The Storm King(91)

Sirens sound from inland, and she knows not to be here when they arrive. May wouldn’t need praise or newspaper photos or handshakes with the mayor. The Lake has forgotten May, and that’s how May would want to keep it.

She rests a palm on the boy’s head. He is not yet quite returned from where he’s been. She’ll watch from the water until she’s sure he’s safe.

She savors the feel of his thick hair in her fingers. They are bonded now, she knows. They are both on their second lives, and every good thing the boy grows up to accomplish will be more chips against the damage done by the demon June. He’s the answer she’s been waiting for.

“Make it count, my little miracle man,” she whispers to him. She walks backward into the cold water. “Make it matter.”





Eighteen

How Nate found himself free of the wrecked car and on that stony beach had always been a mystery. Finally learning the answer had to mean something. It had to change something.

The woman rolled up the right sleeve of her bathrobe. Strands of a half dozen scars wove the underside of her forearm. Nate understood she’d gotten these from reaching through the Passat’s window to unlock the door and pull him from the lake’s deadly embrace. He had a similar network of marks on his own ruined arm.

He clenched his hands into fists to keep them from trembling. The pain in his bad arm jolted up to his shoulder. All he could see was the glittering water. All he could feel was the lake licking his feet.

Things loosened inside him. Things for which there were no names.

“My brother.” His voice sounded like rusted metal. He remembered Gabe’s grip on his hand. He saw his brother’s lips, opened in a perfect circle of terror as their car crashed through the guardrail.



“I didn’t see him,” the old woman said. “I’ve played it in my mind ten thousand times, and I didn’t see him. The light was bad and when the car tipped, it—” Her voice was different than it had been. More textured, somehow. Her face was changed, too, as if somewhere in her story she’d changed roles.

“Why’s my picture in the middle of this?” Nate pointed to the wall plastered with clippings and laced with string. He realized that he didn’t want to talk about the accident or the lake or his lost family. He couldn’t.

“Look at it,” she said. “Go on.”

The newspaper page detailing the car accident Nate had survived was yellowed after sixteen years. This was the part of the wall where the red string was thickest, centered from a nail pounded into his chest. One string linked Nate’s photo to a clipping about the Deckers’ house burning in the foothills so many years ago.

Nate followed this string onward to an article about the county arson investigators finding the cause of the fire suspicious. Charges weren’t filed, but insurance money was never paid out for the house, which had been a total loss. From there the string continued. Though he was not implicated in the arson, Mr. Decker’s reputation had been damaged, and he’d been unable to secure a loan to sustain his slumping businesses. His local retail chain had to file for bankruptcy, and two of its locations were sold off, causing thirty people to lose their jobs. Their names were listed on a page of legal paper. Notations were written alongside some of them: divorce, bankruptcy, depression.

“What is this?” Nate asked.

“Just look.”

He chose another string. From his face, it connected with a photo of Tom posing in a soccer uniform. Either junior or senior year, Nate guessed. From there he followed it to a pencil-line drawing of a house with a tree collapsed against it. The string flowed from this image to an article about the high school’s soccer coach being pulled over for a DUI. Next was a memo sent to the high school staff about the coach’s termination.



The coach’s last name of Corso. Tom’s former soccer coach and also, surely, the father of Pete Corso, the missing teen. Nate had once directed a Thunder Run against him, which ended with a tree collapsing against his house.

“He’d been sober for ten years before that.” The woman pointed to the drawing. Nate remembered that several windows had shattered, and part of the roof had sheared off. “The stress from the damage knocked him off the wagon. Lost his job. His marriage.”

“You couldn’t possibly know that,” Nate said.

Pete Corso’s photo was the next waypoint on the string. It was a smaller version of the one the chief had shown Nate that morning. Next to it was a sketch of the shattered window at the Union. Maura Jeffers’s face appeared alongside Pete’s. Nate had brought her father’s business down with an insect infestation that had pushed the family finances past the breaking point. This was noted here, too, complete with a notice from the county declaring the infested building unfit for habitation.

The wall held a catalog of Nate’s sins and what the woman judged to be their consequences. The documents and strings that covered the walls were a decades-long narrative in which victims became vandals and the vengeful became the punished. A story of anger and blowback. The saga of the Lake itself.

As Nate examined the wall, he saw suicides, high school dropouts, substance addiction, school suspensions, and dozens of other symptoms of misery. All the teens he’d seen in the Night Ship must have a story like Maura’s and Pete’s. Most of the events on this wall surely had more than a single cause. Still, Nate couldn’t avoid the fact that the Storm King’s malign reign had rippled far and wide. The red lines tracked soaring imbalances in the equations of pain.