The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron Page 0,28

crude horseshoe pit and played until the light failed. Karla and Li-Hua shot two memory cards of photos. Bernice taught Lourdes cribbage and gin rummy. She even managed to power through a book about dream symbolism by candlelight while her companions slept. The book wasn’t particularly illuminating in regards to her specific experiences. Nonetheless, she slept with it clutched to her breast like a talisman.

On the final evening, Bernice went with Lourdes to the woodshed to fetch an armload of dry pine to bank the fire. They lingered a moment, saying nothing, listening to the crickets and the owls. From inside came the raucous cries and curses of the latest debate between Dixie and Karla.

Lourdes said, “I haven’t thanked you. I was in trouble the other night.”

Bernice laughed softly. “Don’t worry about it. Nancy would’ve killed me herself if I’d let you sink. You have no idea how many years she spent freezing by the pool while I had my swim lessons when we were kids.”

“That’s Mom.”

“Yes, well…” Bernice cleared her throat. “I think I was hallucinating. Lack of oxygen to the brain.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been meaning to ask. Did you happen to see anything odd in the water?”

“Besides you?”

“Watch your lips, kid.” Bernice smiled, but her hand tightened on the frame of the shed. The pit of her stomach knotted. Last night she’d been under the lake again, and Nancy was with her, glimmering dead white, hands extended. Only, it wasn’t Nancy. She’d simply given the figure a face. “No biggie. I sucked in a lot of water. I think a fish swam by. Panicked me a bit.”

Darkness had stolen across the water and through the trees, and Lourdes was hidden mostly in shadow, except for where lantern light came from the windows and revealed her hair in halo, a piece of her shoulder, but nothing of her expression. She said, “I didn’t see any fish.” She was silent for a moment, and when she spoke again her tone was strange. “There was something wrong with that boat.”

“I’ll say. Probably rotted clean through.”

“What I mean is, it wasn’t right. It didn’t belong here.”

Bernice tried to think of a witty response. She wanted to scoff at what Lourdes was hinting. “Oh,” she said. “The Flying Dinghy of Lake Crescent, eh?”

Lourdes didn’t say anything.

7.

Three years passed before the Redfield Girls returned to Lake Crescent. This was Dixie’s year to choose and she invited Lourdes, who agreed to join them. Bernice and Li-Hua declined to accompany their friends on the trip, a first since the women had established the yearly tradition. Bernice begged off because the week prior she’d fallen while cleaning her gutters and suffered a broken ankle. It was healing nicely, although it was wrapped in a cast and not fit for bearing any kind of weight. Li-Hua’s excuse was that Hung remained in China on a business trip and someone had to keep an eye on their rambunctious teenage sons, Jerrod and Jules.

Bernice knew better. While Dixie and Karla had quickly gotten over the close call with the rowboat, she and Li-Hua shared a profound antipathy toward the lake; its uncanny emanations repelled them. As for Lourdes, an invitation into the circle was irresistible to a girl of her youth and inexperience, albeit she expressed reluctance to abandon Bernice. In the end, they had a few glasses of wine and Bernice told her to go—no sense watching an old fuddy duddy lie about all weekend listening to her bones knit.

Bernice spent the whole weekend at home, pruning rose bushes, and riding around on Elmer’s sputtering mower. Sunday morning news predicted a storm. She worked straight through lunch and finished putting away the tools and hosing cut grass stems from her ankle cast minutes before storm clouds blocked out the fading sun. Thunder cracked in the distance and it began to rain. She hobbled to the pantry, searching for flashlights and spare batteries. The power died a few minutes later, as it always did during storms, and she grimaced with smug satisfaction as she lighted a bunch of candles (some of the very same she’d purchased on Saturday!) in the kitchen and her bedroom. She boiled tea on the camp stove Elmer had always kept stashed in the garage, and retired to bed, intent upon reading a few chapters into a pictorial history of the Mima Mounds. The long, long afternoon of yard work put her under before she’d read two pages.

Bernice woke in complete darkness to the wind and rain falling