The Lady of the Lake

By R. E. Braczyk

In the summer of 1954, fourteen-year-old Ted Samulski is yearning for the kind of adventure that movies and books seem to promise, but nothing ever happens in his hometown of Slaterville, Massachusetts.
He and his friends Buzzy and Zolly head off on a camping trip to explore a remote part of Great Mashpaug Lake. They think they are alone, but their discovery of a sunken treasure reveals that someone is watching and listening.
Bringing their find to the surface sets off events that launch them on a desperate run for their lives through night woods and even darker swamps. Stories both ancient and modern converge as hidden sins are revisited, old transgressions are reconciled and events from the distant past reach out to shape lives in the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475974010

R. E. Braczyk

R. E. Braczyk graduated from Boston University and is the recipient of the Greer Prize and the Daniel Chester French Medal. He divides his time between New York City and Westport, Connecticut.

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THE LADY OF THE LAKE

Copyright © 2013 R. E. Braczyk.

Cover photo: Monica Bernier 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7400-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7401-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013902496

iUniverse rev. date: 07/29/2015

Contents

Chapter 1 Dawnland

Chapter 2 The Lake Bottom

Chapter 3 Home

Chapter 4 Skunk Island

Chapter 5 Trail of Events

Chapter 6 The Lady

Chapter 7 Herrod’s Swamp

Chapter 8 Abduction

Chapter 9 Cadman Oliver

Chapter 10 The Chase

Chapter 11 Reconciled

Chapter 12 Tell It … Tell It Again

Chapter 13 What Followed

Chapter 14 1962

Chapter 15 2004

To the people of South Central New England

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to all my early readers—Sharyn Finnegan, Bell Adler, Paul Budzynkiewicz, Craig Becker, Lisa Paddock, and my daughters, Maxine and Julia.

Thanks to Brian Emery for his help with the graphics.

Thank you to the people at iUniverse, who made it all as painless as possible.

Most of all, a profound thank-you to my wife, Monica, whose support and encouragement has meant everything.

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CHAPTER 1

Dawnland

A n unlined asphalt strip ran due east from the state highway onto a narrow arm of gravel that reached out into Great Mashpaug Lake. At first, Breezy Point Road, as it was known, sloped gently for a hundred yards between unmown fields, and then it crossed an abandoned railbed to level out on the natural isthmus that was as narrow as a causeway. Minutes before sunrise, the cool night air drew billows of fog from the warm lake water, obscuring vast cedar swamps and open ponds to the north and south.

By noon, the August sun would bake the tar blistering hot, but in the minutes before sunrise, fourteen-year-old Ted Samulski could walk barefoot right down the middle of the road. Slim, with sandy hair and dark brown eyes that spoke of his Middle European origins, he was dressed in the jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers that were his uniform for the season. Except for a bathing suit and Sunday clothes, he made no wardrobe decisions between the last day of school in June and the start of the next school year in early September. At the moment, he had his arms crossed tightly over his chest and was holding a sneaker in each hand. His head was bent in concentration, and his usual energetic stride was subdued. Ted was proceeding with deliberate steps, setting one bare foot down directly in front of the other. The usual feverish flow of his thinking was also in check as he self-consciously rolled his gait—heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe—as if walking some imagined tightrope. He looked neither right nor left; his full attention was focused, through the soles of his feet, into the ground.

As with so many small-town kids, what he knew from school, his own reading, and—most of all—movies served only to inform him that grand and powerful events happen everywhere in the world except here in Slaterville, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1954. What he yearned for was a castle in Wales or Roman ruins to explore. What he was doing at the moment was making the best of what was at hand.

Ted had read somewhere that Indians walked in this manner, one foot directly in front of the other, to minimize their tracks. He put that information together with the notion that many modern roads followed old wagon tracks, and that those tracks overlaid Indian trails, which in turn had overlaid ancient game paths. Long before his relatives had come to work in the factories, Nipmuck, Pequot, and Mohawk had known Great Mashpaug Lake as a fishing ground and sacred meeting place. They called their home here in Eastern New England Dawnland, and rumor had it that there had once been an Indian graveyard out on the point where Ted was now headed. Certainly, he concluded, natives must have passed along this very bottleneck of land in their travels. He could picture them in his mind. What he was trying to do just then was feel with his own naked feet the echoes of those remote footfalls. For the better part of a mile he proceeded in this manner, ignoring the dawn chorus of birds and the sudden glow in the mist as the sun broke the horizon. He worked to screen out any distractions and let in only the faint vibrations that the earth might have preserved. Perhaps the morning light would somehow stimulate things.

Ted was not concerned about traffic. He knew from experience that the wet, foggy air that surrounded him carried sound much better than dry air, and that he would hear a car coming a mile off. In those days, few fishermen bothered to make the trip this far from town, and after all, only one person lived out this way. Then, too, it was Monday. Everybody in Slaterville was at work. He proceeded in his odd fashion past pine groves and stands of hardwoods that grew dense as the peninsula widened. The road eventually began to slope up and came to a fork that wasn’t a divergence at all but two ends of a large loop. He chose neither branch. Instead, he headed straight off the pavement out across the large grassy oval in the middle. Most of this open space was dedicated to a sad-looking baseball field that had no baselines or benches and a pitcher’s mound that was worn into a shallow pit. A flimsy backstop pulled together from scrap lumber, rough poles, and chicken wire leaned awkwardly behind home plate on his right, at the edge of the road. There had been an attempt to improve it with a coat of green paint, but that only succeeded in making the thing look like some giant dead bug tangled in a web. The dew on the long outfield grass shocked Ted’s bare feet, snapping him out of his trance. For a moment, he wondered if he had actually felt anything on his probing walk.

Just beyond the diamond, across the road on his left, was a large, low wooden shed facing north, out onto Middle Pond. Elevated on pilings, with screens all around, the building appeared to hover, so that Ted could see both beneath it and through it to the lake beyond. The outside was painted white, and it had a vast green shingle roof ridged by a thirty-foot-long white sign with black lettering announcing Breezy Point Shore Dining. Both ends of the sign were capped with the familiar red enamel disks advertising Coca-Cola in its trademark script. The interior of the so-called pavilion was unfinished pine. The structure was a shell meant only for summer use, rented out for the occasional company picnic, wedding, or clambake.

Ted marched from left field straight across the first-base line and the road, out onto a wide band of grass that seemed to end in sky. He strode right up to the edge, which sagged an inch or two under his weight. The place where he halted was actually a kind of man-made cliff. In front of him, most of the eastern tip of Breezy Point was missing, completely gone except for a band of gravel that described the contour of its original curving shoreline. In the center, where there had once been a hill, there was the opposite of a hill—a hole in the ground that had filled with lake water to become a lagoon. Years earlier, a concrete company from Hartford had mined the high-quality sand deposits. With heavy equipment they had, in a few years, carted away what amounted to a hill fifty feet high and ten times the size of the ball field. They then scooped out the center, forming a sheltered harbor for the docks of a marina.

Vast sand and gravel deposits underlay this whole area along the Massachusetts-Connecticut border. All of New England, together with much of North America, had been subjected to the crushing force of glaciers in the last ice age, and a mile-thick ice sheet had scraped over this very spot for thousands of years. When the glacier began to melt, the outflow of fresh water washed the sand and gravel that had been ground from bedrock. Thick deposits of washed sand formed the basin of the lake and were prized for making the best, strongest cement.

Ted was standing on a three-inch mat of tangled roots and humus that was about as thick a covering of topsoil as the area had been able to accumulate in the roughly ten thousand years since the ice. Below his feet, a few pebbles came loose and trickled down a slope some forty feet to an unpaved parking area below. In the years since the excavation, approaching its angle of repose, as the settling process was called, had produced a sloped face that started three feet behind the edge of the turf. The unsupported carpet of tightly woven roots now had a bit of room to spring like a diving board.

Ted did not think any of these things. He simply bounced once, twice—then vaulted into the disk of the rising sun. His exuberant leap took him five feet out and twenty feet down before he plunged calf-deep into loose, dustless sand. He backpedaled in the little avalanche he had made as a curtain of sand swept along with him to where the larger rocks had tumbled themselves into place along the bottom of the slope. A few quick hops and Ted was on flat ground, headed to the barn-sized building that housed the office, boathouse, and workshop of Breezy Point Marina. On the side facing him, four mullioned windows let light into the workshop. To their right, huge barn doors provided automobile access to the boat bay and its lift. The office was on the opposite side facing out onto Middle Pond. The entire structure was painted white and had the same green shingles as the dining hall above. A wooden walk took Ted around the windowless west wall to a wide deck that ran across half of the building’s front. A step down from there, two wharves projected out into the water, serving as docks for the marina’s fueling business. Two steps up led to the office door. To the right of that stood a solitary, sentinel-like gas pump, bright orange with a glass globe on top spelling out Gulf in dark blue letters against an orange disc. Next to the pump was a reel with a gas hose that could reach out forty feet to the boats.

Ted bounded up the stairs into the smallish office. It had a wide plate-glass window across the front wall, a desk cluttered with papers on the left, and a dusty glass display case on the right containing some faded fishing items and a couple of boxes of candy. A potbellied woodstove occupied the middle of the back wall. At the moment, the stove was completely obscured by the silhouette of a large man dressed all in navy blue. Mornin’, Ted, came a voice in the flat, local accent that tended to drop r’s and g’s. The owner of the voice wore a mechanic’s uniform, pants and shirt, with the words Breezy Point Marina stitched in yellow thread over the right breast pocket and Oscar over the left.

Ted could smell the mingled odors of clam chowder and coffee. Mornin’, Mr. Morracy, he responded.

Oscar Morracy was heating his breakfast and, at the same time, warming his back against the stove. He was a man in his midforties, with a long soft face, small slit eyes, and a large pulpy nose that just made you think moose. The elements of his face didn’t all come together nicely, so at first glance one could feel a bit uneasy. But when he smiled, his outgoing nature blossomed. He was a single man who didn’t care for things domestic. The clam chowder, Ted guessed, was left over from something that had gone on up at the dining hall in the last few days. Ted had known Mr. Morracy to eat a gallon of the stuff three meals a day for a week rather than cook. His clothing came from a uniform service that dropped off a bundle of clean, starched shirts and pants monthly. Mr. Morracy had often joked, I’d rent ma shoes if I could. What he cared about almost to the point of