Page 70 of The Souls of Lost Lake
She brushed it away. “No, I wasn’t.” Yet she didn’t want to tell him how her mind had played tricks on her. Images of her dead mother floating at the bottom of the lake, her white face, her wide eyes. Her brother’s hand reaching up toward her, trying to pull her down to be with them.
“I shouldn’t be here.” Her whisper was raw.
Noah didn’t respond.
“I should be dead just like them.”
“Why?”
The simple question made the tears flow harder. Ava made sure not to sniff, so that in the darkness of the cellar, Noah wouldn’t be aware of the tears.
“I remember”—her voice shook—“climbing down here to hide, ’cause that’s what I did when I needed to hide. I squished behind a barrel of potatoes. Me and my doll, and I held her, even though I was thirteen I held my doll like she was the last thing I had left. I nigh on squeezed the stuffing out of her, and I hid. I just—hid.”
Noah’s hand rested on hers, the shadows covering his movement. His fingers threaded through hers, his skin warm and real. Strength was in his hand, and sure, he probably meant nothing by it, but the way his fingers slid between hers left Ava breathless in a way she was not prepared for. She should move her hand away. But she didn’t. She couldn’t.
“Do you remember who was here that day?” Noah asked softly.
It was the question she wanted to answer. More than anything, Ava wanted to answer it. But all she could see in her memory was a pair of brown shoes as they clomped across the cellar floor toward her. And she’d looked up, up, and then ... it was all blank. Just a murky image of someone who had left her here that day. Her and her doll.
Ava pulled her hand away from Noah’s. She wrestled to her knees and began patting the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for my doll.” Ava ran her hands over the earth, connected with a barrel. “My doll. I left her here. I left her behind.” Sure enough, in the darkness behind the barrel, Ava’s hand connected with the soft body of a doll. Pulling it toward her, she cradled it against her chest, her chin coming to rest on the doll’s hard porcelain head, the hair feeling like straw against Ava’s skin. “I left her behind,” she murmured again, feeling not so differentfrom her doll and from the empty cellar that was the last remnant of the Coons family’s lives. “I left her behind.”
That’s what this place did, after all. It stole things. Abandoned innocence. In its trail, it left a bloody path of broken bodies and broken hearts.
28
The parsonage that had been more like a prison was now a respite, a place of hidden safety. They snuck back into the parsonage before daylight cast its full attention to the earth and before the lumbermen and wagons broke the stillness with the first hints of a busy day to come. Noah had closed the door behind them and locked it. He’d gone from window to window and made sure the curtains were pulled. Worry etched the corners of his eyes, as did defeat. His plan to bring a measure of dignity to Jipsy’s death had fallen dismally shy of whatever resolution he’d figured would come of retrieving the woman’s body.
They stood in the kitchen shivering in their wet clothes, both of them at an impasse, although Ava wasn’t sure why.
“Best get into dry things,” she said.
Noah’s eyes trailed down her body and then he swiftly looked away. Toward the coffeepot, cold on the stove. “Good idea.”
Ava glanced down at herself. For a second, she wondered why Noah had looked away so fast. Must be she was as ugly as a bug’s ear. Then she noted, with some embarrassment, that her shirt had unbuttoned the top few buttons, and skin was peeking out in places that made sure anyone who saw knew she wasn’t a girl anymore, but a full-fledged woman.
She clutched her shirt closed. “I’ll go change.”
“You do that.” Noah made a pretense of checking the firebox of the woodstove. Darned if his own damp shirt wasn’t stickin’ to the muscles in his back. Ava stared for a long moment, lost in theticklish feeling that traveled through her. A preacher shouldn’t have muscles, should he? Not like those.
Noah lifted his head. His eyes locked with hers. “You’d best go, Ava.”
“Yes.” She scurried away. Blushin’ like a schoolgirl probably. Once in her room, she shrugged out of her blouse, her overalls, her wet underthings. There weren’t many options for other clothes other’n the two dresses Hanny had brought for her. Probably scoured from the mission bin at church. Probably castoffs—with her luck—from prissy Mrs. Sanderson.
Regardless, Ava slipped the navy-blue dress over her head, making sure the pearl buttons on the pleated front were securely buttoned. Once she’d finished, she wrestled her hair into a braid. A look in the mirror reminded her of the shadows in her heart, as they were reflected under her eyes. She should just collapse on the bed. Drift away into dreamland and try to forget the horrifying memories that once again began to crowd into her thoughts.
Desperate to escape them, Ava hurried from her room and back down the stairs.
“Slow down or you’ll break a leg, child.” Hanny’s voice floated from the sitting room.
Ava ducked into the room, looking around for Noah. Hanny was quick to notice. She was already seated on the sofa, embroidery in her lap. “Noah has already left. Places to go, people to see, I expect.”
“Why are you here?” Ava didn’t mean to sound rude; it was just confused curiosity as to the quick shift of Noah’s presence to Hanny’s.
“Why, I brought over some cinnamon rolls.” Hanny gave Ava a meaningful look filled with censure and grandmotherly sternness. “A good excuse to come over to the parsonage. Check in on you two.”
