Lost Lake House (5 page)

He passed by, a big figure with a slight
element of familiarity that caught her attention. That was who it
was—the city police chief, whose visits to her father had been
frequent lately, and often paid with the furrowed brow and
preoccupation that kept his eyes ahead on the sidewalk now. Dorothy
waited till he had turned the corner, then slipped from the cover
of her bush and ran.

The group at the drugstore corner hailed her
noisily, scolding her for being late. “I’m sorry—I almost got
caught,” Dorothy gasped, catching hold of the street lamp and
holding onto it as she recovered her breath. “I had to wait till he
passed by.”

“Who, your father?”

Dorothy answered without thinking. “No, the
police chief. He was—”

“He’s got the chief of police out after
her!” cried Sadie merrily. “Nobody in your family does things by
halves, do they, Dolly.”

“No, it’s not that,” said Dorothy, who had
been jolted out of the mood to appreciate a joke. “I know what he
was there for. Dad’s been—”

“Will you come
on?
Half the night’s
gone already!” said the young man who was Kitty Lawrence’s
particular property that night, and they all hustled down the block
and into the waiting cars. Amid the clamor, Dorothy was still
thinking back. The police chief’s visit might well carry some
significance for the Lake House crowd—but she found it hard to
break into their conversation with any serious subject.

“Dad’s got the city to offer a reward, you
know,” she managed to say to Kitty at last, when they were both
perched on the back seat, elbowed up against each other to make
room for the crush of fellow-passengers.

“For you?” Kitty laughed.

“No, for information about speakeasies.
Didn’t you tell me about one at the—”

“What are you doing, training for a race?”
Sadie shrilled at the car’s driver as they swerved around a bend in
the road.

“No, making up all the time Dolly lost.
Never fear, we’ll be there by nine!”—and with a roar from the
engine they took a corner at dangerous speed, with shrieks and
whoops from the passengers. Dorothy clutched the door-handle and
twisted to look over the side of the car—the second automobile in
the party, taking its cue from them, surged up alongside, its horn
blaring and dust and gravel spitting from beneath its tires. The
drivers were trying to race; the other one wanted to pass on the
narrow road—and Dorothy suddenly remembered that there was a bridge
across a stream around the turn just ahead.

They flung round the turn and there it
was—the car wrenched sideways at the last moment, stalled and
sputtered, and the other car screamed past onto the bridge with so
little room to spare that one of its wheels scraped the first car’s
bumper.

“Look
out!
” shouted Dorothy, half
rising from her seat: less with fear than with a sudden
adrenaline-surge of anger at the carelessness with so many lives
and limbs. But no one heard her; the air was filled with jesting
abuse hurled at the driver, who was trying to get the car back onto
the road. Dorothy plumped back into her seat, tugged down the hat
she had almost lost and blew a stray curl out of her eyes. She
spent the rest of the ride seething, and had never been so glad to
pull off into the gravel lot above the ferry at the end of it.

Now, poised in the ballroom doorway, she
surveyed the scene, a little on tiptoe and with her hands clasped
in front of her. Dorothy still retained the air of a young girl at
her first dance. But conversely, she had found herself popular at
first, then a little overlooked as time went on, instead of the
other way around. The rest of the number was accomplished, and
still she stood in the doorway, watching a little more soberly as
no partners appeared to invite her into it.

When the music ended, she walked, setting
her light feet precisely on the marble floor, to the nearest sofa
and sat down upon it. She felt the change, but did not yet realize
the reason for it. On her first visits to the Lake House she had
had plenty of partners; her natural prettiness and enthusiasm for
dancing were enough to ensure that. But gradually she had realized
that she didn’t like some of the young men she danced with: the
ones whose voices were too loud, or whose jokes she didn’t like, or
who tried to hold her a little too tight. Instinctively, she became
a step more reserved, and in time those who found they could no
longer get as much fun out of her dropped away and passed her over
for partners better at the flirtatious conversation they preferred.
Not Sloop Jackson, though…

Ida Greenbush dropped down on the sofa
beside her. “Personally, I think it’s too warm for dancing,” she
said, which was her standard excuse each time she found herself
sitting out without a partner.

“Mmm-hmm,” murmured Dorothy, undeceived.

The band began to play “Wonderful One,” and
she sighed. But she was not allowed even the pleasure of listening
to it, for just then Kitty and Sadie arrived, both of them with
eyes snapping in anger, and with only one young man between them,
which was the clear cause of the trouble.

Sadie said, “Well, if you think it’s
my
fault that Maude got him to dance with her—”

“He never would have asked her if you hadn’t
teased him. You dared him.”

“I did not! I never dare anybody, because
they always go and do it! I’d be scared to dare!” declared
Sadie.

“You dared him,” said Kitty. She turned her
back on Sadie. “Come on, Dolly, let’s get something to eat.”

With nothing better to do, Dorothy got up
and followed her. The refreshments, at least, never disappointed in
their department, and perhaps she might meet someone there who was
better company…

Dorothy’s footsteps slowed, halfway to the
refreshment-tables, and her eyes followed Kitty’s slender figure
moving rather ostentatiously among the people who filled the way.
There was only the barest trace of disloyalty left in the thought
that she liked her own friends rather less than the crowds at
large. Kitty’s blasé airs and catlike jealousy of any girl who
talked to the man she had her eye on at the moment, Sadie’s giggles
and over-flattery, Ida’s ineffective imitations of aristocratic
snobbery, all seemed more obvious, got on her nerves a little more
with each outing. They had never been the girls whose society she
gravitated to at school; she had only tagged after Kitty a little
in admiration of her grown-up attitudes—but they were the only
girls she knew who went to the Lake House, and so while she was
here they were her “circle.”

They were never wholly in tune even
here—perhaps because they came for different things. For Dorothy it
was the dancing, just the dancing and a bit of that fairyland
glamor that she kept so determinedly undefined. For the others,
dancing was only one element of an experience that mostly included
flirting and posing, posing as either languid or reckless depending
upon whom one was trying to impress.

Do you have to try and impress people
here?
Dorothy thought as she navigated among elbows to find the
little finger sandwiches and pastries she liked best.
Do you
have to act?
It seemed to her that their trying to act only
brought out those faults and traits of her friends’ in clearer
relief.
I wonder what
I
become
, she thought;
I
wonder what about me stands out clearer when I’m here, on this
midnight island that isn’t quite the real world
…

Someone touched her elbow, a smooth touch
that sent a little electric thrill to her shoulder. She turned
quickly enough that the pastries nearly slid from the little silver
plate in her hands, and looked up to find Sloop Jackson in their
midst.

“Nourishment?” he said, helping himself to a
finger sandwich off Dorothy’s plate with the self-assurance that
was somehow mesmerizing. “Good idea.”

“Only a little,” said Kitty, moving up a
little closer and trying to give the impression that she was
elbowed that way by the crowd. She smiled patronizingly at Dorothy.
“I’d be careful of those pastries, Dolly; they’re frightfully rich
when you’ve got a figure to consider.”

“But I’m only a child; I haven’t got a
figure to consider,” said Dorothy smoothly, and felt that for once
she had turned to use the sharpest thorn in her own flesh.

Sloop Jackson looked around the group,
enlarged by the addition of Sadie, who had seen Jackson’s approach
and followed in his wake, towing her young man along. “How’d you
all like to come downstairs with me? I can get you in.”

“Love it,” said Kitty, with a quick dart of
her black eyes which, had it possessed the power of the fabled look
that could kill, would have neatly detached him from Dorothy and
placed him on Kitty’s other side. But it did not work quite that
way. Dorothy, putting her plate down on a corner of the
refreshment-table as they passed it, found that Sloop Jackson’s
hand remained at her elbow as he guided the group of his patronage
into the hall—his fingers just touching it, but in a way that
seemed to say he had claimed a certain possession of her. It was
interesting, but it was the lesser of her concerns as they threaded
their way through the halls, against a tide of people with glasses
in hand. Half interested, flattered at being included, Dorothy
nevertheless felt a little uneasy. She had tried to close her eyes
and ears to the meaning of the glasses and the references to
“downstairs,” perhaps feeling it would not sit well on her
conscience if she acknowledged it. Now, what could she do? She
could not back out without appearing an idiot in front of her
friends…and Sloop Jackson would look down on her with that amused,
infuriating smile…his hand at her elbow was infinitely to be
preferred, no matter how unsettling.

They descended a twisting, tiled staircase
with an iron railing to a landing choked with potted ferns, a
white-coated attendant standing up against the broad stone chimney
that filled part of one wall, as if he were merely waiting for the
crowd to pass by so he could go on about his business. But Sloop
Jackson produced a colored paper card from his pocket and showed it
to him, and the attendant took a brief comprehensive glance at card
and man, gave a nod, and put his hand to a spot on the side of the
chimney. Instantly the whole broad chinked-stone slab slid to one
side and swung out, revealing a doorway and steps down into a room
that seemed darkly illuminated with a reddish light, from which the
chink of glass proceeded. Dorothy went down the steps, Jackson at
her side and the others following, feeling as if she were
descending into some underground cavern lit by a subterranean
forge. The floors were hardwood and the walls paneled in stone; the
lamps were red-shaded and shone upon a twinkling array of glass
bottles along a large bar and on shelves behind it. There were low
round tables, and red silk sofas arranged like booths around the
walls. There was less press of a crowd here; select groups,
admitted by the colored paper cards, clustered about the tables or
herded by the bar.

Dorothy moved slowly through the room among
the others—outwardly calm, but there was a quick nervous pulse
beating in the hollow of her throat. She stopped when they
did—Sloop Jackson had released her arm and was leaning against the
bar, calling the white-coated bartenders by their first names;
Kitty and Sadie and Sadie’s young man whose name Dorothy could
never remember were pressed up on her other side, possessing
themselves of empty glasses and laughing at something she had not
heard.

While the bartender was filling their
glasses with something that had an unnatural-seeming tang of pine
about the smell, Dorothy turned her back to the bar and rested her
elbows on the shining surface, and stole another look about her. A
“speakeasy”; for the first time she was standing in a speakeasy. It
was as luxurious, in a piratical sort of way, as anything else
about the Lake House, but besides the red glow and the glitter of
glass, she was seeing the black headlines on the newspapers piled
in her father’s study, police truncheons and glaring headlamps and
bottles smashed in the streets.

“Champagne or gin?” said Sloop Jackson at
her side.

“Gin,” said Kitty Lawrence on the other.

“Dolly?” said Jackson.

Dorothy looked up at him, and over at Kitty.
They were entirely at their ease and matter-of-fact—she wondered if
it was because they assumed her to be as worldly-wise as they were,
or if by common consent they were pretending not to know she
wasn’t. Her eyes went to the glass in Jackson’s smooth manicured
hand, hesitated there a moment. He grinned and slid his other arm
along the edge of the bar behind her, and lifted the glass as if to
put it to her lips himself. An initiation—a first draught of
grown-up life for a curly-headed child. Ignoring the alarm bells
that were chiming agitatedly in her head, Dorothy put up her hand
and took the glass from him, and lifted it the rest of the way. The
odd juniper tang met her nostrils as she put the drink to her
lips.

She took one sip, and swallowed it—it was
dreadful, but Dorothy managed to get it down and not to spill any
on her dress. It gave a strange foreign feeling to the inside of
her mouth, and tasted the way it smelled but worse. She took a
half-bewildered look at Sloop Jackson—realized they were all
watching for her reaction. Half mesmerized, she lifted the glass
again, but as it came near all her senses rebelled against it and
she jerked it away.

“It’s awful!” she said violently, forgetting
for the moment to care about what the others thought. “It’s
horrible—I don’t see how you can all like it—”

Kitty and Sadie burst into laughter, and
Jackson laughed too, though more tolerantly. Dorothy suddenly saw
red, a madder red than the glow of silk sofas and speakeasy lamps.
Angry at them, angry at herself and frightened of she knew not
what, she tried to hand the glass of gin to Jackson, changed her
mind and put it abruptly down on the bar, still unreasoningly
careful not to spill it; pulled away from them and made for the
entrance to the speakeasy, bumping blindly into several people. She
ran up the steps and found there was no handle on the inside of the
secret door—she pounded on it with her fist, and it swung open
almost immediately, but Dorothy saw that was only because a man in
evening tails and a woman in shimmering blue stood outside, the man
with card in hand that he had just shown to the attendant. Dorothy
rushed out past them and down the first hallway that offered itself
to her view off the fern-choked landing.