Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

  She walked down the steps, one-by-one, imagining her mother’s tight shoes (she bought size seven shoes as an adult, though they pinched her feet, a strange and painful sort of vanity) on her own feet. Her mother had been thirteen. She imagined Connie’s face, the slightly receded chin, the fuller mouth than her own, the broader but straighter nose, the blonder hair. She imagined Connie’s face like a mask over her own face. She was going home from school on that afternoon, but how did she get off course? Maybe she never intended to go home. Maybe she had a secret boyfriend, somebody she was going to meet. Maybe she was going with a girlfriend to do something forbidden: drink, smoke weed. Colleen had said that those Collins kids were wild.

  Emily opened her eyes. The day had turned hot. She peeled off her long-sleeved shirt. The sun was almost directly overhead. By the road, the school’s electronic sign played the same message in neon dots over and over again: We will miss you, Jenny. Jenny, the girl in the accident. Like Connie, Jenny had been somewhere she shouldn’t have been, but she hadn’t returned. In the last few days, the newspaper had reported that Mr. Rodriguez, Jenny’s high school history teacher, had been having an illicit sexual relationship with the girl for several months. In questioning, he claimed that he could remember nothing about the accident.

  The sign flashed her name again and Emily wondered if this same sign, with black letters that the janitor had to change every morning instead of a digital screen, had once said her mother’s name.

  1

  Heartshorne, 1965

  Connie waved the cigarette smoke away from her face and toward the screened windows in the girl’s bathroom—everyone else was gone, pretty much, and so she could have a smoke in peace without being caught outside by the elementary school teachers who beat chalk from their erasers and gossiped together like teenagers in the hour after school had ended.

  She had stayed behind to finish her homework, which she hadn’t completed for three days in a row. She’d finished it in five minutes and spent the last twenty minutes of detention writing her name next to Billy Sisco’s name on a full sheet of notebook paper.

  When Mr. Colchester let her out, his bow-tie as bright and his comb-over as stiff as it had been that morning, despite the heat. Connie went to the girl’s restroom again to smoke another cigarette. She wiped the dampness from her throat and underarms with the rough, brown paper towels in the girl’s room. She smelled of bathroom soap now, sweet and cheap, but it was better than sweat.

  Billy hadn’t known that she existed before this year. He ran in different circles. She’d known vaguely that he was a church kid, that his family worked in oil and that he lived in a beautiful, two-story ranch house just before the lake, but all that was from rumor. He was popular—he went to parties, smoked cigarettes behind the bus barn, and did things that normal kids did, but he did them in a way that made him seem slightly outside of them, as though he was only passing through. She’d never heard a story about Billy getting in trouble for smoking or Billy getting so drunk he passed out in the woods. He was there, but he wasn’t quite there.

  Connie, too, had a strange kind of popularity. She was poor and everybody knew it. Her father worked at the gas station and her mother stayed home, usually drunk or passed out from taking her pills at noon so she wouldn’t get nervous after the children came home. When she was nervous, she shouted and her body tightened and twisted until she released her nerves in fury of shouting and crying. Still, Connie managed to make herself more than the daughter of a couple of trashy drunks. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was sharp and pretty and dressed well and didn’t take bullshit. When somebody as much as hinted at her mother’s problems or something unkind about her brothers and sisters, she didn’t let it go: she’d go straight to the person, whoever it was, and tell them exactly what she’d do if she heard anything like that again. She had learned soon that this was enough and she hardly ever had to follow through. People respected her. And when she reached eighth grade, she began to see the weak, the poor, the cringing, much in the way that other kids did: they asked for it by not standing up. If only they’d stop stooping, stop flinching, stop their sniffling, they’d be fine. She didn’t think of herself as one of them, although she lived in a shack with a dozen brothers and sisters, skinny dogs wandering the yards, cats underfoot, and her knuckles bruised from scrubbing sheets on the wash board.

  On the third day of school, after her first detention (this time for chewing gum in chorus and being caught trying to hide it under her chair), she had emerged from the front doors to find it drizzling, the sky roiling and gray. It would downpour.

  She hadn’t brought a jacket, not even a sweater; the morning sky had been clear. She placed her science book on her head to keep her hair and face from getting wet and started walking.

  Hey, I can take you home, a voice called out. A car slowed and stopped when she stopped. The window rolled down. It was Billy in his El Camino.

  That’s ok, she said. She thought maybe he was picking on her, that she’d move toward the door handle and he’d peel away, splashing mud into her face.

  The clouds released then, soaking the paper bag her book was covered in.

  C’mon, he said. You can’t walk that far in this rain.

  She got in and shut the door behind her.

  He started taking her home everyday. He took her to Sonic sometimes and bought her a hamburger and soda. He told her about his parents, his father who was a church deacon and his mother who worked as church secretary and led women’s Bible classes. She told him about her mother’s nerves and how her father came home with a twelve-pack of beer every night and usually finished it before he fell asleep, his snoring thick through his troubled breathing.

  They became friends. She wanted to touch his hand sometimes when it rested on the dashboard. She caught him staring at her as they drove. Sometimes he crept from the road, the car’s wheels spinning in the gravel, and she looked at him, sharply, only to find him looking at her, too.

  At school, they didn’t let on that they were anything more than friends, though people asked and teased, as people did. They’d seen him take her home.

  He just takes me because it’s on the way, she said. Because he’s a gentleman, not like the rest of you assholes.

  Connie liked it secret.They didn’t have to sit together at lunch or hold hands or do any of the things that couples did in school. It was almost more real that way, more adult.

  After a few weeks, they hadn’t even kissed yet, though they had an understanding. They had told each other too much to be just friends. She didn’t know what they were to each other, exactly, and she liked that, too. She watched him at lunch, his mouth moving as he spoke to other people who had no idea the things she knew about him, like that he had dedicated his life to Jesus at twelve during a tent revival in Keno and had cried the first night after he got drunk at a party, feeling that he had disappointed Jesus, but he’d done it again anyway, and still did, over and over again.

  He told her that his mother was beginning to be suspicous.

  She likes me to be around girls from church, he said as he drove her home on a drizzly day, much like their first drive home, if I’m going to be around girls at all. She says she’s heard I’ve been taking you out.

  Taking me out, she repeated. Connie hadn’t thought of it that way.

  I’d go to church, Connie said, but Mom and Dad don’t and they like me home on Sundays for laundry, she said.

  Truthfully, her parents had called the Baptist pastor Jenkins a leach on society. Her mother called herself a Pentecostal but kept nothing of the religion except a belief in faith healing and a love of dancing.

  It doesn’t matter what she thinks, he said. I’ll be with whoever I want.

  Connie’s stomach flared. I’ll be with whoever I want. So they were together. Like a couple, the real thing. She tried not to blush as she sipped on the soda.

  Connie had never heard him say anything unkind about his mother. She was a saint, knew the
Bible backwards and forwards, prayed every night for the safety of her children and the salvation of every person in Claymorecounty, and then every person in the world.

  She really means it, he’d say. She really wants every single person saved.

  He gripped the steering wheel and grimaced. She’s a wonderful person, he said. But she just doesn’t understand sometimes.

  •

  The day she disappeared, Connie took the path behind the high school. It went straight through the woods, skirted the wire fence of a pasture where cows stared dully but rarely ever moved. Once she cleared the pasture, she’d be at the back of the general store, where she was supposed to meet with Billy. They were meeting secretly now, no more car rides out in the open, just until he figured out what to tell his mother. They had kissed in the car at Sonic and he said that he didn’t care who knew. They were a couple now, and he loved her, and when he turned nineteen, he’d file for an Indian house and take care of her. Her stomach had been so nervous and sick then that she couldn’t finish her burger and when he dropped her off at home, she had spent the afternoon in a fog so thick that her mother had to ask her three times if she wanted dinner: she’d just been lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling fan. She couldn’t sleep that night, either, imagining herself in her own house, cooking food she liked, picking the colors of curtains and sheets and towels and watching whatever she wanted on television.

  She had almost reached the edge of the woods, where the trees thinned out and became pasture, when she saw them: a group of men gathered around something on the ground. The object was metal and the sun through the leaves speckled it with light. One knelt down by the metal object with a butcher knife (she saw its broad flashing), trying to pry it open. The other three stood around him, smoking, talking low. She didn’t recognize them from behind: they wore plain and plaid button-ups and jeans. Each wore boots, not the fancy kind that cowboys wore but the kind of work boots with steel inside the toe to keep men from getting their feet broken if concrete or rerod fell on them.

  It was a cash register, she saw, as she stepped closer, though it was misshapen now from their attempts to beat it open. She saw the man kneeling down on the ground more clearly than the others—his face was partially-hidden by his greased hair, which hung over his eyebrows, but she recognized him anyway. It was a man she’d seen before hitchhiking on the side of the road, holding his dirty thumb out on the roadway from Heartshorne to Keno, walking backwards along the roadway.

  Blackshaw, her father had said, passing without even as much as slowing down the car. Her parents knew him. Her mother said she remembered James Blackshaw from school—he was about five years younger than her, but he was wild enough that even the adults knew his name. He got kicked out junior year. He got a girl pregnant—ruined her life and left her alone. Nobody would touch her after that.

  Connie didn’t know much else about him. She’d seen him in the general store from time to time, looking over the canned beans or asking for the cheapest pack of cigarettes.

  Her mind didn’t put together what she was seeing—a closed cash register, men bending over it to pry the drawer open—until it was too late to turn around. She had come to close and they’d heard the dried leaves crackle under her hard-soled mary-janes.

  I can’t believe he didn’t give you a key, James said. Seems like they don’t trust you to begin with.

  One of the men shrugged. I don’t know how all that works. I just stock.

  Hey! One of the men had sighted her. James looked up, the knife still in his hand.

  She could have run back to the school in five minutes. She could have run back shouting the entire time, and they might have let her run, hoping that she wouldn’t talk out of fear or a desire not to be a tattletale. Children in Heartshorne were taught young, and with great emphasis, not to be tattles. The worst violation, even worse than lying, was to tell what wasn’t supposed to be told.

  But she didn’t turn around and run. Men made her fearful; men older than her but younger than her father, in particular, made her blush, made her feel as though she could do nothing but exactly what they said. She wanted them to look at her but was afraid when they looked too closely or carefully, afraid when they smiled and afraid when they didn’t smile.

  She stepped forward. She would be good and wouldn’t make them upset.

  I’m sorry, she said. I’m just trying to get over to the general store.

  2

  Emily bought a Heartshorne Star from Rod’s Swap Shop. On the front page, Jenny’s face in her senior photo was placed next to another school photo, this time of an adult man—he was a teacher at Heartshorne High School, the science teacher and girl’s softball coach, and the man who had been driving the car in the accident, Mr. Rodriguez. The article said that in custody, he had admitted to a sexual relationship with the girl, one which had been going on for almost a year by the time of the accident.

  I loved her, he had told the police. I was going to marry her when she turned eighteen.

  They had spent the afternoon at the lake, swimming and picnicking. The accident occurred on the way home, on an otherwise safe and deserted stretch of road, the speed limit 40 miles per hour.

  The accident was deemed suspicious by the Keno authorities. There was no apparent cause of the car going off the road and Rodriguez’s blood was free of alcohol or other intoxicants.

  Emily brought her newspaper home and lay it on a stack of papers, each from the last few days with a picture of Jenny’s face in black and gray somewhere on the front page, though each said mostly the same thing: her family was asking for answers and that Rodriguez claimed that he couldn’t remember the accident or the reason for it. She read each article greedily upon getting the newspapers in her hands and then couldn’t look at them again.

  Emily remembered Rodriguez, the cut on his forehead that bloomed and spilled as he told her that he didn’t know what had happened, that he was afraid he had hurt the girl and that he had not meant to.

  Emily touched her own forehead, which ached with a vague, dry pain that had hidden under the surface of her activities all day, too slight to urge her to make the effort to do anything about it. Now, at the end of the day, it crept up to the surface. She pressed the her left thumb and forefinger in the soft spot between her right thumb and fingers, an old trick she had learned to ease her headaches. She didn’t know if it worked, but at least it distracted her mind until the ibuprofen kicked in.

  Her hands felt rubbery and weak and her fingers collapsed around the objects they touched. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She took a plastic-covered package of saltines from the cabinet and sat down. She took out the folder full of her mother’s articles and examined them—not the articles themselves, she had already read them, but the neat columns of text around them.

  Most of the articles accompanying the one about her mother’s disappearance were about petty crimes and small tragedies—cars crashing into trees, floods, thefts, the deaths or escapes of farm animals. Emily turned back to the very first article, the one published the day after her mother had first gone missing. In the column next to the notice about her mother’s disappearance, an article about the new Keno Police Chief featured a barely visible photograph of a man with black hair, black eyes, and cheekbones that slashed along the sides of the otherwise featureless face. At the bottom of the page, there was only a small column—a robbery from the general store, a stolen cash register that had been discovered missing only that morning. There was no sign of forced entry, though no employees had seen anything suspicious and all had posession of their keys.

  The General Store had been on Highway 2, at the junction between the highway and Echo Lake Road.

  Emily knew exactly where that was. It was Rod’s Swap Shop, around where her mother had been discovered when she finally came home, malnourished and covered in cuts and otherwise fine, though she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) remember anything about where she had been.

  The General Store had been
owned by the Richardsons. Their sons helped out and they hired no outsiders, preferring to keep the business in the family.

  Richardson, Levi Richardson. It was a common name, but maybe they were related. Was he old enough to have been alive then, maybe even a child, old enough to have memories of this missing girl?

  Emily closed the folder and ate saltines until her mouth was so dry she swallowed hard to get the ball of crackers down.

  She planned what she would say to Levi when she went to him. She’s ask him if he remembered Connie’s disappearance. She’d tell him that she needed his help.

  She went to the kitchen sink and turned the tap on and bent down to drink directly from the stream of water as she did sometimes when she stumbled into the bathroom at night from a sharp, sticky feeling of thirst, too tired to go down to the kitchen and get a cup, her hair darkening in the metal basin though she tried to hold it back and out of the water.

  3

  I’m sorry to bother ya’ll, Connie said, crossing her arms across her chest. I’m just on my way through. The man who had turned faced her and smiled, though the others looked down at their shoes. One said fuck as he exhaled smoke and threw down his cigarette to crush under his feet. She recognized one of the standing men: he worked at the General Store. He was just out of high school, a Richardson, John Richardson. His family owned most everything there was to own in town: the gas station, the general store, and a cafe between Heartshorne and Keno that served breakfast all of the time, their eggs salty and tasting of butter and bacon even when nobody at the table had ordered bacon. They just looked at her. Connie stepped forward, holding her books close to her body.

  I’m sorry, she said again, I’m just trying to get by. She walked forward, hoping that they would part their tight circle in the middle of the path let her go. She wouldn’t say anything: she wasn’t a snitch, and if a Richardson was out here, maybe it wasn’t something funny after all. Maybe they were just fixing the stuck cash register.