About twenty-five yards to the right of the house was an old outhouse with a peaked roof and a traditional half-moon vent hole in the wooden door—a relic of time before the house had been equipped with modern plumbing. Past the outhouse and down a slight incline was the lakeshore where an old wooden boat dock jutted out some twenty feet over the water.
Chris turned into the entrance and drove over an ancient, loose-planked wooden bridge that spanned a dried-up streambed that curved around the house.
“Check it out!” yelled Andy as they turned into the driveway and approached the house.
Chris pulled the van up in front of the porch and stopped. They all jumped out and ran immediately down to the lake.
“Why don’t we take our bags into the house first?” Chris shouted after them, but like restless kids needing to release pent-up energy after a long car trip, they paid no attention to her. She shrugged and sighed.
“Chris! Come on down!” shouted Debbie from the dock.
Chris shook her head. “You go ahead,” she called to her. “I’m going to take my bags in the house first and look around”
Behind her, inside the house, someone parted the curtains slightly and looked out.
Chris turned back toward the house and the figure in the window disappeared. For a moment, she stood still, simply staring at the old place. It seemed like a long time. A very long time. Almost as if it had been another life. Then she took a deep breath, grabbed her duffel bag, and climbed the porch steps to the front door.
Her parents hadn’t wanted her to come here, nor did they want to come here anymore themselves. The kept talking about putting the old place on the market, but somehow they never got around to it, as if they simply didn’t want to deal with anything that touched it. As if what had happened to her was their problem.
Well, it wasn’t their problem, she thought bitterly. It was hers. What had happened had happened to her, not to them. They didn’t seem to understand that. She was the one who had to deal with it, one way or another. Avoiding it was not the answer. Your problems didn’t disappear if you ignored them. The only way that she could think of facing what had happened to her was to come back here and deal with it once and for all. Come back to Crystal Lake where the nightmare had begun.
She started to look for the keys to the front door and then noticed with surprise that the door was slightly ajar. She frowned. There wasn’t supposed to be anybody here.
“Hello?” she said uncertainly.
There was no response. Glancing over her shoulder toward the lake where her friends were, she hesitantly took hold of the doorknob and pushed open the door. It opened with a creak and she stepped inside.
With all the curtains drawn, the house was dark. Only the faint gleams of sunlight penetrated through the gaps in the faded window curtains, sending thin shafts of light across the floor.
“Is someone here?” she said nervously.
Suddenly she felt a hand grab her by the neck and yank her backward sharply. She gasped, opening her mouth to scream, but before she could, she was pinned against the wall and felt herself being kissed passionately. Opening her eyes wide, she broke the kiss, pulling back, and gave her “attacker” a hard shove.
“Rick!” she said, enormously relieved and yet at the same time really angry at being scared like that. She hadn’t expected to run into him here, at lease not this soon, but then she realized that he must have been working out in the barn, hauling in the hay, when they had driven up. Her father had obviously forgotten about stopping the delivery and Rick was just being helpful, trying to get it in before it rotted. He probably didn’t know that her family wasn’t coming this summer, that they were probably never coming back again. She had never told him about what happened, and as a result, there was no way he could have known what coming back here again meant to her.
“Is it just my imagination or did it just get cold in here?” said Rick, sounding disappointed.
Rick was a tall, attractive, well-built twenty-three-year-old with short dark hair and an easy smile. He was dressed in a plaid work shirt and jeans and he leaned against the wall, watching Chris uncertainly, the puzzled expression on his face saying he didn’t know what he had done wrong. She gave him an exasperated look and walked away from him, trying to collect herself.
“Did I do something wrong?” said Rick, coming toward her with a look of concern on his face.
She turned back to him with a sigh. “No . . . it’s just being here again,” she said, not sure how to make him understand. She really didn’t want to get into it now. She wasn’t ready for him. Not yet, it was too soon. “I know it’s only been a year,” she said, “but I feel like I’ve been away forever.”
Her gaze went around the room. “It doesn’t look like anything’s changed,” she said, sighing wistfully. “Even the paintings are still crooked.”
She went over to the wall and straightened one of the inexpensive landscape paintings. Her father had bought them at a “starving artists” warehouse sale, thinking he had found a real bargain, and later had found out that the “starving artists” were starving in Korea, where they were being paid slave wages to turn out hundreds of copies of the same landscape scenes for export.
“You’ve certainly changed,” said Rick, watching her, unable to understand her standoffishness. “Don’t you even say hello anymore?”
“I’m sorry,” Chris said, turned back to him. She forced a smile. “Hello, Rick. How are you?”
He smile uncertainly. “Well, that’s a start.”
He reached for her and bent down to kiss her once again, but she pulled back,
