Meredyth stared to where Lucas watched Howard grab some hedge clippers from the well of the truck, and slowly the middle-aged gardener began snipping away at the oleander bushes surrounding the house.
"Looks like he's fine, Mere. Just missed a section of grass is all."
"Damn, he's really hacking my oleander bushes all to hell. Maybe I'd better put a stop to that before we go out on the lake."
"Must know what he's doing. Mere. Isn't it true that the more you cut flowering bushes back, the more they flower?"
"I don't know. You're probably right." Her body language told him she opted for the lake over a confrontation with Howard Kemper. She now pulled Lucas onward toward the docks, and soon their shoes were making a pitter-patter against the weathered boards winding about the boathouse. On one side bobbed a canoc and a rowboat, and on the other, beneath the canopy of the boathouse, Lucas made out a motorboat hovering on davits just above the water.
She placed a hand over the switch that would send the motorboat down and into the water. "Your choice," she said. "I just want to enjoy the sunset from the lake."
"Rowboat. It's more romantic, and I can use the exercise."
She pointed out to where the fishing poles hung in the boathouse. adding, "And there's live bait in the cooler. We keep it stocked at all times. By the time we get out on the lake, the worms will've thawed, and you can count on their wiggling their behinds coming off hibernation. We'll have lake perch for dinner. You clean 'em, I'll cook 'em."
"Nothing better than lake perch," he replied, opening the cooler and staring at its empty contents. "No worms here. No ice either."
She looked over his shoulder, perplexed. "Must be those damn Farnsworth boys. They've emptied us of fresh bait and not replaced it."
"Forget about it. Let's just go boating," he suggested, replacing the fishing poles he'd lifted from their hooks.
As they boarded the rowboat, Meredyth continued berating the Farnsworth brothers. "Gotta talk to those two. I don't begrudge them enjoying the lake and using what's here while we're gone, but the least they could do is show a little respect for the property of-"
"It's only worms, Mere. Let's just enjoy the lake and the evening."
"You're right." She nodded, smiling. They went out on the water as the final rays of daylight began to wane in the west. Meredyth sat in rapt attention to the display of light, color, and brushwork across the sky created by the mix of sunset, cloud, and haze.
"Oh, Lucas, look at it!"
"Beautiful," he agreed.
"It's like a light show, like I imagine the aurora borealis to be."
"I've seen the northern lights in Alaska."
"Alaska, really?"
"Now there's a show," he said. "Looks like God's version of a Navajo sand painting, only in the sky."
"When were you there?"
"On a trip last year, one of those adventure travel packages that followed the 1890s Gold Rush from Skagway to Dawson. Want to do it sometime? It's a rough trip but great fun. We can see the lights together."
"I'd like that. I really would."
"Alaska's incredible, Mere, a religious experience."
Lucas had rowed them out to the center of the lake, had rested the oars, and had allowed the boat to drift and glide, going about in a lazy circle with the wind and the eddies. Meredyth had gotten comfortable, her shoes kicked off, and she now lay nestled into him, her back to Lucas, and he leaned into her and wrapped his arms about her. They watched the changing, lavender sky, considering each unique, evolving reflection that changed with each drifting cloud in the western horizon.
The wind had grown cold and biting, lifting Meredyth's hair into his face, and Lucas laughed as he struggled with it. The rowboat twirled now in the wind like a Disneyland Tea Cup ride. They laughed at the joy of it, Meredyth shouting, "Horray! Whoa!" as if on a roller coaster.
"Wind's really gusting. I'd better get control of this thing," he finally said.
"Why? Let it be. I love seeing the sky and clouds go round and round."
Something hit them a hard, teeth-jarring thud that shook Lucas's oars off their gunwale rests, noisily jangling the oarlocks.
"What the hell was that?" she asked.
They were rammed by something large and threatening, and Lucas wondered aloud, "Some big-assed Texas alligator maybe?"
In order to look around, Lucas hefted her up to a sitting position and they both gasped, simultaneously seeing a loose rowboat on the now-dark waters. The moon had disappeared beneath scudding clouds, and the lake had become a black mirror image of the night sky.
"What the hell…a loose boat."
"Happens out here on occasion," she calmly replied. "Looks like it tore loose from the Brody pier."
The boat had ricocheted off and was drifting away from them. Flies hovered above the little ghost boat, and Lucas began swatting a few that had jumped ship and come aboard with them. Getting to his knees and using an oar, he began pulling the errant boat toward them. "We'll run it back across the lake to your neighbors," he said.
"Forget it. They'll find it in the morning."
But as the wayward little green boat approached under Lucas's control, they both saw the flesh of a dead man under returning moonbeams, the dead man lying stripped and cold against the bottom, covered in squirming, feeding worms.
"Your missing worms… thawed out hours ago."
The worms covered the man's features, and his blood- soaked throat, where they slithered like miniature snakes in and out of a gaping knife wound zigzagging from ear to ear below the rugged beard, creating a second mouth that crawled with life.
"My God, it's Howard Kemper!"
"The gardener? That's impossible."
"Yes, it is!"
"Then who the hell was up at the house on the mower in his clothes?"
"It's her, Lucas! Lauralie! She's somehow found us!"
"I need you calm, Meredyth! Calm down. Get a grip." He held her shoulders firm in his hands, shaking her.
"And here we sit, literally sitting ducks, in the middle of the fucking lake, defenseless!"
"We can row for the other shore, get to your neighbors, call for help!" He lifted one of the oars and pushed off the boat that had carried Howard Kemper's worm-eaten body to them. He then lifted the second oar and began rowing desperately for the opposite shore.
"There're no lights on at the Brody place," she shouted, shaking the boat. "There's always a light."
"Maybe they're away!"
"No… they'd use a timer. Something's terribly wrong. She's been there…used their place to watch us…used their boat to come across to my house, killed Kemper, and masqueraded as him." She recalled the ferocity with which Kemper had attacked her oleander hedges.
"Then we'll break in at the Brodys, sound an alarm, get people out here one way or the other, and snare her in her own trap."
"She's up there in my house. God knows where…doing what? Making a special delivery of some sort. God, what I'd give for my cell phone right now."
"And my guns."
A muffled thunderclap came tumbling down to the lake from the house, followed by a second identical clap. "What the hell was that?" asked Meredyth.
"Sounds like rifle fire crackling in the distance." Like gunfire heard in Civil War reenactments, Lucas thought, except these shots were live rounds.
In the gloom of darkness, it was difficult to see what was happening on land at the house, and at the stables, but Lucas and Meredyth could make out the faint silhouette of the Farnsworth pickup truck up at the house, in the driveway alongside Kemper's truck. Following their eyes down the slope of the lawn, they saw the two bodies downed by gunfire, and in a moment, a glimmer of hope welled up, as each boy. Tommy and then Jeff, showed signs of life.