Under the Lake Page 9

  “A few days, a few weeks, who knows?” The doctor stabbed at him with the needle.

  “Jesus, what kind of prognosis is that?” Howell howled.

  “Best medical science can do, I’m afraid. I’d send you over to the local chiropractor for a little wrestling match, but I just sent him down to Atlanta for a laminectomy the other day.”

  “For what?”

  “Back surgery,” the doctor grinned. “Last resort, of course.” He scribbled something on a pad. “Take one of these every four hours for the pain. They’re a sort of artificial morphine, so don’t get too enthusiastic with them. Come and see me in four or five days if you’re not better, and we’ll give you another injection.”

  Howell hobbled out of the place, got the prescription filled, and stumbled into a booth at Bubba’s. The place was buzzing with locals in for mid-morning coffee, and after a moment the lawyer, Enda McCauliffe, plopped down across from him.

  “How’s it going, John?” he asked.

  “Just terrific, Mac,” Howell replied, popping one of the pain killers into his mouth and washing it down with coffee. “I’ve just come from the doctor’s, and I think I’m crippled for life.” He told the lawyer what had happened to him.

  “Well, that’s just awful,” McCauliffe commiserated. “You know what I’d do if I were you?”

  “Suicide?” Howell asked.

  McCauliffe shook his head and seemed to suppress a laugh. “Not yet, anyway. Mama Kelly.”

  “Mama Kelly?”

  The lawyer nodded. “The old lady has something of a reputation in these parts for healing – you know, warts, cross-eyed kids, the lame and the halt – that sort of thing. Of course, none of your better people would ever stoop to that.”

  Howell blinked at him. “You’re kidding, aren’t you? You’re not really suggesting that I do that.”

  “Seems to me you come under the heading of lame and halt, and anyway, you’ve had an invitation, haven’t you?” McCauliffe sipped his coffee and grinned a wicked little grin. “Couldn’t hurt.”

  “I don’t think I’m that bad off,” Howell replied. The pill was beginning to work, now, and he was feeling a little light-headed with it. “Don’t worry, I’ll tap-dance again.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ve seen folks down for months with that sort of thing, though. 'Course, being a writer, you make your living on your ass, anyway.“

  “With my mind, buddy.” Howell ordered some eggs and another cup of coffee. “Say, you’d have loved it up at my place last night. We had a regular seance up there, some people from across the lake and I.”

  “Oh?” McCauliffe looked both interested and wary.

  “Oh, sure,” Howell said. He told the lawyer about meeting the two couples on the lake and about their experience after dinner. He didn’t mention the girl at the window. As he spoke, McCauliffe’s expression began to change from interest to derision.

  Howell continued, “The bloody dining table, which must weigh two hundred pounds, actually spelled out a name – a word, anyway. Came right off the floor at one point. And this morning, all my player piano will play is ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’.”

  McCauliffe put down his coffee cup, suddenly irritable. “Oh, come off it, John, who’ve you been talking to?

  “I kid you not, Mac, that’s just the way it happened.”

  “What was the name or word the table spelled?”

  “Rabbit. As in bunny.”

  McCauliffe was still irritable. “Now look, John, you’ve had your fun, but this has gone far enough. I don’t want to talk about this any more.” He picked up his check and started to rise from the booth.

  Howell put a hand on his arm. “Look, Mac, I’m not telling you all this to get you riled. It honest to God happened, at least, I think it did. Could I make all this up?”

  McCauliffe slumped back into the booth and mopped his brow. “No,” he said cautiously. “No, you couldn’t make it up.”

  “Mac, is there something you’re not telling me? Has anybody else around here ever had a run-in with this sort of thing?”

  McCauliffe gazed over Howell’s shoulder through the window and out across the mountains. “Not for some years,” he said finally. “At least, not that I’ve heard about.”

  “Tell me,” Howell said, not entirely sure he wanted to know.

  McCauliffe looked back at him, then out the window again. His eyes seemed to go out of focus. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “True story, not a ghost story. As much of the truth as I know, anyway. As much as anybody knows, I guess.” He called to Bubba for another cup of coffee, and when it came, he sat back and started to talk.

  “I told you about the Irish community that used to live in the valley. My family was among them, Bo Scully’s, several others hereabouts. Well, just after the war, late ‘46 or early ’47 it was, I guess, Eric Sutherland started to put together the land for the lake, and, of course, that meant all of the valley. There was a lot of resistance in at first, and for a while, it looked as though Sutherland might not make it. Since it was a private, not a public project, he couldn’t take the land by eminent domain, he had to buy it outright. He had a couple of Atlanta banks behind him, though, a lot of money. One or two families capitulated, then, finally, the rest of them. All but one, a family called O’Coineen. They wouldn’t budge.”

  “I suppose Sutherland brought pressure to bear.”

  “Oh, he had been doing that all along. The local bank was with him, of course, and they held a lot of paper in the valley. The worst pressure on the O’Coineens came from the other families, though.”

  “Why was that? I mean, if they’d all held out in the beginning.”

  “Well, Sutherland had already paid them three or four times what their property was worth as farmland, and he was smart enough to offer them a hefty bonus beyond that – but only if they all sold. Sutherland was confident enough of the outcome to start building his dam. When the dam was nearly finished – this would have been early 1952 – the O’Coineens were the only holdouts, and things started to get nasty.”

  “Friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor,” Howell said.

  “Exactly. Donal O’Coineen’s barn was burned and some welldigging equipment destroyed – he had a welldigging business in addition to his farm. Things started to get rough for his child at school – there were two daughters; one of them had already graduated. Donal developed what I guess you’d call a siege mentality. He pulled the child out of school and wouldn’t let his wife shop in the town. They grew most of what they needed and he went over to Gainesville for the rest. There were rumors that Sutherland had offered them more than the others under the table, and that made things worse. The O’Coineens just pulled their heads in, like turtles, and refused to budge. Then Eric Sutherland closed the dam, and the water started to rise.”

  Howell sat up straight. “Jesus, how could he do that?”

  “Well, it was pretty high-handed, all right, but he had the signatures of all the landholders except O’Coineen, and they’d all been paid everything but the bonus. These people had allowed their homes and farm buildings to be pulled down and their timber cut; they’d found other farms and had money in their pockets. They’d scattered, of course; the old Irish community was gone. So Sutherland had the right to fill his lake right up to the road which was the boundary of O’Coineen’s property. The law prevented him from flooding the road and cutting O’Coineen off, but suppose there was some error in calculation on the part of the engineers? The roadbed was pretty high and formed a sort of earthen dam for O’Coineen’s property. After two or three weeks, the water on the one side of the road was actually higher than the level of his land, which fell away downhill from the road into a sort of hollow. That’s where his house was. He knew that if the roadbed caved in, he’d be flooded. And he still had his wife and daughters there, convinced, apparently, that they were all that was keeping Sutherland from letting the water rise any further. Things were getting pr
etty tense.”

  “So, what happened?”

  McCauliffe grinned; he was enjoying the storytelling, now. “What do you think happened?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Howell cried. “What happened?”

  “One of two things,” the lawyer said. “Some folks believe Eric Sutherland’s story, that he went out to the O’Coineen place one night and talked Donal into selling. O’Coineen signed a deed of transfer for his land and instructed Sutherland to put the money into his account at the bank. Then he took his wife and children and left the county that very night. The water continued its inexorable rise over the roadbed and flooded the farm.”

  “And the other thing?”

  “Other folks believe that Sutherland never saw O’Coineen. That the roadbed gave way and Donal O’Coineen, his wife, and.two daughters were drowned in the ensuing flood.”

  “So? Which of those two things happened?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “What do you mean, nobody knows? How could they not know?”

  “Because, in any case, the O’Coineen family was never seen again, not by anybody who knew them, anyway.”

  Howell was speechless for a moment. “What about the money? Didn’t O’Coineen take that?”

  “The money is still right down the street there, in the bank, drawing interest.”

  “You mean, then, that Eric Sutherland may be a murderer?”

  “I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that. A manslaughterer, maybe. Around here, your view on that depends on how close are your economic ties to Eric Sutherland.”

  Howell slumped back into his seat. “Jesus, that’s the most hair-raising thing I ever heard.”

  McCauliffe grinned maliciously. “You ain’t heard nothing, yet, John.”

  “There’s more?”

  The lawyer nodded. “The elder daughter was about my age, nineteen or twenty at the time – she was blind. Her name was Joyce.” The lawyer waited a moment for that to sink in.

  The hair on the back of John Howell’s neck began to move around.

  “The younger girl, who was twelve or thirteen, I guess, was named Kathleen.”

  Howell tried to speak but swallowed, hard, instead.

  McCauliffe took a sip of his coffee, put down the cup, and sat back. “And in the Irish language, me bucko,” he said with a sigh, “the name ‘O’Coineen’ means ‘rabbit.' “

  10

  Bo Scully drove from his office south along the lake shore. He tried breathing deeply to dissolve the knot that grew tighter in him with every mile. It was always this way, he thought, as the knot continued to form; it always would be, he supposed. He turned through the wrought-iron gates, which stood open to receive him.

  Their relationship had always been peculiar, he thought, since the very night Eric Sutherland had first spoken to him, as he limped off the field after a particularly bruising game in his junior year of high school. He had just turned seventeen. Sutherland had invited him to lunch the next day, and the event had been awkward for both of them. Sutherland had never married, had no immediate family; Bo was fatherless, so he had reckoned the man was simply extending a kindly hand to a fatherless boy. But there was nothing kindly about Sutherland, even when he was working hard to be hospitable. It had occurred to Bo that Sutherland might be queer, but there had never been any hint of that in their relationship, not since that first day, when they had eaten club sandwiches on the back terrace of the big house and talked stiffly of Bo’s football career.

  He saw Sutherland infrequently, though they talked on the phone more often, when Sutherland needed something or wanted something done. The summonses to the house were infrequent, a few times a year, not counting the big annual party, and there was always something specific and of importance to discuss, as there had been when Sutherland had suggested – nearly ordered – that Bo run for the dead sheriffs unexpired term. Bo wondered what it would be today.

  His heavy shoe struck the tiles of the front stoop with a hollow sound that somehow reminded Bo of the whole house. It was certainly well furnished, he thought, as the white-jacketed black man showed him into the house and down the hall to the study. But the house seemed unused, uninhabited by any real person. It might have been a photograph in a glossy magazine. Even the study, which he now entered, seemed to belong to some absent spirit rather than its owner, who had built it. Its order was too perfect, almost obsessive. Bo suspected that the leather-bound classics on the shelves had not been read, and he had never known Sutherland to use the expensive shotguns in the polished mahogany case. He thought that many of the things in the study might have belonged to Sutherland’s father, who Bo had never known. Sutherland nodded at a chair, and Bo sat in it. The servant noiselessly closed the door behind him.

  “You all right?” Sutherland offered a box of cigars.

  “I’m real good, Eric.” The man had insisted on being addressed by his Christian name ever since Bo had come back from Korea. Bo was the only person he knew who called him that, and Bo was not comfortable with it. He accepted the cigar; he thought it must be Cuban, though he had no way of knowing, since he despised cigars.

  Sutherland came to the point quickly, as he always did. “I think it’s time Mr. John Howell departed us,” he said.

  Bo stopped himself from objecting; first he wanted to know exactly what Sutherland meant by ‘depart.' He put the cigar in the ashtray next to him and left it there.

  “I want you to see to it,” Sutherland said.

  Bo leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. “Eric, I don’t think we should overreact to Howell.” He still didn’t have a firm grasp on Sutherland’s intentions, but he was worried by what the old man might mean.

  “He’s up here to spy, isn’t he?”

  “I’m not at all sure that he is,” Bo said, as calmly as he could manage. He thought that Howell probably was at the lake to spy, but not quite the sort of spying Sutherland had in mind, and he felt this was no moment to agree wholeheartedly with Sutherland. This felt very dangerous. “My best information was that he left his job some time back to write a book. He hasn’t worked for the paper for a long time, now.”

  “He knows them, though, and they know him. He’s just the sort of fellow they’d put up here if they were being sneaky, don’t you see that?”

  “Well, since he knocked an editor of the paper halfway across the newsroom when he left, I don’t know that I do think he’d be the sort they’d send.” He was trying to sound reasonable; he’d never seen Sutherland quite so worked up. “His name seems to be mud around that newspaper.”

  “Well, maybe he’s doing it on his own, then. Maybe he thinks he can work his way back into their good graces if he comes up with something here.”

  “Our information was that the paper was sending one of its reporters. It just doesn’t add up.” Bo thought it just might add up, but he was fighting his way out of a corner, now.

  Sutherland slapped his palm on the leather surface of the big desk. “Well just why in hell can’t they leave it alone, for God’s sake? It’s been nearly twenty-five years.”

  “Of course it has,” Bo said. “What could he possibly dig up that could be embarrassing after this long?”

  “Nearly twenty-five goddamn years,” Sutherland said, then sagged back into his chair.

  “Now, Eric, I don’t want you to worry about this,” Bo said, as soothingly as he could manage. “I’m keeping an eye on Howell, and so far there’s been nothing to be alarmed about.” That wasn’t true, but he didn’t want Sutherland alarmed. Sutherland alarmed was dangerous. “You just trust me to handle him; it’ll be all right, I promise you.” He wanted Sutherland calm for his own reasons. Anyway, Howell had probably saved his ass during that holdup, and he liked the man. “Let’s not overreact,” he said again.

  “I wish I’d never put that money in the bank,” Sutherland said. “It eats at me to this day.”

  “You did the best thing in the circumstances,” Bo replied. “You covere
d yourself. There might have been serious trouble if you hadn’t done that.”

  Sutherland sagged even further. “All right. You keep an eye on him. If there’s the slightest sign that he’s after something, I want to know about it, you hear?”

  “Why, sure, Eric, you just leave it to me.”

  Bo’s shirt was sticking to him when he left the house a few minutes later. He had to keep Sutherland happy; the man didn’t have an important heir, and Bo knew he was in line for something, maybe everything. God knew, the old man had brought it up often enough. John Howell might be a problem, or he might not be. Bo thought the best thing to do was wait. As a rule, he preferred waiting until he had to move. He still didn’t know what Sutherland’s intentions toward Howell had been. He had been afraid to ask. He didn’t want to know.

  Bo glanced at his watch as he left the house. Just four minutes to go. Sutherland had nearly kept him too long. He drove quickly out of the south side of town and pulled up at a telephone booth in the parking lot at Minnie Wilson’s convenience store. The phone was already ringing when he got to it. He snatched the instrument off the hook.

  “Yeah?”

  “That you?”

  “Yeah, I got your teletype.”

  “Don’t say that on the phone, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Sorry. What’s up?”

  “I’ve got a big one for you.”

  “When?”

  “Soon enough. They’re getting cranked up down south, now. A few weeks, maybe. It takes time to put together a big one.”

  “A big one means big at my end, then?”

  “Don’t get greedy, friend. You’ve been very well taken care of so far, haven’t you?”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “I think I can get you seventy-five, maybe eighty for this one. Trust me to deal for you.”

  “You’ve done okay by me so far. I’ll trust you.”

  “Okay, I just wanted you to know what’s in the works. We’ll be doing it as a training operation; there’ll be a bigger carrier involved than usual.”