Read Larkin Lake Lights free: the opening chapter

Book One, Chapter 1: The Girl Who Left

The sign was still there.

Nora Quill saw it from a quarter mile out, a green rectangle leaning slightly toward the ditch as if it had been listening to something interesting in the cattails for fifteen years. WELCOME TO LITTLE LARKIN, it said. EST. 1876. POP. 2,143. The three had been repainted, and recently, in a white that did not quite match the other numbers. Somebody in this town had opinions about the population, and that somebody owned a brush.

"Okay, so," Nora told the windshield, "we are not going to cry at a road sign. We are thirty two years old. We have a master's degree. We have a car." The car, a 2011 Subaru with a hatch that only stayed up if you wedged a broom handle under it, answered by making the noise it made when it went over forty on a downgrade. Behind her the entire contents of a Chicago studio apartment shifted in a single slow avalanche. A box marked KITCHEN?? slid into the back of her seat. A spider plant she had been keeping alive out of spite leaned over her shoulder like a passenger reading the map.

She did not cry. She rolled the window down instead, and the air came in cold and green and smelling of pine sap and wet sand and, faintly, of diesel from the marina at the bottom of the hill. Somewhere out of sight a mourning dove was saying the same sad thing it had been saying since 1998. Nora's chest did something complicated that she declined to examine.

Main Street started at the highway and ran straight downhill to the lake, the way a child draws a road: no curves, no ambition, just a determined line toward water. The lake itself sat at the bottom like a blue plate somebody had set out for company. Larkin Lake, nine miles long and cold enough to stop your heart in August, glittering in a way that seemed frankly unnecessary for a Monday afternoon.

There was one stoplight. It was red. Of course it was red.

Nora stopped, drummed her fingers on the wheel, and looked very hard at the brick front of the old First Larkin Bank building so that she would not have to look at anything else. That was why she did not see the golf cart until it was beside her, bumping up over the curb with the cheerful disregard of a vehicle that had never once been ticketed. It was lime green. It had a fringed canopy, a basket on the front full of rolled papers, and a vanity plate wired to the back that read LUCILLE.

Driving it was a small woman with a silver pixie cut, purple reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and a tracksuit the precise color of an amethyst geode. She leaned across the gap between them and rapped two knuckles on Nora's passenger window, which was down, so she rapped the door instead.

"Nora Elizabeth Quill."

"Mayor Lindqvist," Nora said, and found she had sat up straighter, the way she had at nine in a fourth grade classroom that smelled of tempera paint and pencil shavings. "Hi. Hello. You look exactly the same."

"I look seventy four, and I earned every one of them. You look tired. Did you stop in Cadillac?"

"I stopped in Cadillac."

"At the gas station with the good jerky?"

"I don't eat jerky."

"That's where you went wrong." Hattie Lindqvist plucked a rolled paper out of Lucille's basket and passed it through the window like a diploma. "Your grant agreement. Countersigned. The state pays for ten weeks, starting today, which I'm aware you know because I'm aware you read it four times. The assessment report is due to the council on Lantern Night. August ninth. I have written that date on my refrigerator in permanent marker, which my granddaughter says is a cry for help."

"I'll have it done."

"I know you will. You always turned your homework in early and then asked for it back to fix the commas." The light turned green. Neither of them moved. A pickup behind Nora did not honk, because this was Little Larkin, and the man inside had probably been in Hattie Lindqvist's fourth grade class too. "Welcome home, sweetheart."

"I'm not home," Nora said. "I'm on a contract."

Hattie smiled at her with enormous patience, the smile of a woman who had once watched Nora try to prove that a paper airplane could reach the gym ceiling and had let her find out on her own. "Ten weeks," she said, and bumped Lucille back down off the curb and puttered away toward the lake, waving to the pickup driver, who waved back.

---

Hadden's Hardware & Bait was halfway down the hill on the left, and it had not changed either, which Nora was beginning to understand was going to be the theme of the day. Same wide front porch. Same hand painted sign. Same long green bench beneath the front window, the paint worn down to bare wood where generations of backsides had polished it.

The bench was occupied. Of course it was occupied. It was above freezing.

Three people sat on it in a row like birds on a wire. On the left, a very tall old man with a gravel voice and a captain's cap, who Nora was fairly certain had driven the lake ferry when she was a kid. In the middle, a tiny man in a seersucker shirt and a red bow tie, his white hair combed into an architecture of its own. On the right, a woman of about a hundred, upright as a fence post, with a red ledger open on her knee and a pencil in her hand.

All three heads turned to follow the Subaru down Main Street. Nora watched it happen in the side mirror and felt it on the back of her neck like a sunburn.

She could not hear them. She did not need to. She had grown up here. She knew exactly how it went. Earl Pettibone would squint and say, "Who's that, then." Lenny Szabo would say, "Needs a trim, whoever she is." And Gloria Bassett, who had run the post office for forty years and therefore knew what every family in Little Larkin had received, sent, returned and been embarrassed by since the Eisenhower administration, would not even look up from her ledger.

"The Quill girl," Gloria would say. "The one who made the speech."

Nora pressed the gas a little harder than she needed to.

The speech. It had been June then too, the graduation party in the Quills' backyard with paper lanterns strung between the maple and the garage, her father grilling bratwurst in a KISS THE MAILMAN apron. She had been eighteen and full of acceptance letters and a feeling she now recognized as panic wearing a party hat. Someone had handed her a cup of fruit punch and a fork to tap on it. Someone had said, speech, speech. And Nora Quill, valedictorian, had stood on a lawn chair in front of half the town and told them that she loved them all, truly, and that she was going to the University of Michigan and then to a city with buildings taller than the water tower, and that she was never, ever coming back to Little Larkin, and that they should all take it as a compliment.

People had laughed. Most of them. She had meant it as a joke, mostly.

Then she had gone to Ann Arbor, and then to Chicago, and then she had made it true for fourteen years, coming home only for Christmases short enough to fit between flights, and every year the joke had gotten a little less funny and a little more like a promise she had to keep.

And now here she was, driving down Main Street at four in the afternoon with a spider plant on her shoulder, coming back.

Her phone, face down on the passenger seat, buzzed once. She did not turn it over. It would either be another LinkedIn notification congratulating a former coworker on a promotion she had probably earned, or it would be nothing, and she was not ready for either.

---

The yellow house on Birch Street had a new porch swing. That was the first thing she noticed, and it nearly undid her more than the sign had. The old swing had been the color of weak tea and had shrieked on the backswing like a gull. This one was painted white and hung from new chains, and her mother was sitting on it with her bare feet tucked up and a paint rag over one shoulder, and she was up and down the steps before Nora had even gotten the Subaru into park.

"Oh," Ellen Quill said into her hair. "Oh, look at you. Oh, you're all bones. Frank! Frank, she's here, she's all bones."

"I'm not all bones."

"You're mostly bones. Come in, come in. Your father made a casserole."

"Dad doesn't make casseroles."

"He does now. He's retired. He has to do something with his hands or he starts delivering other people's mail out of habit. Don't laugh. Mrs. Dunphy got her own catalogs twice last week."

Frank Quill came out wiping his hands on a dish towel, stooped a little more than at Christmas, the same gentle round face and the same ears that stuck out like a jug's handles. He hugged her and lifted her an inch off the porch, which he had not been able to do since she was fourteen, and set her down and stepped back to look at her with his head tilted.

"Well," he said. "If it isn't the prodigal daughter. You know what they say about prodigal daughters."

"Please don't."

"They're always bringing home pro digals." He waited. "Professional seagulls."

"That's not even a pun, Dad. That's just words."

"It's a work in progress, like your mother's lake." He kissed her temple. "Welcome home, Noodle."

The house smelled of turpentine and cumin and the lemon furniture polish her mother had used since the first Bush administration. Every wall was covered in paintings of the lake. The lake at dawn, flat and pink as the inside of a shell. The lake in a storm, gray and furious, whitecaps like torn paper. The lake under ice, under fog, under a moon so big and orange it looked like a mistake. Her mother had been painting the lake for forty years and had never once been satisfied with it, which was, Nora thought, either the most romantic thing she knew or a cautionary tale.

The casserole turned out to be chicken and rice and something green that might once have been broccoli. It was delicious. Nora ate two helpings and listened to her father explain the new recycling schedule in detail and her mother describe a heron that had been fishing off the dock all spring, and she felt the questions coming the way you feel weather coming off a lake, a change in pressure, a softening at the edges of every pause.

Her mother asked first, because her mother always asked first and gentlest.

"So how is everything at the firm, sweetheart? Halberd and..."

"Krane. Halberd and Krane." Nora stabbed a piece of broccoli that did not deserve it. "It's fine. It's good. I'm between projects, actually, which is why the timing worked out. The Wrigleyville theater wrapped and there's a gap before the next big thing, and when Hattie called about the grant I thought, okay, so, three good reasons: it's a beautiful building, it's paid, and you two have been asking me to come home for a summer since I was nineteen."

All of that was true, technically, in the way that a building could pass a visual inspection and still have carpenter ants eating the sill plate.

The truth was that in May, on a Tuesday, she had walked into a conference room on the fourteenth floor and been told by a woman from Human Resources with a sympathetic head tilt that her position had been restructured. Restructured, as though Nora were a parking garage. Six weeks before that, at the ribbon cutting for the Wrigleyville theater, the restoration she had spent two years of her life on, her boss Gregory Halberd had stood at a podium under the gold leaf ceiling she had personally color matched from a cigar box sample and thanked everyone on the team and then said, "When I first saw this ceiling, I knew it could be saved," and the room had applauded, and Nora had stood in the third row with her hands clasped in front of her and felt something in her chest go very quiet and very cold.

She had not told her parents. She had not told anybody. It was the only thing she had left that nobody in Little Larkin knew, and she meant to keep it that way until she had something better to replace it with.

"Between projects," her father repeated, nodding. "That's a good place to be. I was between routes once, in 1994. Best two weeks of my life."

"You had pneumonia, Frank."

"I had a lot of time to think."

Her mother watched Nora over her water glass with an expression Nora remembered from every time she had come home from school saying the day had been fine. Ellen Quill did not push. She had never once pushed. She just looked, the way she looked at the lake, as though if she waited long enough it would tell her what color it really was.

"Well," her mother said finally. "We're glad of the gap."

"Me too," Nora said, and was startled to find that it was almost true.

---

She waited until the dishes were done and her father had fallen asleep in front of a Tigers game, and then she put on her denim jacket and walked down to the lake.

It was after eight and the sun was going down behind her, behind the town, so that everything in front of her was lit gold from the back: the dock, the bobbing aluminum boats in the marina, the lifeguard chair on the town beach where nobody had lifeguarded since the budget cuts. The sand was cool and gave under her sneakers. A pair of kids were throwing a tennis ball for a wet black Lab that never once brought it back. Out on the water a loon called, that long rising wobble that sounded like grief and laughter had tried to share a single throat, and every hair on Nora's arms stood up.

She walked north along the beach until the sand gave way to roots and pine needles, and the trail climbed onto Larkin Point, and then there it was.

The Larkin Pavilion stood at the tip of the point like a ship that had decided, a century ago, to stay. Eight sides. A wraparound porch with turned posts. White clapboard gone the gray of driftwood and old wasps' nests. Tall windows, half of them boarded with plywood that had its own weathered history of spray paint (KYLE + JENNA, SENIORS 09, a creditable drawing of a moose). And on top, rising out of the steep octagonal roof, the copper cupola, gone a soft verdigris green, with the round glass windows of the lantern room winking in the last of the light. At its peak, a weathervane in the shape of a fish pointed stubbornly west. Behind the building the long pier ran out into the lake on old cedar pilings, its planks silver, its far end disappearing into the glare.

Nora stopped walking.

She had seen photographs. Hattie had emailed her forty two of them, most of them taken at odd angles with a thumb in the corner. She had read the 1926 newspaper notice of the opening and the National Register nomination that had never been filed. She had told herself, three hundred miles of highway long, that this was just a building, a nice octagonal wood frame structure with probable sill rot and a roof of unknown condition, and she was a professional.

The Pavilion looked worse up close, which Nora had expected, and lovelier, which she had not.

Paint hung off the clapboards in long gray curls. A gull sat on the cupola like it had been hired. The porch roof sagged on the lake side in a way that made her wince on its behalf. And still the proportions were perfect, the roofline rising in that steep, confident pitch, the windows marching around the eight sides in exactly the rhythm somebody had once worked out on a drafting table with a pencil and a lot of care.

"Hello, gorgeous," she said.

She went up the shore path toward it with her hands in her jacket pockets and then out of them, because she could not help it. She touched the first porch post. Old growth white pine, she guessed, painted over and over until the paint was nearly as thick as the trim. Underneath, solid. She knocked. It answered with that deep good note of a sound timber, like a cello string plucked once.

"Okay, so," she told the building, setting her hand flat against the post, "you have rot, you have neglect, and you have a town that forgot to call. I know the feeling."

The post did not answer, but it held, solid as a promise, and she was so busy being pleased about that she did not notice the third porch board until her left leg went straight through it.

There was a crack like a dropped plate and then she was standing on one foot with the other leg buried to the knee in a hole that smelled of wet earth and a hundred years of mice. Splinters scraped up her shin. Her right knee, the one still on top, slammed into the board beside the hole. She grabbed the post and swore, an inventive, Chicago swear, the kind she had learned from a demolition crew on Halsted Street.

From somewhere behind her, a man's voice said, "Huh," in a tone that suggested he had been watching for some time.

Nora twisted to look and nearly took the rest of the porch down with her.

He was coming up from the pier side, from the direction of the water, and the sun was behind him so at first he was only a shape: very tall, broad through the shoulders, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. A coil of rope over one shoulder. Then he stepped onto the sound end of the porch, testing each board with his weight before he trusted it, and the light caught his face.

Dark blond beard. A fleck of sawdust in it. Eyes the color of the lake at dusk, which was not a color, technically, it was a mood. And through his left eyebrow, a thin white scar she knew, because she had been sitting next to him in the bottom of a rowboat when he had gotten it, the summer he was twelve and she was ten and a loose cleat had come up off a dock line and caught him across the face, and he had not cried, but she had.

Theo Hadden.

Fifteen years older. A good deal wider. A good deal quieter, from the look of him, though he had never been loud. The boy she had last seen at the end of this very pier, in the blue dark of Lantern Night, with his hand still raised from where it had touched her face and his mouth still open on whatever he had been about to say, while she ran.

She had dropped her lantern. She remembered the sound of the glass. She had not looked back.

Theo crouched beside the hole, looked at her leg, looked at the board, looked at her. His face did nothing at all. It was like watching a closed door decide whether to open.

"Don't," Nora said. "Do not say anything."

He did not say anything. He hooked both hands under her elbows and lifted her straight up out of the hole as though she weighed about what the spider plant did, and set her down on a joist he had obviously already checked, and let go.

Her shin was bleeding in a thin, undramatic scrape, the kind that would sting in the shower for a week. Her jeans had a tear at the knee. Her heart was going at a pace she declined to attribute to anything but adrenaline.

"Thank you," she said, with dignity. "That board was rotten."

"Mm." He leaned over and looked into the hole. "Sill's gone on this side. Joists too, probably. Water comes off the roof right here." He tilted his head up at the sagging gutter. "Been coming off right here for about thirty years."

"I can see that. I could have seen that if I'd been looking, I was looking at the post, the post is beautiful, did you know that post is old growth? You can tell from the ring count on the checked end, you can see it from here, there's maybe forty rings to the inch." She heard herself and stopped. "Sorry. I'm babbling. I'm bleeding and babbling. Hi, Theo."

"Nora."

Just that. Her name, set down between them like a tool on a bench.

They looked at each other. Behind him the sun went the last inch into the trees and the whole lake went from gold to rose to the color of the inside of a mussel shell, and somewhere out on the water the loon called again.

She remembered, suddenly and completely, the way he used to laugh when they were teenagers, a short surprised bark, as if laughter had snuck up on him from behind. She wondered whether he still did that. She wondered why she had just wondered that.

"What are you doing out here?" she asked. "It's almost dark."

"Could ask you the same."

"I'm working. Sort of. I start tomorrow, officially, but I wanted to see it first. Without anyone watching." She looked pointedly at him. "Which went great."

He coiled the rope a little tighter on his shoulder and said nothing, but one corner of his beard moved in a way that might, on another man, have been a smile.

"Hattie said she'd lined up a local carpenter for the assessment," Nora went on, because silence had always made her talk the way a draft makes a candle flicker. "Somebody to open walls, pull boards, shore up anything that's about to fall on me. She said he was the best in the county and that I'd know him. I assumed she meant I'd know of him. I assumed he'd be sixty and named Bud."

Theo looked at the hole she had made. Then he looked at her, one eyebrow, the scarred one, going up a fraction.

Nora's stomach dropped through the porch the way her leg had.

"You're the carpenter?" she said.

And Theo Hadden, who had once tried to kiss her at the end of this pier, shifted the rope on his shoulder and said, "You're the expert?"

The sample ends here.