The Girls of Tonsil Lake (27 page)

Sheriff Arthur got there first, very quickly, followed in minutes by Reverend Parrish. Then we saw them talking to Rosie and Mrs. Hardesty, looking over at us occasionally. The ambulance came next, followed by a wrecker and another police car that held other guys, real divers with all kinds of equipment.

On the bank of the lake, we moved closer together, sitting with our shoulders touching. We said little.

When they removed Hardesty’s body from the car, I thought I was going to be sick. A sidewise look at the other girls showed me they didn’t feel much better.

“I wonder,” said Suzanne, “if we’ll have to go to jail.”

Andie gave her a withering look. “Rosie will take care of it.”

Vin nodded. “She always has.”

The back doors of the ambulance slammed and my mother and Suzanne’s walked Mrs. Hardesty toward her trailer. Rosie looked over at us, then went to speak to the sheriff again.

I took a deep breath. Maybe I wouldn’t throw up, after all. “I think we should make a pact.”

****

The pact had worked out well, I thought. I parked myself on a tree root and watched the other three. I listened to Suzanne’s trill of laughter, Andie’s deep-throated guffaw, and the musical whoop that was Vin’s, and wondered what joke I was missing.

“Question of the day,” Suzanne called. “Andie just asked it and it wasn’t even her turn.”

I sat up straight. “What is it?”

“Where did we hide the time capsule?”

Suzanne

How could we have forgotten about the time capsule? Not just one but all of us. Now that Andie had said, right out of the blue, “Where in the hell did we put that time capsule?” I remembered the day we assembled it, sitting around the table in Rosie’s tiny dining area before we left for college.

“What was it in?” Vin said. “Wasn’t it one of the cracker tins that you got if you paid a little extra.”

Andie’s brows knit as she frowned. “Couldn’t have been. We used the really, really cheap crackers, the ones that tasted just like the cardboard box they came in only they weren’t near as crisp.”

“That’s right,” I said, and turned to Jean as she approached. “What
was
it in?”

“Oh, shoot.” She stopped a few feet away. “The ammo box!”

“The what?”

“It was an army surplus ammo box. It belonged to Chuck Hardesty. It was just lying there after...after everything, and we took it. God knows why. You probably kept part of your makeup in it, Suzanne. But I’m sure it’s what we used for the time capsule. We put...Lord, what did we put in it?”

“A BeeGees bubblegum card, a copy of one of your stories, Jean, a newspaper clipping from the hostage situation in Iran, four locks of hair, a few other things that would have mattered to adolescents in the late nineteen-seventies. There was a letter, too, identifying you all and telling the finder what you hoped to achieve with your lives.” The voice came from behind a tree, and Reverend Scott Parrish followed it around. He smiled at us. “The hair, as I remember it, didn’t exactly match the colors I see on you today.”

We all murmured greetings, exchanging embarrassed looks.

“Was there anything else in the box?” asked Andie.

“Yes, there was.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“I do.” He nodded toward the farmhouse. “The Arthurs have left. Their daughter is in labor with her first child. Would you like me to meet you there and bring you the contents of the box?”

“Yes,” said Vin quietly. “Thank you.”

The Arthurs had left us a note urging us to make ourselves at home. If they were not back before we left on Sunday afternoon, they added, please lock the doors and feed the cat. They hoped we enjoyed our stay and would come back soon.

We made coffee and rustled cookies out of Jenny’s well-stocked pantry. By the time we’d placed the refreshments on the table, the minister was at the door. We looked at each other.

“I’m scared,” I said. “It took me so long to lose that girl from the lake. I don’t want to find her again.”

“Suzanne, try not to be such a ninny,” said Andie. Her voice was as wilting as ever, but she didn’t look too comfortable, either.

Vin stretched out her hand and we all laid ours on it for a moment. “There are things,” Andie reminded us, “that we’ll never tell anyone.”

Jean opened the door to the waiting minister. One look at his face and the ammo box in his hands let us know we didn’t have to worry about telling him anything.

Because he already knew.

Vin

I felt a sudden, unreasonable urge to bolt the back door and run out the front one, but Jean’s car was parked in the back, so if we went out the front our only option for escape would be the lake. We could row out to the center in the bed and breakfast’s rowboat and just stay there until the world opted to leave us alone, but it would be really cold out there. I opened the door.

“Reverend Parrish,” I said. “Thank you for coming.”

He stepped inside. “Call me Scott. We’re all grownups now, I think.”

Suzanne took his coat, Jean ushered him to a seat, and Andie poured the coffee. I stood with one hand on the doorknob, not at all sure we shouldn’t have prepared for a quick escape. I regretted that we hadn’t allowed the men in our lives along on this trip. They’d have taken care of us, would have kept the past from rising up to...

What was I thinking? We could take care of ourselves. I let go of the doorknob.

The ammo box sat on a newspaper in the middle of the table. “Didn’t we bury it?” I said.

“No, we gave it to Rosie.” Andie looked over at me. “We’d trusted her with everything else.”

“It was wintertime, our senior year in high school,” Jean recalled. “We couldn’t bury it because the ground was frozen.”

How was it that everyone could remember all these details so well now after we’d forgotten the damned time capsule’s very existence for thirty-some years?

“How did you get it, Scott?” asked Suzanne.

“Rosie came to see me shortly after you all left for college.” He looked over at Andie. “She hadn’t been feeling well and she wanted to get right with the Lord as well as get everything in order.”

Andie looked as startled as I felt. “You mean she knew?” she asked. “Rosie knew she was going to die?”

“I’m not sure she knew that,” said Scott slowly, “but she was aware something was wrong. Her lifestyle changed drastically those last months. She even started attending church, though she sat at the back and left as soon as services were over.

“When she chose her burial plot, she asked for one in the back. She explained that the person who sat on the back of the bus was the one who opened the emergency door in case of an accident and she thought maybe if she wasn’t good for anything else, she was good for that.”

Oh, dear God, but she had been good for that. I felt a sharp niggle of shame, though, because I’d thought the church membership had consigned her to the remote gravesite.

“I blamed the people of the church for putting her back there, saving the good spots for the Hendersons and the Arthurs and folks like that.” Andie gave mumbled voice to my thoughts.

Scott laughed. “I imagine a lot of people looked at it like that. But Sheriff Arthur and Mr. Henderson even offered to pay extra so she could have a more choice final location.” He rolled his eyes heavenward. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have repeated that.” He cleared his throat. “Well, would you like to see what’s in the box?”

We looked at each other. “You open it,” said Suzanne, pushing it toward him.

“All right.” He reached for the hasp on the end of the box, but Jean’s voice stopped him.

“Wait,” she said, and we all turned to look at her, our heads moving in unison as though we were spectators in a tennis match.

“Why are we doing this?” she asked, color creeping up her cheeks and making her look healthy and strong. “We’re fifty-one years old and no one’s telling us what to do. Why are we sitting here scared to death something from our past is going to hurt us when we have the power to prevent it? It’s not as though we had this delightful childhood we want to revisit.”

She rose from the table. “You can go ahead if it’s what you want to do, but I want no part of it.”

“You’re right, Jean.” Suzanne got up, too. “Good heavens, guys, when I see that lock of hair, I might want to slit my throat because I can’t duplicate its color.”

Andie and I exchanged glances. “We don’t need to have it opened,” I said, halting Jean and Suzanne’s flight from the room. “We can heave it into the lake this afternoon.”

“All right.” Scott pushed the box aside. “But I’d like to talk to you anyway.” He folded his hands on the table before him and looked around at us. “About Rosie. And about the night—or more accurately—the morning Chuck Hardesty died.”

Chapter Nineteen

Andie

“You know about that night?” asked Vin. “All of it?” Her face was pale and set, and I don’t know whether it was by accident or design, but we all scooted our chairs a little closer to hers, to the point that Scott Parrish faced all of us.

He nodded and took a deep breath. “I was there.”

“There?” Jean echoed. “You got there when the sheriff did, right?”

Scott was silent for a moment, then he said, “Before I met and fell in love with my wife, I met and fell in love with Rosie Bennett. She was ten years older than I, practiced a profession people of my calling would like to put out of business, and never gave me the time of day. But”—his face creased into a boyish smile that made me remember why Jean had had such a crush on him—“I thought she hung the moon. I’m not yet convinced she didn’t.”

Rosie had been dead for over thirty years, but sometimes I still thought I heard her whiskey voice, smelled the too-sweet rose scent of her cologne, felt her hand light on my shoulder. She hadn’t been much for physical affection, but that touch had always let us know she cared. Scott Parrish’s words were about the Rosie we’d known. I felt a wave of longing.

“Unrequited love plays havoc with one’s sleep,” he said. “I was going down to the lake to fish when I heard Vin scream, not that I knew it was her. By the time I got around there, the car was already in the lake and the sheriff was diving, trying to get him out. I dived, too, but neither of us could do anything.”

“You and the sheriff dived?” said Vin. “I don’t remember that.”

We shook our heads. “I know he got there fast,” I said, “but I didn’t realize he’d gone into the water.”

“He was with Rosie.”

Suzanne frowned. “That can’t be. We’d have seen his car.”

“Not if he parked behind the trailer,” said Jean.

Scott nodded. “Which is what he did.”

“They all did,” I remembered. “Even ones who didn’t hold elected office didn’t want it known that they were visiting Rosie.”

“After it was all over, the sheriff was praised for arriving so quickly,” said Scott. “His wife knew where he’d been, and eventually his family did, but they didn’t find it out from Rosie. Mr. Arthur remained sheriff for many more years, a good and popular one.”

That explained why the sheriff’s son helped care for Rosie’s grave.

Only one question remained unanswered. I reached for the ammo box. “I have to know,” I said.

“It’s not in there.”

We all looked at Scott. “Where is it?”

“In Chuck Hardesty’s car.”

“But that went to the junkyard. It was compacted and crushed and...well, whatever they do with cars after they do that,” said Vin.

The minister nodded. “Yes.”

“So it was all illegal,” said Jean, her voice subdued. “It was hushed up that one of us killed Chuck Hardesty so the sheriff’s reputation would stay intact. Rosie did that for us.”

Scott’s face went so white I thought he was having a heart attack.

We exchanged looks of concern, and Jean got up to get him a glass of water.

“Are you all right?” said Vin.

“Yes,” he said, “but I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?” We looked at each other. Didn’t we know enough, for God’s sake? What little gem of horror did he have to hand down to us now?

“An autopsy was performed, as the law decrees in cases such as this was, but the results were never made public. It was reported that he was drunk and drove into the lake and drowned. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened. The gunshot was to his shoulder and only incidental. You girls didn’t kill him any more than I did.”

Vin frowned. “If that’s true, why didn’t we know?”

Scott looked uncomfortable. “Perhaps you should talk to your mother about this.”

“She won’t tell me anything. You probably remember her well enough to know that,” Vin snapped. “If we’re to know the truth, it’s got to come from you or the sheriff.”

“Mrs. Hardesty filed a wrongful death suit against Rosie. She dropped it on the advice of her lawyer when she found out the results of the autopsy.”

I wasn’t surprised that Mrs. Hardesty had never told her daughter about that particular incident. I knew she’d hated Rosie and hadn’t been too fond of us girls, either. But if she had known, I realized, so had Rosie.

Why hadn’t she told us?

Jean

We were relieved to know we hadn’t committed murder after all. Yes, I know self-defense made it something less than murder anyway, but I also knew the shooting of Chuck Hardesty had bothered us all.

But why hadn’t Rosie told us? I could see the question written clearly on Andie’s face and in Suzanne’s eyes. Only Vin seemed undisturbed by the betrayal of the one person we’d all trusted.

The ammo box still sat on the kitchen table two hours after Scott had left. One by one, we sat down. We looked at it, at each other, then Suzanne shrugged and drew it toward her. “We know the gun’s not in here. That was the only thing I was afraid of.”

We nodded agreement, and she lifted the hasp.

The contents of the box were the items Scott had listed and we had remembered. The dreams we’d spelled out on lined paper were the ones I’d written about in my new book. Wealth for Vin. Fame and beauty for Suzanne. Family and true love for me. Andie’s dream for life was summed up in one word: Survival.

We laughed over the BeeGees trading card and the awful story I’d written, sighed over the locks of hair. We sniffed, grimacing, at the nearly empty bottle of dime store cologne and tried to remember whose plaid ribbon was tied around an envelope of snapshots taken with the point-and-shoot camera Andie’d gotten for Christmas one year.