Under the Lake Read online

  I’ll take you home again, Kathleen

  Across the ocean wild and wide

  To where your heart has ever been,

  Since first you were my bonnie bride.

  The roses all have left your cheek,

  I’ve watched them fade away and die

  Your voice is sad whenever you speak,

  And tears bedim your loving eyes.

  Oh, I will take you back, again,

  To where your heart will feel no pain,

  And when the fields are fresh and green,

  I’ll take you to your home again.

  By the time the albino finished, Howell was practically in tears from the beauty and sadness of it.

  “Your piano’s tuned,” the man called out.

  Howell roused himself from the deck chair and returned to the living room. The dog, Riley, was still lying on his back in front of the dying fire, snoring softly. “You sing and play very well,” Howell said to the albino.

  “Oh, God gives everybody some sort of talent, I guess. Mine’s making music. I play the guitar and the mandolin and the accordion and fiddle a bit, too. You ought to come down to one of the Saturday night dances at the community center sometime. Want to try the piano?”

  Howell sat down at the keyboard and played a few bars of “Lush Life”. “You like Duke Ellington?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” the albino replied. “That’s Billy Strayhorn’s tune, though. It’s hard to separate Ellington and Strayhorn; seems like one takes up where the other leaves off.”

  “Right. Say, I didn’t call you about tuning the piano, did I? I mean, my memory has been a little spotty lately, but…”

  The albino laughed. “Oh, no. Mama sent me. She said you needed the piano.”

  Now Howell knew why the albino looked familiar. “That was your brother who brought the firewood, wasn’t it?”

  The albino nodded. “That was Brian. Brian’s a little…” – he made a gesture – “but he’s a good lad. He liked bringing you the wood.”

  “He wouldn’t let me pay him for it. I wanted to…”

  “Oh, no, Mama wouldn’t have that.”

  “Now, look, I want to pay you for the piano tuning. You do do that for a living, don’t you?”

  “Yes, that and playing at the dances. Well, all right, I usually get twenty dollars for a tuning.”

  Howell pressed the money into his hand. “Listen, I don’t quite understand about ‘Mama’. Who is she?”

  “My mother.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Dermot Kelly.”

  Howell shook the hand. “Glad to meet you, Dermot. I’m John Howell. But how did she know I needed firewood and the piano tuned? Did Bo Scully tell her about me?”

  Dermot Kelly picked up his case and began to move toward the door. He didn’t seem to need assistance finding his way. “Mama and Bo Scully don’t have much to do with each other,” he said. “No, Mama just knows things other people don’t know. She’s been sick for a while, now, but she still has her moments.”

  Howell walked with Dermot to the door. “I’m afraid I don’t really understand this, but I’m grateful to her for sending you and Brian around. Will you thank her for me?”

  “Thank her yourself,” Dermot replied. “She wants to meet you, anyway. She says she’s been waiting for you for a long time.”

  Goose flesh rose on Howell’s skin. “Well, I’ll drop by and see her if she’s well enough. You said she has been sick?”

  “Yes, but she’ll be well enough when you come. We’re just a ways up the hill from the crossroads,” he said, pointing. “You’ll see the mailbox. Come any time.”

  “Thanks, I will. And thanks again for the tuning.”

  “Don’t mention it. Riley!”

  The dog, who had never stopped snoring, was instantly on his feet. He walked quickly to Dermot’s side, neatly avoiding the furniture. Together, the two of them walked down the stairs, down the short drive, and started up the road. Dermot moved slowly, but with some confidence.

  Howell watched them for a moment. Before they went into the trees, Dermot Kelly raised a hand and waved, as if he knew Howell was watching them. When they were gone, Howell went back into the house, still amazed at the pair. “Talk about the blind leading the blind!” he said aloud to himself.

  5

  As Howell turned right at the crossroads and headed for town, he looked up the hill and saw the Kelly mailbox at the roadside. Some how, he wasn’t ready to meet a sick old lady who knew when he needed firewood and piano tuning. Too bad she didn’t know that he was out of beer and booze, too, and send somebody around with that. Four days alone at the cabin had depleted his supplies of everything, so there was ample reason for a trip to town. He could always work over the weekend to make up for lost time.

  He found a parking space on Main Street; he could use one of Bubba’s cheeseburgers and a beer. The place was fairly crowded. “Sit over yonder with McCauliffe,” Bubba said, motioning toward a booth where a man ate alone.

  “You mind?” Howell asked the man, pointing to the empty seat.

  “Glad for the company,” the man said, sticking out his hand. “Enda McCauliffe, known to one and all as Mac. Sit yourself down.” McCauliffe was a slender, rumpled looking man somewhere in his forties, dressed in a wash-and-wear seersucker suit that had been washed too many times.

  Howell introduced himself. “How’s the, ah…?” he half asked, indicating the food on the plate before Mac McCauliffe.

  “Stuffed cabbage,” McCauliffe replied. “No worse than the pork chops, and a damn sight better than the chicken-fried steak. In fact,” he said loudly, glancing sideways at the approaching Bubba, “We’ve never been too sure around here from which animal the chicken-fried steak derives. It ain’t chicken, and it sure ain’t steak.”

  “Now, Mac,” Bubba cautioned, “don’t go knocking my cooking; you eat it most every day.”

  McCauliffe nodded. “The voice of experience. Bubba came to us from Texas,” McCauliffe said to Howell, “which will explain a lot as you get to know him, but not the origins of the chicken-fried steak – or, for that matter, one or two other bits of Western exotica which occasionally pop up on the menu.”

  McCauliffe had the characteristic mountain drawl of the local residents but spoke in different cadences, somehow. He was wearing a rumpled wash-and-wear blue suit, a blue shirt, and a necktie. Howell ordered a cheeseburger and a beer.

  “Well chosen,” McCauliffe said. “Not even Bubba can do much harm to a cheeseburger. What brings you to our parts, Mr. Howell? I know you from your journalistic endeavors, of course.”

  Howell gave what was becoming his standard explanation of his presence, one which everybody seemed to accept with a grain of salt. Nobody seemed willing to believe that he had actually come to Lake Sutherland to write a book. “Enda… that’s an Irish name, isn’t it?”

  “It is indeed. So’s McCauliffe”

  “Seems like I’ve run into a lot of Irish names around here – for Georgia, anyway.”

  “I expect you have. There are still a number of us scattered hereabouts.”

  “Still? Were there once more?”

  “There was a little community of us in the valley before it became the lake. A group that somehow ended up in Savannah instead of New York or Boston during the potato famine of the last century. They were hired right off the boat to work on the railroad up here, and eventually they bought some land in the valley and settled in. Their descendants lived in the valley for nearly a hundred years before the lake came. A very tight little community, they were.”

  “I saw a priest on Main Street the other day and thought that unusual.”

  “It would be in any other Georgia town of this size, I suppose. There were just enough Catholics in the valley to warrant one.”

  “He looked a little worse for the wear.”

  McCauliffe smiled and nodded. “Well, the Irish clergy have never held with the Protestant attitude toward drink, and I suppose Father Harr
y held with it less than most. Still, there was a time when he wasn’t always drunk. After the lake came, his parishoners scattered, and he was getting on a bit. The archdiocese pensioned him off. He’s past eighty, now.”

  “Remarkable that the booze hasn’t finished him off.”

  “Ah, me lad, you underestimate the resilience of an Irish constitution.”

  “Where is the Catholic church, then? I don’t think I’ve seen it in my travels.”

  “It’s under the lake,” McCauliffe said, wryly, “like a great many other things hereabouts.”

  “You’re the first person I’ve heard who seems less than enthusiastic about the lake,” Howell said. “It seems to have done a lot for the area.”

  “For a very small area,” McCauliffe replied. “And a very few people. I’m afraid that my lack of enthusiasm for the lake is reflected in my law practice. There are two lawyers in town, you see; there’s Swenson, who’s the attorney for the power company and Eric Sutherland and for the quality folk hereabouts; then there’s me.”

  “What sort of practice?” Howell asked, intrigued.

  “Whatever’s going. Drunk driving, the odd bootlegger, though that’s dying out, since liquor came to Sutherland. Terrible thing, legal booze. A lawyer could do very nicely in the bootlegging line a few years back. I do a will now and then, though most of my clients don’t have enough to bother with a will. And I sue Eric Sutherland and the power company for people who get mad enough. Not many of them about,” he grinned. “If you’re mad at Eric Sutherland, I’m the only game in town.”

  “Somehow it doesn’t sound very profitable to get mad at Eric Sutherland.”

  “A good rule of thumb,” the lawyer agreed. “You’ll fit right in around here.

  “Well, I don’t expect to be around long enough for that to matter. Say, do you know the Kelly family, out near where I’m staying?”

  McCauliffe nodded, but didn’t speak. He simply concentrated on the stuffed cabbage, staring at his plate.

  “They’ve been very nice to me; Brian brought around some firewood, and Dermot came and tuned the piano. Their mother apparently sent them around. I can’t imagine how she knew I needed those things.”

  McCauliffe stopped eating and looked at him. “Mama Kelly sent her boys to you?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  McCauliffe continued to stare blankly at him. “Jesus Christ,” he said, finally.

  Howell hardly knew how to reply to that. “Uh, how many Kellys are there?”

  “There’s the twins, Brian and Mary, they’re the youngest; Dermot is the oldest, and Leonie comes after him, I think. There were a couple of other kids who died in infancy. Their father, Patrick Kelly, has been dead for twenty years, I guess.”

  “Brian’s retarded, isn’t he?”

  McCauliffe resumed eating and nodded. “His twin, Mary, is, too, from all accounts. Dermot’s all right, except he’s an albino, of course. Leonie’s… Leonie’s very bright. She’s… like her mother, in some ways.“

  “What’s her mother like?”

  “She’s… unusual, I guess you’d say. After Patrick… passed on, Mama Kelly made her living for a long time – raised those children – as a sort of fortune teller. She’s been sick for a couple of years, now, though. Just hanging on, I hear.”

  “Dermot says she wants to meet me. I guess I should go by there and thank her for the wood.”

  McCauliffe stopped eating again. “John, let me give you some advice; you can take it or leave it.” He kept his voice low. “The Kellys make a lot of people around here… nervous, I guess you’d say. Eric Sutherland is prominent among them. A lot of people will have a piano tuner up here from Gainesville just to avoid using Dermot. You’re not going to endear yourself hereabouts if you have much to do with them. They… oh, Jesus, I’m sounding like some sort of snob. That’s not what I mean to convey at all.”

  “Well, just say it, Mac,” Howell replied. He was baffled.

  “Oh, shit, I suppose you may as well know about this. It’ll come up sooner or later. Mama Kelly was married to her husband…

  Howell laughed. “So…?”

  “I’m really screwing this up,” the lawyer said, shaking his head. “What I meant to say was, the parents, Patrick and Lorna – that’s Mama Kelly – were brother and sister.”

  It took a moment for this to sink in with Howell. “Jesus H. Christ! And they had how many kids? Why didn’t the law…?”

  “The valley was a very backwoods area for a long time, until the lake came. People just minded their own business. After the lake came, though, Eric Sutherland and some other prominent locals started making noises about doing something about it – arresting Patrick and Lorna, I guess, and putting the kids into an orphanage. Then… ”

  “So what stopped them?”

  “Then Patrick died – a tree he was cutting down fell on him – and it seemed better just to let things lie, I guess. There wouldn’t be any more children, and nobody would ever have adopted the others. Dermot was nearly grown, anyway, and Brian and Mary were… well, you’ve seen Brian. The whole thing just died down.”

  “What about the priest? You said he’d been around here for a long time. He would have had a lot of influence with Irish Catholics, wouldn’t he? Couldn’t he have stopped it in the beginning?”

  “John, what I’ve told you so far I know to be true. But this, I stress, is just rumor. Nobody knows for sure but Lorna Kelly.” He paused, seemed undecided as to whether to go on.

  “Well, come on, Mac,” Howell said, “you can’t just leave me hanging.”

  “It’s said that Father Harry married them in the church.”

  Now Howell was speechless. “Well,” he was finally able to say, leaning back in the booth and shaking his head, “every small town has its eccentrics, I guess, and its skeletons, too.”

  McCauliffe shrugged and returned his attention to the stuffed cabbage.

  6

  There was a parking ticket waiting for Howell on the windshield of the station wagon. He had put money in the meter, but his conversation with Mac McCauliffe had kept him at Bubba’s longer than he had anticipated. Five bucks down the drain for want of a dime. The back of the ticket said that it could be paid at the sheriffs office, opposite the courthouse.

  The sheriffs office was a storefront in the square. Inside, a radio operator and two female clerks sat in an open office area separated from the public by a counter. He recognized one of the women immediately. What was her name? She had been a features writer on the Constitution when he was there. She recognized him, too, and beat one of her coworkers to the counter. “Can I help you, sir?” She quickly held a finger to her lips., her face miming urgency. Heather MacDonald, that was her name. He had seen her byline in the paper not more than a few weeks before. “What can I do for you?” she asked, her back to the others.

  “Oh, I just want to pay a parking ticket.” Scotty, they called her. She was small, with short, dark hair; pretty. He had eyed her in the city room more than once.

  “May I see the ticket, please?” Her eyes were begging him to go along.

  He handed her the ticket. What the hell was she doing in Bo Scully’s office? He glanced over her shoulder. The sheriff was at his desk in a glassed-in office at the rear.

  “That’ll be five dollars,” she said, reaching for a receipt book. She palmed a note pad at the same time. “Name?”

  “John Howell.”

  “Address?”

  “The Denham White cottage on the north shore.”

  “RFD 1, that would be.” She quickly wrote something on the notepad and turned it around, then went back to the receipt. It read: “Just shut up and leave. I’ll contact you later.”

  “I guess so. I haven’t received any mail yet.” Howell looked up and saw Scully coming toward them. “Hi, Bo,” he said.

  She quickly crumpled the note and ripped off the receipt. “Here you are, sir.”

  “What brings you to see us, John?�
� Scully asked, stepping up to the counter.

  “Came to pay a fine; forgot about a parking meter.”

  Scully laughed. “Pity you didn’t see me instead of Miss Miller, here. You might have bribed me to fix it.”

  Howell laughed, too. Miss Miller? What the hell was going on here?

  “John, meet Scotty Miller, our latest addition here. She’s hell on the word processor. Scotty, this is John Howell, the famous newspaperman.”

  “The former newspaperman,” Howell said, shaking Scotty’s hand.

  “So he keeps telling me,” Scully said. “I was just on my way out, John; want to take a ride with me?”

  “Where you going?”

  “Just to make some rounds. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour, since you already contributed five bucks to the kitty.”

  “Sure. I’ve got to do some grocery shopping, though. Will we be long?”

  “An hour or two, depending on what’s happening.”

  “Fine. Nice to meet you, Scotty.”

  “Same here,” she replied, looking worriedly from Scully to Howell.

  The two men left together and got into Scully’s unmarked car. “You seen much of the area?” Scully asked.

  “Only what I saw driving up here. It’s been raining ever since, until today. This is the first time I’ve even been to town since that day we met.”

  The sheriff wound the car idly through the streets of the town. “Eric Sutherland hired an architect from Atlanta to design the look of the town,” he said, waving a hand at some store fronts. “Got the city council to pass a bill requiring any new building to conform.”

  “Looks nice,” Howell said. “Not too contrived. Simple, neat, lots of trees, too; bet it’s pretty in the fall.”

  “Lots of leaves to get raked in the fall,” Scully said.

  The sun struck the brick of the storefronts, giving them a glowing warmth.

  “Those are Harvard brick,” Scully said, seeming to read Howell’s mind. “Sutherland went to Harvard, and I guess he liked the brick the school was made out of. When the major building was going on, he imported them by the carload. To this day, if you want another kind of brick, even to build your own house with, you’ll have to special order it. We got two building supply outfits here, and both of them stock nothing but Harvard brick. I reckon there’s some Yankee brickmaker up in Massachusetts wondering what the hell we’re doing with so much Harvard brick down here.”