Under the Lake Read Online Free PDF Page A

garden rolling down to the water. Near the road a black gardener was being supervised by a tall, elderly man with a fringe of white hair. This had to be Eric Sutherland, the power company owner and, from what Denham White had said, de facto ruler of the town which bore his name. “Better call on the old man and pay your respects,” Denham had advised. “He’ll be your landlord, in a manner of speaking, and he likes to know who’s treading on his turf.” On impulse, Howell stopped the station wagon and got out. Might as well get it over with.
    “Mr. Sutherland?” He approached and offered his hand. The man grunted and took the hand gingerly. “My name is John Howell. My brother-in-law, Denham White, has offered me his cabin up here for a while, and he suggested I drop by and say hello.”
    Sutherland glanced at the heavily loaded station wagon. “Looks like you could be homesteading, Mr. Howell.”
    “Well, yes, I suppose it does. I should be here for about three months, and I didn’t want to make any unnecessary trips back to Atlanta.” Howell nodded toward the lake. “What a beautiful setting. I understand this is all your handiwork.”
    “Yes, it is,” Sutherland replied, without modesty, “and God couldn’t have done a better job.” He didn’t seem to take much pleasure in his achievement, Howell thought. “I like the folks who come up here to do their part in keeping it as it is.”
    Howell smiled. “Well, I’ve no plans to change anything.”
    “Yankee, are you?” asked Sutherland.
    “No, sir, North Carolina originally. Chapel Hill. Guess my accent has gotten a little scrambled with my travels.” Shit, the old bastard had him on the defensive already.
    “I knew your father-in-law. Damned good man.”
    Howell nodded. “So I hear. He died before I met my wife.” Howell had heard nothing of the kind. Denham White Senior had been a ruthless buccaneer of a businessman; not even his own children had a kind word to say about him. Howell figured anybody who remembered him as a “damned good man” bore watching himself. “Well, it’s nice to have met you, sir,” he said, starting to turn toward the car. But he had not yet been dismissed.
    “I believe you’re a newspaper reporter,” Sutherland said, staring right through him. “What do you think you might have to report on in these parts?”
    “No, sir, I’ve been out of the newspaper business for acouple of years now. I’m writing freelance; that’s why I’m up here. I’m working on a book.”
    “And what is the subject of your book? Wouldn’t be anything local, would it?”
    Howell was a bit taken aback by Sutherland’s increasing hostility. “Oh, no, sir. It’s a novel. I’m . . . not quite ready to talk about it just yet. Superstitious, I guess.”
    Sutherland gazed at him in silence for a moment. “We’ve already got too much superstition around here,” the old man said. “Good day.” Abruptly, he turned and walked toward his house.
    As the man walked away, Howell reflected that, in his experience, people who didn’t like reporters usually had something to hide. He tried to shake off the thought. He wasn’t up here to report on anything; he had other work to do.
    He drove slowly through the little town, a neat, prosperous-looking place with the usual assortment of stores and businesses for a small north Georgia town, but with a difference. The business districts of Georgia towns were not, in general, very pretty. The shops and offices grew up out of necessity rather than by plan, and if one merchant had some sense of taste and style, his next-door neighbor usually didn’t, creating a hodge-podge that averaged out as plain, or sometimes, plain ugly. But Sutherland looked as though someone had worked out a uniform architectural plan on Main Street. The buildings were all consistent in style, and there were no neon or other garish signs. Instead, the name of each business was lettered in the same typeface. There were