The Reservoir Read Online Free Page A

brother, Willie, was happier working in the fields with the horses and machinery, but though they had grown to care about different things, Willie never, since the death of their little brother, ceased to take responsibility for protecting Tommie—the hard kernel of guilt born in Willie was countered in Tommie by a sense of unburdened freedom from guilt. Tommie would stand with his brother in the general merchandise store in Ayletts, sucking the sweetness out of a piece of penny candy and staring at the Currier & Ives lithograph of elegant, long-necked ladies with glittering jewels and parasols strolling with fine gentlemen. Since then he had been to balls in Richmond, seen elegant ladies walking dogs on leashes, and patronized saloons and houses of bad repute. But all through law school he dreamed of more—of travels to Washington and New York and beyond, of those dazzling lives he and his mother had imagined were out there waiting for them. His mother had kept her heart young with a stoneware jug her husband kept filled for her. Tommie alone of the family was left to carry out some as yet unfulfilled promise.
    As he turns up the cedar-lined drive, he sees a girl in a white dress scurrying in front of him and disappearing through a break in the trees. He almost calls out for her. Then his heart leaps. He was going to call “Lillie” because that’s who she looked like, her brown ringlets bouncing off her shoulders when she came to live with them—when? Has it been seven years already? He tries to remember. She was almost fourteen, he sixteen, and when she got used to him she would jump out and scare him or try to get him to chase her up the drive. If he refused, she would laugh and say he was an old grump—she poked her lower lip out and stumped along, hands in pockets, mocking him. He hated her making fun of him. But it was worse when she ignored him, even when she did it to get his attention.
    Now he hears high laughter, and it is so like Lillie’s he feels the hair on his neck stand. He darts through the trees looking for the child. “You there! Come out! Come on out now, I won’t hurt you.” He looks around, goes over to a clump of English boxwoods, and peers in. No sign of anyone.
    He heads back to the drive, keeps walking, then turns around suddenly. He had thought perhaps to catch her this way, but no one is there. He hurries up to the porch and goes in, calling out for Aunt Jane.
    As he expected, Mr. Lucas is ordered by Mr. Meade to drain the reservoir so that no one can complain about the sanitation of the water. “Foolishness,” Mr. Lucas says to himself as he turns the valves in the pump house. “I’ve found more dead animals in there than anybody wants to know about, but never mind that. Water’s so low, won’t take but ten or twelve hours to empty.” In the meantime Mr. Lucas goes back up to the embankment and down to the picket fence surrounding the water. He lowers a pole to measure the water level; in an hour he’ll check to make sure it’s dropping. The mid-afternoon sun feels good on his back. Police officers have come and departed, and now most people have gone home to their dinners. A few curiosity-seekers are strolling the embankment, pointing out where they think a body was found. They stay respectfully at the top, and Lucas is thankful he does not have to answer any more questions.
    He heads back up the slope to the top of the embankment. He’s not sure why he walks on the grass instead of the steps, nor why he keeps his eyes down, unless it’s that he might find something belonging to the girl—some token of her last night alive that he might take for a souvenir. It’s not likely, the police having thoroughly searched every inch of the place and turned up a glove and a piece of shoelace on the walkway, a matching glove and a veil outside the reservoir grounds, and a hat in the deadhouse.
    Now he heads down the other side and to the hole in the outer fence. He lifts the loose