Chapter One

She saw them only in dreams now. A young Japanese couple, the man tidy and stoic, the woman—his wife—petite and unassuming, a quiet sensuality concealed just below her studied exterior. Still as sculpture, the man would stand with his head bowed but eyes lifted, peering. James would emerge from surrounding shadows and crawl across the bare floor, nude and glistening with perspiration. The woman, inanimate as her husband, lay like a figurine with parted legs and sorrowful eyes, welcoming James with silence, thin lips moving soundlessly in prayer. James moved with an animal grace she did not remember him having in the real world, slithering over the woman, his pale buttocks gliding between the woman’s legs as he tried to replace what had been taken, all that had been lost.

And the source of their loss, the little boy—such a beautiful child—his smile shy but genuine, young eyes full of wonder and awe, he was always there too. In short pants, matching jacket, neatly pressed oxford, flawless haircut and miniature dress shoes, he reminded her of a tiny businessman. But in her dreams he was detached, the same as her, forced to watch from a distance, already swallowed by darkness, already gone. Dead.

 

 

From a pair of glass sliders overlooking a large deck and enormous expanse of lake, Katherine sipped her coffee, hands clutching either side of the mug to absorb the warmth. She’d had the dream so many times that remembering it had little effect on her these days. Segments of it would cling to her like residue then dissipate over time as the day progressed, leaving her with only blurred and segmented visions.

A gentle but steady snow was falling, blowing about and blanketing Blissful Point in a sea of white. Frozen sheets of ice concealed the lake and hugged the weighted branches of trees along the portion of forest surrounding it. It had begun snowing the night before and had continued straight through to morning. The weather people on television had warned an enormous snowstorm was following behind this initial band of snow and that within the next twenty-four hours it would hit the area with a ferocity not seen in these parts since the infamous blizzard of 1978. A small Massachusetts town nestled amidst miles of woodland, in winter the population fell to less than five hundred residents. In summer it was an alternative to the more crowded Cape Cod vacation spots in the state, but the tourists who descended on the lake and filled the quaint little shops and cafés of the main street were little more than memories, as the locals dug in for what were always quiet and uneventful winter seasons. Most business properties sat boarded up and locked down, idle and silent, awaiting the return of summer. In winter, the village often looked as if it had been deserted, and on lonely days such as these, when snow and freezing temperatures kept even the year-round townies indoors, it might as well have been.

The woodstove in the corner of the small den crackled, filling the room with welcomed heat and the pleasant aroma of burning oak. The fire had gone out during the night, but now reborn, was quickly overtaking the chill Katherine had awakened to.

The main house where she lived was bookended by several small cottages all set back from the lakeshore and scattered amidst the sparse section of forest nearest the water. It had been twenty years since she and James had purchased the property and moved in, renting the cottages to tourists during the summer months and suffering the often-maddening solitude the remainder of the year offered.

And then, of course, there was the lake. Roosting there like some constant and dispassionate deity. Over the years she had grown to hate these cottages, this house, the grounds—with its picnic tables, rope-and-board swings, picturesque walking trails, bicycle paths carved into the forest landscape—and the lake.

Most of all she had grown to hate the lake.

When someone vanished without a trace, as James had done a little more than a year earlier, it didn’t allow for the same levels of logic and closure certain death did.

Gone. That was the only tangible reality Katherine could be certain of. James was gone. To this day the authorities continued to consider him alive, as no body had been found and there was no evidence to suggest foul play or even suicide. But Katherine knew better. James was gone and he wasn’t coming back. Ever.

James, you have to see a doctor, she had told him days before he vanished. You have to get help, you have to stop this.

With tears in his eyes, he had reached out and cupped the side of her face, gently stroking her cheek and smiling. It’s too late for that.

And sadly, he’d been right.

Ironically, it was Katherine who wound up in therapy of sorts, seeking out Carlo Damone, an old college friend she’d stayed in touch with over the years. Carlo had originally set out to be a teacher, and although he’d graduated, he never got his teaching certification and instead went on to hold a string of menial jobs. In college he’d been the ultimate party guy—a hard-drinking and drug-taking madman, everyone’s best friend and a social god—but when the party was over and real life came knocking, Carlo had never quite managed to adapt. In his twenties and thirties he’d bounced from one casual and unfulfilling relationship to the next, and though he’d moved briefly to Los Angeles he’d returned to Blissful Point within a year, broke and again seeking out a job to pay his rent. He was currently experiencing his longest stint in one job since they’d graduated college, and though it was only pumping gas at a local station downtown, this seemed to center him somewhat. Though a bit more stable, he often appeared as restless as ever, and still struggled with a drinking problem he’d had for the better part of two decades. But at least he now seemed resigned to staying put and getting himself together. Still, it was often difficult for Katherine to look long and hard at her old friend. Such promise and potential, and all of it reduced to a mere ember.

She remembered sitting in Carlo’s latest digs—a tiny apartment above a small market in one of the less-appealing neighborhoods in town—and continuing to search for answers she suspected would forever linger just beyond her grasp. The state highway was so close the hum of traffic was often intrusive. “I’ll never understand how you deal with the noise here.”

“I like the noise, keeps my mind busy.” He smiled playfully. “Hey, at least the rent’s cheap. And I have an old friend that lives nearby.”

“What’s left of me anyway.”

“Lot more left of you than there is of me,” he said flatly.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

This time Carlo’s face showed no reaction, but his sad brown eyes gazed at her over half-glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. He’d been reading when she showed up and had apparently forgotten they were there. His vanity had never before allowed her to actually see him wearing them. “Real quiet out at the lake these days?”

“Yes, it is, but I won’t be there much longer.”

Carlo formed a chapel with his hands and let his chin rest at the summit where his fingers met. “I think it’s definitely a good idea for you to try to start again somewhere else, but under the circumstances, Kate, are you sure that’s the best way for you to deal with what’s happened?”

“You’re not honestly suggesting I stay there?”

“Not to the detriment of your health and wellbeing, no. I’m just saying running is never the answer.”

Katherine could not be so sure.

“Believe me,” he added, “I know, I’ve done it most of my life.”

Memories of the authorities dragging the lake and how she’d stood in front of these same sliders watching the search and rescue recovery teams systematically hunt for James filtered through her mind. Miles of forest were scoured but no trace of him was found. The whisperings in town that he had gone mad gave birth to numerous theories regarding what may have happened to him, the most popular of which suggested he’d wandered off into the dense woods and up into the mountains where he became lost and eventually died. He was strange, people said, a poet and eccentric who kept to himself and rarely socialized with anyone other than his wife. But the people here had never really known her, much less James. There were also those who suspected her, the way spouses are always suspected first, but she dismissed those people and their rumors.

But for Carlo, and Marcy and Luke, a local couple Katherine and James had been friendly with for several years, they had few friends or acquaintances they socialized with, and thus a very small circle of people who knew them in anything beyond the most facile sense. Marcy and Luke had divorced a few years earlier when Luke, an attorney, had taken up with his secretary and promptly moved out of town. Though their days of socializing as a couple were over, Marcy had remained friendly with Katherine and had been there for her during those horrible days after the disappearance. Only two years younger than Katherine, Marcy too now lived alone, as her only child Samantha, at twenty-one, had moved in with a boyfriend in Boston.

Marcy and Carlo had both been there for her as best they could, and she loved them for it. But in the end, Katherine still felt very much alone in her post-James existence. Alone in the darkness that had stolen him, in the darkness he had left behind.

Still, Katherine did her best to remember that they hadn’t always been surrounded by such morbidity. In fact, the first few years they had taken up residence on the lake had been wonderful.

The madness had only begun once the lake had taken the child.

James had found the body in the early morning hours, floating facedown near the small pier from which he had fallen. Apparently the child had left the cabin his parents were renting and had wandered out to the lake in the middle of the night. Police speculated that in the dark he had fallen from the pier, struck his head and drowned in the shallow water just feet from shore.

James was never the same. Always a sensitive soul, the death of the young Japanese boy was something he was never able to recover from. And Katherine’s visions of him kneeling in the sand, moaning through tears, the boy’s tiny body clutched in his arms, lifelessly dangling there like some unattended puppet, had burned itself into her subconscious for eternity.

Months later, with fear and uncertainty, James would say, I can’t seem to focus. Do you understand? I can’t focus. I—I can’t stop it.

It’s not your fault, she had assured him repeatedly. They were responsible for watching their own child. It was a tragedy, but you—we—did nothing wrong.

James had smiled in a way she had never seen him smile before. Like he knew something she didn’t. Many, many things.

For weeks before he disappeared he’d begun speaking to her in cryptic phrases and mutterings, as if convinced she knew what he was talking about.

Sweetie, she’d finally said, you say things to me the way you’d say them if you were talking to yourself, as if I can understand without any explanation, as if I’m inside your head.

You don’t ever want to be there, James had said. Not ever.

And he was right.

Even a year and a half after his disappearance, most tourists didn’t want to patronize a resort where first a child had drowned and then the proprietor had vanished without explanation a few months later. But for a few stragglers during the summer prior, the cottages had remained vacant and become rundown with neglect. What had once been a picturesque and charming little area was reduced to memories and fog.

“A large real estate developer made an offer on the property,” she’d told Carlo on her last visit to see him. “Quite a substantial offer, actually.”

He finally realized his reading glasses were still on and pulled them off. “Are you going to take it?” he asked, placing the glasses on a small table covered with assorted dog-eared paperbacks and notebooks.

“It’s too much money to pass up.” She assumed he would ask another question. When he didn’t, she said, “Besides, there’s nothing holding me there now, nothing to tie me to the lake. Sometimes I wonder if the whole thing wasn’t cursed from the beginning.”

Carlo said nothing, aware that she was referring to how she and her husband had managed to purchase such an expensive piece of real estate in the first place. Katherine’s father had died when she was in high school, and though they were a working-class family, he had been heavily insured. Her mother had inherited nearly three hundred thousand dollars, and when a few years later she died from lung cancer, the remaining funds were left to Katherine, her only child. Most of it had gone toward the purchase of the lake.

“If it hadn’t been for the deaths of my parents, we would’ve never been at the lake.”

“But you did end up there,” Carlo reminded her. “You can’t second-guess things that have already happened.”

“Aren’t those the only things you can second-guess?” She tried to smile but it was hardly convincing. “I know it sounds melodramatic, but I even researched the history of the lake and woodlands. I don’t know what I was hoping to find, a record of other horrible things happening here over the years maybe, who knows?”

“An actual curse, huh?” Carlo grinned playfully. “Any luck with that?”

“You’re such a wiseass.” She flashed a smirk of her own. “There was no record of anything ever happening at the lake. It was built back in the 1940s and there wasn’t a single incident in all those years. Not a drowning or a death, which in itself almost seems suspect, but it’s true. It’s always been a quiet and fairly profitable little lakeside resort, all of it painfully uneventful. At least until that little boy drowned.”

“You didn’t really expect to find anything different, did you?”

“I guess not.” She sighed absently. “I mean, no, of course not. At any rate, if all goes well I’ll sign the papers next month and just sell it all off. I’ve finally begun to imagine life beyond that place for the first time in years. I retain residency through this winter but I’ll have to be out by spring so workers can begin demolishing the cottages and clearing forest. Again, assuming the deal goes through. They plan to build a lakeside shopping center. Awful, I know, but I have to let these things, this place, go.”

The sun was setting, darkening Carlo’s apartment. A shadow crept across the room like the thief it was. “It’s understandable that you’d be a little freaked out with their plans. The lake’s been your home for a long time.”

“But I can’t concern myself with that now. I’ll be gone, and I won’t be going back.”

She hadn’t yet decided exactly where she’d go, but despite Carlo’s concerns, she felt the only hope for a normal life again depended on her ability to start over elsewhere. At the end of the day, proverbial and otherwise, the only thing she knew for sure was that this would be her last season there.

“One more winter,” she said softly, “one more winter on the lake.”