The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron Page 0,23
flew around the grate and everybody but Dixie glanced into the shadowy corners of the room.
“Man, you’re getting good at this,” Bernice said dryly.
“Keep going!” Lourdes said. She’d pulled her sweater over her nose so that only her eyes were revealed.
“I’d be quiet,” Li-Hua said.
Dixie chuckled and handed her glass to Li-Hua. Li-Hua poured her another three fingers of wine and passed it back. “Oh, the locals adore stories—the eerie ones, the true crime ones, the ones that poke at the unknowable; and they do love their gossip. Everybody, and I mean everybody, has a favorite. The most famous tale you’ll hear about Lake Crescent concerns the murder of poor waitress Dolly Hanson. Of all the weird stories, the morbid campfire tales they tell the tourists on stormy nights around the hearth, The Lady of the Lake Murder is the one everybody remembers.
“A tawdry piece of business, that saga. In the mid-‘30s, the bar had grown into a popular resort for the rich townies and renamed Lake Crescent Lodge, although most of the locals stubbornly referred to it as Singer’s Tavern. A few still do. According to legend, Dolly, who was Bernice’s aunt, of course, had just gotten divorced from her third husband Hank on account of his philandering ways—”
“—And the fact he beat her within an inch of her life whenever he got a snootful at the tavern,” Bernice said.
“Yes, yes,” Dixie said. “On the morning of the big Singer’s Christmas party of 1938, he strangled Dolly, tied some blocks to her and dumped her in the middle of the lake. The jerk went about his way as the resident merry widower of Port Angeles until he eventually moved to California. People suspected, people whispered, but Hank claimed his wife ran off to Alaska with a salesman—or a sailor, depending on who’s telling the tale— and no one could prove otherwise.”
“Some fishermen found her in 1945, washed up directly below the lodge. That lake is deep and cold—there aren’t any deeper or any colder in the continental US. The frigid alkaline water preserved Dolly pretty much fully intact. She’d turned to soap.”
“Soap? Like a soap carving, a sculpture?”
“Yes indeed. The cold caused a chemical reaction that softens the body, yet keeps it intact to point. A weird sort of mummification.”
“That’s freaky,” Lourdes said.
Dixie chuckled. “Say, Bernie—wasn’t it Bob Hall, who identified her? Yeah…Hall. A barber by trade, and part time dentist, matched her dental records. The young lady’s teeth were perfectly preserved, you see. That was curtains for old two-timing Hank. He was hanged in ‘49. That’s just one incident. Plenty more where that came from.”
“More murders? More soap mummies?” Karla said.
“I suppose there could be more corpses. Deep as she is, the lake would make a pretty convenient dump site. Folks are given to feuds here in the hills. A lot of people have disappeared from this end of the Peninsula over the years. Especially around the lake.”
“Really? Like who?”
“All kinds. There was the married couple who bought a washing machine in Sequim and were last seen a mile or so from where we are right now. Those two vanished in 1955 and it’s still a mystery where they went. Back in 2005, an amateur detective supposedly found the lid to the washer in two hundred feet of water near a swimming hole called The Devil’s Punch Bowl. The kid got pretty excited about his find; he planned to come back with more equipment and volunteers, but he hasn’t, and I doubt he will. It wouldn’t matter anyway. Then there’s Ambulance Point. An ambulance racing for the hospital crashed through a guardrail and went into the drink. The paramedics swam away from the wreck, but a logger strapped to a gurney in the back of the ambulance sure as hell didn’t. Every year some diver uncovers the door handle to a Model A, the bumper from a Packard, the rims to something else. Bones? Undoubtedly, a reef of them exists somewhere in the deep. We won’t find them, though. Like the old timers say: the mistress keeps those close to her heart. Some say the souls of those taken are imprisoned in the forms of animals—coyotes and loons. When a coyote howls or a loon screams, they’re crying to their old selves, the loved ones they’ve lost.”
Lourdes’s eyes were wide and gleaming. “You actually wrote an essay about this?”