“Crap. I lost my phone in the water.”
“Oh, man, that sucks,” Mark said. “Want me to see if I can locate it? I can dive in and feel around for it.”
“No, but thanks anyway. It’s not insured and it was on its last legs. By the way, were you with Harry? He’s supposed to meet me here.”
“Oh, yeah. He and Doug and Tessa should be turning up any second now. We were riding together for awhile, then Tessa stopped to rest. Doug had another problem with his chain and Harry has to be careful ‘cause of his shoulder, so he took a different path. Anyway, they should be back soon.”
“Okay. Well, thanks. I’m going to go change. Fortunately, I brought clothes with me. I guess Harry told you about us camping out.”
“Yep. We’re all staying. It’ll be a heck of a good party.”
That did not make me happy. The last thing I wanted to do was hang out with Tessa the fame whore and Mark the abuser. I thought about going ahead and leaving, telling Harry I wasn’t feeling well or something.
“Hey, Marty?” Donavan said. “Listen, I know you think I’m a horrible person, but I’m not. I swear to you I never laid a hand on ‘Brina. I loved that girl. I was planning on proposing to her at the end of the season. She was a good girl. Not shallow like most of the girls I run into. She’d had a hard life and I wanted to try and make things right for her. I’d never, ever, not in a million years, have done anything to hurt her.” He barely managed to get it out. His voice cracked and by the time he finished, tears were streaming down his face.
It was a good show, but I still didn’t buy it. However, I also saw it as an opportunity to find out more about Sabrina. “Did you guys meet at school?”
“No. Well, I didn’t remember it. She said we’d met back then at a frat party at the bar Harry and I worked at one summer. She moved into Glenvar View right after the season started. I ran into her a couple of times getting mail and stuff like that. She told me she remembered meeting me down in Raleigh that time and said she had gone to a few of our games down at the U. We got to talking and we hit it off. Like I said, she was a good girl. Amazing, actually.”
He was finishing up that story when Harry appeared out of the woods. Frankly, I was a bit disappointed. I wanted to ask Mark more questions, but not in front of the Harry.
Harry took his bike helmet off and gaped at me. “Holy cow! You’re soaked. What happened?”
I told him about my spill into the lake. “I’m not sure what hit me, but it left a bruise on my back.”
“I hope you’re okay. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here to rescue you.”
I told him it was fine, that Mark had fished me out of the water, and went to change into some dry clothes. While I was changing, Tessa and Doug reappeared. I borrowed Harry’s phone and sent Tim another text, letting him know I’d drowned my phone, that I wasn’t all alone with Harry, and that it would be more like four or five hours before I texted again.
After that, the five of us sat around one of the picnic tables drinking beer from red plastic cups and munching on the subs I’d brought, along with some cold pizza the others provided. It was actually quite fun. That is, until Harry proposed that we all rent kayaks and paddle around the lake.
Mark took one of the envelopes from the box by the door and filled it out while Harry and Doug unloaded the kayaks from the rack they were stored on. I managed to get a look at Mark’s handwriting before he stuck the envelope through the slot. It didn’t match up with the writing on the card at all. Mark’s was small, but really messy and contained a mixture of caps and lower case. Still, that didn’t let him off the hook, as far as I was concerned. Maybe the names written on the card were of no significance.
The others were not only experts at kayaking, but, unlike me, were also in really great physical condition, so I soon found it impossible to keep up. Finally, I told them to leave me. I pulled up closer to the bank and leaned back, my feet hanging out into the water. It was nice and peaceful. I’d been laying there for about thirty or forty minutes, dozing in the sun, when I heard a loud boom. I recognized it right away; I’d been near the woods enough times to know a shotgun blast when I heard one. It had sounded close. I sat up and looked around, but didn’t see anyone. Harry and the others were nowhere to be seen either.
I pulled my legs into the boat and then jerked them right back out again. Something was down in the bottom, slithering around. I jumped straight out of the boat and into the water, screaming as loud as I’ve probably ever screamed in my life. I. Do. Not. Like. Snakes.
Harry rounded the bend and paddled up to me. I was clinging to the side of the kayak, whimpering and kicking as hard as I could in case there were any brother or sister snakes to the one in the boat hanging out in the water.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He grabbed the edge of my boat and pulled it over toward him.
I told him about the snake in the bottom of the kayak and he used his paddle to “encourage” it to leave.
“It’s only a little moccasin snake. Won’t hurt you.”
“I thought they were poisonous.” My heart was still racing and he wasn’t helping a bit.
“Not this kind. You’re thinking of cottonmouths. This is just a harmless little water snake.” He plucked it off the end of the paddle and tossed it out into the middle of the lake.
“Good thing I was here to rescue you this time,” he said. “C’mon. Let’s get you back to shore and into some dry clothes. Assuming you have another set, of course.”
He managed to convince me to get back into the kayak and we made the long, slow, torturous trip back to the boat ramp. It took all of my strength to get out of the kayak. Thankfully, Harry rescued me once more and pulled it up onto the ramp.
All I had left that was dry were the sweats, so I put them on along with one of Harry’s t-shirts. After that, I sat on one of the camp chairs drinking a soda while he helped the others set up the tents. They had brought two of them, Doug’s large two room one and a smaller one room one that belonged to Harry. We grilled steaks and corn over a campfire and sat around having a pretty nice evening.
I found myself studying Mark Donavan at one point. He’d been pretty quiet the entire night, and mostly just stared into the fire, looking sad. I still didn’t like the guy, but he seemed to be genuinely bereaved.
About ten, I borrowed Harry’s phone again and texted Tim. He texted back a simple “good night call if need me” and I left it at that. I yawned several times, trying hard to stay awake, but the cozy sweats and warm fire made me sleepy. Everyone else was yawning too, and finally Harry decided it was probably a good idea to stop drinking and go to bed. Doug put out the fire and he, Mark, and Tessa went into the two room tent.
Harry gave me a small LED lantern and led me over to his tent. I crawled into the lightweight sleeping bag he’d brought for me and settled down. It had been a long, crazy week and, despite my earlier nap, I was exhausted. Harry moved his sleeping bag next to mine and we made out for about thirty minutes before falling asleep.
At about two, something woke me up. I was disoriented. Harry was awake too. “What was that,” I asked.
“I don’t know. It sounded like a kid crying. Might be a mountain lion. Probably a couple of stray cats fighting, though. I’m going to the restroom. You gotta go?”
I climbed out of my warm bag and shivered. “Let me put on my shoes.” He waited, then we made our way across the park to the small stone building that held the primitive restrooms. It was a moonless night and there was a pretty heavy cloud cover. The little LED lantern did an okay job, but I was worried about spiders and snakes. Especially snakes. I checked the toilet area over as well as I could and did my business as quickly as possible.
Harry was evidently still in the restroom when I came out. I held up the light and looked around while I waited. The restrooms were to the right of the pier and it looked like someone was sitting on the end of it. All of the sudden, I heard a loud squall and a sp
lash. Whoever was there had either fallen in or jumped. I reacted without thinking, and ran out onto the pier, hollering for help. When I got near the end, my ankle caught on what felt like a rope and I tripped. Next thing I knew, I was back in the water. This time, though, it was cold and dark and it felt for all the world like someone was forcing me under.
Somehow, I managed to surface and suck in a lungful of air. The other person was under water and grabbed me hard around the neck, choking me and pulling me back under. I fought as hard as I could, punching and kicking and somehow, eventually, I managed to get loose.
In a dead panic, I surfaced again and swam as furiously and as fast as I possibly could to the left, toward the boat ramp. I heard someone, I think it was Mark, hollering for me and two more loud splashes. I was afraid to answer, even though I figured my sputtering and spitting made it pretty easy to figure out my location.
My sweats were bogging me down, so I stopped swimming long enough to pull them and my shoes off. I saw a lantern bobbing around over by the pier. Doug called my name, and I heard Harry yelling that he thought he’d found me. I was still too scared to let them know where I was. With my heavy clothes and shoes off, I was able to do a quieter breast stroke. It took forever, but finally, I reached the concrete ramp and crawled up it on my hands and knees. My heart was pounding and I still wasn’t sure what to do. They were still calling for me, but I didn’t want to answer. I was sure that one of them had tried to drown me.
Finally, I came to my senses. Unless they were in it together, there was safety in numbers. Alone, I was a dead duck. “Over here,” I called. “By the boat ramp.”
Doug Curry was the first to reach me. He helped me to my feet and led me back to the tents, where he got a sleeping bag and wrapped me up in it. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“No. Not really. Can you let me use your phone? I really want to go home and I’m cold and scared and I don’t want to drive myself and all my clothes are wet and I’ve lost my shoes and I want to call Tim. He’ll come get me.”
Harry, Tessa, and Mark Donavan all returned as I was saying that. All three of them were soaking wet.
“Thank God,” Harry said. “Thank God you’re all right. I don’t know what I would have done if you’d drowned. I tried so hard to rescue you. I wanted to save you, Marty. I really wanted to. You know that, don’t you?” He knelt down beside me and kissed me tenderly, then went in the tent to put on dry clothes.
While they were inside, I called Tim. All I said was, “Come get me.”
He didn’t ask any questions. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Doug had stirred the fire back up and got it going pretty quickly. I inched as close as I could to it. He had loaned me a t-shirt and an over-sized pair of shorts once he’d led me back to the tents and made sure I was okay.
Harry, Tessa, and Mark returned within minutes, all dressed in dry clothes.
Harry sat down as close to me as he could get. “What on earth happened?”
I knew one of them was likely the person who’d held me under, but I didn’t know which one. Much to my dismay, I began to cry. It took about ten minutes before I was able to tell what had happened.
“When I heard the scream, I thought it was you,” Harry said. “I saw you go in the water and dove in to try and save you. Tessa and Mark dove in after me, I think. I don’t know. It all happened so fast.”
Doug chimed in. “I was in the bathroom and by the time I got out there, you were already over by the boat ramp.”
Tessa said she heard the scream, grabbed the lantern, and heard the splashes. “I was a lifeguard in high school, so I guess I reacted on sheer instinct.”
The three of them kept talking over each other, trying to figure out exactly who had done what first and how long it had taken them. Harry particularly was worried that he hadn’t been able to rescue me. I assured him that it was okay, that I was okay, but he kept beating himself up over it.
Mark was quiet. He sat on the ground beside my chair and rubbed his hands together near the fire, still warming them. “Are you okay, Marty? I mean really okay?”
It surprised me. He looked genuinely concerned for my well-being. I didn’t lie. “No. I’m scared and I want to go home.”
“I don’t blame you,” Mark said. “You’re right to be scared.”
There wasn’t any ominous tone to his words, but still, I felt uneasy. It seemed like a warning to me. Was Mark Donavan out to get me? I shivered and snuggled closer to Harry. He wrapped his arm around me and held me tight against him, but kept up the loud discussion with Tessa and Doug about what had happened.
Tim was furious when he arrived. He checked out the pier using a high-beam light and found the rope that I’d been tripped up by.
“I’m calling Winger,” he said.
I begged him not to. “You said yourself he thinks I’m some sort of looney, out for attention. He won’t believe it, Tim. I know you disagree, but, please, all I really want is to go home and crawl in bed and sleep for about a million years.”
“Fine, but I’m not leaving you alone, even with Charli. I’ll call her and tell her we’re on our way and that I’m staying, too,” he said.
Just seeing him climb out of his truck and having him hug me close had made me feel much stronger. I told him I could drive. The last thing I wanted to do was ever come back to the lake again, even to pick up my car.
Harry apologized over and over and over to me and to Tim about his failure to save me. He seemed to really want Tim to like him. It was strange, but I chocked it up to his feeling guilty.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Harry said. “I’ll make it up to you tomorrow night. You put on your prettiest dress and I’ll take you to the best restaurant in town. We’ll do the works.”
Tim had given Harry an earful when he got there and now he was glaring him down. Harry moved toward me as if to give me a kiss, but it turned into a slight peck since Tim had his arm around my shoulders and chose that moment to pull me even closer to him.
We left shortly after that, and when we got to Charli’s, she made me some decaf and brought me a cookie.
We all had a different person in mind as a suspect. Tim, of course, thought that it was Harry. I was convinced it was Mark Donavan and Charli thought it had been Tessa.
“I think she views you as a threat. You know, we didn’t ever think about that. She could have killed Sabrina. You said she told you she was interested in Mark Donavan. From what you told me, she sounds pretty ruthless and amoral.”
“I know she’s like that,” I said, “but Mark Donavan has more motive to want to hurt me. When I fell in earlier, when something hit my back, he was right there within minutes, pulling me out. He tried to convince me that he’d never hit Sabrina, but I don’t buy it. Of course he’s not going to admit it. He’s a sociopath, I think. He actually acted like he genuinely cared if I was okay, but it was sort of creepy, too. I think he’s afraid I’m going to somehow find some evidence or something. I really think he’s the one that did this to me.”
Tim didn’t have any reason at all to suspect Harry other than the fact that he thought he was a loser and he automatically hated any guy that I liked.
I was grateful that I didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn. Charli and I were opening the gift shop on Saturday, but not until ten. I took another very long, very hot shower, put on some clean shorts and a t-shirt and went to bed in Jaelyn’s room. Delbert had abandoned me for Tim, his buddy, who was sleeping in the boy’s room. As I lay there, I got to wondering if it was possible that Ed, or even Carole, had somehow slipped out to the lake and been the one who tried to drown me. I replayed the events over and over, trying to figure it out, even though I just wanted to sleep.
I was worn out and an emotional wreck, but I couldn’t stop my brain. All I could think about was how close I came to drowning. And every time I closed my eyes, I remembered seeing Sabrina, dead on my kitchen floor.
I knew better, but I couldn’t h
elp it. Finally, I got up and padded across the hall to the boy’s bedroom. Tim was in Kevin’s bed, flat on his back and wide awake, his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
“Mind if I crash in here? I can’t sleep and I’m scared to death.”
“Of course not. And, I’m glad to hear that you’re scared. You should be.”
I turned down the covers and climbed into Adam’s bed. Delbert hopped down from where he’d been curled up by Tim’s feet and jumped up next to me. He snuggled into the place underneath my neck and licked my cheek. The tears came in a torrent then.
Tim had me in his arms, holding me tight to his chest and smoothing my hair, before I knew what was happening. I don’t know how long he held me or how long I cried, but eventually I wore myself out and fell asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, neither Tim nor Delbert were anywhere to be seen. The cute robot clock on Adam’s nightstand told me that it was nine o’clock. I got up, pulled my hair back into a pony tail, and went to the kitchen in search of coffee and food.
Tim and Charli were at the breakfast bar drinking coffee and having what appeared to be a serious conversation when I stumbled in. They were evidently talking about me because they both clammed up as soon as they saw me.
Tim excused himself a minute later, saying that he was going to run errands and help his dad with some project or another. “I’ve, uh, I’ve got a dinner date, so I probably won’t be over until about ten or eleven tonight. Is that okay?” He glanced over at me. “I’m staying here again with y’all. Just to be safe.”
“Sure,” Charli said. “Are you going to Albertino’s?” She sounded sort of nonchalant when she asked, but I sensed an ulterior motive in her question.
“No. I think we’re going to drive over to Roanoke and have dinner downtown. Maybe head up to the star after that,” he said, referring to the giant neon star that sits atop Roanoke’s Mill Mountain. It’s a Mecca for people on dates looking to do something “romantic”. It’s where Ricky Ray had proposed to me. In fact, it’s where about half the couples I know of who are married got engaged.
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