A cool wind whipped over the prairie and curled around her body. Kris pulled stray auburn locks from her face and tucked them behind her ear. She looked down at the front tire. The metal rim rested on deflated rubber. A flap of black tread dangled from an open wound near the top of the tire.
Like Jonah’s ear, dangling from the side of his head.
Her legs began to tremble. The tremors worked their way up her torso and into her shoulders. Her body quaked.
She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nose. She could smell the Kansas countryside: the ripe green wheat; the powdery earth of the dirt shoulder; the harsh bite of burned rubber still lingering in the air.
It’s just a flat tire, she reminded herself.
Her body calmed. She opened her eyes again.
The moon had disappeared behind a thick layer of clouds. Even the stars seemed to have retreated into the black sky. The ground below her was gone. She was floating in an abyss.
Kris Barlow stared at the point where the headlights lost their battle with the dark and the night consumed them. She had to believe there was a road in that void beyond the headlight beams. She needed the road to be there.
Because she could not go back.
Not yet.
Not yet.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SOUND OF the car had changed. The chorus of tires now had a soprano, as the spare tire—a compact donut whose tread was half the width of the others—worked double time in its frantic effort to keep up.
Kris glanced down at the speedometer. A sticker affixed to the sidewall of the donut had warned not to push it past fifty miles per hour, but only when the needle was edging closer to seventy did she ease up on the accelerator.
She could feel her destination drawing her forward into the darkness like a magnet.
In her chest, something fluttered, like the tickle of feathers. It was as if the Jeep had suddenly dropped down a steep hill, even though the road before her was as straight and level as the last hundred miles.
It was the same sensation she had felt when she woke two nights before, her body slick with cold sweat.
Filling her mind had been a perfect image of the house. It could not have been more clear if someone had held a photograph before her eyes. Eventually the house faded, her eyelids drooped, and Kris fell back asleep. But even in the morning, she could not shake the residual image, burned like a nuclear shadow into her brain.
The house. Surrounded on both sides by trees. The blue sky reflected in its windows. The shimmer of sunlight on the lake just down the steep slope of the backyard.
It had been a week since they lowered Jonah into the ground. In that week, Sadie had not cried. She had remained silent, choosing instead to communicate through simple nods and shakes of her head.
Kris had cried, alone in her bed at night. She had clamped her hands over her mouth, trying to muffle the sounds, hoping Sadie was fast asleep. First she had cried out of sadness, then anger, then loneliness as she realized this was the rest of her life.
When she had slept, she dreamed of a deep black hole in the earth, of staring into that darkness as if waiting for something to emerge. She knew something was down there. She did not want to be near when it came roaring out of the blackness, and yet she could not look away. She stared into the impenetrable depths, fully aware that the thing down there in the shadows was staring back with wide, unblinking eyes, its lips curled over slick, wet teeth. And then the image of the house had reappeared, and Kris no longer felt like crying. She no longer worried about the thing in the hole in the earth.
The next morning, she had dragged the large, black trash barrel in from the garage and began clearing the refrigerator of the leftovers from Jonah’s wake—trays of hardening cheeses and drying meats, aluminum pans of gelatinous pasta, drawers of wilted lettuce and shriveled carrot and cucumber slices.
She remembered their faces, the family and friends who had stopped by to offer condolences. The pity didn’t bother her; she had expected that. Nor did the morbid curiosity of those who came simply to see how a middle-aged woman dealt with the death of her husband. No, the one thing she had not prepared herself for was the hint of accusation in some of their eyes. She had not thought they would choose sides. And yet a few of them—not many, but enough to convince her it was not coincidence—smiled with narrowed eyes that said, You brought this on yourself. They thought they had accomplished something by judging her, by gloating in the face of her pain.
But they no longer mattered. There was the house, and the house called for her to return. It was an opportunity to heal. It was hope.
School was over by then, and Sadie had missed the last few days of her second-grade year. So when Kris announced that they would be going away for a couple months, her silent little girl simply shrugged. Then Sadie returned to her bedroom, where she buried her face in her pillow, as if hoping that when she opened her eyes, the illusion of happiness she had known since birth would be restored.
This is a good idea, Kris had told herself. The house is exactly what we need.
She waited for the second voice to speak. It always did, especially when she felt conviction. It spoke in that irritatingly unsure tone, as if it felt a sense of purpose in casting doubt. It was only a fleeting moment, and then, just as she had expected, Timid Kris worked a fissure into the peace like water in a stone, splitting it with her favorite word: But.
But … this is her home. She might be better off here, with her friends.
They’ll only remind her. They won’t let her move on, Kris shot back.
In the pitch black, far in the recesses of her mind, something squeaked: a tiny door creaking open, just a crack, enough to let that taunting third voice through. Her shadow voice. From behind that door, Shadow Kris purred, It doesn’t matter where you go. Her daddy’s dead. And what if, God-forbid, something happens to you? What then? Sadie will be alone. All alone. All alone …
Kris squinted as she imagined forcing that little door shut. Even then, she could still hear the soft scratching of nails against its far side and the muffled whisper of the truths she wished were lies.
We’re going, Kris had thought. We have to go.
No sooner had she made this mental declaration than she was overcome by a sense of dread. The house might not be available.
Not long after her mother’s death, Kris’s father had made it available for rent. They had become a family of two, and a trip to the lake for summer vacation no longer held a sense of release. Besides, Dad was spending more and more time in his woodworking shop behind the garage, and Kris was often out with her friends, riding bikes along Sycamore Creek or hanging out in the empty bleachers at the middle-school football field. When she pedaled into the garage each evening, she could still smell the earthy odor of sawdust and whiskey in the air.
A real estate agent in Pacington had handled the day-to-day—drawing up the contracts, supplying keys to renters, hiring the cleaning crew. And so it went, as far as Kris knew, the modest two-story house on the rocky slope overlooking Lost Lake’s crystal-clear waters abandoned to a revolving door of strangers.
When her father finally passed away from cirrhosis a year ago, it had occurred to Kris that she should phone the agent, if for no other reason than to make sure the rent money wasn’t going straight into his pocket. But she never made that call.
Now the idea of spending the summer at the lake house had taken root in her mind, and she knew she could no longer ignore it.