The Lake and the Lost Girl

by Jacquelyn Vincenta

  “Okay. I’m outta here, Professor.” Shane pulled his keys from his pocket and headed toward the door.

  “I’ll ride with you, Shane.” Drew clutched his jacket sleeve.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Frank said, leaning back against the door, effectively trapping them all inside the barn. “We can’t have everyone leaving with different stories. Let’s make sure we all understand the way things are, okay?”

  It was then that Lydia noticed, like an image dreamed and stored in dark amber, her son’s face watching from a dimly lit window of Jack’s house. And moments later, the sound of police sirens erupted a mile or so away and quickly grew louder. The five people in the barn froze, helpless against their meaning: Nicholas had called the police.

  “To hell with you all.” Frank pretended indifference, but his body and face were suddenly alert to the reality of what was going on around him, and he moved with the agility of a thief, opening the door and slipping out, taking off at a trot over the same sandy earth that Mary Walker had eagerly crossed sixty years before to reach Robert Kenilworth.

  Shane and Drew hurried out to Shane’s car as four policemen emerged from two squad cars. Shane pointed toward Frank, and the men followed his dark form into the woods.

  Besieged by shock and a weeping too deep for tears, Lydia backed away stiffly and sat down on a wooden chair at the table, while Jack continued to stand at the door and watch, awaiting the officers’ return. The wind howled, the rain splattered in bursts, and Lydia’s eyes roved the room in a daze. Everything looked strange. The intricate, varied tools hanging from hooks, the drawings pinned to the wall that fluttered now and then in the wind from the open door. The random objects of ordinary life—an ashtray, a broom, a phone book. Durable, fragile ordinary life.

  Strangest of all was the photograph of the Fata Morgana that seemed to stutter and shake in the storm. Robert Kenilworth’s boat. Lydia had noticed it before, yellowed and so faded that it appeared it would one day vanish altogether off the paper. Could Robert Kenilworth’s boat have been damaged on Lake Michigan because he had carried a desperate Mary Walker away from White Hill when he never should have been on the water at all? Lydia stood and slowly walked to the photo, her gaze catching flashes of the ghosts there.

  Of course he had. And he’d regretted it.

  She could not have said how long she stood in the trance of Mary Walker, Robert Kenilworth, and the Fata Morgana. As if the sudden rift in her own life had opened her to these other energies, she felt an intimate connection to their spent lives.

  “Frank is gone,” Jack said after a while, just behind her. “Nicholas seems okay, but I told him we’d be with him in a minute.”

  Nodding, Lydia turned around. Jack stood right there, his face so serious, so sad. She wanted to scream and cry; she wanted to fall against him; she wanted to run away.

  “I loved Frank, Jack.” Her thoughts were splintered, and her voice sounded like a stranger’s. “Doesn’t that seem mad? I loved him so much. The crazy man who just ran into the woods to flee policemen…that man who threatened to kill me tonight. I loved him so much.”

  “Of course it isn’t mad,” Jack said quietly. “It’s what we do.” He took hold of her hands gently. “Listen. They found him, took him for some questioning. One of the officers told me that Frank will be kept overnight and most likely taken to Grand Rapids for a psychiatric evaluation. You can go by the police station tomorrow. Everyone has left now.”

  She returned her gaze to the Fata Morgana, but the photograph was completely blurred by tears. Jack’s hand touched her right shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Lydia,” he whispered. After a long silence, he said, “And I want to say… I do see what you mean.”

  “About what?”

  “About marriage being complicated.”

  She gave a broken laugh, but as she turned around toward him, she collapsed into tears, and for a moment, she clung to him. For a moment, she allowed herself to close her eyes and simply feel the warmth and safety of the boatbuilder—a man who had unexpectedly been willing to help her cross dangerous water.

  “I have a proposal for you, Ms. Milliken.”

  She stood back and tried to look into his eyes but felt awkward and confused.

  “This boat you’ve been staring at here.” He stepped over and pulled the Fata Morgana from the wall, then walked to the couch and sat with the photograph in his lap. She eased down next to him. “She needs a biographer. A good one. She has…a lot of stories to tell.”

  “Does she.” Lydia pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped her eyes.

  “So many. Some happier than others. But we can get into that later.” He turned the photograph over and began to pry back the metal stays that held the cardboard backing. “What do you think?”

  “Oh, you know I am interested.” She tried a smile but was unable to maintain it. “It’s time for me to retire from writing romances. I have become unsuited for the subject matter.”

  Jack nodded slowly.

  “The Fata Morgana had two owners before my grandfather. She lived in two other lakes before this one, believe it or not. Huron and Superior. A well-traveled lady. Hardworking.” Sighing, he pulled the cardboard away—and between it and the photograph lay a sheet of paper. “She even provided sanctuary and a writing table one autumn for a poet in search of…something. Running from something. A very lost poet, you might say. Who was then chased through history by people who wanted her to be something she just wasn’t.”

  His hands rested on the paper, and he looked up at Lydia. She grew alert, her breathing shallow. One corner of his mouth rose.

  “It was the last poem the woman ever wrote. Sadly.” He held up his hand as if to stop any objections. “But definitely. The last.” With his thumb and forefinger, he gently turned over the aged and fragile leaf that weighed barely more than a breath, and it quivered in the light and air. “Do you recognize the handwriting?”

  Epilogue

  Chicago, Illinois—November 1939

  …I have been sad;

  I have been in cities where the song was all I had—

  A treasure never to be bartered by the hungry days.

  ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), “For Pao-Chin, a Boatman on the Yellow Sea”

  In the chill of late autumn, the city felt cruel. Robert Kenilworth had been to Chicago but rarely beyond the harbor, and the streets lined with shops and apartments writhed with people rushing against an icy wind. The map he held was flawed, but Robert was not a man who was easily deterred or confused. When at last he found the building that matched the address Mary had sent him, his knock was answered by a middle-aged woman whose appearance was as battered as the tenement’s front stoop.

  “At last,” she said curtly in response to his introduction, then led him upstairs. One flight, two, three—narrow, creaky, and unlit. She pushed open a stained pine door with a crack down the center and no lock. “Here.”

  The small room contained a narrow bed, two shelves, a crude counter, and three lines of string strung from nails on the rafters for drying clothes. One sock remained pinned there. He turned toward the other side of the room. A single window with yellowed curtains faced the back side of an identical building, a wooden frame chair set before it.

  “No toilet or sink,” he stated.

  “She knew that when she signed. Water’s down the hall. Running water is a lot to ask for nothing, mister. And I provided a bucket and a pitcher. That’s more than most do.”

  “Okay,” he said, firmly enough to stop the rant that he suspected would flow as long as he let it. “What did she owe you?”

  “Well, it was eighteen dollars for what she didn’t pay me, and it was forty-one dollars that she still owed the doctor. I don’t know who paid for the burial.”

  “You paid the doctor the balance she owed?”

  “I plan to with what you giv
e me,” she said, raising her chin. “I’ve worked with him before.”

  “Fine work he does, too.” Robert scowled, pulling his wallet from his coat pocket. “I’ll give him twenty dollars. And that’s too much. See that he gets it, and make sure he knows that she didn’t live long after.”

  She tucked the money into her waistband.

  “He knows already,” she said. “Says it was her own fault, you know.”

  Wickedness. Robert stepped to the window and tried to open it, but it was sealed shut. Ignorance.

  “Where are her belongings?” he asked.

  The woman pointed, and Robert’s gaze followed the direction of her finger to the hanging sock. He gave an empty laugh and glared at her.

  “Where are the rest of her belongings, ma’am?”

  The woman shrugged, eyes wide, lower lip stuck out.

  “Came with nothin’.”

  “I know what she came with,” he said. “I brought her here.”

  But that wasn’t entirely true. He had dropped her off at Hull-House, a way station from which she had said her relatives would pick her up. At that time, she had had two modest bags and the sewing box, and he knew from the one letter she’d sent him that she’d carried all of those things with her to her “new place.” He’d expected her to stay with relatives. That is what she had claimed she would do when she’d recited her plan back in White Hill.

  “So you were the cause of her having to have that operation? That was your child?”

  Robert Kenilworth glared down at the floor, the dirty, splintery floor where untold numbers of strangers had pissed and cried and toiled their way through the days. No, no, no. No, if it had been his child… He shook his head, and a wave of desperate grief passed through his body like nausea. There was no reason to talk with this woman any more than necessary.

  “If you can find the remaining items that belonged to Mary Williams, I will make sure you’re compensated. She had a sewing box that meant a lot to her. You haven’t seen that?”

  The woman shrugged. “Like I said, she didn’t have nothin’.”

  “Well. If it turns up,” he said, writing his name and address down on an envelope that he handed her, “this is the same address you sent the telegram to. I will pay for your efforts. Likewise, if you will give me the names of her visitors. I need to inform her Chicago kin, if you have not.”

  “No visitors. No kin that I ever saw. She never left the room those last two weeks, and no one called for her. I don’t know what she ate or how she lived…as long as she did, that is.”

  “She had nothing to eat? For heaven’s sake, you didn’t help her?”

  “Mister, she didn’t want help. She said that right to my face. She was too good to accept anything from me, you know.”

  Robert tried to control his voice as he said, “So you left her alone. Informed no one of her ill health. She died. Then you had her buried. Do I have it right?”

  “I didn’t have her buried. She was nothing to me. It’s required by law, and the police took care of it.”

  “Tell me where.”

  “You will have to ask them. She died right there on that bed. They came and got her. Now I will have to replace it.”

  Robert glanced at the horrible little bed, observing the deep depression in the middle where Mary had undoubtedly settled for her last breaths. He gave a small nod and stepped toward the woman.

  “I’d like to be here alone for a few moments, please.”

  “I can’t allow—”

  “Mary was a relation of mine. I’d like some time to honor her passing.”

  When she refused to move, Robert handed her a dollar and the woman turned to stand in the hall. Without apology, he closed the door between them, leaned back on it, and looked slowly around the room. Holy Mother of God. He could never have imagined this nightmare. Her letter after she arrived here had said nothing of the squalor. In fact, it had sounded almost…optimistic.

  She had lied to him. She knew that he would not have let her come here alone if he suspected she could end up in a situation like this. She’d claimed that her mother’s people, the Williams family, had generously invited her for a lengthy visit. They would help her with the child, she’d explained, and furthermore, they were going to help her secure a teaching position. They were fascinated with her poetry and had university and library friends who might be able to arrange readings. Had she believed these things, or were they fantasies? Or worse, were they just lies designed to disarm his concern? Why in the name of God had he fallen for them?

  Oh Lord. It hurt him that she’d had such pride, even with him. How many times had he told her that he would not let her suffer if there was any way he could stop it? That was why he had brought her here, the only reason he had taken the risk of setting her out into this strange, enormous city. To free her from the abuse by her husband that had gone on for years with nightmarish episodes, and then the passionate, ridiculous reunions between the two of them. How many times had he listened to all of that, helpless to change anything or to protect her from harm?

  Then there was the morphine, which had aggravated every problem. He had also begun to worry that the drug itself was going to kill her, so she’d sworn that she would seek a doctor’s help in Chicago, another thing she felt she could not do in White Hill. When he had left her at Hull-House, she had promised to get help with the drug immediately to protect the child in her womb.

  The child in her womb. When she had begged him to carry her secretly to this city on his boat, it had seemed to him one wish he could fulfill that might improve the quality of her life, as well as that child’s.

  But this—his eyes scanned the dark, dangerous, smelly room—this is what it had all come to. For a moment, Robert Kenilworth felt he could not bear it. He had not known enough of the truth to prevent this. She hadn’t given him that opportunity. And now, just like that, she was gone.

  His gaze groped for something, some scrap of her that must have been left behind. But there were no drawers where something could be stashed, no corners or shelves except for those nakedly facing him now. He stepped to the sock on the line and pulled it down, examining the coarse wool. Only this. His heart turned—he remembered seeing it with its mate, wet on the beach. He lifted it to his face.

  The door opened.

  “There is just this,” the landlady said, and held out a full-length, black wool coat. “I’d forgotten.”

  Mary’s coat. Robert stared, his mind tricked for a moment by the form so familiar and yet so utterly empty. He fumbled again for his wallet and pulled out two more dollar bills. When he passed them to the woman, she kept her hand extended until he gave her another. Then she folded the bills into her waistband, shoved the coat at his chest, and stood waiting.

  “Thank you,” he said, gripping it, and he started to close the door again.

  “She cried a lot, you know, those last weeks,” the woman said. “So I brought her tea sometimes. But she wasn’t friendly. She wasn’t grateful. I’m not surprised—”

  “That’s enough,” Robert said, as he tried to block the visions her words gave rise to. “Have some pity. She was far from home. She was…” So many things occurred to him to say about Mary, but there would never be anyone to whom he could speak of her. “She was far from home.”

  Before the landlady could say more, Robert closed the door, held his hand against it, and listened for her to walk away. He waited three, four minutes, until at last her steps descended the stairs. He gazed down at the coat, took a deep breath in spite of the foulness of the air, and moved to the bed to sit down.

  A different man might have wept, might have raged against the tiny prisonlike room that had played a part in the death of someone he loved. But for Robert Kenilworth, those moments would hit unexpectedly over the years to come. In a sort of stupor of grief that had begun when he received the telegram
about Mary’s death from the landlady, he continued to force himself to focus on doing what he could for Mary, on finding some way to bring resolution to the ill-fated journey out of White Hill. He thought there must be an appropriate ritual of some sort, a prayer—some formal acknowledgment of her life’s passing that would have meaning. As he had traveled to Chicago on the train, he’d imagined that there would be a way to achieve a sense of peace once he arrived, though he’d had no idea how.

  Here, now, there seemed to be nothing. She was dead. Her body was buried. He would consult with the police; he would find her grave and bid her farewell. Then he would take her coat back to White Hill and bury it deep in the sand near his workshop in the dunes where they had spent so much time together. But as far as his conscience was concerned, he was responsible for the tragedy set in motion when he agreed to her plan. He should have known better. He couldn’t fathom what might ameliorate this wretched sorrow and guilt, but he had possessed some hope that visiting the place of her death would help.

  From beyond the window, Robert could hear the thin cries of children playing. The sun was already falling low, and the November chill that penetrated the room had crept into his bones. He gazed down at the coat, squeezing the cloth to feel the weight and texture of it, picturing her lifting its hem as she’d handed him her bags and climbed onto the Fata Morgana with the sewing box.

  “I will need this, Robert,” she had declared of the box, using an attitude he recognized as the artificial cheer she mustered when she was afraid. “I will be so glad you helped me carry it to my new home. You might even be glad yourself, for I may sew something for you.”

  But when Mary sewed, it was embroidery, nothing more. Or mending. Or…with a little rush of hope, Robert lifted the hem of the coat to his lap and opened it to run his hands along the lining, and there at the center, back seam, near the hem, was a hiding spot like others she had told him about or shown him. How she loved to hide things, binding her words secretly into the things around her, as she said. She had made loose stitches with white thread, and those had already been mostly ripped out. His pulse quickened, and pulling back the fabric, he found an envelope inscribed with his name and address.