The Reservoir (10 page)

“Dude, what’s wrong?” Daniel asked, tipping his head to look into the kid’s face.  “Why are you crying?  We haven’t called the cops yet.”

Zack moved closer to the boy.  “Look at me.”

The kid shook his head from side to side.  His chin brushed his chest.  He squeezed his eyes shut and refused to look up.

“Kid, talk to me,” Zack said.

No response.

Zack glanced at Holly and nodded.  She took a step toward the boy and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.  “Please talk to us.  We just want to understand.  Why did you break into that shed?”

“I already told you!” he cried, but he did lift his head, now meeting her gaze full one—his eyes blazing.  Holly didn’t look away from him, nor did he break eye contact.  Gradually, the boy’s eyes softened.  “You remind me of my sister,” he said wistfully.

Holly smiled.  “Do I?”

He nodded.  “Your hair is the same color.  I like your hair.”

“Thank you.”  She smiled.  “Do you live around here?”

He shook his head.  “We only come up for a few weeks during the summer.  Not my sister … anymore.  Just … us.  My mom and dad and me.”

“But not your sister?”

He shook his head. 

“Why doesn’t your sister come?” Holly asked mildly.

“Because she’s already here,” the boy said matter-of-factly.

“So she lives up here?” Holly said confusedly.

He shook his head, watching her with earnest eyes.  “Naw, she’s in the lake.”

Holly felt shivers travel from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.  They came in waves, leaving her cold and frightened.  The boy had said his sister was in the lake.  Could it be the girl they saw was … his sister?

Zack had a firm hold of the boy’s arm and was pulling him along to the cabin.

“I’m going to scream,” he threatened.  “You can’t take me in there.  It’s kidnapping.”

Holly hurried to catch up to them as they approached the back porch.  “Nobody’s kidnapping anybody.  We just want to talk to you,” she assured him.  “What you said before…”  She let the words hang in the air.

The boy pulled to a stop, and when Zack continued walking, the kid launched forward, and would have taken a face plant had Zack not kept him upright. 

“Yeah, yeah,” the boy murmured, “My sister’s in the lake…  I know.  I sound like a loon.  Don’t worry, you’re not the first person to think I’m nuts.  Everybody does.”

“I don’t think you’re nuts,” Holly told him, while Daniel strode to him and thumped the kid on the back, in what was meant to be a commiserating gesture.

“I feel your pain,” Daniel said.

The kid gave him a bewildered look.  “Whatever.”

“Really,” Holly assured him.  “We want to talk to you.  We want to hear all about your sister.”

“Why?”

Holly cast glances at her friends, who stood in a semi-circle.  The boy’s eyes widened as understanding dawned. 

“You’ve seen her!” he cried.  “You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”

“Let’s talk in the cabin,” Holly said, and the boy stopped struggling against Zack’s hold and went inside willingly. 

Zack released his arm and the boy followed the group into the kitchen, where Zack promptly took a single-serving bottle of orange juice from the fridge and passed it to him.  He nodded his thanks and took the chair Daniel indicated.

“Have you had breakfast?” Niqui asked.  “We have cereal, or I could cook you bacon and eggs.”

He shook his head.  “No thanks.  You don’t need to go to the trouble.”

“We have donuts,” Kendall offered.

“Okay.  I could eat a donut.”

Kendall pulled a donut out of a box on the pantry shelf and gave it to the boy, along with a napkin.  Everyone then crowded around the dinette table.

“First,” Zack said, “what’s your name?”

“Thomas Cooke.”

Zack extended his hand.  “Good to meet you, Thomas.  I’m Zack.”  He proceeded to introduce the others.  “Okay, Thomas, again from the top.  Why did you break into the shed?”

Holly glanced at Zack with surprise.  She would have asked him about his sister, and the boy’s assertion that she was in the lake.  But she decided not to interrupt.

The boy took a big swig of orange juice and then began talking.  “To tell you the whole story, I have to go back a couple years…”

Zack nodded.  “That’s fine.”

The boy bit into his donut, and then glanced off toward the window, chewing.  He was lost to his thoughts, but came back to the present when Zack tapped the table top with his knuckles.

The boy smiled sheepishly.  “I almost don’t want to talk about it,” he said with a tremulous laugh.  “Every time I try to talk about … it—to my family, I end up seeing a head shrinker.”

“Nobody’s going to shrink your head,” Daniel assured him with a nervous chuckle.

Holly glanced her friend’s way, realizing Daniel probably did feel a kinship with this boy.  Like Daniel, had this boy believed himself to be crazy?

With a deep sigh, the boy spoke, “I’ve been coming up here with my family every summer for as long as I can remember.  Two summers ago, when my sister graduated from high school, she didn’t want to come here with us.”  Thomas paused and swallowed.  “She had made plans with her friends to drive to California, but my parents wouldn’t let her go.”

“But she was eighteen,” Niqui said.

Thomas shook his head.  “No, she was seventeen.  Her birthday is … er … was August 31st.”

Zack nodded.  “Okay, so your parents nixed the trip and made her come here instead.”

“Yes.  She wasn’t happy at all.”

“She didn’t like it up here?” Holly asked.

“Oh, no, I mean, yes, she loved it up here.  She loves … er … loved the water.  She was … is like a fish.  I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who loved … loves the water like she did … er … does.”

He shook his head in frustration.  “I don’t know how to refer to her anymore—loved, loves, did, does, was, is…”  He ran a hand through his hair and his eyes teared up.  “How do you refer to a ghost?  I mean, she’s not alive, but, she’s still sorta here… in the lake, I mean.”

Holly’s goose bumps returned with a vengeance, and when Kendall scooted closer to Daniel, and Niqui moved closer to her, grabbing a hold of her hand, she knew her friends were as apprehensive as she was at the moment.

 “Okay, listen, you just told us again that she’s in the lake….”  Zack glanced at Holly, his eyes registering his confusion, before he turned back to Thomas. 

“She is in the lake,” Thomas said matter-of-factly.  He glanced around the faces around the table.  “You’ve seen her.  Don’t try to deny it.”

“Daniel, Zack, and I have seen her,” Holly told him.

Thomas leapt from his chair and fist-pumped the air.  “I’m not crazy!”

“You’re not crazy,” Daniel assured him.

“Assuming it’s true your sister’s in the lake, or, presumably, her ghost haunts the lake, how did she get there, and why does she remain here?” Zack asked.

“Cassie doesn’t
haunt
anything,” Thomas said angrily.  “But I’ll answer the last part first,” he said, sitting down in the chair.  “I think she stays here for a couple reasons.  One—I think she wants to tell me something, and two, like I told you before, she loved the water.  Always has.  But she always loved this reservoir, this country.  She used to say if she could live anywhere in the world, it would be on the shores of this lake.”

Zack nodded.  “It is beautiful up here.”  He paused briefly, thinking, but then met Thomas’s eyes.  “Thomas, what happened to your sister?”

He shrugged.  “We don’t know for sure.  Like I was saying, we came up here two summers ago.  Cassie was upset, because she had made those plans with her friends.  Anyway, our first night here, she got in a fight with my mom.  She was pleading with my mom to let her take that road trip to California.  Mom said, ‘No way.’”

“What happened then?”

“Cassie slammed out of the cabin.  We heard the jet ski motor, and then she took off.  Mom and Dad figured she just needed time to cool off, but they were worried, because it was almost dark.”  He paused for emphasis.  “It’s dangerous on that big, bad reservoir in the dark.”

Holly shivered again and wished she was beside Zack.  His strong arms around her would be welcome at the moment, well … any moment, she mused.

“And then?” Zack encouraged Thomas to keep talking.

“She was gone a long time.  Mom especially was scared, because it’s so dark out there at night, and there are always logs floating on the top…”  He sighed.  “Anyway, Cassie didn’t come back.  Dad tried to take our boat out to look for her, but he turned back because he couldn’t see anything.”

“What happened then?” Daniel asked.

“Dad has a friend who works at the Sheriff’s Office.  He called him and the guy told us to stay put, that they’d send a deputy out.  Dad told the guy what happened, and he called out the Marine Patrol.”  Thomas glanced off toward some unseen spot on the wall, and when he refocused, his voice broke.  “They couldn’t find her.”

“What did they do then?” Holly asked softly, her heart tugging for this little boy who had lost his sister.

He shrugged.  “They looked for her all night, shining search lights and calling to her.  She never answered,” he said tremulously.  “By morning, they called out Search and Rescue.”

“But they didn’t find her either?” Zack asked.

Thomas shook his head.  “No.  They found our jet ski at the end of the Siouxon, propped up against that big log that juts out across it.  You know—the one almost to the very end.”

Holly nodded.  “I was just there the other day,” she said, and then shivered again.

“But there was no sign of Cassie?” Daniel inquired.

“No.”

“Did Search and Rescue keep looking?”

“For awhile,” Daniel told him.  “But as soon as the cops found out that Cassie and Mom had fought about that California trip, they decided she had run away with her friends.”

Zack shook his head confusedly.  “Wait, you mean, they found her jet ski propped against a log, but not her, and thought she’d run away with her friends.  I’m confused.  How would that be possible?  Doesn’t that channel under the bridge, uh, the Siouxon, end in a waterfall?”

“There’s a trailhead just above it,” Holly explained.  “They probably thought she’d made arrangements to hike the trail to the road and meet up with her friends there.”

Thomas nodded.  “The problem with their stupid theory was that Cassie would never have done anything like that.”

“But she was upset,” Niqui pointed out.

“She would have never gone down the Siouxon at night.  She couldn’t have seen well enough to do it.  She loved the water but she wasn’t stupid.”

Zack scrubbed a hand across his jaw and sought Thomas’s gaze.  “Did they talk to her friends?”

“They tried to reach them, but had trouble getting a hold of anyone for days.  They were driving all over California, and didn’t have service a lot of the time.  When we did finally get a hold of them, they told my parents Cassie wasn’t with them, but the cops didn’t believe them.”

“Why not?” Kendall asked.

Thomas shrugged again.  “I don’t know.  They figured she was a runaway, but Cassie wasn’t like that.  Even though she was mad at Mom, she never would have worried her like that.”

“But when Cassie never showed up…” Niqui said, speading her hands wide.

“The days just kept going by and we never heard anything more,” Thomas said.  “And then we left and went home.”  Thomas’s voice was faint and tears began to fall onto his cheeks, but he squared his shoulders and took control of himself again.  “We came back the next summer…”

“I don’t think I would have ever come back,” Niqui said with a shudder.

“Me neither,” Kendall echoed.

Thomas sighed.  “I think Dad came up here a lot of times me and Mom didn’t know about.  I think he hiked the hills above the old logging roads everyday for months.”

“But why come back for a summer ‘vacation’?” Zack asked.

“Because some shrink told my parents I needed to face Cassie’s loss head on, at the place where she went missing.”

“Wait, I’m confused,” Holly said.  “But you hadn’t seen Cassie’s ghost at that point, right?  Wouldn’t that next summer have been your first trip back?”

He nodded.  “I had a hard time with … everything.”

Holly reached a hand toward him and squeezed his arm.  “Of course, you did.  You’re very brave.”

He pushed her hand away.  “I’m not brave.  I’m not brave at all.”  With that declaration, he dropped his head to the table.  It was Zack who patted the boy’s back while he cried.  When he finally rose up, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, his face was defiant.  “When I saw Cassie last summer, in the water—the first time—I really thought I was losing it.  I told Mom and Dad about seeing her, and that’s when they took me to another doctor.  They put me on medication, but it didn’t help, ‘cuz, I’m not crazy.”

“We know you’re not,” Holly said soothingly.

“Wait!” Daniel said suddenly, but leveled his tone. “Thomas, did the authorities look for Cassie’s body in the lake?”

Thomas sniffled.  “They looked around where the jet ski was found, but it’s pretty shallow there.  They did have divers check out the channel, but as far as the rest of the reservoir, it’s just so big…”

Zack sighed.  “I’m sorry for your loss, kid.”

“She’s not lost!” he cried, and aimed a finger toward the lake.  “She’s out there!  She’s probably watching us right now, trying to tell us something.  But I’m too big a wimp to help her—my own sister.  I’m not like her.  I’m not brave.  I hate the water!”

“I want to give Thomas a minute to calm down,” Zack told Holly.  The couple had walked out of the kitchen and onto the back porch.  “The poor kid’s really upset.”

Holly nodded.  “We never did ask him why he was breaking into the shed.”

“He told us,” Zack said, “to count the chains.”

“But why did he want to count those chains?  Wait a minute!” Holly said.  “You never did tell me what was under those tarps you were looking at.”

“Chains,” Zack said succinctly, “and old boat anchors.”

Holly shrugged.  “Well, we are on a reservoir.  I imagine a lot of people have spare chains and anchors.”