Haunted Legends (34 page)

The night before the Redfield Girls were to leave on the trip, there was a storm. She was startled by loud knocking on the front door. She hesitated to answer, and briefly lamented not adopting another big dog for protection after her black Lab, Norman, died. Living alone on a piece of wooded property outside of town, she seldom received random visitors—and certainly not in the wee hours. A familiar voice shouted her name. Her teenage niece Lourdes Blanchard had flown in unannounced from Paris.

Bernice ushered Lourdes inside, doing her best to conceal her annoyance. She enjoyed kids well enough. However, she jealously coveted those few weeks of freedom between summer and fall, and more importantly, her relationship with Lourdes was cool. The girl was bright and possessed a wry wit. Definitely not a prized combination in anyone under thirty.

Bernice suspected trouble at home. Her sister Nancy denied it during the livid, yet surreptitious phone call Bernice made after she’d tucked the girl into bed. Everything was fine, absolutely super—why was she asking? Lourdes saved a bit of money and decided to hop the international flight from Paris to Washington State, determined to embark upon a fandango of sorts. What was a mother to do? The child was stubborn—just like her favorite auntie.

“Well, you could’ve warned me, for starters,” Bernice said. “Good God, Nance, I’m leaving with the Redfield Girls tomorrow—”

Nancy laughed as the connection crackled. “See, that’s perfect. She’s been
clamoring to go with you on one of your little adventures. Sis? Sis? I’m losing the connection. Have fun—”

She was left clutching a dead phone. The timing was bizarre and seemed too eerie for coincidence. She’d had awful dreams several nights running; now, here was Lourdes on her doorstep, soaked to the bone, thunder and lightning at her back. It was almost as bad as the gothic horror novels Bernice had been reading to put herself to sleep. She couldn’t very well send Lourdes packing, nor with any conscience leave her sitting at the house. So she gritted her teeth into a Miss America smile and said, “Guess what, kid? We’re going to the mountains.”

The group arrived at the lake in the late afternoon. Somehow they’d managed to jam themselves, and all their luggage, into Dixie’s rusted-out Subaru. The car was a hundred thousand miles past its expiration date and plastered with stickers like
FREE TIBET, KILL YOUR TV
, and
VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS
. They stopped at the lodge and picked up the cabin key and a complimentary fruit basket. From there it was a ten-minute drive through the woods to the cabin itself. While the others finished unpacking, Bernice slipped outside to sneak a cigarette. To her chagrin, Lourdes was waiting, elbows on the rail. Her niece was rapidly becoming a bad penny. Annoyingly, the other women didn’t seem to mind her crashing the party. Perhaps their empty nests made them maudlin for the company of children.

“Aunt Dolly died here. This is where they found her.” Lourdes squinted at the dark water thirty or so yards from the porch of the cabin.

“That’s great-aunt to you.” Bernice quickly pocketed her lighter and tried to figure how to beat a hasty retreat without appearing to flee the scene. “To be accurate, it probably happened closer to the western side. That’s where they lived.”

“But she’s the Lady of the Lake?”

“Aunt Dolly was Aunt Dolly. She died an awful death. Cue the violins.”

“And the ghost stories.”

“Those, too. Nothing like enriching cultural heritage by giving the tavern drunks a cause célèbre to flap their lips about.”

“Doesn’t it make you sad? Even a little?”

“I wasn’t alive in 1938. Jeez, I never knew the gal personally. How old do you think I am, anyway?”

Lourdes brushed back her hair. She was straw blond and lean, although she had her mother’s eyes and mouth. Bernice had always wondered about the girl’s fairness. On the maternal side, their great-grandparents were a heavy mix of Spanish and Klallam—just about everybody in the immediate family was thick and dark. Bernice had inherited high cheekbones and bronze skin and black hair, now turning to iron. She owned a pair of moccasins she never wore, and a collection of beads handed down from her elders that she kept locked in a box of similar trinkets.

A stretch of beach separated them and the lake. The lake was a scar one mile wide and ten miles long. The water splashed against the rocks, tossing reels of brown kelp. Clouds rolled across the sky. The sun was sinking and the water gleamed black with streaks of red. Night came early to the Peninsula in the fall. The terrain conspired with the dark. For the most part, one couldn’t see a thing after sundown. The Douglass fir and western redwoods rose like ancient towers, and beneath the canopy all was cool and dim. Out there, simple homes were scattered through the foothills of Storm King Mountain in a chain of dirt tracks that eventually linked to the highway junction. This was logging country, farm country; field and stream, and overgrown woods full of nothing but birds and deer and the occasional lost camper.

An owl warbled and Bernice shivered. “Anyway. How’d this gnat get in your ear?”

“I read about it a long time ago in a newspaper clipping—I was helping Grandma sort through Grandpa’s papers after he died. As we drove up here, I started thinking about the story. This place is so . . . forbidding. I mean, it’s gorgeous, but beneath that, kind of stark. And . . . Dixie was telling me about it earlier when you were getting the key.”

“That figures.”

The younger woman pulled her shawl tight. “It’s just so . . . awful.”

“You said it, kid.” Bernice called her niece “kid” even though Lourdes was seventeen and on her way to college in a couple of weeks. Depending upon the results of forthcoming exams, she’d train to be a magistrate, or at the very least a barrister. They grew up fast in Europe. Even so, the divide
was too broad—Bernice was approaching fifty and she felt every mile in her bones. Chaperone to a sardonic, provocative little wiseacre seemed a hollow reward for another tough year at the office.

“There’s another thing . . . I had a really bizarre dream about Aunt Dolly the other day. I was floating in a lake—not here, but somewhere warm—and she spoke to me. She was this white shape under the water. I knew it was her, though, and I heard her voice clearly.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t remember. She was nice . . . except, something about the situation wasn’t right, you know? Like she was trying to trick me. I woke in a sweat.”

Bernice’s flesh goose pimpled. Uncertain how to respond, she resisted the temptation to confide her own nightmares. “That is pretty weird, all right.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask about the murder,” Lourdes said.

“But not quite, eh?” They must be sharing a wavelength. What wavelength, though?

“I wish Mom had mentioned it.”

“It’s quite the campfire tale with your cousins. Grandpa Howard used to scare them with it every Halloween—”

“Way insensitive.”

“Well, that’s the other side of the family. Kissinger he isn’t. Nancy never told you?”

“Frank discourages loose talk. He’s a sensible fellow. Mom follows his lead.” It was no secret Lourdes disliked her father. His name was Francois, but she called him Frank when talking to her friends. She’d pierced her navel and tattooed the U.S. flag on the small of her back to spite him. Ironically, his stepsons John and Frank thought Francois was the greatest thing since sliced baguettes.

Fair enough, if she hated him. Who knew what Nancy was thinking when she married the schmuck. Except, Bernice
did indeed
know what her sister had been thinking—Francois was a first-rate civil engineer; one of the best in Paris. After Bill died, Nancy only cared about security. Her two boys were in middle school at the time and Bill had been under the weight of a crippling mortgage, the bills for his chemotherapy. Bernice suspected she only got herself pregnant with Lourdes to seal the deal. It shouldn’t irk her that Nancy had made the smart choice. When Bernice lost Elmer, she’d gone the other direction—dug in and accepted the role of widow. Eleven years and
she hadn’t remarried, hadn’t even gone on a date. It was wrong to begrudge Nancy, but Lord help her, she did, and maybe that was why she resented poor Lourdes just a tiny bit—and maybe she was envious because she and Elmer put off having their own children and now it was far too late.

Lourdes said, “That’s why you brought us up here, right? To tell the tale and give everyone a good scare?”

Bernice laughed to cover her mounting unease. “It hadn’t occurred to me. I brought a bag of books and sunblock. We’ve got our evening cribbage tournaments. Hope you don’t get too bored with us biddies.”

“Dixie promised to go hiking with me tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Bernice detested hiking. The hills were steep, the bugs ravenous. She’d allowed her gym membership to lapse and piled on almost fifteen pounds since spring. No, hiking wasn’t a welcome prospect. And to think she wasn’t 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.

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 . . .”

“Okeydokey. 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 aeon 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 the bottom for trespassing.”

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

“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.