Lost Lake House (4 page)

Marshall had thought he knew what it meant
to be afraid. When he was ten years old a fierce slavering dog had
rushed at him out of an alley, to be turned aside only at the last
minute by a yell and a stone flung by a teamster in the street; and
for a long time that heart-stopping moment had been the benchmark
of fear in his mind. But it was not until that last gray autumn,
walking the streets of the city with his hands in his coat pockets
and a growing knowledge that the few pennies in the bottom of the
old tea-canister at home would only last so long, that he knew a
subtler, creeping fear that was worse.

Marshall had left school at fifteen—for
almost three years he had scrounged odd jobs of all descriptions,
earning nickels and dimes and scattered dollars to help keep food
on the table and a roof over the head of four little brothers and
sisters. It had always been a struggle to make ends meet, but they
had never been really close to the edge of destitution—at least not
close enough that Marshall had to think about it. Then came a
stretch when business was bad in the city, and he could find no
work anywhere. Slowly, the supply of coins in the tea canister
dwindled. The rent was due…the weather was growing colder. Days of
tramping the streets, of closed doors and shaken heads and the
pinch of want beginning to be felt at home…and Marshall was afraid,
though he kept his hands clenched tight in his coat pockets and his
firm young jaw set so no one would ever suspect his lips wanted to
tremble. And then he had chanced to hear that the Lost Lake House
was hiring help.

It was unofficially heard, for everyone knew
that the Lost Lake House only hired people who could keep their
mouths shut. They didn’t exactly use an employment office. Marshall
knew this, but there had not been a decent meal in the Kendrick
house for three days, and he pushed the thought to the back of his
mind.

He went down to Maurice Vernon’s offices on
the slightly seedier side of the city—an odd bare place where no
work ever seemed to be done, but which was the front for several
vague enterprises. He pushed open the frosted glass door to the
outer office, a dim, hollow little room with a good deal of dust in
the corners, and applied to a simultaneously sharp-looking and
bored-looking man at the desk, in the quietly tense voice that was
all anyone in Maurice Vernon’s employ would ever know of Marshall
Kendrick.

The man gave him a look—seemingly trying to
read something in his face—and then shook his head. He was likely
not accustomed to hire people off the street, whose fitness for
potentially shady work he had no way of gauging at first glance.
The tacitly underhand nature of the place was evident in the very
bareness of the office, and had Marshall found himself there at any
other time, he would have been the first to back out. But the
memory of the peaked, big-eyed little faces and spindly arms and
legs at home rose up before him, and drove him to desperation.

“I want to see the manager,” he said.

The man at the desk looked up with a
half-scornful expression. “What?”

“The manager of the Lost Lake House. Let me
talk to him.”

“No. Come on, kid, beat it. I told you
there’s nothing doing.”

“You can let me talk to him for just a
minute.”

“He’s busy. Beat it, will you?”

“I’m going to see him first,” said Marshall
through his teeth, and made for the door of an inner office behind
the desk. The man flung down his pencil angrily and dragged himself
up out of his chair to try and stop him, but the scuffle only
lasted a few seconds before the office door opened and Bill
Harolday, the manager of the Lake House, appeared in the doorway
frowning.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Wants a job,” said the man from the desk,
disgusted.

Bill Harolday’s glance crossed with his
subordinate’s, and it was evident their reasoning was the same. He
shook his head. “Sorry. Can’t help you.”

He would have turned back into his office,
but this time Marshall would not be turned away. “Mister, I’ve
got
to have a job. They said you were hiring. My father’s
out of work—my mother’s got four other kids to feed. I’ll do any
kind of work; I’ll wash dishes; I’ll clean out trash cans. You said
you wanted help and I’m willing, so why not?”

His voice almost cracked and he caught
himself up short—he could not lose control that far. Bill Harolday
was still shaking his head—”Sorry, kid, but I’ve told you—”

But Maurice Vernon had heard him. He was
there in the inner office and overheard, and he came out with his
ever-present unlit cigar in his hand and looked Marshall over.
“Never mind, Bill,” he said to the manager, and to Marshall,
“What’s your name?”

“Marshall Kendrick.”

“Need a job, do you? How old are you?”

“Almost eighteen.”

Maurice Vernon nodded appraisingly. “Well,
you look sturdy enough,” he said. “Willing to do most any kind of
work?”

The answer checked for only half a second on
Marshall’s lips—for in this office, he sensed it was a question he
might not be prepared to give the correct answer. But he did not
wait long. “Yes sir.”

“All right,” said Vernon, “you’re hired,”
and he turned to the manager and began talking about something
else.

Marshall started work at the Lost Lake House
as a groundskeeper, helping to keep the beaches clean, clip lawns
and shrubberies and clear away the litter left on the terraces and
paths by each night’s revels. When they found he knew something
about boats he was allowed to help with maintenance of the
boathouse at the back of the island and its fleet of half a dozen
nondescript rowboats. And gradually, over time, he was pulled into
the nocturnal operations of the Lost Lake House, which housed not
only the rumored speakeasy, but an active distillery in its
cellars. Marshall, who had fished from the shores of Lost Lake for
years and rowed most of it in a friend’s boat, became useful in the
new method of smuggling the bootleg liquor Maurice Vernon was
putting into practice about that time—taking it out by boat to
rendezvous on the lonely far side of the lake, now that all regular
trips of the island ferry were watched. Vernon had taken a fancy to
him, in his careless way, and generous tips in addition to
Marshall’s regular wages were always forthcoming after a successful
midnight ‘run.’

He was an expert now at muffling oarlocks—at
guiding a boat along in the black shadows of overhanging trees
without even a faint ripple from the dark water—at helping to
transfer cargo in the dark without a word and without missing a
hold. He had been made privy to the secret of the specially built
boathouse with the trap-door in its flooring, the tunnels that led
from there to the Lake House cellars. They regarded him as
trustworthy—a fine compliment, that; he must have given the
impression of being without scruples. Or perhaps Maurice Vernon
sensed something of the stiff obligation that bound him. He would
not have talked so freely of hundred-dollar rewards if he had not
taken it for granted that Marshall was as safe as any one of
them.

And down on the shore of a rough lake in the
gray blustering morning, Marshall worked vengefully—hating his job,
hating himself for the short-sightedness that had gotten him into
it. He dragged up a piece of wet driftwood and flung it into the
wheelbarrow with cold work-scraped hands. The job meant security,
and it also meant living with a festering conscience. Week by week
he was helping to break the law, despite a bitter disgust for the
racket that fattened the purses of profiteers like Vernon and
filled the pockets of the sharp, crooked men under him who brewed
and ran and sold the stuff. And yet it fed his family. His mother
never knew that half the money he gave her came from tips shoved
carelessly into his hand by Maurice Vernon on occasions like
these—she only knew his job paid well. The nighttime absences were
easily explained; even on ordinary nights now the head
groundskeeper and the waiters often wanted him around late, to
stoke fires or carry supplies into the kitchens.

He
earned
it, anyway. If there was
such a thing as profiting honestly from crime, he did that.

Marshall finished his work on the beach, and
took the wheelbarrow to the upper side of the island and dumped it
into the trash bins there—the driftwood went to feed the fires of
the underground distillery. Then he walked back along the shore
toward the ferry, his hands in his pockets and his cap pulled low
over his eyes against the wind. He looked up at the House again,
and there was a touch of some other, lonelier feeling besides
bitterness in the gray eyes beneath the brim of the cap. Sometimes
he thought he hated the thoughtless crowd that danced and laughed
and flirted the nights away on top of it all. Other times he almost
envied their thoughtlessness…envied that they never had to think
about hard things. But that was only when he was very tired.

What did they come there for, he wondered?
He saw the Lost Lake House in daylight; he knew there was nothing
to it but the intoxicated shine of Vernon’s electric lights and
gin. Did they find something there that they really liked, or were
they merely part of the façade, putting on a reckless show for each
other and for the quiet, unseeing wooded shores of the midnight
lake?

From the shadows under the trees at the edge
of the lawns, through the brilliantly-lit windows that poured their
light out on the grass between, he had watched the pageant played
out, the players all alike, no matter how daring and unique they
thought themselves. Only here and there, from time to time, a
wide-eyed neophyte—a tentatively eager schoolgirl, looking at the
dance with eyes that saw fairyland. These ones never lasted
long—they either shied away, and could be counted lucky, or else
they were gradually drawn into the whirl of recklessness and
insincerity until they were indistinguishable from any of the
others.

It was this sight, for reasons Marshall did
not know, that hurt him most. Perhaps because they were like the
girls he might have known once, when they were younger—bending
inky-fingered over a copybook at school, skipping home along the
sidewalks on summer evenings; casting curious, friendly glances at
a boy they did not know—and never would know, for all that was far
behind him now. Like something he might have known, but going,
gone, swept away into the whirl of the Lost Lake House while he
stood outside in the dark, tarnished by his own foolish choice, and
seeing no other future.

“First one gets cut in on by Gerald is a
rotten egg!” cried Sadie Penniman as the quartet of girls scattered
over the dance floor.

The other three found partners almost at
once, and Dorothy stood alone for a moment, her toes together,
looking expectantly from side to side. The band was in the middle
of a jazzy number of the kind that was most fun to dance to, and
after the various scares and hassles she had undergone on her
journey to the Lost Lake House that night, she felt entitled to
some immediate compensation.

First she had made herself late trying to
band her curls with a ribbon the way so many of the other girls
wore it, but at last gave up in exasperation, and the conviction
that it made her look exactly like the kitten she had had as a
child when she tied her doll’s bonnet on its head. Then, sliding
hastily down the trellis, she had snagged a button off her coat and
lost more minutes searching for it in the dark on the ground by the
back porch. When at last she found it she caught it up and ran—and
came within inches of dashing onto the street directly into the
path of a man walking down the sidewalk. Dorothy caught herself
back just in time and flattened herself against an oak tree,
shielded from view by a camellia bush, trying to still her scared
gasps for breath and wondering that the man had not heard her.