Salvage (8 page)

"I need to go up there, ask around. See if she went there looking for her ghost, or..."

…
or if he'd followed her up there
, he finished in his mind, not wanting to speak the words aloud.

The thought occurred that the last time he'd needed to know about Lori's death he'd nearly killed himself,
would have
, if not for an incredibly fortuitous series of events: for the postal employee to accidently put Lori's postcard—of all things—in Sophie's mailbox, and for Sophie to choose the perfect moment to return it.

Sophie's mother chose the moment, he thought. Sophie was just acting out her mother's wishes. Following in the footsteps of a ghost. Or so she claims...

Rationally, he knew the harm of this venture: that by going up to Chapel Lake he would be fully committing to what had begun with Lori's drowning and should have ended tonight in the tub. That, because he'd hallucinated some backwoods Bible-thumper holding him underwater while his unsympathetic flock stood by and watched, he'd already driven halfway down the back roads to Crazy Town. That this little guilt trip of his was irrational, harmful.
Dangerous
. The second step on a gravely obsessive quest that had already nearly taken his life. Continuing any further down the path would lead toward an inevitable downward spiral.

But if Lori's ghost really is a real person… If she'd gone up there to Chapel Lake and
found
him…

Owen printed out the directions, laying them on the kitchen counter by the dish where he kept his keys, pocket change, and dead batteries. After the highway, the country roads to Chapel Lake would undoubtedly punish his car. He'd put in a call to Avery, explain the situation and what he'd planned. She might argue, but eventually she'd admit that having him gone for a week was far better than the guilt trip he'd give her by forcing him to stay.

First things first: he needed a few hours of sleep. He was exhausted, despite the brief lapse of consciousness. He fell into bed, was asleep within minutes, and he slept like the dead.

By some miracle, there were no dreams.

3

The map hadn't lied. After the highway, there were only fields and trees and rolling green hills. Some roads were paved, others macadam. Driving them was like sitting on one of those vibrating chairs in the mall.

The drive itself was peaceful. The farther he got from home, the more he focused on the act of driving itself, the better he began to feel. A few times, he thought of Lori, he pictured her in the roadside shops rifling through moccasins and dreamcatchers and cheap sunglasses, wondering if she had stopped and gotten out at the Peterborough Lift Locks or Burleigh Falls (he hadn't himself, had only marveled at them as he drove by). He imagined her, but didn't see her: there were no more hallucinations of Lori in her damp white gown, mouthing words he couldn't hear. He quickly pushed away thoughts of Lori's tormented spirit and the man who'd walked on water, forcing himself to enjoy the road, the scenery, the smells. The smells of sweet hay, sour dung, chip truck potatoes, spicy conifers, chalky gravel—the perfume of the countryside—blew in through the open windows, filling him with pure good feelings, and vague, fragmented memories of a childhood half-forgotten. His mood seemed to brighten, the fog of depression seeming to lift, though he knew it couldn't last.

Passing through a small town very near his destination, he noticed the gas was low. In his hurry to beat traffic, he'd forgotten to gas up. On the outskirts of Chapel Lake, a service station parking lot shimmered in the late-morning sun. He pulled the car up to the pumps. The sign said FULL SERVE, something Owen thought had disappeared with the advent of debit cards. A bell dinged when his tires rolled over the rubber cable on the blacktop.

"We don't got none a them battery charger doohickeys, if that's what yer waitin on."

The voice startled him. The attendant had approached from behind, dressed in coveralls and scuffed steel-toed shoes, his bushy brown eyebrows raised in mild curiosity. His scruffy hair of the same color rustled like feathers below a trucker's cap with the ESSO logo, although this station appeared to be no-name. There was a garage in back, from where the gas jockey must have come, and a grease-slathered kid who stood eyeballing them from the open doorway, ratchet in hand.

"Oh, it takes gas," Owen said.

The attendant peered down at the gas cap and nodded thoughtfully. "Headin' up the Chapel, are ya?"

"Huh?"

"I said, 'you headin' up Chapel Lake?'" The guy was mid-fifties, maybe younger, his face
leathered and weathered
, as Margaret Saddler had once said while swooning over Clint Eastwood. He wiped his grimy fingers with a dirty rag, which only served to smear oil further into the creases in his skin.

"Oh," Owen said. "Yup. I guess you don't see a lot of city folk out here."

The man raised a bushy eyebrow. "That s'posed to be cute?"

"No." It was. "How did you know I'm headed out there?"

"Saw that Scoobie 'quipment in yer backseat. Figgered you're either headin' up the Chapel, or just come f'm it and got yersef turned around sommers up the road there. Either way, we're glad to have yer b'ness."

The man's country patter made Owen grin. The name stenciled on the lapel of his overalls read, BEAU, and unless he'd been a beautiful baby, Owen thought, it had been one hell of a practical joke to play on a kid.

"Want me to filler up then?"

"That'd be great, Beau."

The attendant looked down at his own lapel, then back at Owen with mild irritation. "It's
Bew
."

Owen suppressed the urge to laugh, and Beau/Bew went about pumping the tank full. The numbers rattled up, the cost per gallon seemingly incongruous with the age of the pump itself, which appeared to be an antique. He looked in the rearview, expecting to see Beau's kid—or whoever's kid he was—still standing there with the ratchet in his hand like some movie maniac. But the kid was hard at work on a lawnmower engine, with a slightly bent, unlit cigarette poised between his lips, and Owen felt a twinge of guilt thinking the kid was potentially a homicidal hillbilly.

Beau whacked the squeegee against the inside of the holder, ridding it of the excess water.

"Don't worry about the windows," Owen said, and the bushy brown caterpillar resting over the old man's left eye rose. "They're only gonna get dirty again once I hit that road to the lake."

Beau shrugged and tossed the squeegee back in the holder with a splash of gray water. He lifted his hat to scratch absently at his sunburned scalp. "Yee-ep," he said, as if they'd been talking all along. "Gonna be a scorcher."

Owen considered whether or not a reply was required, but the pump dinged, sparing him the effort. Beau put his cap back on, pushing it right down to his small ears. He jerked the nozzle out and set it back in its cradle. Then he unfolded a pair of bifocals from his hip pocket—the medical tape wrapped around its bridge looked like the cocoon his caterpillar eyebrows might have formed—shook them open, and used them like opera glasses to squint at the gauge.

"That'd be forty-eight forty-five," he said, dropping the glasses back into his pocket. "Now, will that be cash or Master Charge?"

4

Owen had gleaned a strange fact about Chapel Lake in his research: the village itself had no actual chapel, aside from the one submerged under the lake. The nearest church was fifteen kilometers northeast in a town called—in what was likely an unintentionally ironic biblical reference—Locust. He'd read this on the blog of a salvage diver who seemed to think it was not just peculiar but disturbing, and had speculated that the townspeople still held cabalistic gatherings in the old chapel under the lake. An odd leap of logic, in Owen's opinion, but the idea had conjured up a haunting image of a gloomy underwater church filled with men, women, and children in diving gear, listening to a similarly equipped preacher via transceiver.

The first thing he'd noticed driving into the village of Chapel Lake was its lack of signage. Most other villages would have some kind of flowery town sign with a cutesy or folksy sort of motto, often carved out of wood. Lacking that, a simple green metal road sign with the town's name in tall white letters, the kind that shined when high beams hit it at night. Chapel Lake had neither. What it had instead was a big wooden water tower with CHAPEL LAKE painted on the side the color of dried blood. Much of the paint had flaked off, and as he drove past, Owen realized you couldn't spell Chapel Lake without an H, an E, and two Ls.

The town wasn't exactly thriving, either. Many small towns had become havens for retirees, meaning big business from Baby Boomers, well-to-do folk trying to escape the city, the rat race, the teenagers and immigrants. Chapel Lake, it seemed, was not one of those towns.

Maybe a dozen years ago it had been a decent-sized tourist trap (the run-down B&Bs were evidence of that), but not today. Windows of a bakery advertising "Authentic Canadian pastries" were lined with newspaper, the door adorned with WE ARE CLOSED FOR BUSINESS FOREVER printed on dot-matrix computer paper. In a small park, no one posed for photos in front of the oversized cedar canoe. The post office's sad red and white maple leaf hung from the rusted pole like a wet rag. The hardware store—NOW HIRING, according to a sign in the window—was closed, and the outdoor market sparsely populated: a few meager displays of peaches-and-cream corncobs and strawberry baskets, the remnants of a half-assed Mennonite furniture venture, and something called Miss Betty's Jams 'N Preserves. All of this Owen saw as he drove through town, while curious citizens shaded their eyes and squinted back at Owen in his fancy little car.

"You people can roll out the welcome wagon anytime, now," he muttered, waiting at the flashing red light in the center of town. An elderly lady turned to look down at him from the sidewalk with a thunderous expression, though she couldn't possibly have heard him with the windows rolled up and the air conditioning on. He suspected she might cast the same glower of disapproval on anyone she didn't recognize, particularly upon such an obvious out-of-towner. The lights changed and she shuffled her walker across the street. Owen turned left.

Potholes were more common than usable road beyond Chapel Lake's business district. The realtor renting out the cottage had an office on the north end of town. Between there and what passed for the "downtown core" were turn-of-the-century homes gone to seed, a fenced-off auto yard, a small antiques "shoppe," and a closed-down Dairy Queen.

Wickman Realty was a small square one-story building, the kind of off-white stucco eyesore with a flat roof that could just as easily be a dentist's office or a chiropractor's, except for the storefront windows. The lawn was neatly manicured, one of the few in the area. The windows held neat photo displays of houses and cottages for sale, lease, or rent. Owen scanned them for the cottage Lori had stayed in, but since he didn't know what to look for, and had just hoped something would leap out at him, he gave up, disappointed.

A young couple with a baby sat at Skip Wickman's desk when Owen stepped in, the bell above the door tinkling. The couple peered back over their shoulders.

"I'll be with you in a moment," Skip said.

It was cool inside, like a fridge, compared to the street. More photos of houses, trailers, cottages and empty lots were posted on a photo board. A rack by the door displayed brochures for towns, townships, and lakes in the region. Children playing in the water. Couples holding hands at sunset. Horse carriages, speedboats, canoes, fishermen, the Mushkoweban Falls Hydroelectric Dam (
Power for Our Future!
), the Peterborough Lift Lock, a bridge called the James A. Gifford Causeway across Chemong Lake, pinecones, snowmobiles and skiers, village fairs and festivals, cotton candy and livestock, trees and trees and even more trees.

Finally, Skip shook hands with the husband and wife, who looked to be in their early twenties and had probably just signed the lease on their first mobile home. He led them out of the office, holding the door for them. As they thanked him again, Owen noticed the woman had teared up a little. Their baby boy began to cry the moment they stepped back out into the heat.

Skip Wickman turned from the closing door, its bell tinkling. "God loves His children, but they sure do test His patience with all that crying," he said, more to himself than to Owen, his realtor's smile still affixed, turning it like high beams toward Owen. He was in his early fifties, hair salt-and-pepper at the temples, beige suit and slacks creased just so, his tie nearly the same shade of brown as his skin. "Now, how can I—?"

Skip's mouth remained open but no words came out. He stood there, still holding the door handle, looking Owen up and down.

"You okay?" Owen asked.

Skip closed his mouth. "I'm sorry. You must be Mr. Saddler." His eyes narrowed. "You know, it's uncanny how much you look like her." The man swallowed hard. He seemed to consider how to proceed, having perhaps said too much. "I was so sorry to hear about your sister. Lovely girl." After a pause, he stuck out a hand. Owen shook it. Skip's handshake was firm, his palm as cool and dry as his office.

"She was," Owen agreed, not expecting how much it would hurt to speak of her in the past tense. "On the phone, you said the cottage—"

"
House
," Skip corrected. "Belonged to one of the Hordyke boys. Their family founded Peace Falls. Jim Hordyke built the house by hand in the mid-'50s. There's a plaque put up by the Historical Society, a sort of honorary commemoration, I'm sure, it being the only house from Peace Falls still standing, after the flood, where it had been built. But nobody cares much for historical footnotes like that anymore. When he'd built the house—old Jimmy Junior, who was actually the
fourth
in a long line of Jimmys—it lay on the top of the hill overlooking the town of Peace Falls, about as far away from the water as you could get."

Skip opened a palm toward his desk, the only one in the office. "Can I offer you a drink? I've got terrible coffee and lukewarm water." He grinned. "Not to oversell either."