Page 72 of It Happened on the Lake

F or once, the house was quiet, thank God, even out here, in the garage.

Janet Collins unloaded the dryer, hauling towels and sheets into her basket.

Afterward, she moved the load of jeans into the dryer, set the timer, and started the old Speed Queen tumbling again.

It was loud, probably on its last legs, but for now, it had to work. God knew she couldn’t afford a new one.

Carrying her basket, she headed up the three short steps into the kitchen.

Her sons weren’t home. Well, David had moved out and was working at a car wash in Northeast Portland while taking a few classes at the community college.

Rory, now a rowdy senior in high school, was barely skimming through and was currently spending the next few days with his father.

Finally, peace and quiet!

Bliss!

She loved her kids, she reminded herself as she set her laundry basket on the kitchen counter, but she was sick to her back teeth of messy rooms, trash, and underwear left everywhere, and the fact that both of them, with their ravenous appetites, were bottomless pits.

She figured she should have become a franchise owner at McDonald’s.

That would have been a helluva lot cheaper.

And the loud music! Enough with Michael Jackson, Guns N’ Roses, and whoever else they were listening to.

Well, to be fair, she’d cranked the bass up and listened for hours to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-DaVida,” back in the day.

But she’d been stoned, of course, and hadn’t changed her ways even when, before she’d moved out, her dad had yelled at her to turn down the phonograph because, “That goddamned hippie music makes my fillings vibrate!”

So maybe her kids were high, too. She hated to think that. But if they listened to the Doors or the Stones or Led Zeppelin for heaven’s sake, that would be different. Besides, Jim Morrison, Robert Plant, and Mick Jagger? Oooh. Those men were gods!

Humming to herself, she put her ratty terry-cloth dish towels away and caught a glimpse of the video game console hooked up to her TV in the adjoining living room. Between MTV and all those damned video games, her kids were going to turn into zombies!

Worried about Rory, she wondered if she should give in and let him do what he always threatened and allow him to move in with his dad.

She would give it about three days, a week at the most, before Rory came crawling back.

And she’d let him. Of course she would. Unfortunately he reminded her of her own rebellious self in her late teens.

Lately, because she’d seen in a local news broadcast that Chase’s mother had died on a flaming boat on the lake and that there was banter about some of the cold cases surrounding Lake Twilight being reopened, her thoughts had turned to those crazy days of her youth, where everything revolved around the whole peace, love, dove phrase.

Back then she protested the war. She hated the establishment.

She didn’t trust the entire military industrial complex.

She took a bus to Washington, D.C. and demonstrated after Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Later she participated in Earth Day and joined an antiwar sit-in and burned her bra for women’s rights, for God’s sake.

Looking back, some of that time in her life was a blur, some happening before she’d moved onto the lake, some after she moved away from Almsville.

But it was all a part of her identity, from the fury of the race riots to the serenity of the sit-ins.

Now, though, she had to admit, she’d been high a lot of the time or making candles or love bead jewelry or screwing her brains out.

Blushing, she remembered one night in particular when Chase had stopped by and she’d been involved with him and Charla, a threesome that had blown his mind.

Chase had been an animal. An all-star athlete who could go for hours.

But of course back in her “Moonbeam” days, she had no trouble keeping up with him.

That had been a long time ago, when her hair had been long, her hips slim, her waist tiny, and her breasts not daring to sag.

Humming “We Shall Overcome,” she pulled out a huge king-sized fitted sheet from the basket.

Lord, she hated trying to fold these things.

As she struggled with the sheet and caught the reflection of her middle-aged self in the plate glass window over the kitchen table, she remembered the events of the night Chase had gone missing.

Everyone who lived in the house had split after a quick visit from the cops.

She, Moonbeam in those days, had been out on the covered deck, smoking a joint, staring across the water, listening to the rain gurgling in the gutters of the little house.

She’d found a pair of small army grade binoculars on the railing where Trick had left them, probably by mistake.

He loved to use them and spy on the houses nearby.

Ronnie had accused him of blackmailing the people he spied upon, but Trick, as usual, blew him off.

That night, high on grass, she peered through the binoculars, focusing on that big house on the island.

The curtains were open, and she noticed a blinking light in one of the upper windows.

It went on for a few seconds, then stopped.

Rhythmically, almost to the beat of a song that ran through her brain.

It was kinda cool. As the mansion had grown dark again, she was about to turn away.

But then the blinking started up again. Cool.

But the house went dark. She kept watching and smoking.

She was just about to put down the field glasses when she spied a shadow outside the big house, like someone hurrying to the stairs that cut down the face of the island to the dock, near what looked like a cave but, Trick had informed her, was actually a boathouse.

It was dark and misting so hard it was difficult to see.

On top of that she was feeling the marijuana kicking in.

Nonetheless, it sure looked like someone was now on the dock and wrestling with something large—maybe a kayak or a canoe. Crazy!

She caught another light and movement in the house, on a lower level.

Most likely in the room that Trick had told her was the old lady’s bedroom where the shadowy figure of someone was moving throughout the room.

“Nothing goin’ on in there,” he’d confided when he’d told her about the mansion a few weeks ago.

“That’s the old lady’s bedroom, and she’s a wrinkled old prune, let me tell you.

I bet she’s dry as a bone inside. Probably farts dust.”

“That’s crude,” Moonbeam had countered. “And cruel.” Sometimes—make that often times—Trick’s crassness really got under her skin.

“Just tellin’ it like it is.” He’d been standing on the deck with her, his glasses fogging a bit, the scarf holding his hair in place slipping.

“And how would you know?” she’d asked, bothered.

“Oh, I have my ways.” His smile had been smug, not hidden by his beard.

“You’ve been there?”

“Maybe.” But his sly grin had confirmed the obvious.

“But how?”

“My secret,” he’d said, so proud of himself. “My ‘tricks,’ you know.” He’d made air quotes and laughed. “You should see inside,” he’d said. “So many places to get lost. So many places to hide. So many treasures to lift.”

“You stole from them?”

“Moi?” he’d intoned, his eyebrows raising over the round rims of his glasses as he motioned to his chest and feigned affront. “Never!”

Man, she’d wanted to slap that self-satisfied smile off his face. And she knew he’d been lying. Trick was capable of just about anything if money was involved.

And looking through the binoculars this night, she wondered if she was even focusing on the right room.

Still trying to figure out what she was viewing on the island, she heard a door opening behind her.

She turned to see Ronnie stepping onto the covered area.

“Hey, Moon . . . wanna go for a ride?” He offered her a tab, and she dropped acid.

And that was that. Everything got a lot more fuzzy after that , she thought now, as she gave up on folding the sheet neatly and picked up a pillowcase.

She did remember the cops, though. Down the street they’d roared. Screaming sirens. Flashing lights.

Panic had ensued.

Someone came—Jesus, had it been a policeman?—and told them to get the hell out.

They all did. In one big hurry. Scrambling away, not bothering with some of their things. Only staying long enough to say, “I didn’t see anything,” to the other officer who stopped by before they tore out.

It seemed surreal now, but through her haze she had recognized them. Weren’t they the cops who lived down the street?

“But you’re no longer a tripped-out flower child,” she said aloud.

Nope. Now she was a mother, with sons of her own.

And a new respect for the law. As a kid all she wanted to do was avoid trouble, save her own skin, but now .

. . should she call the police? Tell them what she knew?

Her memories were foggy at best, drugged.

And maybe it was unimportant now, wouldn’t make a difference.

She’d had feelings of guilt ever since she’d fled the house that night, been conflicted over the years, more so once she became a mother.

She bit her lip and couldn’t shake the feeling that she should make an old wrong right.

Probably because of the tragedy the other night. Chase’s mother on that burning craft? There certainly was no connection.

Nonetheless, telling what she knew was probably the right thing to do.

She was a mother trying to set a good example for her two sons who seemed hell-bent to mess up their lives. “Do it,” she told herself.