The Quick-Change Artist: Stories

The Broken Lake

The Broken Lake Forest Lodge Glen Allen, Virginia Spring  AFTER A WEEK of hard, heavy rain, Castle Lake burst into Crystal Lake, and as one they split their banks and flooded out a section of railroad tracks big enough to hold an engine and twenty freight cars. The next morning, giddy sunshine threw its sparks over the receding water, violets and jill o’ the ground bloomed in the spongy earth, a haze of gnats danced smokily above the shining shallow puddles, and Lizzie Fletcher opened the door of her uncle’s hotel to greet the president of the RF&P Railroad, a man frantic for his enterprise. She, who pushed her sharp cheekbones out at the world, one broken like a smooth bowl put together wrong, from the time in England when as a child she spun beneath the wheels of a gig: she loved this home of hers. She was easier with people than with critters, such as the peacocks that picked their way among the rose paths and came to peck the ground near Alexander Bean’s feet. Lizzie distrusted peacocks; you  could live with them for years and never win their cold glamorous blue love. Her uncle, Captain John Cussons, adored them all, the peacocks and turkeys and pheasants, geese and squirrels and muskrat, and most of all the deer that shoved their dumb gentle mouths into his hand and scratched their velvet antlers against his sleeve. Lizzie had spent all morning gazing from a fourth-story window, the spyglass cold against her eye, enthralled by the marvel of damage. The railroad tracks and hapless freight cars zigzagged in a watery still life on her very lawn, their cargo of lumber and gravel spilled and afloat. She wished there were more guests to see the spectacle. Uncle John was rich, no matter that few visitors came to Forest Lodge.That hurt his touchy pride, which she protected as best she could. From her high window, she’d looked through the glass, past the angular question marks of the oaks’ branches to the skewed deranged tracks. Gazing beyond the rail line, she focused on the homesteads she knew so well: Broaddus, Tinsley, Sheppard, big houses with lightning rods proud and green-globed against the sky; the modest huts of Steele, Black, Purcell, and Granger, whose inhabitants now stood gawking at the washout; and finally she fixed the glass on the deep secret spot in the woods where Melton lived, Melton whom her uncle hated, and for a long time, so had she. He had killed a fawn. He couldn’t read. In the far distance, Richmond offered a vibrant purple glow to her vision, a silver energy, as if the rails and the new violets converged in crazed profusion. The immediate danger was past. Last night the rail offices had been notified by telegraph, telephone, and hysterical messenger , and Uncle John wrote in his huge script to the railroad president: “Accept my hospitality, Sir, while we negotiate settlement for this misfortune.”  The Quick-Change Artist So she opened the door to a gamine-faced man whom right away she wanted to torment. “If you’re here to sell soap or gold mines, why don’t you go on down to Melton’s. He needs a gold mine.” “Ma’am,” the man said and took off his hat. “Is Captain Cussons at home?” “You must be Alexander Bean,” she said, bringing him into the foyer. She was thirty that spring, and when her uncle died in  she would inherit it all: the hotel and the deer park, the printing shop and the thousand acres, and with her hundred thousand dollars she would sail to France. Newspapermen writing the Captain’s obituary got Lizzie’s kinship all balled up. Was she niece to her uncle or her aunt? She could have told them she was her uncle’s niece by blood, not Aunt Susan’s, Aunt Susan who was so much older than John Cussons, Susan who died of a stroke the day after a terrible storm swept through in , Susan who had been married for her money! Though nobody ever said so. So Lizzie said, “Come in” to Alexander Bean and watched with pride while his cider-colored eyes took in the huge foyer, the paintings all over the walls (a feathery Virginia crane, Uncle on horseback, an Alpine ravine), and the double stairway that swept upwards, capped by...