Free The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron Page A

pronounced Norwegian ancestry.
        "It's more than white man superstition, though. In the winter, thunderstorms boil down the valley, set fire to the high timber, tear the roofs off houses, and flood a hundred draws from here to Port Townsend." Dixie nodded to herself and sipped her drink, beginning to get into her narrative. "The wind blows . It lays its hammer on the waters of the lake, beats her until she bares rows of whitecap teeth. She's old too, that one; a deep, dark Paleolithic well of glacial water. She was here an eon before the Klallam settled along the valley in their huts and longhouses. The tribes never liked her. According to legend, the Klallam refused to paddle their canoes across Lake Crescent. This goes back to the ancient days when the Klallam were paddling just about everywhere. They believed the lake was full of demons who would drag them to bottom for trespassing."
        A gust rattled the windows and moaned in the chimney. Sparks flew around the grate and everybody but Dixie glanced into the shadowy corners of the room.
        "Man, you're getting good at this," Bernice said dryly.
        "Keep going!" Lourdes said. She'd pulled her sweater over her nose so that only her eyes were revealed.
        "I'd be quiet," Li-Hua said.
        Dixie chuckled and handed her glass to Li-Hua. Li-Hua poured her another three fingers of wine and passed it back. "Oh, the locals adore stories-the eerie ones, the true crime ones, the ones that poke at the unknowable; and they do love their gossip. Everybody, and I mean everybody, has a favorite. The most famous tale you'll hear about Lake Crescent concerns the murder of poor waitress Dolly Hanson. Of all the weird stories, the morbid campfire tales they tell the tourists on stormy nights around the hearth, The Lady of the Lake Murder is the one everybody remembers.
        "A tawdry piece of business, that saga. In the mid-'30s, the bar had grown into a popular resort for the rich townies and renamed Lake Crescent Lodge, although most of the locals stubbornly referred to it as Singer's Tavern. A few still do. According to legend, Dolly, who was Bernice's aunt, of course, had just gotten divorced from her third husband Hank on account of his philandering ways-"
        "-And the fact he beat her within an inch of her life whenever he got a snootful at the tavern," Bernice said.
        "Yes, yes," Dixie said. "On the morning of the big Singer's Christmas party of 1938, he strangled Dolly, tied some blocks to her and dumped her in the middle of the lake. The jerk went about his way as the resident merry widower of Port Angeles until he eventually moved to California. People suspected, people whispered, but Hank claimed his wife ran off to Alaska with a salesman-or a sailor, depending on who's telling the tale- and no one could prove otherwise."
        "Some fishermen found her in 1945, washed up directly below the lodge. That lake is deep and cold-there aren't any deeper or any colder in the continental US. The frigid alkaline water preserved Dolly pretty much fully intact. She'd turned to soap."
        "Soap? Like a soap carving, a sculpture?"
        "Yes indeed. The cold caused a chemical reaction that softens the body, yet keeps it intact to point. A weird sort of mummification."
        "That's freaky," Lourdes said.
        Dixie chuckled. "Say, Bernie-wasn't it Bob Hall, who identified her? Yeah…Hall. A barber by trade, and part time dentist, matched her dental records. The young lady's teeth were perfectly preserved, you see. That was curtains for old two-timing Hank. He was hanged in '49. That's just one incident. Plenty more where that came from."
        "More murders? More soap mummies?" Karla said.
        "I suppose there could be more corpses. Deep as she is, the lake would make a pretty convenient dump site. Folks are given to feuds here in the hills. A lot of people have disappeared from this end of the Peninsula over the