Lost Lake

(preview)

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An early spring warmed the Northwoods. The night air sang with the crystal call of spring peepers; the wind sighed through the pines. The full moon was ripe and fat and yellow as corn.

On the gently lapping shores of Lost Lake, the dead girl stared sightlessly at the stars.

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April 3, 1880

There is a winding road that cuts through the red pine.

The tree trunks tower above this little rock road. They are tall, straight as arrows, and interspersed with the softer white pine. The forest floor is quiet now, a carpet of red-brown needles and a little snow. Soon it will erupt with thick green ferns and white trillium and yellow marsh marigolds.

When I stop my horse, I hear a loon and I know I am close.

As of today, the road ends abruptly in a roundabout sheltered by trees. In the summer there are berry bushes here. I shall try to preserve them as much as possible; but this is where the road will continue to my great estate.

I dismount and tie Estella to a tree branch. I fasten her nosebag round her head. She nickers softly.

I am dressed roughly, in workman’s attire, so I pay no mind to the bare branches scraping past me as I make my way down the deer path toward the lake.

I have now entered Heaven.

The trees thin as I walk out to the edge of the point. This is where my manse will be built. We break ground next month, weather willing. I know Spring can be treacherous here in the Northwoods, with sudden snows and surprise freezes. Yet I believe we will succeed.

This is the most beautiful place in the world.

february

“If tomorrow were our last day on earth, wouldn’t you want to spend it with me?”

She wouldn’t. That was the part that hurt the worst.

Tanith Fitch, née Croft, glanced into the rearview mirror. Lukey was asleep. Luke, she mentally corrected herself. She’d babied him for far too long, using his autism as an excuse. Luke, then. Luke was asleep. In his slumber his face was painfully innocent. He looked so young and so small.

In the front seat, Tristan was also asleep, wrapped in his Angry Birds blanket that had been his comfort for years. Six years, to be exact. Six years since they’d moved into the pretty refurbished thirty-year-old split-level house on a quiet suburban street lined with trees. The pretty blue house with the red front door.

Six years in that pretty house. Six years of hostas in the front yard, the kids playing in the back yard, Luke being born and growing up. Six years of trick or treating and snow angels and Christmas lights in the big picture window in the living room. Picnics on the deck, cookouts with neighbors and pretending to be normal.

Six years since Jared had started using.

He’d messed around before. Before the pretty house. Seven years in the cramped two-bedroom apartment and unanswered questions about what he got up to in the parking lot, behind the battered shed. His “boys” coming over at three in the morning. His skinny female co-workers with faces full of pock marks. High school dropouts who’d do anything for a bump.

He’d been a functioning addict then. Mostly meth; occasionally coke. He was still capable of hiding it from Tanith, to a certain degree. She didn’t know about the infidelity, not then.

The new house changed everything. It was supposed to change everything, but for the better. It did not. Jared saw the partially finished garage as an opportunity for a man cave; and, not knowing his intent, she’d been fine with it. She didn’t realize why he was buying metal cabinets that locked.

There were three bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs. He claimed the downstairs bedroom as well as the garage; and once again, she didn’t question.

Idiot that she was.

Every time she caught him with a meth pipe, he claimed it was a one-off. But it kept happening. Every time he was so apologetic, so repentant. Every time he swore it was the last time. And he was a master gaslighter; every time she got upset, she was the nag, the bitter wife, the one with the anger problem, the reason he used.

Then he started bringing women home. To their home. The home she worked to pay for. Because of course he didn’t. The female co-workers with their fake eyelashes and poor grammar were a thing of the past; she’d supported them for six years. And while she did this, while she worked two jobs and went to school, he brought home women in the dead of night and “partied”.

She kept thinking it would stop. She hid it from her friends, her family, from everyone. She hid bruises and fractured toes and cuts, because he was violent when his stash ran out. Very violent.

Six years of hiding, then. Six years of pretending he’d stop, he’d change, he’d get better, go to rehab, realize that he was throwing his family away.

Now it was over. She had decided in January, a month ago now, that this last concussion would, indeed, be the last.

And so she drove north.