Echo Lake: A Novel (5 page)

Hello, Ma’am, he said. I’m Levi, Pastor of the Heartshorne Free Will Baptist Church. You might have seen our flyer.

Emily held out her hand to him and hoped that her handshake was firm enough—clergymen made her nervous. She imagined that they were always weighing her for possible sins, gauging how much prayer might be necessary to make her whole.

Emily Collins.

He smiled, dropping her hand. The light glared down on his watchface, making it expand into a star of light.

I heard from Cheryl down at Rod’s that you’d made it in, he said. We heard somebody was taking over the place. I thought I’d come down and welcome you to our little town.

Emily nodded. Thank you.

So what brings you here? Do you have family in the area?

Fran was my great-aunt, Emily said. She left me all of this. She motioned toward the room behind her.

He didn’t speak, though his eyes widened slightly.

Did you know Fran at all, Mr…?

Call me Levi, he said. Or Pastor Richardson, if you prefer. I knew her a little bit—she wasn’t a frequent visitor to the church, but she was well-known in our community. I’m sorry about your loss, he said. Lovely woman. The first of many tragedies we’ve experienced here in Heartshorne. He looked up at her from behind his eyelashes, his head bowed slightly.

Emily nodded. She had the urge to say amen, but didn’t. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

I didn’t really know Fran, she said, but thank you.

Whether you knew her or not, her death was a shock to everyone.

Emily searched her mind for what might have been a shock to anyone about an eighty year-old woman’s death. He continued to shake his head. She’d have to say something soon—she wasn’t sufficiently shocked for his taste, she could tell.

But why shocking? She asked. Very sad, of course, but I wasn’t shocked, once I heard her age. I thought she was eighty.

He looked at her, frankly confused this time.

You don’t know?

She shook her head. Tell me, she said.

She hated moments like this, when bad news she should have known was still mysterious, still beyond her reach, and she looked like a fool for not knowing.

You weren’t told how she died? He shook his head. They should have told you, especially before you came all the way down here with your things.

I’ve hardly been told anything, she said. I got my key in the mail and I have to meet with, what’s his name, George, George Sawyer, to sign the papers tomorrow—Levi’s vigorous head-shaking stopped her. She felt a quick, jabbing pain in her stomach. Her happiness couldn’t be over so soon, already. Levi was going to ruin everything. The house wouldn’t be hers anymore after he said whatever he had to say. Or it would be hers and she wouldn’t want it anymore. She’d been greedy in taking what wasn’t hers from a person she did not know, and now she’d be punished with the very thing she had wanted.

She waited, clutching the edge of the door.

I’m sorry to the be the one to tell you this, he said. This was supposed to be a friendly visit. He made a sound between his teeth, as people do when touching something hot.

Emily stepped outside and shut the door behind her. She should have invited him in, but she didn’t want to hear what he might have to say in her new house. The words might catch in the curtains and wallpaper like cigarette smoke and remain there, hanging in the air.

Tell me, she said. It’s better to know.

He looked down at his black shoes. The sun, now high above their heads, shined down directly on them through the scant trees. Emily felt her cheeks and forehead redden. His silver watch gleamed.

Fran was murdered, he said. They found her with her throat cut. He swallowed and leaned against the siding, which buckled slightly under his palm. She’d been dead for days when they found her—she didn’t have many visitors, no family around here anymore, not for years, and so the home-health nurse found her on her scheduled visit.

Emily held her hand against her throat. Do they know who did it? Levi shook his head slowly. No. They figure some meth heads. Some kids trying to rob her. They didn’t take anything. Probably because she didn’t have much to take.

Emily saw a quick, involuntary image of a blade sliding across skin, the skin separating like lips, the blood pouring out.

How did they come in?

The police say the killer came right through the screen door, killed her, and walked away, Levi said. She left her door unlocked, like many people around here do.

Emily noticed her own hand around her throat and lowered it. She leaned back, touching her fingers against the doorframe. The house behind her had changed. She imagined something growing inside it, a pulsing, moving something.

You all right, Ma’am? Levi asked. He squinted at her and ran his hand across his forehead. He was sweating visibly.

Emily nodded. Is it safe? I mean, do the authorities think it’s safe to live here?

Well, he said, that I can’t say, Ma’am. Nobody feels safe right now, with Frannie’s death, the children missing, and the others—

The others?

Other deaths in the area—mostly people who were mixed up in things like drugs and drinking, younger people. He shook his head. But if you’re asking what I think, I don’t think this house is more dangerous than any other place. It was a random crime, that’s what the police said. Nowhere is safe anymore, is it?

Emily nodded again, though she wasn’t sure if she agreed. He had not answered her question, but she felt too tired to push him.

Thank you for telling me about Fran, she said. She looked at the man, sweaty and well-meaning, squinting up at her against the sun.

She walked back up onto the steps.

Please, she said, opening the door to her house, please come inside and have some tea.

•

After Levi left, Emily turned on all of the lights and shut the windows, despite the damp heat that invaded the living room and made her discard her clothes as soon as he’d left. She wore only her bra and underwear and walked around the still-empty rooms, sticky and uncomfortable, jumping at shadows on the walls.

She’d agreed to go to a community pot-luck at the church. She cursed herself for not thinking.

It isn’t just a Free Will Baptist thing, Levi had assured her. We invited all the churches. We even put an ad in the paper. It’s a good way to get to know your neighbors!

She’d wanted to say no, but the idea of being with people appealed to her in that moment. And she felt she owed him something: he had given her news that nobody else would. She was nervous about accepting; she saw, poking from his breast pocket, a red-edged tract, which she was sure he would pull out at some point, or perhaps leave in her bathroom. When she’d lived in Virginia, she remembered that the religious kids used to bring stacks of them to school, convinced after a particularly exciting summer of church camp that they were meant to spread the gospel. The desire never lasted all that long, but when they were in the heat of it, she’d find multiple tracts stuck just inside her locker every afternoon. Even then, she was a well-known unbeliever, her mother’s disdain for organized religion having rubbed off on her. It was, Emily quickly realized, an easy way to shock people, at least, even if it made her an outcast.

At one point, he did offer her “some literature,” which she turned down, kindly.

I do understand about your beliefs, she said. They just really aren’t for me.

He nodded, sighed and dropped the subject.

Eventually, after a few more words about community and friendship, she agreed to go. She promised to bring cookies.

I’m sorry to turn down your materials, she said as he left, waving her hand to the neat, front pocket of his shirt. I have my own beliefs, she said. I understand what you are preaching and all, but I’m just not interested.

He had only nodded, smiling tightly. I understand, he said, and I appreciate your honesty. I can only pray that you’ll change your mind.

Her aunt Fran, according to Levi, had kept to herself (meaning she wasn’t a member of a church, Emily assumed, not sure what other community activities there were to be part of), but had been
a good woman
, a phrase that Emily didn’t know how to define.

There used to be lots of Collins’s around here, Levi said. But you probably know more about that than I do.

Emily thought he might want her to tell him more, to explain how an eighty-year old woman happened to be left alone without any family in a remote house, miles down a dirt road. But Emily had nothing to say. Her mother had left Heartshorne before Emily was born and had given Emily only her stories about her childhood and her distaste for the place. Emily had simply shrugged in response. It didn’t seem like the right time to launch into personal stories.

Now that she knew how Fran had died, Emily walked through the house again, examining the walls and carpets and cabinets for evidence. What could have possessed somebody to murder such an old woman, a woman who owned little of value? Did Aunt Fran have a hidden heroin stash behind a false wall or a cache of machine guns under the shag carpet?

Nothing had been stolen, according to Levi, and no messages left. Surely it wasn’t a suicide—Emily imagined that cutting one’s own throat was impossible, though she had heard of some people who wanted to die so badly that they stabbed themselves in the chest or set themselves on fire.

She forced her mind away from the image of her aunt seated in a recliner, running a knife around her own throat, and instead touched the pencil lines that marked the doorframe inside the small, windowless bedroom. A mark to indicate a child’s growth? But as far as she knew, Fran had had no children. If she had, then they’d be living here instead of Emily.

The rooms, though plain and bright, seemed cast in a reddish glaze now. This was the scene of a crime, no longer a normal house. Where had they tied the yellow police tape?

Funny how all of the things that had been done in the house—making coffee, sleeping, arguing, presumably sex—were swallowed up by this one event, this event that probably had taken less than a few minutes. The murderer had come in and slit her throat as she slept, that’s what Levi had said. Maybe she hadn’t even woken up, and instead just drifted from a shallow sleep to a deeper one, her skin faintly wet, her throat itchy, and then gone into whatever unconsciousness or different sort of consciousness happened when you were no longer breathing.

Had she been afraid, though? What if she’d woken up, confused by her own blood, trying to call to somebody before realizing that nobody was close enough to hear and her voice no longer worked? Had she wished she wasn’t alone?

Emily walked back downstairs. The small upstairs rooms made her feel claustrophobic with their sloped ceilings and leftover furniture. Downstairs, she put on her shoes to walk across the red carpet. She’d have it pulled up and replaced. Surely you couldn’t get blood completely out of a carpet.

She was certain that she should feel more afraid. She lived in the middle of nowhere, and her aunt had been murdered in this house. Plus, the pastor had mentioned other murders in the area. She felt jumpy, electric, but not afraid. Curious, but not afraid.

Emily touched the walls of her new house, and walked to the window, avoiding the stain. The yard was impossibly green in the afternoon light and she sun glinted through the cracks in the green, little commas and triangles of yellow light.

It was beautiful.

She would call the police tomorrow and ask, demand, in fact, to know what they knew. And if she was not in danger, she would stay.

But isn’t everyone in danger of something? And Emily wasn’t an old woman, asleep in her chair with her front door open. She locked her doors out of city habit. She woke at any strange sound in the night, or even unstrange sounds, like the television’s creaks and shifts in the humidity or the click of the ceiling fan. She was careful. Maybe she’d buy a gun.

She opened the front door and made her way to the backyard, where the grass had grown up past her ankles, though it was sparse and infested with thick, hardy weeds that made the ground sharp under her feet. The yard made a neat semicircle around the back end of the house, ending in narrow passages through which Emily could circle back to the front yard and the dirt road. She pushed the dry hose aside with her feet and a small animal—a toad or enormous grasshopper—hopped away and into the woods.

The forest gathered around her, green and heavy. It pulsed with the sound of cicadas. She watched the wall of green rustling with the wind. The grass crunched as she walked toward the forest, the dandelions and thick, thorny plants crackling under her heels.

It was sweltering even under the overhanging trees, which bent down, caging the heat, fanning it lightly onto her head and bare arms.

She didn’t know how much of the woods beyond the house were hers—the deed had said, and the lawyer had told her over the telephone—but she couldn’t remember the exact amount. More than five acres but less than ten. A number that had surprised but not astonished her.

It seemed like such a responsibility, to own a piece of the woods. Maybe she would put up a fence.