Marie's Secret

By Lee Conrad

By the fourth year of the drought, Lake Marie no longer had much to hide. Positioned between parched hills and the dam at the north end, the small lake, once filled with cool spring water and streams, was a sad memory to the locals. For one person, the drying up of the lake didn't make him sad… it made him nervous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee Conrad
• Release date: Dec 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215285640

Lee Conrad

Lee Conrad lives in upstate New York with his longtime love and their three rescue cats. His stories have appeared in Fiction on the Web, Literally Stories, Ariel Chart, Sundial Magazine, The London Reader, Books ‘N Pieces, Blood and Bourbon, Written Tales and The Blue Lake Review.

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This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

By the fourth year of the drought, Lake Marie no longer had much to hide. Positioned between parched hills and the dam at the north end, the small lake, once filled with cool spring water and streams, was a sad memory to the locals. For one person, the drying up of the lake didn’t make him sad... it made him nervous.

The buildings around the lake consisted of a bar with a marina, old working-class cottages, upscale lakefront homes and one mansion. The owners no longer went fishing, and boats and jet skis had long ago been moved back to homes in the suburbs. For Sale signs along the lake road gathered dust with no buyers who wanted a cottage on a dead lake.

A stench of rot permeated the area as the muddy bottom heated with the sun. Bones of dead fish were everywhere and trash from generations of uncaring people littered the bottom.  Kids from the nearby village of Marie would come to scour the muck for junk and hope for treasure. The only area of water left was near the dam, and it was quickly evaporating.

The Lakeview Inn, a clapboard one story bar with faded blue paint, sat at the east end of the lake at the deserted marina. A few of the locals and some remaining cottage owners still came and drowned their sorrows with beer and bourbon.

Dante Torrence, whose job at the marina dried up like the lake, sat at the bar nursing his beer. He was 35 years old, of medium build with black hair. Dante was also a former inmate of the prison upstate who desperately wanted to