Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

  She shook her head. Her dark hair rioted with the platinum. It looked as though her scalp bled ink.

  The world is different than it used to be when we were kids, you know? She said. Can’t even protect your children.

  True, Emily said, that’s true. She wondered, though, how true that was. She remembered the faces on the back of milk cartons, stories about cults on Geraldo, and learning about good touches and bad touches in school. Everybody had been afraid then, she remembered. But maybe it was worse now. Maybe parents hovered by the window, hoping that their children would make it home every afternoon after school.

  Thank you for your help.

  The woman nodded and stood up straight, patting the newspapers back into a neat stack.

  Good luck, she said. Holler if you need help.

  Emily nodded, but she didn’t think she’d want help. She was free. She had the key to her own house in her pocket. She had five boxes and a loose pile of clothes already on hangers balled in the trunk. She could do it on her own.

  •

  The house was set far back from the road, beyond a wide, deep lawn, left un-mown for several rains and infested with dandelion and dark patches of clover. It was obscured by trees and heavily shaded. She parked her car in the driveway and walked up to the door, watching the cicadas jump away from the dirt path as she stepped. The grass rattled dryly under her shoes and she imagined it would be hard and cutting under her bare feet. Before the door were three concrete steps and a stoop. On it, a stained Welcome mat and one newspaper rotting in its bright orange plastic bag greeted her.

  The house was nothing spectacular: one-story, the roof sloping upward slightly and meeting itself at a dull peak. It was covered in a standard white aluminum siding, grimy from rain, and the windows were small and infrequent, but she wasn’t disappointed. She had expected so little that an intact house, only cosmetically ugly, was a relief. The lawyer had told her little about the house but that it needed few repairs, was small, and that she could move in as soon as she got there. He seemed eager to be done with it.

  She’d learned her low expectations from her mother, who had always had a glimmer of hope at every new place, though she had been disappointed over and over again. Emily had learned that hope was exhausting.

  She held the key in her hand. It looked like any other key, a generic copy from a hardware store key machine, the edges serrated. She clutched the key and stood on the first step, occasionally looking behind her out into the driveway when something rustled or a car threatened to come closer from the distance.

  What if she were wrong about the house, if the lawyer had been wrong and this very minute was on his way to take the key away and turn her back, to tell her that somebody else, a closer family member more in need of a home, had been found?

  But she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She saw herself getting down on her knees in the dried weeds to beg the lawyer not to make her leave. She imagined the feel of the grass beneath her knees, how even the crickets would jump away from her.

  He’d look down at her without understanding.

  You can’t be alone, he’d say, looking at her with the contempt that the loved try to hide from the unloved. That’s impossible. You are thirty years old. Go to your family. Go to your friends.

  The front door opened into a dark, empty room. She almost tripped on piles of letters and pamphlets piled before the front door—a mail slot was placed knee-level in the door. Emily stuck her fingers into the slot, making the hinge squeak.

  She gathered the mail and shut the door behind her. The small living room had one large window which revealed a square of the backyard and the woods that surrounded it. The light dappled sparsely through onto her dry backyard, which was grown up and completely empty of anything but a coil of old water hose, disconnected from a spigot and cracked where the plastic had been curled.

  She hadn’t lived somewhere so secluded since she’d been eight, when they had lived in a trailer in rural Virginia and Connie had tried to make a living as a reiki healer. She’d set up shop in the trailer, in what should have been Emily’s room, after a weekend reiki training and retreat which had cost them an entire month’s worth of utilities money.

  In those days, they’d eaten their dinners of canned beans and wheat bread out on the porch, it being more comfortable outside than in the trailer, which caught and held heat like the inside of a car in summer. Emily remembered tossing and turning at night, the sheets sticking to her body and her sweat waking her with its tickly slide down her face.

  The only people they’d seen on the roads then were the mailman and teenagers looking for the backroad way to the lake and sometimes a police officer trailing a swerving pickup. Connie’s few clients would arrive and immediately be whisked away to her office. It smelled of incense and little bottles of essential oils that pooled and stained the wooden countertops. Connie had placed soothing things in the room, like Aloe Vera plants, crystals, and photographs of various spiritual teachers. Emily had hated the room. All of the smells made her eyes water.

  As a child, living so far away from everything had made her feel isolated. She had hated it. Now, she felt safe tucked away from the road and other houses. She could dissapear if she wanted to.

  Emily flipped the light switch in the kitchen and set the mail down on the kitchen counter: Three Wal-Mart circulars, a printed advertisement for a high school Indian Taco dinner, and a pamphlet from Heartshorne Free Will Baptist Church:

  Welcome to Heartshorne!

  We hope that you will join our church family

  in worshipping hte Lord and serving our community.

  Sundays: 9:00 to 11:00 AM and 5:00 to 6:30 PM

  Wednedsays: 6:00 TO 7:30 PM

  Fridays: Community prayer and remembrance, 7:00 to 8:30 PM

  This was the only message that was meant for her—Welcome to Heartshorne! How had they known so quickly? The typos were charming. She imagined the church secretary, ancient and unfamiliar with computers, hunting and pecking her way through the announcement, probably counting spaces to center the document. She placed the mail neatly in a pile on the kitchen counter.

  She walked from room to room, turning on every light, touching each doorknob, examining the walls for marks of the previous inhabitant, great-aunt Fran (a name that made Emily think of spunky older women in cozy mysteries, though she knew nothing about the real woman). The walls, though, were clean and white and she could smell the faint poison of new paint. The two bedrooms were small, and one windowless, but this was still far more room than she was used to having. Being here wouldn’t be like living with Eric, who took up all of the space with his instruments and his sheet music and his piles of Buddhist philosophy books, the first chapters filled with earnest highlighting and dog-eared pages, the rest clean and unread.

  Downstairs, she’d been left with a refrigerator, range, plastic counters, and a rickety kitchen table with a gouged plastic tabletop. She slid her fingers along the deep grooves. Probably from knives cutting through apples or tomatoes.

  The kitchen’s enormous, deep steel basin could hold every pot and dish she’d brought with her, and the water came out strong and hot, though a small stream flew ninety degrees from the faucet, spraying her shirt with water when she turned the water all the way up. Lighting came from an uncovered, low-watt bulb above her, a metal-beaded string hanging down.

  The living room was clean, with only faint, whiter spaces on the freshly painted walls where pictures had been removed and a plate-sized stain darkening the maroon carpet just below the window. The lawyer said there had been few things of value in the home, and they had either destroyed or sold some pieces, according to her will. She had donated any money from the sales to the local Baptist church. Fran had left Emily a few basics; a refrigerator, range, couch, and a bed.

  She sat cross-legged on the carpet and looked up at the still ceiling fan, its dust collected in strings, the strings moving slightly.

  This is my house. I own it. S
he said it aloud to the house, which absorbed the words without an echo.

  Her great-aunt Fran had been dead and buried for four months before the Claymore county courthouse had tracked Emily down. Frannie had left the house to Connie or her survivors. The lawyer had asked Emily if Fran and Connie had been close. Emily had not known how to respond, the idea of Connie being “close” to anyone so foreign to her.

  When Emily had heard her mother’s name spoken by the man on the telephone, she’d had a strange moment of fear: what if he knew that Connie had died a difficult, lonely death and that Emily had been grateful when she finally stopped breathing completely? Of course, he knew nothing about it—nobody did. Connie had been, as she usually was, completely alone when it had happened. The man on the telephone had merely given his condolences and moved on to business.

  Emily got up from the floor and started to move boxes from the car to the living room. She set her teakettle and dishes in the cabinets, folded her clothes in a neat pile in the back bedroom, and put away the little bit of food that she’d had left over from the trip and her infrequent stops at convenience stores.

  After two hours, she’d all but finished, and it was still morning.

  I should nap, she thought, but she wasn’t sleepy, despite getting only five hours of sleep the night before. She felt a humming inside her body, the same kind of excitement she’d felt in those first years with Eric, when she’d see him mount the stage and think he is mine. That’s my boyfriend.

  She examined each room in the house carefully, kneeling to into the gaps underneath and behind the refrigerator and stove for anything Frannie might have left behind—a loose shopping list, a leftover piece of junk mail indicating what charities she gave to, if she gave to any at all—to indicate who she’d been. What kind of woman would choose such a red carpet? Why hadn’t she planted flowers? And the white boxes on the walls—what pictures had they held? What did a woman without much family have on her walls? Did she collect art?

  Emily was on her knees, trying to peel back the carpet in the living room to see what kind of floor had been covered up underneath it, when the door rattled with a knock—it was loose in its frame and a slice of light came through the edges.

  She had the thought, again, that this must be the wrong house, not hers at all. What if the real owner wanted to come in?

  She stood up, smoothing her clothes. It’s fine. Just somebody knocking, someone who wants to say hello. The house was hers.

  But there was still that nagging feeling that she did not belong.

  Emily touched the key in her pocket, that proof of her belonging, and opened the door.

  The man at the door wore a neatly ironed blue-checked shirt, the colors of sky and snow. His face was round and abundant without being fat—boyish cheeks below crow’s feet that indicated he was older than he looked. He smiled and held out his hand. Emily was distracted by his metal watch, the enormous face which was sparsely populated with slim roman numerals, the kind of watch you could barely read, it was so minimal.

  Hello, Ma’am, he said. I’m Levi, Pastor of the Heartshorne Free Will Baptist Church. You might have seen our flyer.

  Emily held out her hand to him and hoped that her handshake was firm enough—clergymen made her nervous. She imagined that they were always weighing her for possible sins, gauging how much prayer might be necessary to make her whole.

  Emily Collins.

  He smiled, dropping her hand. The light glared down on his watchface, making it expand into a star of light.

  I heard from Cheryl down at Rod’s that you’d made it in, he said. We heard somebody was taking over the place. I thought I’d come down and welcome you to our little town.

  Emily nodded. Thank you.

  So what brings you here? Do you have family in the area?

  Fran was my great-aunt, Emily said. She left me all of this. She motioned toward the room behind her.

  He didn’t speak, though his eyes widened slightly.

  Did you know Fran at all, Mr…?

  Call me Levi, he said. Or Pastor Richardson, if you prefer. I knew her a little bit—she wasn’t a frequent visitor to the church, but she was well-known in our community. I’m sorry about your loss, he said. Lovely woman. The first of many tragedies we’ve experienced here in Heartshorne. He looked up at her from behind his eyelashes, his head bowed slightly.

  Emily nodded. She had the urge to say amen, but didn’t. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

  I didn’t really know Fran, she said, but thank you.

  Whether you knew her or not, her death was a shock to everyone.

  Emily searched her mind for what might have been a shock to anyone about an eighty year-old woman’s death. He continued to shake his head. She’d have to say something soon—she wasn’t sufficiently shocked for his taste, she could tell.

  But why shocking? She asked. Very sad, of course, but I wasn’t shocked, once I heard her age. I thought she was eighty.

  He looked at her, frankly confused this time.

  You don’t know?

  She shook her head. Tell me, she said.

  She hated moments like this, when bad news she should have known was still mysterious, still beyond her reach, and she looked like a fool for not knowing.

  You weren’t told how she died? He shook his head. They should have told you, especially before you came all the way down here with your things.

  I’ve hardly been told anything, she said. I got my key in the mail and I have to meet with, what’s his name, George, George Sawyer, to sign the papers tomorrow—Levi’s vigorous head-shaking stopped her. She felt a quick, jabbing pain in her stomach. Her happiness couldn’t be over so soon, already. Levi was going to ruin everything. The house wouldn’t be hers anymore after he said whatever he had to say. Or it would be hers and she wouldn’t want it anymore. She’d been greedy in taking what wasn’t hers from a person she did not know, and now she’d be punished with the very thing she had wanted.

  She waited, clutching the edge of the door.

  I’m sorry to the be the one to tell you this, he said. This was supposed to be a friendly visit. He made a sound between his teeth, as people do when touching something hot.

  Emily stepped outside and shut the door behind her. She should have invited him in, but she didn’t want to hear what he might have to say in her new house. The words might catch in the curtains and wallpaper like cigarette smoke and remain there, hanging in the air.

  Tell me, she said. It’s better to know.

  He looked down at his black shoes. The sun, now high above their heads, shined down directly on them through the scant trees. Emily felt her cheeks and forehead redden. His silver watch gleamed.

  Fran was murdered, he said. They found her with her throat cut. He swallowed and leaned against the siding, which buckled slightly under his palm. She’d been dead for days when they found her—she didn’t have many visitors, no family around here anymore, not for years, and so the home-health nurse found her on her scheduled visit.

  Emily held her hand against her throat. Do they know who did it? Levi shook his head slowly. No. They figure some meth heads. Some kids trying to rob her. They didn’t take anything. Probably because she didn’t have much to take.

  Emily saw a quick, involuntary image of a blade sliding across skin, the skin separating like lips, the blood pouring out.

  How did they come in?

  The police say the killer came right through the screen door, killed her, and walked away, Levi said. She left her door unlocked, like many people around here do.

  Emily noticed her own hand around her throat and lowered it. She leaned back, touching her fingers against the doorframe. The house behind her had changed. She imagined something growing inside it, a pulsing, moving something.

  You all right, Ma’am? Levi asked. He squinted at her and ran his hand across his forehead. He was sweating visibly.

  Emily nodded. Is it safe? I mean, do the authorities think it’s safe
to live here?

  Well, he said, that I can’t say, Ma’am. Nobody feels safe right now, with Frannie’s death, the children missing, and the others—

  The others?

  Other deaths in the area—mostly people who were mixed up in things like drugs and drinking, younger people. He shook his head. But if you’re asking what I think, I don’t think this house is more dangerous than any other place. It was a random crime, that’s what the police said. Nowhere is safe anymore, is it?

  Emily nodded again, though she wasn’t sure if she agreed. He had not answered her question, but she felt too tired to push him.

  Thank you for telling me about Fran, she said. She looked at the man, sweaty and well-meaning, squinting up at her against the sun.

  She walked back up onto the steps.

  Please, she said, opening the door to her house, please come inside and have some tea.

  •

  After Levi left, Emily turned on all of the lights and shut the windows, despite the damp heat that invaded the living room and made her discard her clothes as soon as he’d left. She wore only her bra and underwear and walked around the still-empty rooms, sticky and uncomfortable, jumping at shadows on the walls.

  She’d agreed to go to a community pot-luck at the church. She cursed herself for not thinking.

  It isn’t just a Free Will Baptist thing, Levi had assured her. We invited all the churches. We even put an ad in the paper. It’s a good way to get to know your neighbors!

  She’d wanted to say no, but the idea of being with people appealed to her in that moment. And she felt she owed him something: he had given her news that nobody else would. She was nervous about accepting; she saw, poking from his breast pocket, a red-edged tract, which she was sure he would pull out at some point, or perhaps leave in her bathroom. When she’d lived in Virginia, she remembered that the religious kids used to bring stacks of them to school, convinced after a particularly exciting summer of church camp that they were meant to spread the gospel. The desire never lasted all that long, but when they were in the heat of it, she’d find multiple tracts stuck just inside her locker every afternoon. Even then, she was a well-known unbeliever, her mother’s disdain for organized religion having rubbed off on her. It was, Emily quickly realized, an easy way to shock people, at least, even if it made her an outcast.