Free Echo Lake: A Novel by Letitia Trent

water and he imagined the lake swallowing it up and letting it rest down at the bottom, where the yellow fog came from.
    He walked back up the path to John’s without any trouble. Inside, the room was just as he’d left it. How long had he been gone? He didn’t know how far it had been to the woman’s house, how long he’d stayed. Already, his memory was fading. The headache was like a buzzing television, a sound that drowned out his memory of the events or images. He remembered the rock, sharp against his knee, and how the smooth side fit perfectly in his hand.
    The television was still on, but now it showed an infomercial for a bottle of pills. A number flashed across the screen and a man with teeth as bright as the concentrated light of a flashlight (how did he get the one in his hands? Billy thought) smiled and his mouth moved. Billy lay back down in his spot, curled his body into a ball, and fell asleep.
    Shannon Dawkins was found four days later. She was a loner, a little strange, people said, and had been missing from work for three days before anyone came out to see how she was. She lived in the country, far out even for Heartshorne, and her parents were used to not hearing from her for long stretches of time. She’d had trouble with drugs when she was a teenager, and she hadn’t been quite right since then. But she was quiet and kept to herself and worked at the Dollar Tree fifty hours a week from Monday through Saturday.
    The sheriff found her in the front yard of her trailer. He had to shoo away the birds, who’d ripped holes in the thin white fabric of her nightdress and had pecked holes into her scalp, leaving her hair scattered across the lawn.
    By the time her body was found, John and his friends had cleared out. Billy had seen blood underneath his fingernails when he woke that morning.
    Fuck, he said. How much did I drink?
    John laughed. You had your share.
    I think I must have scratched myself in my sleep, he said. Or maybe that girl, Judy or Claire or whoever, the one I was sleeping next to.
    He remembered dreaming of a woman in white who had led him down to the edge of Echo Lake and had tried to drown him in yellow, soupy water.
     
     
    8
     
    Emily repainted the walls a softer white than the bright bluish white they’d been before and had the carpet torn up, revealing real wood floors that needed only to be polished and finished. When the carpets were gone, Frannie seemed gone, or at least the image of her death had faded. Emily was glad she had never met the woman—it would have been that much more difficult to live in the house if she’d had a face to match with the name.
    She had called the police station and inquired about Frannie’s death. It was unsolved, but deemed a random act of violence, unrelatd to any of the other recent deaths.
    The other ones are probably drug-related, the woman who had covered the case said. And Ms. Collins’ death could be related to drugs, too, though not by any fault of her own; sometimes meth heads, looking for money or drugs or simply out of their minds, do things like this. It isn’t common, but I’d get your locks re-done, your windows secured, all of that. Otherwise, I’d say you are in no more danger than anyone else.
    The news didn’t comfort Emily, but at least she knew what to do about it. She had the windows reinforced, the locks changed. Every night, she shut the house up tight except for her second-floor bedroom window.
    Despite what had happened there, the house was becoming hers. And she had to make it hers, had to stay, because she had nowhere else to go. She’d considered leaving after the church meeting, had told herself that she’d just go back to Columbus, where at least she had friends from work, or more accurately acquaintances that she had once called friends. Maybe she could get her old job back if the position hadn’t been filled already. She imagined herself going back to the office after buying a new black skirt and button-up