Lost Lake House by Elisabeth Grace Foley Page A

motion. The furnace chimneys were disguised in decorative
stone, running up boldly through the interior of the House, and
only emitted smoke at night or when the groundskeepers and kitchen
staff were clearly visible at their innocent tasks around the
island.
    The gravel path down to the boathouse needed
attention: weeds had to be pulled and the stones raked smooth. For
a moment before he started work, Marshall paused with the rake in
his hands, looking up at the first pale gray wreaths of smoke
ascending from the chimneys against the china-blue morning sky. At
any moment—any moment he chose—he could end it all himself. He knew
the camouflaged doors and the hours of the bootlegging runs…and now
he had the boathouse key. He could walk into any police precinct in
the city and give them the information that would probably make the
chief of police leap from his chair and nearly swallow his cigar,
if the chief of police was given to smoking cigars. No decent
law-abiding person would ever blame him for splitting on a
bootlegger. He would more likely be commended.
    He remembered the light, the lifting of
anxiety in his mother’s careworn face when he gave her his first
week’s wages from the Lake House. “The Lord will provide,” she had
said gently, looking at the dingy dollar bills as if they had been
delivered straight from heaven. And he had put his arms around her,
because he was taller and stronger than she was now and wished that
he could always protect her from the worry that had been a part of
their lives so long.
    She had been saying “The Lord will provide”
for all of his eighteen years, and she believed it still. She had
always taught him the same. But there were some things his mother
didn’t know either, these days. She didn’t know the unboyish streak
of cynicism formed in Marshall’s mind by the knowledge that it was
Maurice Vernon’s providing and his own willful wrongdoing that was
keeping them from the poorhouse. If he told her where the money was
coming from—would she really be brave enough to turn it down, and
face again the cold uncertainty that had terrified him before?
    No—Marshall made the decision as swiftly as
he always did when his thoughts reached this point. He would not
give her another burden in making the choice…even though there were
times when he ached for some sort of comfort or guidance. This was
his own affair. He would not burden her with knowing that the son
she had worked to raise with so much love and prayer was searing
his conscience to keep her and her little ones fed and secure.
    The breeze ruffled through the flower-heavy
bushes of the garden, their blossoms beginning to fade and drop
with the end of summer. Marshall began, slowly, to rake the sloping
gravel path, while above him, the smoke from the chimneys, now
thick and steady, rose in narrow columns against the sky.
     

     
    On that same Monday morning Dorothy Perkins
was again considering the harassing question of shoes. She had
spent Sunday morning trying to keep her feet tucked out of sight
under the pew in church so no one, least of all her father beside
her, would notice how shabby her good shoes had become. Every time
her attention became involved with the sermon, she would realize
with a start that she had unconsciously let her feet slip back into
view, and had to whisk them away again. This was not the
proper way to spend a church service. Before next Sunday came, she
would have to do something about it.
    Dorothy’s problems loomed huge to her on the
scale of her own small life. She never considered the size and
scope of the world very much except as it affected her, and from
her point of view at this moment, nobody had ever been in such an
awful mess as she was. Curled up in a woeful ball on her bed, her
cheek resting on her hand, she reviewed it unhappily. She couldn’t
keep going to the Lake House in these shoes much longer—as a matter
of fact she couldn’t go much of anywhere in them