Summer at Forsaken Lake

by Michael D. Beil

  Hayley sighed. “That’s just what the kids in We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea said.”

  As he nosed Goblin around the bend, Nicholas was astonished by the sight that greeted him. Ominous clouds barely skimmed over the treetops, dabbing dark brushstrokes of gray onto a world that, moments before, had glowed with the bright greens and blues of summer. With the second drumroll of thunder came a gust of wind, filling the sails and heeling the boat over rather suddenly.

  He barked orders at the twins. “Hayley, come here—now! Take the tiller for a minute while I get the sails down. Head right for that house. Hetty, go below and get those red sail ties. Now!”

  Whether it was his no-nonsense tone or the frightening sky above them, they both sprang into action. In a matter of seconds, Nicholas had wrestled the jib to the deck and secured it with the sail ties that Hetty handed him. He opened the anchor locker and lifted out the Danforth anchor and chain.

  “Okay, Hayley, when I say ‘Go!’ I want you to turn the boat directly into the wind. Then just keep the bow pointed in that direction, okay?”

  Hayley nodded, her eyes wide with excitement—and maybe just a pinch of terror.

  “Hetty, you take the mainsheet. The second Hayley starts turning, you uncleat that thing and let it out two or three feet. Then cleat it again, and keep your head down, because the boom’s going to swing around like crazy. All right?”

  Looking as if she might bite through her bottom lip, Hetty gave him a thumbs-up. “I’m ready.”

  Nicholas stood at the forestay, watching the fast-approaching shoreline, where the overturned maple leaves seemed to be waving him off. When they reached the spot he had chosen, he gave Hayley the signal. The twins did their jobs perfectly, and he tossed the anchor in front of the boat as far as he could and waited to see if it would “catch” in the mud while Goblin began to drift slowly backward.

  “Come on, come on,” he said, tugging on the anchor line. He was about to give up on it when he felt a jerk as the anchor snagged on some submerged object. “Yes! It’s holding. Let’s get that mainsail down.”

  * * *

  While Nicholas and the twins prepared themselves and Goblin for the approaching storm, Charlie and Nick had their hands full. Ethan Kuerner, conscious but still doubled over in pain, sat on a hay bale inside the barn.

  “Kinda like somebody’s … driving a railroad spike into … my chest,” he said when Nick asked him how he was feeling. Like most farmers, however, he was more concerned about the livestock than his own well-being. He looked up at Charlie. “You’ve got … to get the cows … in the barn. Bad … storm coming. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, bolting out the door as the ambulance pulled in the driveway.

  Charlie was no expert on cows, but she had spent enough time on friends’ farms to know how to get a herd of the black-and-white behemoths moving back to the barn. She raced around the pasture, yelling and slapping rumps until they started in the right direction. Then she ran down to the lake to retrieve the “escapees” that had wandered through the open gate. As they moseyed along the path to the barn, a flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed a few seconds later by the booming of thunder. The cows picked up the pace after that, and Charlie closed the gate as the first drops of rain splashed onto the dusty barnyard. She glanced up at the sky and thought of Nicholas and the twins huddled in Goblin’s cabin, sorry that she was missing out on the experience.

  The paramedics had removed Ethan from the barn by then, and were closing the ambulance doors, ready to leave, when Nick intercepted Charlie.

  “Hey, kiddo—all the cows in? Listen, I hate to do this to you kids, but Sue’s a nervous wreck. She’s in no condition to drive herself to the hospital, so I’m going to have to take her.”

  “How is Mr. Kuerner? Is he going to be all right?”

  “I think so. Looks like it was a heart attack. He’ll probably be in the hospital for a few days for some tests, but the paramedics sounded positive.”

  “What should I do?” Charlie asked.

  “You can come with me, or stay here until I get back—which will probably be an hour and a half, two hours—or you can row out to Goblin and ride it out with the rest of the gang.” As he said those words, the sky opened up and began to drench them, so they moved under the barn’s overhang.

  “I’ll wait here until the rain lets up,” she said. “But if I take the dinghy, how will you get out to Goblin?”

  “I’ll go next door to the yellow house I told Nicholas about. Keep an eye out for me. I’m hoping this will all be blown over by the time I get back.”

  Charlie watched as the ambulance started down the drive, with Nick and Sue following in the Kuerners’ tired Plymouth, and then went into the barn to wait out the storm.

  It was a long wait. The final hour of daylight was completely obliterated by the dense clouds and unrelenting rain. Lightning knocked out the power all along the lake, so she sat with the cows in the dark, steamy barn, listening to the wind howling through the hayloft above her and wondering what Nicholas, Hetty, and Hayley were going through aboard Goblin.

  * * *

  “Maybe you’d better let out some more chain,” Hayley said to Nicholas, for the third time in the last hour.

  Nicholas stuck his head up out of the cabin, listening to the wind whistle through Goblin’s rigging. He looked to both sides of the cove, taking bearings as Nick had taught him to do, making certain that the anchor was holding them firmly in place.

  “We haven’t moved an inch,” he reported. “It’s not like in the book, when the tide came in and lifted the boat up. There’s no tide here, I promise.”

  Unconvinced, the twins continued looking out the portholes until it was too dark to make out the shoreline.

  “How much longer till Uncle Nick and Charlie get back?” Hetty asked. “It’s been hours. What if something’s wrong? I’m scared.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Nicholas replied. “And we’re perfectly safe.” His words were punctuated by a blinding flash of lightning and an earsplitting crack of thunder.

  We’re perfectly safe, Nicholas repeated to himself. On the terror scale, he was somewhere to the right of “slightly nervous,” but was still well to the left of the twins, who were nearing “petrified with fright,” and Pistol, who buried his head under a blanket. He did his best to seem cheerful as he lit the kerosene lantern on the bulkhead next to the mast.

  The lamp filled the cramped cabin with golden light, immediately improving the twins’ state of mind.

  Hetty even reverted to her British accent. “That’s ever so much nicer, Nicholas. Well done, old chap.”

  Nicholas slowly shook his head. “I think I liked it better when you were scared. Why don’t you two take turns reading something out loud—to pass the time,” said Nicholas. “But please, not in that stupid fake accent.”

  Another flash, another loud crack—from somewhere out on the lake—as Hayley retrieved her book from her duffel in the forepeak.

  “Did you guys feel that?” she asked, diving under the blanket with Hetty and Pistol. “I think it hit us.”

  “It didn’t hit us,” said Nicholas. “Trust me, if lightning hits us, you’ll know it.”

  Nevertheless, he climbed to the top step and stuck his head out of the cabin for a good look around. “At least the rain has stopped for now. I think the wind is picking up again, though. Uncle Nick is pretty smart; this cove is probably the calmest spot on this side of the lake. I don’t know what we would have done if we were on the other side. It’s nasty out there.”

  He flinched as lightning struck on the shore behind him, illuminating the lake for a tiny fraction of a second. Long enough, however, for Nicholas to see something—or at least think he saw something—he didn’t expect to see: a sailboat, directly across the lake from him.

  In the blackness that followed the flash, his eyes detected nothing, and he couldn’t help wondering if it was merely his imagination running wild
, or perhaps a rare (according to Nick) second sighting of the “2:53,” even though it was only a few minutes past ten. He stared in the direction of the boat, straining for another look, but the darkness was complete; it was impossible to distinguish the line separating sky from water. Rain began to fall again, but he didn’t take his eyes off his spot, despite Hayley’s pleas to close the hatch because the cabin was getting wet.

  A burst of light directly in his line of sight blinded him momentarily, but the follow-up flashes confirmed his notion: there was a boat out there. A sailboat, and it was in trouble, its mast broken ten feet above the deck, sails and rigging hanging sadly from the stump.

  Squinting through the rain, Nicholas noticed a dim light where the boat had disappeared again into the darkness that poured into the sky surrounding him. Someone, he was certain, was waving a flashlight back and forth.

  Now what am I supposed to do?

  Nicholas weighed his options as he continued to watch the barely visible light swing from side to side. The easiest solution was to simply ignore it—pretend he hadn’t seen the light or the boat. After all, there was no reason to expect him, or anybody else, to see anything in those conditions, was there?

  “Nicholas! Close the hatch! We’re getting soaked!” Hetty cried.

  But Nicholas had made up his mind. They had to help. Nick hadn’t prepared him for a situation like this, but he was pretty sure there was a “sailors’ code” that included helping a boat in trouble—no matter what.

  He stepped into the cabin and closed the hatch. “Get your foul-weather gear on, girls. There’s a sailboat out there, and it’s in trouble. The mast is broken, and they’re just drifting. Somebody might be hurt. They’re waving a flashlight around, and we’re the only ones who can help right now.”

  “Ha-ha, Nicholas. Very funny,” said Hetty.

  “No, I’m serious,” he replied, taking their still-dripping rain gear from the hanging locker. “We have to help them.”

  “Wh-what about those patrol boats?” Hayley asked. “Uncle Nick says they’re like the Coast Guard. Why can’t they do it?”

  “I doubt that they’re even out there right now,” said Nicholas. “They probably figure everybody’s off the lake at this point.”

  “Why do we have to do anything? We’re just kids,” said Hetty. “And besides, didn’t you promise Uncle Nick that we would wait for him here? What if he comes back and we’re gone? Remember what he said about storms?”

  Nicholas pulled on the yellow slicker that Nick had given him. “True, but we may be their only hope. We have to do it. Uncle Nick will understand.”

  Hayley and Hetty started to stir from the berth, but stopped when a brilliant flash illuminated the cabin through the portholes.

  “Look, I need your help,” Nicholas said to them. “We’ll be okay—I promise. I know what I’m doing. Just like John did in the book. Didn’t he take good care of his little brother and sisters?”

  “We did want an adventure,” Hayley admitted. “C’mon, Het. It’s kind of exciting. Wait till we get back home and we can tell Jennifer and Katie. It’ll be amazing. And Zoe Peterman. She will just die of jealousy.”

  Hetty’s face brightened a little at the thought of having something special to brag about when school started back again in September.

  “Great!” said Nicholas. “Get dressed, put your life jackets on, and come up on deck. And get Pistol into his life jacket, too. You know he’s going to come up in the cockpit, and I don’t want to lose him. You’re all going to stay nice and safe in the cockpit. I need you to steer while I get the mainsail up.”

  Hayley’s eyebrows shot up. “Mainsail? We’re going to sail? Why don’t we use the motor? Wouldn’t that be a lot easier?”

  Nicholas nodded. “Yep. It would. Unfortunately, the key must be in Uncle Nick’s pocket. It’s not in the ignition. Don’t worry, I’m going to reef the main.”

  “What’s that mean?” Hetty asked, zipping her several-sizes-too-big foul-weather gear.

  “It means that I’ll make the sail a lot smaller than usual, so it won’t heel the boat as much. Theoretically.”

  Nicholas had never actually reefed, but Nick had explained the concept and the process to him, and he was certain it was the right thing to do.

  Even though the wind and waves in the cove were nothing compared to what awaited them out on the lake, they were enough to make moving about on the deck difficult. Raising the mainsail and tying in the reefs took longer, and required more energy, than Nicholas had expected, but each time he stopped to catch his breath, that dim flashlight waving at him in the distance egged him on.

  After what seemed an eternity, they were ready to cast off. Nicholas lifted the anchor aboard and quickly stowed it while Hayley and Hetty sat on opposite sides of the cockpit, all four hands glued to the curved wooden tiller. Hetty pushed, Hayley pulled, and Goblin’s bow spun away from the shore and headed out for the middle of the lake.

  When Nicholas moved aft into the cockpit, the twins tried to hand him the tiller.

  “No way,” he said. “You guys are doing great. Just keep us headed in this direction.”

  The first taste of what lay ahead hit them—a gust of wind heeled them dramatically as Nicholas let out the mainsheet as fast as he could.

  “Nich-o-las,” cried Hetty, suddenly very close to the water racing past her.

  “You’re fine. You can move up to the high side, next to Hayley, if you want. Just remember what John’s dad told him: one hand for yourself and one for the ship.”

  “Hey, I see the light now,” said Hayley, looking forward. “I think the rain’s slowing down, at least.”

  As the sturdy Goblin plunged forward into the waves, Nicholas explained his plan. They would make one pass by the disabled boat so he could talk to its captain and decide how to proceed.

  “The most important thing for you two is not to get distracted. You have to listen to me, so if I tell you to turn hard to port, you do it right away.”

  “Wait. Which way is port again?” Hayley asked.

  Nicholas’s face fell as he glared at her. “Hayley! How can you not know—”

  “Gotcha!” she screamed.

  Hetty high-fived her. “Nice. Did you see the look on his face?”

  “We’re not idiots, Nicholas,” said Hayley. “We know port and starboard.”

  “Just pay attention, okay?” he said with a shake of his head. “We’re getting close.”

  Lightning, well off in the distance, provided enough light to see that it was a man standing and waving on the deck of the boat, which appeared to be sitting quite low in the water.

  Nicholas aimed his flashlight up at the torn remnants of the mainsail to help the twins see where they were going as they surged closer and closer. As they swept past the stern, he saw the boat’s name, Maguffin II, in gold letters.

  “Hello! Is that Goblin? Nick? Boy, am I glad to see you!”

  He was older than Nicholas had expected, with a scruffy gray beard, a long ponytail that stood straight out in the breeze, and a belly that no foul-weather gear could hide.

  Hayley whispered to Hetty, “For a guy who’s standing on a sinking boat, he sure seems pretty calm.”

  “Quite,” said Hetty. “I’d be screaming my bloomin’ ’ead off.”

  Nicholas directed the twins to steer around the boat and point the bow into the wind so he could have a few extra seconds to talk to the man. He knew that they would have a hard time keeping her head to wind in those conditions, but it was necessary. For this first pass, Goblin kept her distance, getting no closer than thirty or forty feet to the hull of the sinking boat, which was low enough in the water that waves were breaking over her deck.

  Pistol put his front paws up on the cockpit seat for a better view of the action. When he caught sight of a stranger so close to Goblin, he started howling.

  “Hey, Pistol,” said the man. “I’d recognize that old face anywhere.”

  Satisfied that the m
an wasn’t a threat, Pistol quieted down, wagging his tail enthusiastically. Nicholas shouted across the water, “This is Goblin, but Nick’s not on board. What happened?”

  The man pointed at the broken mast that lay across the deck, sails dragging in the water. “Lightning. Took a direct hit. Blew out all the through-hulls, plus another big hole under the mast. She’s going down. Fast.”

  “What can we do?” Nicholas asked. “Are you alone?”

  “Yep—just me. No point in trying to save the boat—she’s toast. But I could sure use a lift—if you’ve got room.”

  Nicholas couldn’t help admiring the guy for maintaining his sense of humor after all that. “I think we can squeeze you in. We’ll make another pass and try to get as close as we can.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Okay, Hayley,” said Nicholas, sheeting in the main. “Hard to port!”

  The twins pulled hard on the tiller, with Hetty letting out a scream as the wind filled the sail, heeling them over at a precarious angle.

  Nicholas eased the sheet and Goblin leveled off a bit. “Get her moving, and we’ll tack around and make another pass. But this time, you’re going to have to get really close, so he can jump aboard. Think you can handle that?”

  “Piece of cake,” said Hayley.

  “How do we know this guy isn’t a pirate?” Hetty asked. “He could be faking this whole thing just to steal Uncle Nick’s boat.”

  “He breaks his mast and sinks his own boat so he can steal this one? Pretty good plan,” marveled Nicholas. “You know, Hetty, I think you might be right. Maybe we should just go back to shore and wait for Uncle Nick. This guy looks kind of dangerous.”

  “Really?” Hetty’s eyes grew wider and wider.

  Nicholas counted to three. “Gotcha!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Charlie checked her watch for the umpteenth time, her eyes straining to read the hands in the dark barn. Twenty minutes to eleven, and still no power, and no Nick. The rain had slowed considerably, but not the wind; its velocity had increased quite dramatically. The trees shook violently, littering the yard with small branches. When she thought about trying to row the inflatable dinghy around the point to the waiting Goblin in those conditions, she cringed.