Page 16 of The Souls of Lost Lake
Hanny turned, her eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”
Ava didn’t like the way dread coursed through her with the paralyzing effect that truth could be a fearsome thing, and she wanted to be sure she was on the right side of it.
Hanny waggled her index finger in the air. Its knuckle was swollen, the skin wrinkled from age. “I’ve seen a lot in my eighty-nine years, and one of them is that some people have wickedness deep inside, and it scares them so fiercely they choose not to remember it.”
“I never killed no one,” Ava insisted again, and she sure would not admit to Hanny that her observation was terribly correct. At least the not-remembering part.
Hanny huffed and shuffled past her. Ava trailed behind, mostly because she didn’t really know what she was supposed to do. They entered the short hallway, with Noah’s bedroom door down just a tad from her own, and then they entered the main living space, which had a sitting couch, a small woodstove, a bookshelf packed with books, and a small secretary where Noah must sit and prepare his sermons. In the room’s corner by the front window was a stuffed chair covered in a goldenrod yellow velvet that had seen better days.
A sigh pushed through Hanny’s pale lips. She clucked her tongue.“I never thought—not once—I’d be living in a parsonage.” Before Ava could respond, Hanny finished, “But I guess that boy Noah has no choice but to let me stay here too. Otherwise you’ll both be gettin’ married by morning’s light or the town will chase you both out for sure and for certain.”
Ava blanched.
Hanny’s laugh was simple. Small. Resigned and a little overwhelmed. “A murderess, a coward, and an old widow with her own tales to tell. Aren’t we the trio of sinners to congregate under a steeple?”
8
The ground felt cool beneath her bare feet, but not freezing. A small rock scored her flesh, and Ava stumbled, stretching out her arms to break her fall. Her palms skidded across the soil, the rough ground biting into her soft skin. Her knee cracked against a tree root that jutted up, and the momentum of the fall rolled her to her side, where she thudded into the base of a tree trunk.
Startled, Ava blinked rapidly to clear her vision. It was night. If stars twinkled, she couldn’t see them. The forest was too thick overhead where the tree branches arched in a canopy of darkness. Crickets chirruped from the deep, and an owl’s lonesome cry echoed the pounding of her heart.
“No. No, not again.” Her whisper startled even herself as she twisted onto her backside and shoved her back against the tree. She held her hands out, palms upward, the stinging of torn skin making her eyes water. She couldn’t tell in the darkness if her knee was bleeding, but it felt sticky when she touched it with the tip of her index finger. Her feet throbbed.
A bat swooped down in front of her, and Ava whimpered, shrinking back as though the oak tree would grow arms and embrace her, shielding her from the wretched evil darkness of the woods. She smelled that metallic scent again. It permeated her senses so much that she could taste it on her tongue. That familiar, pungent, ironlike flavor. Blood. It shouldn’t be familiar to her. There was no reason it was familiar to her. But yet it was.
“Go away,” she whispered. Her words carried through the black,winding around branches, cutting beneath the underbrush, and floating away into the depths that continued for miles beyond. “Go away,” she whispered again as if the blood could hear her. As if it would draw back from her mouth, from her nostrils, shun her senses and return to wherever it had come from.
It had happened again. The last time had been over a year ago. The night wandering. The sleepwalking. The awaking to find herself deep in the forest, as if her body and subconscious were returning her somewhere she’d been before. Somewhere she couldn’t remember. Or didn’t want to remember. But always it came with the scent of blood. Always she ended up bruised, cut, or hurt. Widower Frisk had taken to locking the door to the room she slept in when she was younger. Locking it from the outside with a bolt lock, not knowing Jipsy had already taught Ava to lock it from the inside for other reasons. It made her feel extra safe instead of trapped. Until the night she was sixteen and had, in her stupor, shoved her arms through the window of the little room, ending her silent unexplained quest in blood.
Ava released a shuddering breath, squeezing her eyes closed against the willful threat of the woods. Of whatever lay inside of it. Lurking. Looming. Like a wolf that darted between trees. Just a shadowing glimpse now and then. Wisps of a tail, a fang ... but never the full picture. Never the beast in its entirety.
The bobbing light from a flashlight startled her. Ava snapped her head in the direction from where she’d come. The light was circular, stretching out into the dark like a small beacon of hope, but Ava felt only dread. Dread that it chased her for no good reason but to condemn her. She stumbled to her feet. Her knee throbbed, and she was now very aware of the cut on her foot as she applied weight to it. She’d no intention of hanging around waiting for the light to discover her. To shed on her truth or reveal the reality of why she was here to begin with.
That she was crazy. Plumb lost her mind. And, that every so often, it came again—the craziness—and when it did, it came worseand angrier than before. Until one of these days when it finally ate her alive.
“Ava! Ava Coons!” It was more hushed than a shout. As if the man calling was afraid he’d wake someone.
Ava shrank into the underbrush, ignoring the thorns on the bush that ripped and poked into her cotton blouse.
Sticks cracked. Leaves rustled. Footsteps as shoes connected with the ground.
“Ava, where are you?”
A familiarity unraveled around her. The voice. She knew it. Still bewildered enough to be uncertain, she clapped a hand over her mouth, feeling the scrapes on her palm against her lips.
“You need to come home, Ava,” the man insisted.
Home? For a moment, the vision of a rocking chair fluttered through her mind. It was rocking, but there was no one in it. It tipped backward, then forward, backward, forward, backward...
“Ava!” Louder now.
Where had she heard the voice before? She closed her eyes, trying to identify it. Friend or foe? Widower Frisk? No. And right now, that was the only man she could recall. The mind was as dark as the night around her. Suffocating with its stifling weight.
A shoe appeared in front of the bush she’d hidden under.
Ava muffled a yelp.
The man stopped.
