“Here’s one example. Look.” He opened it to the page with an article about Koslowski Boat Works. “This is from December 1939.” He read: “‘Damage during inhospitable October winds left this fishing boat in need of Peter Koslowski’s expertise.’ Well, ‘this fishing boat’ is the Fata Morgana.” Jack nodded toward the photograph of his grandfather’s boat. “You can see.” He pointed at the old newspaper clipping. “I can tell. Look. You can see the word Morgana.”
“What is the connection to Mary Walker?” Lydia had pushed herself up and leaned against Jack’s arm to see what he was pointing to.
He shook his head. He’d stepped right into the story he didn’t want to tell. “I don’t know, Lydia.”
“You brought it up! You said this photograph would have told me something. Well, what? Was your grandfather on Lake Michigan with Mary?”
He looked at her. “So you see my point. That question would be a good place to begin. Frank could have learned much, much more over the years by looking for things like this. By digging up and identifying the pieces of her life’s history in this little world of White Hill.”
“And now? Can’t you share the true history now? What happened to her? Please, Jack, help me.”
The lateness of the hour and the emotional pain of the night had drained Lydia’s face of color, and her features seemed almost blurred.
“Frank won’t want it,” Jack said flatly. “He won’t even be able to hear it. I’m sorry, but it’s pretty obvious to me that that’s the way it is. And I’d prefer to keep as much of my grandfather’s information as I can to myself.”
“You can’t do this to me!” Lydia’s voice bent with despair. “I should at least tell Frank that you know for certain she died in 1939. Don’t you think so? There must be some kind of proof that you can share with us.”
“Yes, I have her death certificate.”
“Would you agree to show it to him? Maybe he’ll understand that this will save him from humiliation later.”
“Yes, I’ll do that.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath and pressed her palms on her thighs. “Thank you. I’ll call him. He needs to see once and for all that the basic premise of his search is false. And that there may be more detailed information available through you.” Jack thought he saw hope in her face.
“You do that. I’m tired of the whole thing, and I’m sad to see what it’s done to you and your son.”
He finished his whiskey but felt no relaxation from it.
“If anything can make him give up this charade, surely proof of her death will,” Lydia murmured. “Surely it will.”
Jack nodded, but the hope he had held for that outcome had dwindled as he’d spoken and thought about the hidden past. It was too ugly a tale. No one wanted any of it. Hell, even Nicholas would be disappointed. Jack ground his teeth and wished Frank Carroll would vanish, too.
“What time is it?” Lydia’s voice wavered.
He looked at his watch. “Going on midnight.”
“I’ll call right now.” She stood up slowly. “Will you talk to him? After I do?”
“Sure.” He nodded, staring at the floor, and thought of all the things he’d like to say to the son of a bitch. But he would stick to the facts he had documentation for, no more, no less, and no commentary. Let the chips fall where they would. “The phone’s on the wall by that worktable.”
Lydia moved lightly across the room, and Jack watched her. He stood and walked to the door at the far end of the barn, pushed it open two feet, and stared through the still-bare tree boughs and pines at the darkly flickering lake.
31
Carson Woods, Michigan—August 1939
We shall remember that a new moon sank
Into a quiet lake, or that a bough
Of leaves sighed over us; not lips that drank
For the last time, or eyes that slowly filled,
Or stricken voices muted on a word,
Laughter that groped and faltered and was stilled.
~ Mildred Amelia Barker, “Not Again”
Mary took the colored fishing floats out of a wooden crate and turned it upside down to sit on it, avoiding Robert’s eyes as she spoke. At first he sharpened his knives as he listened, but then he stopped and leaned against the worktable, watching her profile.
“I’m ashamed to admit it, but I don’t fully understand the science of my own body.” She spoke furtively. “It’s terrible commentary on my education and on our society, but I suppose it’s also because I had no one. I didn’t have women in my life when I was growing up. The point is, there is no way to explain all of these things I am experiencing except by admitting to myself that—” She broke off, and when she turned her eyes toward him, they were filled with tears. “Oh God, Robert, what am I going to do?”
He wanted to make sure he understood. His heart beat faster even as her words made it feel heavy.
“Please explain, Mary.”
“Oh. You know.” Elbows propped on her knees and hands clasped together in front of her mouth, she tried to speak, then covered her face with her hands. “I’m pregnant. I’m just sure that I am.”
Robert stood and looked out the window, peering through the woods toward his house, then stepped outside briefly and scanned the road and dunes. It seemed there was no danger of anyone interrupting them. He stooped beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. Instantly she gripped him as if for her life, fingers digging into his back. He felt her shake against him, felt the fabric of his shirt quickly dampen with her tears, and he closed his eyes. She smelled of cloth, soap, and pine.
“You know how I feel about my life!” she cried, pulling back to look at him. “I can’t do it. Robert, I just can’t do it.”
He watched and said nothing. A child inside her. A child of Mary’s that would come into this world. Of course she was afraid. But his first thought was that he could help her. Perhaps he could even help her raise the child somehow. Yes. He would, he must. Mary’s child… The thought of it suffering Bernard’s cruelty the way that Mary did was dreadful, unthinkable. And he did not believe that a child would change the man unless he wanted to alter his behavior. Robert did not know any men of Bernard’s violent temperament who had ever learned self-control. He took her shoulders and looked straight into her eyes.
“Mary, listen. You must try to think differently. I will help you do what you have to in order to take care of yourself and your child. I’ll help you find a way.”
“What? Help me how? You can’t help me!”
Robert thought she almost laughed, and her expression was a stubborn mix of hopelessness and anger.
“That isn’t true. Together we can figure something out.” His hands tightened on her shoulders, and his voice toughened. “You can’t give up so easily. These are lives you’re talking about. A child’s. Your own.”
“Give up? Give up?” She threw his hands off. “I have lived with this man for five years, and tried and tried to believe it would get better. He gives me just enough kindness that I, like a fool, keep hoping. But he’s a brute, Robert, and he’ll never think of me as anything more than his chattel! God, I would think you of all people would see that.”
He stiffened. She was pushing him to step into the drama of her tragedy, but he would not be a pawn to her tears or her temper. He would only help in a way that might lead her to a saner life and better health. He stood up and held his hand down for her to take.
“What?” She looked up at him pitifully. “Do you want me to leave?”
“Yes.” He tried to keep emotion out of his voice. “I will help you take care of a child, Mary. I swear to you I will. I’ll find a way. I will help you get off the morphine and build the life you want, but I can’t just watch you give in to fears and weakness. I won’t abandon you, but I will not help you continue to run from your own responsibility.”
“My responsibility? Fine, Robert!” She stood, falling into a storm of angry tears. “But I don’t see how I—or you—can do any of those things. None of them. They are impossible. Your ideals can’t change the way things really are in this world.”
“Changing Bernard into a gentle man may be impossible. But the things I have just said I will do—the things you can do for yourself to make your life better—are not impossible. I don’t believe that.” He fought to maintain an even tone of voice.
“But how—” She lost her breath to sobs. “How can you stand there and say that? You can’t help me raise my child. You have a wife and child of your own! You can’t pay for doctors to help me with the morphine or anything else when you are barely eking out a living. It’s true! I don’t know what patriarchal desire to control my actions you are speaking from. But if I listen to you, I will spend my life in misery and never, ever will my unborn poetry see the light of day.”
As she spoke, her attitude exploded from chagrin to indignation. She glared at Robert.
“I thought you understood,” she whispered venomously and turned to leave.
Reflexively, Robert lunged after her, putting his hand on the door to keep it shut. He was not finished.
“Listen to me, Mary. There is nothing in me that wants to control you.” He spoke in a low tone. “It is something else that moves me…something you don’t seem to understand yet.”
She crossed her arms and waited, but he straightened, continuing to stare at her, and said no more. Their eyes locked for seconds upon seconds, at last softening, and Robert put his hands on either side of her face and pressed his lips to her forehead where her hair clung in damp strands against feverish skin. Then he held her head to his chest and closed his eyes.
“For over two years now I have listened to you, watched you in your life, and tried to help you,” he said. “I know your struggles, and our moments together have not occurred without effect. You know this. That’s why you come here to me. We have this between us. We’re no longer powerless.”
Robert Kenilworth’s mind rarely left the realm of reason, but in this moment it was deluged with passion and a kind of wishful thinking that he had never experienced before, and he followed its buoyant seduction.
Her blue eyes, when she pulled back and looked into his, were grateful but sad.
“Oh, Robert. You’re forgetting…you are forgetting Bernard. He will kill me. Or you. Or he will have me locked up in a mental asylum. If I don’t conform to what he wants, he will kill my soul somehow. You can’t stop that. Not if he knows where I am.”
The concept of Bernard Evans assuming the right to snuff out this woman, who was barely more than a girl and whose soul was not anyone else’s to decide the fate of, jarred loose Robert’s inner control, and he felt a seething hatred and rage that frightened him. He pulled her against his chest, his eyes searching the twilight for some consolation that wasn’t there, his heart rocked by confusion.
“We will find a way to keep you safe, Mary, you and your child. We will…because we must. Go back to your house,” he said. “And please think. As I will.”
He dropped his hands and turned away. And just as Robert’s wife, Elizabeth, entered the wooded path that led to her husband’s workshop, Mary closed his door behind her and raced home against the red sun, through the trees.
32
White Hill, Michigan—April 1999
Gather together, against the coming of night,
all that we played with here…
~ Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), “In a Darkening Garden”
Lydia dialed her home phone number from the phone in Jack’s workshop, letting it ring seven times until the answering machine clicked on and she heard her own recorded voice. She hung up, stared at the wall, then picked up the receiver again and redialed. After six rings she heard Frank’s muddy “Hello.”
“Frank.”
“Lydia?” His tone was confused. “Where are you?” She heard him shift around. “It’s after midnight. I thought you were here. Where are you calling from?”
“Listen, Frank. There’s something very important I need to tell you. Are you awake?”
“Am I awake? What’s going on?”
“I have found a source of firsthand information about Mary Stone Walker. It’s extremely significant.”
“Lydia—”
“Listen.”
“No, you listen. Where exactly are you?”
“It doesn’t matter. Could you please just let me say what I have to say?”
He sighed heavily and said nothing.
“There is written evidence available right here in White Hill of what happened to Mary Stone Walker. Evidence that will prove she could not have composed a poem in 1940…since you aren’t willing to believe me about the authorship of the one in your book.”
“Oh my fucking God. You’re just dead set on killing this document, aren’t you? What… Are you calling from a pay phone at a bar or something? Hanging out with your friends and plotting against me?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s my style, Frank.” Lydia glanced over her shoulder. Jack was no longer sitting on the couch. She spoke quietly. “You’ve got to retract that poem. Somehow, we have to make everyone understand that it was a mistake.” He was silent. “They’ll understand. I’m sure we can make them understand. And you will have new information to offer. Brand-new information to offer to the academic world and to incorporate into your book.”
She was thinking that Frank wouldn’t even have to say who forged the poem since it could have been anyone really. The only thing necessary was to get the information Jack possessed in front of the right people, and surely Jack would agree to that. Only a few things needed to be said.
“Frank?”
“I don’t know why you’re doing this.”
“I’ll come home right now and bring you the evidence—”
“I don’t want to see some stupid thing you’ve come up with out of the bowels of your imagination.”
“I have not made anything up.” She hesitated. She had to tell him where the information came from. “In fact, I am waiting to hear all of the details until I am with you. Jack Kenilworth has documents in a box of items his grandfather left behind, and he knows—”
“So that’s where you are? You’re at Kenilworth’s?” He gave a harsh laugh. “That’s priceless.”
“Frank, he knows the truth. His grandfather was close to her—”
“Lydia. Quit. I’ve heard enough. First, you wanted to tell me you wrote the poem, and now you’ve run off to your con-man friend, and you’re calling me to say that this White Hill nobody knows the whole story. His grandfather happened to have had a secret relationship with the beautiful Mary Stone Walker, Lydia? Come on! Oh, and by the way he has never discussed this with anyone before, but he wants to tell me right now, tonight. Just quit, would you? Give it up. I’ve made an important discovery that gives absolute credence to my theory, and apparently you can’t handle it.”
“You’re completely wrong.”
“Look. I don’t know what your plans are, but I sincerely hope they don’t include returning to this house tonight.”
Lydia heard the clatter of his phone and stood motionless with the receiver at her ear for a long time in the thick silence of the dead line, because she couldn’t bear to hang up and turn to Jack. Her skin crawled with humiliation. Silently, she replaced the receiver but leaned her head against the wall, eyes closed, and didn’t turn around for several minutes.
“Jack?”
The voice came from darkness at the barn door. Lydia jumped and turned around.
It was Nicholas, who saw her at the same moment she saw him.
“Mom? What are you doing here?” He moved slowly toward her.
Lydia tried to compose her features as she heard Jack approaching.
“What are you doing up, Nicholas?” she asked as calmly as she could.
“I… Dad just called. To Jack’s.” He pointed toward the house, his face alarmed. “Why are you here? What’s wrong?”
“What’s up, Nicholas?” Jack asked, approaching them.
“My dad just called you.” Nicholas’s eyes flickered toward Lydia, then back to Jack.
Lydia tried to keep panic out of her voice. “What did he say?”
“I answered it because the phone was right by my head,” Nicholas said.
“He wanted to talk to me?” Jack asked.
“I guess.”
“Nicholas, what did he say?” For a moment, Lydia hoped that Frank might have asked to meet Jack.
“He said… He said for me to tell Jack to stay out of his business.”
Lydia’s hands fell to her sides. “Didn’t he say anything else? Nicholas, didn’t he say he wanted to talk to one of us?”
Jack put his hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. “He’s just upset. It isn’t anything for you to worry about. Your mom was trying to talk to him about something that he feels strongly about.”
“But why? I mean, what did he feel so strongly about?” Nicholas asked suspiciously as he stepped backward, away from Jack. “What did he mean about staying out of his business?”
“He’s angry about things that have to do with the distant past and his own ideas about it,” Lydia said recklessly. “He doesn’t want to see evidence of the objective truth. He wants his fantasy just as he likes it.”
Jack let his gaze rest on her, and the humiliation burned all over again. She wanted to hug Nicholas to her, even as her son looked at her with something she could not read—was it anger? In the last few hours, life had turned inside out for her, and the one thing she could believe in, that she must be able to believe in, was her son. Frank could steal her poem, deny her credibility, and tell her not to come home, but he couldn’t take her son.
Could he? What if he started telling everyone she was crazy? What if he told Nicholas she was insane, and Nicholas believed him because for his entire life, he’d cherished the hope of finding Mary Stone Walker’s work and now Lydia seemed to be trying to tear holes in this dream come true for no apparent reason but jealousy? Her mind sparked and spun until she had to press her hand to her forehead. She walked to the couch to sit down.
The Lake and the Lost Girl Page 27