Behind the Boater's Cover-Up Read online

  After sneaking onboard, Nettie had motioned for Gloria to go down to the lower level while everyone was still boarding on top. There were two bedrooms. They checked both, picked the larger of the two, and then found the largest closet there, which wasn’t very large.

  But it must’ve been a pretty good hiding spot. People had come into the room three times so far, and no one ever mentioned seeing a crazy blonde peeking out of the closet.

  “What’re we gonna do?” Gloria asked when the bedroom went silent again.

  “Same as I told you before. When it sounds like the party’s in full swing, we’ll pop up to the deck and join in. They won’t even know we’re not supposed to be here. You know how it is with parties. Who knows how anyone got there or who’s officially invited?”

  “This isn’t a party,” Gloria said. “This is a private get-together.”

  The voices were back, again. Someone was in the room. Sweat trickled down Gloria’s temple.

  “Okay, in about 15 minutes, we’ll start the music,” a man said.

  “Got it,” a kid answered.

  “Grab the bags and beer from the cabinet and let’s start this party.”

  They left again.

  “Did you hear that? Beer… and a party,” Nettie whispered. “They’re probably just driving far enough out so homeowners won’t hear them. It’s late.”

  A few minutes later, as soon as they heard Jerry Lee Lewis blaring from the speakers on the main deck, Nettie pushed open the door and motioned for Gloria to follow her out. “Come on,” she said, under her breath. She opened her purse and popped out a compact. Looking at herself in the tiny mirror, she ran a finger under an eyelid. “What is with you today?” She swiped her face with the puff and pouted on some lipstick.

  “My mom’s gonna worry about me. That’s all,” Gloria said, straightening out the lining of her skirt.

  “My mom too.” Nettie rolled her eyes. “But let’s worry about moms later, and stop acting like moms now, okay, mom?” She playfully elbowed Gloria, handing her the lipstick and her compact. Gloria reluctantly put some makeup on.

  “And fix your hair too,” she snapped.

  Nettie inspected Gloria’s face when she’d finished. She pushed Gloria’s cute brunette bob this way and that, finger-combing it. “I think you’re a doll,” she said, making Gloria’s heart race.

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “I’ve always thought it. You’re definitely the cute one, and you don’t even need a dye job.”

  When the girls were done primping, Nettie pulled Gloria up the narrow staircase that led to the deck with Gloria shaking her head no the whole way.

  “Just be cool for once in your life,” Nettie said. “Talk to people. Don’t be a...”

  “I’ll try not to be a wet rag,” Gloria said before Nettie could say it.

  “You’re not a wet rag, okay?” She adjusted her bra and opened the door to the deck. “I’m sorry I said that before. Let’s go have fun.”

  But as soon as Gloria saw what was going on upstairs, her stomach flopped and her heart sank into her throat.

  We could only see their backs as they faced the lake and reached over the edge of the boat, laughing and talking. I tried to count the people there, check their clothing against the people I’d seen at the party, but it was dark and I couldn’t tell anything for sure. I heard a large splash over the side while Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On played in the background, which was followed by whoops and laughter. “Holy crap. That sunk fast,” somebody yelled as they reached over the side of the boat.

  Someone else was in the middle of pouring two beer cans into the water then threw the empty cans in with it.

  “This is a pretty weird party, Net,” Gloria whispered.

  “I’ve been to weirder,” Nettie replied, adjusting her dress and sashaying forward. Gloria backed away, eyeing the life preserver on the wall by the stairs, already thinking about jumping. Something didn’t seem right.

  “Getting the fish drunk so you can take advantage of them?” Nettie teased as she strutted across the boat. She stopped at the group. “Remember me?”

  “Oh shit,” one of the boys said when he turned around and saw Nettie. The older man, who had been leaning over the side of the boat, turned around to see what was going on. His pale face got three shades paler in the light of the boat and the moon. He chucked the beer bottle he was holding into the lake and charged full speed at Nettie. She fell hard against the boat deck, her head hit the side of the metal rail on her way down.

  “Ohmygosh, ohmygosh,” one of the boys said.

  The one I knew was Myles pointed at Gloria, who was still standing by the stairs. “There’s another one,” he shouted to his friends and charged at her. Gloria screamed and turned. She tugged the life preserver off the wall, but her hands fumbled and wouldn’t work right. Myles yanked it from her grasp and smacked her hard across the face with it. Pain shot through my jaw and down my neck as I felt everything Gloria had felt that night. Punch after punch landed on our nose and eyes, each one felt more numb than the last, less painful as it went on. I fell to the floor of the boat and crawled along the planks, begging for my life. “We didn’t see anything,” Gloria said, her voice muffled. “We don’t know who you are. We won’t tell. We don’t even know what’s going on here.” I tasted iron as she talked. She was bleeding a lot.

  My eyes had swollen shut, and I couldn’t see who was doing what anymore. But the boys were all screaming now.

  “Shut-up,” an older man hissed through what sounded like gritted teeth. “Just everyone shut up and calm down.” He hoisted me over his shoulder with ease as I had little resistance left in me now. Wind shot over my wounds, the pain almost a numb constant throbbing. “They won’t survive.”

  The cold hard water hit me like I’d been thrown onto cement. It whooshed around my ears, spilling into my lungs, making them burn. I spun around, down was up and up was down. I had no idea how to get to the surface. Darkness consumed my every sense and I knew my end was coming soon. Somehow, my body floated upward enough for me to get a sense of which way to swim. My thoughts were Gloria’s as I coughed my way above the water, surprised I was breathing, surprised they’d let me off the boat. I looked around for Nettie.

  “Nettie!” I yelled over the boys still screaming from the boat. I had no idea what they were saying. I could really only hear my own breathing now, panting hard along the surface of the lake.

  Nettie didn’t respond and my eyes were too swollen to see much. I swam a little farther out and yelled her name again, gulping in a huge mouth of what smelled like sewer water.

  “Gloria,” she said, her voice slurred and low. I swam toward it. Nettie’s beautiful Marilyn Monroe face was puffed out in odd places and already darkened with bruises. Her hair stuck to her head in matted, wet clumps, mascara streaming into the blood that dripped from her scalp. “I’m so sorry,” she said when I reached her.

  “It’s okay,” Gloria told her. “We’re alive. That’s the only thing that matters. We’re okay.”

  “We’re not okay.”

  “We’re gonna be. We can swim back to shore…”

  “I can’t swim that far.” She was crying now.

  “I can,” Gloria said. “And you can too. I’ll help you. We’ll take it one stroke at a time, got it? I won’t leave your side.”

  Nettie took a few strokes and stopped to cry again.

  “Float on your back when you get tired,” Gloria said, pulling herself onto her back. “Like this.”

  Nettie flopped over, coughing up water, gurgling. “We’re never going to make it.”

  “You just need to take your mind off of it. Remember that song your mom taught us when you fell off your bike in kindergarten? The one about never giving up?”

  Hysterical sobs came from Nettie’s direction. She slapped the water hard. “Stop it, Gloria. We’re going to die. I’m not singing about it.”

  The sound of a boat approaching caught Gloria's
attention and she turned herself back over. “Look, I’m afraid too. But there are two boats now. I think one’s the police,” she said, with tearful joy in her voice.

  “Oh please let it be the police,” Nettie gurgled back, her head barely above the water.

  “It is! It’s the police.” With all the energy she had left, Gloria kicked above the surface, enough to scream and wave her arms about. “Somebody probably called about the screaming, and they came to investigate. We need to get their attention.”

  The engine cut out on both boats, and for a minute, it was quiet, still, calm. “They tried to kill us.” Gloria yelled and waved her hands around until a bright light shone right on her. “Over here! Save us! Please!”

  She blinked into the light. It stung her swollen eyes and she couldn’t really see. The sound of an engine turning on again filled the night, growing louder and louder, faster too. Gloria squinted against the light. It was headed right in the girls’ direction.

  “What are they doing? They’re going too fast.” The light got brighter. Gloria waved her arms around a little more frantically. “Stop!” she screamed, her voice high-pitched, desperate.

  She grabbed her cousin around the neck, and kicked as hard as she could with achy legs, trying to swim off to the side and avoid the boat. “It’s not sto…”

  Oddly, I heard it first. A loud cracking sound I knew was probably my head followed instantly by darkness.

  Chapter 9

  Sympathy Pains

  The hardest part was always dying. Over and over again. It was all I could think about when I snapped back to life in my living room, gasping like I was still under water.

  It never seemed logical that one second there was life and hope, and the next, there simply wasn’t anymore. A snap of a finger, a blink of an eye. And even though I always knew the moment was coming, it didn’t make it seem right. I wondered if that was how I was going to feel when my time came. Even though I tried to tell myself these channelings were preparing me for my own final moment, I knew they weren’t. It was never going to seem right.

  I got up, my face still stinging a little with the sympathy pains that came from living through someone else’s violent death. I staggered over to the credenza in the back, to my notebook where I would write everything I could remember while it was still fresh in my memory. I checked my face in the reflection of one of the silver bowls displayed along the back wall, fully expecting to see bloody swollen gashes.

  I was fine, even though fine was far from what I was feeling.

  I made myself remember everything I could — the people involved, the oddities of the night — even though I wanted to forget every last one of them. I had a job to do here.

  Myles Donovan was the one who’d beaten Gloria senseless, him and his dad, and his dad had thrown Gloria overboard. I knew from my research that Myles’s dad had died a long time ago, but Myles was still here. The 80-year-old powerhouse who owned much of Landover County. And that old man was going down.

  I scribbled as fast as my hands would go, trying to remember who else had been onboard, who the other kids had been, but once Gloria had been spotted at the “party,” things had gone ape, as she would say, and not in a good way. I wrote my questions out one after another, circling the biggest one I had. Why?

  Why were they dumping things over the side of the boat? Pouring beers out? There was definitely more to this story than the part I’d just lived through. And I was going to figure it out, and a way to connect it to Myles Donovan.

  My phone rang and I lost all concentration.

  Rosalie didn’t even let me say “hello.”

  “Where the hell have you been?” she yelled. “I’ve been trying to call you for more than a damn hour. You will never believe who came by my shop today, not to buy anything, of course. But to try to tell me you’d made an agreement with her to do another seance.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “Satan,” she began in the overly dramatic tone she seemed to reserve for Paula Henkel moments. “Please, for the love of our friendship and everything decent and good in life, do not tell me Satan is spewing out truth.”

  “It’s true,” I said, looking through my cabinet for the ibuprofen, and some crackers. Something, anything to snack on. I was starving. “But admit it. We made a ton of money last time and we could sure use a ton of money right now. What’re you gonna do, cut my hours to less than nothing? But honestly, if you won’t do the seance with me, I’m doing it by myself because I need the money.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Dr. Dog said the Purple Pony’s not doing very well,” I added.

  “What’s it to him?” She spatted back.

  “That’s not exactly denying it.”

  I opened my ibuprofen and went to the sink for water, downing my pills. The water tasted good, like I was dying of thirst almost. I took another gulp and another, wiping the back of my mouth with the edge of my sweater. I leaned against the kitchen island, and looked outside. It was already dark. I must’ve been channeling for hours. “Okay, you think about it,” I finally said, sick of the awkward silence. “But I just lived that boater’s death in a channeling.”

  “Oh no,” she said, like I’d just told her I kicked a puppy on my way out from robbing an orphanage. “How long?”

  “What time is it?” I asked

  “Almost 9:15, and the fact you had to ask me that means you were channeling for way too long.”

  “Only about an hour,” I interrupted because I didn’t want her to worry, even though I was pretty sure it had been afternoon when I’d started.

  I rubbed my jaw and temples as I talked. “It was no accident. I know who did it. And they’re going down. Myles Donovan.”

  “And now, in addition to crazy, you’ve gone and flipped your lid too.” Her voice rose beyond concern, bordering on freaking out. “I am about to turn 60. I have heard about that accident since I was a kid. The papers, the people, the whole town has the same story. What do you have except an old ghost’s memory that says otherwise? Because it seems to me you are forgetting the tread-cautiously part.”

  She was right. “I don’t have any evidence yet,” I admitted.

  “Is that what you’re hoping to do with this seance? Get another standing ovation? Not gonna happen with this one. Besides, Myles Donovan is gonna die soon anyway. He’s gotta be close to 80. No sense in stirring the pot.”

  I opened the cabinet and pulled out a large drinking glass, filled it all the way up with tap water, and chugged. “Just finish setting up the seance,” I said in between sips. “The truth about this accident is going to come out, so we might as well make money from it.”

  “So you’re saying you’re going to be foolhardy no matter what I say.”

  “Yep.”

  Rosalie didn’t say anything after that, and we sat in silence until I finally interrupted it. “I can’t care if there’s not enough evidence to convict anyone and I sure as hell don’t care if that old man dies before he’s convicted. His reputation, dead or alive, will suffer. Gloria and her cousin at least deserve that.”

  “I’m just wondering if I deserve it,” Rosalie said. “The last thing I need is Myles Donovan gunning for me.”

  I downed my water, remembering how skunky and rancid the lake had tasted, how it felt in my lungs. I couldn’t help but wonder just what kind of hot water I was about to land in by stirring this particular pot. I took a deep breath and reminded myself it had to be stirred.

  I knew I wouldn’t see Gloria again for a few days while she rested. It was hard on her to relive that night too. But I couldn’t wait to tell her how brave she’d been. She always seemed so timid and unsure of herself. She was the one who held Nettie together and figured out a plan. She was the one who’d tried to do the right thing all along. Her family deserved to know that about her too.

  I got off the phone with Rosalie, the details of the channeling still crawling through my head like worms in a garden, disgusting yet there
for a purpose.

  The girls had obviously stumbled onto something they weren’t supposed to see, something Bill Donovan was involved in. And something he’d enlisted his teenage son and his friends to help him carry out.

  I knew the newspapers weren’t going to be very helpful on this one. Was there anything truthful printed there?

  One of the articles clearly said Mr. Donovan and Mr. Linder had been asleep below deck. That wasn’t true. I knew because I’d been there, hiding down below, until I was thrown overboard by one of the allegedly sleeping men, which also happened to be the only older man I saw that night.

  The police investigation. The newspaper. They all seemed to be going along with the same narrative the Donovans had created.

  I tried to think back to the channeling. Was it really the police boat that had run the girls over?

  I decided to pay the local boating shop a visit tomorrow to see what they could tell me. It was a long shot, but maybe they kept records from that time period that would indicate if Myles Donovan had taken his boat in for repairs.

  But then I remembered it was winter. Would anyone even be there?

  Chapter 10

  Making a Splash

  Before heading out the next day, I tried to call my mother again. But the woman who lectured nonstop about the common courtesies of answering phones and returning messages wasn’t picking up or returning my messages.

  I swallowed my worry, grabbed my purse, and headed down to the Knobby Creek Boating Company.

  There were several boating service companies on the lake now, but Knobby Creek seemed to be the oldest. It was also the creepiest. And it wasn’t just the rundown wooden warehouse that looked straight out of a slaughterhouse movie. I couldn’t get over the two weird statues of old fishermen in overalls that greeted customers on a bench by the front door. Because nothing says good service like stuffed people watching you.