In the Dark of the Night

Chapter 5

THOUGH ERIC HAD spent a week at Phantom Lake last summer, everything looked a lot better to him this year. Since the storm had cleared, the weather had steadily improved, and there wasn’t a trace of the humidity that had begun smothering Evanston as they left that morning. But it wasn’t just the weather that was different; the whole village looked better than he remembered it. Coming in from the south, they’d turned right at the flashing red light — which he didn’t remember at all — and half a mile farther they were in the center of town.

To the right was the village itself; to the left, a long narrow park lay between the road and the lakeshore, widening out at the eastern end to a large pavilion built over the water. The buildings of the village, brightly painted and in perfect condition, seemed lifted directly out of a previous century.

“It looks like a movie set,” his father said.

“Maybe it is,” his mother replied. “Maybe they only put it up for the summer, and stow it away in a warehouse somewhere all winter.”

“Can they do that?” Marci piped, then reddened as Eric rolled his eyes and groaned. “Well, they could, couldn’t they?” she insisted in a futile attempt at recovery.

“I was only kidding, honey,” her mother said.

Turning back to the window, Eric gazed out at the summer party going on in the park. The swimming beach to the west of the pavilion was filled with splashing kids and dogs, and every kid in the water seemed to have either an air mattress or some other kind of floating toy. Farther out, beyond a rope limiting the swimming area, ski boats crisscrossed the water, some of them with Jet Skis playing in their wake. There were enough blankets spread out on the huge expanse of grass behind the beach to turn the lawn into a giant patchwork quilt, and at least half a dozen barbecue fires were burning.

And there were girls everywhere. In the water, on the lawn, and on the bike path at the edge of the road. “I love it here,” Eric heard Marci say, but he didn’t take his eyes off a blonde on Rollerblades who was wearing nothing but a bikini.

“So do I,” he replied, with a note in his voice that made his mother turn around, see what he was looking at, and glare at him.

“Eyes front,” she said.

“It doesn’t hurt to look,” his father said.

“Look at what?” Marci asked.

“Never you mind,” her mother said. Then, to distract the little girl from pushing the subject, she pointed out the window on the other side of the car. “Look, an old-fashioned ice cream shop!”

They were in the heart of the village now, and next to the ice cream and candy stores they saw a small movie theater, a cluster of T-shirt shops, and a fish-’n’-chips restaurant. In the next block there was a tiny pharmacy, a dry cleaner, a small courtyard complex that seemed to be occupied by nothing but art galleries and gift shops, and an antiques store.

Merrill pointed to the next street. “Third Street,” she said. “That’s where we turn, and the real estate office should be on the right.”

Seconds after Dan slid the Lexus into a spot right in front of Rita Henderson’s office, the entire family was on the sidewalk, stretching. “This’ll take a few minutes,” Dan told Eric. “Why don’t you and your sister take Moxie for a walk?”

Marci got the leash out of the car, opened the dog’s kennel cab, and had just hooked the leash onto Moxie’s collar when the dog managed to slip past her and leap to the sidewalk. Moxie shook himself violently, then strained at his leash, trying to search out a patch of grass. Marci half ran after him, with Eric after her, the two of them following the dog toward the park. No sooner had they crossed Main Street than Moxie started to sniff, decided on a spot, and squatted.

As Eric and Marci waited for the dog to finish his business, two boys about Eric’s age stopped on the sidewalk a few yards from them and stared at him.

Eric hesitated. Did he know them? Had he met them last summer when he was staying with the Newells? “Hi,” he finally said, “I’m Eric Brewster.”

“Who cares?” the shorter boy replied.

The uncertainty on Eric’s face dissolved into a frown. “Is something wrong?”

The taller one shrugged. “Dunno yet.”

Moxie, no longer squatting, was crouched at Marci’s feet, a low warning growl rumbling in his throat.

“C’mon, Marce,” Eric said. “Let’s—”

Before he could finish, the bigger of the two boys spoke. “Aren’t you going to pick up after your dog?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing as they fixed on Eric.

Eric saw Marci looking up at him, and was sure she was about to burst into tears. “We’re going to pick it up,” he said. “I’ve just got to get a bag.”

“Yeah, right,” the other one said. “If you were gonna pick it up, you’d’ve brought a bag.”

“We just got here—” Eric began.

“Who even wants you here at all?” the boy interrupted. “So pick up after you’re damn dog, okay?”

A knot of anger forming in his belly, Eric took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and picked up Moxie’s droppings. As the two boys watched, he looked around, spotted a trash barrel, and dropped them in. Not wanting to put the handkerchief back in his pocket, he dropped that into the barrel, too, and turned back toward the two boys.

They were already halfway down the block, laughing loudly. As Eric watched, one of them wheeled around and raised a hand, middle finger erect. “Asshole!” he yelled. “Who needs you? Why don’t you go back wherever you came from?”

Eric’s jaw clenched but he said nothing. Still he knew he wouldn’t forget. The faces of those two boys — and their words — were burned into his memory. And if they wanted to start something—

He cut the thought off, telling himself they weren’t going to start anything. Yet even as he tried to reassure himself, he knew he was wrong.

They had started something, and if they pushed it, Eric knew what would happen. Kent would want to finish it, and in the end, he and Tad — neither of whom had ever been much for fighting — would back him up.

And the two boys, whoever they were, would be sorry.

A HALF HOUR LATER the Brewsters drove around the last bend in the freshly graveled drive and found themselves staring at the dark stone facade of Pinecrest.

Merrill gasped in spite of herself. “Good lord,” she breathed. “Are you sure this is it?” But even as she asked, she knew this was, indeed, the house they’d rented, though it looked much larger than it had in the e-mail attachment.

“Of course this is it,” Eric said from the backseat. In fact, he’d seen it before, if only briefly, and only from down at the lake, last summer. “Pretty great house, huh?”

“It looks like a witch’s house,” Marci declared, her voice quavering and her words echoing what Merrill had been thinking as she’d gazed at the house at the end of the drive. Her first impression when she saw it on Ellen Newell’s computer was that the house looked haunted. As she gazed at it now, nothing she saw changed that impression; in fact, it looked even more like a haunted house.

“Don’t be an idiot, Marci,” Eric said, glaring at his sister. “It’s cool. In fact, this might be the coolest house on the lake.”

“Either way, it’s ours for the summer,” Dan Brewster said as he braked the car to a stop at the foot of the front steps. “Let’s unload the car, unpack everything, and then go exploring.”

He popped the hatch and turned off the engine. Eric was out of the car before the engine even died, but Merrill was still gazing through the window.

“This is way too much house for the rent,” she said, still making no move to get out of the car. “Something’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Dan assured her. “We got a good deal is all.”

Merrill wasn’t convinced of that, and as Dan and Marci got out of the car, she sat where she was, staring at the big stone house.

“If you’re not even going to get out of the car, then you better let me have the key,” Dan said.

Finally, Merrill got out and handed the key to him — a single key on a pewter Phantom Lake Real Estate fob — as if the act of relinquishing it might somehow absolve her of any responsibility for having rented the house.

Eric was already unloading boxes and suitcases and taking them up to the front porch. “C’mon, you two,” Dan said to his wife and daughter. “Marci, why don’t you help Tippy and Moxie get adjusted?”

Merrill followed him to the front door, and when it swung wide, she gasped again. But this time it wasn’t so much at the house itself, but at the panorama of the lake visible from where they stood.

“Wow,” Eric said. Picking up two suitcases, he stepped into the foyer — actually more like an enormous entry hall — and gazed in awe at the ornately carved mahogany woodwork, the marble floors, and the arched ceilings.

“Okay,” Dan conceded, grinning at Merrill. “You’re right. It’s a lot bigger than it looked, and a lot fancier. But the rent’s been paid, and they can’t raise it. So let’s just count our blessings and spend the summer pretending it’s a hundred years ago and we own a railroad or something. S’pose there’s a butler hiding around here somewhere?”

Merrill advanced to the foot of the broad staircase leading to the second floor. “Why don’t you go up and find your room,” she said to Marci.

The little girl shook her head. “I don’t want to go up there by myself.” She had let Moxie and Tippy out of their cages, and now snapped the leash on Moxie’s collar to keep him close, while Tippy began prowling through the room, sniffing everything, her tail twitching. “Tippy doesn’t like it here,” Marci announced.

“Tippy’s just poking around,” Dan countered. “She’ll love it as soon as she gets used to it. And so will you.”

Eric grabbed both his bags and managed to hold one of his sister’s suitcases under his right arm. “C’mon, Marci,” he said. “Let’s go up and find our rooms. First one upstairs gets first pick.”

Unable to resist her brother’s challenge, Marci dashed up to the top of the stairs and pushed open the first door she came to.

The room behind the door was larger than their living room in Evanston, and even the view of the lake through the large picture window couldn’t overshadow the huge four-poster bed that dominated the room. It was hung with heavy brocade curtains in a pattern of dark reds and greens that matched not only the bedspread, but also the drapes at the window, the cloth on the tables, the wallpaper, and even the carpet. A life-size painting of a man on a horse occupied most of one wall, and another was dominated by two enormous dressers made of the same heavily carved mahogany as the four-poster bed. Two large chairs and a chaise occupied the ample space left unfilled by the bed and its nightstands.

“Pretty neat, huh?” Eric said.

“I hate it,” she replied. “It’s too big.”

“Don’t be a baby. It’s a great room!” Eric dropped her suitcase on the floor, then took his own bags to a room that differed from Marci’s only in its hues: in this room there were dark blues and browns, rather than the reds and greens of Marci’s. He went back out to the car for his parents’ suitcases, took them up to the master suite, and set them at the foot of their bed, which was even larger than the four-posters in his and Marci’s rooms.

Going back downstairs again, he helped his father bring the last load of groceries into the kitchen, set them down, and started toward the door. “Okay if I go down to the boathouse?”

“Sure,” Dan replied, starting to unpack the bags onto the huge counters where a chef and two assistants could easily have worked. “Maybe I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Eric went through the dining room and out the patio door into the late afternoon sun. Shadows stretched across the lawn, and as he started toward the lake, crows cawed from the trees.

The old stone boathouse had the same architectural style as the main house, tall and faintly gothic. There was a small terrace in front of its main door, a few large windows set into its walls, and it was situated near the dock, with double doors that opened directly onto the lake. He and Kent had tried to look in the window when he was here last summer, but the windows were too dirty to see through and the door had been padlocked. Now, the windows were washed, chairs were on the terrace, the weeds had been replaced by flowering plants in an old oak wine barrel, and the padlock on the door was gone.

Inside, the boathouse was dark and silent, the only noise coming from the lapping of the water against the old and badly dented aluminum boat that was utterly unlike the gleaming wooden runabout that Eric had been picturing. In the corners of the concrete walkway that ran around the three walls of the boathouse were old tackle boxes, crawfish traps, and some tools that he didn’t recognize. A sling hoist with enormous wheels for raising the boat had been installed in the center of the structure, and seemed the only modern thing to have entered the boathouse in a hundred years.

The cover was off the boat’s outboard engine, and a tool kit was open on the boat seat.

A fouled spark plug lay on a rag on the floor of the boat.

Clearly, he wouldn’t be taking the boat out tonight.

THE KITCHEN WAS bright and roomy, if a little dated, but surprisingly well stocked with better cookware than she had at home, and by the time Merrill had put all the groceries away, she was starting to feel better about the place. Except that the big kitchen and formal dining room seemed to demand something a lot more elaborate for dinner than the hot dogs and potato salad she had planned.

“I’m going to start the barbecue,” Dan said as he came out of the pantry, heading toward the dining room and the terrace beyond. But the expression in his wife’s eyes stopped him. “Are you okay?”

Merrill did her best to hide her misgivings, though she knew her whole family — and especially her husband — could read her like a book. “Oh, it’s nothing, really,” she sighed. “Just another of my stupid thoughts.”

“Which one this time?” Dan asked, coming over and slipping his arms around her.

Merrill sighed ruefully. “A really stupid one. Namely, should we be eating hot dogs and potato salad in that gorgeous dining room?”

Dan laughed out loud. “Absolutely not. So we won’t — we’ll eat our hot dogs and potato salad out on the terrace like the civilized people we are. And we’ll save the dining room for formal occasions.”

“I don’t intend to have any formal occasions,” Merrill protested.

“Then we’ll ignore the dining room,” Dan told her. “That’s the nice thing about renting — since we don’t own the house, we don’t have to use any of the rooms we don’t like. It’s not like we bought the place and have to get our money’s worth. So figure out which rooms you like, and ignore the rest.”

He continued out of the kitchen, and Merrill took the hot dogs from the refrigerator and cut the package open. If only it were that simple, she thought. Then she decided to put her worries aside. He’s right, she told herself. All I have to do is ignore the rooms I don’t like. It’s only for the summer. It’s not forever.

MARCI STOOD AT the window with Moxie in her arms and watched Eric enter the boathouse, then turned around to eye her room suspiciously.

She didn’t want to open the closet.

She didn’t want to open the dresser drawers.

She didn’t want to unpack.

And she didn’t want to be a baby, either. But her room at home had all her stuffed animals, and her books, and her pictures and all the rest of her stuff. She liked her bed, which wasn’t nearly as big as the one in this room, but was just the right size for her. And she liked her bedspread, and her heart-shaped pillow, and the bird feeder that hung in the oak tree outside her bedroom window. Her room at home was hers, and this wasn’t. This was someone else’s room. Someone old.

And she hated it.

She knew she’d never get used to it.

Setting Moxie on the floor, she started casting around in her mind for some way not to have to sleep there.

Maybe she could sleep with her mom when her dad went back to Evanston for the week.

And maybe she could go back home with him and just come up on weekends, too.

Or maybe—

A movement in the reflected image of the lake in the mirror over the dresser against the far wall caught her eye, and Marci turned back to the window itself. Something was moving out there, barely visible through the tops of the trees, almost out of sight.

She shifted her gaze to the boathouse, but Eric was still inside.

Then she saw an old rowboat creep slowly into view, with something standing straight upright at its front end. As she watched, the boat slowly turned until it was pointing straight at the house, and now Marci could see that the thing in front was a big cross, like the one on top of the steeple of the Methodist church where she went to Sunday school. And sitting behind the cross, holding the oars, was an old man with a long beard.

And he was staring right at her.

Marci held still for a second or two as the man’s eyes seemed to bore right inside her, then she wheeled around and ran toward the stairs, already yelling. “Mom! Mom!”

Merrill met her at the bottom of the stairs, and as Marci flew into her mother’s arms, the tears that had been building up since she first saw this horrible house finally spilled over.

“There’s a man outside in a boat. A boat with a big cross in it! And he was staring at me.”

Merrill hugged her daughter and smoothed her hair. “A boat with a cross?” she asked, then turned and looked through the living room and its picture window, down the front lawn to the water.

She could see nothing but a ski boat speeding across the far side of the lake. “Honey, what are you talking about?”

“I hate it here!” Marci wailed. “I want to go home!”

Merrill knelt down and put her arms around the sobbing child. “It’s just going to take some getting used to,” she said. “We’re going to have a wonderful summer, you’ll see.” Sitting on the stairs, she pulled Marci close. “We’re going to have a barbecue tonight, then Daddy will build a campfire and we’ll toast marshmallows and make s’mores. That’ll be fun, won’t it?” Marci sniffled, then nodded, her face still buried in her mother’s shoulder. “And tomorrow we’ll go to town and do something even more fun. Girl stuff.”

Marci’s sobs slowed and turned to hiccups.

“Okay?”

Marci nodded.

“You want to help me set the table?”

Marci nodded again.

The crisis over, Merrill kissed her daughter on the forehead and dried the tears from her cheeks, and a moment later Moxie, who had followed Marci down the stairs, jumped up into Marci’s lap and licked her face.

“That’s my girl,” Merrill said, taking her hand and leading her toward the dining room and the kitchen beyond.

Just before she passed through the dining room door she glanced once more through the living room window, but everything seemed normal, just as before.

A boat with a cross? What on earth could Marci have been talking about? But whatever it was, it was gone now.

Or had never been there at all.