Lost Lake (21 page)

Kate held on to her daughter tightly. She was so small that it felt like Kate could wrap her arms around her twice. With all the loss Kate had experienced lately, this was the unimaginable one. This was the one she knew she couldn’t live through. She closed her eyes and felt the tears sting.

“There’s something down there,” Wes said, sloshing back into the water.

“What?” Kate said, her eyes popping open. “Wes, wait!”

But he took a deep breath and went under again. Kate could remember the maze of roots down there. It was like swimming through a scribble.

“Mom, you’re squashing me,” Devin finally said.

Kate pulled back. She angrily wiped at her eyes. “What were you doing out here? I told you not to go swimming around these roots!”

Devin looked taken aback at Kate’s tone, as if it never occurred to her that Kate would react this way. Devin had an agenda that made sense to her, but Kate had no idea what it was.

“What if something had happened to you? What if you had gotten hurt? You scared me, Devin.”

Devin’s eyes darted to the water.

Kate pushed her daughter’s tangled wet hair behind her ears. “Sweetheart, what are you looking for?” Kate asked more softly. “What is it? Let me help you. What do you want to find?”

Devin pinched her lips together.

“I know this has been a hard year,” Kate said, “and I know it seemed like I wasn’t there for you, but I was. And I am now. You’ve got to trust me again. You’ve got to talk to me. That’s how we’re going to get through this. Together.”

Devin still didn’t say anything.

“Is this about your dad? Is this about moving?”

Devin finally said, “The alligator doesn’t want any more to change, either. He wants everybody to stay.” Devin wiped her eyes with one hand. She wasn’t wearing her glasses. “That’s why he wanted me to find the box.”

“What box?” Kate asked as Wes emerged from the water again.

Devin pointed to the plastic bag Wes was now pulling out of the lake. “The Alligator Box.”

*   *   *

With his clothes sticking to his body, and inches of water pouring from his work boots, Wes made it to the trail and went to his knees beside Kate and Devin. Devin called it a box, but it didn’t look like a box. It looked like there was something more sinister inside the black trash bag. He unknotted the tie and reached in … and drew out another black bag.

He opened it only to find another. Then two more.

Finally he pulled out an old plastic waterproof tackle box. It was sooty and burned in places, like it had been in a fire.

My God.

Wes set the box down as if it were made of glass, then sat back and stared at it. Finally, pushing his wet hair out of his face first, he slowly reached forward and unsnapped the locks. He took a deep breath as he opened the seal. Out poured a curious counterbalance of smells—musty and dank, smoky and scorched. But there was an underlying scent that was all Billy. It punched Wes in the gut. It was almost too much, all of these memories flooding back, when there were times over the past few years when he couldn’t even remember what his brother looked like. The sheer tangibleness of these things, of Billy’s Alligator Box, almost made him sick.

The box had been here all along.

Billy had been here all along.

And the thought that he’d almost missed it, that he never would have found it once Lost Lake was gone from him and belonged to other people, terrified him.

He reached inside, and the first thing he took out was a cardboard pencil box gone soft. He opened it and poured dozens of alligator teeth into his hand, touching them as if they were jewels, as if they flashed and sparkled. He put them back in the pencil box and set it aside. Next he brought out a small plastic alligator toy Billy used to play with at the breakfast table. Then a key chain shaped like an alligator, which Wes had given him for his sixth birthday. A cigarette lighter that had once belonged to their mother, engraved with the initials
ELI.
A cracked gold pocket watch Billy had hidden so their father couldn’t pawn it, because it had belonged to their grandfather. And a single aquamarine cuff link Wes couldn’t place.

The box was almost empty now. Wes looked inside and felt the blood rush from his face. His hand shook as he reached in and brought out a single unmailed letter, sealed in a plastic sandwich bag. He automatically looked at Kate. She saw the letter in his hand but didn’t seem to recognize it.

He quickly put the things back in the box, then stood.

“That really is the Alligator Box, isn’t it?” Kate asked him.

“Yes.” He had to leave. That was all he could think of. He had to get away and process this. “I’m sorry, I really need to go. I’ll see you tomorrow at the party.” They were looking at him strangely as he clutched the box, dripping wet. He tried to smile. “No more swimming out here alone, okay?” he said to Devin.

“Thank you, Wes,” Kate said.

He nodded, then walked away.

*   *   *

“We have to talk about this,” Kate said to her curiously silent daughter after she’d taken Devin back to their cabin and washed her off. “What just happened out there? Why did you jump there, of all places, when I specifically told you it was dangerous?” This had been no accident. She’d found Devin’s glasses on a stump by the trail. She’d taken them off before she’d gone into the water.

They were sitting on the couch now, Devin on her lap. Devin sighed deeply. “The alligator kept trying to give me clues to where the box was. I finally understood. I had to get it before it was too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“I’m not sure.”

Kate paused, changing tactics. “Did you see the box—the trash bag—through the water? Did you know what it was, or were you just guessing?”

“No, I saw your phone. I saw it the day Bulahdeen showed me the place where the knees are, but I didn’t realize what it was at first. The alligator must have moved it there, to tell me exactly where to jump.”

“My phone?”

Devin pointed to the coffee table, where Kate thought Devin had placed her cypress knee on their way to the bathroom. But instead of the knee, it was Kate’s phone in its electric blue case, wet and covered in grime. Kate reached forward and picked up it, nonplussed.

“I didn’t realize how deep the water was. I couldn’t make it all the way to the bottom and stay there long enough to pull the bag out of the dirt. And there were all these roots in the way.”

Just the thought of it made Kate shiver. What was going on? Devin was a dreamer, not a risk taker, so this was simply baffling. “Have you ever seen this alligator before?” Kate asked gently. “Or did this just start here?”

“He lives here.”

“And he talks to you?”

“Yes.”

“And he told you where the Alligator Box was?”

“That’s what I keep trying to tell you!” Devin said, her skinny arms and legs trembling with frustration.

“Does he have a name?” Kate asked.

Devin suddenly stilled and looked at her curiously. “You know what his name is.”

“No, I don’t.”

“His name is Billy.”

A slight chill ran through her. It suddenly made sense, in a distant way, like remembering a decision you made long ago, one you wouldn’t make now, but one that had made perfect sense back then. Putting aside her disbelief and confusion and worry for a moment—all things the adult in her felt—Kate found that the only thing left was the one true thing.

Kate had left her childhood here.

And Devin had found it.

*   *   *

Decades ago, Wes’s father and uncle—brothers Lyle and Lazlo—jointly inherited two large plots of land on either side of the interstate. Older brother Lazlo had moved from Suley years before, gotten a job in construction in Atlanta, then met and married the daughter of the man who owned the construction company. He quickly went from a manual laborer to the man in charge, the first in a long line of ne’er-do-well, dirt-poor-but-land-rich Patterson men to do so. Lazlo convinced his younger brother Lyle to split the inheritance, giving Lazlo sole right to the acreage to the north of the interstate. Everyone thought he was being magnanimous, because Lyle and his new wife and young son Wes needed somewhere to live, and the land to the south of the interstate was beautiful and had an old hunting cabin on it. What Lazlo didn’t tell his brother was that the northern land was actually prime real estate, and he had plans to develop it. The southern land, on the other hand, was basically worthless without the land that curved around it like a question mark and locked most of it in—Eby’s and George’s Lost Lake property.

So Lazlo developed his land, built an outlet mall and a water park, and brought a lot of money into the county. He became Suley’s golden boy, while Lyle was holed away in a cabin that didn’t even have electricity. Wes’s younger brother, Billy, was born six years later, and their mother left them soon afterward. Wes didn’t know what happened to her. Years ago, someone said they’d seen her hitchhiking just outside of Houston. Hitchhiking
west,
away from here.

One of the last times Wes had seen his uncle was after the fire, when Lazlo came in for the funeral for Wes’s father and brother. When he stopped by the hospital to see Wes on his way back out of town, Wes remembered asking him when he would be going back to Atlanta with him, assuming, of course, that the only family he had left would take him in. He remembered Lazlo’s vague, stammering reply, and the impact had been staggering:
Lazlo didn’t want him
.

Lazlo left after the funeral, and even though he came into town almost every summer with his family, to stay for a week at the Water Park Hotel, Wes had only seen him a handful of times.

In fact, he’d seen more of Lazlo in the past few days than he had in the past ten years combined.

Sure enough, as Wes backed his van to the garage door on the basement level of his building that afternoon, he saw Lazlo’s Mercedes parked to the side. The car was running, the air conditioner undoubtedly on high.

Wes pushed the remote control to the bay door, and it rose up, exposing the cavernous concrete garage. Shelves and cubbyholes lined the walls, and the open space was divided neatly into sections labeled
ELECTRIC, CARPENTRY, LAWN CARE, PLUMBING, ROOFING, MASONRY
. He was meticulous about this place. “A little OCD never hurt anyone,” his foster mother used to say.

There was a small glassed-in office to the side, with its own outside entrance, but no one was inside. His dispatcher, Harriet, and handyman, Buddy, were gone for the day, Fridays being half days for them. All calls were supposed to be forward to Wes’s cell, which he only now realized had been in his pocket when he’d jumped into the lake to find Devin.

All he could think as he’d run to the water was, I can’t lose another one. His legs still felt weak over it, his head light.

He backed the van into the garage, then got out.

“I almost gave up waiting for you,” Lazlo said as he got out of his Mercedes. “Where were you?”

“I’ve been helping at the lake this week,” Wes said. He took his cell phone out of his pocket to see if it was still working. Nothing. It was toast. He went to the phone in the small office to check for messages. Luckily, he hadn’t missed any. He forwarded all calls upstairs.

“I looked for you in the restaurant first. Your cook said you were out with a girl. I thought you’d gotten lucky,” Lazlo said with a “heh-heh-heh” as he entered the garage.

“I was just going up there,” Wes said, walking back out of the office. Maybe it was the afternoon he’d just had, maybe it was the thought of losing Devin, or the miraculous discovery of the Alligator Box, but suddenly he felt the need to reach out to someone, someone who knew his brother. Someone who understood. “Do you want to join me? Have a beer?”

“That’s nice of you to ask, son. But I don’t think so. I’m just here to tell you that I’m going to Lost Lake to get Eby to sign the papers tomorrow. I thought you might want to come along, get it all squared away. Nice and neat.”

“Tomorrow?” Wes asked, surprised. “Does Eby know?”

“Of course she knows,” Lazlo said in a tone that suggested Wes might be daft. “She agreed to sell.”

Wes shook his head. “I mean, does she know you’re coming tomorrow?”

Lazlo shrugged. “I don’t think so. What does it matter?”

“There’s going to be a party for Eby at the lake tomorrow. Eby’s great-niece is helping to organize it. A lot of people from town are coming.”

Lazlo hitched his trousers up at his thighs and did a lean-sit against the carpenter’s table near the staircase to the restaurant. Warm, enticing scents were floating down, basil and oregano and tomato. It made Wes long for something, something he couldn’t place. A happy childhood, a home. But he’d never understood how he could miss something he’d never had.

“One last good-bye. That make sense,” Lazlo said. “But I didn’t know Eby had family. What’s the niece’s story?”

Wes shifted his weight. He shouldn’t have brought up Kate. “She’s widowed. She decided to take her daughter on vacation to meet Eby. Get reconnected.”

“Eby’s going to be coming into some money,” Lazlo suggested. “Maybe she wants a piece of the pie.”

“She doesn’t need money,” Wes said.

“All women without a husband need money.”

“How would you know?”

“I’ve seen it happen. Not to me and Deloris, of course. She’d skewer me in a divorce. She’s always looking for an excuse, so I’m always very careful about my indiscretions.”

“Kate is helping Eby because Eby needs help,” Wes said. “It’s the reason I’m doing this, too. The entire town would help her if she would just ask.”

“Hmm. That’s unsettling.” Lazlo got up and brushed at the back of his expensive trousers. “But this party is a good idea. A farewell party, just so there’s no misunderstanding. Eby will say good-bye to everyone. I’ll come. I’ll even buy the meat. There’s a cook there, right? She could grill it.”

Wes smiled. “Lisette doesn’t grill.”

“Why the hell not?”

Wes blinked in surprise at his uncle’s change in mood. There was a little of his father in his uncle, in that mercurial temper. “She’s French.”