The Lake and the Lost Girl

by Jacquelyn Vincenta

  “Do you think her last name might have been Kenilworth?” Lydia asked.

  “I just can’t say. I never knew the woman. And I didn’t know any fishermen at all. We just heard stories and names thrown about for a few weeks. Bernard, his family, everyone who had a thought—they were putting their two cents in all over town, and that’s what the newspapers printed. Just gossip that didn’t lead anywhere. Even a couple of years later when I returned to White Hill for a college event, Bernard’s brothers were still making up dramatic explanations, for one thing claiming that Mary had run away to Detroit to be a prostitute. Wicked men! And all the rest of us old college friends with our sorrow. They were too hateful.”

  “I don’t understand why they didn’t fear for her life, Ruth. I have never been able to get over that. It seems unnatural.” Lydia sipped her tea, a familiar frustration rising. Had no one in White Hill loved Mary Walker?

  “It was because of specific Evans family belongings that were missing, I think,” Ruth said. “Valuable things like jewelry that had belonged to Bernard’s mother. Things that Bernard said proved to him that she planned on making a new life with someone else. Though I never thought of Mary as a thief. She was too impractical!”

  Together they laughed.

  “But even if there were things missing, she could have been kidnapped, murdered, drowned,” Lydia said. “She could have intended to leave but met with some disaster before she could. She never contacted anyone, did she? Ever in all of these decades?”

  Again Ruth gazed at her, and Lydia felt a shot of wild hope that the woman was about to reveal the secret that she and Frank had believed in—that Mary had made contact after that October night. Ruth lowered her eyes to her lap.

  “I have forgotten many things,” she said. “Eighty-six years is… It’s such a long time to live. But I will never forget the shock and intoxication I felt one day when a telegram arrived a few months after my friend Mary disappeared. It said simply, ‘Spring will swoop in and bathe our hearts in light, dear Ruth! Prepare your best dress, love, and we will go dance in the green.’” She gave a little laugh.

  “You see? I still remember those beautiful words. It was something Mary said many times during every one of those long, draining winters that we shared. And we actually did prepare our dresses. Meticulously!” She chuckled brightly and shook her head. “So, as one naturally might, I passionately wanted that telegram to be from her! No one else admitted to sending it! Not until a full year had passed and the Mary we were praying for still had not made her existence known.

  “But it was one of us. It was Josephine Baxter. As far as I could tell, she imagined she was keeping Mary alive with that little trick of the telegram, as if pretending could conjure her up. For some reason, the loss, Mary’s absence, and the not knowing had troubled Josephine more deeply than anyone else I know. I didn’t dare tell her how upsetting her telegram hoax had been for me…how much it hurt my heart, and then when I saw through the trick, how it angered me. Poor Josephine. I think some people are too sensitive for this world, don’t you? She didn’t live long either.”

  Lydia believed that most human beings are too sensitive to bear the weight of human existence, and so they build their private shelters of delusions, addictions, and dreams. She watched Ruth Donovan’s brow grow troubled and her composed expression shift to confusion that seemed to flow in from the past.

  “Oh, it was so awful,” she said at last. “So awful. So many times when Mary first disappeared, I saw her dead body floating in the water. In nightmares. In those dreams, it was obvious that she was dead, on the lake right there near the college. Her dress was purple with cold water, her face barely recognizable and bloated. Oh, so awful. I would wake sweating. Weeping.

  “But in the dream I had last night, Mary was floating along in the water as if on her way somewhere. So strange! And she was not in White Hill; no, it was someplace else. I could see trade docks and ships.” Her hands gestured the imagined shapes, then she directed the question in her eyes toward Lydia. “And this time her eyes were open. In the old dreams, she was clearly deceased, her eyes closed, her limbs lifeless. So maybe this one…maybe you could interpret that as a sign she lived on past her disappearance.”

  After a few moments, Ruth Donovan gave a long sigh and leaned her fragile body back in her chair. “But I don’t believe that’s what happened.” Her mind seemed perfectly, painfully clear as her eyes gazed out the window into the late-spring afternoon. “I have had a long career as a teacher. I have loved and buried two husbands, raised three children, and watch them bear children. I have traveled to many of the destinations that the very young Mary and I once dreamed about. San Francisco. Paris. The islands. And all that time, all those decades, she could have been living, too.” Ruth Donovan looked directly into Lydia’s eyes, as if this fact were so elusive that they needed to agree on it. Then she shook her head. “It boggles my mind. But you see, I don’t think it happened, although I often tried to imagine it. And sometimes pretended it was so. No, I’m afraid she has been gone a long, long time.”

  Her voice began to shake a little. She sipped her tea, then stared into the cup. After a moment she took a long breath.

  “So if you and your husband are trying to keep her poetry and her name alive, that’s a nice thing. She would have been glad, that girl I knew sixty years ago. But I don’t think there is ever going to be anything more to say. Her life was cut short, and that was a tragic turn. Ours go on. I have had to accept that I will never know what happened to my friend. It is just another shadow in this world, which, while beautiful, has often made me violently sad.”

  24

  White Hill, Michigan—April 1999

  It was as though I curved my hand

  And dipped sea-water eagerly,

  Only to find it lost the blue

  Dark splendor of the sea.

  ~ Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), “The Net”

  “This one’s not so bad,” Dolly said as she and Lydia started examining the chair seats the next afternoon. She lifted another. “This one’s cut near the center.”

  Lydia eyed the torn fabric and padding with continued disbelief.

  “Do you really think any of these are salvageable, Dolly?” She stared at the debris into which half of her marital savings, and a good portion of her hope for the future, had vanished. “The woman who wanted to buy this set would be horrified. I’ll be lucky if I can sell four of them with the table for a hundred bucks. What a mess.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll have some luck,” Dolly said. “Don’t give up yet. I’ll shoot for Friday and give it my all.”

  Moments later, Lydia heard Jack and Nicholas enter the main room of the barn, and when she left Dolly’s sewing room, she pretended not to notice Nicholas’s surprise at the sight of her. She picked up the briefcase she had brought.

  “Hey there,” she said. “I don’t want to interrupt whatever you guys are doing. But I wonder, Jack, if you might have a few minutes to speak with me?”

  “Sure, we can talk in my office.”

  In the tiny room, he settled into his desk chair and gestured to a folding chair across from it, looking at her with curiosity. “What can I help you with?”

  She cleared her throat and lifted the briefcase onto her lap. “I have been thinking about the fact that you tried to speak with Frank about Mary Stone Walker,” she began, her hands growing moist on the leather as she directly broached the subject she’d hoped he might bring up on his own. “I know that we need to be gathering information from living people. This is a conviction, for me. I’ve been trying to persuade Frank to join me in it, but until he does, I am taking it on myself. Not long ago, I drove to Misquers to meet Ethel Van Zant’s granddaughter.”

  “Who is Ethel Van Zant?” Jack asked.

  “She lived here in White Hill and worked as an herbalist, almost a doctor to some, it sounds like,”
Lydia said, opening her briefcase and passing the scrapbook to Jack. “This was hers. Her granddaughter wasn’t willing to talk to me about it. Just wanted to get rid of it.”

  Jack spent a few seconds looking at the first page, then the second and third. “Oh wow,” he murmured. “Nice. Stuff right out of the twenties, thirties, forties. Huh. Some from the fifties.” He flipped back toward the beginning of the book and paused at a photograph of the Evans Mill.

  Lydia had spent a long time examining that simple photograph of the warehouse with a large sign over the entrance and two open-bed trucks out front, and she’d tried to read between the lines of the short paragraph, but there just wasn’t much information there. Three pages later, Jack paused again, peered closely into the page for a good minute, and then closed the scrapbook.

  “Sorry, got distracted,” he said. “Mind if I hang on to this for a couple of days?”

  “Of course not. I’m not sure what to do with the information at this point. I’ve looked through it, taken some notes. It’s good background information, but I can’t glean any clues specific to Mary Walker’s life. You’ll notice the articles are all just loose, so be careful. Frank took the scrapbook out of my study the other day and went through it looking for hidden documents.” She gave a small shrug. “As he does.”

  “The glue is old, yeah,” Jack fingered an article, looking at the back of it. “Won’t hold up to much.”

  “So you’ll let me know if you find something I might have missed that sheds light on Mary?”

  He gave her a nod. “I will do that.”

  It was clear that he was waiting to hear if the scrapbook was the reason she had asked to speak with him, or if there were more questions.

  “Well, I also visited with one of Mary’s friends, Ruth Donovan.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Interesting.”

  “Do you know the name?”

  “No, I can’t say I do. I don’t know much about the people of that generation, except my grandparents. Good conversation?”

  “Oh yes. But I guess I was hoping for more. Something to go on. You know, to convince Frank that there are valuable facts to be had out there. Beyond antiques.” She tried to read Jack’s face as he nodded. “She did mention something curious that I wondered if you might know about.”

  He shrugged. “Try me.”

  “She said that when Mary Walker went missing, there were two witnesses—at first—who saw a woman walking toward the pier that night. Over the years I’ve only heard of one. Ruth said the other retracted her statement because she just couldn’t be sure.”

  “Okay.” He gazed at her steadily, and she found an apology rising into her mind. She felt like a suspicious cop trying to corner him.

  “Ruth Donovan’s journal mentioned that the other witness was a fisherman’s wife. She couldn’t remember the woman’s name, or the fisherman’s, but she’d written down the initials E. K.”

  Jack’s gaze shifted away from her to the wall behind her, and his mind seemed to be working.

  “You’re wondering if I know anything about what the fisherman’s wife saw, and who she was,” he said at last, focusing his eyes back onto hers. “I really don’t. But I applaud your effort to find real people’s stories about Walker. I mean the woman is still causing trouble, so I sometimes wonder if her memory should just be dropped. You being one of the major victims of all this…obsession.”

  “I see what you mean. But for me at this point, finding out facts could potentially free me from the obsession, as you call it. Jack, I don’t mean to put you on the spot—”

  “It’s okay,” he said, leaning forward. “It’s fine. E. K. My grandmother was Elizabeth Kenilworth. So I guess it could have been her. Although there were many, many fishermen in this area. But I was never privy to anything she did or thought about that night, so this only sets up a question in my mind that I will never be able to answer. You see? What good does that do? For me or you?”

  “I do see.” She looked down at her hands.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Lydia. I see the bind you’re in. But as far as a story like this goes, I don’t really want to know if my grandmother was involved,” he said. “Their lives were their lives, and these events were over and done with so long ago, with so little left behind in the way of words or letters or anything, that I’m hopeless to understand stuff like this that comes up. To me, it is not a fascinating mystery or trivia for a doctoral thesis. It’s just unsettling questions about people I loved and won’t ever be able to speak to directly about anything I’m left wondering about.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack.” Lydia tried to gauge how much damage she had done. He seemed to grow angry as he spoke. “I shouldn’t have bothered you with it. I’m just looking for a way to close this chapter of our lives.”

  “I know. And I think that’s a good thing. But realistically…for you and Frank, what would that look like?” He laughed briefly. “I don’t think your husband is going to stop doing what he does until he constructs some sort of ending that fits the story he likes. That’s a strong impression I got every time I encountered him. And you’re very kindly assisting him by perpetuating the interest. Believing it still matters.” Jack’s expression softened. “You’re in a tough spot, kiddo,” he said. “And undoubtedly Mary Walker’s true reality is not nearly as much fun as these stories of her surviving and writing in secret, so I’m guessing he’s not going to want anything you might dig up.”

  She straightened. “Frank may be interested in a romantic story about Mary Walker, Jack, but I want out of this game of antiques and fantasies. It’s expensive, and it’s robbing me of the things I care about, like my husband, and a peaceful home. I want the truth.”

  “That’s good,” he said quietly, reaching for a pencil that was on his desk and turning it end over end on his thigh. “Because the truth usually comes out in the end.”

  There was no invitation in his voice, no hint of facts he would like to disclose, and Lydia was wary of jeopardizing a friendship based thinly on shared school days and his special relationship with her son.

  “I have not been clear on where you stand on issues of your family history, Jack. I truly don’t mean to pry. But some time ago you wanted to tell Frank something about Mary Walker,” she said cautiously.

  “Yes, that’s true, I did offer some information to Frank. I heard he’d been looking for unpublished works by Walker for many years and was also interested in her life story. But a man can’t hear what he doesn’t want to hear. Your husband isn’t the only one who has taught me that.”

  “But you can help me now if you would be willing to tell me whatever you would have told him. If I can find out something that will lead Frank away from his fantasy, I could get free. We all could… That’s what I am going to try to do.” She was holding her hands out beseechingly and noticed that they shook slightly.

  “I would bet my workshop that nothing will lead your husband away from his grand quest, Lydia. I’m sorry, but that’s how I see it. I’m just a naysayer to him, and anything I told you would only put you in the middle. Between him and his dream.”

  She considered this as she fought back tears of tension and fatigue. After a minute, when Jack shifted to lean back in his chair, she returned her gaze to his face. He looked as if he was trying to guess her thoughts.

  “I wish you would move on. With or without Mary Stone Walker. Nothing is worth all of this fuss. And you… Well, I personally feel that you deserve more.” He looked over his shoulder toward the hall. “Somebody there?”

  Nicholas pushed the door open.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” he said, smiling at Jack. “I figured it out.”

  “Great, Nick! Okay.” Jack smiled, then aimed a friendly pointing gesture toward Lydia. “Back to work. Next time we talk boats?”

  “Sure.” Then she was alone and spoke quietly to his empty chair. �
�Or whatever comes up.”

  After leaving the barn with Nicholas ten minutes later, Lydia could see Jack’s silhouette in the doorway as he watched them get into the Jeep. She fumbled with her keys.

  “Jack’s an interesting guy,” she said, trying to draw a veil over her mood. “He was telling me the other day that we should fix up a boat and learn to sail. Seems like a fun idea, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but do you think Dad would agree to it? I can’t picture him on any kind of boat.”

  Lydia stared at him for a moment without answering, and he looked back at her uncomprehendingly. They were halfway home before she spoke.

  “Nicholas,” she said, as they passed the Phillips 66 gas station at the edge of town. “It’s important that we stop thinking first about what Dad wants or is going to feel every time you or I want to do anything.” She glanced at him. “It’s an old habit that we have fallen into because we’re nice people who want everyone to be happy. But it’s not right to do that anymore. Not for me. Not for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we imagine that Dad is the only person in the family whose opinion matters, then we devalue our own lives. You see? And that’s not right.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you? Think about it. All the little parts of your life. The little parts of mine. They matter just as much as his do. Not almost as much. Each piece of your life matters every single bit as much as Dad’s.”

  Nicholas stared out the side window into the passing darkness. She could feel his relaxed mood turn to tension, and she regretted saying anything. They rode in silence the rest of the way home, and when they pulled slowly into the driveway, the first things Lydia’s headlights lit up were the rear bumpers of four visiting cars.

  “Jeez, what’s the deal?” Nicholas said, his eyes wide.

  “I don’t know.” Lydia barely spoke the words. They pulled up onto the grass beside the driveway, got out, and walked rapidly toward the barn. Lydia placed both of her hands on the barn door and shoved, while Nicholas reached above her hands and pushed, too. Inside, Frank sat like a king in his chair with six other people gathered around him. All faces turned toward Nicholas and Lydia.