Rubbing her sore knee, Bit asked, “Do you live around here?”
The boy nodded, but said nothing.
“Where?”
The boy slowly raised a finger and pointed toward the lake. “There.”
But giggled. “Out there? Silly, that’s just a lake. You can't live in a lake. You'd drown.”
Ignoring the girl, Mason scooped up a handful of clean lake water and washed off her bleeding knee. Then, he tore off a piece of his own shirt and gently wrapped it around the wound. “This’ll help stop the bleedin' some,” he said, tying the ends of the rag in a knot, “but you’ll still be a’hurtin’ like fire fer a spell.”
“Thanks,” Bit said. She looked at him and said, “You sure talk funny, Mason.”
A wide grin spread across the boy’s smooth, round face. “You do too, Bit,” he snickered. He looked away for a moment, then asked: “Want to see a secret?”
“Sure. Where?”
He pointed toward the boathouse. “In there.”
“The boathouse?”
The boy’s smile broadened as he nodded.
“I’m not supposed to go in there alone. My Uncle Danny says it’s dangerous.”
“You ain’t a'gonna be alone. I’ll be a’with you.”
Bit thought for a moment. “Okay,” she said, “as long as you’re with me.”
The boy helped her to her feet, then guided her down the rocks over to the boathouse.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
LAURA FOUND THE KEYS to the storage shed hanging from a nail just inside the heavy pantry door alongside dozens of others. She knew it was the right one because of the little white tag that read: “Official Bunker: Authorized Personnel Only.”
“Kooky survivalist,” she chortled.
She went outside and headed toward the shed. The building was not big—about twenty by forty feet in diameter and some twenty feet in height. It was made of some kind of reinforced steel painted in an army green color. There were no windows, and the thick door looked stout and sturdy enough to withstand a direct hit from an Abram’s tank. She rapped on the door with her knuckles. Solid steel, too.
A regular fortress.
This is where Laura wanted to hide should the A-bombs ever starting falling.
She stuck the key inside the padlock and turned it. The heavy door swung back on grating hinges, and she found herself staring into a dark room stacked to the ceiling with boxes and crates of all shapes and descriptions. She found a light switch and flipped it up. Nothing happened. Of course, silly--the power's off.
Looking around, she found a battery-operated lantern on a shelf just inside the door and clicked it on. The burst of light quickly turned darkness into light.
Laura had not really known what to expect she'd find inside Danny's "survival bunker." But when the light came on and flooded the room, her mouth literally fell open. “You've got to be kidding me," she said.
⸙
“COME ON,” THE BOY said to Bit. “It’s over here, jes' inside this little building.”
Bit followed him tentatively inside the boathouse. The door slammed shut behind her and she flinched. She walked along the narrow U-shaped platform, careful to keep her balance. Danny's small sailboat bobbed up and down against the mooring, making a strange scraping sound. Scrawled alongside the bow was the name, Princess Augusta.
“That’s my Uncle Danny’s boat,” she said to the boy who waited for her on the other side of the ramp. Her voice echoed eerily across the tiny room.
“Over here,” he called to her, waving with one hand.
Bit listened for the echo of his voice—but there was none. She thought that was strange.
She worked her way along the wall toward the boy. One of the boards cracked under her foot and, for a moment, she thought she was going to plunge head-first into the cold, green water.
When she finally reached the other side where the boy stood waiting, she found him staring down into the water. “Where is this secret you wanted to show me?" she asked.
Again, her voice made a hollow, echoing sound.
"Down there,” he replied. Again, Bit noticed his voice carried no echo. He pointed straight down into the crystal, emerald-colored water. “Look.”
Bit looked down and couldn't believe her eyes.
Shimmering in the sands on the bottom, about five down in the emerald-colored water, were hundreds of coins similar to the one she had found earlier down on the beach. "Dude," she exclaimed, "That looks like treasure. Where'd all that come from?"
“Belonged to my pa,” the boy choked.
“Your pa?”
“Yep. He saved it up and wuz gonna pay off our farm with it. This is where my brother, Luke, hid it a'for' they came a'lookin' fer it that night.”
Bit had a hard time understanding the boy’s strange accent. But she caught enough to gather that all those coins down in the water belonged to the boy’s father. She continued to stare at the shiny coins scattered below. “Who's ‘they’? Who came looking for it?"
The boy shrugged his bony shoulders. He seemed to be struggling with some painful memory. "Course, this was dry land back then. Warn't no lake here a'bout's."
Bit was confused. How could this be dry land? She looked down at the coins again, then up at Mason. She noticed he had big, brown eyes, and she couldn’t get over how sad—so terribly sad—they looked.
"Them ol' Terrill brothers came with their dogs and guns. My pa tried to fight 'em off, so did Luke. But there was too many of 'uv'em, they didn't stand a chance."
The boy waited a moment before saying, “That's only part uv' my secret. Want me to tell you the rest?”
⸙
LAURA WANDERED AMONG the tall stacks of food and supplies. Wide, sturdy metal shelves supported case after case of medical equipment, batteries, food, water and ammunition of multiple calibers. Blue plastic barrels marked "H2O" were linked up with connecting hoses and stacked on one side of a wall. Another rack supported dozens of bottles of wine and enough cases of whiskey to make any Buckhead bartender envious. At the far end of the building, a cluster of more shelves was stacked high with jugs of pickles, jars of peanut butter and cans of fruit and vegetables. Canned meat products filled one entire wall—Spam, Vienna sausages, tuna, salmon, chicken, potted meat and boxes of beef jerky in various flavors and blends.
In one corner long black cases of firearms rested in tubes and sealed plastic bags. Laura didn't know that much about weapons but easily recognized various models of shotguns, pistols, rifles and a variety of military-style machineguns. She even noticed a collection of crossbows and what she would call "regular bows" dangling from hooks. Cases of steel-tipped darts and arrows lay nearby.
“Danny Rambo,” she laughed.
This was definitely the place she wanted to be when the "shit" hit the fan.
⸙
LAURA PACKED UP a few packages of freeze-dried vegetables and fruits, locked the door of the shed behind her and started back toward the house. When she rounded the corner of the shed, she groaned when she saw Bit coming out of the boathouse.
How many times had she warned her to stay away from that place? Bit knew Danny had placed the boathouse off-limits because of some dangerous old boards.
Laura huffed over to Bit and said, “Please tell me what you were doing in the boathouse." She loomed over the girl, hands on hips, waiting for an explanation.
Bit was soaking wet. Anastasia and Teddy both looked as if they had been dredged up from some briny pit. “Mom,” Bit started, “can I tell you something?”
Laura cut her off. “Were you in the boathouse? Answer me.”
A mournful looked passed over the girl's face. “Mom, will you please listen..?”
“Answer my question.”
“Mom, I…”
“Did you, or did you not go inside that building?”
Bit gave up. "Yes, ma'am," she said, nodding slowly.
“Oh, Bit,” Laura wailed. “Didn’t I tell you how dangerou
s that place was? You could have been hurt.” Laura stopped when she noticed the bloody rag wrapped around her knee. “What on earth happened to your knee?”
Bit began to sob. Tears flowed down her cheeks. “Mom, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Will you please now listen?”
“Later. Let me get you inside the house and cleaned up first.”
Chapter Forty
AROUND TEN O’CLOCK that night Laura went up to check on Bit. She found her sitting in the middle of her bed, hugging Anastasia and sobbing her heart out.
“Are you feeling better?” Laura asked.
"A little."
"Then you should be asleep." Laura was still steaming at Bit for disobeying her instructions to stay away from the boathouse.
“Can’t I have Teddy?” she whimpered. "Please?"
“He’s still too wet and dirty,” Laura replied. “I’ll bring him to you when I’ve finished cleaning and drying him off. But that’ll take some time, so you go on to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”
"Mom?” Bit called out between sobs. “Can I just tell you one thing?”
Laura relaxed. It pained her to see Bit suffering like this. Punishing her was as hard on herself as it was on her daughter. She sat down on the bed. “Okay, one thing. What?”
Bit blew her nose. “You know that old treasure coin I found down on the beach the other day?”
“What about it?”
“There are a lot more of them in the boathouse.”
Laura blinked. What could she be talking about?
“I saw them. Lots of them. They’re in the water at the bottom of the boathouse.”
"You saw them?"
Bit brightened as she nodded.
Laura wanted to know more about the coins and a million other things, but instead of pressing her, she leaned close and asked, "Sweetheart, please tell me why you disobeyed me and went into that old boathouse. It's not at all like you not to mind me. What if something had happened? What if you had fallen through one of those old boards?"
“I'm sorry, Mom,” Bit replied, genuine remorse in her voice. “I won’t ever do it again.”
Laura softened at her daughter's words. She cupped the girl's face in her hands. “If anything ever happened to you, I…I wouldn’t want to live anymore. Do you understand what I mean?”
Bit wiped tears from her cheeks. “Yes, ma'am." She looped her arms around her mother's neck and sobbed. "I love you, Mommy. I don’t ever want you to be sad.”
“I love you too, sweetheart, with all my heart.”
They clung together like leaves under glass, mother and daughter, and then Bit told Laura about the boy and revealed to her all the things she had learned in the boathouse.
⸙
SOMETIME DURING the night it started to rain.
By dawn the weather had turned wintry cold, with spatters of gray sleet mixed with howling sheets of freezing rain. Out on the lake, waves the size of boulders rocked and rolled, colliding against each other with thunderous fury.
Laura sat in front of a roaring fire, knees drawn up under her chin and guzzling hot chocolate.
With the power still off, Laura had earlier gone back to Danny's storage shed and searched around until she found a couple of kerosene heaters. She had brought them back to the house, along with several containers of fuel, and placed one in Bit's bedroom, the other in the kitchen. Like magic, the amazing little heaters had done wonders in taking the edge off the icy chill.
Laura had tossed and turned all night, trying hard to process all that Bit had told her about what happened at the boathouse—the boy, the silver and gold coins in the water, the grisly revelation behind the massacre of that boy and his family. It hadn’t seemed real, of course, not one word of it. But Bit never lied, and Laura knew, deep down in her heart, that her daughter was telling the truth. She promised to go see the coins for herself first thing tomorrow morning.
Incredibly, Bit's gruesome story matched what she had read in the files back at Phyllis's house.
On some undefined level, it all began to make sense now--the little cemetery in the woods, the old newspaper clippings, Phyllis's cryptic research. Throw in the skull that washed up on the beach, the visions and ghostly faces at the door—not to mention the bells and the eerie laughter on the night wind—and the pieces started to come together. Bit's startling disclosure struck her as the final piece in this whole bewildering puzzle.
“They seem more restless than ever,” Phyllis had said that night at her cabin.
Still, Laura wasn't ready to believe in ghosts. A bloody massacre might have happened at Bear Gap Lake long ago, but that did not necessarily mean that phantoms walked the beach at night or that the spirits of murdered little boys were haunting her daughter. As an educated woman, Laura was convinced that some kind of rational explanation lay behind the string of bizarre events.
“Mommy, my knee hurts,” Bit said.
She stood in the doorway of Laura’s bedroom holding a towel against her bleeding knee.
Laura jumped out of bed and went to her daughter. “How long has it been bleeding like this?”
“It just started. It hurts real bad.”
Laura pulled back the bandage and examined the wound. It looked worse than before. Dark blisters had formed around the cut. Reddish-black blood and puss oozed from the open wound. An infection was obviously trying to set in.
“I’ve got to get you to a doctor,” she said, pressing the bandage back over the wound to staunch the flow of blood. She flew into the bathroom, found the bottle of aspirin. "Here, take two of these," she said, handing the girl the pills along with a glass of water. "It should make it stop hurting some."
The wound obviously required medical attention. That meant getting to the hospital or least the nearest doctor. But without a car, how was that possible?
She'd think of something. She had to before the infection spread.
She picked Bit up in her arms and carried her back to her bedroom. She put her down on the bed and stuck a couple of pillows under her knee. “You must keep it elevated,” she instructed Bit. “That'll help slow down the bleeding.”
Laura realized that if she didn’t get help soon, there was a very real possibility Bit would bleed to death.
“Try not to move around until Mom gets back,” Laura said.
She raised the heater's wick as high as it would go before leaving the room.
Chapter Forty-one
IN THE KITCHEN, Laura rummaged through the drawers until she found, buried under a stack of magazines and old grocery receipts, a telephone book. It was thin and incredibly old looking, with automobile ads long outdated.
Laura flipped frantically through the pages until her fingers finally landed on the name she was looking for: “Anderson, Whit, MD."
Laura picked up her Samsung and dialed the number. She was surprised when Whit picked up the phone on the second ring.
“I’m on my way,” he said after Laura explained the situation to him. “Just let me get my bag.”
“What about the roads? They’re pretty bad.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got an old four-wheel-drive Land Rover that's built like a tank. Be there in twenty minutes.”
Laura hung up the phone and breathed a deep sigh of relief. She went back to Bit's bedroom and found she hadn’t moved, her leg still propped up on the pillows. The fresh bandage was already turning bright red.
“You’re going to be all right,” she reassured Bit. “The doctor's on his way.”
⸙
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER Laura saw the headlights of a vehicle pulling into the drive. Clutching the MagLite, she hurried outside and saw Whit stepping out of an old-style Land Rover.
"That sure was fast," Laura said, greeting the doctor at the door and welcoming him inside.
"I know my way around these old roads," he replied.
"Thank you so much for coming."
"It's my job. How is the young patient?"
“Sh
e’s resting. But I’ve never seen so much blood.”
Whit glanced around, saw the candles and kerosene heater. “I see you’ve lost power, too,” he commented. "At least you've got some heat."
“If you call it that," Laura said, shivering in her coat and scarf. "It's been off since yesterday."
“You’re not alone. The whole valley’s out. Sometimes it takes the crews several days to find the problem.”
Laura led Whit down the candle-lit hallway and upstairs to Bit's bedroom where she lay propped up in the middle of the bed. The kerosene lantern hissed and flickered at the foot of the bed.
“You remember Doctor Anderson, don’t you, sweetie?” Laura asked her daughter.
Bit recognized the doctor immediately and nodded. “You’re the man we saw in the store.”
Whit sat down on the edge of the bed next to her. “You’ve got a good memory.”
“Thank you, Doctor Anderson.”
Whit patted her hand. “Please, just call me Whit. Everybody else around here does.”
Bit smiled. “Okay, Whit.”
Whit unsnapped a black, old-fashioned leather bag, reached inside and pulled out a few medical supplies. He smiled at Bit and said, “Let’s just take a look, see if we can’t fix you right up.”
He pulled back the bandage and peered at the cut. “Nasty little ding you’ve got there,” he said. “How did you get that?”
“I fell on the rocks out front,” Bit explained.
“Ouch, that must have hurt.”
“It did. I was stuck until Mason helped me out.”
Whit looked up at Laura. “Mason?”
“He’s a little boy who used to live around here,” Bit explained without elaborating.
“Sweetheart, the doctor doesn’t have time to hear about Mason,” Laura said quickly.
Whit waved her off. “No, that’s okay. Please tell me a little more about Mason, Bit”
Bit glanced across at her mother who stood next to the bed, arms folded across her chest. She nodded her approval.
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