Page 33 of Lake Hollow Curses

“Are you accusing Mitch of doing this?” Charlie is quick to ask.

“No, no… he said he’d never seen it and I believe him. But who would’ve placed them in there?” he replies, rubbing his jaw. “I don’t know why she’d have them; dad was sure she was in good health.”

Cal pipes up, “Fuck… okay, today Kami felt the need to tell me something.” He kicks at the coffee table, while rubbing at the back of his neck. “Her mom remembered Lala asking questions about a medical condition called…” He pulls his phone out to look at something. “I searched it up… it was hyperkalemia,which is low potassium. She wanted to know if Jeremy Eiler had been diagnosed with it, or if young people could be.”

I don’t like where my mind is going…

“What if… shitballs on fire… okay, what if it’s been Carlotta all along? Before any of you jump down my throat just listen, okay, I’ve watched a lot of true crime shows.” They all look at me with their eyes wide, Grady starts to object, Charlie’s mouth drops open. “She left a letter pointing the attention away from her, she met with a detective that didn’t grow up here and presumably didn’t know her past with Daniel, which Julia Hemminger most certainly would have… she said she knew Lala and your mom, Charlie.” I pace, gnawing at my thumbnail. “Something triggering may have happened and she started to recreate the way Daniel died. She got her hands on potassium chloride, which Wilder found out is not traceable in an autopsy, she injected the victims… who knows where, and dumped the bodies in the lake by The Bends.”

“Except there are major flaws with your theory,” Wilder says next to me. “She got away with it. No one was questioning that they were accidental until she found something that she brought to the Ross family’s attention. Not to mention that she, herself, appears to have been killed by someone.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I agree, it wasn’t my aunt. She knew something that got her killed,” Grady says with confidence.

Charlie shakes his head. “That’s pretty far-fetched. I’m with Wilder and Grady on this.”

Cal chews the inside of his cheek, his face still flushed, tendons on his neck sticking out from all the information dumped on him in the last few minutes. “But… I don’t think you’re that off base. It couldn’t be Carlotta; she was trying to find answers. Did you tell the detective all this? About the meds being found?”

If it’s not Carlotta, not one of the guys… who the fuck could it be? Deep down I can’t let go of the detective’s warning. I start to analyze the way Cal and Charlie are behaving. But they aren’t giving me a hint of something amiss in their reactions. Right now, all the guys seem to be on the same page, working to find answers.

“The night Sara died.” I close my eyes for a few seconds, then blow out a breath. “Sorry to rehash this, but it may be the only way to pick up something missed in the past.” Wilder squeezes my hand in encouragement. He’s had to walk me through this enough to know I won’t back down. “Cal, when did you last see her?”

His voice is thick as he says, “We’d just gotten home from the baseball tournament. She’d had a fight with my parents on the way home, they’d grounded her, taken her car privileges away. She was angry and left to walk… to walk to Wilder’s I guess.”

I knew all that. None of it was anything different from what any of the guys had heard before. I turn to Grady. “You were dropped off at Wilder’s. They were fighting, she left to go home. You followed her?”

Cal sits forward. “No… no, you said that you hadn’t followed her? Right?”

Grady tells them the lies he has since confessed to Detective Hemminger and to Wilder. “When I saw Katie, she was trying to get away from me unseen. I made an assumption.” He looks at Charlie in apology. “I couldn’t wrap my head around it, but if the drowning wasn’t an accident. If it wasn’t Wilder…”

“You thought it was Katie?” Charlie looks sick. He puts a hand over his mouth. “And that’s why you acted strange, not singing at her funeral…”

Nothing new is learned from going through it, but Charlie knows now that Grady had suspected Katie did something toSara. It’s not easy to hear. None of the revelations tonight have been.

Then the connections between the drownings are thrown out.

“They aren’t though, two of them were tourists,” Cal states, “If we’re going with a pattern, what possible one could there be?”

“I’m not convinced there’s a pattern,” Charlie says.

We spend a half an hour tossing out the things that people have said over the years, from the downright ridiculous, “sacrifices to the lake by satanists,” to “accidental drownings blamed on the water currents pulling people under.” But the only thing we can all agree on is that the Sheriff’s office reopening of all the drownings, except Katie’s, is suspicious.

“They can’t think she did any of this, she would’ve been nine when the drownings started. That’s an insane leap,” Charlie says with conviction. “And then what… she drowned herself?”

Charlie asks Wilder questions about the visions, asking him how he knows that he didn’t black out and do something. It gets heated. Charlie questions the break-in at Carlotta’s office and that only Wilder and I knew about the evidence.

Wilder points out that so did Lala’s killer.

Charlie points out that Wilder had access and even had his hands on the necklace to put it in the cabin to scare me. Instead of throwing it, he could’ve pocketed it.

Wilder rolls his eyes and lets them know I witnessed him tossing it.

Cal gets involved pointing out again that Wilder wasn’t even around when Susanna Ross was here.

Eventually, they drop the bickering back and forth.

By the time we’re all talked out, my fears about Cal and Charlie have eased considerably. The relief that our secrets are out, the lies admitted to, and the suspicions talked through, almost makes the prospect of leaving even worse. We’re feeling more like a unit, like a group of people invested in each other.

Rubbing my eyes and yawning, I lay down on the couch, my head in Charlie’s lap. He runs his hand through my hair, saying softly, “Try to sleep. We’ve been talking for three hours.”

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