Green Lake

by S. K. Epperson

  Whatever she was doing, she was making him think more about her, and he knew he was only setting himself up for disappointment in doing that. She would be packing up and leaving at the end of the summer, making all considerations moot. He would rather she go back to being haughty and demanding than feeding him and touching him and saying nice things to him. She didn't know how long it had been for him, how the weeks had blended into months and the months into years and how he was usually so utterly exhausted when he came home that he was too tired even to touch himself and masturbate away the pressures inside his body.

  She had a way of making the tiredness seem less. When he found her sitting in his truck that evening his adrenaline went to work all over again, and when she spoke, talked about his doing a good job, he experienced an odd flushing sensation under his skin, more pleasure than pride. Still he didn't know how to take her. She was different from anyone he had ever been exposed to, even in school. He had never had a teacher who looked like Madeleine Heron. He might not have graduated if he had.

  He took one last drink of Jack Daniel's before putting the bottle away in the cabinet. His senses were practically reeling now, unused as he was to the effects of alcohol. He moved to the kitchen window and looked up to the log cabin. The curtains were closed, but he saw a light in Madeleine's bedroom, the same bedroom where he had seen her take off her clothes on the first night.

  Eris thought about what he had seen that night, the generous, rosy-tipped breasts, and the slender, curved stomach above rounded white hips, and he went to lie down on his bed.

  Before he could lower a hand to touch himself, the image of little Kayla Michelle Lyman intruded, her silky blonde hair wrapping itself around his wrist while he struggled to free her from the pontoon boat's rope.

  Eris rolled off the bed and stumbled to the bathroom, hanging his head over the toilet and vomiting until the water was brown with undigested whiskey and even his eyeballs hurt with the effort to vomit more.

  The next morning he showered, toweled himself, and brushed his teeth, all without managing to meet his own eyes in the mirror. He felt like shit, and he wasn't going to get into the reasons with himself. He took a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator for breakfast and downed four aspirin before leaving the house.

  He called the lake office by radio later that morning to see if anyone had heard whether the autopsy on the little girl had been completed. It had, but the voice on the other end said he had been instructed not to talk about the results over the radio. Eris stopped and used his cell to call his superior.

  “She had semen in her stomach,” he was told. “Some bruising around her ears and jaws.”

  Eris swallowed and felt his stomach deliver a threatening rumble. “Did she drown?”

  “Yes. You might stay close to the lake today. When people hear some sick bastard is out there getting his rocks off killing kids, there could be a mass exodus.”

  Eris disagreed. People would keep a closer watch on their children certainly, but the idea of such deranged activity would see most hanging around, looking with suspicion at strangers and talking in shocked, hushed tones to their neighbors. People were funny that way, and they weren't going to change any time soon. The park would go on as before, with a little more tension than usual and a little less friendliness.

  Sometime that afternoon the news leaked out, and Eris was stopped no less than a dozen times by people wanting to know if it was true. Eris said there had been no official word yet. Technically, he was not lying. There had been no official news release.

  Around three o'clock he spotted Manuel Ortiz edging around a tiny cove. Ortiz called to him and docked his Ranger bass boat at a private dock so he could lope up and talk to Eris. Eris watched him approach and prepared to answer the same questions he had been answering all day.

  “You know the people who own that dock?” Eris asked when Manuel reached the truck.

  “No,” said Manuel, grinning. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “Not today,” Eris answered. “How are you?”

  “Very well, thank you. Madeleine has mentioned your kindnesses to her in the last week, and Jacqueline and I thought to repay you by inviting you to dine with us this evening.”

  Eris opened his mouth, and Manuel held up a hand.

  “Before you say no, let me tell you about the juicy porterhouse steak that awaits you if you say yes. I will begin cooking at seven, and it would please me very much if you agree to join us. Madeleine's life of late has not been easy, and we appreciate anyone who makes the effort that you have. She can be a difficult woman, and she has admitted to being difficult with you.”

  This surprised Eris. He couldn't see her admitting to being difficult. The part about her life of late not being easy intrigued him, but he wouldn't ask.

  He wondered what else she had said to them about him. He didn't want to spend the evening talking about the dead little girl, or his part in yesterday's nightmare.

  “Thank you,” he said, “but I'll pass.”

  Manuel was disappointed. “She can be quite charming when she chooses. She is not so ... hard . . . always.”

  “I've got things to do at home. Thank you for the invitation, and good luck with your fishing.”

  Manuel stepped away from the truck, and Eris drove on before he could say anything further to persuade him. He liked the idea of sitting down and eating a good steak with nice people, but none of them really knew each other, and Eris felt awkward and ill at ease in such situations. There were always those preliminary questions, covering everything everybody did, and where everybody went to school, and if they knew anyone in common. He wasn't any good at just sitting and chatting with Sometime that afternoon the news leaked out, and Eris was stopped no less than a dozen times by people wanting to know if it was true. Eris said there had been no official word yet. Technically, he was not lying. There had been no official news release.

  Around three o'clock he spotted Manuel Ortiz edging around a tiny cove. Ortiz called to him and docked his Ranger bass boat at a private dock so he could lope up and talk to Eris. Eris watched him approach and prepared to answer the same questions he had been answering all day.

  “You know the people who own that dock?” Eris asked when Manuel reached the truck.

  “No,” said Manuel, grinning. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “Not today,” Eris answered. “How are you?”

  “Very well, thank you. Madeleine has mentioned your kindnesses to her in the last week, and Jacqueline and I thought to repay you by inviting you to dine with us this evening.”

  Eris opened his mouth, and Manuel held up a hand.

  “Before you say no, let me tell you about the juicy porterhouse steak that awaits you if you say yes. I will begin cooking at seven, and it would please me very much if you agree to join us. Madeleine's life of late has not been easy, and we appreciate anyone who makes the effort that you have. She can be a difficult woman, and she has admitted to being difficult with you.”

  This surprised Eris. He couldn't see her admitting to being difficult. The part about her life of late not being easy intrigued him, but he wouldn't ask.

  He wondered what else she had said to them about him. He didn't want to spend the evening talking about the dead little girl, or his part in yesterday's nightmare.

  “Thank you,” he said, “but I'll pass.”

  Manuel was disappointed. “She can be quite charming when she chooses. She is not so ... hard . . . always.”

  “I've got things to do at home. Thank you for the invitation, and good luck with your fishing.”

  Manuel stepped away from the truck, and Eris drove on before he could say anything further to persuade him. He liked the idea of sitting down and eating a good steak with nice people, but none of them really knew each other, and Eris felt awkward and ill at ease in such situations. There were always those preliminary questions, covering everything everybody did, and where everybody went to school, and if they knew anyone i
n common. He wasn't any good at just sitting and chatting with people. Maybe if he drank more he would be better at it, but he didn't enjoy drinking and didn't trust himself when he did drink. It surprised him that anyone did. He was still paying for the desperation of the previous night.

  As he drove on he thought about the Lyman’s and wondered how they were holding up. He felt suddenly bad for thinking ill of them and their grandstanding on television. They couldn't help what they were anymore than he could help what he was. It was just the way things turned out.

  Ronnie's wife was sick. She had been sick ever since Ronnie called her yesterday and told her that her baby was dead. She couldn't eat anything, and even when she drank something she threw it right up. The people at the Trinity Shelter in Augusta were worried about her, and they couldn't understand why she was so angry at her husband, whose poor head was shaved half bald where it had been stitched, and who looked as if someone had gut-kicked him and left him fighting for air.

  The reason for Sheila's anger was clear to Ronnie. She thought he had done it. She thought he had killed their baby girl to get more money coming in. Not enough money was coming in, so she thought he had killed Kayla to get more sympathy and more begging time on TV.

  He had called his mom and told her to bring Kayla to the Haven a day or two early. He had to, because they were kicked out of the park, and he was going for really high drama by having his little girl show up looking for them just one day after they had been kicked out.

  But someone else had snatched her from in front of the Haven after his mother drove away. Someone bad had taken her and done dirty things to her before killing her, and it was killing Ronnie because he couldn't get his wife to believe that it wasn't him who had done it.

  What kind of wife would believe something like that about her own husband? Ronnie asked himself as he received yet another evil glare from the pasty-faced Sheila. She was sick, all right. She was sick in the head, thinking such things about him. She was making everyone in the shelter stare at him and whisper. Last night he had wanted to hit her so bad he nearly bit his lower lip in two trying to prevent it. If word got out that Ronnie Lyman slugged his wife, then those little five and ten dollar checks that were dribbling in out of sympathy for them would stop quicker than a mouse pissing.

  They might, anyway, if he couldn't get her to be nice to him again. Goddammit, they were going to bury their little girl tomorrow and she shouldn't be treating him as if she hated him. She even had Kelsey and Kendra looking at him like he was some bad old half-bald bogeyman.

  He threw himself onto his bunk and closed his eyes, tired of it.

  Sheila watched him, hating every freckle, every little hair in his eyebrows. The lazy, greedy, worthless bastard. She knew she should have left him the first time he hit her. She knew it. But by then she already had Kelsey, and no way to get a job without a high-school diploma. Her mom couldn't keep Kelsey because she worked, and there was no way Sheila could go back to high school with a baby. It was stupid to go on and have another baby, and even more stupid to have a third one. But Sheila loved her babies so much. They took all the love she had to give and gave it all back to her, something Ronnie would never come close to experiencing, let alone understanding. He was incapable of feeling love for anything. All he wanted out of life was food, shelter, free money, and someone to hit.

  That someone wasn't going to be her anymore, Sheila told herself. The filthy, disgusting animal wasn't going to get near her or her two other little girls. Let him go back to live with his mother and knock her around again. She was used to putting up with it. She had put up with it from Ronnie's dad, and then from Ronnie's older brother, and then from Ronnie. She did everything she was told and never argued. If anyone asked, she thought her boys were the most wonderful men ever to walk the earth. There were none better.

  They were all sick, Sheila told herself.

  All of them but her. After the funeral tomorrow, she was getting away. She was leaving and going to one of the other shelters who had offered help. Maybe they would help her get a GED so she could try and get a job somewhere. She could live in low-income housing and take a bus to work. She and the girls would get on all right without Ronnie. They might even do better, looking at the way things had gone for them so far. Sheila had never felt right about taking things from other folks. Her own mother was dumb as dirt and twice as poor, but she never took nothing from no one. She waitressed and carhopped and worked from the time she was fifteen, and there were plenty of times she could have applied for welfare and gotten it, but she never did.

  Sheila wasn't going to apply for it if she didn't have to, but she would wait and see how things worked out. The people in the shelter were really understanding and helpful and easy to talk to about such things. They understood when women feared the men they lived with, but feared going it alone even worse. But this thing with Kayla, this thing with her poor, dead baby was all she needed to get her mind made up. She had to get away from him. He was bad and he always had been bad and he wasn't going to be getting better anytime soon. All she needed for tomorrow was to line up some transportation for her and the girls. Then she would be gone, and Ronnie and all his lying, scheming, and cheating people by crying on television would be behind her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “He declined,” said Manuel in answer to his wife's question about whether Eris Renard would be joining them for dinner.

  Madeleine had known he would, but still her limbs stiffened.

  Jacqueline glanced at her before continuing to mix a blender full of daiquiris.

  “I forgot to mention it earlier, Madeleine, but your in-laws called me Thursday evening. They wanted to know where you were and how you're getting along. I said you were at our cabin, but I didn't say where. They wanted to know if you needed any money.”

  Her head lifted sharply, and Madeleine stared at her sister. “What?”

  “His mother admitted how insensitive they were after Sam's suicide. They blame it on shock. Now they realize everything you said was true, and they want to try to make it up to you.”

  “Bullshit,” said Madeleine, and Manuel frowned at her in disapproval.

  Jacqueline's look was patient. “I told them I would speak to you. If you wanted to contact them, you would.”

  “I don't want to.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “Can you blame me?” Madeleine asked, her temper flaring.

  “They practically accused me of murdering their son. How do you expect me to feel?”

  “Just as you do,” Jacqueline soothed. “Forget I mentioned it.” She turned to Manuel then said, “Madeleine took me over to meet her new friends today.”

  “The children you mentioned last night?”

  “Yes,” said Madeleine, relaxing somewhat. “We had a good afternoon.”

  “I got to call bingo,” said Jacqueline, pretending to preen. “And I was very good.”

  Manuel smiled at her and reached down to hand a scrap of the fat he was trimming off the steaks to the kittens at his feet.

  He did like cats. He played with them and talked to them and lovingly scratched their arched little backs.

  “Hey,” Jacqueline said. “Don't feed them on the floor. Find a plate if you're going to give them scraps.”

  Manuel swatted her on the bottom and she swatted playfully back, until he caught her and brought her to him for a kiss.

  Madeleine noiselessly excused herself and went out to the front porch, feeling embarrassed and a little envious of her sister and her luck in finding someone who suited her so perfectly.

  Sam and Madeleine had not been nearly so compatible, and she often thought she had married him simply because of the horrible experience she had had in her last year in the field and because she was nearing thirty and wasn't married yet. The day she married him she knew in her heart she did not love him in the romantic sense of the word, but he was funny and witty, handsome and athletic, and she loved being with him.

 
; Until he lost his job.

  Damn his parents for even daring to offer money after the way they had treated her at the funeral. Their cold stares and their refusal to ride in the limo with her or even sit near her during the service. How they had the gall to call up Jacqueline and—

  “Hello,” said a nearby voice, and Madeleine jumped to see Sherman Tanner strolling toward her with his little dog.

  “Hello, Mr. Tanner. How are you?”

  He ignored the question. The eyes in his thin face were practically glowing.

  “Did you hear what they found during the autopsy on the lost little girl?”

  Madeleine's mouth tightened in discomfort. “No.”

  “Semen,” Tanner said in a delicious, sibilant whisper, as if he were savoring the word. He waited until he saw Madeleine's eyes grow round before he added the words, “In her stomach”

  A shudder passed through Madeleine, and she carefully lowered herself to sit on the porch step. “She was murdered?”

  “It would appear so, wouldn't it?” Tanner answered.

  A flash of the little girl's face and body appeared in Madeleine's mind and she squeezed her eyelids shut and attempted to push the image away.

  “Horrible, isn't it?” said Tanner, still speaking in a whisper.

  Madeleine could only nod.

  “I heard Renard was the one who found her,” Tanner said.

  ”A pontoon boat with twelve frightened children found her, Mr. Tanner. Renard took her to shore.”

  “Says who?” said Tanner.

  “Says me. I was on the pontoon boat.”

  Tanner's eyes opened wide. ‘‘You were? You were on the boat with the kids? How did you find her? What did she look like?”

  Madeleine stood up in disgust, and she was about to open her mouth and tell Tanner how sick she thought he was when Jacqueline opened the door and said the steaks were almost ready.