It had been a long and tiring day. Four hundred and some odd miles, the last thirty of which seemed to have taken forever. Between the two of them, they had given voice to their impatience half a dozen times before they finally pulled in behind their cottage on Crooked Lake.
“Now we can start complaining about what a pain unpacking is,” Bill Claymore said. His tone of voice made it clear that he didn’t much care for the task of lugging suitcases and boxes of staples and what they thought of as summer stuff into the cottage. It was always like this, he thought. They enjoyed the lake once they got there and settled in, but getting there and settling in was always another matter.
It was the 5th of May, and it was still chilly. In fact it was downright cold. They had debated postponing opening the cottage until Memorial Day weekend, but Bill was anxious to get in some fishing before the summer crowd arrived and Helen’s term as president of her book club had come to an end in April. So here they were, nearly an eight hour drive from their home in New Jersey, contemplating a cottage which had been closed since the previous September. A cottage which would be every bit as cold inside as it was outside. A cottage whose refrigerator and cupboards would be bare, except for odds and ends of spices and sacks of flour and sugar, tightly sealed to frustrate the mice which seemed to find their way into the place during the long months which separated one summer from the next.
Tomorrow they would stock the larder. Today they faced the task of unloading the car, turning on the water and electricity, and checking to see what if any damage winter snows and winds had done to The Summer House. The Summer House. A weathered wooden sign with those words on it hung above the back door, telling them that they were back at the lake. Bill hated the name. It was so unimaginative, so unclever. Why hadn’t the family accepted his suggestion that the cottage be called Wanderlust, or Jersey on the Lake, or Serendipity? But he had been outvoted, not that any of the others had a better idea. The Summer House had become the default choice.
Bill popped the trunk while Helen gathered up an armful of books from the back seat. He set the two suitcases down on the back porch and fished in his pocket for the keys. It was 6:20 in the evening. The sky was blanketed by clouds, the early evening light already dim.
“Why don’t you just take it easy,” Bill said. “I’ll flip the circuit breakers and then I’ll finish unloading the car. We can put things away tomorrow.”
She gave him no argument. The lights came on, and in fifteen minutes he had moved everything from the car to the living room and turned his attention to the task of heating some water for tea. But of course there was no water. Like many of the residents along the lake, the Claymores drew their water from the lake, which meant shutting down the pipes in the fall and opening them up in the spring. It was a familiar ritual, necessitated by the fact that the pipes would otherwise freeze and burst during the cold winters typical of upstate New York.
“I’ve got to go down and open the pipes,” he announced. “Just give me a few minutes, and we’ll have some tea.”
And toilets that flush, he thought.
The task required a trip to the pump room, a semi-finished basement with a dirt floor, a maze of pipes, and a number of valves whose function he had mastered over the course of several frustrating summers. Bill smiled to himself, recalling that their youngest son, Barry, had been afraid of it as a little boy. Heaven knew what creatures he thought lurked down there, but it was not until he was into his early teens that he had cautiously ventured down the steps and into the dreaded pump room.
Bill flicked on the hall light and opened the door to the basement. He thought he detected a strange odor. It was not strong, but it seemed different from the usual musty damp smell he had come to associate with the pump room. He turned on the flashlight as he made his way down the stairs, shining the beam around the floor, expecting to see a dead mouse or some other small animal that had somehow made its way into the room and expired there over the long winter.
There may have been a dead mouse in the pump room, but Bill Claymore was quickly aware that what he was looking at was much larger and more shocking than a mere mouse. There on the dirt floor, folded into an awkward sitting position against the far wall, was a human being. A woman, by the look of things. And it was doubtful that she was sleeping, not in this cold room, not in a cottage which had been locked up since the previous Labor Day weekend. He had had no experience with such things, but he was as certain as he had been about anything in his life that there was a dead woman in The Summer House.
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