Locked Doors

2

ON the same Friday evening, Elizabeth Lancing lay in the grass at her home in Davidson, North Carolina, watching her children roughhouse in the autumn-cooled waters of Lake Norman.

Her husband Walter was on her mind.

Tomorrow would have been their seventeenth anniversary.

Pushing against her thighs, she rose and strolled barefoot down to the shore.

Jenna had wrangled John David in a headlock and was trying to dunk her younger stronger brother as their mother walked the length of the pier.

Beth sat down at the end where steps descended into the water.

She moved her fingers through wavy carbonblack hair just long enough to graze her shoulders. Her fingertips traced the lines these last brutal years had channeled into her face.

Beth knew she was plain. That was fine. She’d been plain her whole life.

What wasn’t fine was having the hard countenance of a fifty-year-old when she’d just turned thirty-eight. Lately she’d noticed how lived-in she looked. If Walter were still here maybe what few looks she had wouldn’t be deserting her.

She rolled her jeans up to her knees.

A rogue jet ski skimmed across the middle of the lake, invisible save for its brief intersection with a streak of moonlit water.

Beth’s feet slid into the liquid steel, touching the algae-slimed wood of the first submerged step.

It was a chilly night and she rubbed her bare arms, thinking, October is the cruelest month. Darling, has it been seven years?

In one week Beth would have to contend with another anniversary-this coming Halloween night would mark seven years since Walter’s disappearance.

The writer and murderer Andrew Thomas had been a close friend of her husband. Andrew’s old house still stood in the trees on the opposite side of the cove. Someone had taken up residence there in the last year and it was strange to see those lights across the lake again.

The circumstances attending Walter’s disappearance had grown no less bizarre or mystifying through the passage of seven years.

On a cold and wet Halloween night in 1996, he’d sat Beth down at the kitchen table and informed her that their family was in terrible danger.

He’d told her to take the kids away.

Refused to explain what was wrong.

Said all that mattered was getting Jenna and John David out of the house immediately.

She could still remember her husband’s eyes that night, carrying a component she’d not seen in them before-real fear.

Out beyond the steps, bubbles broke the surface and the water-slicked head of Jenna blossomed out of the lake.

My last image of my love-I see Walter in the rearview mirror as I drive away with our children into the rainy Halloween darkness. He is standing on the front porch signing “I love you,” his hands held high in the orange porchlight.

She never saw Walter again.

His white Cadillac was found two weeks later in Woodside, Vermont, parked near a dumpster, the driver seat slathered in his blood.

Beth knew in her heart that Andrew Thomas had killed her husband.

She could not begin to fathom why.

“Come in, Mom!”

Beth descended two more steps, the water now at her knees.

“It’s too cold, sweetie.”

“You’re such a wimp,” Jenna taunted, treading toward the steps. “I might just pull you in.”

“Oh no you won’t.”

Jenna’s head disappeared and Beth climbed back up onto the pier, smiling as she scanned the water.

“I see you!” she yelled though she couldn’t. “I see-”

Wet arms wrapped around her own and Beth screamed.

“Got you,” John David said. “You’re going in.”

“No, J.D.,” Beth pleaded as he muscled her toward the edge. Though only a prepubescent boy of eleven he was strong and quick. “I’m your mother and I am telling you that if you push me into that water I’ll ground you forever. Is it worth it?”

John David sighed and let go.

Beth stepped away from the edge and faced her son, thinking, You’ll be taller than me in two years.

Beads of water glistened on his hairless littleboy chest.

“Now I want to tell you something,” she said with convincing parental sternness. “You listening to me?”

“Yes ma’am.”

His voice was still high, at least a year from turning.

“I want to tell you…this!”

Beth shoved him off the pier and he screamed as he hit the water. She laughed, raised her hands in victory, and shouted, “Never underestimate the Mom!”

As John David bemoaned the injustice Jenna jerked him underwater by his ankles. The ripples made by the jet ski had begun to lap against the beams of the pier.

“I’m going in!” Beth yelled. “Don’t stay out long!”

“Come on, Mom, it’s Friday night!”

Walking back up the pier, she acknowledged this interval of peace-her children had touched her; what else mattered?

When she reached the cool grass she glanced back at her kids, then on across the lake at the quarter mile of shoreline where the monster used to live.

She’d received a letter from Andrew Thomas after Walter’s car turned up in Vermont.

As she walked into the house to fix herself a drink and look through her wedding album, the words of that thing echoed in her head:

Dear Beth,

Before I begin, please know that I did not murder my mother. And don’t believe what you read in the papers. I say this only to qualify what I have to tell you about your husband. Walter is dead, Beth, and it’s my fault, and I am so, so sorry. I want you to know that he died protecting you and Jenna and John David, and he did not suffer. Also know that because of his efforts, you and the children are safe. He’s buried in a secluded grove of pines in the Vermont countryside. I wish I could personally deliver this news to you but I have to disappear now. I hope you understand. I’m not an evil person, Beth. I tried to make the right choices. I’m going to keep on trying to make the right choices. But evil is alive and well in the world. And sometimes all we can do is not enough.

Andy