Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

  Her mother shook her head. No toast today. Your brothers used up the last of the bread last night when they came in late. You can get out the milk, though.

  Connie placed the bottle on the table, the glass sweating.

  Connie wanted nothing more than her old life back. This was the first step, doing something normal and small. Her old, miserable life, the one she’d complained about so often. It seemed very small and precious now.

  Her mother stood over the steaming pot, cursing under her breath when the bubbles pooped and burned her hands. She didn’t seem to notice Connie in the room, didn’t marvel at her return to the normal world.

  So maybe it was over. Her life could resume again. She’d go back to school. People would forget.

  The newspaper sat by the milk jug. Connie smoothed it out so she could see the front page. A young man’s face was on the cover. The photo lacked detail. It could have been almost anyone, the picture being mostly shadow. But she knew who it was immediately—the hair as dark as the eyes, the severe line from just below the cheekbone down to the chin.

  She touched the picture. Above it, the headline said Young Man Found Dead. It took her a moment to reconcile the picture of a man she’d known alive with the headline. It had to be him.

  Her stomach dropped and her knees gave. She sat down so heavily on one of the rickety kitchen chairs that her mother turned and scolded her.

  Connie, don’t plop down like that. Mind the chairs or you’ll be eating from the floor.

  Connie nodded, not hearing. She read the story. It was sketchy and said little about the murder. That’s what it was, murder—he’d been shot in the head and then thrown into the river.

  A former inmate of McCallister maximum security prison, the article said, incarcerated for armed robbery, just six months out. Drifter. Estranged from his family.

  Probably some trouble with drugs or alcohol, the sheriff said in the article. He was well-known as a thief and a drunk. Its a shame that such a thing should happen to someone so young, but I can’t say that he’ll be missed, the article reported in the sheriff’s words. Connie had seen the Sheriff in the newspaper, a thin, balding man with a craggy face much like James’ had been. Connie read the quotes, hoping to see some glimpse of the James that she remembered. His mother and father did not send in a comment, nothing to say that he had been a son, once, a baby, perfect in the ways that all babies are perfect. She searched for some hint that others understood that he had been a person. But she could find not a single kind word. Not a single mention of something he had done that might make him less than the black words on the page—former inmate, armed robbery, drifter, estranged.

  •

  Connie waited for Frannie. She’d called her that morning right after breakfast, waking her from her late sleep after the night shift. Frannie was the only one who knew about James. Frannie grew angry quickly: Connie had once seen her throw a glass jar full of pennies at her mother when Frannie was drunk and her mother had said Frannie, why don’t we make a pot of coffee for you, get you sobered up? And Frannie knew people. She loved talking about her connections, the men and women in town who she knew who were important. She knew where to buy the purest everclear, where to go to get a new license plate for a car if you needed to ditch the old one fast, and where to get televisions for cheap.

  Connie’s mother had hinted that Frannie had connections beyond electronics and alcohol. She worried that Frannie was going to get a reputation.

  Frannie arrived smoking a cigarette, her hair up in a messy bun.

  Before she could speak, Connie shook the newspaper at her. Frannie set down her magazines and purse. She nodded.

  You saw it, that boy’s death.

  Connie nodded.

  So what do you think of it? Frannie squinted and began to unpin her hair.

  Connie set the newspaper down. Do you know what happened?

  Frannie smiled. The smile made Connie’s stomach turn, and she feared she’d begin to cry if Frannie didn’t say something soon that would soothe her, that would let her know that it was just a coincidence.

  Now why would you think I know about something like that? Looks like the boy made somebody angry. She dropped her smile and unwound her hair, which fell in a coil down one shoulder. She began to separate it, breaking up last night’s hairspray.

  Looks like he was probably asking for it, she said.

  Connie set the newspaper down. Her throat closed up. She looked down intently at the pattern of her blanket, following the zigzags of stripe until she felt she could lift her eyes.

  She wouldn’t cry, not in front of Frannie. There wasn’t any point. She’d have to explain everything if she cried—she’d have to say she wasn’t raped, just treated badly, that she didn’t hate James (hadn’t hated him: was everything in past tense now that he was dead?), and that Frannie had gotten somebody killed for nothing.

  Family was all she had now. James was gone, and she’d never had him anyway.

  Looks like it, she said, when she finally looked up. A few tears slid down her cheeks, but that was all. Frannie came to the edge of her bed and sat down.

  Listen, Frannie said, you don’t need to feel bad about this. You didn’t have anything to do with it, okay? You didn’t know nothing, you didn’t do nothing, and you don’t know nothing now, you hear me? There’s nothing to know.

  Connie nodded. She swallowed until the tightness in her throat passed.

  Frannie put her hand on Connie’s knee. I love you, she said. Nothing’s gonna happen to you again with me looking out for you.

  •

  For a couple of weeks, things were quiet. Connie went back to school when the bruises faded. People treated her differently, but not as she had expected. They treated her delicately, as though she were very sick and only appeared well. Her teachers allowed her to bring home the work she had missed. She wouldn’t fail this year, but it was close. She came home and did homework each night until bed until she had made up everything she’d missed in the weeks she was out. Before, she wouldn’t have worked hard—being held back didn’t scare her. But now it did. She wanted to get away, and if you failed school, you could never get away. The careful, distant way that people moved around her made her feel lonely. This wasn’t her home anymore.

  Billy nodded to her in the hallway, and once he spoke to her after school, explaining why he hadn’t called, why he hadn’t visited.

  You know we can’t anymore, he said. He didn’t meet her eye. Whatever we were doing before, that has to end. My mom, she, she just wouldn’t let me, you know?

  She knew. He was kind, but whatever they had had before, that undefined thing, was over. She had not expected anything else. Something had happened to her, everyone knew, even if they didn’t know what, and whatever had happened had made her unsuitable for him. She understood that, though she couldn’t have articulated it. It was understood the way that James Blackshaw’s death was understood—something had happened and now the world was being set right, even if it hurt.

  She did not doubt that the night she’d spent away from home, and what had happened in that night, meant that she must somehow pay. Now that James was dead (it was her fault, she had no doubt about it, though she didn’t know how it had happened and hadn’t wanted it to happen, it was her fault), she willingly took whatever unhappiness that Heartshorne decided to give her. It seemed only fair.

  Suddenly, she was a quiet girl, timid even. The girl who didn’t take bullshit, the girl who pushed first in a fight, that girl was gone. Connie pulled her hair back tight so that her face was open and the skin thin around her hairline. Her skirts were well below the knee. She was always too warm in sweaters and sleeves.

  •

  The rule is that you don’t speak about it. You don’t brag about it. You don’t threaten anyone with things you should not know and give details of deaths that you should know nothing about. When Frannie told the man at the bar who pushed her against the wall and pressed the his sharp hipbone
against her stomach that he would end up like Blackshaw at the bottom of the lake, a hole in his head, and when she went back inside the bar, crying, saying that he had tried to force her, she was drunk and hardly knew what she was saying. Motherfucker will end up like Blackshaw, she told the room as she rubbed the makeup from under her eyes and re-buttoned her blouse.

  People heard her. In a different town, her words would have gotten her arrested and questioned until they extracted the answers they needed. In this dive bar, the problem wasn’t what she had done or arranged to be done, but that she had broken the rules about how to handle such information. What if word traveled out beyond Heartshorne?

  When Frannie left the bar, she knew she had said too much. She hoped nobody would talk. She hoped it wouldn’t get back to her family.

  But it did. Frannie got an anonymous call the day later, saying that the sheriff’s office was going to give her a call soon, that she best prepare her alibi. Connie’s mother got a call asking if she’d heard of Blackshaw, if she could explain her whereabouts on the night of his murder. Her father, at work, heard that Frannie had talked. He heard that some people wanted to get to the bottom of the murder. Even Blackshaw had a few friends, and it only took a few friends to get the police involved, even for a no-good person like Blackshaw, a person who was better off at the bottom of a lake.

  Of course, they all had alibis, they were all somewhere else that night. But still, it was too close.

  Connie wasn’t given much notice. She never understood quite how word traveled. Her parents called her to the kitchen. Her brothers and sisters had all cleared out. They said that they knew what had happened to her, and that Frannie had run her mouth about the Blackshaw boy, making it unsafe for them to stay in town. They said that the family was moving.

  It’s not good to keep you here, her father said, with what with what happened and all. It’s not good for your brothers and sisters. We don’t need the police down here. We don’t need any trouble from Blackshaw’s family or friends or any of those prison people he knew. Her father spoke quietly but firmly. She did not argue. He didn’t look at her. Her mother kept her lips pressed together. She seemed angry, though she continued to treat Connie carefully, as she had before the knowledge of what had really happened, though her lips remained shut.

  They didn’t say it, but it was clear that the whole thing was her fault. They had to leave Heartshorne because of her.

  As they packed their belongings—everyone except Frannie came along, even her older brothers and sisters—her mother managed to say few words to her, nothing more than label the box “fragile” or to shout at her for folding the linens sloppily and not along the seams that had developed over the years from folding and ironing and folding again.

  •

  They moved to Kansas, a nondescript town and a smaller, more dilapidated house than they’d had in Heartshorne, where good land was cheaper and easier to come by. They felt like strangers in Kansas. They missed the hills. They were not Midwesterners by nature, not friendly, not religious, not interested in their neighbors or the local football team. The flatness made them feel exposed and lonely. They didn’t understand neighbors visiting with food and asking questions about where they had come from, why they lived where they lived, and what the children hoped to do when they grew up. It seemed nosey, sneakily unkind.

  Connie’s father died of heart failure after working for ten more years for the telephone company in Coldwater, Kansas. He died almost a year to-the-day after his retirement, for which he received a plaque and a cake, delivered to the house with his name spelled on the front. He had not worked long enough to earn a pension.

  In Kansas, Connie began to think of herself as always on the verge of leaving. She wasn’t there, really. She moved through school and jobs and dates with a detachment. She wasn’t unhappy. She didn’t miss the girl she had been before she had met James Blackshaw, that girl who had been lost somewhere between the school and the general store. That girl was gone, so why mourn her? She’d been stupid, anyway, and had been too innocent. Look where innocence had gotten her.

  Connie would not be innocent. She wouldn’t be caught in a place like Heartshorne again. Because she was from there, a daughter of Heartshorne, it was right that she had been punished. But no place would own her now.

  She was completely free.

  21

  Emily emerged from Colleen’s trailer into the heat, the change so sudden and unexpected that she gulped the air and was afraid that she might not be able to catch her breath.

  She held her stomach. Am I breathing? It didn’t feel like air, exactly, but like the prickly stream of forced motion that came from a automatic hand-dryer in a public bathroom.

  She had left her windows down in the car, but it didn’t help—inside, she felt her skin damp and burning. She rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioner.

  She switched on the radio and listened to a song about a woman who finally decides to divorce a man who isn’t good to her. She woman sang that she was now free to go out at night and free to watch the sun rise.

  Emily listened to the lyrics carefully, trying to think about anything but what she had just learned.

  By the time she had left Colleen’s, she had somehow worked her way back into the woman’s good graces. She’d asked about Colleen’s children and grandchildren and her work at the textile factory (now closed) in Keno.

  Come back sometime, Colleen had offered, placing her bird-like hand in Emily’s hand. Her kindness, as strange and sudden as her anger, confused Emily. Emily nodded and promised that she would.

  In the song on the radio, the woman’s repetition of the word free became a shout, and the instruments in the background responded by rising in volume. A guitar shrieked as the drums pounded and the entire movement of sound became more insistent in agreeing with her voice. Yes, freedom.

  Emily discovered that she was crying when she felt the tears slick the steering wheel.

  •

  Jonathan sat in her living room, on the carpet instead of the couch, where he never seemed quite comfortable or knew exactly how to sit. On the floor, he crossed his legs and sat upright. He shuffled his cards deftly in a few movements of his hand and set down the deck between them.

  Okay, what would you like to ask?

  Emily set her glass of wine on the carpet. She’d been nervous all afternoon after speaking to Colleen, but also at the thought of seeing Jonathan again. But he had not allowed her to be nervous. He had come to her and let her rest in the smell of his clothes, which didn’t smell of soap but of something clean like cedar and his skin underneath, slightly salty. She told him the story that Colleen had told him and he said exactly the right thing:

  That’s fucked up, he said, and gave her a hug.

  Emily looked at the back of the cards. The edges were rough and in some places the paper separated away in layers. He had used the same deck for years, he told her, though he had dozens of others which he used for himself.

  What do you ask yourself?

  He had shrugged. Anything. Anything I don’t understand and need help with.

  Can I ask the cards about something that isn’t just about me? Emily asked. I mean, something bigger, something that I can’t control on my own, with just my own choices?

  Jonathan looked down at the deck. You can ask what you need to know about the situation. He looked up and gave her the lopsided, nervous smile he gave her (and maybe everyone? She didn’t know him well enough to know yet) when he was about to say something he wasn’t sure about.

  Is it about the town? He asked. Your family? The whole thing? Because I can only tell you things directly about you and your choices. I can’t explain somebody else’s behavior.

  Emily nodded. She pursed her lips together. I want to know what needs to happen to make the murders stop, she said. I want to know if I have something to do with it. If I can help.

  Why? He asked. How could you stop it?

  She shrugged. I
’m from here, she said. This is the only place I can call home. My mother left because something terrible happened and she never had a home again. If I’m going to stay here, I want to help make it right.

  He nodded and picked the cards up again, shuffling. He stopped and cut the deck.

  Okay, he said. Here’s what the cards have to say.

  1

  The Harris twins had just arrived home from school when Frank saw them. The boy still wore his backpack. The girl’s was on the ground, bright pink and plastic reflecting in the sun. It was the hottest time of the day, just before dusk and after an entire day of sun overhead. He wondered how children could play in this heat, how they didn’t just fall over with exhuastion.

  They were taking turns on the tire swing. They were about eight or nine, maybe ten. They still played like children, though from the car, where he had parked with his window down, he could hear the boy shout words like stupid and die. The boy, in between turns, was playing with a toy water gun, pointing it at his sister on the swing and at something beyond her.

  Frank liked these two children. They had spark. He liked the children with spark most. He had the twin emotion of excitment, a palpable fluttering in his stomach, and sickness at his excitement, which also bloomed in his stomach as heartburn. He swallowed down bile and composed his face. He couldn’t appear suspicious to them. He had to be friendly, but not too friendly. He had to get them to come with him, otherwise, it would be messy, it would be partly ruined, like the time before, when the child had bit him in the shoulder when he was driving and he’d had to let the kid out after threatening that if he told, he’d come back and kill the boy’s whole family.

  These ones were trusting. He stopped his car in front of their house and asked if their parents were home. He knew they weren’t, but just in case some other adult was lurking around, he had a plan. There was a dead cell phone in his pocket and a story about having to reach his wife, who was in the hospital up in Keno. It wasn’t much of a story, but he figured the details would flesh out if needed. He performed well under pressure.