Lake Thirteen (12 page)

I didn’t say anything, just plopped down into an easy chair. Logan nodded as he plopped down on the couch next to her. “Any doubts I may have had before, I don’t have anymore.” He ran his hand through his hair. “It was pretty fucking freaky, to be honest. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life.”

“Are you okay?” Rachel asked me with a slight shiver. “But I’m not sorry I wasn’t with you guys.” She shivered again, hugging herself. “I suppose all three of you could just be fucking with us, but”—she grinned—“you aren’t smart enough to come up with something this elaborate.”

“I’m not sure whether to be flattered or insulted,” Logan replied, crossing his eyes as he scratched his head.

“Flattered, of course,” Rachel batted her eyes at him with a ridiculous smile on her face. “I would never say anything insulting to you.”

He rolled his eyes. “So what did you girls find out in town?”

“So glad you asked—you guys aren’t going to believe this.” Teresa opened her shoulder bag and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Like Miss Tyler said yesterday, poor Albert’s murder was one of the biggest things to happen in North Hollow—at least up to that point.” She made a face. “Anyone who thinks the tabloids are bad today—they got nothing on the way real newspapers were back then. The
North Hollow Times
pretty much tried and convicted Robert Shelby the minute they found Albert’s body.” She glanced over at Rachel, who gave her a slight nod. She passed us each a photocopy without a word.

When I looked down at it, my blood ran cold.

It was a photograph, grainy and that same sepia tone as the ones at the historical society. It looked like—

Me.

And the caption underneath read “Pervert Robert Shelby: Wanted for the Murder of Albert Tyler.”

I swallowed.
“Pervert?”

“The paper wouldn’t say exactly what they meant by that, but apparently Shelby had been run out of Boston for ‘perversions’—sometimes they called it ‘crimes against nature’—they found that out after the murder, of course.” Teresa swallowed. “The resemblance is uncanny, isn’t it? And I think we can be pretty sure what they meant by perversions and crimes against nature, can’t we?”

My head was spinning. I couldn’t take my eyes off the sepia-toned image.

Like the one of Albert, it looked enough like me for the two of us to be twins. Yes, the hair was different, and there was a scar on his cheek, but the resemblance…if Albert and Robert stood next to each other, and I with Marc…

“So Albert looked like your boyfriend, and Robert looked like you,” Carson said in the silence. “I guess that kind of explains why Albert’s ghost felt compelled to try to communicate with you.”

“I’m not sure it’s Albert, after all,” I said slowly, unable to take my eyes away from the picture. “We’ve thought so, from the very beginning, because this all started at Albert’s grave, and we hear the voice calling Bertie. But what if it’s
Robert’s
ghost?”

No one said anything, and when I looked up, they were all staring at me.

“I
see
Albert,” I went on, my voice quiet and low. “If I was getting flashes of memory from Albert, I wouldn’t see
him, would I? I have no proof, of course, other than this”—I tapped the picture with my index finger—“but come on. Robert looks like me, Albert looks like
Marc
. Marc and I—we’re a couple. According to this, Robert was gay—and the
feelings
I have—whenever I see Albert I feel the same way I do when I see Marc. I think Robert was in love with Albert—”

“And he killed him?” Teresa’s voice was hushed. “Oh my God, that’s so horrible.”

“You guys said the time I passed out I kept saying
not dead, not dead, not dead
,”
I went on, not willing to stop to think any more about it. I wanted to say it, get it out there. If I was wrong, so be it, but I knew, somehow I knew deep inside I wasn’t. “Maybe it was an accident. Maybe Robert killed him and it was an accident.”

“Not dead,” Carson said, stroking his chin. “Something someone might say if they killed someone by accident—you’re not dead, not dead, you can’t be dead, no you can’t be dead—yeah, that makes sort of sense.”

“And maybe Albert is calling him,” I finished. “Sure, the most common nickname for Robert is Rob or Bob or Bobby—but it could also be Bertie. Ro-
bert
.”

“Wow.” Rachel got up. “I don’t even know what to say to that, Scotty. It makes sense…but…” She walked over to the computer and sat down. She started typing, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “Teresa and I also came up with a theory. You know, it’s possible we might be completely off-base about all of this, and have been from the very start,” she said, biting her lower lip. “Did it ever occur to you that this might be past-life experiences instead of ghosts?”

Everyone turned to stare at her.

She turned sideways in the chair so she could face us all. “Outside of that first night in the cemetery, what has happened that could be explained as a haunting? I mean, really. Doesn’t it make more sense that Scotty is having flashes of a past life, lived up here?” She smiled triumphantly at us. “And even the cemetery—couldn’t what Scotty experienced in there be explained away as a natural occurrence when the wall in his mind between this life and the past life was breached?”

For once, Carson was at a loss for words. His mouth opened and closed a few times, but no sound came out.

Rachel’s smile was rather self-satisfied. “You’re not the only one in this family with a brain.” She turned back to the computer and clicked a few keys. The printer hummed and started spitting out pages.

I kept staring at the picture in my hands. It might have been a picture of me taken at one of those photo studios they always have in amusement parks, where you can dress in period costumes and they take your picture, processing it so it looks like it was taken in that time. It was possible, I supposed, that it was all taking place in my head.

It was Logan who finally broke the silence by saying, “That doesn’t explain what happened to us in the woods this morning.”

Carson blew out his breath. “Yes, that is very true.” He looked and sounded relieved that Rachel was wrong.

“Collective hallucinations?” Rachel asked, frowning. She let out a sigh.

“No, I don’t think so,” Logan said with a shudder. “If that was a hallucination—no way, man. No offense, girls, it’s a great theory, and I’d be more likely to believe that than the ghost story—if I hadn’t experienced it myself. And Scotty’s mom heard the voice, didn’t she? There’s no way that was a collective hallucination.” He frowned.

They kept talking, but I tuned them out. It wasn’t an intellectual exercise for me anymore. I
knew.
They’d been in love, I thought as I stared at the picture that could have been a sepia mirror. In love, and a terrible tragedy had happened.

That was the sadness I kept feeling.

But still—even my own theory had an enormous hole in it.

Robert Shelby had run away. He hadn’t died here, the way Albert had. So there was no reason for him to be haunting the mountainside.

But how was I seeing Albert? How was that possible?

I reached for the prints of microfiche the girls had made of the newspapers at the library. I looked over the pages, my heart aching with each horrible article I read about the search for Robert Shelby. It was all the same thing, really—sensationalist reporting of the shocking murder of poor young Albert Tyler. Clearly, the angle the editor of the paper had decided to go for was that Albert was practically a saint in his absolute perfection. Everyone who knew him loved him and was certain he was destined for a great future, his loss was a loss to not just his friends and family but the world and society, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure the Tylers had been thrilled to read such laudatory articles about their youngest son, but I found it hard to believe that anyone was so perfect. I certainly wasn’t, and neither was anyone I knew.

And there was nothing too vile for the reporters to say about Robert Shelby, who was unable to defend himself. They never mentioned what the perversions or what the crimes against nature were that got him run out of Boston—and even mentioned several times that they couldn’t “because it was a family paper”—but they made it very clear that the Bostonians should have killed him rather than settling for chasing him away, leaving him alive to spread his sick perversions to another community. An editorial even said, “If only the good people of Boston had done their proper duty by their fellow citizens, young Albert’s light would not have been extinguished so young.”

It was pretty clear to me the girls had been right about what exactly the perversion was—he was gay in a time when homosexuality was a mental disorder as well as a crime. He had been lucky to get out of Boston alive—there was a quote from someone high up in the Boston police department:
I felt as though we should have taken more action against Mr. Shelby besides ordering him to leave town, as he was clearly unrepentant, almost defiant, about his crimes here in Boston. I was certain he was going to infect another community somewhere, but it wasn’t my decision to make, and he left Boston in the middle of the night to escape any further judgment against him, and I reckoned it was up to God to punish him. My heart breaks for that poor family.

And I knew the next gay man in Boston who had run afoul of the police didn’t escape with his life—not after this happened.

I felt sick to my stomach.

Thank God times have changed—things still need to get better but at least this kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.

“Robert didn’t kill Albert,” I said. “I just know it.”

“That could explain why both of them are still here, on this plane, unable to cross over to the other side,” Carson replied. “Albert needs for the truth to come out, and Robert needs to have his name cleared.” He frowned. “But Robert got away, didn’t he? If they’d have lynched him, they would have been really proud of killing a monster—they wouldn’t have hidden it, would they?”

“Maybe what we felt in the woods today—maybe that was the real killer,” Logan suggested. He sat on the overstuffed arm of my chair and slapped my thigh with his hand. “But I don’t understand why this is all just happening now, and it hasn’t before.” He flushed a bit. “I asked Annie”—he gave me a sidelong glance, as though to say
don’t say a word about what you saw
—“and she had no idea, said there’s never been any reports of ghosts or anything.” He blushed even darker. “She kind of thought I was a little crazy for even bringing it up, so I had to change the subject pretty fast.”

“Did you sacrifice your chance of getting into her pants?” Rachel spun around in the chair.

Logan made a face at her, and it occurred to me for the first time that I wasn’t the only person in our group that found him attractive.

Before he could say anything to her, Carson said, “It is curious, isn’t it?” He turned to me and smiled. “It’s like
your
presence here is what triggered it all, Scotty.”

“And the trip to the cemetery,” Rachel added. “If we hadn’t gone to the cemetery, maybe none of this would have happened.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Carson ignored the snarkiness in her voice and treated her question seriously. “I guess we’ll never know—but I do think the restless spirit would have connected with Scotty anyway. Going to the cemetery just made it easier.” He cleared his throat. “I’m thinking we might need to try to communicate directly with Albert’s spirit.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” This from Teresa, looking up from the papers she was reading.

“A séance.”

“Don’t we need a medium for that?” Rachel replied. She smirked at him. “I may not have interned at the show, but I do watch it.”

“No,” I said slowly. “We don’t need one. We can do it ourselves.” I took a deep breath. “I vote we do it tonight.”

For the rest of the day, tension seemed to just build with every passing hour.

I didn’t think the day would ever end.

Minutes crept by, and constantly checking my watch or any clock in the nearby vicinity didn’t help matters. I’d never known time to move so slowly, and with each tick of a passing second my nerves got worse. I kept swinging emotionally from wanting to get it all over with and being afraid we were messing with things we shouldn’t be messing with.

It’s not like Carson was an expert on the supernatural by any means. Who knew what could happen? So many things could go wrong…and I had a strong sense that something bad
was
going to happen.

It was like sitting in the dentist’s outer office and hearing the drill making that horrible buzzing sound, and knowing soon enough I’d be the one in the chair with my head tilted back and the drill in my mouth, the smell of burning teeth nauseating me as the drill dug rot out.

My mom always said that worrying was like borrowing trouble.

But I could talk myself down from the panic. The anticipation of the drill was, after all, much worse than the actual experience. And even though I knew there was something that wanted to harm me, I somehow knew that it wasn’t Robert or Albert or whichever one of them it was who’d been invading my mind. They were benign, they wanted to help save me from whatever dark force it was out there in the woods.

The dark force was what was to be feared. And I had to believe it couldn’t really hurt me, despite the evil intent I’d felt from it in the woods.

It has to be the killer, the one who really killed Albert¸
I reassured myself.
That’s why Albert can’t rest—he knows Robert was innocent.

These thoughts slowed my heart rate down and helped the fear to pass, which was better, but the calm soon turned again to impatience.

Going to the garnet mine now seemed like a good idea—I figured it was a distraction, and I certainly could use something to take my mind off what was going to happen that night. The other option was to hang around the lodge by myself—which certainly would have been much, much worse.

The garnet mine probably
would
have been interesting on any other day or any other vacation, but as we walked through and the guide lectured us on the finer points of garnet mining and its history in the region, my mind just kept wandering. I tried to get interested in what she was telling us—we were the only people in the group—but she just didn’t hold my attention. I kept thinking about Marc. Once we’d been led into the mine I wanted to distract myself from my fears and worries, and what better way to do that than thinking about my boyfriend? But it actually had the opposite effect—my mind seemed to transfer my worries about tonight into worries about Marc.

And it didn’t take long for the worry to turn into fear.

His dad is so crazy, maybe there’s another level of meaning to his texts and maybe—maybe there’s a reason why his dad took their phones. Maybe he’s finally completely lost it. Maybe they’re in danger. Maybe that’s what this whole thing is about—maybe Albert is trying to warn me that Marc’s in danger, that he’s going to be killed…

“Stop that, stop freaking yourself out,” I told myself sternly.

I gave my attention back to the tour guide. I suppose it was interesting—Teresa and Rachel certainly looked fascinated, like they were hanging on the guide’s every word—but I just couldn’t make myself care. I hadn’t dressed warmly enough, either. It was chilly inside the mine, and I couldn’t wait for us to get out of there. But of course, after the tour was finished, we had to go to the gift shop, where the girls picked out garnet jewelry for themselves, even though they could never seem to make up their minds on any particular piece. Our mothers were no better, and finally, in disgust, I went back outside.

The gift shop was on another plateau of the mountain, with a huge lawn of perfectly trimmed and edged grass and flowerbeds. At the far end of the lawn, the forest began again, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. After the cool of the inside of the mine and the air conditioning in the gift shop, it felt warm outside, so I sat down in the grass next to the driveway where the cars were parked and pulled out my phone—there was signal here, hooray—and scrolled through my e-mails. I started writing out texts to Marc maybe three or four times, but every time deleted them without hitting send. Carson and Logan wandered across the lawn to the fence. I saw them talking animatedly, but when they wandered back and I asked them about it they both claimed it was nothing.

I didn’t believe them, and that just made me even more uneasy than I already was.

By the time the women were through in the gift shop, it was past six. Rather than going back to the lodge for dinner we went to a restaurant on the state highway. With all eleven of us clustered around an enormous table, talking and joking and laughing, my unease continued to grow—especially as the light began to fade from the sky outside the restaurant’s windows.

It’s not too late to change your mind you don’t have to do this.

But I didn’t really believe that was true.

There was a certain inevitability about the séance, about trying to reach Albert, I couldn’t deny—whether I wanted to or not.

Just because you don’t want to try to reach Albert doesn’t mean he won’t try to reach you. And you can’t control that. You’ve never had any control. The séance, at least, is trying to take some control over these happenings.

I got a text from Marc right after the entrées arrived. I excused myself from the table—getting an odd look from Carson when I did—and slipped away to answer it while everyone dug into their dinner. I didn’t want my lobster mac-and-cheese to get cold, and I could have answered the text at the table, but I just wanted some privacy with Marc—even if it was really just a stupid text message.

His text simply said,
Miss you and wish you were back already. Will Sunday ever come?

Tears filled my eyes as I read it again. I walked around to the back of the restaurant and sat down, and let the tears come. I allowed myself to just sob—and as I cried the tension and stress of the day seemed to ease up a bit. I wiped at my eyes and got control of myself. I’d needed to release some of the pressure, and now I felt a lot better, more in control of myself.

The sun was getting low in the west—it was now after eight—and I typed out quickly,
Is everything okay with you?
Within a minute I got a response,
Dad’s been rough but other than that okay. Just wish you were here.

I couldn’t shake the sense that something was terribly wrong back home, but I wrote it off as nerves. I was all keyed up and needed to get a grip.

But as it drew closer, I was becoming more and more worried about the séance.

I’d agreed to do it because I wanted the whole thing to be over and hoped that communicating directly with whatever spirit was haunting me might finally do the trick. Maybe things had been hard because I’d blocked myself, resisted out of fear, I don’t know. At the time, it seemed like the right way to go to get it over and done with, so maybe I could enjoy the rest of my vacation—so we all could, really. And the parents were starting to suspect something was going on with us. My mother had cornered me outside the garnet mine gift shop and quizzed me thoroughly, but I’d managed to fend off most of her questions and satisfy her. I’d noticed Nancy Stark cornered Logan in the mine, and they’d had a quickly whispered conversation—likewise Lynda Wolfe with Rachel.

But we hadn’t had a chance to compare notes with each other.

I went back inside and slid back into my seat, giving everyone a brittle smile. My lobster mac-and-cheese was still steaming.

“Everything okay?” Logan asked as I picked up my spoon.

I smiled and nodded. The table had fallen silent when I came back, but as soon as I sat down everyone started talking again. As I ate, I couldn’t help watching as the night sky grew darker and darker outside the windows. “Got somewhere to be, son?” my dad asked with a big grin on his face as I checked my watch again.

I smiled back at him. “No, Dad, I—”

Carson cut me off quickly. “Uncle Hank, we were thinking about going for a walk later, down by the lake.” He gave me a weird look that was clearly meant as a warning for me to keep my mouth shut.

Because
of course
I was going to tell my father and all the other adults in our group that we were planning on having a séance and contacting a spirit.

I just shook my head at him.

But finally, dinner was over and the check paid and we were all heading back up the mountain road in our respective cars. I didn’t hear from Marc again—I didn’t expect to, frankly—and it seemed to take another eternity before the parents were back in the lodge’s bar area with a couple of bottles of wine and the Trivial Pursuit game.

“You kids be careful,” Jerry Stark yelled after us as we walked out of the lodge. “No going in the water.”

“Like we would,” Rachel muttered.

“So, where are we going to do this?” I asked. My nerves were jittery, and I could hear my voice shaking just a little bit. “I thought we were going to do it in the game room.”

Carson shook his head and pulled a flashlight out of the backpack he’d been carrying around all day. He turned it on and pointed it at the woods. “I think it would work better down at the ruins,” he said, not looking at me.

The ruins?

My heart sank and my stomach knotted. “I don’t know—”

“It makes sense,” Rachel interrupted me softly. She took my hand. “We talked about it this afternoon—we’re all scared, too, Scotty, but it makes the most sense. The ruins—that seems to be the heart of where this is all coming from. And if we’re all together, we should be safe, right?”

“You don’t know that,” I replied, but somehow, I sensed she was right. I’d known, somehow, all along, that the cabin was the key.

Carson led us into the forest single file. The wind was moving through the trees above our heads, branches swaying gently as we walked down the path. I felt oddly calm. The night was silent other than the whispering breeze. I allowed my mind to wander, not wanting to think about what might lie ahead for me and the others. There was a little part of me that kept thinking we were making a huge mistake, we were playing with powers far beyond our comprehension. I almost felt like I was making my last walk, that the path was actually leading me to a public execution.

Grim thoughts.

When we reached the cabin, Carson handed the flashlight over to Logan and pulled a big woolen blanket out of his backpack, which he spread on the ground. We all took seats in a circle, and he then lit an enormous candle, which he set in the middle. We joined hands.

Carson began talking in a low voice. “Tonight, we come seeking the spirit who has haunted these woods, with light from the world of the living to the world of the spirit. We mean you no harm—we merely want to get some answers from you…”

He kept talking, and even with my eyes closed, I could tell things were changing. The wind was picking up, and I could feel it blowing my hair around. Yet the candle continued to burn as Carson’s voice got louder.

And I felt it coming, whatever it was, I knew it—I could feel it as the hairs on my arm and the back of my neck stood up. I wanted to scream, to get up and run as far as I could, not stop running until I got to the airport in Albany, get on a plane and just keep moving because anything would be better than this, this horrible sense of something awful about to happen, but I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t control it, I was completely helpless…

And it started.

Whatever or whomever it was, it started with a prickling feeling at the back of my head, like it was probing my brain, trying to find a way inside. I was terrified, positively terrified, but there was nothing I could do, I’d agreed to this and had to see it through. So I took a deep breath and let go of myself.

And it was like it poured into me, and I could sense its joy, its relief, at finally finding a vessel. Rachel’s hand on my right tightened, squeezing really hard, and I heard someone gasp, but it wasn’t something I felt like I needed to focus on as I was being filled up with whatever—

—
Albert, it is I, Albert—

—
and I opened my eyes.

I heard Carson asking something but his voice sounded so far away, like we were on a phone call with a really bad connection. I could see him, too, his face shadowed in the flickering candlelight, and I heard myself answering but it wasn’t my voice. But I didn’t feel afraid because somehow, somehow I felt reassured because I knew Albert didn’t want to hurt me, he wanted to help me and he wanted us to help him somehow but I didn’t know how—

—and the dark began to fade as the clearing began to fill with light again, and I could see the trees again, and it was the same as it was all those years ago.

When the tragedy happened.

Shhhh,
Albert whispered inside of my brain,
watch and listen. You know it’s important. You understand, don’t you?

And I saw it all, like I was there.

But I
was
there, in a way. It was warm, spring, with just a slight hint of chill in the air. I could hear the sound of trickling water. The rose blooms were ready to open on the bushes planted just the year before, when the cabin had been finished and Robert, sweet Robert, had moved in.

And Robert was there, lowering the bucket into the well. His hair—so much like mine, thick and curly and black, hanging down to his shoulders but pulled back and tied with a piece of fabric to keep it out of his face. His broad shoulders stretching the fabric of his shirt, which was damp with sweat under the arms and in the center of the back. He was also barefoot, and he took a drink of the cool, clean water and sighed in pleasure.

“Robert!”

I turned and could see him, Albert, coming down the path, the look of concern on his face, as he brushed his reddish-gold hair out of his own eyes. He was hurrying, almost running, and he was slightly out of breath.