The Lake and the Lost Girl

by Jacquelyn Vincenta

  Nicholas was old enough to know that promises should not be made only to comfort someone in pain. But he also knew that his mother was losing hope and that he had to try to help her get it back.

  22

  White Hill, Michigan—August 1937

  Strong flux of life,

  Like a bitter wine

  Out of the bloody stills of the world.

  ~ Lola Ridge (1873–1941), “The Ghetto”

  The creature crawled in through the window. It was the size of her palm, shaped like a star and pulsating like a heart. A long thread unwound from it into the thick night beyond the windowsill, and Mary could make out its glowing trail all the way back into the trees and then across the black lake. She took the sharp point of her fruit knife and hesitantly reached for the thread. It looped around the tip, and she felt her heart speed up with hope. But then the thread sagged and clung with an infant’s weakness. Mary’s throat tightened with grief.

  Before the creature came in the window, she had been writing. The words flowed easily, even though the subject was difficult: the death of her mother in a Detroit hospital. Mary had been only three, but she felt she could almost remember the details since she had begun using the medicine. The doctor said morphine could cause hallucinations, but it seemed to Mary that her visions were real memories unfolding from kernels of buried experiences. They enriched her understanding of her life, and she was grateful.

  The star creature throbbed like the chest of a frog as it floated off to hang in the night. And then it seemed to speak. Mary’s eyelids felt heavy. She looked down at the page.

  Nothing there but yearning, where a mother once had gently

  held her—hands forever useless now, and cold…

  The star spoke. It spoke in a threatening tone, cursing as it bent around the branch of a tree. It growled.

  No. Oh no. It was not the star speaking—the sound was from someone on the stairs. It was that intruder again in the hall. Mary took the sheet of paper she’d been writing on and quickly rolled it, then pressed it flat. Her breathing was fast; her heart was afraid. She heard herself whimpering slightly and listened with pity, as if the sound came from someone else. The rolled poem fit into that hole at the window frame. She had used the spot before to hide dangerous poems with dangerous thoughts that she could not recall now. She lifted the curtain, although it tried to pull away from her, and crammed the rolled poem inside the gap between the window’s frame and the wall.

  The intruder knocked. Then after a few seconds he banged on the door. She didn’t answer. The star creature was nowhere to be seen, and Mary felt bereft. She coughed out a sad cry and put her head down on her arms on the desk. The banging continued, louder and more violent, then came the screeching grind of the chair she’d used to bar the door as he shoved through.

  “What the hell is going on in here? You’re barricading a door against me in my own house? Against your own husband? You’re out of your soft little mind!”

  The intruder stood at the violated threshold, then charged across the room and shoved her aside to grab at the paper on her desk. She stood up to protect herself from him.

  “Just what sort of trash are you writing, anyway?” He flipped the sheets around, saw they were empty, and wadded them up to hurl them to the floor. He grabbed her by the jaw to turn her face toward his, wrenching her neck.

  “Stop it!” Her voice was garbled and pinched. His fingers pressed into her cheeks, then the nails dug in.

  She began to lose her balance and reached back to the desk, palm landing on the paring knife she’d been using to play with the star. The intruder’s expression was contorted with cruelty and disgust until her hand snatched up the knife and sliced his face into tender ridges of skin that moved delicately like a mouth, letting out a long tongue of blood that spread thick and wide. The intruder screamed.

  It was confusing how quickly and easily it happened, and before she knew it, the intruder had knocked her down to the ground, his voice wild, his eyes glaring above her. But then, in one shocking instant, he was just Bernard.

  Bernard’s left cheek was cut in a jagged six-inch diagonal, and he was reaching for the shawl draped on the back of her chair to press against the blood. She screamed, stood up, and backed slowly into a wall, unable to pull her eyes away from her husband’s torn face as he drifted toward her, then staggered slightly and sat down in the chair.

  “Oh God! Bernard! What happened?” Weeping seized her, and she knelt on the floor, crying as she inched forward with pleading eyes until her head was near his knees. He knocked her away with the back of his hand, but she went toward him again and lay her head on his lap, choking on sobs and clinging to his legs as he tried to kick her off once, twice, three times, until she could feel that the bruises on her thighs would be deep, but still she clung. He let loose a single, strangled cry of pain and hit her back with both fists. She lost her breath.

  “Why, Mary?”

  His voice was so weak that she could barely understand it.

  “What secrets are you trying to hide from me?”

  Aware that his rage had been defused by pain, Mary released her grip on him and stood up. Her legs and back throbbed from his blows. When she looked down at his face, it was so bloody that she gasped. She stifled a perverse urge to laugh and pulled gently at the shawl he held against it to view the tear.

  “I’ll get another cloth for you, Bernard,” she said quietly. “Don’t move.”

  But downstairs as she soaked a clean strip of cheesecloth with water in the kitchen, she heard his steps on the floorboards above her head and knew that he was coming after her with renewed anger. Dropping the cloth to the floor, she yanked the back door open and ran into the cold night. So hard to move fast enough, to breathe deeply enough. Oh God. Help me, God. There was only one place she could go, and she ran for that shed to curl among Robert’s fishing nets with the hope that when the fisherman found her there before the sun rose, he might touch her kindly as he had before, because her fear was so enormous she felt it could completely swallow her mind.

  23

  White Hill, Michigan—April 1999

  And she will slip

  Down silently and leave our hill alone,

  And hide where dark leaves drip…

  We caught the sun forever there—the shadows are our own.

  ~ Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), “Imber Nocturnus”

  After refusing to disclose further information about Mary Walker or the Evans family, Lincoln Babcock told Lydia on the phone that there were more records on microfiche than there had been when she and Frank were doing research a dozen years before, and he was right. While Lydia had not even been aware that the weekly paper had existed, the Carson County Gazette had been in print for eleven years between 1931 and 1942 and was now available on microfiche.

  “I remember these names,” she murmured as she sat in a tiny back room of the White Hill Library with the microfiche machine, taking notes. “Helen Hall. Josephine Baxter. Ruth Donovan.”

  In September 1936, someone had written a short announcement about Bernard and Mary’s wedding, listing the groomsmen and bridesmaids beneath a photograph of the Evans-Walker wedding party. Lydia peered into the fuzzy photographic images. The overpowering observation was that both Bernard and Mary were strikingly handsome and confident-looking individuals who appeared to be full of joy on their wedding day.

  The other articles she found offered limited, familiar information about Mary’s era, so she focused on a search through Michigan telephone books for Halls, Baxters, and Donovans, knowing how unlikely it was that she might stumble upon one of the ancient women or a family member. But just as she was about to put the task aside, she found R. E. Donovan-Lee on Eighth Street in Holland, Michigan. That looked promising. Lydia added the name and number to her list, and when she returned home, she dialed it first. An airy, thin female voi
ce answered the phone. Lydia introduced herself as a writer and researcher, and the woman said her full name was Ruth Ellen Donovan-Lee.

  “Are you the Ruth Donovan who was a friend of Mary Stone Walker’s?”

  There was a long pause on the Holland end of the phone line.

  “What a strange coincidence that you’re asking me that on this particular day,” she answered. “I had not thought about Mary Walker for years, but last night she came to me in a dream. Decades ago, I grew weary of thinking about her, always wondering.” Lydia heard sounds that might have been sighing or tears. “Goodness…Lydia? This is astonishing. I think you must come visit as soon as you can. We were meant to talk.”

  Lydia arrived in Holland in time to share a late lunch with Ruth Donovan in her apartment. She was a tall, elegant woman in her eighties whose white hair was pulled back into a bun held fast by a jeweled hairpin. At a round maple table for two, she had set lace place mats, cloth napkins, and a small vase of artificial rosebuds. They shared a chicken casserole as they talked. Ruth’s blue eyes were sharp with intelligence and curiosity.

  “So…” she said, gazing at Lydia for several seconds as she unfolded her napkin. “What brought you to the study of Mary Walker? We always thought she was a genius, but I have to admit, I never imagined she had created a large enough body of work to be remembered.” Her head shook slightly, and she paused often in her speech. “What are you hoping for from me?”

  Lydia explained the theories that she and Frank had shared over the years and described the quest for documents hidden in antiques that they believed Mary had owned or had access to. Ruth looked thoughtful, then pursed her lips.

  “I saw her do that once, and I wondered what was wrong with her. I saw her tack a poem with dots of sticky pine resin between the lid of a trunk and the lining, you know. I’ll never forget it. I have no idea what she thought she was doing, but she was quite startled by my interruption. I remember that look she gave me…fearful, then angry.” Ruth gazed out the window. “She was difficult at times. A bit mad, I used to think.”

  “Do you think she could have made the choice to leave White Hill when she was in a state of…madness, as you say?” Lydia’s gaze took in the lines of Ruth Donovan’s face and tried to envision what Ruth might have looked like at twenty-five.

  “Well, I did wonder about that,” Ruth said. She lifted a bite of casserole onto her fork and held it above her plate for a moment as she talked. “Back when I heard that she had disappeared, it did cross my mind. Bernard contacted me, you know, and asked if I knew anything. His desperation was sad…but scary at the same time. They must have had some terrible rows. In her letters, she never said much about their life together. She was one for long walks when she was troubled, though, and she spoke of many walks.”

  “Was she in love with him in the beginning?” Lydia was enthralled. To be talking to Mary’s close friend—able to ask direct questions about the poet who had become almost like myth to Lydia over the course of her life—was not something Lydia had ever thought possible. And Mary would look this way if she were alive. She would be an intelligent, beautiful woman of more than eight decades.

  “Oh yes, she was wildly in love. If you can call it that. Powerful attraction. He was so physically handsome and so strong.” Ruth clenched her fist and held it up to represent Bernard’s persona, and then her smile seemed to focus inward. The memories she sought seemed extremely far away. “But I don’t really know how long it lasted. She did write to me at least once about hoping for another sort of life somewhere else. But that longing might have emerged no matter whom she married. She was a restless sort. It was early on, as I recall, that she began to dream of running away from everything she knew in White Hill to become that great poet who had no other concerns but writing.”

  To hear testimony to Mary’s dream of leaving White Hill to build a life of letters somewhere else sent a current of excitement through Lydia’s body. What she and Frank had long imagined had been something Mary had actually discussed with her close friend.

  “Then it’s possible that’s just what she did, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. There were practical problems I am not sure she would have been able—or even willing—to figure out. She had no money of her own, for instance. She didn’t have relatives with any means. I know that I myself was still living on a shoestring, rooming with three other girls in Detroit, until I got married. Conditions were hard back then. And Mary and her father seemed very much alone in the world. He died just a year or two after she married Bernard Evans.”

  Lydia watched Ruth Donovan’s face with the sensation that she could almost see the past scenes playing behind her eyes.

  “Poor girl. She had some bad luck. Some sad luck. Mary’s gifts—her poetic gifts, I mean, and her beauty—never seemed worth those burdens. And she was strong, but not consistently. Did she make a go of it somewhere else? Well, I suppose she might have. More likely to happen in the company of a man, though, and it’s true that she was never without admirers. Bernard knew that, and from the very start, anyone could see how it drove him crazy. My first thought when I heard she’d vanished was that he’d locked her away or killed her himself. Lord have mercy. That family had loads of money. I suppose he could have done whatever he needed to do to pull it off.”

  Her eyes were lit by this question that she had wondered about for sixty years, the thin fingers of her right hand spread along her jaw.

  “Did something change your mind about that?” Lydia asked. It had never made sense to her that Bernard was not considered a more serious suspect.

  “Actually, I don’t think the man was capable of lying. Everything he thought and felt was obvious all the time.” She tilted her head with a little shrug. “A good quality in some ways. Or in some people. In Bernard, it often came off as bullying. He just knew everything because it was all so obvious to him in his black-and-white world. But at any rate, his distress about Mary—his rage that she had run away from him, with or without another man—was brutally sincere. He hid it from no one.”

  “You say rage.” Lydia’s mind filled with questions. “What about fear or sadness? He never thought she might have drowned? That was the leading theory by the time I heard about her life.”

  “Well, at first, no one knew what to think. Because just two people had seen her out in the night, and only one had seen a woman actually standing on the pier. The man who saw her could not possibly have been sure it was Mary from the distance. So there were all kinds of speculations. My dear, would you like something else to drink? Maybe some tea?”

  Two people saw Mary on the pier?

  Ruth pushed her chair back and began to stand before Lydia could answer. She walked toward the kitchen, and Lydia followed her.

  “We had a tea for Mary,” Ruth reminisced as she filled a silver kettle with water and dangled two tea bags into a ceramic teapot. Silently, she turned on the flame and watched the kettle. “Yes, we had an afternoon tea for her before she got married. Goodness, it’s strange to think about these things…such old memories that they seem like imaginings. Like children’s stories! Many beautiful, very young girls who brought sweet gifts. Small gifts. I think her favorite was a scarf Helen knit for her.”

  When steam began to rise from the kettle, Ruth poured water into the teapot and pulled two cups from the cupboard. They carried the tea and cups to the table and sat down.

  “Back to that night in White Hill. When Mary was seen on the pier,” Lydia said, watching Ruth’s face for recognition of the subject. “You said two people saw her? I thought there was only one witness.”

  “There was the man,” Ruth said. “That older man with the house on the hill in view of the pier. He saw a woman pass his house, carrying something, he claimed. Then ten minutes later, he saw a figure walking along the pier, and he assumed it was the same person. A day or two later an open, empty suitcase was found rolli
ng around in the water, which made people sure she had been murdered, robbed, and her body disposed of. Bernard said the suitcase wasn’t hers, and I hoped he was right.”

  “I remember reading those details. But I don’t recall anything about another witness. Who was it? Do you know?”

  Ruth poured tea into their cups.

  “I think that man was the only one who would actually testify.”

  “But who was that other person?” Lydia felt the woman’s concentration begin to fade.

  “Yes, there was another, but it didn’t amount to anything. It was just the talk around town. A fisherman’s wife said she saw Mary walking that night. Toward the pier, she said. But then she retracted her statement. She said she just couldn’t be sure.”

  “A fisherman’s wife? Do you remember her name?”

  “Heavens no. Her name. Hmm.” Ruth put her finger to her lips and gazed out the window a long time and then sat up straighter. “Oh, yes. That’s why I got this shoe box out.” She leaned toward a box on the floor near her chair and opened it, drawing out a stack of old composition books.

  “My journals,” she said with a smile toward the books. She looked at the dates on the front covers, found the one she wanted, then leafed through it. “Well, silly fool, all I wrote was ‘E. K. said she saw Mary rushing across the sand and toward the pier. A fisherman’s wife. But she has retracted her statement because it was “too dark a night to be sure of anything,” she said. I ask you, when is the night not dark?’” Ruth lay the book down on the table. “Such an astute character I was, wasn’t I? I’m sorry, I don’t know her name. I wasn’t much of a journalist. But as I recall, she was several years older than me, so she has likely passed away.”

  Lydia’s mind spun quickly and hooked onto a coincidence that seemed impossible. She knew of only one fisherman from that era in White Hill, and his last name began with a K—Kenilworth. Was it possible?