Page 95 of The Souls of Lost Lake
Noah looked down at his feet. The man was a bottled-up jar of nitroglycerin waiting to explode, but dressed under the guise of a preacher.
He lifted his eyes.
Ava refused to look at him.
“Ava,” Noah began, “we’re going to need to come up with a plan. You can’t stay here, not forever—not ... like this.” Alone. That was what he meant. Alone with the potential of more moments like the other night. Where the warmth in the room was caused by more than just a summer’s night.
She knew that. But today she was afraid. Her confidence, her reckless nature, was squashed by the potency of her memories.
Noah cleared his throat. “I think if you go back—”
Ava snapped her head up. “I’m not goin’ back to that lake.”
Noah weighed his words. “Now that you remember so much...” He hesitated. “Well, going back to your family’s home—to the lake—it might look different to you now. Maybe you’ll see something that helps you remember who killed your family.”
“I’m not going back.” Ava half hid behind her door, holding on to it for support. She had been so disassociated from her family’s deaths. But with the memories came the emotions, along with the fear and the horror of it all.
“I’d go with you,” he offered.
Ava glared at him. “You think it’s ’cause I’m afraid to go alone? No. I’m afraid to go, period.” She cursed the tears that burned her eyes. “I don’t need to see—I don’t need to see nothin’ to remember more’n what I already do.” Least of which, the killer’s face. God help her if she remembered his face. Ava was terrified it would imprint on her mind and never go away. For the rest of her life, she would see the killer’s eyes, watch in a replay his fingers adjust on the handle of the ax ... the contemplation ... kill the teenage girl?
“You’ll never be free of this.” Noah’s declaration was harsh to Ava’s ears, even if his tone was gentle.
Ava grimaced and looked away. She adjusted her hold on her doll, feeling the doll’s hair tickle the back of her hand. Turning back to Noah, she nodded in agreement. “I’ll never be free of it if I remember more. It’ll haunt me.” Ava swallowed as anxiety crept up her throat with its stranglehold. “An’ I don’t like ghosts. Never did. Never will.”
“Come away from the window, child.” Hanny’s calming voice made Ava allow the curtain to fall back into place. The old woman had visited shortly before Noah departed that morning. She’d broughta pan of baked goods in case she was spotted, and so no one would ask questions about the amount of visits to the parsonage. But that she stayed and Noah left? Well, Hanny said she was banking on the fact that people were preoccupied with Jipsy’s funeral. She was right. They were. It seemed as if all of Tempter’s Creek had turned out.
Ava covertly hid behind the curtain, observing. The little cemetery behind Noah’s church would become the resting place for Jipsy. “I wonder if they’re really comin’ ’cause they care about Jipsy, or if’n they’re snooping around in business that ain’t theirs?”
“Probably both.” Hanny patted the sofa. “Come. Sit.”
Ava paced across the front room to the picture of Jesus. She stared at Him. He looked busy today. Probably preoccupied trying to make sure Noah did a good job with the eulogy and trying to withhold His fiery judgment on Widower Frisk. Ava knew the old man would smuggle a bottle of whiskey in his inside coat pocket. Drinking at Jipsy’s funeral? It was just something the widower would do. He had to survive somehow. Him without Jipsy was like a saloon without patrons.
“Funerals are a miserable thing,” Hanny observed. “When my Kendrick passed away, I was utterly beside myself. Of course, that was thirty years ago now, but still. I prefer to avoid funerals. Sorrow is a bitter memory and a dreadful companion.”
Ava glanced down at Hanny. The woman was embroidering. Her stitches were small and impressively delicate for someone whose hand had the tremor of old age in it.
“I never had a funeral for my family.” Ava stated it as a realization. There was a vague recollection of the lake. Smoke hovering over the earth, making young Ava choke. The lake had been the place she’d hefted, and pulled, and tugged, and labored four times over to bring her family to an illusion of safety. Safety from the fire meant the lake became their coffin. How long had their bodies floated in the lake before sinking to its depths? Ava knew she couldn’t have possibly gotten any of her family very far into the lake. The wind and the waves would have had them drifting intothe deep, but eventually death would’ve made them float slowly back to the surface.
“How long does a body float?” Ava voiced her morbid thought to avoid the swift violence of her own sorrow. Distance. She needed to distance herself from thefeeling. Shocking herself with black, offensive facts about death brought her family’s murders into a clinical perspective.
Hanny clucked her tongue. “What an awful thing to consider.”
Ava met Jesus’ eyes. “A few hours? Days? Once I saw a bloated dead dog floatin’ in old Nipper’s pond. He told me the dog had been dead quite a while, disappeared under, then came back on top all puffy. Guess somethin’ inside him made him float.”
“You do beat all, child.” Hanny bit the embroidery thread after tying it off.
Ava thought about the dog. Considered the way it had almost doubled in size, it seemed. “’Course, Nipper left him out in the middle, and not long after the dog sank again. Never did come back up.”
Hanny brushed her hand across her embroidery. “Praise be,” she mumbled.
“Do you think that’s what happened to my folks?” Ava asked Jesus more than she asked Hanny. But neither of them answered her. It was that awful silence where no one really wanted to say anything. Only the clock ticked. A hypnoticticktock, ticktockthat made Ava’s eyes heavy. But she didn’t want to close them. Didn’t want to think anymore. No more. No more thoughts of bodies, of the lake, of her family...
“I’m goin’ to go take a nap,” Ava announced, though she wasn’t sure she’d ever napped a day in her life before. It was the only way she could think of to make the thoughts go away. To still the whirling in her mind, the awful sensation in her gut that this time she wasn’t going to be able to forget. That her family’s murders were following her with a vengeance that required restitution.
“You do that, dear.”
Ava took Hanny’s encouragement, and with a last glance atJesus, she hurried from the room. Jesus had looked, for a moment, as if He shared her sorrow. Her pain. But it was just a painting.
