“Same goes for you,” Heil said. “Trap more snappers, but leave them in their cages. Let everybody swim and fish and enjoy themselves. We can pick up the search in the off-hours.” He paused. “Although I agree, there’s probably not much left of her to find.”
Kevin stepped inside the bar as the rumble of the crowd subsided. Jo immediately went over to him. She grabbed his hand and led him down the stairs to the parking lot. She wanted to know if he had found Caroline, but she couldn’t ask him here, not with Heil and the fishermen within earshot.
“Did you find her?” she asked once they were outside and alone.
“No.” He stepped closer to her. He smelled wet like the rain mixed with cigarette smoke, but underneath it all, she smelled the soap on his skin, a scent unique to him. “Would you please tell me what’s going on,” he said.
“Caroline opened Stimpy’s traps and let the snappers out.”
“That doesn’t sound like something she would do.”
“I know. But I’m pretty sure she did.”
“Come on, why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand her sometimes. Maybe she thought it was cruel to capture them.” Caroline may have believed the ends didn’t justify the means, and although Jo was frustrated with her daughter, she also couldn’t help but feel proud of her too. In some ways Caroline was right. It was brutal both to the turtles, the ones who got tangled in the lines, and to the little girl now thought of as bait. It was a harsh reality. Sometimes life was cruel.
Kevin nodded.
She motioned to the bar, to where Heil and the group of men plotted inside. “They want to give up the search,” she said. “And the sheriff”—she kept her voice low—“he was asking some of the men questions … you know, about Billy.”
She waited for him to say something, anything, but he remained quiet. He always acted crazy whenever she brought up Billy. He wouldn’t even look at her.
Then he said, “Why don’t you go see if Caroline is back at the cabin with Gram? I’ll find out what’s going on inside.” He took the stairs two at a time.
She looked across the parking lot, spotting Sheriff Borg and Patricia, and then turned her gaze to the lake and the lone watercraft with the last three men from the recovery team.
She raced up the hill to Lake Road and the cabin.
* * *
Jo pushed open the door to the screened-in porch. Inside she found Caroline and Gram sitting on the porch swing with a photo album opened in their laps. Gram exchanged a look with Jo and shook her head: a motion that Jo understood to mean that Gram didn’t want her to confront her daughter. She wanted her to keep quiet. But since when did Jo listen to Gram?
“Caroline, where have you been?” She crossed her arms and looked down at the flip-flops on her daughter’s feet.
“I went for a bike ride,” Caroline said, and avoided looking at Jo in an attempt to hide her lying eyes.
Jo could always tell when Caroline was lying. She was terrible at hiding her emotions. Her face gave her away every time. All Jo had to do was look at her daughter to know what she was feeling on the inside. She suspected it had to do with her age and innocence. Thank goodness, her daughter at least had that.
“You wore flip-flops to ride your bike? Where are your sneakers?” she asked.
“I couldn’t find them.”
“Because they were covered in mud and Gram had to throw them away. Do you want to tell me how they got so dirty?”
“I don’t know.” Caroline stretched out the last word sounding like a whiny guilty child.
“Please look at me,” Jo said. “And tell me you didn’t sneak out of your room last night and mess with Stimpy’s traps.”
Caroline dipped her head and hid her face under the visor of her baseball cap. “I didn’t,” she said in the same whiny guilty voice.
“That’s enough,” Gram said. “She said she had nothing to do with releasing those snappers, and I believe her.”
Over the top of Caroline’s lowered head, Jo read Gram’s lips. Leave her alone.
Jo looked away. So Gram was taking Caroline’s side. Not once in all of Jo’s life had Gram ever stuck up for her. Not when she had been a pregnant teenager, a time when she had needed her most. And not now, when Gram clearly understood that Caroline had broken a law. For an instant Jo felt envious of her own daughter, and at the same time she felt petty and childish, too.
“Who’s this?” Caroline asked, and pointed to a photograph in the album.
Gram looked down through the reading glasses she had perched on the tip of her nose. “I’m not sure,” she said.
They both ignored Jo at this point. It took everything Jo had not to yell that she was her mother, demand Caroline answer her questions, but she happened to glimpse at the colored photo and did a double-take. It was a picture of Billy at his cabin. He was holding up a lake trout. Jo had taken the picture. Dee Dee was in the shot, along with a little girl Jo couldn’t place.
“Where did you get these?” she asked, but she already knew the answer. They were stored in the back closet all these years, the one Gram had finally decided to clean out.
Caroline kept her finger on the little girl in the photo. “She looks like Sara, the little girl who drowned.” She looked up at Jo, a little frightened.
“Oh my god,” Jo said. “That’s not Sara, that’s Pattie Dugan.” Patricia. “Dee Dee used to babysit Pattie every summer. Pattie is Sara’s mother.”
“I’ll be,” Gram said. “I remember her parents, Bob and Jean. They rented the Sparrow for many summers. Nice people. Good people.”
Good people meant lake people, regulars who were accepted in the association and community. It meant Pattie had been one of them this entire time. Jo touched her neck and throat.
Gram continued. “But they stopped coming when Bob lost his job. I heard later they divorced,” she said. “But that’s all lake rumors. I don’t know if any of that is true.”
Jo had to sit down, and she plopped onto a wicker rocking chair across from Caroline and Gram and the photo. It wasn’t the shock of seeing a picture of Billy that made her knees weak, although that was a part of it. It was the surprise to find out she had known who Patricia was all along. Patricia Starr was little Pattie Dugan.
Pattie must’ve been nine or ten years old in the photograph. It was no wonder Jo didn’t recognize her now that she was an adult. It all seemed logical except the part about Billy.
Was it possible Patricia, Pattie, didn’t know Billy had drowned that summer?
Jo tried to think if she had seen Pattie in the summers since then, but how could she be sure? Jo had only been able to stay with Gram for a couple of days at a time before taking off. She hadn’t spent an entire summer at the lake since she was sixteen.
“Do you remember what summer they stopped coming?” she asked Gram.
“My goodness, I’d have to think about it. I’m not sure.”
Jo didn’t like the feeling that crept up her spine.
“This changes everything,” she said. “It’s Pattie’s little girl out there. She’s one of us. They must not know.” She was referring to the lake association and even Sheriff Borg. “Heil will have to continue searching. He can’t leave a regular out there.”
The logic was twisted but true. A first-timer, an unknown without any attachment to the lake community, someone who didn’t contribute year after year to help line the pockets of Heil and the locals, wouldn’t be treated the same. If the lake people had any rules—hell, if they had any conscience at all—it was their unwavering loyalty to their own kind. They may have reopened the beach when Billy had drowned, but they had never stopped searching or limiting their search like they planned to do with Sara. This was because Billy was one of them and Sara wasn’t, but now it seemed as though she was.