Summer at Forsaken Lake (19 page)

Charlie shook her head. “Nope. She still thinks we’re working on that old canoe. Now I’m afraid she’s
going to be disappointed; she’s mentioned a couple of times how much she’s looking forward to going canoeing with me. But then I think about that letter she wrote, and the promise your dad made, and something makes me want to make it all come true. It’s dumb trying to keep it secret, because she’s going to find out sooner or later.”

“Sooner, if the twins have anything to do with it,” said Nicholas with a laugh. “Keeping secrets isn’t exactly their strong point. Except when they’re not supposed to, like when Mom showed up.” He offered the tiller to Charlie. “Here, you take it for a while.”

She took the tiller and they sailed along the causeway toward the marina, where, long ago, their parents’ futures had been interrupted by a falling mast.

“You know,” began Nicholas, “there still might be a way for my dad to keep that promise. I just have to figure out
how
when he gets back from Africa.”

“But didn’t Nick say that he hasn’t been in the house in twenty-five years?”

“I know, but I think he’s ready. I mean, why else did he send me and the twins out here for the summer if he didn’t want to, um, reconnect with Nick? And he definitely wanted me to find the movie and
this
,” he said, pointing at
Imp
. “All that stuff about secrets.”

Charlie’s eyes lit up. “And maybe he wants to connect with other parts of his childhood, too.”

“Maybe.”

“So how do you get him here?”

Nicholas smiled and shrugged. “No idea. But we’ll think of something.”

“True. Never underestimate the power of two smart, devious kids.”

* * *

A few muggy, windless days later, as the sun dropped into the haze, Hayley and Hetty gathered Nick, Nicholas, and Charlie—and Pistol, of course—into their bedroom and insisted that everyone take a seat for a “special presentation.” The guests assumed it would be another musical performance, or the two of them acting out a scene from a book they’d recently read, but they were all in for a surprise.

Hetty taped a map of Forsaken Lake to the wall while Hayley held up Nick’s copy of
We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea
.

“Thank you all for coming tonight,” Hetty said in a very formal voice. “We hope you’re comfortable while we explain why you are here. I will now turn the presentation over to my sister, Miss Hayley Mettleson.”

Polite applause greeted Hayley, which she acknowledged with a smile.

“We’re going on a voyage,” she announced. “We have it all planned out. Everyone here is invited to join
us—and, Charlie, we want your mom to come, too. We can all fit.”

“Where are we going?” Nicholas asked in a sarcastic big brother–y voice.

“Please, hold all your questions until the end of our presentation,” Hetty said officiously.

“Thank you, Hetty,” said Hayley as she picked up a wooden yardstick
(DEMING HARDWARE: FOR ALL YOUR HARDWARE NEEDS!)
to use as a pointer. “As I was saying, we are going on a voyage like the kids in this book did. We’re going to spend two nights aboard
Goblin
, and we’re going to circlenav— er, circumnavigate the lake.”

She traced their proposed route around the lake with the yardstick as she continued. “We start here at Uncle Nick’s house, then go all the way up to
here
, and we can anchor for the night. The next day, we sail over here, around these two big islands, and then back down the other side of the lake until we get to someplace safe to anchor again. And in the morning, we go down to the dam, turn around, and come back to where we started.”

“Just like Christopher Columbus,” Hetty added.

“Ferdinand Magellan, actually,” Hayley corrected. “He was the first to sail around the world.”

“Except he didn’t quite make it,” said Charlie. “His ships did, but he died along the way.”

Nick rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I have to say, I’m
very impressed, girls. This is a well-thought-out plan. The distances for each day are about right, assuming we have
some
wind, and there are good spots for anchoring where you want to stop for the night. It’ll probably be seventy or eighty miles of sailing, depending on how much tacking we have to do. I’m sorry I never thought of it, to tell you the truth. I love the idea.”

“Well, I can’t believe I’m saying this,” said Nicholas, “but I totally agree with Uncle Nick. It’s a great idea,
and
it fits in perfectly with my idea for finishing up Dad’s movie. You’ll see what I mean.”

“When do we leave?” Charlie asked. “And I’m not sure my mom will be able to go—you know, with work and everything. She’ll let me go, though.”

“We can’t go for a few days,” said Nick. “I have some things to finish up around here, and we’ll need to do some planning and provisioning. In the meantime, you two girls need to come up with a menu and a shopping list for me. How about Sunday, a little after noon? That’ll give us plenty of time to get up to the north end of the lake. We’ll be back here Tuesday morning.”

Hayley and Hetty threw their arms around each other, hopping and screaming.

“We’re really going to do it?” Hayley asked.

“Sure,” said Nick. “We can all use a little adventure.”

“A real sea voyage,” Hetty said dreamily.

* * *

The next morning, Mr. Leffingwell called from the drugstore to say that the movie film had finally arrived. Nicholas couldn’t wait for Nick to drive him into town in Betty; he flew his bicycle down the road to Charlie’s house, and they rode together into town, where Nicholas insisted on using his hard-earned lawn-mowing money to pay for the processing. Then they raced back to Nick’s, where they set up the screen and projector in the basement (because it was the darkest place in the house), threaded the film through the sprockets, and held their breath.

“Cross your fingers,” said Nicholas as he flipped the switch and the projector whirred into action.

Their hearts sank as the first fifteen seconds of film flickered and fluttered by without a recognizable image. But suddenly, there she was: the teenage version of Franny, standing on the seawall at the marina, smiling and waving at the camera. The picture was grainy, and shaky, and faded—a far cry from the sharp images they were used to—but there was no doubt about what they saw.

“Yes!” cried Charlie. “That’s my mom! The picture’s not too bad, either.”

The wind whipped the hair around Franny’s face as she turned to look out at the lake, which looked angrier than either Nicholas or Charlie had ever seen it. The next thing they saw was Will, standing on the deck of a
sailboat. It took Nicholas a few seconds to realize it was the same boat that was rotting away behind the storage barn—the one with the hole big enough to stick his head through.

“Wow—that’s my dad,” he said.

“I can see why Mom freaked out when she saw you,” Charlie said. “You look just like him. You’re a little darker, and your hair is a
lot
shorter.”

Next came a brief shot of a hand turning pages in a notebook, stopping on the page that read
Scene 13, Take 1
.

After that, the scene unfolded just as Franny had described it to them. The action began with Will standing on the bow of the boat, about to raise the anchor. As Jimmy, playing the Seaweed Strangler, climbed aboard, he was almost knocked overboard by the boom, which swung crazily across the cockpit. He steadied himself and went after Will with his seaweed “rope.”

Their struggle was cut off after a few seconds, and when the scene resumed, Will was already tied to the mast. The Strangler pulled in several feet of mainsheet and took his place behind the steering wheel. The bow of the boat dived deeply into a wave as it sailed clear of the seawall, nearly sending Will face-first onto the foredeck. The camera then cut away to a close-up shot of waves crashing on the rocks and pilings in front of the seawall before returning to the boat, which had traveled a hundred yards or more out into the lake. Jimmy spun the wheel to tack
the boat, and aimed the bow directly at the rocks. For the next thirty seconds or so, the scene jumped back and forth between shots of the boat getting closer and closer to the rocks and of the rocks themselves.

Even in the film’s rough, unedited state, the effect was remarkable; the Seaweed Strangler appeared to be steering the boat purposely on a path of certain destruction. Running with the wind and the high waves, the boat was hard to control, and at one point, it spun nearly sideways to the shore before returning to its original course.

Then, after one last close-up of the rocks, the camera zooms in on Jimmy, poised to dive off the side of the boat. He looks at Will, baring his fangs and beating his chest, and leaps into the waves.

“Wow!” said Nicholas. “Your dad had guts.”

“Either that or he was just plain crazy.” She thought about it for a second and added, “Probably just crazy.”

They watched as Will threw aside the seaweed that had “tied” him to the mast and ran back to grab the wheel. On the film, he is clearly turning the wheel hard to the right, but the boat doesn’t respond at all; it just barrels along—aiming right at the rocks. Even on the grainy, dark film, the panic in his face is obvious as he tries turning in the other direction, with the same result. He shouts something moments before the boat slams into the rocks, and he nearly somersaults over the wheel. An especially large wave picks up the stern and drives the boat forward again, where the bow hits the seawall—and suddenly the
mast is coming toward the camera like something from a bad 3-D movie.

Amazingly, the screen doesn’t go black. When the mast hit Franny, she must have knocked the tripod over, but the camera continues filming the action—sideways, and from ground level—until the film runs out, after about twenty more seconds.

“
That
was amazing,” Charlie said as the projector’s take-up reel spun the tail of the film round and round. “Mom described it exactly like it happened, but until you see it for yourself …”

Nicholas turned the projector off. “I know what you mean. I know it’s a silent movie, but I swear I could
hear
everything—the wind, the waves, the crunching sound that the boat must have made, even my dad screaming.”

“And when that mast comes down …”

They both cringed. “Youch.”

“Let’s watch it again,” said Charlie. “But this time, can we stop it along the way and check out some individual frames?”

“Did you see something?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Before I say anything, you take another look.”

Nicholas rewound the film and they watched a second time. When they got to the part where Jimmy was about to jump, Charlie said, “Freeze it! Okay, now back up a
little bit, to the place where the boat turns sideways. Right there! Now watch carefully.”

They watched it three times, and each time, they moved closer to the screen. On the fourth try, Nicholas froze the film. “Do you see what I see?”

“Is that a face in the porthole?”

“It sure looks like it. I can’t get it any clearer than this. It
could
just be a shadow.”

“But it stays in the same place as the boat turns,” Charlie replies. “I don’t think a shadow would do that.”

“Why would there be somebody in the cabin?”

“To cut the steering cable. Whoever it was had to wait for the perfect moment—
after
the boat was turned around and heading for shore. Now let’s watch the next part, where my dad jumps off.”

Nicholas let the film run through that scene once, and then backed it up to the shot of the crashing waves that preceded Jimmy’s big jump. They watched a second time, and then a third and a fourth.

“Huh,” said Nicholas. “That’s weird.”

Charlie’s eyes didn’t move from the screen. “Yeah.”

As Nicholas advanced the film frame by frame, they saw what they had missed when it was going by at full speed: as the camera tilted up from the rocks, Jimmy, who had been at the wheel when the camera last left him, was clearly climbing into the cockpit
from inside the cabin
.

“He wasn’t supposed to be down there,” Charlie said. “What was he doing?”

Nicholas chose not to say what he was thinking because this
was
Charlie’s dad they were talking about.

“Maybe he just wanted to, you know, make sure he didn’t, uh … I don’t know. He must have had a reason.”

“Well, I don’t know what that could have been,” said Charlie. “Look at the whole picture. The boat
conveniently
turns sideways away from the camera when he’s at the wheel, then we see what looks like somebody’s head through the porthole, and then him crawling up the stairs. And all the while,
your
dad can’t see what’s going on because he’s facing forward.”

“Huh. So, what are you saying? That your dad was the one who … But
why
?”

“
That
is a good question.”

“Yeah, but how do you find the answer to a question like that? Without, you know, sounding like you’re accusing your own dad.”

Charlie considered the question for a moment. “All this was a long time ago, right? I mean, he wasn’t my dad
then
—he’s just a kid named Jimmy Brennan. And besides, there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything.”

Nicholas sighed. “Yeah. Like,
my
dad really did it.”

* * *