Summer at Forsaken Lake Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Michael D. Beil

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Greg Call

  Interior illustrations copyright © 2012 by Maggie Kneen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beil, Michael D.

  Summer at Forsaken Lake / by Michael D. Beil.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Nicholas and his ten-year-old, twin sisters, Hetty and Haley, spend the summer with their Great-Uncle Nick at Forsaken Lake, where he and their new friend Charlie investigate the truth about an accident involving their families many years before.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89791-7

  [1. Summer—Fiction. 2. Families—Fiction. 3. Lakes—Fiction. 4. Great-uncles—Fiction. 5. Ohio—Fiction. 6. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B38823495Su 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011023511

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To the memory of James and Dorothy Yargo

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sailing Terms

  Acknowledgments

  June 20

  Dear Dad,

  The train just crossed into Pennsylvania, and the conductor told us that it’s still a LONG way to Erie. So far, it isn’t too bad, even if the whole train does smell like somebody threw up. Not that different from the subway in New York, I guess.

  Thanks for the extra money—pretty sneaky sticking it inside a book. You probably thought I wouldn’t find it until August, but Treasure Island looked a lot more interesting than the books I HAVE to read this summer, so I started it while we were waiting at Penn Station. I’m still not sure what I’ll have to spend money on in Deming, Ohio. Mom says there’s no movies and no fast food for miles. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll figure out something.

  The twins threw this huge fit last night, and said they weren’t going to get on the train. Mom finally got them to settle down by promising them that if they behaved all summer with Uncle Nick, she’ll get them a puppy in the fall. I should throw a tantrum—maybe she’ll send me away to boarding school and I won’t have to put up with the twins anymore. To tell you the truth, I wish I were on the plane with you to Cameroon instead of on this smelly train, even though I looked up “meningitis” last night and it sounds kind of scary. Be careful, okay?

  Love,

  Nicholas

  PS I forgot to tell you: I got two hits and turned two double plays in our last game of the season. We lost anyway.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Goblin tugged at her mooring, darting back and forth, her bow pitching high in the air and then dropping violently with every frothy, white-tipped wave. Her rope halyards—used to hoist the sails—slapped against the varnished wooden mast, and a corner of sail that had worked loose flapped noisily in the steadily building breeze. The leaves of the sugar maple tree in the front yard, so brilliantly green a few minutes earlier, turned their dull undersides upward, a million mirrors reflecting the angry gray sky above. Farther out on the lake, the whitecaps were already beaten down by a curtain of rain being pulled across the lake and toward the house and porch where Nicholas Mettleson sat.

  His uncle—great-uncle, actually—had promised to take him and his twin sisters sailing today, but now that would have to wait. The worst of the squall—the heavy wind and the thunder and lightning—would pass by quickly, but the forecast called for the rain to continue most of the day. Nicholas was only a little bit disappointed, though. After all, it was just the third day of summer vacation; there would be plenty of time to learn to sail in the next two and a half months.

  A few minutes later, Nicholas’s great-uncle Nick, a steaming mug of coffee in hand, came out onto the porch through the screen door, followed by his gray-muzzled dog, Pistol. “Mind if we join you? Looks like a doozy. No better place for watching a good thunderstorm.”

  Nicholas smiled at him and scooted to the end of the wooden porch swing, where he felt the mist on his face as the rain blew through the screening. “Do you think Goblin will be all right?” he asked. “It’s really bouncing around out there.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about her. She’ll be fine—ridden out worse lots of times. Much worse.” The chains supporting the swing squeaked as Nick and his young namesake settled in to watch the storm with Pistol curled up on the seat between them.

  “Did you really build it, er, her?” Nicholas asked. He had been sailing only once before—in a much smaller boat at summer camp upstate two years earlier—and was still getting used to the idea that the twenty-eight-foot Goblin was a she, not an it. He was also trying to figure out how Nick, who, as a young man, had lost most of his left arm in a farming accident, could possibly have hand-built a boat as beautiful as Goblin.

  “From keel to masthead,” Nick said proudly. “I’ll show you some pictures later if you like. Built her in the barn out back.”

  Just then, a jagged blue flash of lightning lit up the darkened sky, and they both braced for the loud crack that followed.

  “That was close,” Nicholas said, a touch of worry in his voice.

  “Mrs. Phillips’s television antenna,” said Nick. “Gets it most every time. Sticks up about a hundred and ten feet. All so she can watch those soap operas. Never had much use for television myself. There’s a little one around here somewhere, if you kids get desperate. Course, reception isn’t much out here. Last time I checked, I think I picked up two stations in Erie.”

  “Aren’t you afraid the lightning will hit Goblin?” Nicholas asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure it has—more than once. No harm—she’s properly grounded. The current goes from the mast right down through the keel and out.”

  “What if you were holding on to the mast when it hit?”

  “Can’t say as I’d recommend that, Nicholas. You’d probably look a lot like one of those neon signs in Times Square.”

  Nicholas laughed. Maybe this won’t be such a boring summer after all. Before Nick picked them up at the train station in Erie, Nicholas had met his uncle a grand total of three times: twice at weddings, and once for the funeral of Nick’s wife, Lillie, who had died two years earlier. When his dad first suggested sending him and his twin sisters to Nick’s house on Forsaken Lake for the whole summer, Nicholas was skeptical—especially after looking
up the word “forsaken” in the dictionary and discovering that it meant “abandoned or desolate.” On the inside, he was quite certain that he would hate it, but his dad seemed so excited about it that he hid his true feelings—or tried to. Even though he had never spent any time “in the country” himself, all his friends back in New York City assured him that it would be the most boring summer of his life.

  “There’s nothing to do in the country,” said one.

  “There’s nowhere fun to go,” said another.

  “And everybody knows everything you do,” said yet another. “So you can’t do anything fun anyway.”

  Nicholas’s father, Dr. Will Mettleson, painted a very different picture of life at the old Victorian house, just steps from the lake. Growing up, he spent several summers with Uncle Nick and Aunt Lillie, and loved every second. He learned to fish and sail and camp and how to build things with his own two hands, and he swore to Nicholas that he never once missed the city while he was there. And he promised Nicholas that if he hated it, he wouldn’t have to go back the next summer.

  But something else his father said really got Nicholas’s curiosity moving at warp speed.

  “That old house of Uncle Nick’s, and the lake—they’re both full of secrets. You just have to know where to look. You never know what you might find.”

  “Like what?” a wide-eyed Nicholas asked, forgetting his skepticism for a moment.

  “Start in the tower room,” his father said. “That’s where I always slept. It has the best view; heck, it’s the best room in the house. Maybe the nicest room on the whole lake. I’ve already checked with Uncle Nick—it’s yours if you want it.”

  The tower room, he explained, jutted up through the middle of the house as if somebody had set a greenhouse on the roof, and could be reached only by climbing a tightly wound, vertigo-inducing spiral staircase. The windows gave it a spectacular view of the lake, and on summer nights when the air was perfectly still and it was too hot to sleep in the other bedrooms, a breeze blew through the gauzy, sun-bleached curtains, keeping the room comfortable. Inside, it was the ultimate in simplicity. A bed. A small dresser. A brass telescope on a tripod. In other words, the perfect room for the twelve-year-old Nicholas Mettleson.

  Nick and Nicholas sat together, swinging slowly back and forth as they watched and listened to the storm barreling past them. The lake was calm again, its surface ruffled only by the rain that continued to fall, though not nearly as hard. With a sailing lesson out of the question for the time being, Nicholas decided it was a good time to start his exploration of the house—beginning with the tower room.

  “I’m going upstairs for a while, to watch from my room,” he said. “I’ll bet it’s like being right in the storm cloud.”

  Nick sent him off with a little wave. “Go. Enjoy. We’ll go into town in a while. I need to pick up a few things. You can do a bit of exploring if you’d rather not go to the A&P.”

  Nicholas climbed the staircase, past the small, simply framed oil paintings that lined the walls, not noticing until he reached the last one that they were all signed Lillie. He didn’t even know that his great-aunt had been a painter—and a pretty good one, he thought as he backed down the stairs to get a closer look at each. The paintings were a scrapbook of her life: the house and barn built by her great-grandfather in 1895; the lake in all four seasons; the yard, with its towering maples and poplars; and finally, Nick’s pride and joy, Goblin—resting peacefully at her mooring in one painting, heeled over with spray flying over her bow in another. That one made Nicholas want to go sailing even more.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?” asked Hayley from the bottom of the stairs.

  She and her twin sister, Hetty, had celebrated their tenth birthday a few days earlier. What with that momentous occasion and the long train ride from New York with only Nicholas for supervision, they saw themselves as quite grown up.

  “Some pictures. I didn’t know you were up. Did you have breakfast?” He was under strict orders to look after his sisters—to make sure they ate and went to bed on time and brushed their teeth.

  “Of course we’re up,” said Hetty, joining Hayley. “How could anyone sleep through that awful thunder and lightning? I made toast. And Great-uncle Nick let us have coffee.”

  “You don’t have to call him Great-uncle Nick, you know. Uncle Nick is fine. And you know you’re not supposed to drink coffee—Mom said so.”

  “Can we come up?” Hetty asked. “We haven’t seen the tower room yet.”

  “We’ve only been here a day,” Nicholas said.

  “Please? We won’t bug you. Promise,” said Hayley.

  “All right. You’ve got five minutes.”

  They ran up the stairs, pushing past Nicholas and into the tower room, where they went straight to the windows that looked out over the lake.

  “Oh, it’s looovely,” said Hayley, taking on a sophisticated air. “Look, you can see all the way across the lake!”

  “You can do that from the porch, you idiot,” sniped Nicholas.

  “Don’t be rude,” Hetty said, pushing the curtain aside and pointing at Goblin. “I wonder why he named it Goblin. It’s too pretty to be a goblin. Are we still going sailing today?”

  “I doubt it. It’s supposed to rain all day. He said we’re going into town later to do some grocery shopping.” Nicholas sat on the bed, leaning back against the headboard and noticing for the first time the two squarish oil paintings on the wall between the windows. The first was of the lake at night, the moon’s reflection a diagonal slash across the rippled surface; in the distance, a sailboat—too small to be Goblin—seemed to be disappearing into the mist. The second, which looked as if it had been painted aboard the moored Goblin, showed the front of the house in the early evening, with golden light shining through the windows.

  “Did you guys know that Aunt Lillie was an artist?” Nicholas asked.

  “Duh. Of course,” Hayley answered. “Mom and Dad used to have one just like this in their bedroom.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever. It wasn’t exactly like these—it just has the lake and the yard and some trees, I think.”

  “Where is it now?” Nicholas asked.

  Hayley shrugged. “I dunno. I think Daddy took it with him after they—”

  “Look! You can see someone in the tower room in this one!” Hetty cried.

  “It looks like an old woman,” said Hayley.

  “She probably painted herself into the picture,” Nicholas said, moving in for a closer look. “We saw a painting in school like that. Let me see.”

  The twins were right; there was a figure standing at the window, appearing to look back at the viewer, but the person’s features were blurry, so it was impossible to tell who it was.

  “Wait—there’s someone else, sitting on the swing on the porch. That is definitely Uncle Nick,” Nicholas said. Then he lifted the frame from the wall to look at the back of the canvas. “She painted this one in 1978. It’s called Evening Light.”

  “What about the other one?” Hetty asked. “Wait, let me guess. Moonlight Sail.”

  “Not even close,” Nicholas said, removing the painting from the wall. “It’s called 2:53 A.M.” He turned the painting over for another look. “That’s definitely not Goblin. I wonder what boat it is.”

  He was about to rehang it when Hayley stopped him. “Wait. What’s that?” She pointed at the wall where the painting had been hanging.

  “What’s what?” asked Nicholas. “Ohhh. That’s weird.”

  Just below the nail on which the picture hung, a thin wire stuck out of a small hole in the wall, its end twisted into a loop. Nicholas put the end of his index finger in the loop and was about to give it a good tug when Hetty shouted, “Wait! What if it, you know, rings a bell that … summons evil?”

  Nicholas couldn’t help laughing at that. “Summons evil? Hetty, what have you been watching?”

  She backed slowly away as he pulled steadily on the wire
. It came out easily at first; then there was a bit more resistance.

  “Stop! I heard something moving,” Hayley said, feeling the wood paneling beneath the windowsill. “Right here, I think.”

  “I’m getting out of here,” said Hetty, moving against the wall near the stairs.

  “Do it again,” Hayley insisted.

  Nicholas pulled firmly again, this time not letting the wire slip back.

  Hayley jumped when a section of the paneling sprang open, hinged at the bottom. “A secret compartment,” she whispered.

  “Cool,” said Nicholas, kneeling down. “The wire connects to this latch.”

  “Wh-what’s inside?” asked Hetty, edging closer, but still looking as if she expected Satan himself to pop out of the hole in the wall.

  Nicholas waggled his eyebrows at his sisters. “There’s only one way to find out.” He felt around at the bottom for a few seconds, then reached farther back behind the wall, and farther, until … suddenly his arm was yanked by an unseen force, and he shouted, “Hey! Something grabbed my— Help!”

  Hayley and Hetty screamed in perfect unison as Nicholas twisted and turned on the floor in apparent agony, his arm being pulled deeper and deeper.

  “What should we do?” yelled Hayley, looking frantically at her twin.

  But Hetty just screamed again.

  “Gotcha!” shouted Nicholas, jumping to his feet.

  Hayley and Hetty stood openmouthed for a full second before shouting, “Nicholas!”

  “Man, you should have seen the looks on your faces,” he said. “And by the way, thanks for all the help. Fat lot of good you two will be if I’m ever really in trouble.”

  “Everything all right up there?” a concerned-sounding Nick asked from the bottom of the stairs.

  “We’re fine, Uncle Nick,” said Nicholas. “Just fooling around.”

  “He was being mean to us,” Hetty tattled, sticking her tongue out at Nicholas.

  “Well, be careful,” said Nick. “Don’t need anybody falling down these stairs and breaking their neck. Ruin your whole day. The rain’s letting up, so we’re heading into town in a few minutes.”