Harrow Lake

by Kat Ellis

  “Maybe she will,” I say.

  My grandmother sways back in her seat. “You really don’t know, do you? I thought you were just being peculiar about it, but you really don’t know.”

  “Know what?” Mary Ann vanishes from her spot on the counter and reappears at my shoulder, like she’s eager to hear the reply. My unease becomes a dread that coats my insides like cold tar.

  Grandmother takes a deep breath. “Your mother is gone. She’s never coming back because she’s dead. Lorelei is dead!”

  What? No. Nolan would never keep that from me.

  “Look at her—she’s lying,” Mary Ann whispers.

  Nolan has spent the last twelve years worrying Lorelei was going to come back for me. She can’t be dead.

  “Why are you saying all this? Lying to me?” I say. Grandmother reaches toward me. I stand, my chair screeching back across the floor. There’s half a room between us, but it feels like nothing. It feels like everything.

  “It happened after the last time you came here . . .”

  “I haven’t been here before, damn it! I’m not Lorelei!”

  Now I see anger flash in Grandmother’s eyes. “I know exactly who you are. Hold your tongue. I meant when Lorelei came to see me after her father passed—and she brought you with her.”

  “Lorelei didn’t . . .”

  Grandmother strides from the kitchen and returns with the photograph of five-year-old Lorelei from above the fireplace. Five-year-old Lorelei who, now I’m really looking, has black eyes, not blue. She’s not Lorelei at all. “Then how do you explain this?”

  I look to Mary Ann to see if she will call her a liar again, but Mary Ann isn’t there.

  My heart thuds. Of course this place felt familiar. Like I’d seen it already, and not just the on-screen version in Nightjar.

  “You see? This picture was taken that day. You were standing in the next room.”

  Up close, I see what I missed before: the red patent Mary Janes I was obsessed with as a little girl; the cowlick parting it took me years to outgrow. A tiny mole near my left ear . . . Lorelei used to tell me that mole was a footprint left by a fairy that whispered happy dreams into my ear every night. How did I forget that?

  How did I forget Lorelei?

  “Of course, Lorelei was just awful to me when she brought you to stay—said some nasty, hurtful things—so I called your father and told him to come and collect his wife and girl. And he did. Lorelei was spitting feathers over that, too, as though I’d done something wrong by letting her husband know you were both here! Honestly, she was acting . . . well, she was acting unhinged, which is why, when Nolan called the next day, I think I already knew she’d done something foolish.”

  Something foolish . . . ? “What do you mean?”

  “He found her in the bathtub. She’d taken some pills, he said.” Grandmother inhales shakily. “Lorelei was always a troubled, impulsive girl.”

  She’s wrong. There’s an itch at the back of my mind, something I can’t quite put my finger on, but she aggravates it every time she speaks.

  Nolan told me that when Lorelei left, he found a note saying she was going to visit her mother, and then planned to make a new life for herself somewhere else, without us. That she would see where the road took her, or some other hipster bullshit. But now I know that at least part of that was a lie: She took me with her. Did she plan to keep me with her in her new life? Did Grandmother calling Nolan put an end to that plan?

  Would that have been enough to drive Lorelei to suicide?

  No.

  “Why did Lorelei come back here?” I ask, noting how my grandmother’s expression shutters immediately. “What did she say to you?”

  “She came to tell me how sorry she was to have missed her father’s funeral,” she says. She’s definitely lying now. I couldn’t tell before, but I can now. Her hands shake as she knots them in the fabric of her skirt, and she won’t look at me directly.

  I wish I could remember being here.

  “Why would she want to end her life?” I whisper, more to myself than Grandmother.

  “How would I know?” I see something festering behind her eyes. Guilt? Shame? Over Lorelei’s supposed suicide, or over lying about it? I’m not sure. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “But there was no funeral,” I press on. “No news reports about her death.” I would have seen those. Would have heard whispers about it, even if Nolan for some reason chose not to tell me.

  He didn’t tell you because IT’S NOT TRUE.

  But he’s never mentioned me coming to Harrow Lake before, either . . .

  “Your father was worried about there being a scandal. He thought you might get hounded by reporters and the like. Of course I suspected it had something to do with the fact he had a new movie opening that month . . .”

  I hold up my hand, halting her. This is too much to process. My every nerve ending prickles in anger, rejecting what my grandmother is saying.

  “Then where is she buried?” My words fly like bullets. “Look, whatever went on between you and Lorelei, that doesn’t give you a free pass to pretend that she’s dead. A famous actress can’t just die without the world noticing.”

  A lock of Grandmother’s hair comes loose from her chignon, coiling at her throat like a silver adder.

  “I don’t know what he told the damn newspapers! Maybe he just told them what he told you—that she left him. I don’t know!”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why doesn’t everyone in Harrow Lake know that Lorelei’s dead? It makes no sense!” I yell.

  Grandmother’s lips tremble as another strand of hair falls free. She’s unraveling.

  “Your . . . your mother was troubled, even from a young age, always talking about nonsense as though she believed it.”

  Nonsense like Mister Jitters?

  Nonsense like monsters and imaginary friends, Nolan whispers in my ear, but I ignore him.

  I think of the drawings hidden under the wallpaper. Lorelei’s father was the one who told her Mister Jitters would come for her. Does my grandmother know that?

  “When she met Nolan and moved away, I thought it was over; I thought she’d outgrown her silliness. And perhaps she had, at least until . . . until her father passed. I was surprised when she didn’t come home for the funeral, but then she showed up with you a few days later. It must’ve been too hard for her to come sooner. Fathers and daughters always share such a special bond, don’t they?” She twists her hands in her apron, as though she’s trying to throttle it.

  “When she came back, she kept talking about that ridiculous story about the man in the caves, exactly like when she was a child. About how I should have believed her.” She shakes her head like she’s trying to shrug away the memory. “I’d hoped Nolan would pull her out of all that nonsense, but he didn’t—or couldn’t. She had some sort of breakdown, Nolan said. But how was I supposed to know what she would do? I didn’t know. I didn’t know . . .”

  Grandmother’s eyes are distant now. I’m starting to wonder if she even knows I’m still in the room when she continues, her voice barely a whisper. “After she died, I didn’t want anyone to know. Your grandfather was always so proud of his little girl; it would have been a black mark on his memory if people knew Lorelei had taken her own life.”

  “You’re telling me her death embarrassed you?” What kind of mother is she?

  “I couldn’t bear to have people look at me like it was somehow my fault. No matter what your father says, it wasn’t my fault!” Grandmother reaches for me, and that’s enough to send me running up the stairs to my room.

  I slam the door behind me, setting off the white jitterbug.

  “It can’t be true,” I murmur, pacing. How could she say those things? Did Nolan tell her Lorelei was dead when she isn’t? Nolan would need a damn good reason
to lie about it. Everything he does has a damn good reason.

  Maybe, with Lorelei gone, he lashed out at the closest thing to her he could: her mother.

  It’s unlikely, but not impossible. And not impossible feels a lot better than dead.

  The jitterbug chatters away on the bedside table where I left it. I’m about to go over and slam that, too, when I hear my grandmother coming up the stairs. I lean back against the door. It rattles as she tries the handle.

  “I know it’s hard for you to hear,” she says. “And I wish I wasn’t the one to tell you, but you can’t keep searching for someone you’ll never find.” A pause. “Why would I lie, Lola? Tell me that.”

  She lied about your suitcase, didn’t she?

  The door shudders again, but I’m stronger than she is. I wish there was a key so I could lock her out. But the keyhole is empty, has been empty since I arrived.

  She stops rattling the handle and her footsteps retreat across the landing.

  After a minute, I ease away from the door. I need to tell Nolan. There’s no way he’ll make me stay here if he knows about the messed-up shit Grandmother has been telling me.

  I wait awhile before creeping back downstairs, my pulse keeping time with the rat-a-tat of the jitterbug now tucked safely in my pocket. I reach the hallway and take a deep breath before lifting the telephone receiver.

  The phone is dead. There’s no dial tone, not even the crackle that has by now become familiar. I press the switch hook a few times, hoping to jostle some life back into it, but there’s no tone. It’s still plugged into the wall. The phone is just dead.

  “Damn it.”

  Carter still has my cellphone. So without the landline, I’m completely cut off.

  I need to get my phone back.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Lola, wait up!”

  Grant’s truck pulls up next to me halfway to Carter’s house.

  “Where are you going?” Grant says. “Need a ride?”

  “No, I’m just out for a walk.” I don’t want to be trapped in that truck with Grant again. I stride on.

  A door slams, then heavy bootsteps hurry after me. I whirl around and I’m face to chest with Grant.

  “Hey, what’s the rush?” he says.

  He’s standing too close, one hand on my arm. His knuckles are grazed. I think of coyotes and bitten fingers, and step back before I can give in to the urge to snap one of them off.

  “Why are you always running away, girl?”

  I glare at him, and the grin falls from his face. “How well did you really know Lorelei? Tell me the truth.”

  “Pretty well, back in the day,” Grant says slowly, like he’s debating whether lying might be safer now. “Why?”

  “Did she ever seem suicidal to you? When she came back here after her dad died, maybe?”

  “What? Suicidal?” Now he recoils. But he’s thinking about it. “Are you saying she’s dead? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  The idea shocks Grant, I can tell. But I don’t know how to answer him. If Lorelei is dead, then why would Nolan be so protective of me?

  Is it protection, though? Or control? Does he control you because he couldn’t control her?

  Shut up!

  No. If Lorelei was dead, Nolan wouldn’t have lied to me about it. So she must be alive. She must be. But I can’t prove that any more than my grandmother can show me a body.

  “I don’t think she’s dead,” I say. “It’s just that someone told me it was possible—that she might have hurt herself after she last visited here.”

  Grant exhales slowly, like he’s relieved. “No way. That’s not Lorelei. She could be a little reckless at times, but she wouldn’t have done that. She only ever wanted to get out of this town. Much as it pains me to admit it, your father gave her what she wanted—a kid, and a different life, away from here.”

  “Then why would she leave us? Leave me?” I grab hold of his arm now. Grant is starting to look worried.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did she come back here?”

  “I don’t know!” Grant yanks free of my grip. There’s a red crescent on his wrist where one of my nails has left a mark. It’s an echo of the spot on my own arm where a tooth burrowed into my flesh. He rubs it, irritation plain on his face. “All I know is Lorelei was glad to be leaving Harrow Lake. I caught her down at the fairground as she was on her way to see your grandma—she was hacking away at that mural inside The Harrowing with a chisel.”

  I see a flash of that scarred wood, the deep gouges in it like claw marks. And now it’s not some faceless stranger attacking my mother. It’s Lorelei. But why?

  Grant seems to sense the questions running through my mind. “I asked her why the hell she’d wanna scratch up a picture of herself, and she turned to me with this great big smile and said, Grant, I’m getting out of this place once and for all, and I’m not leaving any piece of me behind. She was so happy to finally be free. I got the idea that maybe things weren’t quite so peachy with your father, but that didn’t give me any cause to think she’d . . . No. Lorelei was never as fragile as your grandma thought. She was a woman with dreams in her eyes, not nightmares.”

  “Then why do people in this town say she was obsessed with a monster?”

  “I know you’ve heard the stories about this town,” Grant says, “about what’s in those caves. But Lorelei liked going in there. She wasn’t scared of the dark or anything like that. Me and Theo used to tease her about it, actually; sometimes we’d put on masks and hide out in the woods to try and frighten her, but she’d just laugh and say we wouldn’t know a monster if one bit us on the butt.”

  He smiles faintly, and for a second I think I might be seeing some genuine fondness breaking through the smarm. “She had a way of getting caught up in things, though. Nonsense things. Like if she heard a story, or something caught her attention, she wouldn’t talk about anything else.” He scuffs his toe in the dirt. “Maybe that’s why she came back here that day—she wanted to know for sure how much of it was real, and what was just in her head.”

  “You mean Mister Jitters?”

  Grant runs a hand through his thinning hair. “Maybe that was just what she told me, to tease me back. Or maybe she really thought there was something living in those caves . . . I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t me she came back for. But I can tell you one thing for sure: That day, she didn’t act like someone who’d given up on life.”

  I sag, weighed down with so many unanswered questions. My grandmother believes Lorelei killed herself. Grant thinks she came back looking for a monster. Cora said the monster took her. And Nolan . . . what does Nolan believe? And why didn’t he tell me I’d been to Harrow Lake before?

  What else has he been lying to me about?

  * * *

  • • •

  I cut away from the road and follow the slanting afternoon light through the trees toward Carter’s house. I barely notice the woods thinning around me until I reach the clearing that overlooks the distant fairground. A faint rattle makes me look up. The Bone Tree looms over me, its branches dressed in teeth. I back away. Better not wake the rats.

  I whirl at the sound of fast-approaching footsteps and scream when a girl crashes into me. We fall among the gnarled roots of the Bone Tree. Her face is a mess of tears and snot and her red hair tangles around her head. It takes me a moment to recognize her without the blond Little Bird wig.

  “Marie?” She seems even more startled at hearing me say her name.

  “Oh my god, you’re Lorelei!” The girl whimpers as she scrambles away from me and to her feet.

  “I’m not Lorelei,” I snap, dusting myself off and feeling some fresh bruises forming on my legs. “Why the hell were you—”

  “Did he send you?”

  “What? Who?”

>   “He sent you, didn’t he?” Marie is still backing away from me, her fingers knotted in her hair like she might pull it out. Her eyes are huge with fear. “Every night since the parade, I’ve heard him at my window—that awful sound that gets inside your head and won’t leave! He’s coming for me, isn’t he? He’s going to take me!”

  “Mister Jitters?” My voice is breathless, my heart hammering like a fist against cage bars. Her response is to burst into tears again. I reach out to touch her shoulder, but she jerks away. “Did you see him?”

  “I tried to leave the message, but I couldn’t get in!” Marie wails. She’s talking about the caves, I realize—the message for Mister Jitters Carter told me about. To remind him she’s not the girl he’s looking for. The one who got away.

  But did Lorelei get away?

  “Please don’t let him take me,” Marie pleads, clutching my wrist. Her fingers dig in painfully where the tooth came out. “Lorelei, please . . .”

  “I’m not Lorelei!” I snatch my hand away. She stumbles backward like I’ve shoved her. “Look, it’s okay, you don’t have to be scared . . .”

  She bolts from the clearing. I stand there for a moment, then chase after her. It’s easy to follow her frightened sobbing at first, but she’s quicker than me and soon the sound is so faint I’m not sure I’m going the right way.

  “Marie?” No answer. I stop and listen, but hear nothing above the usual restless sounds of the forest. “Marie!”

  A scream breaks through the trees. I run toward it, yelling her name. She’s still screaming—a terrible, haunting shriek, like it’s being torn out of her body.

  Then it stops. The forest holds its breath. There’s no sound at all.

  “MARIE!”

  I run between the trees, but there’s no sign of her. I can’t see anywhere she might have fallen. No blood or claw marks. She’s just gone.

  Then I hear it: chattering. It swells from the forest. Wraps around me like fog.

  Mister Jitters is coming.

  I run.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE