Daughters of the Lake(6)

Kate closed her eyes and shuddered, burying her own face in the pillows as though she was a child again, when the simple act of shutting her eyes could block out the most painful of events. Then she heard voices in the kitchen: her parents, Fred and Beverly, and Johnny Stratton.

She slipped a sweatshirt over her head and padded down the hallway into the kitchen, squinting in the bright light of day.

“Well, there’s my Katie,” Fred chirped as Kate took a seat at the table.

“What in the world happened?” Kate coughed into her sleeve.

“Honey, you fainted on the beach back there,” Fred told her.

“But I just woke up in bed,” Kate said, frowning. “How . . . ?”

“Johnny and I got you up to the house.”

“Up all those rickety stairs?” Kate’s hands flew to her mouth.

“Aw, you’re not too heavy for this old man.” Fred smiled.

“Especially when it’s me who does most of the carrying,” Johnny said.

Chuckles all around. It seemed to Kate that everyone was in extraordinarily good spirits, considering the fact that they had just found a dead body. Two dead bodies. But an uncomfortable silence fell among them, and Kate knew the liveliness was just for show.

“I was out all of this time?” Kate asked, searching her mind for a memory that would not materialize.

Johnny and Fred shot each other a look. “You were sort of, well, delirious, you might say, when we got you back into the house,” Fred said. “Mumbling all sorts of crazy things. Your mother thought bed was the best place for you.”

“How long ago was that?” Kate asked, looking at the stovetop clock.

“An hour or so,” Johnny said, clearing his throat.

“And you’re still here?” Kate asked.

“Honey,” Beverly said, pouring Kate a cup of coffee, “Johnny’s going to have to ask you a few questions about the discovery down on the beach this morning.”

Kate took a long sip, careful to steady her shaking hands. “What kinds of questions?”

“You seemed to recognize her, is all,” Johnny said slowly. “Well, that’s not quite all. You seemed to know the baby was there. Neither of us had seen it, until you pulled her dress away.”

Johnny waited for Kate’s response to the question he didn’t pose. She looked at him, and then from one parent to the other, but said nothing.

“Do you know any more about this, Katie?” Johnny asked, finally. “Are you mixed up in this thing in any way?” Johnny scratched his head and fidgeted in his chair.

Kate looked around the room at these faces she’d known all her life. They knew, just like everyone in town knew, she’d been having a rough time of it lately. She had moved back into her parents’ house because Kevin, her husband of five years, had had an affair. With a much younger woman in the newspaper office where they all worked. The cliché of it would have been enough to make Kate gag if the devastation of it all hadn’t imploded her world.

She had left Kevin and their house and everything in it—except her beloved Alaskan malamute—and come home to regroup and get her life back together. The whole sordid mess was common knowledge. Nobody had escaped hearing about—or just plain hearing—the loud confrontation between Kevin, Kate, and Valerie—the other woman—at the Jackpine Tavern on the night of Kate’s birthday. A thing like that kept the gossip mill running for months in a small town.

What had Johnny just asked her? “I’m sorry, John. What?”

“I asked what you knew about this, Kate, if anything,” Johnny said, and the gentleness in his voice was enough to break her heart.

What could she say? She couldn’t very well tell the sheriff that she had been dreaming about the woman who had washed up on the beach—she’d sound like a lunatic. And she was certainly not going to talk about what had really happened out on the beach, that she had looked at the dead woman and seen herself lying there. It was as though she had stumbled across her own dead body on the beach, and more horrifying than that, her baby’s.

She wasn’t going to tell them she nearly died of grief at seeing the baby’s sweet face, so silent, so lifeless. Had she not fainted, she surely would’ve snatched the baby out of the dead woman’s arms and held it close to her chest, the way a mother would. No, it was better not to tell anyone about that.

But she had to say something. The three of them sat there, looking at her, waiting. Kate opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again.

“I’m going to lay this right on the table for you folks,” Johnny said. “Traffic tickets, DUI arrests, minor offenses—those are the kinds of things I can make go away. But something like this? A woman and her baby, dead?”

“Now, John, you’re not insinuating Katie’s involved in this,” Beverly broke in, much to Kate’s relief.

Now she had a minute to think. This was insane, all of it. How could she explain what she had done on the beach, that she had been grasping for the baby when she shouldn’t have known—didn’t know—there was a baby?

“I’m not insinuating anything,” Johnny said, watching Kate intently. “It’s just, the way you went after her like that. We had to drag you off her, before you fainted. My people are going to be investigating this thing, Katie. Better that I know now if there’s anything more to know. I’m on your side, here, honey. If you are involved in this in any way, if you know this woman or have ever seen her before, you need to tell me now.”