The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron Page 0,22

even consulted in the change of program. Dixie’s treachery would not go unremarked.

“Tomorrow afternoon. Then she’s driving us into Port Angeles for dinner at the Red Devil.”

“That’s a bar. Your parents—”

“The place serves fish and chips. Dixie says it’s the best cod ever. Besides, there’s no drinking age in France.”

“Cripes,” Bernice said. Her desire for a cigarette was almost violent, but she restricted herself to a couple of Virginia Slims a day, and only in secret. Lights came on in the cabin. Dixie stuck her head out a window to say dinner was up.

3.

Li-Hua made stir fry and egg rolls over the gas range. She preferred traditional southern Chinese cuisine. A tough, sinewy woman, she’d endured a stint in a tire factory during the Cultural Revolution before escaping to college, and eventually from Hainan to the United States where she earned her doctorate. For years, Karla nagged her to write a memoir that would make Amy Tan seem like a piker. Li-Hua smiled wisely and said she’d probably retire and open a restaurant instead.

They ate garlic bread on the side and drank plenty of red wine Karla and her husband Chuck had brought home from a recent tour of Wenatchee vineyards. Normally the couple spent summer vacation scuba diving in Puget Sound. As Karla explained, “We went to the wineries because I’ve gotten too fat to fit into my wetsuit.”

After dinner, Dixie turned down the kerosene lanterns and the five gathered near the hearth—Bernice and Li-Hua in the musty leather seats; Karla, Dixie, and Lourdes on their sleeping bags. The AM transistor played soft, classical jazz. Karla quizzed Lourdes about her dreaded exams, the pros and cons of European track education versus the American scattershot approach.

Bernice half-listened to their conversation, wineglass balanced on her knee, as she lazily scrutinized the low, split beam rafters, the stuffed mallard and elk head trophies, and the dingy photographs of manly men posing beside hewn logs and mounds of slaughtered salmon. Darkness filled every window.

“You want to tell this?” Dixie said. “Your niece is pestering me.”

“I know. She’s been bugging the crap out of me, too.”

“Oh, be nice, would you?” Karla said. She stirred the coals with a poker. “Yeah, be nice,” Dixie said while Lourdes didn’t try hard to cover a smirk. Her cheeks were flushed. Dixie and Karla had given her a few glasses of wine. “Hey, they do it in France!” Dixie said when confronted. “Go for it, then.” Bernice shook her head. She was too drowsy and worn down to protest. She always enjoyed Dixie’s rendition of the tale. Her friend once wrote an off the cuff essay called Haunted Lake. It was subsequently published in the Daily Olympian and reprinted every couple of years around Halloween.

“If you insist.”

“Hey, guys,” Li-Hua said. “It may be bad luck to gossip about this so close to the sacred water.”

“Come on,” Dixie said.

Li-Hua frowned. “I’m serious. My feet got cold when you started talking. What if the spirits heard us and now they’re watching? You don’t know everything about these things. There are terrible mysteries.”

“Whatever,” Bernice said. She refused to admit the same chill creeping up her legs, as if dipped in a mist of dry ice. “Let nothing but fear….”

“Okie-dokie. What’s so special about the lake?” Karla dropped the poker and leaned toward Dixie with an expression of dubious interest. “She’s cursed.” Dixie was solemn.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Li-Hua said.

“I get the feeling you Northlanders brought a lot of superstitious baggage from the Old World,” Karla said, indicating Dixie’s pronounced Norwegian ancestry.

“It’s more than white man superstition, though. In the winter, thunderstorms boil down the valley, set fire to the high timber, tear the roofs off houses, and flood a hundred draws from here to Port Townsend.” Dixie nodded to herself and sipped her drink, beginning to get into her narrative. “The wind blows. It lays its hammer on the waters of the lake, beats her until she bares rows of whitecap teeth. She’s old too, that one; a deep, dark Paleolithic well of glacial water. She was here an eon before the Klallam settled along the valley in their huts and longhouses. The tribes never liked her. According to legend, the Klallam refused to paddle their canoes across Lake Crescent. This goes back to the ancient days when the Klallam were paddling just about everywhere. They believed the lake was full of demons who would drag them to bottom for trespassing.”

A gust rattled the windows and moaned in the chimney. Sparks