Back in the Bel Air, feeling ridiculous and desperately disappointed, he sat looking at the corsage as if it could explain what had just happened. Could he possibly have misunderstood? No! It was supposed to be that night. And she was expecting him. No way he had it wrong.
He drove off slowly and stopped out of sight in the ravine where the creek flowed. He debated long and hard, then drove a little farther, pulled over, took off his jacket and bow tie, and made his way on foot back to the cottage. He watched the door from a distance for an hour in the cool May evening. Nothing.
Twice he started to leave, turned around, and went back. Once he circled the house silently from the cover of the woods. It was well after dark. He looked at his watch. The prom would have started. Lights were on in the cottage. Now and then he saw someone move behind a curtain. He couldn’t tell if it was Ree or the younger of the two women he had seen at the door.
Eventually he gave up and went back to the Chevy. At a drive-in where he was sure no one would see him, he ate a hamburger, pondering her mother’s grief and her father’s anger. He stayed out until the hour when he was supposed to be home—midnight. And never saw her again.
Phil got in late, and Al pretended to be sleeping. Then when Phil slept late the next morning, Al slipped out early. That Sunday, he’d mostly stayed out of the house and managed to avoid his brother, which was easy—Phil hardly ever came home that year. Al thought his mother looked at him funny once or twice.
Ree Medina didn’t come to class on Monday or all the next week. Teachers were silent, their questions evidently answered. A couple of people innocently asked him, Where’s Ree? What happened to Ree? What could he say? He was aware of whispers. Then the school year ended.
He scoured the newspapers every day, saw nothing. The least sensational explanation at the time was that she had moved away—one of her teachers said that—but no one moved away from the cottage except Ree. Al knew that because he kept a discreet eye on her house all through June.
When he heard nothing, but there was no hue and cry, he concluded that she’d just left town for whatever reason and hadn’t bothered to tell him. He’d been stunned. Crushed. And amazed at the way the surface of the town and school had closed over her without a ripple.
In the absence of any clear and reliable information, rumors coalesced around the idea that she’d done something awful and been sent away by her family. That she had run off with somebody was how his brother’s friends spun the story. Actually, it wasn’t friends, plural, as Phil kindly pointed out. It was just one guy and he was jealous. Only Stan crowed that he’d predicted that Ree Medina would dump Al MacDonald soon enough. And sure enough, Stan said, she had. He said she’d left town in a car with a guy.
Stan was a habitual liar, Phil explained.
Al sat across the bed, slumped against the wall, while Phil leaned on the doorjamb, tossing a baseball up and catching it, over and over, without looking at it.
“Then why are you friends with him?”
Phil made a little smirking shrug, gave his head a jerk as if to cast off Al’s question. “He’s one of the guys. We hang out.” Phil was talking about the stars of the baseball team, which had gone to the state championship in Charlottesville that spring. “He’s a jerk. He’s jealous.”
Because of Ree. Stan had asked her out a couple of times and been turned down flat. When it got back to him that Ree hung out with Al, Stan teased Al mercilessly. Getting it on with Miss Snooty-Blondie-Medina, dork?
“What happened to her?” Phil was asking, so apparently he didn’t know.
Al shrugged, avoiding his brother’s eyes. “I don’t know.”
“When did you last see her?”
“Right before school let out Friday.” He’d walked her to the bus.
Phil took a minute processing that information. “What, you went to pick her up and she wasn’t there?” He laughed softly and said, “Sorry!” turning his face away and grinning.
“Did Stan really say somebody saw her?”
The words Phil had said earlier hung in the air—in a car with a guy. Phil shrugged and started to leave.
Al sat up. “Hey. Do you know anything?”
Phil said, “Nope,” but wouldn’t look at him.
“Phil.”
“I don’t know anything.”
Al took that to mean that Phil heard things, didn’t know if they were true, and wasn’t going to repeat them to Al. Rumors. Rumors swirled in her wake, he knew that, but most of them didn’t reach his ears.
In a car with a guy—said the liar Stan. Pregnant—according to Nancy, who had never met Ree Medina. Al couldn’t square either idea with the girl he knew. But what did he know about her?
Standing in his bedroom, all these years later, Al said, “What was going on with you, Ree?”
7
The Angry Old Man
Dry, hot air. The smell of exposed wood, sawdust, mothballs.
At the top of the attic stairs, where the heat of the day hung motionless, Regina dropped her bag on a small landing that offered a window facing the driveway at the side of the house. Regina opened a closed door on the front side of the house and hit a solid obstacle. She stuck her head in the room and found it jammed with boxes, stacks of paper, and furniture that she recognized as the erstwhile contents of the study that had been converted to a sickroom. She flipped on the overhead light and allowed her eyes to travel over William’s desk chair, an oak file cabinet, and a work table piled high with manila folders and boxes. Her eyes rested on a writing box of polished walnut inlaid with brass and mother-of-pearl.
She shoved the door open a little wider and turned sideways to slip inside. The room was stifling. She inspected the writing box briefly, trailing her hand across its surface, leaving faint tracks in dust, then tried to open it. Locked. Stymied curiosity rooted her to the spot for a long moment. She would take a closer look in the morning.
This side of the attic was divided into two roughly finished rooms, one for boys and one for girls. Twin bunk beds, a miniature play table and chairs, and other assorted furnishings for children had been pushed aside haphazardly: a little desk, a trunk for toys, a rocking horse.
As a very young child already in her sister’s care, Regina had followed Mary up the steep stairs into the attic for the first time, climbing out of dense gloom below where Alice hid in her darkened bedroom and William lost himself in work. Edith was already married and had two children, the eldest just one year younger than Regina. Frank and Pace were home from the war, and they and even young Bebe were engaged or married and starting families. Mary had married Robert Medina and moved to the cottage, taking Regina with her. It was Mary’s idea to have the high-ceilinged space in the front of the attic built out for the growing brood of grandchildren.
While Mary planned the work of plastering the walls and partitioning the two rooms, Regina explored the nooks and crannies of the vast, dusty, and unused back half of the third floor. How excited she had been that first year, as the silent old house prepared for visitors, and how disappointed she’d been to find that no one intended for her to stay in the new rooms. She hadn’t protested when Mary kept her in the cottage. Robert was off on a mission to Alaska, and Mary would have been alone without Regina. Anyway, at first there were only Edith’s two, who screamed and refused to spend the night upstairs by themselves. They’d ended up in Edith’s room, in Mary’s old bed.
But soon the idea of the children’s rooms caught on. The grown Hannon children came home for holidays and summer vacations, bringing their growing families, and the old house’s spirit lifted. At one time, the attic held as many as a dozen children doubled up in beds, on cots, and in sleeping bags. They blew through the house like a wild herd and came to a halt in front of Regina, the back ones bumping into the older ones in front, all looking at her like, Who’s that?
She was Mary’s pet, Ree, never part of the raucous ongoing slumber party in the boys’ and girls’ rooms in the attic, never quite inside the closed rank
s of the visiting cousins or, for that matter, the five adult siblings. She sat at the children’s table on the porch at dinner, but drifted behind and away when the herd took off afterward to play on the lawns and the dock and the lake. She went home at night with Mary.
Once Regina asked if she could stay in the attic on Christmas Eve, so she could run downstairs with the others to open presents. But Mary said no, it wasn’t fair for Ree to make the children’s rooms any more crowded than they already were when she had a perfectly nice room of her own in the cottage.
Eventually, as the herd reached their teens, they spilled out of their attic quarters, complaining about the heat in summer and the cold in winter, which as children they had not minded, and the visiting families began staying at the Holiday Inn in Piedmont. Regina hadn’t seen any of them in close to a decade and didn’t want to.
She shut off the light, closed the door on the children’s rooms, and grabbing her bag, headed for the unfinished side of the attic, which spanned the whole back of the house. Roomy, but raw and low-ceilinged, it was the one place in all of Blue Lake that she thought of as hers. The other children had been afraid of this side of the attic. Once, Edith’s wicked and inaccurately named oldest girl, Angelica, told the other children that the back of the attic was haunted by Eugenie’s ghost. This outrage caused a storm of tears and screams and refusals to sleep upstairs, and shook Alice so badly that she took to her bed for days.
The nether part of the attic, facing west, was even hotter than the children’s rooms. An old china cabinet, a linen press, and old-fashioned wardrobe stood immediately inside the door, ranged like dignified servants. They had once been regularly used to store extra dishes, tablecloths, napkins, and flatware—back in the days when Blue Lake was a glittering triumph and Alice a young beauty with five perfect children and a handsome, doting husband, all the money in the world, everything.
Beyond this front line, dormer windows looked out on the lake, and tall casement windows at the far ends looked into treetops. Bare plank floors creaked underfoot. Regina dropped her bag, turned on a small lamp, and opened the windows at opposite ends. Cool air rushed in. In the open space under the spine of the roof, she’d long ago arranged a desk, easel, reading chair, and standing lamp. She’d found a circular rag rug and a rocking chair too. The space appeared undisturbed since she’d last seen it. Her sketch pads, paints and brushes, pens and pencils were neatly arrayed the way she liked them on a large work table, a rough old thing that the carpenters had left behind when they built the house.
Growing up, between the children’s invasions, this side of the attic was her sanctuary. Whenever Robert came home from his various missions and temporary assignments, Mary fawned on him, the cottage revolved around him, and Regina felt like an intruder. Left to her devices, she took to playing in the attic, reading and doing her homework there. When she reached her teens and Robert came home to live in the cottage with them, she spent even more time in the attic to avoid him.
The one time she had come to Blue Lake in the last eight years, at the time of her father’s first stroke, she had refused to stay at the cottage, holing up in the attic. She’d tugged out an old mattress and made herself a sleeping corner. That was still as she’d left it too. But when she checked the sheets, she was surprised to find them fresh. Mary had guessed she would choose to sleep here.
All around her loomed the detritus of the past. Ancient steamer trunks of old clothes. Alice’s sidesaddle and riding habit. A wardrobe of clothes from a bygone era. Her grandfather’s ancient roll-top desk, stuffed with yellowing sermons. Wedding gifts. Letters, photographs, and a portrait of Alice and her sister when they were children.
And somewhere, deep within the rafters, where the raw underside of the roof sloped down to the floor, Regina knew there was a suitcase, hastily packed by Mary more than twenty years before and pushed out of sight. Eugenie’s clothes.
Again, she was rooted by a nagging doubt. As a little girl, she’d once found that suitcase and been mystified by it and Mary’s downplaying explanations. A morbid curiosity tweaked at the back of Regina’s mind. Blue Lake was crisscrossed with forbidden territories.
The windows had gone black with night. Regina turned out her light and waited for her eyes to adjust. Hard to believe she was really here, after all this time away. She’d had no idea when she got up that morning that she’d finish the day at Blue Lake.
Nor had she dreamed of seeing Al MacDonald for the first time in eight years. Remembering their conversation that morning, she hung her head. He was right, of course. She was Ree Medina when he knew her. And she disappeared without a word to him. Amazingly, he didn’t seem angry. She’d thought he would be. He must have thought she was heartless. That she didn’t care.
In the dark reaches of the attic, old wood adjusted to the cool night air with little creaks and pops. Branches stirred against the eaves. Murder! The idea was horrible. Who would murder a little girl? How awful it would be for Alice if her child was murdered. But Mary had said they’d found no evidence of murder. Regina felt guilty for even bringing it up. Mary hadn’t been upset exactly, but Alice would be.
And that ghost story! About a woman drowning herself in the lake because her lover had left her. Drowned herself in this lake? Now that she thought back, Regina remembered Al telling her something like that once, long ago, but hadn’t realized he was talking about her own home and family. Where did these ideas come from? She leaned into the window and searched out the lake with dark-adapted eyes, remembering another story of a suicide, this one real. She shivered at the recollection—not of the suicide, but of the time when she heard the story.
When Regina was just starting high school, Robert was living at the cottage, serving as a substitute pastor for the diocese and traveling only on Sundays. Mary was, as usual when her husband was there, preoccupied with pleasing him. Or trying to. Regina walked home alone if she stayed late for school activities. She stopped asking if it was all right to stay after school for this club or that, because when she did, she got an absent-minded “okay”and felt sure Mary wasn’t even listening. It never occurred to anyone to pick her up in a car.
At first, when she walked home after school, Regina took the route that the bus took. Until one winter afternoon when she was fifteen. A cold, light rain mixed with snow fell from a dismal gray sky. A downpour earlier in the day had left the ground deep with mud and standing water. At a low point in the Shackley Road, where the puddles merged to form a sheet of uncertain depth, she decided to cut across higher ground. She looked in every direction. No one in sight. She would climb the hill and take a shortcut through a field.
She slipped through a break in the fencing and picked her way from one clump of grass to another, looking only at her feet, choosing her steps on the uneven and slippery ground, regretting her choice to leave the road as she felt cold water seeping through the sides of her shoes.
A rough voice broke her concentration. “Th’ fuck you doing here?”
She gasped and jumped back, losing her balance. The man grabbed her wrist, but she fell backward anyway, dangling from his iron grip, twisting to land on her knees in the mud.
He yanked her back to her feet. “Get the fuck out of here.”
“I’m sorry,” she gasped, snatching her hand away. “I was trying to stay out of the water. I’m going that way—” She pointed ahead to the road, past the low part, toward home.
He roared, breath stinking of whiskey, “I know where you’re going. You can fuckin’ take the road.” He pointed back the way she came.
When he yelled, half-incoherent, his lower jaw moved in a strange broken pattern, toothless on the bottom right side. She staggered, transfixed, and whimpered when he lurched toward her.
“You fuckin’ Hannons think you fuckin’ own the world.”
“But I’m not—”
He swiped at her. “Turn people out when it suits you, take what you want, blame who you please.” He stepped toward her, both hands fi
sted.
“Okay!” She gasped and held up her hands in front of her face, palms out. “I’m going!”
He shouted, “Put it all on Tiberius. Blame a girl ain’t done nothin’ to nobody. Tiberius ain’t done nothin’ to nobody. No matter to you.”
“What?”
“Drive a innocent girl to the grave.” Spitting rage.
He swung an arm at her
“Okay, okay.” Breathless, unsteady on her feet in the sinking muck, she trembled. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
She heard another voice behind her and whirled with a cry.
A woman said, “You go on, get away from here. Leave it, Sam.”
He lurched toward Regina, who turned and fled, heading back to where she had come through the fence, slipping and stumbling. She kept looking back, not wanting to take her eyes off him, afraid he would grab her from behind, fleeing the blast of anger and hatred.
Once on the road, she was afraid to pass the old man’s property even at a distance, so she doubled back and took a long way home, shaking all the way, running when she could, breath coming in urgent white puffs. It was dark by the time she reached the house.
Mary was waiting for her on the porch, wringing her hands. “Ree! Where were you? Are you all right?”
Regina kicked off her sodden shoes and brushed past Mary into the warmth of the cottage, then recoiled from Robert Medina’s glower. “Where have you been, walking the roads at this hour? What would the rest of your family say if they knew the way you carry on?”
“Robert.” Mary’s voice was soft, but she shielded Regina, taking her muddy coat from her shoulders, following her to her room. “What happened to you? We were worried sick.”
“I’m okay, I am, really. I got lost. Well, not exactly lost. I walked on somebody’s property by mistake, and he chased me off, so I had to go around a long way.”
“Did he do anything to you? Did he hurt you?”
“No! No, he just scared me.”
Blue Lake Page 6