Daughters of the Lake(10)

This made a kind of sense to the people of Great Bay. They thought Addie’s immunity to the cold of the lake was some odd by-product of the circumstances of her birth. None among them ever wondered exactly why that might have been.

Neither did anyone wonder why Marie’s husband, Marcus, always caught the most fish in his nets, or how he seemed to be drawn to the biggest schools time and time again, or why he never had so much as a close call out on the lake while others risked life and limb daily. They all simply thought of Marcus as an excellent fisherman, someone with a natural talent for the waves and whatever lay beneath them. Marie had thought as much, too, until Addie was born and the old legends began swirling around in her mind once again.

The year Addie turned five years old, Jess Stewart came into the yard. Addie was playing beneath a tent of her mother’s clean, white sheets hanging on the line in the back of the house. She loved the way the sheets smelled when they hung out there, fresh and alive with lake scent. Ten-year-old Jess lifted one of the sheets and looked at the girl, sitting there in the summer sun.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Addie said to Jess. They were the first words ever spoken between them.

“I know,” he replied. “I’ve been waiting for you, too. Shall we go fishing?”

Up she stood, then, taking his hand. When skin met skin, young Addie knew she would live the rest of her life with this boy. As their fingers laced together for the first time, the years passed in that instant, a lifetime lived right there. Addie saw her future in a flash, the way some people’s lives pass before their eyes at the moment of their deaths. She saw visions of a bicycle, letters composed on a small writing desk in her room, and a wedding in the snow. She saw arms intertwined. She felt love. She saw a baby, and tears. She heard a woman’s voice issuing a stern warning. She saw men shouting and heard a gunshot that echoed into the depths of her being. She saw the lake then, big and bold and comforting. She did not know what to make of all this, being only five years old. It all happened so fast, in an instant, right before her eyes.

And then it was over. The day just as normal as it had been before. The cicadas buzzing just as they had been, the sun beating down upon her just as before, the sky the same shade of robin’s-egg blue. But when she looked into the eyes of Jess Stewart and he looked back at her, she knew something had changed. They had lived a lifetime together already.

Addie didn’t know it then, she never knew it, but Jess felt the same thing that day when they first held hands. But the pictures that flashed before his eyes were a good deal more disturbing than those seen by the little girl. He shook them out of his head and led Addie into the life that fate had created for them.

Marie saw what was happening between the two children and wasn’t surprised, on Addie’s first day of school, to open the door and find Jess Stewart standing there, scrubbed and ready for the day, his unruly hair combed into neat submission.

“I thought I’d walk Addie to school,” the boy announced. “I’ll get her settled, show her the ropes. I’ll bring her home, too, at the end of the day.”

Marie folded her arms and looked the boy up and down, squinting.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Cassatt,” Jess said. “I’ll take good care of her.”

Marie remembered the morning of Addie’s birth, how Jess was the one who found her. She nodded, knowing she was powerless over what had been put in motion that day five years earlier.

“Come right home after school, do you hear?” she warned him, wagging her finger. “I don’t want to be worrying about where you are.”

But watching her daughter walk down the lane, hand in hand with Jess Stewart, Marie knew she had nothing to fear.

It was then she remembered the book.





CHAPTER SIX

Night had fallen by the time Kate and Alaska pulled into Wharton, a tiny portside community an hour down the shoreline from her home. Best known for its quaint, New England–like atmosphere and stunning views of the islands just offshore, Wharton was home to expensive yachts, small galleries featuring the work of local artisans, gourmet restaurants, and several mom-and-pop operations like ice cream shops and smoked-fish stands that gave the town its personality. More than any other place on the lake, Wharton had always been a tourist mecca. But that’s not what Kate loved about it. For Kate, and for many locals who knew its history, Wharton was a magical place.

The town had sprung up in the wilderness, far from any other city, in the 1700s, when fur trappers, missionaries, explorers, and later, wealthy businessmen learned to appreciate its oddly temperate climate and unsettlingly warm winds. Street after street was filled with grand homes boasting enormous front porches, well-manicured lawns, and flourishing gardens. In this harsh northern land where it was winter much of the year, the air in Wharton was so warm that magnolia trees grew.

Scientists postulated that the oddly warm weather had something to do with the rocky cliffs that surrounded the town on three sides. Others argued it was the presence of several islands just offshore to buffer the cold winds that blew across the lake. Legend had it that Wharton was blessed with its temperate climate by the spirit of the lake itself, because this was where it had found its true love centuries before. But in modern times, people didn’t think too much of that mythical hogwash. Wharton’s climate was what it was. And what it was was a tourist draw.