Dreamland Lake Read Online Free PDF Page A

headed around the lake that way and up to the clubhouse. It wasn’t anything more than a delaying action. We both knew it.
    But the minute we got to the clubhouse door, we could see they hadn’t even started fixing it up for the season. It was just one big room—dance floor size—and we could look across to the French doors that led out to the porch overlooking the lake. They were bolted shut, and the rest of the windows still had their winter shutters on.
    No coke machine yet, either, so I was willing to give up, but Flip said, “Something funny about this. Look, the door’s been forced.” It had. The padlock was still closed, but the hasp was ripped out of the rotten wood on the doorjamb. The bent-up nails were scattered around on the front step.
    I wouldn’t even have noticed it. But Flip was givingit his private-eye look. It gave me the creeps. And for a minute there, I’d just as soon have headed on into the woods. But we charged into the clubhouse, you-know-who in the lead.
    At first, it looked like nobody had been there since fall. Last year’s unburned newspapers jammed into the big rock fireplace, and all the empty lockers for the tennis players’ gear standing with the doors open. It had a pretty abandoned feeling about it.
    Flip was all over the place at once. “Take a look at this,” I heard him say from over in the far corner. He was squatted down in front of the giant roller they use to smooth and level the clay courts. It was propped up in the cobwebby corner. There was a thin crust of dried clay on the roller part. Somebody had scratched a swastika on it, with a pocketknife, probably. One of those crooked crosses like this, that the Nazis used to use for their emblem. “It’s fresh,” Flip said. “Look, you can see the crumbs from the clay on the floor there. Somebody’s been carving on this recently.” I about half-expected him to take out a clean envelope and sweep the crumbs into it for laboratory analysis.
    “So what?” I said. “This whole place is carved up with initials and dirty pictures and all kind of stuff like that.”
    “But not with swastikas,” Flip said. “And what about those?” He nodded down at the floor. There, on both sides of the roller, were candles stuck onto the floorboards in their own wax. They were burned almost down to nubs. Black candles. Talk about weird. We just stared at them awhile. Then I muttered, “It’s almost like an altar.”
    “Yeah,” Flip said, “like it meant something important to somebody.” He reached into his pocket andfumbled around through all the portable junk he carried with him and came out with a book of matches.
    “Let’s forget it,” I said, but he was lighting the candles. When they began to glow, the front of the roller brightened up and the swastika stood out. It was even carved down into the metal part—very careful work with little flourishes that the candlelight picked up. It was like something in an old World War II movie—down in a bunker or something. But it was more than ever like some evil kind of altar.
    “I’m getting out of here,” I said.
    “Two of us,” Flip said. He stomped on one of the candles, and I stomped on the other one. And we made our exit through the clubhouse door at the same time. It was good to be outside, even with the woods that close.
    In a way, The Mysterious Nazi Altar took the edge off my fear of going into the woods. “Bunch of little kids fooling around in the clubhouse,” I said, for an easy explanation.
    “No. That’s not anything little kids would think of,” he said. And then, we were in the middle of the woods, almost at The Spot. “I should’ve brought my light meter,” Flip said, acting a little too easygoing, I thought. He was fumbling with the camera case, supposedly deciding on the shutter setting in the little clearing where we’d found the dead man. Neither of us looked right at the spot.
    But if we were going to take a picture of it, we were going to have