The Storm King(20)

“They say June wasn’t even in her teens when she started working as one of Morton Strong’s enforcers,” Tom continued. “Old Mort used to own the whole pier. Back then, this place had prostitutes, gambling—you name it. Strong was the North Country’s answer to Al Capone. June was nine when she pulled her first fingernail from one of the Century Room’s welchers.”

“Strong, Strong, don’t ever do him wrong. He’ll set ya on the short pier, but the walk you’ll take is long.”

The Lake loved its stories. Nate knew this, because he’d become one of them. He was the Boy Who Fell. He was the one whose survival cleaved to no logic but the lake’s own ineffable imperatives.



“Check it out,” Johnny said. “Bring over the light.”

Nate followed the sound of his friend’s voice to the sprawling bar. He tripped over something, and the rattle of glass broke the silence of the place.

“Bottles everywhere, man,” Johnny said. “Still stuff in them, too.”

Nate gave Johnny the glow stick. A few dozen bottles remained on shelves where there had surely once been hundreds. There were more on the floor, some intact and others bristling with shards.

“It’s weird that they left all this stuff here, isn’t it?” Owen asked.

“Looks like they left in a hurry,” Johnny said, lowering his voice by an octave. He put the light under his chin to cast his face in eldritch angles.

Shattered glassware was strewn across the floor, and some of the tables appeared to be half-set. Nate imagined the place packed with crowds: happy patrons one moment, a riotous stampede the next. He imagined them overturning furniture and tearing at one another to escape.

“I don’t remember how it closed,” Tom said. “Did it shut down after Just June got through with it?”

Nate shrugged. A place like this was built of myth and varnished in legend. Like all the Lake’s stories, the truth hardly mattered. Here was a place so strange, girls might scurry as quiet as rats through passages hidden in the walls. Here was a place so vast, dancers might spin to the band never knowing that a room above them rang with screams. Nate sat on one of the stools. The bar’s surface was scarred with marks as if scoured by countless fingernails.

Lucy’s face floated to the surface of his mind. She wore that look she’d had when Adam was only inches from laying into Nate. The look of a person who’d unwrapped a coveted gift only to realize it was something they didn’t at all want.

“Maybe the liquor’s still good,” Johnny said. “I’m freezing.” They were sopping, and it wasn’t any warmer here than it was outside. He uncorked a bottle and sniffed it. “Brandy, I think.” He pushed it over to Nate.



“Alcohol can go bad, you know,” Owen said. “It can make you blind.”

Nate tipped the bottle into his mouth and swallowed a sludge of peach and gasoline.

Lucy had been as angry at him as he was furious with her. But her rage had dissolved at the very moment it seemed sure to deliver its dividends.

“We saw you on the street before,” Johnny told Owen. “Was that your mom with you? She’s a piece of work. I saw her hit you.”

“Oh,” Owen said. He looked at the floor.

It puzzled Nate, this thing with Lucy. They were enemies. They had been since April, though her hatred had never made much sense to him. He’d already lost so much. But if he had to parse the chances that compounded upon other chances to lead to the accident, if he had to scrape past the death and pain that obscured the facts, it was difficult to remember why, for his part, he’d judged Lucy as guilty as he had.

“Your dad’s one of the managers at the Empire, isn’t he?” Johnny asked.

“Yeah. And Mom’s an accountant there,” Owen said.

“What’d you do to get her so pissed?”

“Breathing would piss her off.” Owen lifted his eyes from the floor. “She hates how fat I am. No one wants to have a porker for a son. That’s what she calls me. The Porker. She puts me on all kinds of diets.”

“I guess trick-or-treating isn’t exactly Weight Watchers approved.”

“Yeah, she didn’t like that at all.”

Above, Nate could just make out the banisters of the Century Room. Legend had it that Morton Strong and Just June once threw a meddling do-gooder from its heights to the bar below. Maybe the planks upon which Nate’s stool sat were the same ones that had shucked the woman’s brain from her skull.



Morton Strong and Just June were the Lake’s most infamous villains. They were the bad guys in the stories that most haunted the Night Ship. They were murderers, thieves, and extortionists, yet there was still something to admire in them. Because imagine shaking loose the restrictions of law and goodness and rightness. Imagine tearing loose of other people’s expectations and other people’s rules.

Imagine being free.

“So you were hiding from her?” Tom asked.

“I wasn’t hiding.”

“You were standing in the dark by yourself in the rain,” Johnny said. “Or is that normal for you?”

“Give him a break, Johnny,” Tom said.

The Lake’s stories weren’t the same as truth. The kind of lore that mythologized the Night Ship was the type that grows from teller to teller. Stakes are heightened and nuance is lost. Events are polarized until all that’s left to see is black and white. Every story needed villains, but Morton Strong and Just June had once been people, and no single word could sum up the true nature of a person. Even if it could, you had to remember that people are always changing.