Summer at Forsaken Lake (11 page)

“Nicholas tells me that his dad never told him anything about that summer,” said Nick. “And he hasn’t set foot in my house since that day. Even when Lillie died, he came to the funeral, but he never came back here to the lake with everybody else.”

“Jeez, you guys!” cried Charlie. “You’re killing me here. Will you
please
just tell us what happened!”

Franny leaned back in her chair and told her story:

“It was the perfect summer. I’m sure there were days when it was too hot, and days when it rained, but I don’t remember them. They just wouldn’t have mattered. Will had spent the previous two summers with Nick, so we were already good friends, but that summer was … different. We were older, more, um, sophisticated, I suppose. Nicholas, your dad really was amazing—he wasn’t like any of the other boys I knew. He knew so much, about
everything
, and was convinced that he could do anything if he put his mind to it. He saw some Disney movie about kids making their own horror movie, and decided that he could do that. Nick had a sailing magazine with a story
about a kid who built his own boat, and the next thing I know, Will’s building a boat.”

Nicholas glanced over at Charlie, who winked at him. She still hadn’t told her mom that they were working on the boat in Nick’s barn.

“He bought an old movie camera at a garage sale, and then he made all the neighborhood kids pitch in their lawn-mowing money to pay for film and developing while he wrote the script. Your dad was a real wheeler-dealer, Nicholas; he told them if they wanted to be in the movie, they had to cough up some cash. He said, ‘I’m gonna make you all famous!’ and most of us believed him. Well, you’ve seen the parts of the movie that he finished—it’s pretty good, considering the equipment we had.”

“Why didn’t he finish it?” Charlie asked.

“I’m getting there,” Franny answered. “
Patience
, Charlie. We shot scenes out of order, just like in Hollywood, because some days Jimmy—that’s Charlie’s dad—had baseball practice, or somebody else had to go fishing with his dad, or mow somebody’s lawn, and besides, we just couldn’t wait to film this exciting finale that Will had dreamt up. It’s near the end, when the Seaweed Strangler gets his revenge on the rich hunter who has been harassing him. Just as the guy is about to set sail in his big sailboat, which we had borrowed from Jimmy’s cousin, Teddy Bradford, the Seaweed Strangler climbs aboard. He ties the owner of the boat to the mast, facing forward, and then he takes the wheel. It’s a really windy day, and
he aims the boat right for the pier over by the causeway, where there are all those sharp rocks and old iron things sticking up out of the water. When the boat hits all that, it explodes in a big ball of fire.”

“What! My dad blew up a boat?” Nicholas asked.

“Well, no, not really,” Franny explained. “It was all going to be done with special effects. Here’s how it was
supposed
to work: I was running the camera that day because Will was playing the part of the rich guy tied to the mast. Everything was going perfectly. The boat was anchored, and Will pulled up the mainsail, and then went up on the bow to pull up the anchor. When he turned around, the Seaweed Strangler, who had climbed up the ladder on the stern, was standing there waiting for him. They struggled for a few seconds, and Will ended up tied to the mast with a bunch of seaweed, facing forward and watching in horror as the Seaweed Strangler turned the boat so it was heading right for me and the rocks. According to Will’s plan, when the boat was still about a hundred feet away from shore, Jimmy was supposed to dive off the back of the boat, and then I could stop filming, because the rest of the scene—the boat crashing onto the rocks, the explosion, and the fire—was going to be done with a model boat that Will made to look just like the real one.

“The second Jimmy jumped off, Will got loose from the seaweed and ran back to the steering wheel. The wind had picked up and the boat was moving faster than he expected, I think, but there was still plenty of time for him
to turn the boat safely away from the rocks. Except … something happened. Will couldn’t turn the boat. I still remember seeing him at the wheel, and the boat getting closer and closer. For some reason, I kept the camera running. And that’s all I remember.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Charlie. “What happened next?”

“Your mom got a bump on her noggin the size of a grapefruit is what happened next,” said Uncle Nick.

Nicholas and Charlie looked at one another, confused.

“But … I thought you were on the shore,” Nicholas said.

“Yep. Standing there with the camera up to her eye, according to the people who witnessed it. That boat had its mainsail up and was moving pretty good when it hit the rocks. Well, when the boat stopped suddenly like that, the backstay broke and the mast and sail just kept right on going, right over the bow. The mast came down on Franny before she could move. Got a good concussion and a broken arm out of it, and I’d have to say she got off easy. Might have killed her.”

“Ahh, that explains the
cast
,” Charlie said. “In the letter, you talked about having a cast on for a long time.”

“I don’t get it,” said Nicholas. “Why didn’t Dad turn the boat?”

Uncle Nick and Fran looked at each other with uncertain expressions.

“Nobody knows,” said Uncle Nick. “Will swore that
he had the wheel all the way over, but the boat didn’t respond. Boat crashed so hard that Will had two broken ribs from where he hit the steering wheel.”

“Maybe it was in a dream while I was in the hospital, but I always swore that I remembered him turning the wheel and screaming something about the rudder. But in the end, it just didn’t matter. My parents went crazy. They threatened to sue Will’s family, saying he’d done it all on purpose for the movie. He had left some sketches at my house of how he wanted the scene to look on film, and when my dad found them, he said they were proof. They showed the boat crashing on the rocks with the mast broken—and the drawings looked
just
like the photos of the wreck that ended up in the paper. They printed them side by side, and after that, everybody just assumed he was guilty.”

“What about the model boat? Didn’t he tell everybody about that?” Nicholas asked.

“He tried, but it didn’t seem to matter,” Uncle Nick said. “Like Fran says, it all looked bad for him, right from the start. I remember him sitting on the porch swing after it happened. He looked terrible—he felt just awful about Franny—but he swore to me that it was an accident. And I believed him. He never would have lied to me. The worst part was, they wouldn’t even let him visit you in the hospital.”

“I know,” Franny said. “He tried calling, but my dad answered the phone. Told him never to call me again,
and then he hung up. That’s when I decided to write the letter.”

“And this letter—you say it never made it into Will’s hands?” Uncle Nick asked.

“That’s the way it looks,” Franny said.

“Lot of water under the bridge since then,” said Uncle Nick with a sad shake of his head. “For both of you.”

“So that was it?” Charlie said. “He left and you never heard from him again? Mom, you said yourself that you believed in him—didn’t you even
try
to prove his innocence?”

“Charlie, I think you’ve been watching too much TV,” Franny said. “What was I supposed to do? I was fourteen and in love with a boy from New York—who my parents hated. It was hard for me to imagine a happy ending to the story.”

Nicholas looked at Charlie and in an instant knew how he’d be spending the rest of his summer.

* * *

With the sanding completed and inspected by Nick, it was finally time to start the painting and varnishing of
Imp
. Hayley and Hetty had their hearts set on pink, but Charlie and Nicholas—and Uncle Nick, who cast the deciding vote—chose a glossy fire-engine red for the hull.

“Sorry, girls,” Nick told the twins, “but these two are
doing all the work. I think they should get to choose the color. Tell you what, though. If I build another boat, you can paint it any color you want.” He winked at Nicholas.

That seemed to satisfy the twins for the moment, and they ran off to sit on the dock, dangling their toes in the water. Nick, with Pistol riding shotgun in Betty, rumbled off to the hardware store in Deming to pick up the paint and brushes while Nicholas and Charlie wiped the dust off
Imp
one last time.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Charlie.

“Uh-oh. About what?”

“Mom’s story. Your dad. That whole thing with the boat.”

“And?”

“There’s something missing. There’s about a million holes in that story. Think about it.”

“I’ve
been
thinking about it,” Nicholas admitted. “And you’re right. I couldn’t sleep last night because I was thinking about it. I even wrote down a bunch of questions that I want to ask your mom.”

“Me too!” said Charlie, unfolding a sheet of paper that she’d taken from the front pocket of her shorts. “And then she left for work this morning before I had a chance to ask any of them. Get your list; I want to see what you said.”

Nicholas ran up the stairs to get his journal and then they began to compare notes.

“What was your first question?” Nicholas asked, his hand covering a page in his journal.

“Okay,” Charlie said. “Here goes: Did anybody ever check out the boat to see if your dad was telling the truth?”

Nicholas smiled and then slid his hand down the page a few inches and showed Charlie the two words he had written:
Boat investigation?

Charlie’s mouth dropped open. “Omigosh. That is so obvious, right? I mean, somebody must have looked at it, right?”

“Maybe not,” said Nicholas. “But that’s not my number one question. I want to know what happened to the film that your mom shot that day.”

Charlie held up her list with a smile. “Yep. Here it is on mine, too. Because the scene that she described is definitely not in the movie that you found.”

“It couldn’t be. Even if Dad had taken the camera that day, he would have had to send the film away to get developed and then add it to the parts he’d already edited. He just didn’t have time to do it; his parents came and took him back to the city.”

“Maybe he still has the film.”

“It’s possible, but why wouldn’t he have just stashed it where he put everything else? It was a good hiding place.”

“Good point. Well, somebody must know what happened to it.”

A few minutes later, as Nick pulled Betty into the driveway, Pistol barked and then jumped from the passenger-side window of the still-moving pickup truck, tearing across the yard after a very surprised rabbit.

“Go, Pistol, go!” Charlie cheered.

“When we’re talking to Uncle Nick, let’s focus on the boat for now,” Nicholas said. “I’m going to do a little more snooping in the tower room. Maybe Dad stashed the film in another hiding place that only he knew about.”

For the next hour, Nick taught them how to paint, slowly dipping into the can and brushing on the white primer (“You’re not Tom Sawyer, whitewashing a fence here; think of this as a piece of fine furniture”), while the interrogation began.

Charlie started gently. “So, Nick, um, we were wondering if there was, you know, any kind of investigation after that whole boat-crash thing. Like with the police or something.”

Nick scratched his head, getting some of the primer in his hair in the process. “Oh well, at least it’s white. Nobody’ll notice. An investigation, you say. What’s gotten into you two? Why do you want to dig up things that have been buried away for twenty-five years?”

“It’s kind of like this boat,” Charlie answered. “It was buried, too, but now we’ve sanded away the old wood and we’re going to make it perfect and show the world just how beautiful it is. That story of Mom’s needs a little sanding, too, if you ask me. The truth is there—it’s just hiding under the surface. I’m sure of it.”

Nick looked up at her, smiling. “Here, you take the brush for a while. Just keep it moving, and spread this primer out nice and thin. When it dries, we’ll give it a
quick sanding, and then we’ll be able to lay down the first coat of red before lunch.”

“And then what?” Charlie asked.

“And then we wait,” answered Nick. “We’ll let that dry overnight and hit it with the second coat tomorrow morning.”

“So, about the investigation,” said Nicholas. “Does this mean you don’t know—”

“Or you
do
know but don’t want to talk about it?” Charlie interrupted. “Is there something we’re not
supposed
to know?”

“Slow down, Charlie,” said Nick. “There’s no conspiracy, I promise you that—at least as far as I’m concerned. If you two want to go digging around in the past, by all means dig away. I don’t know about any kind of police report or anything like that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was one. Must have been an insurance company involved somewhere. As I recall, Teddy Bradford got a brand-new boat a few weeks after the wreck. Money must’ve come from somewhere. He sure didn’t get it from working hard, if you know what I mean. But why don’t you go take a look at the old boat for yourself.”

“What? It’s still around? Where is it?” Charlie cried. “Why didn’t you tell us that in the first place?”

“Well, sure it’s still around,” Nick answered calmly. “Fiberglass boats sure aren’t as pretty as wood, but the doggone things last forever. It’s over at Tressler’s—the other side of the lake. They’ve got a big old barn they use for
storing the summer people’s boats and campers during the winter. It’s been a few years, but I saw it out behind the barn when I was over there looking at an old Lyman runabout. Can’t imagine it’s gone anywhere.”

* * *

“What do you mean, you can’t ride a bike?” Charlie looked at Nicholas with a mixture of horror and disbelief as she pulled open the garage door at her house.

Nicholas shook his head. “I live in Manhattan. I just never learned. You make it sound like I’m the only one who doesn’t know how.”

“Well,
yeah
. Everybody knows how.”

“Everybody who
learned
how. My dad is always away during the summers, and I guess Mom never got around to it. I’m not even sure she knows how herself. Some of my friends don’t know how, either. Plus, we live in an apartment. It’s not like we have a garage, you know. Where am I supposed to keep a bike?”