Summer at Forsaken Lake (2 page)

Nick and Nicholas sat together, swinging slowly back and forth as they watched and listened to the storm barreling past them. The lake was calm again, its surface ruffled only by the rain that continued to fall, though not nearly as hard. With a sailing lesson out of the question for the time being, Nicholas decided it was a good time to start his exploration of the house—beginning with the tower room.

“I’m going upstairs for a while, to watch from my room,” he said. “I’ll bet it’s like being right
in
the storm cloud.”

Nick sent him off with a little wave. “Go. Enjoy. We’ll go into town in a while. I need to pick up a few things. You can do a bit of exploring if you’d rather not go to the A&P.”

Nicholas climbed the staircase, past the small, simply framed oil paintings that lined the walls, not noticing until he reached the last one that they were all signed
Lillie
. He didn’t even know that his great-aunt had been a painter—and a pretty good one, he thought as he backed down the stairs to get a closer look at each. The paintings were a scrapbook of her life: the house and barn built by her great-grandfather in 1895; the lake in all four seasons; the yard, with its towering maples and poplars; and finally, Nick’s pride and joy,
Goblin
—resting peacefully at her mooring in one painting, heeled over with spray flying over her bow in another. That one made Nicholas want to go sailing even more.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” asked Hayley from the bottom of the stairs.

She and her twin sister, Hetty, had celebrated their tenth birthday a few days earlier. What with that momentous occasion and the long train ride from New York with only Nicholas for supervision, they saw themselves as
quite
grown up.

“Some pictures. I didn’t know you were up. Did you have breakfast?” He was under strict orders to look after his sisters—to make sure they ate and went to bed on time and brushed their teeth.

“Of course we’re up,” said Hetty, joining Hayley. “How could anyone sleep through that awful thunder and lightning? I made toast. And Great-uncle Nick let us have coffee.”

“You don’t have to call him Great-uncle Nick, you know. Uncle Nick is fine. And you know you’re not supposed to drink coffee—Mom said so.”

“Can we come up?” Hetty asked. “We haven’t seen the tower room yet.”

“We’ve only been here a day,” Nicholas said.

“Please? We won’t bug you. Promise,” said Hayley.

“All right. You’ve got five minutes.”

They ran up the stairs, pushing past Nicholas and into the tower room, where they went straight to the windows that looked out over the lake.

“Oh, it’s looovely,” said Hayley, taking on a sophisticated air. “Look, you can see all the way across the lake!”

“You can do that from the porch, you idiot,” sniped Nicholas.

“Don’t be rude,” Hetty said, pushing the curtain aside and pointing at
Goblin
. “I wonder why he named it
Goblin
. It’s too pretty to be a goblin. Are we still going sailing today?”

“I doubt it. It’s supposed to rain all day. He said we’re going into town later to do some grocery shopping.” Nicholas sat on the bed, leaning back against the headboard and noticing for the first time the two squarish oil paintings on the wall between the windows. The first was of the lake at night, the moon’s reflection a diagonal slash across the rippled surface; in the distance, a sailboat—too small to be
Goblin
—seemed to be disappearing into the mist. The second, which looked as if it had been painted aboard the moored
Goblin
, showed the front of the house in the early evening, with golden light shining through the windows.

“Did you guys know that Aunt Lillie was an artist?” Nicholas asked.

“Duh. Of
course
,” Hayley answered. “Mom and Dad used to have one just like this in their bedroom.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever. It wasn’t exactly like these—it just has the lake and the yard and some trees, I think.”

“Where is it now?” Nicholas asked.

Hayley shrugged. “I dunno. I think Daddy took it with him after they—”

“Look! You can see someone in the tower room in this one!” Hetty cried.

“It looks like an old woman,” said Hayley.

“She probably painted herself into the picture,” Nicholas said, moving in for a closer look. “We saw a painting in school like that. Let me see.”

The twins were right; there was a figure standing at the window, appearing to look back at the viewer, but the person’s features were blurry, so it was impossible to tell who it was.

“Wait—there’s someone else, sitting on the swing on the porch. That is definitely Uncle Nick,” Nicholas said. Then he lifted the frame from the wall to look at the back of the canvas. “She painted this one in 1978. It’s called
Evening Light
.”

“What about the other one?” Hetty asked. “Wait, let me guess.
Moonlight Sail
.”

“Not even close,” Nicholas said, removing the painting from the wall. “It’s called
2:53 A.M
.” He turned the painting over for another look. “That’s definitely not
Goblin
. I wonder what boat it is.”

He was about to rehang it when Hayley stopped him. “Wait. What’s that?” She pointed at the wall where the painting had been hanging.

“What’s what?” asked Nicholas. “Ohhh. That’s weird.”

Just below the nail on which the picture hung, a thin wire stuck out of a small hole in the wall, its end twisted into a loop. Nicholas put the end of his index finger in
the loop and was about to give it a good tug when Hetty shouted, “Wait! What if it, you know, rings a bell that … summons evil?”

Nicholas couldn’t help laughing at that. “Summons evil? Hetty, what have you been watching?”

She backed slowly away as he pulled steadily on the wire. It came out easily at first; then there was a bit more resistance.

“Stop! I heard something moving,” Hayley said, feeling the wood paneling beneath the windowsill. “Right here, I think.”

“I’m getting out of here,” said Hetty, moving against the wall near the stairs.

“Do it again,” Hayley insisted.

Nicholas pulled firmly again, this time not letting the wire slip back.

Hayley jumped when a section of the paneling sprang open, hinged at the bottom. “A secret compartment,” she whispered.

“Cool,” said Nicholas, kneeling down. “The wire connects to this latch.”

“Wh-what’s inside?” asked Hetty, edging closer, but still looking as if she expected Satan himself to pop out of the hole in the wall.

Nicholas waggled his eyebrows at his sisters. “There’s only one way to find out.” He felt around at the bottom for a few seconds, then reached farther back behind the
wall, and farther, until … suddenly his arm was yanked by an unseen force, and he shouted, “Hey! Something grabbed my— Help!”

Hayley and Hetty screamed in perfect unison as Nicholas twisted and turned on the floor in apparent agony, his arm being pulled deeper and deeper.

“What should we do?” yelled Hayley, looking frantically at her twin.

But Hetty just screamed again.

“Gotcha!” shouted Nicholas, jumping to his feet.

Hayley and Hetty stood openmouthed for a full second before shouting, “Nicholas!”

“Man, you should have seen the looks on your faces,” he said. “And by the way, thanks for all the help. Fat lot of good you two will be if I’m ever really in trouble.”

“Everything all right up there?” a concerned-sounding Nick asked from the bottom of the stairs.

“We’re fine, Uncle Nick,” said Nicholas. “Just fooling around.”

“He was being mean to us,” Hetty tattled, sticking her tongue out at Nicholas.

“Well, be careful,” said Nick. “Don’t need anybody falling down these stairs and breaking their neck. Ruin your whole day. The rain’s letting up, so we’re heading into town in a few minutes.”

“Okay, we’ll be down in a second,” Nicholas said.

He went back to the secret hiding place and reached in
once again. The twins kept away from him, arms crossed and half expecting him to try to trick them again. There was no trick, though. First, he pulled out a tattered spiral notebook, its front cover nearly torn off, and set it on the floor. The second item was more mysterious-looking. It was a round metal canister, gray-green in color, about six inches in diameter and half an inch thick. Someone had printed
The Seaweed Strangler
on one side with a black marker. Nicholas gently lifted the lid off and saw that a reel of movie film lay inside—the narrowest film he had ever seen. He unwound a few inches of the film and held it up to the light, but the pictures were so small he couldn’t make anything out.

Meanwhile, Hayley picked up the notebook and flattened out the cover with her hand. “
The Seaweed Strangler
, by Will Mettleson,” she read.

“Daddy wrote a story?” Hetty asked.

“Looks that way,” Nicholas responded, glancing at the notebook. “But this is old movie film—from before video cameras were invented. I wonder if he …”

“What?” asked Hetty. “If he what?”

Nicholas turned to the twins. “I think maybe he made a
movie
.”

“Daddy? Made a movie?” said a doubtful-sounding Hayley.

“Can we watch it?” Hetty asked, getting more excited by the second.

“All right, kids, time to go,” Nick shouted up at them.

“We’ll be right down,” Nicholas said, placing the film reel back in its canister and setting it and the notebook on the bed.

“I can’t believe Daddy made a movie,” said Hetty.

Nicholas smiled to himself, remembering his father’s words:
You never know what you might find
.

* * *

One detail that Nicholas’s father hadn’t considered when planning his children’s summer at the lake was Nick’s attachment to his pickup truck, the only vehicle he had and the last remnant of his days as the owner of a small Ford dealership in Deming. It was a 1968 Ford—built long before the addition of backseats and other creature comforts. Nope, Betty (for that was her name—and no, Uncle Nick wasn’t telling why) was a
truck
. Firm bench seat. AM radio. Manual transmission. (Nicholas marveled at Nick’s one-armed driving technique.) Air-conditioning? In a truck? Who needs it when you have perfectly good windows that roll down … by cranking a little handle!

After the four of them squeezed into the cab, Pistol, a mix of beagle and who-knows-what-else, jumped in on Nicholas’s lap before he could close the door.

“I guess Pistol’s coming with us,” Uncle Nick said. “You’ll have to hold on to him if he sees any rabbits. He’ll go right out the window after them.”

Hayley and Hetty looked at their uncle doubtfully. “He wouldn’t really,” said Hetty.

Nick held up two fingers. “Done it twice already. The first time we were stopped, but the second we were going about twenty-five.”

“Wh-what happened to him?” Hayley asked.

Nick shrugged. “Nothing much. Limped a little for a couple of days. He’s a tough old son of a gun.”

As they reached the end of the long gravel drive and pulled out onto Lake Road, Nicholas rolled his window up partway and slipped three fingers under Pistol’s collar. Pistol turned to look at him, his tongue hanging from the left side of his mouth.

“Looks like you’ve met your match,” Nick said.

Nicholas wasn’t sure if that was meant for him or Pistol.

* * *

When they got to town, Nick and the twins went into the A&P, on Deming’s town square, while Nicholas decided to follow Nick’s advice and do a little exploring. He bought a can of soda at the corner gas station and then, remembering his promise to send his dad a letter or a postcard a week, stopped to browse through a rack of outdated postcards on the sidewalk in front of the drugstore. There were the usual pictures of the old railroad station, and the town square (with cars from the fifties and sixties parked
in front of the diner), and a couple of aerial shots of the lake. They were ten for a dollar, so he picked out a dollar’s worth, paid for them out of the money his dad had handed to him in the train station, and then started to walk up a side street with signs indicating that a school was nearby. Halfway down the block, a Little League baseball team was practicing in the yard behind a tired-looking school building. Except for a chain-link backstop, the field was bare; the outfield was covered in grass and weeds badly in need of cutting, and the infield was good old-fashioned dirt—which, on a rainy day like this one, meant good old-fashioned
mud
. Nicholas stopped and leaned against an oak tree next to the sidewalk to watch. On his team in New York, the Yorkville Yankees, he was a decent-fielding second baseman with a solid .285 batting average. But everyone knows that pitching wins baseball games, and the Yankees, sadly lacking in that department, ended the season in last place. Of course, if they had made the play-offs, he would probably still be in New York.

On the “mound”—actually a rubber floor mat from a car, set in the middle of the infield mud—a girl was getting ready to pitch. A long brown ponytail hung through the back of her cap, and she blew an enormous bubble with her gum as she listened to some instructions from the coach, who sat in a folding chair where the first-base-side dugout would be—if there
were
a dugout.