Shallow Rock

Book summary

In 1973, rookie deputy Kelly Mackinaw faces her toughest challenge yet on Lost Lake, where she’s trapped with three bodies, a dozen suspects, and a ghost with a grudge. Alongside Vietnam vet Mitch Herkemer, she must unravel a web of secrets before tensions between wealthy outsiders and local squatters turn deadly.

Excerpt from Shallow Rock

Lost Lake, New York: June 15th, 1973.

SATURDAY

Deputy Kelly Mackinaw brought her Plymouth Duster to a slow, rolling stop. There was something up ahead in the fog. She’d been watching for wildlife, but this looked human.

“What is that?” she asked, leaning over the steering wheel.

Mitch Herkemer uncurled from his slouch in the passenger seat. “Where?”

The eyes had caught her attention. The figure was absolutely still, like any animal caught in the headlights, but there was no shine to its eyes; they were empty black holes.

“Just up ahead, on the shoulder.”

It looked like a girl—long hair hanging down past her waist, a faded gray dress, pale skin the color of mist. Kelly frowned. “It’s a little girl.”

Mitch leaned forward. The windshield wipers on slow automatic swept away the condensation that formed instantly after each pass.

He let out a slow sigh. “That’s Sarah Punk,” he said.

“What the hell is she doing out here in the middle of the night?”

The wipers made two full passes. “She’s a ghost.”

The girl appeared to be fading, the fog seeping into her body. Kelly looked at Mitch. She’d only met him a few hours ago, so it was hard to tell if he was pulling her leg. He had to be.

“Fuck off. Who is she? A friend of yours?”

“I wouldn’t call her a friend. She’s been dead for fifty years.”

Kelly had been hearing bullshit ghost stories about Lost Lake ever since she was a girl. She honked the horn.

“Jesus,” Mitch said, shocked.

The girl didn’t flinch. She stood, shoulders hunched forward, arms at her sides, staring at them with lifeless, hollow eyes while long fingers of murky vapor crawled up her skinny legs.

Kelly flicked on the four-ways and opened the door. “Okay, let’s see what she wants.”

“She doesn’t talk,” Mitch said.

Kelly slammed her door shut. Dank, heavy air wrapped itself around her neck, sending chills creeping down her spine. She’d called their bluff, but the girl still wasn’t moving. As she came around the front of the car, the girl’s body drifted away from her—thinning, dissolving into the surrounding haze.

“Hey!” Kelly shouted. “What are you doing?”

A hole opened up beneath her eyes. A high-pitched scream sliced through the sluggish air.

Kelly dropped into a crouch. “Son of a bitch!” she shouted.

“She screams,” Mitch said from the other side of the car.

“No fucking way.” Lightheaded, Kelly stood up.

“Told you,” Mitch said.

“That was a bird.”

“You think so, man?” Mitch was standing too. His voice was shaky.

Kelly walked towards where the girl had been standing, thinking maybe there was a stump or a rock there in the shape of a human. Nothing but fog and the stink of decay. She crouched down, looking for footprints. Nothing.

“I try to deal with her on a righteous level, you know,” Mitch said. “But she still scares the shit out of me.”

Kelly scuffed the gravel with her boot. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said.

***

Mitch sat up straight. “Okay, we’re here,” he said.

A single, naked bulb cast a blurry, bluish circle over a door to their right. Kelly brought the Duster to a halt on a patch of sloping, hard-packed dirt. She looked around. Besides the light, nothing but fog.

“Never go past the light,” Mitch said. “Another twenty yards and you’re in the lake.”

Kelly put the car in park, set the handbrake for good measure, and got out. She could hear water lapping against rock.

“I see why they call it Lost Lake,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s not always this bad.” Mitch was crouched down with his face close to the doorknob, key in hand.

Kelly held her watch up to her face. Nine o’clock; the drive from Trapper Lake had taken almost an hour and a half. It hadn’t been too bad. Except for the bit of weirdness near the end, Mitch had been good company.

“It’s got something to do with the shape of the hills, thermal layers, pressure,” Mitch said with a shrug. He stood up, opened the door, then turned and nervously scanned the enveloping fog.

“That ghost of yours hang around here?” she asked.

Mitch reached inside the door and flicked on the lights.

“Not just here, but yeah, this is part of her stomping grounds. I guess my dad didn’t tell you that.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“That’s cool. I just didn’t want you to think we were hiding anything from you,” he said.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she replied.

Kelly had been hired on short notice when a Wanakena Sheriff’s Department deputy had been abruptly dismissed. Looking to hire the department’s first female deputy, Gail Harmon, the Chair of the Board of County Supervisors, had done a thorough search for a suitable candidate. Kelly, an ex-Airforce MP, graduate of the first female course at the New York State Police Academy and granddaughter of a past sheriff of nearby Essex County, was at the top of a very short list.

Kelly had jumped at the chance to get back to the Adirondacks where she grew up. The Buffalo PD, where she had been serving for the past two years, hadn’t given her any hassles about her contract. The biggest problem turned out to be finding a place to live. Wanakena was the most sparsely populated county in the United States east of the Mississippi. There were no apartment buildings or rooming houses, and with summer starting, all of the motels and cottages were completely booked up.

Sheriff Herkemer had suggested that she stay at the old lumber camp on Lost Lake, which he was in the process of converting into a year-round residence. It was a work in progress, but it had electricity and indoor plumbing. His son Mitch was up there working on it. There was plenty of room.

They brought in bags of groceries and a cooler from Kelly’s car. While Mitch put the stuff away, she had a look around.

The cookhouse was a long rectangular space with a kitchen area at the end of a dining table that ran the entire length of the room. The walls bore the legacy of fifty years of hunters and family campers overlaid on the rough décor of nineteenth-century woodsmen. There were whitened antlers over the door, cryptic markings carved into the beams recording opening dates, weather reports, and the tally of yearly hunts. Ashtrays bearing the logos of forgotten companies lay on the white vinyl table cover.

On one wall, a faded wooden sign proclaiming The Moose River Cooperage Company hung in the middle of a cluster of dusty, black-and-white photographs of lumberjacks and log riders. On the other wall, beer bottle caps of a hundred different brands were nailed side by side in long, orderly rows.

There was an unshaded bulb over the door and another over the kitchen area, where a wood stove co-existed with a new electric range, and a faucet sat next to a cast iron pump.

When he was finished, Mitch took two bottles of Black Label from the old, lever-handled Admiral fridge and handed one to Kelly. “So, what do you think?” he asked.

She nodded. “We had a hunting cabin on Whitefish Lake when I was a kid. A lot smaller than this, but pretty much the same.”

“You hunt?”

“Sure. I’ve got an older sister and two brothers. My sister hated the bush, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that I’d rather be out in the woods shooting guns and getting dirty, than staying at home getting supper ready. My mom wasn’t crazy about me going out, but my dad was cool with it. What about you?”

“Sure, used to.” Mitch paused to consider the question. “It’s been a while.”

He was a good-looking guy; a solid, six-footer with broad shoulders and big hands. She could imagine how he must have looked in high school, with his blond brush cut, clear blue eyes, and square jaw; he would have been the perfect, All-American North Country Boy. Now, with his hair down to his shoulders and a solid tan, he looked more like one of the Beach Boys. He was around her age; late-twenties, a little spacey, but not a freak. Definitely a whiff of weed coming off of him, but no threatening, macho vibes.

“Come on, I’ll show you the best part of this place,” he said.

At the far end of the cookhouse there was a screened-in porch with a mismatched assortment of chairs and a comfortably battered-looking couch.

Mitch settled into an Adirondack chair with a sigh. Kelly hooked her patrol belt over a nail by the door and stood looking out at the lake.

Fog lay on the surface of the water under a moon-bright, cloudless sky. She breathed deeply, taking in the cool night air, listening to the throbbing voices of bullfrogs and the whine of mosquitoes fretting against the screen. It felt like home. If she and Mitch could be cool, it would be a great place to stay.

“How many people up here?” she asked.

“Not a lot. Over on your right, is Mrs. Ratsmueller and beyond that, the Margin shack. But nobody’s up there this summer. On the left is Mrs. Anderson. Around the other side of the bay, there’s the three new cottages. Then, way the hell at the other end of the lake is the Parker place.”

“And how many ghosts?”

“Just the one,” Mitch replied, looking up at her with an easy smile. “But she gets around.”

“Sarah Punk…she’s the one who lures kids into swamps and drowns them?”

“There’s more to it than that, but yeah, that’s her.”

Kelly shrugged. Mitch believed in ghosts; most people did. To her, ghost stories, superstitions, religion, were all just bullshit reasons not to face hard truths. She wondered what hard truth the Sarah Punk story was covering up.

It had been a big day for her; the culmination of two weeks of paperwork and interviews, running back and forth between Trapper Lake and Buffalo. She had been sworn in at the station by Gail Harmon. The sheriff had been there with a few members of the police committee and four of the other six deputies. They had ranged in attitude from curious to just shy of openly hostile.

She was dog-tired, but too keyed up to sleep. “Go ahead, I know you’re dying to tell me,” she said, resting her rump on the low ledge of the window frame.

She figured that the story would tell her more about Mitch Herkemer than Sarah Punk, which was what she wanted. If there was anyone she needed to be worried about up here, it would be the strange man sleeping in the next room, not some little girl ghost.