The Lady of the Lake

Stay put right here a minute and look at that water, because it gave something back once that it had no business keeping so well. They call me Ranger Boone. I've stood at the edge of a lot of lakes, but this is the one that taught me cold water has a memory. It was July of nineteen forty. A couple of fishermen out on Lake Crescent saw something pale come rising up out of the deep toward them, slow, the way nothing living ever moves. It was a woman. Bound up, weighted down, and she had been under this lake for the better part of three years. Now here is the thing about this lake, the thing Ranger Quinn told you up top. It is deep, it is bitter cold, and down where she lay there is almost no oxygen at all. And that water did something to her, something that doesn't happen most places. Instead of letting her go the way the dead usually go, the cold and the chemistry turned her flesh to a firm, waxy, soap-like substance, and it held. It preserved her. The lake, in its own quiet way, kept her almost exactly as she went in, and in keeping her, it kept the proof of what was done to her. They didn't know her name at first. So let me give it to you, because she deserves to be more than a body in a tale. Her name was Hallie Latham Illingworth. She was a waitress at the tavern right here on this shore, and she had vanished just before Christmas of nineteen thirty-seven. Her husband, a beer-truck driver named Monty Illingworth, told everyone she had simply run off and left him. People talked, the way people do, and then the talk died down, and Hallie was gone, and that was that. For nearly three years, that was that. And then the lake gave her back. Here is where the truth turns, and where the lake quietly testifies. They identified her by a custom dental plate, the kind made to fit one mouth and no other, matched all the way back to the dentist who fashioned it for her out in South Dakota. And the rope, the heavy rope wound around her, matched rope that Monty Illingworth had bought from a store right here by the lake, and the store still had the leftover length to prove it. The water hadn't just hidden a crime. It had preserved every thread of the evidence and then floated it up to the surface in its own time. In March of nineteen forty-two, Monty Illingworth was convicted of second-degree murder, and went off to prison for it. The folklore came after, the way it always does. Folks took to calling her the Lady of the Lake, and the name has stuck for generations, and you'll hear it spoken around here still. I'll leave the legend where the people keep it. But the woman underneath the legend was real, and the rope was real, and the lake's long, cold, patient memory was real. So the next time you marvel at how flawless and far down you can see into that blue, remember this: the very cold and the very depth that make this lake so beautiful are the same cold and depth that would not let one woman's truth stay hidden. The lake held her down all that time, and then, when it was good and ready, it raised her up and pointed.