around the program she had used to input statistics and numbers and the curious ping sound that the program made when she typed something in incorrectly. This was how her days had been filled, and she couldn’t even remember how it felt or exactly what she did. Emily was alone, but not lonely.

Living as she did in Heartshorne felt like camping. She drove to town every other week for toilet paper and weekly groceries and drove back and loaded up her refrigerator so she wouldn’t have to go to the convenience store and subsist off of hot pockets and chicken strips. She was alone with herself and sometimes so bored that she read books she hadn’t cracked since college: the essays of Montaigne,
The Confessions of Nat Turner
, and
The Catcher in the Rye
, which made her miss being young enough to be charmed and not annoyed by Holden Caulfield. The days were long and warm. And her house, not yet cluttered with the things that she would inevitably buy to fill it, was all empty spaces and bare corners. She hoped she’d never fill the space. She practiced being there in all of that empty, in lying down on the living room carpet and staring at the white ceiling until she could memorize the stipples of paint and cracks. So much had passed her by in her previous life. She wouldn’t forget so much now, she decided. She wouldn’t be the kind of person who couldn’t remember what she had done everyday for years or exactly how the places she spent her time had looked.

She hadn’t met many people in Heartshorne yet, aside from the church meeting. She wasn’t quite sure where people lived. The main roads and highways were all but deserted, dotted only with infrequent houses and convenience stores and churches, but each afternoon a schoolbus full of children passed her. She’d driven her car down the dirt road that went past her house until it branched off in two smaller dirt roads, each labeled with a direction and a number: SW 56, NW 305. She supposed all of the houses were there, but where did they go? Did the roads even out and widen and become pavement again? There were mazes of roads and houses beyond hers, she imagined, but she feared getting tangled up, her car stuck in a muddy ditch miles and miles from a house or phone. Her cell phone didn’t work out here—didn’t work until Keno, where she didn’t much need it anyway, there being nobody to call. She had called Eric once, when she arrived, to let him know where she was. He had said little when she called and she heard the faint sound of music in the background. He asked her how she was, but she could hear the boredom in his voice, so she’d told him that she had a job interview to go to and hung up. But she knew Cheryl at Rod’s Swap Shop, and often visited, making excuses about having to stock up on supplies, though there truthfully wasn’t much there she had any use for. She could only use so many beer cozies and wind chimes and American flag flip-top lighters.

How do you do it? Emily had asked Cheryl one day when visiting to buy an umbrella and plastic cups. How do you manage to stand here for eight hours a day? You don’t even have a chair!

Cheryl shrugged. I’m just standing here, she said. It’s not rocket science. I mostly have to keep myself from falling asleep. That’s the hardest part. Cheryl chewed gum when she spoke, a habit that reminded Emily of being a teenager. Chewing gum and sitting in your room, the smell of nail polish and magazine perfume samples, watching television for clues about how to be an adult and worrying deeply about how well a particular boy liked you, a boy who you would probably never see again after high school. They’d all be gone, all of your friends, probably, scattered. Those were the beautiful years before you understood how temporary other people can be.

Do you know anything about the Free Will Baptist Church? Emily asked. She hadn’t gone back since the meeting, but felt she should do something to return Levi’s kindness.

Cheryl nodded. Everybody knows them—nice, but hoity-toity, you know? Think Heartshorne’s their town. They look down on people who show up to church not dressed to nines. My Momma used to go to the nondenominational church up in the Painted Hills. Cheryl pointed vaguely towards Arkansas, where a jagged but short range of mountains interrupted the highway. They didn’t look down on nobody for how they dressed.

Emily nodded. I went there the other night, to the Free Will Baptist church, I mean. They had a dinner.

Cheryl removed her gum and put it back in the foil wrapper.

That’s how they get you to come—all friendly at first. Then they come to your house and want you to commit yourself to Jesus and come to their church. She shook her head. Once they came to my door. I told them I worship Jesus in my own way. She looked up at Emily, suddenly, her eyes wary. It was such a swift, clear change that Emily was afraid that she’d somehow offended. Are you big into church? Cheryl asked.

I’ve never been to a church service, Emily said, not before this one I went to, and it wasn’t even a service, really. My parents didn’t have a religion. I guess I’m an agnostic. Don’t really believe in any of it.

Connie had believed in astrology and in the presence of evil, free-floating and capable of showing up in anyone, anywhere, and that was about all. She checked the paper every morning for her own horoscope and Emily’s and read them aloud, scoffing the entire time.

This isn’t real astrology,
she’d say.
You have to know the time of birth, the moon sign, the houses, all of that.

Cheryl sniffed. Well, I believe in God and Jesus and all, she said. I just don’t think I gotta be in church all day, you know?

Emily liked Cheryl because she need only be asked a question and she’d be off, rarely pausing to ask Emily her thoughts on the subject. Emily liked this. She didn’t want to talk about her thoughts right now.

Cheryl talked about her children, all three in consecutive grades at Heartshorne Elementary School. She talked about the man she was dating who had just gotten a ticket for driving with an open beer can in his truck, even though he wasn’t even drinking the beer. She talked and Emily listened, happy to hear the sound of anyone’s voice but her own echoing in her head.

Sometimes, Emily drove to Keno for amusement. Keno had a decent library, a cafe, and a few restaurants. Heartshorne had a library, too, a tiny place where teenagers came to check their e-mail on the two old computers and flip through fashion magazines. Emily kept her reading to classics and mass-market novels—Stephen King, Daniel Steele, and some pocket classics like
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
or a smattering of Dickens novels in crumbling hardback. She’d taken home
Tess
,
Carrie
, and
It
. They’d all given her nightmares. And there was The Garden, the occult shop. The week after the church meeting, she visited for the first time. She didn’t expect to find anything but incense and water pipes and books about chakras and yoga mats. The Garden was just outside of Keno, before the
Welcome to Keno
sign proclaimed its name and the famous citizens who had hailed from there—a country singer who had won the second season of American Idol and a professional football player. The store had only a small hanging sign outside of an otherwise normal one-story house, the house notable only becuase it wasn’t a trailer or a crumbling one-story with a yard full of waist-high weeds, car parts, or children’s toys bleaching in the sun. The land between Heartshorne and Keno was not just empty, but emptied-out, as though everybody who was able had picked up and left together, leaving behind only what they had broken or objects too large to take along—cars with flat tires and children’s playhouses. The land flattened and emptied as Emily drove north, the stretches of space covered in scraggly, dried grass. It was like the surface of the moon for stretches, rocky and with no sign of human life aside from the road she was driving on and the trash that littered the edges of the highway. And then, The Garden’s sign appeared, so small she had to squint to make sure it was the right place.