Island of Lost Girls - Jennifer McMahon [11]
Rhonda unlocked the door at the top of the stairs, went straight for her bedroom, and changed, relieved to be out of her uncomfortable suit at last. From the dormer window beside her bed she had the perfect view of the south end of Nickel Lake. She stood for a moment with the curtain pulled back, watching the swimmers and sunbathers at the town beach, wondering if word of the kidnapping had reached them. She had this ridiculous urge to open her window and yell, like the town crier, warning mothers to keep their children safe; to beware of rabbits.
Rhonda turned away from the cheerfully oblivious swimmers with their bright towels, umbrellas, and coolers, and checked the messages on her blinking machine. Only one from a man on the Lake Champlain research team, wanting to know if thered been a mix-up about the time of her interview and offering to reschedule if she was still interested in the position. Rhonda erased the message. On the way out, she stopped in the hall to glance in the mirror. Behind her were two of the dissection drawings she was so proud of: the squid and the rabbit. Rhonda loved her biology classes and was particularly fond of the dissections. She enjoyed drawing the accompanying diagramslabeling the parts and sketching the map of organs, going back later with a colored pencil to turn the heart red, the spleen purple, the liver green. She had dissected a sheeps eye, a pig fetus, a pigeon, a cat, a squid, numerous frogs, and a rabbit. She was so pleased with the drawings shed had them framed and hung them on the walls of her apartment, where some other woman might put family portraits, maps, or posters of babies in sunflower costumes.
Her eye caught on the backward image of the rabbit in her mirror, skin pulled back, muscles and chest wall cut away to reveal the organs. She blinked, grabbed the keys from the table under the mirror, and headed out the door.
TOCK ALWAYS GOTnaked before getting in the hot tub, and Rhonda hated it. She hated that the other woman was so slim and muscular, so totally unashamed of her body. Tock peeled off all her clothes as nonchalantly as someone taking off a pair of sunglasses. Peter wore blue swimming trunks. Rhonda wore a black bathing suit, and even in that, she felt too exposed and put a T-shirt on over it.
The hot tub was homemade, as was nearly everything in their small, off-grid A-frame house, which sat on twelve acres of land fronted by a stream at the dead end of a three-mile-long Class 4 dirt road. The road wasnt maintained by the town, so it was up to Peter and Tock to plow and grade it each spring. Rhonda, who didnt have four-wheel-drive, knew better than to attempt a visit in the winter or during mud season.
Tock and Peter had built the house together three years before, giving careful, woodworkers attention to each detail, making the house more like a work of art than a home. They heated with wood, got electricity from solar panels and a bank of batteries with a gas-powered generator for backup.
Rhonda and her father came to help with the house-building on weekends. Rhondas contribution (aside from entertaining Suzy and keeping her out of harms way) was measuring and marking boards. Rhonda was afraid of all tools, of the images they inspiredimages of herself reaching down to touch the spinning blade of the table saw, of letting the circular saw slip and hit her thigh, of how easy bleeding to death could be; how easy to be marked forever in the way her father was marked. All it takes, her father used to say when telling his story, is one second.
Rhonda knew the