The House Across the Lake(21)

Eli shakes his head. “No.”

I take a sip of wine and close my eyes as it flows down my throat, listening as Katherine once again says, “So awful.”

“Only swim at night,” Eli intones. “That’s what my mother told me.”

And it’s what Eli told me and Marnie every summer when we were kids. Advice we ignored as we splashed and swam for hours under the full weight of the sun. It was only after the sun set that the lake frightened us, its black depths made even darker by the shroud of night.

“She heard it from her own mother,” Eli continues. “My grandmother was a very superstitious woman. She grew up in Eastern Europe. Believed in ghosts and curses. The dead terrified her.”

I slide into the chair next to him, feeling light-headed from both the wine and the topic of conversation. “Eli, please. After what happened to Katherine today, I’m not sure anyone wants to hear about that right now.”

“I don’t mind,” Katherine says. “I actually like telling ghost stories around the fire. It reminds me of summer camp. I was a Camp Nightingale girl.”

“And I’m curious why swimming at night is better than daytime,” Tom says.

Eli jerks his head toward the lake. “At night, you can’t see your reflection on the water. Centuries ago, before people knew any better, it was a common belief that reflective surfaces could trap the souls of the dead.”

I stare into my glass and see that Eli’s wrong. Even though it’s night, my reflection is clearly visible, wobbling on the wine’s surface. To make it go away, I empty the glass. Savoring be damned.

Tom doesn’t notice, too intrigued by what Eli just said. “I read about that. In the Victorian era, people used to cover all the mirrors after someone died.”

“They did,” Eli says. “But it wasn’t just mirrors they were worried about. Any reflective surface was capable of capturing a soul.”

“Like a lake?” Katherine says, a smile in her voice.

Eli touches the tip of his nose. “Exactly.”

I think about Len and get a full-body shudder. Suddenly restless, I stand, go to the wine bottle on the porch steps, and pour myself another glass.

I empty it in three gulps.

“And it wasn’t just the Victorians and their superstitious relatives in Eastern Europe who thought this way,” Eli says.

I reach for the bottle again. It’s empty, the last few dregs of wine falling into my glass like drops of blood.

Behind me, Eli keeps talking. “The tribes that lived in this area long before any European settlers arrived—”

I grab the second bottle of wine, still uncorked, which annoys me almost as much as what Eli’s saying.

“—believed that those trapped souls could overtake the souls of the living—”

Instead of asking Tom to do it, I pick up the corkscrew, prepared to jam it into a five-thousand-dollar bottle of wine I have no business touching.

“—and that if you saw your own reflection in this very lake after someone had recently died in it—”

The corkscrew falls from my grip, slipping between steps into a patch of weeds behind the staircase.

“—it meant you were allowing yourself to be possessed.”

I slam the bottle down and the porch steps rattle. “Will you shut the fuck up about the lake?”

I don’t mean to sound so angry. In fact, I don’t mean to speak at all. The words simply roar out of me, fueled by a fiery blend of alcohol and unease. In their wake, everyone else is silent. All I can hear are the steady crackle of the fire and an owl hooting in the trees somewhere along the lakeshore.

“I’m sorry,” Eli says gently, aware of his rare lack of tact. “You were right. No one is interested in this nonsense.”

“It’s not that. It’s just—”

I stop talking, unsure of what it is I’m trying to say.

It dawns on me that I’m drunk. Drunk drunk. Tipsy is now just a memory. I’ve started to tilt like Katherine, the lake going sideways. I try to stop it with a too-tight grip on the porch steps.

“I don’t feel too good.”

At first, I think I’m the one who says it. Another unprompted outburst, even though I’m not conscious of my mouth opening, my lips moving, my tongue curling.

But then more words arrive—“Not good at all”—and I realize they’re coming not from me but from Katherine.

“What’s wrong?” Tom says.

“I’m dizzy.”

Katherine stands, swaying like a wind-bent pine.

“So dizzy.”

She stumbles away from the firepit, toward the lake.

The wineglass falls from her hand and hits the ground, shattering.

“Oh,” she says absently.

Then, suddenly and without warning, she collapses into the grass.





Midnight.

I’m alone on the porch, wrapped in the same blanket Katherine had returned earlier. I’m mostly sober, which is why there’s a beer in my hand. I need something to ease me into sleep; otherwise it’ll never happen. Even with a few drinks, I rarely sleep a full night.

Not here.

Not since Len died.

Boone was right when he said the lake was too quiet. It is. Especially at this hour, when the only things breaking the steady nighttime silence are the occasional loon call or a nocturnal animal scurrying through the underbrush along the shore.