Croaked (2 page)

~II~

CROAKED

“’Scuse me, sir,” I said in my best redneck drawl. “Is this Lost Lake Road?”

The man getting his bills from the mailbox shaped like a large-mouthed bass had the solid, no-nonsense look of a lifelong farmer. He peered into our car, politely touched the brim of his cap to my wife Tanna, then looked at the envelopes in his hand. “Post office seems to think so.”

“I’m Ry Tully, with the
Weakleyville Press
, and I’m looking for--”

He interrupted me. “You Prentiss Tully’s boy?”

“Yessir.”

“Your daddy used to fish my ponds,” he said.

“He fished everybody’s, if he could. Never had a fishing license that I know of.”

“Yeah, you could get away with that back then. Everybody knew everybody.”

“Did he ever fish Salamander Lake?” I asked.

“Well, son, I don’t see how. Don’t nobody know where it was, that’s why they call this Lost Lake Road.”

“There you go,” I said, and smiled patiently while he bark-laughed at his own humor.

At last he continued, “But I do ‘member my daddy saying that, about six miles down past where the road turns to gravel, there’s a curve that used to be a straight stretch of road with a bridge across the lake. Y’all might look there. Course, now, I done lived here for fifty years and ain’t never seen a sign of it. Always figured it was one of them stories, like the Cades Bottom Boogeyman.”

After we started driving again Tanna, who’s blind, said, “So he knew your father?”

“Everybody around here did.”

“You don’t talk about him much.”

“Not much to say. He fished, he drank, a truck drove into his car and killed him and Mom.”

She reached over and took my hand. Eventually she said, “So was that farmer’s head actually flat, or did he just sound that way?”

“Hard to tell under the Bass Masters cap.”

“He reminded me of some of my Dad’s friends, the ones that whispered about me behind my back, which is--”

“--not the way to keep secrets from a blind person,” I interrupted, imitating her tone. “Yeah, I know.”

She grinned sideways at me. Because I tend to think of her as a college professor and expert in her field of parapsychology, always and thoroughly in control, I forget that she was raised in the same rural-south environment where ‘different’ wasn’t cool. She tried very hard not to let that childhood bitterness color her adult perceptions, but sometimes things slipped out.

Half-bare trees arched over the road ahead. Their remaining leaves were deep gold, red and brown, and they rattled as cool autumn breeze shimmied through them. The crisp wind blew stray strands of long red curls around Tanna’s face, and I felt a warm mix of renewed affection and the same old tenderness.

We reached the curve described by the farmer. It made a hairpin “S”-bend in the road, and featured several white, cross-shaped memorial markers. Given the local teenage predilection for tear-assing down rural roads, it’s no wonder this sharp-edged switchback had a death toll. The names on the makeshift crosses reminded me that I’d covered two of those wrecks myself. I just never connected this place with long-vanished Salamander Lake.

I stopped the car. Thick, dry woods lined the road on either side, which was odd enough in such a heavy, agricultural area. I wondered who owned the land, and why it had never been cleared for farming. And while I’m no topographical expert, it sure didn’t look like any body of water could have ever existed here, not even a typical West Tennessee swamp, let alone Salamander Lake. Still, I got out and took some pictures.

“Journalism is so exciting,” Tanna yawned from the car.

“Just keep your shirt on.”

“If I don’t, will it make you go faster?”

“Might make me come faster,” I shot back.

She groaned and shook her head. Then she called suddenly, “Hey, listen to the frogs.” A distant amphibian cacophony sounded through the trees. “Kind of late in the year for them, isn’t it? Are you sure there’s no pond or creek around here?”

I looked at the uneven but obviously above-water terrain. “Pretty sure. Could be tree frogs, I guess. You’re right, though, they’re usually hibernating by this time of year.”

“Can you feel the tension?”

I scowled, which was wasted on her. “I’m hurrying up, okay?”

“No, not between us, between...everything.” She opened the door and stepped carefully onto the road. Gravel crunched beneath her hiking boots. “There’s something really wrong here.”

I looked around at the trees outlined against the bright blue sky. A half-dozen geese honked as they flew over, punctuating the steady, almost subliminal croaking. It was a little odd, but not spooky. “I don’t feel anything.”

“Really? Then why are we whispering?”

She was right; we were. And I had no answer for that.

***

Okay, now I was really hooked. What began as a mere four-paragraph filler feature on some obscure bit of local folklore was on its way to “obsession” status. As editor of the
Weakleyville Press
, I could assign myself any story I wanted, and I’d picked this one because it looked easy, harmless and interesting. You’d think I’d learn. So the next day, I began real hard-core research.

“This map was made in 1889,” Eb Flecker said as he spread it on my office desk. An obsessive local historian, he was an invaluable source of information about Weakleyville and Martin County, but tended to be a bit intolerant of people who didn’t find his tales quite as fascinating as he did. I’d learned to fake enthrallment. “You can see right here, there’s a damn forty-acre lake, and what we call Lost Lake Road goes right across it.”

He was right: the road ran across the lake’s narrowest spot on a levee that, in the middle, turned into a bridge. There was no sign of that vicious curve at all. “Okay, once upon a time there was a lake,” I agreed. “So what happened to it?”

“Look at your damn aerial,” he snapped. I compared the map to the ten-year-old aerial photo from the county zoning board office. The scale was different, but there were enough common reference points for me to recognize it as the same area.  And in the middle of the photo, approximately where the center of the lake was on the map, stretched a very visible raised area, almost a seam. The terrain pulled in toward it, as if someone had cut out the lake and then stitched up the hole.

“And?” I prompted.

“I think Salamander Lake went straight down, Mr. Tully. I think an earthquake opened up a big crack and it just fell into the earth. That’s how Reelfoot Lake got formed, you know; big earthquake on the New Madrid fault, the land dropped and the Mississippi River ran backwards filling it in.”

I didn’t mention the lack of evidence for that theory; Eb was the fourth expert I’d interviewed about this. State geologists and environmental scientists at West Tennessee University all agreed there was no way the lake could’ve just fallen down a hole. None of them offered a better theory, though; I think they hoped the whole question would just go away, back to the paranormal websites where it usually lived alongside Bigfoot, ghosts and Giorgio Tsoukalos’s aliens.

An hour after Eb Flecker departed, light fingers tapped at my office door. “Hey, big guy, give a lonely lady a ride to campus?”

I looked up in surprise. Tanna didn’t usually visit unannounced, since her blindness made getting places a bit difficult; if she’d gotten a ride out of someone, it must be important. She had on her brown leather jacket and a deep navy flannel shirt, which brought out her blue eyes and red hair.

“You better not be lonely,” I said as I kissed her, “or I’m doing it all wrong. What’s up?”

“Did you know there’s a worldwide decline in frog populations?”

I looked wonderfully blank, which of course she missed. “They do say it’s not easy being green.”

“I’m serious. I was talking to Winifred Jones in the biology department about those frogs we heard out by your lost lake. Frogs are just vanishing. Nobody knows why, and it’s happening all over the world. And up in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the frogs are turning up mutated, with extra legs and eyes and things. Environmentally, those are some of the cleanest lakes in the country, so nobody knows why it’s happening. And Winnie has no idea why frogs would be out and about at this time of year when they should be hibernating.”

I took a quick look at the aerial photo again. Nowhere within ten miles of the mystery curve was anything large and wet enough to support the number of frogs we’d heard, but it sure hadn’t sounded like a declining population. “Well, that’s pretty interesting, but I’ve got my own mystery here.”

“I think,” Tanna said with certainty, “there’s a connection.”

“Between a modern worldwide ecological problem and a local geographic mystery from the turn of the last century?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re the parapsychologist. Do you know where the lake went or the frogs came from?”

“I think the frogs are in the lake. And I don’t think the lake went anywhere.”

***

I drove Tanna to the university library, where a graduate student would act as her eyes, helping her search for more information about the frog disappearances. Plenty of material was online, sure, and her laptop had reading software, but a lot of what she wanted remained located primarily in books. We got a study room, and I used the time to look through old issues of my newspaper the library had scanned and archived. The iPad screen let me expand the old, tiny text until it was mostly readable. Tanna's helper, Daniel, read through the analytical bits of frog biology with all the enthusiasm of...well, a college boy reading aloud about frog biology.

Then I found what I sought: a spring 1902 issue of the
Weakleyville Press
with a front page headlined, LOCAL LAKE VANISHES!

Tanna sensed it. "What did you find?" she asked before I could say something.

"Listen to this," I said. “‘During last month’s spate of tremendous thunderstorms, Salamander Lake apparently vanished into the bowels of the earth. No trace of the forty-acre body of water could be found the next week, and repeated investigation has yielded no evidence of its whereabouts. According to government civil engineers, there is no evidence the lake ever existed.

“‘Tornadoes accompanying the thunderstorms destroyed four homes and two businesses in the area that formerly bordered the lake. Local experts suggest that the tornadoes set up landslides that filled in the lake, but this theory met with official disdain.

“‘Among those killed in the tornadoes were retired Colonel Jonas Little, formerly of Virginia; Felix Vantassel, owner of
Salamander Lake Hatcheries
; and noted Spiritualist and author Kelso Mitchell.’”

“Ry’s research sounds like a lot more fun,” Daniel said. “Can I help him for a while?”

“He doesn’t grade your thesis,” she pointed out.

There was a photo of a damaged building included with the story. A huge broken sign read Salamander Lake Hatcheries in foot-high letters; under that, in smaller print, it said something really odd, which I noticed but didn’t mention because it seemed irrelevant.

“Kelso Mitchell,” Tanna repeated. “A Spiritualist.”

“You know about him?”

“Never heard of him, but Spiritualists were thick on the ground back then. Most of them were fakes, like the Fox sisters. But not all.” She turned to Daniel. "Do you know where the parapsychology section is?"

"133," he said with grad student weariness.

"See what you can find about Kelso Mitchell in the books on spiritualism."

"Can't I just look it up online?"

"
I
can do that."

"Yes, ma'am," he sighed wearily. When the door closed behind him, Tanna added, "Or I can have my studly husband do it for me."

"Anytime," I said. "But not until you tell me where the lake went. You said you knew."

She leaned close to me and bit her lip; she’d done almost the same thing, in this very same library, on our first sort-of date. It had the same effect on me now, and probably always would.

“I might be able to do better than
tell
you,” she said softly. “Tomorrow night’s the dark moon. It’s the best time of the month for doing the kind of magic I’m contemplating. If you’re game...I might be able to
show
you where the lake went.”

“Salamander Lake?” I said dubiously. “The one that disappeared over a hundred years ago? The one that no else has ever been able to find even a trace of?”

She nodded, and smiled her sly witch smile.

***

Tanna, in addition to her role as professor of psychology and parapsychology, is also Lady Firefly, a third degree Wiccan priestess. Or, more simply, she's a witch. And because she’s a good witch (in the sense of being good at her job), I stood next to my car on Lost Lake Road a little past midnight and willingly let her blindfold me.

“The last time we did this, we ended up covered with baby oil and you had rope burns on your ankles,” I said as she cinched it tight. Thrown back on my other senses, I realized just how many frogs had to lurk in these woods to generate the soft, omnipresent croaking we heard. It had to be forty degrees, and frogs are cold-blooded; where the hell were they?