Praying for Sleep

from the beach is what the State Park Service, still overly generous, calls a “peak,” though it’s really just a flat-topped summit six hundred feet high.
    These rocks have their ghosts. In 1758 a small band of Mohegans, trapped on the side of this mountain, jumped to their deaths rather than be captured by rival Pequots. The women flung their screaming children before them then leapt to the rocks below with their men. Lis could still recall in perfect detail the bad, earnest illustration in her fifth-grade textbook of a squaw, looking more like Veronica Lake than a princess of the Mohican Confederacy, reaching for her tearful child as they were about to sail into the air. The first time she’d come here, a skinny wan girl, Lis walked these trails close to tears, thinking of the sorrow—whole families flying through the air. Even now, thirty years later, sitting across from Kohler, she felt the chill horror the story had evoked in her childhood.
    Six months ago, on May 1, the Atchesons and the Gillespies—a couple they knew from the country club—planned a picnic at Indian Leap. Accompanying them were Portia and a former student of Lis’s, Claire Sutherland.
    The morning of the outing—it was a Sunday—had begun awkwardly. Just as Lis and Owen were about to leave, he got a call from his firm and learned that he had to go into the office for several hours. Lis was used to his zealot’s schedule but was irritated that he acquiesced today. He’d worked almost every Sunday since early spring. The couple fought about it—genteelly at first, then more angrily. Owen prevailed, though he promised he’d meet them at the park no later than one-thirty or two.
    “I didn’t realize until later how lucky it was that he won that argument,” she told Kohler softly. “If he hadn’t gone into work . . . It’s funny how fate works.”
    She continued with her story. Portia, Claire and Lis rode with Dorothy and Robert Gillespie in their Land Cruiser. It was a pleasant two-hour drive to the park. But as soon as they arrived, Lis began to feel uneasy, as if they were being watched. Walking to the lodge house to use the phone she believed she saw, in a distant cluster of bushes, someone looking at her. Because she had the impression that there was something of recognition in the face, which she took to be a man’s, she believed for an instant that it was Owen, who’d changed his mind and decided not to work after all. But the face vanished into the bushes and when she called her husband’s office, he answered the phone.
    “You haven’t left yet?” she asked, disappointed. It was then noon; he wouldn’t be there before two.
    “Fifteen minutes, I’ll be on my way,” he announced. “Are you there yet?”
    “We just got here. I’m at the gift store.”
    “Oh”—Owen laughed—“get me one of those little pine outhouses. I’ll give it to Charlie for making me come in today.”
    She was irritated but agreed to, and they hung up. Lis went into the store to buy the souvenir. When she stepped outside a moment later and rejoined the others at the entrance to the park, she glanced over her shoulder. She believed she saw the man staring again, studying the five of them. She was so startled she dropped the wooden outhouse. When she picked it up and looked back again, whoever it might have been was gone.
     
    Kohler asked her about the others on the picnic.
    “Robert and Dorothy? We met them at the club about a year ago.”
    The foursome had coincidentally picked adjacent pool-side tables. They became friends by default, being about the only childless couples over thirty in the place. This mutual freedom broke the ice and they gradually got to know one another.
    Owen and Lis were initially no match socially for their friends. Not yet inheritors of the L’Auberget fortune, the Atchesons lived in a small split-level in Hanbury, a grim industrial town ten miles west of Ridgeton. In fact the country-club membership itself, which Owen had insisted on so that he might court potential clients, was far too expensive for them, and many nights they’d eaten sandwiches or soup for dinner because they had virtually no cash in the bank. Robert, on the other hand, made buckets of money selling hotel communications systems. Owen, a lawyer in a small firm with small clients, masked his chagrin under careful smiles but Lis could see bitter jealousy when the Gillespies pulled up in front of the Atchesons’ tacky house in