Page 33 of The Souls of Lost Lake
Giving up on Jesus for the moment, Ava paced the room some more before stopping at Noah’s desk. It was a small wooden secretary with its desk lowered on a hinge and a chair slid under it. The left side of the secretary had four shelves filled with books. She bent to peruse the titles. Nothing but preacher books. She could read. At least that was a bonus. Straightening, she observed the few items on the desktop. Pencils in a leather cup. A Bible tucked neatly off to the side. Its corners were worn, but the gold-embossedHoly Bibleon the cover looked new still. An envelope lay underneath the book. Ava tugged it out and read it.
“Emmaline Radcliff,” she whispered, rubbing her thumb over the return address with its flowery script. “Fancy name.” Without regard to right or wrong, Ava opened the envelope and pulled out a single page of stationery. She skimmed it.
My dearest Noah,
I wished to write to you once more, if only to express my own deepest regrets for all that transpired between us. I realize we will never speak to each other again—at least in this lifetime—and while I have reconciled with that, I have also been overcome by the grief that only you can share with me. None other can comprehend the loss which knifes at my heart every wakingmoment. Would that I could have changed the outcome. As it is, such is our life now, and I can only pray that you, and God, will extend mercy and forgiveness in the midst of the sorrow. That God will see fit to bring beauty from the ruins of my soul. My wrongs against you have been great, and yet I will remember you with bittersweet love. Godspeed, dear Noah.
Yours in memory alone,
Emmaline
The words caused tears to spring unbidden to Ava’s eyes. She swiped at them, not fully understanding why she felt the pang of sadness and why, in that moment, she felt as though Emmaline Radcliff had reached across the miles toher. Bring beauty from ruin ... it was an image Ava had never before considered. It made her hesitate and made her settle on the chair at the desk and lay the letter out flat, running her fingers over the words as if they were as precious as Scripture itself.
What was beauty anyway? Ava wasn’t sure she’d ever seen it. Not really. Her chest constricted as sadness—that deep, sucking sadness—washed over her again. It came often, if Ava was honest. It gnawed at the edges of her, leaving her heart in tattered fragments. Grief. Loss. That sense of aimless belonging. She belonged, but she didn’t. Ava squeezed her eyes closed. The memories that were just out of reach. She could see them. Shadows of them. Her father—he’d smoked a pipe. She knew that. When she caught the scent of tobacco from another man’s pipe, her body reacted with a start. Yet her father wasn’t there. Nor was her mother. She remembered the butter churn and her mother’s stained apron. Funny things to remember really. No lullabies or kisses. Just butter and an article of clothing that didn’t exist anymore. Like her brothers didn’t exist. Arnie and Ricky. Both of them older. Wild. She remembered they were wild. Wild like the woods they lived in. And then the memories disappeared into a void of blackness. Nothing but this hollowache that made Ava feel as if she were outside her body and looking in, and that she was missing something of herself—something just out of reach of her fingertips.
Ava folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. Emmaline wished to have changed the outcome of whatever shared grief had weighted her words and remained harbored behind Noah’s eyes.
Well, Avacouldchangeheroutcome. A sense of determination rose within her, running through her blood, reaching into the bowels of her spirit and screaming for vindication. It was there, pounding, like a heartbeat thudding against her chest cavity, pressing against her ribs with a ferocity to scream the truth. The truth of what had happened. The truth of who she was.
Who was Ava Coons?
A murderer?
It was her darkest fear. In the confinement of her soul and in the recesses of her being, Ava asked it of herself daily. Was she a killer? And now, had she killed again?
Ava looked down at her hands as if they were stained with blood, and bile rose in her throat. She knew something no one else did. She knew that betrayal caused a person to hate, and with hate the borders of morality were demolished with the power of vengeful need. A need to pay back evil for evil. Wickedness for wickedness. It was inside her. A bitter poison first planted as a child in the corners of her mind—corners hidden even to herself.
Noah Pritchard had missed something that morning when he’d told Ava to stay inside, to stay out of sight while Jipsy had vanished, with murder on the tongues of the townspeople. He had missed the lack of grief in Ava’s expression. He had missed that she showed no surprise or shock. He had missed that Ava had felt nothing. Nothing at all on word of Jipsy’s death.
It was the nothing she felt that scared Ava the most.
14
This time she was very much awake, her mind clear. The moon hid behind clouds and treetops, but Ava slipped into the night anyway. Ava waited for what seemed like hours until she heard Noah’s bedroom door close. She’d heard him pacing like a madman. Heard him grumbling something about Hanny. About being alone in the house with a woman. Maybe he was arguing at a picture of Jesus too. Ava figured he’d find out soon enough that Jesus wasn’t gonna say nothin’.
Ava gave him another hour to be sure he was asleep with no more wearing ruts into his bedroom floor. Now her feet landed on the earth outside her bedroom window. She glanced back, assured Noah hadn’t sensed her absence from the parsonage. The lights remained off. Crickets chirruped their night song, and a bat wove in an undulating flight over her head. Mosquitoes on the menu. Blood-sucking insects that took from their prey until it satisfied their bloodlust.
Ava darted across the dirt road, ducking into the shadows of the church. If Mr. Sanderson had seen her the other night, she needed to be particularly aware that slinking about Tempter’s Creek in the wee hours would only add suspicion, if not injury, to her already inflamed reputation of guilt. Sneaking along the side of the church, Ava looked over her shoulder before tiptoeing up the back steps of the building. She tried the rear door. Locked. Peering in the window to the right of the door, Ava could make out the back entrance of the church. A few boxes answered for the dark shadows in the farcorner. A snow shovel leaned against a wall next to a broom. The frame of a cross was propped against the wall. She recognized it as the Easter cross, which was rammed into the ground in the front yard of the church every spring. Now it collected dust. Forgotten. Redemption usually was forgotten. The irony was not lost on Ava.
She rattled the doorknob again. Getting into the church would gain her access to the pastoral records. If she remembered anything, it was that her mama and daddy were married in this church. That being the case, Ava figured if she could find the records, it might tell her who was in attendance—if anyone—and then she could find those people. Ask questions. See if she could uncover more memories of her parents. Her brothers. Find out why they’d lived so deep in the woods alongside a lake no one seemed to talk about, and find out why, after all these years, the Coons family was a whisper on people’s tongues. That mysterious awe of death and the lore of unsolved questions. Ava needed to find who in Tempter’s Creek knew them—who knew the Coons family as people, not victims of violent assault. Maybe even people who knew Ava as a little girl, before she’d wandered from the woods after the bloodbath. Before she’d lost all recollection of who she was and what had happened. Ava needed to exonerate herself. If not for the folks of Tempter’s Creek, then for herself. While they assumed she was Jipsy’s killer and perhaps Matthew Hubbard’s, Ava needed to prove to herself she wasn’t. Or else uncover that she was and turn herself in before she caused more eternal harm.
Another sweep of her gaze into the night revealed nothing. Ava reached into the pocket of her overalls and tugged out a soiled handkerchief. Wrapping it around her knuckles like a bandage, she gripped the loose ends of it in her palm. Without hesitation, Ava punched the bottom corner of the window. The glass shattered, silencing the crickets and sending all night sounds into complete stillness. Ava held her breath. A light breeze blew tendrils of hair across her face. She stuck her arm through the hole in the glass, careful to avoid the sharp edges of the broken windowpane. Avafelt along the door until her hand connected with the knob. She turned the lock, then with her free hand twisted the doorknob from the outside. The door gave way, opening with an inevitable creak of its hinges to announce Ava’s arrival.
Her shoes made small thuds against the floorboards as she moved. The smell of must and closed-up building met her senses. The back entryway had another closed door leading into the main room of the church. She turned its knob, relieved that it wasn’t locked. Opening it, Ava peered into the darkness. The short hallway before her led straight into the sanctuary. She could see shadows dancing across the floor, the pews appearing as dark lines of predatory observers, hissing through the darkness into Ava’s mind.
You never come.
You never come.
No. She had never been inside this building. Church was always something to be avoided, like its goers avoided hell. Ava steered away from the sanctuary and instead ducked into a small office off the hallway. This room smelled more familiar. Scents of coffee and old books, and the warm smell of Noah Pritchard’s spicy cologne. She wished she had a flashlight. Should’ve thought to swipe one from the parsonage kitchen. Instead, here she was, in the pitch-black, looking to find church records that went back over three decades. And right here was where Ned would insert some off-the-cuff remark about how if she’d been educated, she’d have known to think through what she needed.
The crunch of a foot stepping on broken glass made Ava freeze. She caught her breath, standing motionless in the darkness of Noah’s church office.
“Aaaaaava?” A singsongy whisper sent chills through her. She backed up a step, her hip colliding with the corner of Noah’s desk. She couldn’t tell if the voice was male or female.
“Aaaaaava Coons?”
Another footstep, only this time it was a thud against solid wood flooring.
