The Secrets of Lake Road: A Novel

by Karen Katchur

  Adam looked up at her, his eyes round and innocent, but in them Caroline could see he wanted the truth, as all kids do. “Yes,” she said. “They’re hoping the snappers will lead them to Sara.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

  A few more steps and they reached the parking lot where the recovery team gathered in what appeared to be a break in the search. Their watercraft was docked. They drank soda pop and ate sandwiches. Caroline looked toward the Pavilion and, sure enough, one of the doors was flung open. Maybe the snack stand had opened to feed the men. Sara’s parents were positioned on the hood of the car in the same position Caroline had found them hours earlier. A man dressed in recovery gear was talking with them. But other than the team and Sara’s parents, there wasn’t anyone else around.

  “I better get home,” Adam said. “See you later.” He walked on the outer rim of the parking lot, staying far away from the scene.

  Caroline took the same path through the woods to avoid the recovery team as well. Cougar announced her presence with a round of barking. She vowed to bring him a treat on her next time through.

  When she reached The Pop-Inn, jug full of lake water in hand, she spied her father’s blue pickup truck parked alongside the cabin. She raced around back. He was sitting on the steps, wearing blue jeans and a gray T-shirt. His messy brown hair fell haphazardly across his forehead. Her mother was sitting next to him, her hands folded in her lap.

  “Daddy!” she squealed, and dropped the jug to the ground as she launched herself into his arms.

  “Hey there, Caroline.” He laughed and gave her one of his bear hugs. “I missed you, too,” he whispered into her ear.

  She pulled back to look at him just in time to see her mother point to the jug at the bottom of the steps.

  “What’s that?” her mother asked.

  Caroline lifted her chin. “Water from the well.”

  Anger flickered across her mother’s face but disappeared as quickly as it came. “Of course it is,” she said, and stood.

  Caroline watched her mother cross the yard, walking like a person who had lost her way, drifting without any purpose. Her mother dropped into the hammock under the apricot tree. And Caroline found herself wondering if the trip to the well had been worth it, made purely out of spite, making her mother angry for a brief moment, and in the end, only pushing her mother further away.

  She turned toward her father. “When did you get in?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Kevin watched Jo walk away. It seemed to him, she was forever walking away. Even after all these years, the sway of her hips and the toss of her long dark hair jump-started his heart and stirred him below. He often had to remind himself that she was no longer sixteen, young and free, that she was a grown woman and she was his. Well, legally she was his wife, but although she had been loyal as far as he knew, she would never really be his. Her heart and soul seemed to be elsewhere, and he didn’t let himself think too hard or too long about where that might be.

  They were kids when they first met, barely thirteen, about the same age as Caroline was now. Jo had the same lanky arms and legs as his daughter, but that was where the likeness ended. Caroline had his brown hair and deep brown eyes where Johnny looked more like his mother with his hair as dark as night.

  But Jo at thirteen was a sight to be seen with her hazel doe eyes, dark hair, and golden sun-kissed skin. She had been attached to Billy’s side even then, following his lead, hanging on his every word. She was smitten, and Kevin had hated him for it. The way she had looked at Billy had soured Kevin’s stomach until he had tasted bile on his tongue. What he wanted more than anything back then was for her to look at him that way.

  But in the end he had never blamed her.

  There was something about Billy that even Kevin had found irresistible. Billy had that “it” factor, whatever “it” was. He was charming with the girls and laugh-out-loud funny with the guys. He was quick with a joke and a smile. His pale blue eyes penetrated you when you had his attention, making you feel as if you were the only person in the world who existed. And to gain Billy’s interest, to have his eye-locking stare directed at you, made you feel special, made you feel like you mattered, like whatever you had to say was important. How was Kevin ever supposed to compete with that?

  One night they had been standing alone under the steps of the bar at the Pavilion drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Jo had taken off to pee in the woods across the parking lot. Eddie and Sheila had wandered to the pier, their silhouettes visible in the sliver of moonlight. And Billy, well, he had directed those piercing blue eyes at Kevin.

  “Do you have a thing for my girl?” he had asked.

  “What?” Kevin had shuffled his feet, swaying a little on his drunken legs. “What makes you think that?”

  “I see the way you look at her.” Billy’s voice had had an edge Kevin had never heard before, and it had made him uneasy. He had immediately wanted to make things right between them, to put his best friend’s mind at ease, no matter if what he had said was a blatant lie.

  “No way, Billy,” he had said. “You’re wrong.” He hadn’t known whether Billy had believed him that night, but looking back, it hadn’t mattered. In the end Billy’s suspicions had been confirmed.

  When Jo was settled on the hammock, head turned away, he looked back at his daughter. “So, what have you been doing with yourself?” he asked.

  Before Caroline could answer, Gram appeared behind the screen door. “Are you three hungry? I’ve got pork barbeque on the stove.”

  “None for me,” Jo mumbled.

  Kevin rubbed his stomach and elbowed his daughter. “How about you?” He hadn’t had a home-cooked meal in a long time, even if it was only pork sandwiches. On the occasional nights when he was home and not on the road, Jo rarely cooked. She was more of the takeout or frozen dinner kind of wife. She didn’t think too much of slaving over an oven, preparing meals for her family, when the fast food place down the street could do the job for her. “Besides,” she had reasoned. “I spend an hour making dinner, we sit at the table all of ten minutes, and then we’re finished. Everyone gets up and leaves, and I have to spend another hour cleaning dishes. What’s the point?”

  Gram felt differently, however, and Kevin supposed it was a generational thing. Gram believed her position was to take care of the home and her family. She walked around with an apron tied at her waist most of the time, cooking and baking, cleaning up after the kids. She was happy in her role.

  But Jo was a different breed of woman, questioning society’s ideals about who she should be, challenging everything from sexuality to family to the work force. If Jo hadn’t gotten pregnant at sixteen, Kevin firmly believed her life would look much different than it did today. He often felt he was to blame for proposing, for holding her back, and for being the very reason she didn’t become the woman she was meant to be.

  She often wore a retro red T-shirt with the Virginia Slim cigarette slogan, her favorite brand that read YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY. She’d stomp around the house complaining about picking up dirty laundry and vacuuming crumbs off the living room carpet, cursing that she hadn’t come a long way at all. Kevin attributed these occasional outbursts to PMS, but that was a sexist thought and one he wouldn’t dare say out loud. The truth was, he wouldn’t mind if she quit her housecleaning job—at least the one outside their home. It wasn’t like she was good at the whole cleaning lady thing anyway, but they needed the extra cash. Why Jo didn’t bother to look for a better job or think about some kind of a career was beyond his understanding. And in the end, sexist or not, he liked to imagine her wearing a little French maid’s uniform while he was hauling freight across country alone in his rig even though her work attire was really jeans and T-shirts.

  Sitting at the kitchen table in front of a steaming pulled pork sandwich and homemade potato salad made his stomach rumble. “This looks amazing.”

  Gram beamed. “Then eat,” she s
aid.

  During lunch Caroline remained unusually quiet, but every now and again she stole quick glances back and forth with Gram. Kevin attacked his sandwich, waiting for one of them to bring up the news from the lake. Jo had told him again about the bones and the drowning before he had both feet out of the pickup truck and on the ground. They had been discussing it right before Caroline had turned the corner and thrown herself into his arms. At the time all he could think about was that at least one of his girls was happy to see him.

  When he finished eating, he wiped his fingers on his napkin. “Well, I already heard about what happened,” he said, figuring he’d make it easier on them. “I’ll head down to the lake and see what I can find out.”

  “Can I come with you?” Caroline asked.

  “Why don’t you stay here and help Gram clean up?” He kissed her forehead. “I’ll let you know if there’s any news.”

  Caroline looked disappointed, but she nodded and reluctantly said, “Okay.” Gram kept her thoughts on the matter to herself. He wondered what she might’ve said to him about the bones if they had been alone.

  * * *

  Kevin followed the dirt road down the hill. He crossed onto Lake Road and continued downward toward the Pavilion. The doors were closed and the place looked deserted. The sight gave him pause. There was only one time in sixteen years that he remembered the Pavilion closing its doors to the public. He hadn’t expected all the memories the scene would conjure. All the emotions he had kept in check for so long stacked up inside him. His chest tightened, and he was having a hard time breathing. He wiped the back of his neck where moisture had gathered. The sun was hotter than usual, maybe because cooling off in the lake was no longer an option. The thought made him shiver despite the heat.

  Pull yourself together, he told himself. But now he understood the look in Jo’s eyes when he had first stepped out of the truck. She looked haunted, much more than usual. He stared at the CLOSED sign on the door. He suspected Heil planned on opening tomorrow no matter the outcome of the search. He couldn’t believe he had kept the Pavilion closed for three days as it was, and he couldn’t fathom the amount of money he had to be losing. Heil loved his money.

  Kevin gathered himself and willed his legs to keep moving. Each step he took around the building felt as though he were stepping back in time and what awaited on the other side would seize his heart all over again. When he turned the corner, he half expected to see Billy’s parents and sister, Dee Dee, crying, cursing, and a sixteen-year-old Jo, face drained of color, paralyzed by the scene unfolding in front her. But instead he saw the underwater recovery team standing around the watercraft. He recognized one of the men and slowly walked toward him.

  His tongue felt thick and clumsy, but he managed to say “Jim” in his normal voice, and he extended his hand. He had known Jim through Eddie; he was one of the regulars who frequented Eddie’s bar whenever he wasn’t volunteering for the local fire department.

  “What’s the situation?” Kevin asked.

  “We think she went down near the diving boards. It’s a fifty-foot drop. There’s so much muck at the bottom, it makes searching difficult even for the best divers. You can’t see shit.” He glanced at Kevin. “But you know that. Damn near impossible.”

  And yet, Kevin wanted to add, they were able to find bones in all that muck, but Jo had warned that Heil meant to keep that quiet, not wanting to remind people of past drownings. For once, Kevin agreed with Heil. “What’s the next step?” he asked instead.

  “They’re going to widen the search area.” He lifted his baseball cap and scratched his head. “Some of the fishing guys caught some snappers. They think they have a better chance of finding her with the turtles. You ever hear of such a thing?”

  Kevin shrugged. It was how they had found Billy. And in fact, he had heard of other instances where unusual methods had been used. An airplane had gone down in the Atlantic several years back, and divers reported that crabs had unintentionally led them to the carnage. He supposed snappers weren’t any different from crabs, feeding on what was provided. People. Humans. We were part of the food chain whether we liked it or not.

  Jim situated the cap back onto his head and pulled the bill down low, hiding his eyes. “It might not be a bad idea to try it,” he said. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “I hope it doesn’t become a circus out there.” Kevin thought of Stimpy and his men on boats, following the lines tied to snappers and what that would look like to the little girl’s parents. For a second the image of Billy’s body flashed in his mind’s eye, how the men pulled Billy into the boat and then dumped him onto the beach. His flesh had been shredded to the bone on one of his thighs, his forearm clawed off. The skin on his chin had been torn, and the flap lay on his neck.

  “You okay?” Jim asked.

  “Yeah,” Kevin said. “Sure.” He allowed himself a glance at the girl’s parents. “Did anybody tell them what to expect?”

  Jim looked at the couple and then turned back to Kevin. “Nope. I imagine right now, they just want her found.”

  “Right,” Kevin said, wondering how in the world anyone could prepare them for what horrors finding their daughter would bring. It had been three days. There was no telling what she was going to look like when they managed to pull her out.

  He turned to the sound of a car. The sheriff’s vehicle pulled into the lot and parked near the girl’s parents. Sheriff Borg got out and talked to the couple. He glanced in the direction of the underwater recovery team where Jim and Kevin were standing.

  Kevin looked at the ground and turned away from the sheriff. “I’ll catch you later,” he said to Jim, slinking away, not wanting to attract any attention to himself.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The sun was making its slow descent behind the mountains when Jo climbed the stairs to the second-floor bar. She found Kevin sitting at the far end of the room away from the crowd that had gathered at the tables. Eddie leaned on the bar in front of him. The two had their heads together, and she immediately walked over to them, wanting to know what was going on. She had spent most of the day wandering the colony, avoiding the cabin and cleaning closets.

  “Hey,” she said, and sat on the stool next to Kevin.

  Kevin looked up and caught her eye. He still looked at her sometimes the way he did when they were teenagers, as though he was seeing her for the first time, and his eyes filled with the same deep desire. And like when they were teenagers, her body reacted, her yearning just as strong. But she wished he wouldn’t look at her that way now. Ever. It made her feel so damn guilty.

  Eddie put a cold beer in front of her. “The vultures are at it again,” he said, nodding in the direction of Heil and his crew.

  “I heard.” She turned in her seat to look at the mob when one of the men with Heil yelled, “It’s been three damn days! It’s time to take this matter into our own hands.”

  “I have a family to feed,” Nate said. He owned the bait and tackle shop located at the opposite end of the lake. “I empathize with the parents, but a man’s got to provide, and I can’t do that if no one can fish on that lake.”

  She turned back around, having heard it all before. It wasn’t until Stimpy bounded up the steps and dropped a snapper the size of a truck tire onto the bar, that the crowd hushed.

  “This is the biggest one I caught, but I’ve trapped a half dozen more, and they’ll work just as good.” Stimpy looked at Heil who nodded his approval.

  “What about the sheriff?” Jonathon asked.

  “I don’t see him doing anything to stop us,” Stimpy said, and again looked at Heil.

  Heil mumbled, “That’s true.”

  “Any objections?” Stimpy asked.

  “No, no,” the crowd of men muttered. Jonathon raised his arms, surrendering. The women in the crowd looked away. Jo stared at the beer in her hand.

  “All right then.” Stimpy picked up the large snapper by its tail, managing to keep the turtle’s mouth
away from his body. It looked to weigh close to fifty pounds. “Let’s do this,” he said, and walked out.

  In another minute the crowd dispersed. Some left the bar, while others bellied up for a night of drinking to try to forget what they had just agreed to.

  “Maybe I should talk to the little girl’s mother,” Jo said.

  Kevin turned on the stool to face her head on. “What could you possibly say to help?”

  “I’m not sure, but someone should say something. Don’t you think?”

  “Why should it be you?”

  “Why not?” she asked, and looked at Eddie, who tossed his hands up as a way of saying he was staying out of it and made his way down to the other end of the bar.

  “I don’t know,” Kevin said, and lowered his voice. “It might sound like you know something about how she feels. Like maybe you’re still pining away for someone.”

  She glared at him. Why did he always do that, say things to see how she would react? He was always testing her. “Take that back, Kevin.”

  “Why?” he muttered.

  “Take it back,” she said sharply.

  “Okay, okay.” He put his hand on the back of her neck and squeezed maybe harder than he should. “Relax. I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say. I didn’t mean it.”

  She stared at him a second more. “Yeah, okay,” she said, and he let her go. She sensed people watching them.

  He turned back to the bar and picked up his beer. She peeled the label off her bottle. The fact that she had been Billy’s girl first was something Kevin couldn’t, or wouldn’t, forget.