Stuart Woods - Under the Lake

Leonie flushed. “Can’t you just forget about that?”

“I guess a single girl in a town this size can’t just walk into the drugstore and buy a pregnancy-testing kit. Might as well advertise in the local paper. It was positive, wasn’t it?”

She continued shelling peas in silence.

“No, I can’t forget about it,” he said.

“It’s not your responsibility,” she said, her voice softer. “It was my decision. You had nothing to do with it. Well, not very much, anyway.”

“It’s my responsibility, too. I understand, now, why you thought it was the only way.”

“It is the only way,” she said. “Who’d marry me?” She looked him in the eye. “You?”

“I’m already married,” Howell said, and they both knew it was an evasive answer.

She didn’t call him on it. “I don’t want anything more from you. I’ve got what I want, what I’ve wanted for a long time. I’m content.”

“Are you sure you ought to be content? You’re entitled to a life of your own, you know. Why don’t you get out of here when you’re mother’s gone? Make a new start somewhere.“

“I have responsibilities,” she said. “Brian and Mary depend on me. I can’t just lock them away someplace. Dermot’s different, he’s an independent soul. But I can’t abandon the twins.”

“I see,” he said.

“I’m not sure you do see,” she came back quickly. “People like you are footloose; you go where you want to, when you want to. You don’t let yourselves get tied down with things as ordinary as family.”

Now it was Howell’s turn to flush.

“I don’t think you understand that other people are born into situations – or just accept them, live with them and do the best they can.”

“Sure, I understand that.”

“No, not really, John. It’s something you’ve never learned. Maybe it’s the reporter in you; you dig into something, get what you want out of it, then move on. When you’ve finished whatever it is you want to do here, you’ll leave, and you won’t come back. You’ll put yourself first, and I guess that’s the right thing for someone like you to do.”

“Look, I want to help you. I… ‘

“No.” She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t make commitments you may not be able to keep. You’ll just have that much more guilt to bear when you don’t keep them. I meant what I said. I trapped you. It was my decision, and I knew what I was doing at the time. I didn’t do it lightly, and I know how to bear the responsibility I’ve taken on. You owe me nothing. That’s the way I want it.”

“All right,” Howell said, pushing back from the table, “if that’s what you want.” He left her and went into the living room. Scotty was asleep on the sofa. Dermot and the twins had come from somewhere and were sitting on the front porch. Dermot was picking at his mandolin. Howell sat down in a comfortable chair and picked up the photograph he had seen on his first visit to the house.

Kathleen O’Coineen stared back at him with huge eyes. The priest had been right; she was startlingly beautiful. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine in the picture. There was still that familiarity about her. He thought, for a moment, that he knew why, but then he heard a car engine. He parted the curtains slightly and looked out. A sheriffs car was pulling into the Kelly driveway. Howell stepped away from the window. Bo had moved faster than he had expected. There was no place to run. He’d have to go along and hope McCauliffe could get him out in time.

He peeked carefully through the curtains again. The car had stopped in the drive. The reflection on the windshield concealed the driver; Howell thought he must be taking a careful look at the house, and he was glad that he and Scotty had parked out back. Then the car backed into the road and drove away toward town.

Howell sank back into the armchair and let his pulse return to normal. Then he leaned back and let himself doze. What had he been thinking about before? He was too sleepy to care. He had wrestled with too much today. His mind needed to gather itself for what was ahead.

When Howell woke up, the priest was coming out of Lorna Kelly’s bedroom. He nodded to Howell.

“Father Harry, how are you?”

“I’m fine, m’boy, fine,” the priest answered.

Howell pointed toward the bedroom and raised his eyebrows.

“She’s asleep, bless her heart,” Father Harry said, “and you look as though you could use a few more winks, yourself.” He waved and went toward the kitchen.

At six o’clock Scotty woke him, and they went in to supper. All of them dined quietly in the old-fashioned kitchen on fried chicken, fresh corn and peas, cornbread muffins, and iced tea. Father Harry, alone, seemed to have been sipping something else. Howell remembered meals like this from his childhood, at the homes of family friends whose people were dying, except at those meals, the food had been brought by sympathetic neighbors. Apart from her family, there was no one to attend Lorna Kelly’s death but an alcoholic priest and two fugitives.

They lingered over coffee until the sun was nearly on the horizon. Scotty got her camera gear from her car, and Howell gave her the film. He went back into the house.

“Can I borrow a flashlight?” he asked Leonie.

“Sure,” she said. She went to a cupboard and brought back a large, six-volt model. “Listen,” she said, tentatively. “I’d like to see this again.” She looked up at him. “And I’d like it delivered in person.”

He smiled at her and touched her cheek. “I’ll be careful. There’s not much to this; we’re just going to go up there and perch in the woods and take some pictures and come back.”

“See that you do. The baby might want to meet his father one of these days.” She handed him a thermos of coffee and a paper bag. “You might get hungry.”

Howell nodded and turned to join Scotty. They left the Kellys’ backyard and entered the woods, picking their way through the trees and brush. The sun was below the treetops, and dusk was nearly upon them. They tried to hurry, to be in position before it got dark. They were climbing slightly.

Twenty minutes later, the ground leveled off, and they came to the edge of the airfield and stopped, still well into the trees. Howell looked at the windsock. He pointed to the little shack next to a couple of small aircraft near the end of the runway. “Let’s work our way down there. Any airplane is going to land in that direction, and it seems like a natural sort of meeting place, anyway.”

In the fading light, they circled a quarter of the way around the airfield, walking as quietly as possible and not using the flashlight. They saw no one, no cars, nothing that hadn’t been there when they arrived. In the trees near the end of the runway, perhaps thirty yards from the shed, they found a depression in the ground, well padded with pine needles.

“This looks good,” Howell said, masking the flashlight with his hand and playing it briefly over the ground. It was something like a sandtrap on a golf course. The ground seemed to fall away rapidly from there. In the last moments of light, Howell could see tops of trees below them, and, in the distance, the lake. “The pine needles won’t make much noise when we move around. A lot better than leaves. What’s the longest lens you’ve got?”

“A one-fifty to two-fifty zoom, but it’s not very fast.”

“My friend says it doesn’t have to be. That film will make it look like daylight.”

“Good.” She sighted through the camera toward the shed. “Jesus, I can’t see much. It’s just as well the film can. We’ve got six rolls; I’ll use the motor drive; we’ll practically have movies of this event.”