The subject was one they went on to discuss into the wee hours of many nights, and the search for clues within Mary’s words, which had begun in an Ann Arbor apartment, had continued for almost two decades. But Frank’s belief in the murder had dissolved years ago when he became captivated with his own, much different version of Mary’s fate.
“Between you and me”—Lydia decided against a discussion of the murder theory and tried to adopt a more collaborative tone—“since no one has been able to figure out for certain what happened, doesn’t it seem likely that something completely unplanned and tragic occurred? Like suicide, for instance?”
“Well, that would be its own sort of betrayal, wouldn’t it?” Lincoln blinked, staring at Lydia with no visible trace of emotion.
“That seems harsh.” She took a step back and adjusted the camera bag strap on her shoulder. They studied each other with mutual mistrust. “So…exactly what is your connection to the family, Lincoln?”
“I’m a businessman with a soft spot for ruins—human as well as structural. I’m also distantly related to Bernard Evans.” He looked at his watch, then swept his hand out toward the house. “Shall we go in? I don’t have a lot of time.”
Instead of heading toward the front door, Lincoln led Lydia around to the back of the house. After turning the doorknob to find it locked, he eyed a low, shattered window and began chipping a crust of crystallized snow from its sill.
“I couldn’t find the keys to this place this morning,” he said irritably. “New hardware and security are planned, but in the meantime…” He nodded toward the window. “We’ll make use of the most recent vandalism.”
“I don’t understand. You want me to climb in the window?”
“Mrs. Carroll.” His voice was pinched. “Entry through this window is our best option, and we should not waste any more time.”
“Well, pardon me, Mr. Babcock, but you said that you would take me in and show me around. I could have trespassed through a broken window by myself.”
“As you know, Mrs. Carroll, for decades, the Evans family has stated their unwillingness to memorialize Mary Stone Walker,” Lincoln Babcock said. “The fact that I have procured permission to bring you here indicates a slight shift in their mistrust of the public, but the family is still not at the point of offering official tours or condoning trespassers.” He gestured toward the window. “Shall we?”
“After you,” she answered and watched him deftly swing one leg and then the other into the house.
Attempting to avoid the broken glass, Lydia followed slowly, standing up into a room that contained a heavily stained porcelain sink, chunks of fallen plaster, and piles of decomposing leaves, sticks, and trash. Mary’s kitchen. Lydia’s attempt to remember lines written about this room was eclipsed by the intimate, dead smell of rotting things.
The past is beyond your reach, the smell whispered. It has lost its skin.
“The house wasn’t in this condition when I last saw it,” Lydia said, glancing at Lincoln, but he was focused on a newly acquired smear of dirt on his suit pants. Cupboard doors had been torn off, fixtures and doorknobs were missing, and dead bugs littered the surfaces. She peered beyond the kitchen, her disappointment rising. “So much vandalism. Almost criminal neglect.”
Ignoring her comments, Lincoln Babcock walked into the next room, his feet crunching unidentifiable things beneath them. Lydia followed, and there in the front room stood the iron woodstove. The black heart of Mary Stone Walker’s home life, heating the days of both misery and hope with equal effect. It tilted on rotted floorboards, its surface rusted by decades of trespassing rain and snow. Lydia lifted her camera and took several pictures of the room. It was worse than abandoned—it looked abused. But Frank would be fascinated.
“It was the attic you were most interested in, if I remember correctly?” Lincoln said. “It would be best to go there straightaway. My time is limited.”
Lydia eyed the stairs. Narrow, without a rail, they rose steeply to a shadowed second story. They didn’t look safe, but she had to climb them, for it was the third-story attic she most wanted to capture on film: Mary’s hiding place. It had been referenced in multiple poems, both overtly and, in Frank’s opinion, through metaphor. What image could be more perfect for the cover of a book about a poet who had wrestled with her fears, as well as the circumstances of her life, and then disappeared forever?
Inside these time-battered walls, it was even easier for Lydia to believe that the right pictures could finally prompt Frank to assemble the stacks of notes and essays he had produced over the course of fifteen years into a book that would bring Mary alive for mainstream readers. To Lydia, this was not just a nice idea; it was an urgent need. She would develop these photos, have the best ones enlarged, and persuade Frank that he owed Mary Walker’s memory the honor of sharing his writings about her with a waiting public. Lydia had become certain that it was essential to her husband’s career—and mental health—to finish the project. And then move on. His life in the real world had been almost completely replaced by an obsession with the poet that had grown static and strangely decadent.
As she followed Lincoln Babcock up the stairs, she recalled the high expectations she and Frank had entertained twelve years before. Frank had planned to return often to search the house for documents that the paranoid, emotional poet might have hidden in the interstices of the structure itself. Lydia had imagined holding small poetry readings in the living room, when the woodstove had not yet started falling through the floor. But even back then there had been no furniture or belongings left inside. Legend had it that Mary’s husband had buried or burned every item the poet had ever touched.
“Do you think it’s true that Bernard Evans destroyed Mary’s belongings, Mr. Babcock?”
“Undoubtedly.” He paused and turned briefly back toward her. “Papers and books would have gone first.”
“In the woodstove?” Lydia mused, but Lincoln Babcock said nothing.
As they passed the second-story rooms, she felt disturbed. One of these was the bedroom Mary had shared with Bernard. Yes, there it was, its arched windows familiar from a poem about night terrors. Lydia stepped inside to take a few shots. How provocative these images would be, printed in Frank’s book next to Mary’s words.
Lincoln Babcock stood uneasily at the door to the attic.
“Mrs. Carroll, I am a bit claustrophobic. I will wait here to escort you out when you are finished. Mary Walker did set up a makeshift desk in the attic, much to Bernard Evans’s surprise when they cleared the place out fifty years ago. She obviously spent time up there without his knowledge. One of many places she hid from her obligations.”
Lydia swallowed her response, for there was nothing to be gained by alienating Lincoln Babcock. Hiding from her obligations indeed. “The Evanses have gotten rid of everything that was part of her daily life?”
“Except for the spaces themselves,” he said. “The views.”
Lincoln’s eyes drifted from hers as if some nervousness was whittling at his confidence. He looked again at his watch.
“I will have to ask you to hurry. Five minutes.”
“What?” Lydia raised her eyebrows. “This is silly. I should just return here alone sometime.”
“Do not consider it,” he insisted. “That wouldn’t do at all. It would be trespassing. Really, it isn’t safe. For you or anyone else.”
Lydia turned toward the attic door, peering up into the space beyond: the attic staircase that she and Frank had never had a chance to climb. With narrow steps blotted out by darkness, it was foreboding. She had not even thought to bring a flashlight.
Heart pounding, she inched up through the dank air until she stood beneath a slanted attic ceiling glazed by weak sunlight. Five long strings hung eave to eave across the space, perhaps for drying clothes in the attic heat, and on the west wall facing Lake Michigan there was a
round window under the roof peak where wind slipped in around the crude frame.
With the father’s arms that could have held me, buried
in the earth, I reach beyond the treetops toward the sea.
Lydia crept carefully to kneel before the window and was delighted to find that she could open it, lean out, and see a portion of the dirt trail that had once been the road into town. Patches of Lake Michigan flashed silver between the tips of cottonwoods, oaks, and pines, in glorious contrast to the haunted space behind her. She backed up a few steps to photograph this scene that Mary would have been so deeply familiar with. The partly overcast sky left the images flat, but Lydia intended to return sometime soon, in spite of Lincoln’s warning.
Then a shout from below shattered the wooded silence. Lydia pushed the window open wider and peered out. A man’s voice called again, and it was not Lincoln Babcock’s.
“Yes, you!” An ancient-looking man pointed up toward the attic window, limping forward with slow determination, his voice strangled by age and emotion. “You crazy bitch, come out of there!”
She pulled back into the shadows, out of his view, as the sound of Lincoln’s footsteps descended the stairs from the second floor to the first. The old man hobbled forward a few more steps and pointed toward her again, his breathing visibly labored. He was tall and broad, with a pink scar that was spread and distorted by time angling across his left cheek.
“Don’t you think I heard ya?” he called, punching out the words and shaking his head at her. “Don’t you think I heard everything you said?”
Lydia couldn’t tear her gaze from his face, made grotesque by rage. He waved arthritic fingers furiously toward the window as if to scratch out what he saw.
“Answer me!” he screamed, the energy in his voice growing.
Lydia heard the heavy front door open, slam closed, and then she saw Lincoln Babcock rush toward the old man. Lincoln grabbed the man firmly by the shoulders and struggled to turn him back toward the road.
“I asked you to wait in the car,” Lincoln said, anger and anxiety battling in his voice. “You see how it is, don’t you? If you don’t stay safe, they won’t let you go out.”
The old man shook his head, made a sound like laughter, and shoved an elbow at Lincoln.
“Mr. Babcock!” Lydia called out the window.
Lincoln Babcock raised his hand in the air in response but did not turn around. Lydia heard their footsteps in the still morning air, then another shout from the old man and Lincoln’s increasingly tense voice in response. One car door slammed, then another, and the car started. The crunch of tires on ice and gravel faded to silence.
Leave me now, cruelty—crooked hand on my soul…
Mary Stone Walker’s words skittered across Lydia’s mind, as if exhaled from fibers of the attic. She peered through the window uneasily. The light on the lake had been snuffed out by cloud cover, and cold, moist air wrapped around her skin.
Fingers shaking from a rush of anxiety, she packed up her camera and avoided glancing into the thick shadows hunched around her. She ought to stay. Lincoln Babcock was gone, and she was free to look around. But no—it wasn’t necessary to do that right this minute. She turned, eyes fixed on the ghost of light floating up from the second story below, feeling her way across the attic floor and down the stairs. She needn’t stay; she could come back another time. She would bring a flashlight and return some bright, clear afternoon.
Lydia hurried past the wreckage of the other rooms, an irrational fear growing that her breath was constricted. It suddenly seemed quite possible that she could lose consciousness or fall through weak floorboards before she escaped the house. The air felt thin and infected. She yanked open the front door and rushed into the yard, and the door slammed shut behind her.
She had let her imagination open too wide, she told herself as she took deep breaths of the outside air, nearly running to her Jeep. She had let her mind entertain thoughts of Mary’s struggle in the house at just the moment when the stranger had shouted up from the yard. She started the engine, turned the heat up as high as it would go, and locked the doors, shivering as she looked to her left, her right, and then behind her, certain someone hidden was watching her.
Lydia stared at the deteriorating house, filled with conviction that the search for the poet had gone on too long with too little gained. Mary Stone Walker was not Frank’s goddess or Lincoln’s criminal, and yes, her life had been worth examining, but maybe enough was enough. Picking around the verbal skeletons that the young woman had left behind and making up theories about what happened to her suddenly seemed a bit obscene. Had anyone given serious thought to the bones, breath, and heart that Mary Walker was in life? Good lord, she’d been a human being without family or any worldly goods of her own, trapped in a small town and a dangerous marriage. Trapped and in peril. And what was she left with, in her fear and hope? In her efforts to make a life, or to escape danger? Words, little strings of words?
The sense of this washed through Lydia’s mind, and her heart expanded with pity as she seemed to see directly into Mary Stone Walker’s life circumstances. Her young hands had cooked meals in that kitchen, her eyes had searched for deliverance of some sort through the glass of that attic window, and finally, she had fled across this very yard. In the end, the versions of Mary conjured by Frank, Lincoln Babcock, and the Evanses did not contain that human being.
Lydia peered up at the attic window where she had just been, at the dead blackness it framed, and it glinted with blame. She shifted the Jeep into Reverse and backed away. Yes, it was time to find a way to put this issue to rest. She and Frank needed to publish his work about the poet, get it into the world, and let her go. Who knew? Maybe even Mary Walker herself needed a release from their acquisitive searching. The hour was late for a woman who had been missing for sixty years—far too late for anyone to hope for good news.
2
White Hill, Michigan—March 1999
…the little dirty city
In the light so sheer and sunny
Shone as dazzling bright and pretty
As the money that you find
In a dream of finding money—
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), “The Bean-Stalk”
Sparrows scattered as Frank’s truck turned into the dirt driveway and rolled toward the small, gray barn. Nicholas watched from the kitchen window as birds rushed to the bare apple tree like one person split into a dozen feathered bodies, but his eyes quickly went back to his father wrestling with the wide, crooked barn doors that had never slid easily. His father cursed, but succeeded in shoving the doors open, and Nicholas sighed. A large object stood covered with a tarp and strapped down in the pickup bed.
He backed away from the window, tipping the cereal box toward the blue ceramic bowl, and frosted corn flakes jingled into it. Hurrying to pour the milk, he sloshed it onto the counter, grabbed a spoon, and rushed back upstairs to his bedroom. As cartoon figures bounced around on the TV screen, he shoved his long legs under the sheets and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.
“Nicholas!” Down below, Frank entered the house and slammed the kitchen door.
“Crap.” Nicholas set down the half-eaten cereal to find jeans in the pile of clothes on the floor. T-shirt, sweatshirt. He heard heavy steps on the stairs that led to steps getting closer and closer in the long hall, and then his door burst open.
“Ah! You are up! Don’t try to tell me you didn’t hear me.”
Electrified by his own quick-fire emotions, Frank was capable of instantly filling a room with his mood. He was six foot four, his eyes sharp blue and magnified by thick glasses, his face surrounded by wavy black, graying hair that fell to his shoulders. Nicholas’s frame and coloring resembled his father’s more than his mother’s, but he was skinny and awkwardly tall for a fifteen-year-old, while his father had expanded over the
years into an imposing presence.
“How come you always tell me to knock first?” Nicholas mumbled, but his father paid no attention.
“I should have gotten you up and taken you with me this morning. You’re getting lazy, Nick.”
This was one of his father’s standard comments, but it still provoked Nicholas. “It’s Saturday, Dad. Jeez.”
“Just get going. Hurry up, I want to unload this armoire into the barn before your mother gets home.”
Outside, the March air was wintry and crisp, but within minutes Nicholas was hot from the effort of easing the immense piece of furniture to the edge of the truck bed. When they began to lower it, with Frank’s back braced against it from the ground while Nicholas attempted to steady it from the truck with canvas straps, the boy lost his grip for a second, the strap slid a few inches, and the thing leaned too heavily against his father, who shouted at him to pull back. With more shouts, teetering, and a couple of loud thuds, they got the armoire safely to the ground, Frank huffing and Nicholas shaking.
“Okay, we’ve got to get it inside the barn. You’re just going to have to put more muscle into it, Nick. Concentrate now.”
“We could try to find something to put under it to pull it along. One of those drop cloths.” He pointed.
“No, no, come on now. We’ll just muscle it over there. It’s only twenty feet.”
Fifteen minutes later, unveiled in the fluorescence of the barn’s shop lights, the armoire was impressive, although the finish was mottled with water damage. Rich cherry wood, a carved headpiece, and copper antique drawer pulls with a heavy patina made it look expensive to Nicholas’s amateur eye.
The barn was cluttered with other pieces from about the same era—trunks, mirrors, chairs, dressers, and even an old stove and an icebox, along with less-significant items, like shoes, suitcases, and wooden boxes of various sizes. Anything from the early twentieth century that had been in Michigan’s lower peninsula a long time, and which possessed a space within in it where a piece of paper could be hidden. Anything, in short, that Frank Carroll imagined could have belonged to the vanished poet Mary Stone Walker and become a vessel for secret, unpublished writings.
The Lake and the Lost Girl Page 2