The Secrets of Lake Road

The possibility that Johnny was Billy’s son and not her father’s left her breathless. She sprung to her feet, gasping for air. How could her mother lie to her and her father? Or did her father know Johnny wasn’t his? Then again, maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was working herself up for no reason. But she felt so much rage inside her.

She picked up a large branch and struck the rock with her mother’s and Billy’s initials over and over until the branch snapped. She searched the ground, grabbing rocks and throwing them at random into the woods. She picked up more stones. One of them sliced her palm with its sharp edge. The cut was small, but deep enough for blood to drip down the side of her arm.

I hate you, she said about her mother. With all her might, she lifted the rock with the stupid initials and flipped it over so she didn’t ever have to look at it again. I hate you.

She pulled the baseball cap off her head, covered her face with it, and cried.

Everything felt like a lie. Her family was a lie.





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Dee Dee opened the screen door to find a strange woman on her front porch. The woman’s clothes were rumpled, her sandaled feet dirty. The wide-rimmed sun hat cast shadows across her face, and yet there was something familiar about her.

“Can I help you?” She leaned against the doorjamb, holding the door open with her bare foot. She crossed her arms. She had been home for a total of ten minutes, her body exhausted after pulling a double shift. And after sitting in the sheriff’s office the last hour, her emotions were just as worn, cast, and dragged like grappling hooks, sharp with anger but also filled with hope now that the bones were in fact Billy’s and the case was officially reopened. She didn’t have the energy to humor this woman who was holding a small stuffed doll in one hand and extending the other for her to shake. She looked at the woman’s hand, the nails bitten down to the cuticles. She kept her arms folded.

“It’s me.” The woman clearly was on edge, and her voice had a desperate pleading quality.

“I’m sorry. Do I know you?” The second the question came out, she recognized her as the woman whose little girl had drowned.

“Yes, you do,” the woman said, and launched herself at Dee Dee, wrapping her thin arms around Dee Dee’s neck. She laid her head on Dee Dee’s shoulder, letting the sun hat fall to the porch floor, and sobbed. Her breath smelled like coffee. Her hair was greasy. She was filthy, and she was on the verge of coming undone.

Dee Dee wasn’t the type to offer comfort. Years of nursing had a way of desensitizing her. She considered herself tough, thick-skinned, detached. But she wasn’t unkind. It was just that life on the lake had hardened her. But she understood the woman’s anguish whether she wanted to admit it or not. The woman had lost her child, and Dee Dee knew all about loss.

“There, there,” she said, and patted the woman’s back. The woman collapsed farther into her arms, and it was all she could do to hold the two of them up. The woman continued to burrow in close, wanting the kind of affection a child seeks from a parent.

“Okay, okay,” Dee Dee said. It was then she recognized the scent of the lake on the woman’s skin, an odd mix of earthiness and sunshine and whatever was rotten on the bottom. It was the identifying factor of anyone who had spent any time here, anyone who the lake had claimed as its own.

“Come inside.” She led the woman into the kitchen, where she helped her into a chair. She set a cold glass of lake water she had pumped from the well onto the table. “Drink,” she said.

The woman gulped the water down. When she finished, she wiped her eyes with the doll. “It’s me, Pattie,” she said, and choked back a sob. “Pattie Dugan. You used to babysit me.”

Dee Dee’s hand flew to her chest, surprised at hearing the name of the little girl she had babysat all those summers ago.

“It’s Patricia now. Patricia Starr. My daughter, Sara…” She shook her head, unable to continue.

Dee Dee ran her fingers through her hair, trying to get ahold of the situation. It took a second or two for the shock to wear off, but once it did, something that had gripped her chest all these years loosened. She gazed into the woman’s blue eyes and saw the child she used to be. The guard she kept in front of her heart had lowered just enough for her to reach out to Pattie, Patricia, and hug her tight. It was the most affection she had shown anyone in quite some time.

“I always wondered what happened to you,” she said. She had babysat Pattie every summer since she was three years old. It was as though she were seeing her long-lost daughter for the first time after an unwanted, painful separation.

Dee Dee had so many unanswered questions, she wasn’t sure where to start. She pulled back and collected herself. She had waited a long time, a lifetime, for Pattie to return, and now she wanted answers. She put a pot of coffee on and sat across from her.