The Restless Lake by Teri Fink

Author:Teri Fink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction, Women’s Fiction, Women’s Adventure Fiction, Literary Fiction, Pacific Northwest Fiction, Eastern European Literature, Contemporary Women Fiction, Yugoslav War
Publisher: Evolved Publishing LLC
Published: 2024-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29 – Luka

After Kathy bundled Olivia away, I headed back to my cabin for a shower. The thunderstorm followed me, dark clouds swarming overhead, fat raindrops splatting on the ground, on my head. The guests were nowhere to be seen—probably upstairs in the library game room playing card games or checkers, or hiding in their cabins from the storm.

Back in my cabin, I stripped and stepped into the shower, standing under the hot, steaming spray, muscles releasing tension in the heat. I hadn’t been afraid during the storm, except when Olivia disappeared beneath the water. I’d been with a lot of guys who flipped their boats, went for an unexpected dunk, swallowed water. I’d been there myself—a couple of times in the winter when the shock of icy water robbed me of my breath and threatened to drag me to the depths. I had never been afraid for myself or any of my racing buddies.

But I had been afraid for Olivia, a kayaking novice.

Scrabbling over scree at seven thousand feet on McGregor Mountain, she moved fearlessly, like a lioness on the hunt, while I had quaked as I stumbled over shifting, slippery rock fragments at the precipice of the perilous drop-off, crawling on hands and knees, humbled.

Water was my domain since childhood. I maintained a healthy respect for frigid lakes and rushing rivers, but no fear. I navigated liquid territory as precisely as Magellan.

Not so for Olivia. When I pulled her out of the drink, I could feel her utter confusion and shock, along with a sobering expression I had encountered before—someone who had looked death square in the face and accepted it, only to find themselves unexpectedly alive.

In Yugoslavia, right before the war, after Croatia and Bosnia had declared independence, and all hell had broken loose, I had been visiting Anya and Nik in Bosnia, hanging out in their apartment, when a knock sounded on the door. Nik opened the door cautiously to find a neighbor, an older woman named Sonja who lived across the hall.

“Something’s going on in town,” she said. “There’s busloads of people at the Hotel Paviljon and they need supplies.”

We all looked at each other, then took off for downtown. The icy sting of winter rushed our steps as we made the ten-minute walk to the hotel. A crowd had gathered around a line of buses parked in the hotel’s car park and along the street.

From the bus windows, scruffy-looking people stared at the gathering crowd with blank faces. Some stepped stiffly off the bus into the cold evening, wearing rumpled clothing too thin for the winter temperatures. Some of them talked to us. They were hungry and thirsty, with no possessions except the clothes on their backs. They said they were Croatians from Vukovar, a city on the Danube, a place where Nik and Rad and I had raced for the Yugoslav Republic Cup in 1986. Rad won that one, Nik second, and I took third.

The whole city of Vukovar, about seventy-five thousand

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