Lineage (43 page)

“Earthquake is too strong of a word,” Alan Jarvis, a geophysicist with the USGS, was quoted as saying. “Right now we know that there was some movement deep below the lake’s bed. At this time the data is inconclusive as to whether or not what we are seeing is an undiscovered fault line in the area.” Jarvis went on to say that the area is not currently active and sensors set up within the lake have registered no further vibrations.

But what authorities found after being alerted by several students from UMD was nothing less than astounding.

“The house is completely gone,” said Dennis Johnson, a State Trooper that was one of the first to arrive on the scene after the emergency calls began to stream in. “When I pulled up to the place, there was just a hole in the ground and a few boards floating in the water, nothing else. The entire house had been swallowed by the lake.”

Sources indicate that Metzger was inside his home at the time of the activity with several guests, whose identities have not been disclosed. He and one female that
is
not being named at this time were able to escape before the house collapsed into the waters of
Superior
. At least two people were killed after being trapped within the falling wreckage. No bodies have been recovered. Metzger remains in intensive care from injuries incurred during the escape, and at this time no statements have been made by his representatives.     

Epilogue

“A man’s character is his fate.”

—
Heraclitus

One year later

A gentle but insistent breeze pushed at the browning grass that lined the river’s bank. Several blue jays that hadn’t heeded the nearing fall’s warnings still called out their shrill, pulsing cries across the flowing waters. The winch’s moaning hum overshadowed nature’s accents, along with the sound of the cable attached to it being drawn tight. The steel creaked like an over-tuned guitar string as the two divers who had emerged moments earlier from the muddy water began to pull off their gear on the nearby slope.

All was reflected in the silver lenses of the uniformed man who stood chewing on an unrecognizable toothpick. His brow was pulled nearly below his sunglass frames, and his black baseball hat threw his lean face into shadow.

“Think there’s someone in there, Sheriff?” the young man said as he stepped up to the edge of the riverbank. The deputy’s uniform was rumpled and his hair was an unruly mop that hung lankly over his forehead.

The older man merely shrugged and watched the swirling currents of the deep water where the cable of the tow truck disappeared. The surface closer to the shoreline began to bulge, and then an oblong shape appeared in the cool sunlight of the September afternoon.

It took the sheriff’s aging eyes a moment to discern what he was seeing, but then the red of a taillight and the flicker of chrome became clear.

“Well, I’ll be damned. I guess I didn’t think there’d be a car, but look at that,” the deputy said. The older man walked down to the edge of the river, and after a moment the younger officer shrugged and followed.

Water rushed from the emerging vehicle, and just from a glance, the sheriff could tell it was an early-model Chrysler. None of the paint was visible through the grime and refuse that had collected and eaten into the doors, hood, and trunk of the small car. He searched the rear end for a license plate but could see none, not because of the accumulated grime but because it had been removed.

The winch’s groan stuttered and then fell silent as the tow-truck driver flipped a switch, leaving the valley in a peaceful silence.

“Thank you, Jerry,” the sheriff said as he passed the truck. The driver nodded and opened the door to the cab, and began scribbling on an invoice pad.

The sheriff ran his hand along the seam of the trunk until his fingers met an outcropping. He knelt and rubbed the mud and slime from the area until he could see the letters there, upraised, offering
themselves
for all to see.

“
Caravelle
?
When the fuck did they stop making those? Christ himself drove one, didn’t he?” the younger man crowed as he peered over the sheriff’s shoulder.

“Deputy?”
The sheriff remained kneeling, but his voice snapped like a whip in the autumn air. “Conduct yourself as though this is a crime scene.” He heard the deputy clear his throat, but no other sounds came from behind him. He stared at the letters lined in cheap chrome for another moment, and then walked to the driver’s-side door.

The window was down and years of submersion had remade the interior into an exaggerated version of its original state. The seats had expanded to twice their normal size, and the dashboard’s features were muddled but still recognizable—a stereo knob here, a shifter there, and a rigid steering wheel that refused to relinquish its identity.

The sheriff’s eyes traveled over everything, and settled onto the occupant in the driver’s seat.

The skeleton was unmistakably female. Its delicate bones and small teeth were the first things that jumped out to him, which he catalogued and stored away in his mind. The arms and hands rested close to the corpse’s lap, and he could see something dark there—wire. The wrists were wrapped together, and only death and decay had loosened the wire’s former hold. Leaning forward into the car, he confirmed what he already had been thinking. The ankles were also bound.

The sheriff straightened and noticed his deputy sidling closer behind him to get a look.

“Fuck me. We got a murder here, Sheriff,” the younger man said.

The sheriff exhaled and focused on keeping his temper in check. The kid had only been on the job for six months. He’d straighten out. He hoped.

“Uh, Sheriff?
We got company.”

The sheriff turned and looked where the disheveled deputy was pointing.

A man stood on the slight rise that marked the beginnings of nearly sixty acres of field that bordered the winding river. He was tall and had dark hair. He was dressed in loose jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Dark glasses obscured his eyes.

“Hey, crime scene!
Get the fuck out of here!” the deputy yelled, and began to close the distance between himself and the lone man.

“Garrison, stop.”
The deputy turned, a confused look neighboring on stupidity hung on his face. “I’ll handle it,” the sheriff said, and strode past his subordinate toward the figure that hadn’t moved.

As he approached the man, he studied him, waiting for the signs of flight that he half expected. The man didn’t even seem to be looking at him. The dark glasses were trained on the still-dripping car below them.

When he was within speaking distance, the sheriff stopped, his hand resting on the butt of his service weapon. Something familiar surrounded the man, an aura of recognition that he couldn’t place.

“Sir, this is a crime scene. You can’t be here right now.” The sheriff searched the area behind the man for a four-wheeler or vehicle that he might have driven.

The man raised his hand to his face and pulled off his glasses, and looked directly at the sheriff. “Hello, Sheriff Dodd.”

Dodd’s mouth opened and then closed. His hand reached from his weapon to his own sunglasses and pulled them from his face.

“Lance?”

The man nodded and a melancholy smile drew across his lips.

“Holy shit.”
The sheriff stared for a moment longer, and then something locked into place within his mind. He glanced back over his shoulder at the tow truck and the car attached to it. His head drooped forward, and he shook it in disbelief.

Without looking at Lance, he said, “You called it in, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Dodd looked up and saw the grimace that had contorted Lance’s face.

“How?”

He heard the air expel from Lance’s lungs. It sounded sad, like the last breeze before the first snowfall.

Lance lowered his eyes to the ground at his feet. “My father told me. I must have blocked it out, and I only just remembered. He told me what he’d done to her and that she was in the river near the weeping willow.”

Sheriff Dodd turned and saw the ancient tree that sat just up the rise from the riverbed, its low boughs hanging in a mournful show of respect. He shifted his gaze back to the child he had carried from the field beyond in the light of a moon over twenty years before. “I’m sorry.” It was the only thing he could think of to say.

Lance nodded and turned from the river. He scanned the horizon and hunched his shoulders as the breeze returned, whispering of the fall that had only just begun. “Thank you. I wanted to tell you that. I never got to say it before.” Lance looked across the distance between them, at the aging sheriff. The man was different now, but also very much the same. He still held dignity and
a rightness
that time hadn’t stripped him of.

The sheriff nodded and squinted again at the man before him, not really understanding what he was feeling but knowing enough not to question it. It was as if something tired and worn had finally ended.

Lance turned and walked across the field without another look back. The sheriff heard his receding footsteps breaking the dry chaff of the last crop as he went.

“Sheriff?”

Dodd looked down to where Garrison waited, his hands twitching nervously at his sides. He pulled his hat down closer to his head and stepped down the slope of the hill, toward the awaiting deputy and divers, who had stored their gear away. There was work to be done and no one else to do it.

The door of the Land Rover snapped shut, locking out the coolness of the day. Lance sighed and looked down at his hands, which sat on his thighs. The plastic and titanium prosthetic pieces clicked as he flexed and moved the fingers that he could still feel but were no longer there.

“You okay?”

He looked to his right and smiled at the imploring look on Mary’s face. “Never been better,” he said.

The concerned creases in her brow remained until he leaned across the center console and kissed her on the mouth. When he sat back in his seat, her expression relaxed and he saw the tension that had been building prior to the trip begin to dissipate like mist in a morning sun.

“Are you feeling okay?” he asked.

She tilted her head and nodded, rubbing her growing belly for a moment before reaching out to hold his hand.
“Just fine.
I’m just worried that the nursery won’t be done in time.”

Lance looked into her teasing green eyes and sighed. Mary laughed and squeezed his hand.

“I’ll finish painting soon. We have another four months, you know,” Lance said, turning the key in the ignition.

“I know, and I’m not pressuring you, although I don’t know why you keep insisting on pink when we don’t know what it is yet.”

Lance smiled and looked out of the driver’s window at the shorn field beside the SUV. Mary had objected over and over again when he’d first brought the paint and stuffed
animals
home from the store, which were definitely girlish in nature. He told her he’d repaint and return the animals if he was wrong, but he just had a hunch. She had rolled her eyes at him and left him to the plastering of bunnies and pink ducks on the walls of the room they had designated as “baby’s space” in the quaint house they’d purchased only months before.

He had withheld the image in his mind from her, unlike what had transferred between Anthony’s ghost and himself when the specter had touched him the second time in the room while he’d pretended to be bolted to the chair. Anthony had shown him exactly what he’d done to his wife the night he’d caught them trying to escape. It had flashed in fast-forward through Lance’s brain, and he’d screamed internally as he watched the river flow around the car’s windows as it sunk beneath the surface, his mother’s unconscious face vanishing below the ebb of water.

But the memory that drove him to buy the female articles for the room he wasn’t ready to share yet, although it still danced across the field of his mind daily, his vision of the little girl in a pink sundress he had seen staring out of the window of the car, her dark hair matching Mary’s almost exactly. And he bet if she had turned to look at him, her eyes would have been green.

He smiled again and saw Mary examining his face, looking for an answer. No, he wasn’t ready to tell her what their daughter would look like yet. For right now, he’d keep it to himself.

“How far are you from being done?” Mary asked as he pulled the Land Rover onto the paved road and began to accelerate from the field behind them, a house he refused to look at dotting the background.

“Maybe another week,” he said, raising his eyebrows and smiling with one side of his mouth.

“I’m so sorry you had to start the book over from scratch.”

“It’s okay. This version is even better than the first one I wrote, as it should be.”

The car was silent for a while, with only the humming of the tires beneath them and the whistle of the air outside.

“Is it a good ending?” she asked, reaching out to hold his hand again.

He squeezed her fingers in his palm where he could still feel her warmth, and nodded. “Better than I ever imagined.”

THE END