The Secrets of Lake Road - Karen Katchur Page 0,32

The doors were closed and the place looked deserted. The sight gave him pause. There was only one time in sixteen years that he remembered the Pavilion closing its doors to the public. He hadn’t expected all the memories the scene would conjure. All the emotions he had kept in check for so long stacked up inside him. His chest tightened, and he was having a hard time breathing. He wiped the back of his neck where moisture had gathered. The sun was hotter than usual, maybe because cooling off in the lake was no longer an option. The thought made him shiver despite the heat.

Pull yourself together, he told himself. But now he understood the look in Jo’s eyes when he had first stepped out of the truck. She looked haunted, much more than usual. He stared at the CLOSED sign on the door. He suspected Heil planned on opening tomorrow no matter the outcome of the search. He couldn’t believe he had kept the Pavilion closed for three days as it was, and he couldn’t fathom the amount of money he had to be losing. Heil loved his money.

Kevin gathered himself and willed his legs to keep moving. Each step he took around the building felt as though he were stepping back in time and what awaited on the other side would seize his heart all over again. When he turned the corner, he half expected to see Billy’s parents and sister, Dee Dee, crying, cursing, and a sixteen-year-old Jo, face drained of color, paralyzed by the scene unfolding in front her. But instead he saw the underwater recovery team standing around the watercraft. He recognized one of the men and slowly walked toward him.

His tongue felt thick and clumsy, but he managed to say “Jim” in his normal voice, and he extended his hand. He had known Jim through Eddie; he was one of the regulars who frequented Eddie’s bar whenever he wasn’t volunteering for the local fire department.

“What’s the situation?” Kevin asked.

“We think she went down near the diving boards. It’s a fifty-foot drop. There’s so much muck at the bottom, it makes searching difficult even for the best divers. You can’t see shit.” He glanced at Kevin. “But you know that. Damn near impossible.”

And yet, Kevin wanted to add, they were able to find bones in all that muck, but Jo had warned that Heil meant to keep that quiet, not wanting to remind people of past drownings. For once, Kevin agreed with Heil. “What’s the next step?” he asked instead.

“They’re going to widen the search area.” He lifted his baseball cap and scratched his head. “Some of the fishing guys caught some snappers. They think they have a better chance of finding her with the turtles. You ever hear of such a thing?”

Kevin shrugged. It was how they had found Billy. And in fact, he had heard of other instances where unusual methods had been used. An airplane had gone down in the Atlantic several years back, and divers reported that crabs had unintentionally led them to the carnage. He supposed snappers weren’t any different from crabs, feeding on what was provided. People. Humans. We were part of the food chain whether we liked it or not.

Jim situated the cap back onto his head and pulled the bill down low, hiding his eyes. “It might not be a bad idea to try it,” he said. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“I hope it doesn’t become a circus out there.” Kevin thought of Stimpy and his men on boats, following the lines tied to snappers and what that would look like to the little girl’s parents. For a second the image of Billy’s body flashed in his mind’s eye, how the men pulled Billy into the boat and then dumped him onto the beach. His flesh had been shredded to the bone on one of his thighs, his forearm clawed off. The skin on his chin had been torn, and the flap lay on his neck.

“You okay?” Jim asked.

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “Sure.” He allowed himself a glance at the girl’s parents. “Did anybody tell them what to expect?”

Jim looked at the couple and then turned back to Kevin. “Nope. I imagine right now, they just want her found.”

“Right,” Kevin said, wondering how in the world anyone could prepare them for what horrors finding their daughter would bring. It had been three days. There was no telling what she was going to look like when