The Drowned Town

By Katherine Luck

Blasting along a deserted stretch of highway in a battered car rattling with empty vodka bottles, a young woman is apprehended by the police. With her, she carries a stack of books written in long-dead languages, a fantastically expensive fur coat, and a loaded gun. And what everyone—including the woman—wants to know is what she's doing in middle-of-nowhere Texas, long after midnight, hundreds of miles from home.

Surging from an insular religious community hidden in the heart of New York City to a vast estate overrun by a powerful family of criminals to a lost town buried under a lake, this mini novella is flooded with suspense, unexpected twists, and dark humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Obelus Division
• Release date: Apr 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781732078468

Katherine Luck

Visit katherineluck.com for updates about upcoming books.

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Katherine Luck blogs at the-delve.com and howtowritelike.com

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THE DROWNED TOWN

1

Not far from my grandparents’ estate—picture a sixteen-building compound of old money New England luxury on acres upon acres of the greenest imported Irish clover, a staff of twenty-three, no horses but several Bentleys, you get the idea—a quaint little town had been flooded in 1933. The town was inundated when a dam was built to supply electric power to the estates of my grandparents and their exclusive gaggle of rich peers.

When I was nine, my grandfather took me for a stroll and paused to point at a spot smack dab in the middle of Progress Lake (great fishing and rowing for Harvard Hellions and Yale Young Republicans).

That’s where the town is, he said.

is

is

is still there, the town is still there, under the still water.

This is not a rare phenomenon, the rabbi said as we sat on his couch sixteen years later, when I was twenty-five. He was undressing my feet, sock by sock.

The ancient Babylonians flooded the city of Uruk in 1100 B.C. There’s Atlantis, of course, should she prove to be more than a Greek fairytale. And the Mesopotamians inundated the entire Diyala Valley in 2600 B.C. to improve the harvest—a dozen villages, gone like that.

The rabbi stopped undressing my feet to snap his fingers. Like that.

The rabbi

The rabbi

The rabbi liked to undress me feet first. We were like the town under Progress Lake: three and a half months’ warning given to clear out before the primal waters rushed in and washed everything away. Our warning came the first time we slept together—it was obviously so terribly wrong. His orthodoxy and my WASPy irresponsible rich college girl routine were not meant to be A Thing That Lasts.

But we ignored the warning.

Three and a half months from start to finish. Then the inundation submerged everything.

2

Just days shy of my twenty-ninth birthday, I finally, finally had my DUI trial after I drove drunk through a tiny town tacked down in the middle of a stretch of Texas wasteland I had no business being in.

I was convicted.

Of course I was convicted. I was guilty as hell.

I was ordered to serve a three-and-a-half-month sentence in the tiny town’s tiny jail. Like the dreary ancient Middle Eastern languages course I was required to take back in grad school, I had to show up at eight a.m. sharp on Monday, no excuses, no weaseling out of it. The judge gave me the weekend to put my affairs in order.

I had only one affair. I needed to return the rabbi’s gun.

Why?

Well, it was a gun.

But in that particular gun-lovin’ land of proud Texan gun-having, my possession of a gun upon arriving at school—no, at jail—bright and early Monday morning would have been regarded with no more suspicion than my possession of a purse, a cell phone, and a clutch of tampons. The desk sergeant wouldn’t have blinked an eye. My two-carat diamond earrings, my platinum Rolex, and my dog-eared textbooks in ancient Middle Eastern languages—Is this here an Ay-rab Koran book?—are what would set off