The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (71 page)

P
ARKED ON THE BEACH
, Henry stares out at the water and gnaws the insides of his cheeks. Feels his heart jumping around in his chest like some caged wild thing that thinks it’s about to be set free.

He understands now. There never was a Danner. It was Suz all along, coming to their daughter before she was even old enough to speak, befriending her, watching her, winning her over. What better way to haunt them? To make them pay for what they’d done.

Stomach acid churns, rises up, burning his esophagus, pushing its way to his throat. He swallows it back down, opens the door, and climbs out of the truck.

And now Suz has been given life, a body, by Emma, fed by the power of their fears, not unlike Frankenstein’s monster. And like that monster, she must be destroyed. Henry knows it’s up to him to do it, because he’s the only one who understands. He’s got to send her back where she belongs, to a grave at the bottom of the lake so her spirit can join her bones.

First thing this morning, he called Winnie to tell her he’d decided to follow her suggestion and put the doll in the moose.

“You really think it’s alive in some way? That Suz is inside it?” Winnie asked.

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said, then went on to tell her about his adventures with the doll in the night.

“Jesus!” Winnie yelped into the phone. “I say let’s burn it. Soak it in gas and torch the fucker.”

But then he’d gone out to the Blazer and discovered the doll had made another miraculous escape.

“But I got you now,” he mumbles, thinking he should walk around to the back of the truck to check, but he can’t bring himself to. Not yet. In his mind, he hears the static noise.

Henry leans against the front of the pickup and lights a cigarette. Just killing time.

Killing. Time.

He shivers, takes a deep drag of his cigarette. It tastes horrible, dank and rotten.

It’s dark. Too dark. The moon hasn’t risen yet. Or maybe it’s a new moon. He should have paid attention to the goddamn Weather Channel last night. Maybe then he’d know.

He pushes the button on his watch, lighting up the face: 11:10. Where the hell is Winnie? Tossing his cigarette down without finishing it, he moves to the back of the truck and opens the tailgate, half expecting to find the doll gone, having jumped from the truck bed when he slowed at a stop sign.

But even in the dim light he can see that it’s there. Jesus, yes, it’s there.

And thankfully, it’s quiet. No buzz. No hundred voices coming from its sand-filled throat.

Henry dances from one foot to the other, scared to touch it, but finally, he tells himself,
Fuck it,
and lifts the Danner doll from the bed, throws her over his shoulder and staggers toward the canoe. The trick is to keep moving. To not stop to think about what he’s carrying.

His feet sink in the sand, his ankles twist on rocks. He remembers carrying Suz into the lake once before, her clothes full of rocks, Tess and Winnie sobbing behind him.

We have to weight her down. So she won’t float.

He remembers how he swam out on his back with Suz resting against his chest, one final embrace. How he saw Tess on the shore and thought of the baby inside her. He made a decision then, as he neared the middle of the lake—he would protect and defend Tess and the baby, no matter what. It was too late for Suz.

“She loves you more than you know,” Suz had told him, and now, he would do his best to honor that. To cherish it. To love Tess back.

He reached the middle of the lake and let Suz go, the rocks carrying her down into the darkest part of the water.

N
OW, AS THEN, HE’S
a man on autopilot, doing just what needs to be done. He’s protecting his family the only way he knows how.

He doesn’t stop to kick off his shoes or roll up his khaki work pants, just wades out so that he’s knee deep in water, opens the door in the moose’s chest and dumps her in, with a triumphant “Arghh!” like some comic book action hero.

But he hasn’t won yet.

He reaches for the can of gas, raises it up high, and soaks the whole moose, from his antlers to the tip of his tail, fuel raining down, some new kind of baptism.

E
MMA CRAWLS OUT FROM
under the tarp, lowers herself over the opened back gate of the pickup and down to the ground. Behind her are woods, thick and shadowy. Off to the left, the rough old logging road they must have taken in, her father creeping along in low gear, Emma bouncing in the back, needing to pee so bad that each bump was agony. In front of them, a lake, probably the lake from
A Long Time Ago
. The water’s black and smells of whatever it is that lakes smell of: fish, algae, bugs, and bacteria. Do bacteria have a smell? she wonders. Mel would know. She suddenly finds herself wishing like crazy that Mel was here, which is dumb because Mel would just be ignoring her, no help at all. She wouldn’t be alone if Danner was here, but Danner hasn’t made an appearance since their argument the day before—in fact, the Danner doll itself seems to have taken off too. What Emma really wishes is that she was back home now, in her warm bed with a bathroom just down the hall. Laura would be downstairs, sneaking cigarettes, chewing on her toes, and watching one of those reality TV shows.

Crouching behind the left-rear bumper of the truck, looking desperately around for the best place to pee, Emma sees her father at the edge of the water.

He’s carrying something. Whatever it was he put in the back of the truck. Emma had been too scared to look and had ridden the whole way with the tarp covering her head, making her dizzy with the smell of turpentine. She’d probably killed some brain cells. It was supposed to make you high, sniffing turpentine, but it just gave her a headache and made her nostrils burn. Why would anyone do that for fun?

Now, as her eyes adjust in the darkness, she sees that this something her father had transported is actually a someone. A woman. Unconscious.

Oh. My. God. This was way worse than her dad having an affair! What if he turned out to be a serial killer or something? Would she still love him? Would she go to the police and tell?

Emma holds her breath, watching.

Soon, she sees that this is not really an unconscious woman.

“No,” Emma mouths the word, her mouth making a little O shape in the dark.

He’s got her sculpture! It’s Danner, she can see from the boots, the tuft of her blond wig. He’s got Danner all wrapped up in shiny yellow rope.

But that’s not even the worst part.

There, at the water’s edge, is the huge canoe Daddy made, and strapped to it, like a prisoner, is Francis, down on his knees. A moose begging for mercy.

“No,” Emma mouths again, a cry without a sound.

Her dad wades out into shallow water, heaves Danner inside Francis through the door on his chest.

What is he doing?

A magic trick, Emma thinks. Like putting the lady in the box before sawing her in half.

Then, she sees her father pull something square and red from the front of the canoe.

Emma can smell the gasoline even from her hiding place behind the truck. He’s pouring it on Francis and the canoe. She hears the liquid rush out of the spout, spatter on whatever it hits.

She has
got
to pee. Now.

She gets down on her hands and knees, crawls into the woods behind the truck, her bladder a hard, painful clenched fist inside her. She finds a tree to hide behind where she still has a view of the beach, pulls her shorts and underwear down. Emma hates peeing outside. You never know what bugs are hiding there in the leaves. Or snakes. She heard a story once about a girl who went to pee when she was camping and a snake crawled up inside her. Then, she had all these snake babies. Mel said it wasn’t a true story, because snakes lay eggs. “Maybe the eggs hatched inside the girl,” Emma said. Whether or not it really happened, it just went to show that when you pee outside, you’re vulnerable to all sorts of terrible things.

Just as Emma starts to go, squatting in leaf litter, holding on to a skinny white birch tree to keep from tipping over, and praying for no snakes or poison ivy, she hears someone coming through the woods. But it’s too late now, she can’t stop midstream to hide, so she hunkers down as low as she can, keeps right on peeing as a figure moves down a path just to her left. Emma watches, holding her breath, shorts down around her ankles as Winnie passes not ten feet to the side of her.

Winnie’s wearing the same outfit she had on the day she jumped into the pool; the day she saved Emma’s life. The wig an exact copy of the one Danner wears, like she and Danner are sisters or something.

Maybe it’s all part of the trick.

Emma is still peeing, it’s the pee that goes on forever, when Winnie steps out of the woods, making her way to the beach.

“You’re late,” Emma’s dad calls.

Winnie approaches the canoe but keeps her head down, as if she’s studying the ground.

In a low voice, she asks about the doll.

“I got it. It’s in the moose,” Emma’s dad tells her.

The betrayal takes Emma’s breath away. How could her father have taken Danner, how could he and Winnie be doing this terrible, unspeakable thing?

Winnie nods, unties the rope from the tree, and pushes the canoe out, then climbs in the front. Emma’s dad gets in the back, behind Francis. They each pick up an oar and begin to row.

Emma rises, pulls up her shorts, waits for them to get a ways out, then slips into the water silently, determined to stop them, to do whatever it takes.

P
USHING OFF IS EASIER
than he thought it would be. And the canoe stays upright. There’s room enough for Winnie up front, and Henry tucked in back, behind the moose, which reeks of gasoline. They row in silence toward the middle of the lake, going right to the spot where he swam out with Suz, and let her sink, clothing full of rocks. Where she went under and was never seen again. He remembers how he treaded water there, watching her sink, following the white ghost of her hair down, down, down until it was a tiny speck, like the reflection of a star.

His paddle slices the water. Henry looks at the ripples it leaves, thinks he sees a face underneath. Suz looking back at him, her face framed in starlight.

He believes that somehow, Suz has become the lake. Her spirit is all around them, lapping at the sides of the canoe, teasing, taunting, telling them she’s got them right where she wants them.

“I thought you were going to burn the clothes and wig,” he says to Winnie. If he peers around the left side of the moose, he can see her back. The blond wig glowing like a beacon. He closes his eyes. Listens to the sounds the water makes.

“And where’s the journal? I thought you were going to put it in the moose.”

She doesn’t answer.

“Winnie?”

She doesn’t respond. Just keeps on paddling, a little harder now.

Henry feels his throat constricting around the gasoline fumes. He glances back toward shore. It’s a long way. He’s not sure he’ll make it. Too much of a swim for a man who is so afraid of water. He wishes he had worn a life jacket. Or never let Winnie talk him into this to begin with.

He thinks he sees something in the water. A duck or a loon maybe. Moving slowly toward them.

Suz, he thinks, some irrational part of his brain taking over. It’s Suz.

He makes himself look away, paddling harder, faster, his eyes fixed on the hind legs of the moose, amputated at the knees. He thinks he hears a muffled moan from inside it.

A muffled voice. No, voic
es
. Definite voices.

The static noise.

But they’re not coming from the moose. There are voices calling from shore, from the beach behind them.

Henry’s paddle cuts into the water. He turns and looks back toward the beach. It’s still coming at them, the thing in the water.

And what Henry thinks of now is not a loon, or a duck, or even Suz. What he imagines is the frogs left in the aquarium—a tank full of pale, bloated bodies. Somehow, in his mind, it’s those frogs who are chasing him—swollen, stinking, and vengeful.

Metamorphosis, babycakes.

There, beyond the frogs, back on the beach, are two figures, jumping up and down, flapping their arms, calling out. They look like puppets: far away and unreal. A woman with blond
hair in flowing clothes. And a man waving a flashlight through the air.

The blond woman looks like Winnie, which is all wrong—Winnie is in front of him, rowing. The man, Henry thinks, might be Bill Lunde.

They’re calling his name desperately.

And they’re saying something else.

Something about Suz.

“It’s
Suz,
” they’re yelling.

But they’ve got it wrong—this is just Winnie dressed as Suz. Even though she said she was going to burn the clothes and wig. Just Winnie.

“Winnie?”

Henry peeks around the moose at Winnie, who has turned to face him, smiling. Only now, she looks straight at him so that he can see her face, and he realizes this is not Winnie at all.

“Oh my god,” he stammers.

It can’t be. It isn’t.

But some part of him knows the truth.

“Surprised?” she asks. “You haven’t seen anything yet, babycakes. I’ve saved the best for last.”

T
HERE WAS A LOUD
rapping at the cabin door, and Winnie screamed against the duct tape over her mouth, thrashed against the ropes so that her chair rocked on the floor. Bill Lunde burst in. Winnie was almost satisfied to see Bill looking shocked for once, seemingly unsure of the next move. He froze for two or three seconds, strode over to Winnie, pulled the duct tape from her mouth.

“Suz,” she gasped. “Suz is here! She looks totally different, but it’s her. She’s here! She’s alive!”

“I know,” Bill said. “But where is she now?”

“Out on the lake with Henry. Oh my god, what’s she going to do to Henry?”

“I followed Henry from his house. I must have missed the turnoff for the lake. I just assumed he was coming here,” Bill explained as he cut Winnie loose. He pulled her up from the chair, out the door and toward his truck. “Come on!” he told her.

“No!” Winnie said. “It’s faster if we go on foot. We’ll get there in half the time. There’s a path just over here.”

She led the way, going fast at first, slapping branches out of the
way. Soon she was hesitating, losing sight of the trail. Bill had a flashlight, but everything was so overgrown it was impossible to make out a path.

“Goddamnit,” she hissed. “It’s been ten years since I’ve come down here at night.”

She remembered their last march down to the water in the dark, Suz in the lead. Winnie was pressing her gun into Spencer’s back, but, in between barked commands, they were laughing. It was a joke. Nothing bad was going to happen. It was just Suz kicking things up a notch, giving them a night to remember.

Winnie and Bill scrambled and stumbled through the dense undergrowth.

“We’ll be too late!” Winnie said, her voice high and squeaky.

Bill found the path.

“This way,” he said.

A flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, he led them down through the woods to the beach. The trees thinned and the packed dirt under their feet turned to sand. Henry’s truck was there, pulled up to the edge of the water, tailgate down. The lake lay in front of them—not the shimmering quicksilver water Winnie remembered from that summer, but something black and bottomless that gave no reflection, just absorbed the light of the stars, swallowed it down deep.

And they were too late.

Henry and Suz were out in the middle of the lake, just reaching the place where they’d watched him let her go ten years before, her clothing stuffed full of rocks.

There was nothing to do but start screaming.

“It’s Suz!” Winnie called, her voice cracking, near hysteria.