5.
 "Two men carried me out. One was Kurt and the other was Mac. Where are they?"
Chuck exchanged a mutually mistrustful stare with Tom.
Tom said: "Some of the locals were telling me a story about this Native American woman, long ago. Of course I don't believe a word of it, but it's imaginative all right."
Unlike you, dear, Jill thought, feeling sad for him.
"Then," Jill asked Chuck, "are Kurt and Mac a couple of Native American men? Could I talk with them?"
Chuck turned, with a last resentful glance at Tom, and opened the door. Before pulling it shut, he paused and appeared to consider whether he wanted to say something.
Jill, when she saw Chuck's look, knew that the world was not all surface and sunshine. She remembered now, half walking, half being carried out of the water while rain lashed all around, up a wharf where there had not been one, to the store that looked all different and wrong.
"You seen ghosts all right," Chuck said.
"Oh for crying out loud," Tom said, "this is all nonsense. I can't wait to get away from here."
Chuck said: "Years and years ago, when white people first came here, two men came to a village near here. A mother sent her young son to guide them. One of them killed the boy and threw the body in the river. The two men got in their canoe and let the current carry them away before the Native Americans could kill them. The woman went mad. Before she threw herself into the river to be with her son, she vowed she would kill them two white men. Nobody ever found her body or the boy's. But you know what? Kurt and Mac never made it back to civilization." Chuck began to smile. "Over the years now and then she's taken one or two people down. Oh yes, she's got them down there in the lake, no matter what the locals tell you tourists, she's got people down there. But you are the first one she's ever sent back. I can't figger why. Else you'd be down there in the deep water, white and clammy as a noodle, reachin' up to touch people's ankles when they go swimming where they ain't supposed to!"
With a last pugnacious grin and glance at Tom, the nurse walked away. The door settled shut with a gentle sigh. She was alone with Tom.
Jill closed her eyes. She wondered if the boy was down there; if the Native American woman had ever found him. Before opening her eyes, she tried hard to find the least painful words in which to tell Tom she wanted a legal separation from him.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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