Stillhouse Lake

by Rachel Caine

  I hadn't noticed, but he's right; one of the many spring storms has blown a sizable patch of roofing away, leaving fluttering tar paper exposed. "Dammit. Know any good roofers?" I don't mean it. I'm still half out the door, mentally planning our escape for when it's necessary. But he, of course, takes me seriously.

  "Not a single one around here. But I've done some roof work in my day. If you just want a repair, I can do it for you cheap."

  "I'll think about it," I tell him. "Look, I'm sorry, but I need to see to my son. Thank you for being . . . so kind."

  That seems to make him uncomfortable. "Sure," he says. "Okay. Sorry." He rocks back and forth for a moment, as if debating saying something else, then casts me a quick glance. "Let me know."

  Then he's gone without a backward look, hands in his pockets, head down and shoulders loose. He doesn't look back. I gather up the glasses and go back inside the house, and just as I'm closing the door I see that Cade has paused a little bit up the hill to look back. I raise my hand silently. He raises his.

  And I shut the door.

  I wash out the glasses and knock on Connor's door. After a long moment he says, "Come in," and I find him sprawled on his bed, game controller on his chest, all his attention on the screen across the room. He's playing some kind of racing game. I don't interrupt him. I sink down on the edge of his bed, careful not to block his view, and wait until his in-game vehicle crashes. He pauses the game before I reach out to smooth hair back from his forehead.

  He's going to have an impressive bruise, I think, but no black eyes or there'd already be darkening from burst capillaries. There's another mark on his left cheek, just where a right-hander would have punched him, and I see raw scrapes on the palms of his hands, where he must have broken his fall. The knees of his blue jeans are abraded and bloodied.

  "Does it hurt?" I ask him. He shakes his head mutely. "Okay, sorry, I have to do this." I lean over and touch his nose, pushing and moving it to make sure that I don't feel anything strange. There isn't any break; I'm certain of that. I'll schedule a doctor's appointment in the next few days just to make sure, though.

  "Mom, enough!" Connor pushes my hand away and picks up his game controller, but he doesn't start the game again. Just fiddles with it idly.

  "Who was it?" I ask him.

  He shrugs. Not as if he doesn't know, of course, but he doesn't want to tell. He says nothing, but he doesn't start the new game, either. If he didn't want to talk, I think, he'd have the thing roaring at top volume. Standard avoidance technique these days.

  "You'd tell me if you were in trouble, wouldn't you?" I ask him. That draws his focus, just for a moment.

  "No, I wouldn't," he says. "Because if I did, you'd just pack us up and move us again, right?"

  That hurts. It hurts because it's true. Javi's left me the Jeep, but I still have to go trade it for the van, and the instant I pull that big, white beast into our driveway, my son will be proven right. Worse: now he's going to believe he's caused it to happen, as if his getting hit by bullies is forcing me to uproot the family. I hope Lanny doesn't decide to blame him, too, because there's no viciousness like that of a teen girl deprived of something she wants. And she wants to stay here. I know that, even if she doesn't.

  "If I decide to move us again, it won't be because of anything you or your sister have done," I tell him. "It'll be because it's the best, safest thing for us all. Okay, kid? We straight?"

  "Straight," he says. "Mom? Don't call me kid. I'm not a kid."

  "I'm sorry. Young man."

  "It's not like this is the first time I got punched. Won't be the last. It's not the end of the world." After another few seconds of fiddling, he puts the controller aside and rolls toward me, head propped up on his hand. "In his letters, does Dad ever say anything about us?"

  Lanny must have told him something, but she couldn't have told him all of it--certainly not what she'd read in that vile message. So I choose my words carefully. "He does," I say carefully. "Sometimes."

  "And why won't you at least read that part to us?"

  "Because that wouldn't be fair. I can't just read you the part where he pretends to be a good dad."

  "He was a good dad. He didn't pretend about that."

  My son says it with perfect calm, and it hurts, hurts like a piece of iron shoved in where my heart should be. And of course he's right, from his perspective. His dad loved him. That's all he ever saw, or knew; his dad was great, and then his dad was a monster. There was never any middle ground, no adjustment period. He saw his dad that morning of The Event, hugged him, and by that evening his father was a murderer, and he wasn't allowed to mourn him, miss him, or love him, ever again.

  I want to cry. But I don't. I say, "It's okay to still love the times you had with your dad. But he was more than just your dad, and that other part . . . that other part was, and is, nothing you should love."

  "Yeah," Connor says, thumbing his game back on. He isn't looking at me. "I wish he was dead." That hurts, too, because I wonder if he's just saying it because he knows that I wish it, too.

  I wait, but he doesn't pause the game again. I say over the roar of the sound effects, "You're sure you won't tell me who hit you? And why?"

  "Bullies, and no reason. Jeez, leave it, Mom. I'm fine."

  "Would you like to learn some moves from Javi? Or--" I almost say Mr. Cade, but I stop myself. I just met the man. I don't really know how Connor feels about him. I don't know how I feel about him.

  "I'm not starring in some teen movie," he tells me. "It doesn't work like that in real life. By the time I get any good I'll be graduated."

  "Yeah, but think of the epic graduation fight," I tell him. "Middle of the school auditorium? Everybody cheering while you take down your bullies?"

  He pauses the game. "More like me ending up bloody and in the hospital, and all of us getting charged with assault. They never show you that part in the movies."

  I don't quite know how to phrase it, so I say, "Connor . . . how did you meet Mr. Cade today?"

  "Well, Mom, he lured me into a rape van with a puppy."

  "Connor!"

  "I'm not stupid!" He flings that at me like a knife, and I admit, it startles. I start to speak, but he runs right over me, never taking his eyes off the screen as the image of a car shifts lanes, speeds, jumps, rounds corners. "I got beat up, I walked home, I sat on the dock, and he just asked me if I was okay. Don't make it some freaky Serial Dad creeper thing, all right! He was just nice! Not every guy in the world has to be an asshole!"

  "I never--" I'm shocked not only by what he says but also by the anger behind it. I haven't realized how much my son has taken his anger and turned it on me until this moment. It's understandable, of course; why wouldn't he? I'm here to represent the shitty life he leads, every day.

  It begs a larger question. I do treat every person I meet with suspicion--and men more than women. I do that out of sheer self-preservation. But I realize now that in doing so, I've appeared unreasonable in my son's eyes. After all, if I distrust those people, especially men, will I eventually look at him the same way? He has to wonder. After all, he's his father's child.

  It breaks my heart and shatters the pieces, and I feel tears gather in my eyes. I blink them away.

  "I'll get an ice pack for that nose," I tell him, and leave.

  I run into Lanny in the kitchen. She's making lunch--enough for all of us, I see, a pasta chicken dish that she's spicing with great abandon. She's a good cook, if a little liberal on flavors. When I open the freezer, she hands me an ice pack already prepared. "Here," she says, rolling her eyes. "Didn't want to interrupt mommy-son time."

  "Thanks, honey," I say, and I mean it. "Looks tasty."

  "Oh, you'll definitely taste it," she says cheerfully, continuing her stirring while I deliver Connor's ice pack. He's already laser-focused on the game, so I leave it next to him and hope he'll remember to use it before it melts.

  "Lanny," I say, as I set the table. "You should go back t
o school this afternoon. I'll call in an excuse for you."

  "Ha. No. I'm staying here."

  "Don't you have an English test?"

  "Why do you think I'm staying here?"

  "Lanny."

  "Okay, Mom, I get it, fine, whatever." She turns the burner off on the stove with an unnecessarily violent snap of her wrist and bangs the skillet down on a hot pad on the dinner table. "Eat up."

  There's no use arguing. "Go get your brother."

  She does that without complaint, at least, and lunch is good. Filling. Even Connor seems to like it enough to try to smile, though he winces and probes at his swollen nose afterward. I place phone calls, Connor and I drive Lanny to school, and I think longingly again about the van that waits at Javier's house.

  I also think that running almost ensures another stir of interest, and eventual links to our real identities. Maybe we don't need to pull up our tentative roots quite so quickly. Maybe I'm overreacting, the way I did when I pointed a gun at my own son not so long ago.

  I'm well aware that my paranoia is part of my huge, overwhelming desire to never give up control, ever again. And I know that same impulse could be hurting my children.

  Like Connor, caught between uncomplicated childhood love and adult hate, and nowhere to stand in between. Like Lanny, defiant and furious and ready to take on the world, but far too young to do it.

  I need to think of them. What they need. And as I stand in the hallway and wipe tears from my cheeks, I realize that what they might need right now is for me to stand my ground and trust that we're going to get through this. Not just another hopeless late-night flight, another town, another set of names to memorize until none of them are real anymore. Their childhood has been incinerated. Destroyed. And running is one more log on that fire.

  It's ironic that there are protection programs for witnesses, but not for us. Never for us.

  But the body in the lake. It nags at me, having this spotlight focused so close to us. There are similarities to my husband's crimes, but I tell myself that it isn't an uncommon way to dispose of a body. I've done that research, obsessively, trying to understand Melvin Royal, trying to understand how that killer could be the man I thought I knew and loved.

  I can hear Mel's mental whisper again: The smartest ones are never found out. I never would have been, except for that stupid drunk driver. Our lives would have gone on just the same.

  That is almost certainly true.

  It's your fault I'm where I am, though.

  That was completely true. Mel would have been convicted of one murder, of course. But it was my fault his true depth of evil had been finally unmasked. Everything in our house had been gone over by the police, of course; they'd missed nothing. But what they hadn't known about, and I hadn't either, was that Mel had taken out a storage locker in the name of my long-dead brother. I only found out about it because the preloaded credit card associated with the account had run out after Mel's arrest, and I'd gotten a call from the storage unit. Apparently--ironically--he'd put the home phone number on the account.

  That voice mail had led me to the storage locker, and I'd opened it up to find a bewildering array of folded women's clothing, purses, shoes. Small plastic bins, neatly labeled with victims' names, that contained the contents of their purses and pockets and backpacks.

  And the journal.

  It was a three-ring notebook, a leather presentation binder. It was filled with lined notebook paper densely covered in his neat, angular writing . . . with printed photographs. Each victim had a section.

  I'd only taken one single look before I'd dropped the book on the floor and rushed to call the police. I couldn't bear even what I'd learned from that glance.

  Mel's charges went from a single count of abduction, torture, and murder to multiple counts. The clerk's voice had gone hoarse before it was over, or so the newspaper accounts read. By that time, I was back in jail awaiting my own trial. In a rare display of spite, Mel had refused to exonerate me from his crimes, and a zealous, fame-hungry neighbor had claimed she saw me carrying something she thought might have been a body . . . though my attorney had picked that apart and gotten me an acquittal. Eventually.

  This man will kill again, Mel's voice says in my mind, and I shiver to reject it, reject him. When he does, you think they won't look at you? Won't investigate? Take your picture? This ain't the old days, Gina. Reverse image search can bring the wolves right to your door.

  I know that voice isn't really Mel, and I also know it's right. The longer we stay here, the more we risk being pulled into Detective Prester's investigation, and that's a sure, slow fuse to blow up our semisettled life.

  But taking this home away from Connor now would make his bitterness, his self-protective, guarded anger, that much worse. He's only just begun to relax, to feel part of something. Taking that away because we might be found out is cruel.

  Still. Having the van ready isn't a bad idea.

  I take a deep breath and call Javier. I tell him I'll make time soon to make the swap, Jeep for van, but there's no real hurry. He's okay with that.

  It feels like a plan.

  But some part of me also knows that it's really not enough.

  4

  I have learned not to trust anyone. Ever. I spend the night at the computer, turning up everything I can about Sam Cade--who is, indeed, an Afghanistan air force vet. He's not on any sex offender registry, has no criminal record, and even has a good credit rating. I check the popular ancestry sites; often somebody's name pops up in a family tree, and it's a good way to check out their history. But his family isn't enrolled.

  Cade's got a couple of social media accounts and a sort of boring dating profile on a match service, though it's several years out of date. I doubt he's even checked it for a long time. His posts are the normal kind of wry observations clever people make, with a support-the-military bent, but in a mostly nonpolitical way, which is a bit of a miracle. He doesn't seem rabidly fanatical about anything.

  I'm looking for dirt, and I don't find any.

  I could contact Absalom and have him deep-dive it, but the fact is, I rely on him for very specific services, the ones strictly to do with Mel and the stalker posse. If I abuse our fragile, faceless relationship, I could lose a vital resource. Checking out a neighbor probably isn't a good use of Absalom's time. Probably. Until I have some better reason to suspect Cade beyond my normal garden-variety paranoia, I can leave it. As long as he avoids me, I'll avoid him.

  Still, it's a little disquieting that when I step outside my front door, I realize that I can see his front porch from here. I've noticed it before, of course, but when we moved in, the cabin was empty, and I'd never found anyone at home when I'd come around the lake on my runs. We're in direct eyeline, though his cabin's modest and tucked in among the trees by the road. I can see the glow of lights in the front windows through red curtains.

  Sam Cade, like me, is a night owl.

  I sit in the quiet, listening to the owls and distant rustling of the trees. The lake ripples quietly and reflects shattered moonlight. It's beautiful.

  It's also very late, and I finish my drink and go to bed.

  I take Connor to the doctor to get his x-rays. He has bruises, but nothing's broken, and I'm supremely grateful for that. Lanny goes with us, though she's in silent mutiny the entire time, glowering at me and anyone who gives her a second look with equal displeasure. I ask Connor again if he'll talk about the person who hit him, but he's a well of silence. I let it go. When he's ready to tell me, he will. I think about making the offer to both of them for more self-defense classes; Javier does teach one at the local gym. I make sure, as we pass the gym, to mention it. Neither of them says a word.

  So. It's that kind of day.

  We eat out at the local diner, which is always a treat for me because of the fluffy meringue pies that they bake fresh daily, and while we're out, I see Javier Esparza, who comes in, slides in at a table not far away, and orders lunch. He sees me and nods
, and I nod back.

  "Hey, kids? I'm going to have a quick word with Mr. Esparza."

  Lanny gives me a glare. Connor frowns and says, "Don't sign me up for anything!"

  I promise not to and slide out of the booth. Javier sees me coming, and as the waitress sets down his coffee, he indicates the chair across from him. I slip into it. "Hey," he says, then takes a sip from his cup. "What's up? The kid okay?"

  "Connor's fine," I tell him. "Thank you again for jumping to the rescue so quickly."

  "De nada. Glad he didn't need it."

  "Mind if I ask you a question?"

  He glances up at me and shrugs. "Shoot--wait, hang on." The waitress is back, delivering a bowl of soup and a piece of coconut meringue. "Okay." He waits for that last until she's out of earshot and clearly minding her own business, and although I don't need the caution, I appreciate it.

  "You know Mr. Cade? Sam Cade?"

  "Sam? Yeah. Sure. Not a bad shot, for a chair force guy."

  "Chair force?"

  "I like it better than flyboy. I mean, they do most of their work sitting down." Javier grins to show there's no real ill will. "Cade's all right. Why? He bothering you?"

  "No, nothing like that. I just--it was odd, having him show up with Connor. I wanted to be sure . . ."

  Javier takes it seriously. He thinks about it for a moment, idly spooning his soup and letting it fall back to splash in the bowl, then finally takes a mouthful as if he's reached a decision. "Everybody I know who knows him, likes him," he says. "Doesn't mean he can't be bad, you know, but my instinct says he's okay. Why, you want me to look into it?"

  "If you can."

  "Okay. One good thing about being the range master: I know damn near everybody in this town."

  Only Sam's new to town, hadn't he said that? He hasn't been here all that long, and he's planning on leaving at the end of a six-month lease. Looking back on it, that seems troubling. Like someone staying a step ahead of trouble.

  Or, again, I'm just utterly, hopelessly paranoid. Why do I care? I can avoid him easily enough; I managed not to run into Cade before, and I can duck him going forward.

  "He offered to do some work on my house," I say to Javier, as some sort of excuse.

  "Yeah, he's good with that," he says. "He put a new roof on my cabin right after he moved in. I think he used to work with his dad in construction, and the price was good. Better than I would have gotten in town, and none of the local guys can nail shingles on straight. And they can't shoot for shit, either."