CHAPTER 28

Sam, Jenny, and Michael Latta,

Lake Alatoona, Georgia, Sunday, June 16, 1974:

The boy sat on a rock, shivering from the cold. He dripped water onto the stone beneath him; the drops collected in tiny pools on the warm granite and then formed black rivulets that ran back into the lake they had come from. He was trying not to cry. He didn’t cry often, and he tried to hold onto his outrage at his mother, as a way of fighting the fright he felt.

His father sat beside him, not saying anything. After a minute, the man stood and walked a short distance to the picnic table where the mother sat. She didn’t look at the man when he approached. He got a towel from a beach bag that was sitting on the ground at her feet and returned to the rock.

“I hate her,” the boy said.

“I know you’re mad, Michael, but there are some things you can’t say in front of me. That’s one of them. It’s not allowed.”

He tucked the towel around the boy’s shoulders. Over at the picnic table, the woman stood up and went down to the water’s edge. She was careful to not glance in their direction. She bent, pulled off her sandals, and walked down the shoreline, away from them.

“She hit me.”

Michael was a quiet, contained boy, not given to sharing more than he had to, and he was humiliated by his own tears. Sam felt helpless. He had only vague memories of his own father, and he often felt that growing up without one gave him an essential disadvantage. He saw himself as an imposter, fundamentally unfit for the job.

“She hit you because she loves you,” Sam said.

Michael gave his father a sideways glance, incredulous.

They had come to the lake for a lunch and a swim. Mike went into the water and had been twice admonished, by Jenny from shore, that he was getting himself dangerously deep. He treated this with seven-year-old disdain, until all at once there was no rocky bottom beneath his feet. He bobbed up, squawking, and then went under again, swallowing water. Sam had gone into the water with his pants and shoes on.

When Michael was underwater and Sam’s splashing progress to him seemed to be in slow motion, there was a terrible moment when Jenny felt her sanity slip. She wondered if it were possible for fear to stop a healthy heart. Then her Sam had emerged with her Michael under his arm, waded in, and set him on the shore. Wild, she had run down and slapped the boy across the face.

Mother and son had looked at each other, speechless with grief, until the spell broke and time started again. He had shrieked. She had turned away, and each of them had taken a broken heart to an opposite side, leaving Sam helpless between them.

“She hit you because she loves you,” Sam repeated. “She was terrified of losing you, and when she didn’t, she was mad at you for scaring her. You scared me, too.”

“That’s stupid,” Michael sobbed.

“Maybe so, but it’s something you should know. When someone’s really mad, they’re scared underneath. Remember that. Someday, knowing it might help you.”

Far up the lake’s shore, the small figure of Jenny stopped walking and turned to look back at them. They sat and watched her as she started back in their direction.

***

Present Day:

“Sorry about your dad,” Kate said. “Come sit in the back.”

She brought me coffee and a piece of pie and sat down across from me. “Something new. Saskatoon berry,” she said. “I’m not convinced.”

I tasted it. “I’m not either.”

“They’re expensive,” she said. “I have no doubt they’re good for you. I feel foolish, because I got talked into buying them because they’re Canadian. They don’t grow around here, and there’s nothing more Canadian than the billions of blueberries and raspberries that do. I’m a fool.”

“I think it’s probably rare that anyone talks you into anything.” I smiled. “Mark it on your calendar.”

“My niece called me last night. She’s pretty angry with you.”

“I’m not exactly happy with her either, Kate. She’s playing house with Joseph again. It’s so far out of character for her that it makes me wonder if I even know her at all.”

“You’ve known each other for a year now, Michael. You’re obviously wanting more than friendship.” She stirred her coffee and set the spoon in the saucer, clearly weighing her words. “She hasn’t told me how her feelings run,” she said, “or I’d put you out of your misery. I don’t make any secret of it that I’d like to see you two together. At some point, things are going to move forward, or they’ll move backward. I think it’s been long enough that you’d best make yourself plain to her. You have your own issues, or you would have done so a long time ago.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I sighed. “I have other problems I want to talk to you about, though. On the island.”

I told her about my visitor the day before, the boy who crawled out of my kitchen trash can. Eli Tull. “It scared me to death, and if I scared easy I wouldn’t be back on that island in the first place.”

“No chance it was a kid playing around then?” she asked. “Got into your house, playing tricks?”

“No, Kate. This is a small trash can. A bucket. An infant couldn’t hide in it, let alone a boy. Even so, it wouldn’t account for horrible injuries on him appearing and disappearing. And the smell. Like the worst kind of swamp while he was there, and no trace of any kind of odor after he left. It was Eli.”

“Sometimes ghosts are trying to frighten us,” she said. “They’re angry and bitter at where they find themselves, and they lash out at the living.”

“I don’t think so, Kate. He changed into something awful, but it wasn’t for long, and when he changed back he gave me this nice, shy smile, like he was apologizing. I think he was making sure I knew who he was.” I struggled for the real sense of what I had seen. “It sounds weird, but I think he was partly...playing.”

“Like children do.”

“Yes. Not entirely playing, though. He came for a reason.”

“I wish Molly had been with you,” she said. “She has a knack for actually talking to them, not just seeing them.”

“I wish someone had been with me. The dog’s useless.”

“Where is your new friend?” Kate laughed. “Out in the truck?”

“No, he’s at home. He doesn’t like getting in and out of the boat, or the truck for that matter. Too big and clumsy. Happy to stay and sleep on the porch.”

“My Molly loves him, though, so she does. Thinks he’s a fine animal.”

A group of older men at a front table gathered themselves to go. They waved back to Kate on their way out.

“So...you think the whole thing was keyed on you,” she said, “not the place. Not the island or the cabin or the kitchen. An active apparition, not a memory. Aware of you, and trying to interact.”

“Yes, definitely active,” I said, “and one that has come here, all the way from Georgia.”

“Can you tell me about Georgia?” she asked. “Your father’s story? Molly told me a lot of it, but she said you found out something awful about him--didn’t say what it was.”

I told her that my father had shot and killed two grown men when he was a young child, and it was why he had been hounded and harassed right before he died.

“Oh, my God. And how old was he when he did this?”

“Really young. Ten years old. He was so outraged that they got away with it, he shot them both dead. That’s his story.”

She stared at me. “That’s incredible. Do you think it’s true? Can a ten-year-old boy even manage a gun?”

“Sure. Some kids are out shooting squirrels and birds younger than that.”

“I’m not daft, Michael,” she said. “A rifle or a pellet gun is a different matter than having the hand strength to fire a pistol and kill a grown man. That’s a tall order for small hands.”

“True, I get that. Sorry. I don’t know. The act itself fits him, somehow.”

“It would have scarred him,” she said, “very badly. Unless a child that age got help, it would profoundly affect them, right into adulthood. I saw enough of it, early traumas, God knows.”

Like her niece. Kate had been a teacher before she retired to Ansett and her coffee shop.

“Was he charged with the murders?” she asked. “What would they do with a child back then, send them to reform school?”

“No, this is the worst part. Apparently someone else was arrested and hanged for shooting the two guys. The black kid, the first victim--his father. My dad tried to tell what he did, and they gagged him, wouldn’t let him tell the truth.”

“Who did?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I suppose his parents, my grandparents.”

“So an innocent man was executed for it? And he wasn’t allowed to tell?”

“Appears even the police wanted it kept a secret. They had already executed someone. No one wanted it brought up.”

“That’s a burden no child should bear,” she said.

I looked across the table at her. Her eyes were impossibly blue. “And your ghost yesterday, the child?” she asked. “You think there’s a connection.”

I stood up to go. She kept her seat and looked up at me, her arms folded on the table.

“I do, Kate. You’ve always said the island was some kind of doorway, and I have a feeling it’s a convenient door for something that’s come a long way to find me and tell me something.”

I pulled out my wallet, and she impatiently waved it off.

“Then it’ll come clear sooner or later. Go with what you’re feeling. Ghosts are feelings, after all. Pure emotion. It’s why they come here, and why we see them.”

That evening I sat on the dock and looked out at the dark. When I had first come here to live, the inky blackness of the nights had nearly overwhelmed me. Darkness in the city was no more than an electric twilight, visible from many miles away as a huge mushroom of light.

When my urban eyes had adjusted after a week or two, I could see fine at night by the ambient light that the surface of the lake gave back. Only the interior of the island was dark enough to need a flashlight, and I never had a reason to go there after sundown. The night was overcast, but there was a hole in the cloud canopy directly above me. The stars over my head were brighter than the scattered lights on the opposite shore.

Molly’s dock light was off again. I wondered if she was leaving it dark as a message to me, or if she had left the lake and was somewhere else tonight. It amounted to the same thing.

‘Take your ghosts, and your feelings, your ego, and your fucking...tragedy and bother someone else with them.’

The cabin’s screen door creaked open behind me. After a minute, Blue padded out and put his head in my lap. I scratched the top of his head.

“Deep down, you’re a good boy, aren’t you?” I asked.

On impulse, I pulled out my phone. I debated a flimsy premise for calling her and then decided to stick to the truth. I missed her. I opened the phone and peered at the lit screen just as it lit with an incoming call.

I pressed the buttons to listen and put the phone to my ear. The voice was instantly familiar.

“I know what you did.”

My breath caught in my throat. I pressed the phone hard against my ear. “Arthur?”

“I know what you did,” it said again, and disconnected.

I knew the voice. It was the same person, and it didn’t sound like Arthur Sutton. Not at all. It certainly wasn’t his mother, unless her ghost could use a telephone.

‘I know what you did.’

“Son of a bitch,” I said, and let my breath out.

On cue, the dog sighed deeply and left to go back to the house. He could push open the cabin’s screen door to go out, but it swung the wrong way for him to go back in. I knew I’d find him waiting on the porch.

I sat thinking. After a few minutes, I stood up and followed the dog to the cabin and got ready for bed. When I finished brushing my teeth, I looked into the mirror.

‘Take your ghosts, and your feelings, your ego, and your fucking...tragedy and bother someone else with them.’

I didn’t want to see the face in the mirror. I didn’t like it. I turned off the bathroom light. In bed, I lay still and listened to myself breathe.