The Secrets of Lake Road: A Novel

by Karen Katchur

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jo sat at the far end of the bar, facing the door. She was drinking soda. It was too early for beer and, technically, the bar wasn’t open. Eddie was kind enough to let her sit inside, out of the rain, although the storm had ended some time ago. He was in one of his moods and didn’t offer much conversation, which was just as well. She didn’t feel much like talking anyway.

  She twisted her hair and let it fall in front of her shoulder. Her shirt was damp and her feet dirty from traipsing around the lake in flip-flops. She had searched everywhere after first stopping at Megan’s cabin, where Megan made a point of telling Jo that she hadn’t seen Caroline since they rode their bikes to the Country Store the day before. The Pavilion was open, but empty. She hoped Kevin had better luck. She checked her phone, considered calling her boss one more time, but she couldn’t get a signal. She dropped it onto the bar. So that was that.

  The crowd that had been on the docks started trickling in. Heil walked in with Stimpy and a couple of other fishermen, and she found herself amidst another community meeting. She sat on the edge of the stool and gripped the soda in front of her, wondering if Patricia would show up. She had to find a way to get Patricia alone and ask how she knew Billy, and why she acted as though he was still alive.

  The men were seated and the discussion started.

  “Why is the sheriff asking questions about that boy Billy and those bones?” one of Stimpy’s cronies asked. “Why’s he bugging us? He said nothing’s official, so why’s he drudging up old news?”

  Jo steadied herself, not making eye contact with any of the men. Although she could’ve sworn every one of them glanced in her direction at the mention of Billy’s name.

  “I’ll talk to the sheriff,” Heil said.

  “It’s bad enough that girl is still out there,” someone bellowed. “He keeps talking about those bones, and he’s going to scare people away.”

  “Hell, I don’t think they’re scared. I think they’re bored,” Jonathon jumped in. “I had two families pack up their vehicles and head home,” he said. “No one wants to hang around the lake in the summer heat if they can’t enjoy the water. Although it’s tragic what happened, people are restless. They’re good people, hardworking people, who spent their hard-earned money to come here. They want to spend their time on the lake fishing and swimming. It’s what they expect, or they want their money back.”

  Some of the other cabin owners chimed in, complaining they, too, had worked hard to fill their rentals and couldn’t afford refunds or cancelations.

  “What about the Trout Festival in a few days? There are a couple hundred people or more expected to come. The kids expect to fish in the tournament. We can’t disappoint the kids,” the father of the Needlemeyer twins said.

  “Okay, okay.” Heil held up his hands to quiet them down. “We’re not canceling the festival or the fishing tournament.”

  “Well, this mess has to be cleaned up by then. We can’t have a tournament while there’s a boat out there dragging the lake for that little girl’s body,” Jonathon said.

  Heil stared at the men long and hard. “You’re not going to lose anymore renters,” he said to Jonathon. “And no one’s canceling anything,” he said to all of them.

  “But I swear, I saw the families packing up the Blue Hen,” a man from the back of the room said.

  The crowd murmured. It was true. Other renters were talking about leaving. The gossip went round and round.

  “Not one person has rented a boat in five damn days,” Stimpy said.

  Nate chimed in about not having any customers, about how he, too, couldn’t afford to lose any more money.

  “Let’s face it: nobody is going to get near the water with those boats out there looking for that little girl,” one of the men said.

  Another said, “It’s been too long. What’s the likelihood of finding her now anyway?”

  “You mean what’s the likelihood there’s anything left to find,” someone said. The group nodded its assent. “They’ll never find scraps. The lake is too damn big. She was small to begin with.”

  “You brought up a good point.” Heil’s voice boomed over the crowd. He pulled his shorts high on his expansive stomach. “Maybe we can talk the recovery team into limiting their search to early morning. There aren’t many of them left now anyway.”

  “What about us?” Stimpy asked, motioning to his gang of fishermen.

  “Same goes for you,” Heil said. “Trap more snappers, but leave them in their cages. Let everybody swim and fish and enjoy themselves. We can pick up the search in the off-hours.” He paused. “Although I agree, there’s probably not much left of her to find.”

  Kevin stepped inside the bar as the rumble of the crowd subsided. Jo immediately went over to him. She grabbed his hand and led him down the stairs to the parking lot. She wanted to know if he had found Caroline, but she couldn’t ask him here, not with Heil and the fishermen within earshot.

  “Did you find her?” she asked once they were outside and alone.

  “No.” He stepped closer to her. He smelled wet like the rain mixed with cigarette smoke, but underneath it all, she smelled the soap on his skin, a scent unique to him. “Would you please tell me what’s going on,” he said.

  “Caroline opened Stimpy’s traps and let the snappers out.”

  “That doesn’t sound like something she would do.”

  “I know. But I’m pretty sure she did.”

  “Come on, why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand her sometimes. Maybe she thought it was cruel to capture them.” Caroline may have believed the ends didn’t justify the means, and although Jo was frustrated with her daughter, she also couldn’t help but feel proud of her too. In some ways Caroline was right. It was brutal both to the turtles, the ones who got tangled in the lines, and to the little girl now thought of as bait. It was a harsh reality. Sometimes life was cruel.

  Kevin nodded.

  She motioned to the bar, to where Heil and the group of men plotted inside. “They want to give up the search,” she said. “And the sheriff”—she kept her voice low—“he was asking some of the men questions … you know, about Billy.”

  She waited for him to say something, anything, but he remained quiet. He always acted crazy whenever she brought up Billy. He wouldn’t even look at her.

  Then he said, “Why don’t you go see if Caroline is back at the cabin with Gram? I’ll find out what’s going on inside.” He took the stairs two at a time.

  She looked across the parking lot, spotting Sheriff Borg and Patricia, and then turned her gaze to the lake and the lone watercraft with the last three men from the recovery team.

  She raced up the hill to Lake Road and the cabin.

  * * *

  Jo pushed open the door to the screened-in porch. Inside she found Caroline and Gram sitting on the porch swing with a photo album opened in their laps. Gram exchanged a look with Jo and shook her head: a motion that Jo understood to mean that Gram didn’t want her to confront her daughter. She wanted her to keep quiet. But since when did Jo listen to Gram?

  “Caroline, where have you been?” She crossed her arms and looked down at the flip-flops on her daughter’s feet.

  “I went for a bike ride,” Caroline said, and avoided looking at Jo in an attempt to hide her lying eyes.

  Jo could always tell when Caroline was lying. She was terrible at hiding her emotions. Her face gave her away every time. All Jo had to do was look at her daughter to know what she was feeling on the inside. She suspected it had to do with her age and innocence. Thank goodness, her daughter at least had that.

  “You wore flip-flops to ride your bike? Where are your sneakers?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t find them.”

  “Because they were covered in mud and Gram had to throw them away. Do you want to tell me how they got so dirty?”

  “I don’t know.” Caroline stretched out the last word soundi
ng like a whiny guilty child.

  “Please look at me,” Jo said. “And tell me you didn’t sneak out of your room last night and mess with Stimpy’s traps.”

  Caroline dipped her head and hid her face under the visor of her baseball cap. “I didn’t,” she said in the same whiny guilty voice.

  “That’s enough,” Gram said. “She said she had nothing to do with releasing those snappers, and I believe her.”

  Over the top of Caroline’s lowered head, Jo read Gram’s lips. Leave her alone.

  Jo looked away. So Gram was taking Caroline’s side. Not once in all of Jo’s life had Gram ever stuck up for her. Not when she had been a pregnant teenager, a time when she had needed her most. And not now, when Gram clearly understood that Caroline had broken a law. For an instant Jo felt envious of her own daughter, and at the same time she felt petty and childish, too.

  “Who’s this?” Caroline asked, and pointed to a photograph in the album.

  Gram looked down through the reading glasses she had perched on the tip of her nose. “I’m not sure,” she said.

  They both ignored Jo at this point. It took everything Jo had not to yell that she was her mother, demand Caroline answer her questions, but she happened to glimpse at the colored photo and did a double-take. It was a picture of Billy at his cabin. He was holding up a lake trout. Jo had taken the picture. Dee Dee was in the shot, along with a little girl Jo couldn’t place.

  “Where did you get these?” she asked, but she already knew the answer. They were stored in the back closet all these years, the one Gram had finally decided to clean out.

  Caroline kept her finger on the little girl in the photo. “She looks like Sara, the little girl who drowned.” She looked up at Jo, a little frightened.

  “Oh my god,” Jo said. “That’s not Sara, that’s Pattie Dugan.” Patricia. “Dee Dee used to babysit Pattie every summer. Pattie is Sara’s mother.”

  “I’ll be,” Gram said. “I remember her parents, Bob and Jean. They rented the Sparrow for many summers. Nice people. Good people.”

  Good people meant lake people, regulars who were accepted in the association and community. It meant Pattie had been one of them this entire time. Jo touched her neck and throat.

  Gram continued. “But they stopped coming when Bob lost his job. I heard later they divorced,” she said. “But that’s all lake rumors. I don’t know if any of that is true.”

  Jo had to sit down, and she plopped onto a wicker rocking chair across from Caroline and Gram and the photo. It wasn’t the shock of seeing a picture of Billy that made her knees weak, although that was a part of it. It was the surprise to find out she had known who Patricia was all along. Patricia Starr was little Pattie Dugan.

  Pattie must’ve been nine or ten years old in the photograph. It was no wonder Jo didn’t recognize her now that she was an adult. It all seemed logical except the part about Billy.

  Was it possible Patricia, Pattie, didn’t know Billy had drowned that summer?

  Jo tried to think if she had seen Pattie in the summers since then, but how could she be sure? Jo had only been able to stay with Gram for a couple of days at a time before taking off. She hadn’t spent an entire summer at the lake since she was sixteen.

  “Do you remember what summer they stopped coming?” she asked Gram.

  “My goodness, I’d have to think about it. I’m not sure.”

  Jo didn’t like the feeling that crept up her spine.

  “This changes everything,” she said. “It’s Pattie’s little girl out there. She’s one of us. They must not know.” She was referring to the lake association and even Sheriff Borg. “Heil will have to continue searching. He can’t leave a regular out there.”

  The logic was twisted but true. A first-timer, an unknown without any attachment to the lake community, someone who didn’t contribute year after year to help line the pockets of Heil and the locals, wouldn’t be treated the same. If the lake people had any rules—hell, if they had any conscience at all—it was their unwavering loyalty to their own kind. They may have reopened the beach when Billy had drowned, but they had never stopped searching or limiting their search like they planned to do with Sara. This was because Billy was one of them and Sara wasn’t, but now it seemed as though she was.

  “Mom,” Caroline said.

  Jo looked from Gram to her daughter. She had almost forgotten Caroline was there.

  “Is that Billy?” Caroline asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Gram slammed the photo album shut, startling Caroline.

  “That’s enough reminiscing for one afternoon,” Gram said, and stood. “Is anyone hungry? I’ll make sandwiches.” She rushed to the kitchen, taking the photo album with her.

  Caroline looked to her mother for an answer to her question, an explanation. Was the boy in the picture the same boy who drowned? Was it Billy, her mother’s old boyfriend and her father’s friend? But Caroline could tell from her mother’s expression that she had already lost her. Her mother had retreated deep inside herself to those dark places Caroline recognized and wished she didn’t. It was anyone’s guess when her mother would surface. The only thing that surprised Caroline was that her mother hadn’t raced out the door.

  “Forget it,” Caroline said. She’d find the answers to her questions on her own somehow, some way.

  She returned to her bedroom where she found the new sneakers. She pulled on a pair of socks and then slipped the sneakers on. She’d get them a little dirty and no one would be the wiser. Gram had promised she’d keep her secret once she explained to Gram her reasons, the same reasons she used with Adam, although she didn’t mention his part, not wanting to implicate him. She was willing to take full responsibility for the two of them if it came down to that. It was her idea, her plan, her doing.

  When she had told Gram she couldn’t stand the thought of what those snappers would do to Sara, Gram had more than understood—she had agreed and believed Caroline brave for taking a stand albeit an illegal one.

  “Sometimes,” Gram had said, “doing the right thing means you have to break some rules.”

  They agreed to keep it between themselves. It would be their secret and theirs alone. Gram wouldn’t tell Caroline’s mother what she had done, and this suited Caroline just fine. Her mother may suspect, but she would never know for sure, if Caroline could help it. Now Caroline and Gram had secrets too. Take that, Caroline whispered to herself about her mother.

  Gram appeared in the doorway. “I’ve got everything out on the table.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “I think I’m going to find Megan instead.”

  “Well.” Gram pressed her lips together in frustration at having set out food no one was going to eat. “Why don’t the two of you come back here? There’s more than enough sandwiches and you can play board games or cards, do something fun for awhile.”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll ask her.” She didn’t want to hurt Gram’s feelings, but she didn’t want to play games. She wondered if she would ever feel like doing anything fun again.

  She stepped outside. The air was thick with humidity from the earlier storm. The day was hot. She rubbed the sides of her sneakers into the dirt where the grass would never grow. She kicked a couple of rocks to give the white tops a broken-in look, and hopped on her bicycle.

  The seat was still wet from her ride in the rain that morning. She had gotten up and went straight to the lake to discover her plan had worked. The men weren’t on the water searching for two reasons: the storm and the fact that their turtles were gone. They were standing on Stimpy’s porch. She could just make out their cross faces from where she sat on her bike in the parking lot.

  When Sheriff Borg emerged from Stimpy’s place, she took off, pushing her bike through the woods, which was no easy task. She wound her way behind the lakefront cabins as quietly as she could. She didn’t stop until she reached Adam’s cabin. She hid her bike behind a tree and tapped on his window much in the same way sh
e had done the night before.

  He wasn’t happy to see her.

  “I can’t come out,” he said. “My mom is mad. She wanted to know why the floor in my room was covered in mud.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her I got up early to fish, but the storm chased me inside.”

  “Good thinking,” Caroline said, and then she added, “Our plan worked.”

  “I know,” Adam said. “It’s all anyone’s talking about.”

  “Okay”—she put her finger to her lips—“don’t say a word to anyone. No one. And they won’t catch us.”

  Of course, this was before she had learned about the muddy footprints they had left behind on the dock. She hadn’t known then that Gram had replaced her sneakers with new ones, or she would’ve suggested Adam do the same. She wondered if she should risk another trip to his cabin to warn him and tell him to get rid of his old sneakers too. But then again, Adam had given his mother a solid explanation for the mud.

  She pedaled across the yard, deciding to go to Megan’s like she had told Gram. She entered the dirt road and almost hit a car coming toward her. She braked hard and swerved to the side.

  “Careful, now,” the sheriff said through the open window of the patrol car. He pulled up next to her. “Are your parents inside?” he asked.

  She tried to swallow. “My grandmother’s home.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “Why don’t you park that bike and walk me in?”

  She did what she was told and got off her bike. She walked it into the yard on shaky legs. While she struggled with the kickstand, he stepped out of the car and put on his sheriff’s hat.

  “Gram,” she called, and stepped through the side door that led to the kitchen. She was hoping to avoid her mother on the screened-in porch. With any luck, her mother had taken off.

  The sheriff loomed behind her. He was twice her size and three times her weight. She thought she might cry.

  Gram was standing at the kitchen sink washing a plate. When she saw the sheriff behind Caroline, she turned off the faucet and stuck her hand holding the wet towel onto her hip. It soaked the bottom of her shirt and the top of her favorite pants with the elastic waistband.