“Go on,” Ned said to his brother. “Let’s see you do it. I dare you.”
Ted glared at his twin and then turned toward the ladder and started to climb. For as long as Caroline had known them, neither brother would ever back down from a dare. It was a brother thing, or maybe a twin thing, always trying to one up each other.
Caroline watched Ted ascend. She had to shield her eyes from the sun when he reached the very top. “This is stupid,” she said.
Ted walked to the end of the board. His brother called up to him, “Pencil jump.”
He dropped his head as though he were hoping no one would suggest how he had to do it, but of course his brother did. “Fine,” he said, and hesitated, head bowed, staring at the water below.
“Bwack, bwack, bwack.” Ned flapped his arms.
Ted wavered. Ned kept squawking, taunting him. Until he jumped.
Caroline pulled in a sharp breath. At the last second Ted spread his arms wide to prevent a deep plunge. He hit the water with a slap.
“Chicken!” Ned called when Ted surfaced. Then he turned to Adam and said, “Your turn.”
Caroline looked at Adam, whose face was no longer pale, but more ash gray. “Don’t try,” she said to him. “It doesn’t mean you’re a chicken. It means you’re smart.” She climbed the ladder to the low dive, but everyone knew you could never touch bottom jumping off the low dive. The lake was just too deep. Still she said, “Watch this, Adam,” and pencil jumped clean into the water. At first it was cool and refreshing, but the farther she sank, the temperature dropped to near freezing. And although she kept her eyes closed, the darkness of what lay below deepened. She kicked her long legs wildly, her arms paddling at a frantic pace, and propelled to the surface, relieved when her head broke above water and her lungs breathed in air.
“Doesn’t count,” Ned said when Caroline climbed the ladder and stepped back onto the pier. “You have to do it from the high dive.”
Caroline made a face at him. Ned resumed flapping his arms like a chicken. A little girl poked her head out from behind him. She was maybe six or seven years old, with blond braids and bright blue eyes. Her bathing suit was yellow with pink polka dots. She must be new to the lake. Caroline had never seen her before.
“Hi,” Caroline said, pushing Ned out of the way. “Is this your first summer here?”
The little girl smiled and nodded.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Sara,” she said.
“I’m Caroline.” She pointed to Megan, who hadn’t moved from sunning herself. “That’s my friend Megan. And the boys, well…” The boys had stopped teasing one another, and they jumped off the pier, splashing around in the lower end of the lake. “Don’t listen to them. They’re not very smart.”
Sara’s eyes widened. “Why not?”
“Because they’re not. They were just being stupid.”
Sara twisted her mouth to one side as though she was considering what Caroline was telling her.
A woman wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat was standing on the beach waving her arms at them. Caroline waved back. “Is that your mom?”
The little girl nodded.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Sara’s mother called.
“Okay,” Caroline called back.
“What are they up to now?” Megan interrupted, pointing to Adam and the twins. Adam was holding something in his hand. The twins were hunched over him, looking at whatever he had found.
Megan stood. “I’m going to find out what it is.”
Caroline hesitated, wanting to follow her. But Sara’s mother had turned her back, and Caroline couldn’t just walk away from the little girl.
“So,” Caroline said, looking over her shoulder at her friends. The circle they made around Adam tightened while she tried to think of something to say to Sara. “Do you like to swim?”
Sara smiled and nodded again.
“Me too.” Caroline looked toward the beach, where Sara’s mother was struggling with a beach umbrella. “Did you feed the ducks yet?”
“No,” Sara said.
Caroline used to love feeding the ducks when she was Sara’s age, although she couldn’t remember the reason why she had thought it was so fun. “Ask your mom if you can feed them.” She glanced at her friends again. The twins were holding whatever Adam had found, and Adam looked upset. “The ducks like it when you do,” she said absently, wondering what the twins were teasing Adam about this time.
Megan motioned to Caroline. “Come here!” she called.
But Sara’s mother still had her back turned as she continued to fight with the beach umbrella. Caroline glanced at her friends again. Adam’s face was flushed.
“Did you ever touch bottom?” Sara asked.
“What? No,” Caroline said. “Never.”
Megan continued waving her over. Caroline shifted her weight from her right foot to her left, gazing at her friends. Sara stared at the diving boards.
Finally Caroline couldn’t stand it any longer. She had to know what her friends were up to. Sara’s mother had said she would only be a minute. She reasoned Sara wouldn’t be left alone for long. She bent down so she was at eye level with the little girl. “Wait for your mom, okay?”
Sara nodded.
“Okay,” she said, and in the next moment she was racing down the pier. “And remember,” she called, “the boys were just being stupid!”
CHAPTER TWO
Jo fooled herself into thinking she didn’t know the reason she had hopped into the old Chevy and sped down the dirt road away from the cabin. She rolled down the window. A warm breeze blew her long hair from her shoulders. “Three Times a Lady” by the Commodores crackled on the radio. You couldn’t get a decent radio station within twenty miles of the lake. With the Pocono Mountains surrounding you on every side, reception was scant, and the outside world as distant as outer space.
She was stuck in a time warp, and the year was 1978, when the lake was at its finest if you listened to the old-timers tell it. Vacationers were attracted to the sense of familiarity, simplicity, sameness. It was the lake’s charm and the reason you came back year after year. The place and the people and their desire to cling to the good old days were what pissed Jo off. There wasn’t anything good about the good old days, at least none that she could remember.
Still, the song wasn’t bad, and for awhile she sang along as she drove around the colony and fought the urge to turn onto the highway and leave the blasted lake and everything that came with it behind.
Tired and worn from years of battling with Gram, her mother—whom she had stopped calling Mom when Johnny had come along—she sunk farther into the driver’s seat. Her right hand lay limp in her lap while she loosely gripped the steering wheel with her left. Everything caught her eye as she passed by, the cabins and screened-in porches, the fishing poles and tackle boxes left outside front doors, the maple tree she had stood under the first time she had kissed Billy.
She turned the corner and looped back around. The smell of sun baked earth filled her head, and the dampness from the lake clung to her skin. The sights, the smells, the feel—all of it reminded her of Billy.
If only Gram knew what she was asking, demanding she stick around for a couple of days, but then again maybe she did know and she just didn’t care. “You can’t change the past,” Gram had said. “All you can do is live with it.”
But the hardest part for Jo to understand was the disappointment in Gram’s eyes whenever she looked at her. It had become a thing between them, this look of disappointment, separating them through the years. Neither one knew how to bridge the gap nor did it seem that either one wanted to try. Too many years had passed. Too much had been said or not said for either to back down now. It was as though both mother and daughter had given up on each other.
“I’m disappointed in you, too,” she whispered to herself in the car as the Commodores crooned about love.
Subconsciously, or maybe consciously, she steered
toward Lake Road and headed down the hill, taking it slow, maneuvering the Chevy around the potholes nobody bothered to fill. She spied Johnny and his friends hanging out on the steps of the Pavilion. He cupped the cigarette he wasn’t supposed to be smoking in his hand and pretended not to recognize their car. As she drove past, she kept her eyes straight ahead.
Pretending not to see each other had been their unspoken agreement since Johnny had turned fourteen two years ago. She didn’t ask the typical questions a mother might ask her teenage son about where he was going and who he was going with mostly because she understood his desire for independence, for freedom. She believed Johnny appreciated the trust she had placed in him, and so far he hadn’t given her any reason not to. She understood better than anyone his need to stray.
After all, he was a lot like her.
He even looked like her—dark hair, full mouth, high cheekbones. The way he looked and behaved, it was easy to forget he was half of his father, too. More times than not she thought of him as solely hers. She didn’t rag on him about things like smoking and drinking as long as he didn’t do it in front of Gram. Besides, he only did those things while he was here. She understood that, too. There was something about this place that brought out the best and worst in you, pushing you to extremes.
“There’s something in the lake water,” she had often joked, but she never laughed. A part of her believed it was true.
Caroline had always been a different variety of kid. From the moment she had entered the world, she had made demands Jo struggled to meet—the feedings every hour, the crying, the fussing, the tantrums when things didn’t go her way. “Mommy, you stay here,” a three-year-old Caroline had said, stomping her foot whenever Jo had tried to leave the house.
The image of Caroline standing in the yard outside of the cabin cut across Jo’s mind. The way she had looked at her, the yearning in her eyes, had scared Jo. A part of her felt threatened by Caroline’s demands of constant love and attention. No matter what Jo said or did, no matter how much of herself she felt she gave, it was never enough. It would never be enough.
For a long time she tried to give her daughter what she could, all the hugs and kisses and affection she demanded, but somehow she’d always come up short. Her biggest fear, her failure as a mother, was simply that she didn’t have anything left to give.
At thirty-two-years old, Jo felt used up.
* * *
She continued driving past Johnny and his friends, and parked on the other side of the Pavilion. The lake poured out in front of her. It was beautiful on the surface, glimmering in the hot summer sun, the water dancing in rhythm against the shore. And yet, underneath all that refreshing sparkle, deep in its belly, its true form lay waiting, where its cold dark reality lurked.
Laughter drew her attention to the beach on her left. Already she could see it was crowded. Families spread out on blankets and chairs. Kids jumped off the low dive and raced to the floating pier in the middle of the lake. Younger kids stayed in the shallow water closer to their parents, where it was safe.
The lake had been her summer haunt since childhood. Gram and Pop had bought the cabin in 1984 at a time when the resort was considered one of the hottest vacation spots in the Poconos. It was at a time when the beach had been overcrowded with vacationers, and a young Jo had to race through hordes of people with her towel and Gram’s beach chair just to get a spot near the water. Pop had to reserve even the smallest of rowboats two weeks in advance if he wanted to do a little fishing.
The lake had held the Trout Festival, the largest festival in the county. But it was the Pavilion that Jo had loved best as a kid. It was always bustling, the second-floor bar hosting concerts with some of the biggest local names in the music industry. Sometimes late at night, when she should’ve been asleep, she’d sneak out of the cabin to listen to the band. She would press her cheek and palms against the Pavilion’s outside wall, the whole building vibrating with sound as though it were alive and dancing with the occupants inside.
Over the years the lake’s popularity had waned and the crowds had thinned, with new vacation spots opening for competition. But the regulars—the cabin owners and locals—kept coming, and together they remained loyal. Once you fell in love with the lake, the Pavilion, it was unlikely you’d fall out.
After tucking her hair behind her ears, Jo climbed out of the Chevy. A delivery truck pulled into the lot. She waited while it backed up to the stairs leading to the second-floor bar. A man in a gray uniform emerged with a clipboard in his hand. He opened the back door of the truck where the kegs and cases of beer were stacked.
Jo hustled past and trotted up the steps. Inside, the heat smoldered like an oppressive cloud. Eddie leaned on the bar, looking over a stack of order forms.
“We’re closed,” he said without looking up.
“Hey, stranger.” Jo sat on the stool in front of him.
He lifted his head and smiled wide. “Hey, Jo. I thought that was your boy I saw earlier. When did you get in?”
“This morning.”
“You look good.” His dark eyes settled on hers. His long hair was tied in a ponytail, and a sweat-stained red bandanna was wrapped around his head. “Do you want a beer?”
“I thought you were closed.”
“Not to you.” He popped the cap off a cold bottle and set the beer down in front of her. She took a long swallow before reaching for a cigarette. He was quick with a light, and when she leaned into the flame, she couldn’t help but notice his missing thumb tip, the one the snapper had bitten off when they were sixteen years old.
He glanced at his thumb, and she was embarrassed to have been caught staring. After all these years, she struggled to shake the image of him flapping that turtle through the water, screaming, splashing, and later, sitting on the beach, staining the sand black with his blood, his then girlfriend, Sheila, holding him.
She had been Billy’s girl back when it had happened. Everything in her life, good or bad or in-between, always led back to Billy.
* * *
She polished off the bottle of beer and set it on the bar, raising her pointer finger, signaling to Eddie for another. She couldn’t remember the last time she had gotten drunk in the middle of the afternoon. Maybe as far back as last week when she had split a bottle of wine with one of the other maids while they were scrubbing the floors in the half-a-million-dollar mansion they were hired to clean back home in New Jersey.
“So are you planning to stick around for a few days?” Eddie asked.
“It looks like it.” She didn’t have much choice. Gram was adamant about needing her help, although she still had to clear it with Rose, her boss. She raised the bottle to her lips. “Apparently, I have chores to do around the cabin,” she said before taking a long drink.
“Is Kevin joining you?” he asked.
“He had to haul a load to Arizona.” Although he was most likely on his way back by now. Kevin drove a big rig for a trucking company. He was on the road more than he was home, and she was okay with that. She understood it was easier for him to be away. He had given up so much, sticking by her when she became pregnant at sixteen with Johnny, marrying her when he could’ve walked away. She loved him for it. Sometimes she loved him so much, it hurt.
The delivery guy made an appearance with several cases of beer stacked on a dolly. Eddie rushed to help him. While the guys unloaded the order, she continued to smoke and drink, wondering how she was ever going to get through the next couple of days.
By the time Eddie returned to the bar, she was feeling dizzy from the heat. Frank Heil, the owner of the Pavilion, the bar, and the beach, was too cheap to leave the air conditioning on when the bar was technically closed. Eddie had to work in the heat until the sun went down and the doors were opened to customers.
“Here.” He opened another cold bottle and set it in front of her. “You know, I didn’t want to say anything earlier, but your boy was all over one of those Chitney girls.”
“
So soon? It didn’t take him long.” She picked up the cold bottle and placed it on her cheek.
“Those Chitney girls are, well, you know what I mean. I’d make sure Johnny knows what he’s getting into. The oldest sister, she’s got two kids, and she doesn’t even know who their father is.” He was about to say something more but then stopped.
People were shouting on the beach below. Their voices traveled through the open balcony and to the second-floor bar. Eddie looked at her. “That doesn’t sound good, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” she said.
A woman screamed.
CHAPTER THREE
Caroline crashed into the circle her friends made on the beach. She peered at the object in Adam’s hand. It looked like two pieces of rusted metal joined by an even rustier circular ring.
“What do you think it is?” Adam asked.
“It’s definitely old.” Ted picked it up and turned it over.
“If you’re cut,” Ned said to Adam, “you’re going to need a tetanus shot.”
“I told you, I’m not hurt,” Adam said.
“Where did you find it?” Caroline asked.
“Right there.” He pointed to the area near the pier where the water was shallow. “I did the pencil jump,” he whispered. “And my foot got caught on it.” He stammered and looked around for his mother, who was always yelling at him to be careful.
Megan took the metal object from Ted. “I think I know what it is.” She squinted in an ominous way. “I think it’s a horse’s bit,” she said. “From the horse in the legend.”
They huddled in close as they passed around the newfound treasure, an expression of awe on their faces. In hushed voices they agreed that yes, it certainly looked like a horse’s bit and appeared to be very old. Yes, it could be from the horse in the legend. More mention was made concerning tetanus shots. Adam kept shaking his head and saying over and over he didn’t get cut.
“What’s this about a horse’s bit?” The woman wearing the wide-brimmed sun hat, Sara’s mother, stepped forward. She had obviously been eavesdropping on their conversation.
The Secrets of Lake Road: A Novel Page 2