The Secrets of Lake Road - Karen Katchur Page 0,40

her chest burst from her lungs in a whoosh.

When she opened her eyes, her arms were splayed in front of her. Her left cheek was pressed in the dirt. Her legs were spread wide. Leaves and twigs stuck to her skin. She sat up, feeling dizzy. She couldn’t catch her breath. Her chest constricted. She sucked in, once, twice, and finally, finally, her chest opened and her lungs filled with air.

She looked up at Willow. She had never fallen from the tree before. She had never had the wind knocked out of her. Slowly, she stood and rubbed her sore shoulder before brushing off the debris from her hands and knees. The hem of her nightgown was torn and hanging on the ground.

It was almost dawn. The leaves were covered in dew. She had been in the tree for longer than she had thought. She slipped back through the window, pulled her nightgown over her head, and shoved it into the back of a drawer. Trembling, she put on a T-shirt and shorts and crawled into bed. It wasn’t until she was buried under the covers that she curled into a ball and thought about what she had seen and heard in her dream. It had felt so real. The fall had been real. Her torn nightgown and aching shoulder were proof.

She was scared, but she couldn’t tell Gram or her parents what had happened. They would be angry with her for crawling out of the window in the first place. They would say she was stupid for falling asleep in a tree. And what if her father insisted on fixing the screen? Or worse, what if he forbid her to ever climb the tree again?

And even though she was frightened, her mind raced ahead, turning over the dream and what Sara had said. She couldn’t let Stimpy and his men follow the snappers and do to Sara what they had done to the eel.

She closed her eyes. Somehow, someway she’d help Sara find her mommy. And maybe in the process, Caroline would find her mother too.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The lake turned into a spectacle of rowboats, motorboats, and canoes. Every local fisherman and their kin were out on the water. Stimpy and his men must’ve trapped two dozen or more of the turtles overnight. It was the only sense Kevin could make of the scene.

Day four of the drowned little girl, and all that remained of the original recovery team was the single watercraft and three crew members. The rest of the team was called to another location in the Poconos, another tragedy, this one occurring along the Delaware River. It had been all over the eleven-o’clock news. A couple of teenagers had been tubing down the Delaware when one of them got sucked under by the current. Kevin had been watching TV with Gram in the cramped living room. Jo had already gone to bed. It had been an early night for everyone after the drama on the beach with the fishermen and the eel.

The word at the lake was that the underwater recovery unit from the next county over would’ve pitched in and covered the Delaware River drowning, but they were tied up in another recovery farther north.

Welcome to summer in the Poconos, Kevin thought, where the water was refreshing and cool—and deadly. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He was standing on the dock next to the parking lot for a little more than half an hour. The sun burned the tops of his feet and the tips of his ears. Sweat dripped between his shoulder blades. His T-shirt was moist and sticky.

The lake water rocked with chaos. The ducks honked their grievances. Men shouted when they felt sure they had found something. Stimpy and his crew scrambled from fishing boat to fishing boat, pulling up drudge and carrion off the bottom, but nothing of the little girl was recovered. It was midafternoon, and they had been at it for several hours. All the while, the underwater recovery team went about their search methodically, professionally.

The Pavilion doors were flung open. Songs played on the jukebox, and bells rang from pinball machines. Two or three families sat on the beach and played in the sand with their young children. The floating pier was surrounded by boats rather than teenagers. The diving boards were empty. And yet, the strangest part was that on a day as hot as today, not one person entered the water. Heil could open the