Haunted Legends (36 page)

“Uh-oh,” Dixie said.

“What uh-oh?” Bernice said. The cabin was growing larger. She looked down again and water was rapidly filling the boat. Dixie was already ankle deep and bailing like mad with a small plastic bucket. “Good grief! It’s the plug.” All boats were fitted with a plug to drain bilge water when dry-docked. She scrambled aft, catching an oar in the shin. She plunged her arm to the elbow, felt around, searching for the hole, and found it, plug firmly in place.

Bubbles roiled about Lourdes’s feet. “Guys . . .” She dropped the oars. Rowing was impossible now as the boat wallowed.

“Oh crap on a stick! I think it’s coming apart!”

“We gotta swim for it,” Dixie said. She’d already kicked off her shoes. “C’mon Bernie—get ready.”

The shore was about seventy yards away. Not so far, but Bernie hadn’t swum a lap in years. Her arms and legs cramped with fear, and the darkness swelled and throbbed in her brain. She tasted the remnants of dinner as acid.

Dixie leaped. Lourdes followed an instant later. She stumbled, and she
belly flopped. Water gushed over the rails and the boat was a stone headed for the bottom. Bernie held her nose and jumped—the frigid water slammed her kidneys like a fist. She gasped and kicked, thrashing as if through quicksand, and her clothes dragged, made, abruptly, of concrete. In those moments of hyperawareness, she had time to regret all of the cigarettes and booze, to lament spending her days off lying around the yard like a slug. The moon hung too low; it merged with the lake until water and sky reversed. She floundered, trying to orient herself in the great, dark space.

“Lourdes!” She swallowed water and it scorched her sinuses and throat. “Lourdes!” Her voice didn’t project, and she began to cough. There was Dixie bobbing like a cork a few yards away, but no sign of her niece. The blaze of moonlight was eclipsed by red and black motes that shot from the corners of her eyes as she gulped air and dove.

On the first try, she found Lourdes in the freezing murk. The girl was feebly making for the surface. Bernice caught the girl’s arm, began to tow her along. A distinct point of light flickered at her peripheral vision. It rose swiftly from blackness, so pale it shone as it tumbled toward her, rushed toward her, and gained size and substance. Bernice gazed upon the approaching form with abject wonder. Perhaps she’d fallen into the sky and was plunging toward the moon itself. Terror overcame her—she screamed and a gout of bubbles exploded from her mouth. She brought Lourdes to the surface in one convulsive heave, and then hands hooked beneath her arms and brought her away with them.

Later, in the fetal position upon the small, sharp rocks of the beach, and after Karla shoved the others aside and administered first aid until she spluttered and vomited and breathed on her own, Bernice tried to summon an image of the form she’d seen down there, to perfect its features, and couldn’t. Even now, safely ashore and encircled by her comrades, the blurry figure was etched in her mind, and evoked a stark and abiding fear. It had come close, radiating a cold much sharper than the chill water. She squeezed her eyes shut, and rubbed them with her palms in a futile attempt to exorcise this image that had leaked from dreams into the physical world.

Dixie and Li-Hua implored her to go to the clinic. What if she was hypothermic? Bernice shrugged them off—after she regained her senses and hacked the water from her lungs, she felt fine. Weak and shivery, but fine. Lourdes was okay, too, probably better, insomuch as youth seemed to bounce
back from anything short of bullet wounds. She huddled with Bernice, eager to relate her tale of near disaster. Her pants cuff had snagged on the rail and she banged her shoulder. Thank the stars for Aunt Bernice and Dixie!

“Guess I owe you one, too,” Bernice said as Dixie wrapped her in a blanket and led her to the cabin.

“Not me,” Dixie said. “No way I coulda dragged your carcass all the way in on my own. You should’ve seen Karla go—that old broad can
swim
!”

Karla and Li-Hua suggested pulling stakes and heading home early in light of the traumatic events. Lourdes disappeared outside and Dixie lay in her bunk, inconsolable for cajoling her friends to accompany her on the rickety boat and then nearly getting them all drowned. “I really fouled up,” she said. Her voice was rusty from crying into her pillow. “What a jerk I am.”

“We should sue the pants off the lodge for owning such a damned leaky boat!” Karla had huffed and puffed her indignation for a good hour.

“We took the boat without asking, didn’t we?” Li-Hua said.

“That’s beside the point. It’s outrageous to keep a death trap lying around. Somebody should give them what for.”

Bernice forced herself to rise and go for a walk down to the beach where she smoked a cigarette and watched the sun rise while the moon yet glowed on the horizon. She stubbed the butt of her cigarette on the sole of her shoe. Her eyes were twitchy and dry and her hair was stiff. She shook her fist at the lake, and spat.

Lourdes stepped from the bushes screening the path and came to stand beside her. The girl’s expression was different today, more sober; she’d aged five years overnight. The patronizing half smile was wiped from her face. “That is the coldest water I’ve ever jumped into,” she said. “I dreamt about this before.”

“You mean the boat sinking?” Bernice couldn’t look at her.

“Kind of. Not the boat; other stuff. We were somewhere in the woods—here, I guess. Me, you, some other people, I don’t remember. You kept telling the story about Dolly.”

“Except I didn’t tell the story. Dixie did. She’s always been better at talking.”

“I got it wrong. Dreams are funny like that. Mom thinks I’m a psychic. Maybe I’m only a partial psychic.”

“Your psychic powers convince you to fly over here?”

Lourdes shrugged. “I didn’t really analyze it. I just wanted to come see you. It may sound dumb, but on some level I was worried you might be in trouble if I didn’t. Looks like I had it backwards, huh?”

Bernice didn’t say anything for a while. She watched the water shift from black, to milk, to gold. “I’ve always had a bit of the sight, too,” she said.

“Really?”

“Sometimes, when I was a child, I dreamed things before they happened. Nothing big. I sure couldn’t pick lotto numbers or anything. It came and went. I don’t get it so much these days.”

“Wow. Thanks for telling me. Mom doesn’t want to know anything. I confided in her once. Frank put his foot down.”

They fell silent and lighted cigarettes. Bernice finished hers. She hesitated, then patted Lourdes’s shoulder, turned and walked back to the cabin.

After breakfast at the Bigfish, their mood thawed, and by mid-afternoon everyone agreed to stay—anything less was an unreasonable waste of what promised to be fine weather and several as yet corked bottles of wine.

Indeed, the remainder of the visit was splendid. By day, they set up a badminton net and a crude horseshoe pit and played until dark. Karla and Li-Hua shot two memory cards of photos. Bernice taught Lourdes cribbage and gin rummy. She even managed to power through a book about dream symbolism by candlelight while her companions slept. The book wasn’t particularly illuminating in regard to her specific experiences. Nonetheless, she slept with it clutched to her breast like a talisman.

On the final evening, Bernice went with Lourdes to the woodshed to fetch an armload of dry pine to bank the fire. They lingered a moment, saying nothing, listening to the crickets and the owls. From inside came the raucous cries and curses of the latest debate between Dixie and Karla.

Lourdes said, “I haven’t thanked you. I was in trouble the other night.”

Bernice laughed softly. “Don’t worry about it. Nancy would’ve killed me herself if I’d let you sink. You have no idea how many years she spent freezing by the pool while I had my swim lessons when we were kids.”

“That’s Mom.”

“Yes, well . . .” Bernice cleared her throat. “I think I was hallucinating. Lack of oxygen to the brain.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been meaning to ask. Did you happen to see anything odd in the water?”

“Besides you?”

“Watch your lips, kid.” Bernice smiled, but her hand tightened on the frame of the shed. The pit of her stomach knotted. Last night she’d been under the lake again, and Nancy was with her, glimmering dead white, hands extended. Only, it wasn’t Nancy. She’d simply given the figure a face. “No biggie. I sucked in a lot of water. I think a fish swam by. Panicked me a bit.”

Darkness had stolen across the water and through the trees, and Lourdes was hidden mostly in shadow, except for where lantern light came from the windows and revealed her hair in halo, a piece of her shoulder, but nothing of her expression. She said, “I didn’t see any fish.” She was silent for a moment, and when she spoke again her tone was strange. “There was something wrong with that boat.”

“I’ll say. Probably rotted clean through.”

“What I mean is, it wasn’t right. It didn’t belong here.”

Bernice tried to think of a witty response. She wanted to scoff at what Lourdes was hinting. “Oh,” she said. “The
Flying Dinghy
of Lake Crescent, eh?”

Lourdes didn’t say anything.

Three years passed before the Redfield Girls returned to Lake Crescent. This was Dixie’s year to choose and she invited Lourdes, who agreed to join them. Bernice and Li-Hua declined to accompany their friends on the trip, a first since the women had established the yearly tradition. Bernice begged off because the week prior she’d fallen while cleaning her gutters and suffered a broken ankle. It was healing nicely, although it was wrapped in a cast and not fit for bearing any kind of weight. Li-Hua’s excuse was that
Hung remained in China on a business trip and someone had to keep an eye on their rambunctious teenage sons, Jerrod and Jules.

Bernice knew better. While Dixie and Karla had quickly gotten over the close call with the rowboat, she and Li-Hua shared a profound antipathy toward the lake; its uncanny emanations repelled them. As for Lourdes, an invitation into the circle was irresistible to a girl of her youth and inexperience, albeit she expressed reluctance to abandon Bernice. In the end, they had a few glasses of wine and Bernice told her to go—no sense watching an old fuddy-duddy lie about all weekend listening to her bones knit.

Bernice spent the whole weekend at home, pruning rosebushes, and riding around on Elmer’s sputtering mower. Sunday-morning news predicted a storm. She worked straight through lunch and finished putting away the tools and hosing cut grass stems from her ankle cast minutes before storm clouds blocked out the fading sun. Thunder cracked in the distance and it began to rain. She hobbled to the pantry, searching for flashlights and spare batteries. The power died a few minutes later, as it always did during storms, and she grimaced with smug satisfaction as she lighted a bunch of candles (some of the very same she’d purchased on Saturday!) in the kitchen and her bedroom. She boiled tea on the camp stove Elmer had always kept stashed in the garage, and retired to bed, intent upon reading a few chapters into a pictorial history of the Mima Mounds. The long, long afternoon of yard work put her under before she’d read two pages.

Bernice woke in complete darkness to the wind and rain falling heavily on the frame house. A lightning flash caused the shadows of the trees to stretch long, grasping fingers down the wall and across her blanket. Something thumped repeatedly. She grabbed the flashlight and crawled from bed and went into the living room, leaning on the cheap rubber-tipped cane she’d gotten at the hospital. The front door was wide open. The elements poured through, and all the papers she’d left stacked on the coffee table were flung across the floor. She put her shoulder against the door and forced it shut and threw the deadbolt for good measure.

She fell into an easy chair and waited with gritted teeth for the pain in her ankle to subside. While she recovered, the fact the door had been locked earlier began to weigh heavily on her mind. What was it that brought her awake? The noise of the door banging on the wall? She didn’t think so. She’d heard someone call her name.

The storm shook the house and lightning sizzled, lighting the bay windows so fiercely she shielded her eyes. Sleep was impossible and she remained curled in her chair, waiting for dawn. Around two o’clock in the morning, someone knocked on the door. Three loud raps. She almost had a heart attack from the spike of fear that shot through her heart.

Without thinking, she cried, “Lourdes? Is that you?” There was no answer, and in an instant her thoughts veered toward visions of intruders bent on mischief and the spit dried in her mouth. Far too afraid to move, she waited, breath caught, straining to hear above the roar of the wind. The knocks weren’t repeated.

Bernice didn’t fly to France for Lourdes’s funeral. Nancy, mad with grief, wanted nothing to do with her sister. Why hadn’t Bernice been there to protect Lourdes? She’d allowed their daughter to go off with a couple of people Nancy and Francois scarcely knew and now the girl was never coming back. As the weeks went by, Nancy and Bernice mended fences, although Francois still wouldn’t speak to her, and the boys followed suit. Those were dark days.

She’d gone into a stupor when the authorities gave her the news; ate a few Valiums left over from when she put Elmer in the ground, and buried herself in blankets. She refused to leave the house, to answer the phone, scarcely remembered to eat or shower.

Li-Hua told her more about the accident when Bernice was finally weaned off the tranquilizers and showed signs of life once again.

The story went like this: Dixie had driven Karla and Lourdes to Joyce, a small town a few miles west of Lake Crescent. They ate at a tiny diner, bought some postcards at the general store, and started back for Olympia after dark. Nobody knew what went wrong, exactly. The best guess was Dixie’s Subaru left the road and smashed through the guardrail at mile 38—Ambulance Point. Presumably the car went in and sank. Rescue divers came from Seattle and the area was dredged, but no car or bodies were found. There were mutters that maybe the crash happened elsewhere, or not at all, and conjectures regarding drift or muck at the bottom. Ultimately,
it amounted to bald speculation. The more forthcoming authorities marked it down as another tragic mystery attributed to the Lake Crescent curse. There were further details that Bernice blocked out, refused to acknowledge. Details about her loved ones’ last moments that she shoved into the cellar of her mind as a sanity-saving measure and soon forgot.