“Is that what you think, that I’m hiding something? Because I told you everything. There’s nothing else going on here.”
The hurt in his voice straightens my spine. “That’s not what I said at all. I know you’re not the reason that woman ended up in the lake. You have an alibi, remember? We were together all night.”
Paul leans into the mirror to inspect his forehead. “This looks great, babe. Thanks.” He squeezes my arm and brushes by, dropping his towel over the bar on his way out of the room.
I watch his naked form disappear into the closet, my chest going hot with exasperation, with aggravation. Paul is a great communicator when he wants to be, but other times—like now—he plies me with only the basics. My first wife died unexpectedly. My dad left when I was ten. My mother can be a little controlling. Jax was once a friend. Flat, nonspecific answers that tell me nothing but the facts.
I hustle after Paul into the closet. “What happens if somebody saw us talking? What if nosy old Wanda Whitaker was looking out her upstairs window and spotted the three of us standing in the alley? Sam’s already halfway to town. He’ll be questioning everybody.”
Paul steps into a pair of navy boxer shorts, digs around in a drawer for a long-sleeved shirt. “Mrs. Whitaker is in Ohio, visiting her daughter. She’s not back until after Thanksgiving.”
“Somebody else, then.”
“Who? It was freezing yesterday. Nobody was out.” Paul pulls the shirt over his head and reaches for a pair of pants. “Let’s just give it a day or two. See if anybody comes forward.”
I fold my arms across my chest, leaning a hip against the wall. “By then it’ll only be worse. Why can’t we just tell the truth? It’ll look better coming now, and from us rather than somebody else.”
“If I thought it would help the investigation in any way, I would call Sam right this second, but I just...” His shoulders slump, a sock dangling from each hand. “I can’t, Char. I can’t go through that again. The suspicion. The rumors. I just can’t.”
His pained expression, the way his voice goes raw and real... My heart cracks wide open, and I stop pushing.
He thanks me with a thin smile, then opens a door at the far end of the closet, pulls out a backpack and leans it up against the wall. It’s the big one he uses for multiday hiking trips, the one he once lugged two thousand miles up the Appalachian Trail. He yanks open some drawers and shoves in clothes much like the ones he’s wearing—waterproof pants, a thermal shirt and socks, hats and gloves and fleece neck warmers. He stuffs his feet into his brand-new leather clodhoppers, leaving them untied. The laces slither like bright red snakes across the hardwood floor.
A dull pounding starts up behind my eyes. “Paul, why does it look like you’re going camping?”
“I realize the timing’s not ideal. That I’m leaving you to deal with all this.” He swipes a hand in the general direction of the lake. “But I’ll only be gone a day, maybe two. Three at the most.” He closes the backpack with one smooth tug on the string, picks it up and slings it over a shoulder.
“Paul.” I pause, trying to pull my shit together. Failing. I press two fingers to my temples. “You have got to be kidding me. You’re leaving? Where are you going?”
“Walk with me, will you?” Paul brushes past me, moving in long strides through the bedroom and into the hall, so fast I have to jog to keep up. “With the storm blowing in, they’re going to have to push Pause on the investigation anyway. I probably won’t miss much. I’ll be back before they even notice I’m gone.”
Like hell. I rush down the stairs, picturing Paul in that hammock of his, a thin sheet of nylon wrapped around a Paul-sized chunk of ice. “Micah will notice, and you’re going to freeze to death out there. And how are you going to get anywhere? You don’t have a car, remember?”
I don’t offer up my old Honda, both because I don’t want him to go, and even if I did, he’d never get it out of the driveway. There are police cars parked every which way out there, ten tons of metal blocking the garage door. There’s no way he’d ever sneak past.
By the time I make it to the kitchen, Paul is already in the pantry, snatching items off the shelves and dropping them into his backpack in no apparent order. Granola, energy bars, some soups, an industrial-sized bag of beef jerky. Hiking food, enough to last him for days. This is a man who loads the dishwasher with mechanical precision, who after I put away the groceries rearranges the pantry so all labels are facing out. He doesn’t throw anything in anywhere willy-nilly.
A jackhammer starts up in my chest, rushing blood to my head so fast it makes me dizzy. “You know how this looks, right? What am I supposed to say? How do I explain you taking off as soon as a dead woman washes up?”
“I know how it looks, which is why I’m asking you—no, begging you—to just sit tight and not say anything. If Micah asks, which he will, make something up. Tell him I’m on a work trip or something.”
I trail Paul back into the kitchen, watching him rummage through a cabinet by the sink, pulling out a reusable bottle and clipping it to a hook on the backpack. “At least tell me where you’re going. What’s so urgent you have to leave right now?”
Now, finally, Paul stops moving. He reaches for my hands, holding them firmly in both of his. “Do you trust me, Charlotte?”
I don’t have to think about it, not even for a second. I nod.
“I’m going to find Jax.” I open my mouth to tell him Jax was looking for him, but Paul stops me. “When I get back, you and I are going to sit down, and I am going to tell you everything. I promise. But right now I really don’t have time.” He releases me, hefting the backpack onto his shoulders. “There’s money in the safe. The code’s 3-0-3-1-9. If you forget, I wrote it on the inside flap of the Le Corbusier book.”
I flinch, and automatically, my hand goes to his ring on my finger. I feel the weight of it, the significance. The day Paul slid it over my knuckle was the day I swore to never give anyone, least of all Paul, reason to think I only want him for his wealth. Yes, I like living in a pretty house. No, I never have to choose between going cold or going hungry again. But there are enough people in this town who think I traded my morals for money, and it would kill me if Paul were one of them.
“Paul, I don’t want your money.”
He stops, turns back. “That’s not what I—Come on, Charlotte. You know that’s not what I meant. What’s mine is yours is ours. You work just as hard as I do for that money. It’s there for both of us, just in case.”
I ignore the first part, even though I don’t know. Not really. It’s true I work hard, but we both know I wouldn’t have a job if not for Paul. I am a guest here, living off the back of my all-too-generous husband.
But a more pressing point is, what would Paul do if I held out my hand right now? Would he smile and slap some bills in my palm? Would it make me a different person in his eyes? Paul once told me he admired me for the way I worked two jobs at sixteen, paying the bills for Chet and me, pulling us both up by the bootstraps. He said he loved how my penniless past shaped me into a person he wished he could be.
But like I explained to him then, I wouldn’t wish my past on anyone. You have to come from nothing to be like me. You have to suffer. And one thing I know about my husband is that he’s never suffered, not that way. He has no idea what it’s like to eat nothing but ramen noodles for thirteen days in a row, or to have your electricity cut off in the dead of winter. He’s never felt that kind of worry. Privilege will do that to a person, make you blind to the struggles of those who exist outside your bubble.
“In case of what?”
“Emergency. Disaster.” He lifts his hands in the air, lets them fall to his sides with a slap. Money is his love language, and he can’t see a single thing wrong with him offering it to me now in place of himself. “I don’t know. The point is, it’s there for whatever you need while I’m gone.”
> “What I need is for you to stay here, with me.”
“I wish I could do that.” He looks sincere enough, but I don’t believe him. There’s too much here I don’t understand, too much he’s not telling me. He might not say all of what he’s thinking, but he’s not supposed to lie.
He presses both hands to my face, his palms cupping my cheeks. “Promise me you’ll sit tight until I get back. Promise me you won’t tell anyone where I’m going.”
“Not even your mother?”
“Especially not her. Promise me.”
I shake my head, not because I don’t want to make that promise, but because I’ve already seen the gleam in his eyes, the determined set of his chin, and I know I can’t stop him. It’s the same expression he wears on a build site, where he can look at a pile of bricks and already see the finished walls. For Paul, there is an answer to every problem, a neat and logical path to every solution. In his head, at least, he’s halfway around the lake already.
But I can’t make myself say the words. I can’t make that promise.
“What about Friday?” I say instead.
“What happens Friday?”
“The appointment with the doctor. The ultrasound.”
Paul grimaces. “I will do my best, my very, very best, to be back.” He pauses, glancing over his shoulder at the door. “But I can’t make any promises.”
“Then neither can I.”
Paul threads a hand around my neck and pulls me in for a kiss, then drops to his knees and presses his lips to my stomach. I stand there like a statue, the room spinning like the world has shifted on its axis and I don’t know how to stop it.
“I love you.” He pushes himself to his feet. “I’ll be home before you know it. Take care of yourself and our baby.”
“I love you, too,” I whisper, but he’s already gone—off like a rabbit released from a trap.
I watch him through the front window, backpack bobbing as he kicks into an easy jog up the drive, and think of my mother. Shoving Chet in my arms and leaving us in a trailer with nothing but crumbs. Ordering me to stop fussing, that she’d be right back. The way my lungs locked up when I looked through the window to see her dropping into some stranger’s car.
Now I sink onto a stool and look around Paul’s big, fancy house—a place with everything I thought I ever wanted, only now it feels empty and cold. It doesn’t take me long to realize why.
In the thirteen months I’ve lived here, I’ve never slept in this big house alone.
* * *
Paul and I were on our fourth date, halfway up the trail to High Falls, when he told me about Katherine.
“We met in college, at one of those dives that serves hot wings and PBR in pitchers. She was on a date with some other guy, but I didn’t care. He went to the bathroom, and I slid into his seat. Later she told me they were just friends, but it was obvious they were close. I assumed they were together.” He grinned over his shoulder. “I’m persistent, but then again, you already know that.”
I smiled, thinking back to the first day he walked into the gas station, how he made me ring him up three times—for gas, then for gum, then for a $100 prepay card I knew he’d never use because clearly he was the type of guy who could afford a monthly plan. I promise not to buy one of those, he’d said, pointing to a giant jar of pickled eggs I had to fish out with a ladle, but only if you tell me your name. He was persistent, all right, and already I was smitten. Our fourth date, and I would have followed him anywhere.
“We were married eleven years, all of them happy. Until one day, a Thursday, Katherine went for a swim. Her daily morning ritual, like me and my runs. She went out the back door, me out the front. Do you know her last words to me? ‘The raccoon pooped on the back deck again.’ I wish I could say it was something more poignant, but we talked about raccoon shit. If nothing else, I’ve learned never to leave someone without a proper goodbye.”
He didn’t look back this time, but I could hear the emotion in his words, the way pain had turned his voice vulnerable. Every other sound faded away—the water pounding the rocks below, my lungs sucking air, the blood thudding in my ears. It was just me and Paul on that hill, and his love for her was flaying my heart.
“I loved her for every day of our time together. I would have loved her the rest of our lives. That’s why all the talk afterward was so infuriating, so unbelievably appalling. Those people don’t know me at all. They didn’t see how I suffered.”
“God, Paul. I’m so sorry.”
He stopped in the middle of the path then, turning back. “No, I’m sorry for burdening you with all this. But I know I’m the elephant in every room in this town. I know how people talk, and I wanted you to hear it from me, not them. Even though, obviously, it’s still a painful subject.”
Obviously. And he’d waited until he was here, leading me up a hiking trail, rather than face-to-face across a dinner table. A group of rowdy hikers came bounding down the trail, and Paul slapped on a smile for them, for me. By the time they disappeared into the woods, the moment had passed.
We started back up the hill, and that was when I knew.
The thing I wanted more than anything, the only thing, was for Paul to love me like he had once loved Katherine.
10
A half-dozen trips up and down the hill later and I am officially done. Spaghetti legs, freezer-burn lungs, skin tingling like I’ve been slapped all over. I can’t keep up with the thirst of Micah and the others, at last count seven hungry bodies who’ve sucked down the coffee faster than I can make it, along with five packs of cookies and two banana breads I dug out of the freezer, defrosted and slathered in cream cheese.
By now the body is long gone, laid out on some cold metal slab at Harris Regional, being poked and prodded by the medical examiner. The cops have made a mess of the back hill, a crisscross of muddy tracks and footprints fanning out from a blue party tent they erected over a flat spot at the bottom. They’ve dragged over a teak table and some chairs, arranged them around a firepit they coaxed into a roaring bonfire. It sends up smoke signals people can see for miles. Dead woman found here. Rubberneckers welcome.
The mess inside is not much better, wrappers and crumbs and coffee grounds scattered like dirt across the marble of the kitchen island. I swipe the trash into the can and the grounds into the sink along with my breakfast, a bowl of oatmeal now congealed into a gooey chunk. I shove it down the disposal, and the way it clings to my spoon sends a wave of nausea rolling through. Eat or puke, I can’t decide. So far this pregnancy hasn’t been much fun.
Especially since there’s no one here for me to share it with. I think of Paul, of his trek to find Jax, and the tears rise unexpectedly, hot and sudden. Paul has told me almost nothing about his former best friend, why the summer after their senior year Jax went off the deep end, walked away from his family and friends, and disappeared into the woods.
Paul’s silence makes it all too easy to believe the rumors. That Jax cheated Paul out of money or popularity, or he slept with one of Paul’s girlfriends. That there was a fight that got out of control, a fit of jealousy, a push too hard. That Jax hit his head, knocked something loose. That the devil made him do it. Lake Crosby gossip and speculation because the people who know—Paul and Micah and Jax—aren’t talking.
I hate that Paul left me here to deal with Micah and Sam, with work and clients, with his mother, who has surely spotted the smoke signals by now. I hate that in a few hours, the sun is going to sink behind the trees and everybody will pack up and leave. The windows will go black with night, and I’ll be in this big house all alone.
The front door swings open, and I jump. “Hey, Charlie, what’s with all the cop cars?”
My brother, Chet, the only soul on the planet still allowed to call me Charlie. My cell has been lighting up with his messages all morning, and the truth is I’ve been expecting him. My brot
her is a needy guy, and he doesn’t take well to anybody ignoring him, least of all me.
I swipe my eyes with my sleeves, clear the tears from my throat. “In the kitchen.”
There’s the thump of him kicking the heavy door with a boot, the thuds of his soles echoing in the high atrium of the house as he heads straight for the back window. He presses his face to the glass, looking down the hill to where Micah and the others are trampling what’s left of the summer grass. “What’s going on? Did somebody get arrested or something?”
“No. Somebody died.”
His head whips around, his eyes bulging. “No shit. Like died, died?”
I nod, flipping on the water and rinsing out my bowl. “She washed up sometime last night.”
He glances back out the window, down the hill to the dock. “Popular spot.”
I don’t want to feel that little niggle of doubt, but it nudges me between the ribs anyway. One body under the dock is a tragedy. Two is a pattern. I tell myself that it is a coincidence, that Paul had nothing to do with either. He was in bed with me all last night, and he loved Katherine. Her death was an accident, one he mourns to this day.
And yet I still hear all Sam’s awful, horrible arguments, the words he said the night before I walked down the aisle to marry Paul. That former competitive swimmers don’t just sink to the bottom of the lake. That drowning is the hardest murder to prove. That one of the reasons Paul is so loaded is because he inherited all her wealth. I don’t know how much, but it’s got to be millions. Her family had even more money than Paul’s, and she got it all when they passed.
“Chet, stop. This is serious. They think she was murdered.”
“Seriously? Why? Who was she?”
“I don’t know. A tourist, I guess.”
He whistles between his teeth. “Talk about a crappy vacation.”
I smile despite myself, a particular talent of Chet’s. The other is the way his eyes, big and green and framed with a thick fringe of lashes, really open up his face, make it seem like he’s paying attention even when he’s not, which is pretty much the only reason he made it through school. His teachers liked him enough to let him squeak by with a C minus.
Stranger in the Lake Page 7
