Micah slips the phone back into his pocket. “When you see Paul, tell him to give me a call, will you? I need to talk to him about something. It’s pretty urgent.”
I smile. “Sure thing.”
He fetches his boots from the mudroom, puts them on by the back door. “I’ll check in before heading home tonight, see how y’all are doing.”
“Sounds good,” I say, even though it doesn’t sound good at all. I don’t want Micah swinging by, not without Paul here as a buffer. Every second I spend alone with that man is another chance for me to lie or worse—to talk myself into a corner. A flash of anger blooms in my chest at Paul for leaving me here, for trekking off into the woods for who knows where or how long. When he gets home, I’m going to kill him.
“Hey, Charlotte?”
I look to where Micah is standing, one foot in the mudroom.
“Keep the doors locked and the alarm on at all times, okay? And maybe have Chet check the windows. Until we figure out who put that woman in the lake and why, nobody’s safe.”
Nobody’s safe.
The words punch a panic button in my chest. Even with a backyard full of cops, even with big, badass Micah in the house next door, the murderer could show up here. My breath comes in a shallow spurt, hollowing out the room and my lungs and my stomach. But somehow I manage a nod.
As soon as Micah leaves, Chet turns to me. “Wanna tell me what that was all about?”
“What was what all about?”
He reaches across the counter for the pot of jam. “Don’t you play coy with me, Charlie Delilah McCreedy. Where is Paul, really? And why did you just lie to the sheriff about it?”
I don’t correct Chet or ask what gave me away. It could be any one of a number of things—my shaky hands, my twitchy gaze, the unambiguous pauses while I thought through my string of lies. Chet knows all of my tells.
I pour the beans in the grinder and flip it on with a thumb. “No comment.”
12
June 12, 1999
7:07 p.m.
Jax didn’t want to be here. While Paul and Micah talked nonsense, sports and parties, and debated which was the superior food group, pizza or hamburgers, Jax leaned back on the lounger and stared out the window at the tops of the trees, wishing he was anywhere but here, at Paul’s house. The top of Leafy Knoll, maybe, or crawling through the caves on the western end of the lake. Paul was cool, but Mrs. K was right about there being something going on between Jax and Micah. For the past hour, Micah had worked Jax’s every last nerve.
He bragged about girls, the ones he’d slept with and the ones he planned to, and how the ones at Clemson, where Micah was starting as a freshman this coming fall, were supposed to be hot and rich and easy. He ticked off his accomplishments like they were nothing, the cliffs he’d climbed and the pounds he’d bench-pressed, boasting and blowing steam until Jax couldn’t take another second.
“I have a question,” Jax said, interrupting an endless soliloquy about the size of his trust fund. Micah stopped flipping through the CDs on the far shelf and swung his gaze around. “Have you always been this obnoxious, or am I just now picking up on it?”
Paul snorted, but Micah didn’t crack a smile. He just stared at Jax in that way of his, his face a concrete slab. “Better than being a buzzkill.”
That familiar angry fire, Jax’s old friend, flicked to life in his chest. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means the whole time we’ve been up here, all you’ve done is stare out the window. You haven’t cracked a smile. You haven’t said more than three words. It’s pretty obvious you don’t want to be here, so do us all a favor, will you, and go home.” Micah turned back to the CDs.
“Fuck you.”
Micah whirled around. “What did you just say?”
This time, Jax said it louder, exaggerating the words. “I said fuck. You. Fuck you.”
“Stop it, both of you.” Paul, playing the peacemaker as usual. He leaned forward in his favorite chair, a leather-lined acrylic bubble that hung from a giant hook in the ceiling, big enough for two people. It was modern and ridiculously cool, just like Paul. “Nobody’s going home, so, Jax, chill. Micah, put on a new CD.”
Micah managed one last glare in Jax’s direction before selecting one from the pile. “Please tell me you don’t really listen to this shit. Where’s the Zeppelin? The Skynyrd and Steve Miller? This is some girlie-ass music you got here, dude. Who the hell is Coldplay?”
Predictable. Ever since Jax’s mother died, this had been Paul’s strategy whenever the two argued, to distract and provide cover by drawing Micah’s fire. Paul knew Micah would rag on Paul’s music, because he always ragged on Paul’s music. And Micah fell for it every time. He was blind to the way Paul was always ten steps ahead of the trends. His music, his clothes and hair, even his bedroom, sleek and shiny and the opposite of the overstuffed house downstairs. Whatever Paul surrounded himself with was what everybody wanted years from now.
“They’re already huge in the UK.” Paul grinned, sounding not the least bit offended. “A major German label just signed them. Put it on and you’ll see.”
Micah chucked the CD back onto the shelf. “Who cares about the UK? We live in America, remember?”
“Led Zeppelin is British.”
Micah frowned. “No, they’re not.”
“They are. Look it up.”
“Whatever.” Micah flopped onto Paul’s bed, swinging his dirty shoes up onto the white duvet, leaving twin streaks across the bottom. “This is boring. I’m bored.”
Only boring people get bored. Jax’s mother’s words whispered through his mind with a painful pang. If she were here, she’d be bothered by Micah, too. He was eighteen, six months older and the son of the man everybody said was buying his way to the top of the town’s police force. Mom wouldn’t like the way Micah thought it gave him permission to do whatever he wanted, either.
“What do you want to do?” Paul said, rocking the swing with a toe. “You want to go somewhere?”
“This is Lake Crosby,” Jax reminded them. “There’s nothing to do.”
Micah reached behind him for a pillow, threw it at Jax’s head. “It’s Saturday night, dumbass. There’s bound to be some people out. Let’s go to town, see what everybody’s up to.”
“Micah’s right. I think I’m just going to go home.” Jax made like he was leaving, sitting up on the lounger, looking around for his keys, even though home was the very last place he wanted to be. The thought of going back there, of another minute in that house, made his chest hot all over again. Everybody here knew it was an empty threat.
Paul unfolded himself from the chair, stilling it with a hand. “Don’t go home, Jax. Come with us.”
“Come with you where?”
“To town. Out.”
“The only people in town this time of year are the tourists.”
“Even better.” Micah sat up on the bed, plunking his feet onto the floor. “Let’s see if we can find a bachelorette party. Those girls are always up for a good time.”
Jax rolled his eyes. “Those girls are also ten years older.”
“So?”
“So you’re being ridiculous.”
“And you’re being a buzzkill. Again.”
“Would both of you just stop?” Paul said, stepping directly between them. “We’ve been friends for too long for this kind of hostility. Where’s this coming from?”
Jax glared at his friends, and he didn’t know, either, though full disclosure, it wasn’t all that sudden and lately Jax harbored a hostility for everything and everyone. The three of them had been friends for ages, and for most of that time, he actually liked hanging out with Micah. Micah was fun and funny and a little crazy but in a good way, the kind of guy who was always the life of the party.
But lately, Jax had started noticing a stre
ak that shot through the core of Micah, like the coal that used to snake through the Appalachians before they tore it all out. The way he was always hanging upside down from bridges or rappelling down waterfalls, how he always had to be the loudest person in the room. It was like Micah always had something to prove, and the older they got, the more Jax thought it was stupid.
Paul held out a hand, his body poised to haul Jax off the lounger. “Come on, man. It’ll be like old times.”
Old times as in: before your mom died, before you became such an angry troll. If Micah had said it, Jax would have punched him in the face, but not Paul. For some reason Jax didn’t fully understand, he never got angry at Paul.
“And if we can’t find a party, we’ll just make our own.” Micah grinned and spread his arms wide. “We’ll be the motherfucking party.”
Jax sighed, slapping his hand in Paul’s. “Fine, but I’m driving.”
13
The rest of the afternoon flies by in a blur.
I make gallons of tea and coffee that, in a surprise move, Chet offers to cart down to the water. After the first trip I figure out why—so he can eavesdrop on the cops, trading hot drinks and homemade snacks for snippets of information he carries back up the hill to share with me.
Chet tells me that the Asheville divers arrived with cold-water gear and are taking turns scouring the lake bottom around the dock for evidence, but the waters are deep, the lake so dark they can’t see beyond their own flashlight beams. So far they’ve found nothing but a shoe and some old junk, and the chunk of hill cordoned off with crime tape and a neat grid of stakes and string hasn’t yielded any clues, either. If she came through our backyard, she didn’t drop any evidence.
When I’m not playing hostess or getting updates from Chet, I stand at the window and watch. Two men stand guard by the shoreline, gripping coiled leashes that snake into the murky water. Currents under the dock are a living, breathing thing. The ropes are there in case they get swept away, a tether that will guide them to shore.
But none of the men Chet overheard are holding out much hope of finding anything useful. Fifteen hundred acres of water in Lake Crosby, with craggy depths of up to three hundred feet. No wonder Micah wanted to get her out so quickly, and to preserve whatever evidence washed off onto the tarp. If something drifted off that woman into the water, it could be anywhere, and it won’t be sitting still. Needle, meet haystack.
Thanks to the cloud cover swirling with coming snow, darkness comes earlier than normal, at well before five. The pines and Fraser firs are quick to filter the light with their dense needles, and shadows clot under the trees. They creep ever closer to the house, the branches above leaning in to shut out the sky. This place is built for looking out, no curtains or blinds to block its showstopper views, but when the lights come on and the windows turn black with night, I always wonder who’s looking in.
Micah pops to the surface, then another diver. They move onto shore, shaking their heads and peeling off their wet suits, drying off with towels someone fetched from upstairs. The cops gather up their trash and toss dirt on the fire. They’re packing up for the day and, by the looks of things, leaving empty-handed.
Chet bangs through the back door moments later, his cheeks chapped from the wind. “All that for a big, fat nothing. Can you believe it? Wait’ll I tell the guys down at the bar.”
“Micah told us not to talk to anyone, remember? If anybody asks, we’re supposed to say ‘no comment.’”
“No. He told you to say ‘no comment.’” Chet peels off his coat, drops it on a hook and jimmies off one boot, then the next, letting them fall to the floor with a thud.
“Chet, you know as well as I do he meant you, too. You can’t go around talking about this all over town, not until we get the okay. You know how Chief Hunt is. If you mess up this case for him, he’s going to toss your ass in jail without a second thought.”
A flash of something crosses his face, fear mixed with resignation. “Oh, come on. It’s not like I can say anything that people don’t already know by now. By now there’s not a soul in town who doesn’t know about the dead tourist, or that Micah’s been searching for evidence all day.”
My phone beeps with a text from Micah. Done for the day. What do you want me to do with the towels?
My thumbs fly across the keyboard. Just leave them by the back door, I’ll take care of it. Go home. Get warm. All good up here.
I walk to the window and press my face to the glass, cupping my hands to see everyone’s gone, nothing but dark massing shapes of the trees and mountains against a slightly luminous sky. Paul is out there somewhere, in woods that come alive at night. Fox and coyotes and bats, tiny rodents that scurry between his legs as he crashes through. Night animals and people like Jax, who don’t mind the darkness.
Speaking of Jax, where is he? Has Paul found him yet? And how does he know where to look? Jax roams the hills during the day and sleeps in caves or rotted-out logs. He doesn’t exactly have an address.
The lake is a sea of swirling black, swollen and churning from a rainy fall. Even from here, even in the coming darkness, I can see the muddy streaks.
“I wonder why they didn’t shut down the dam.”
Lake Crosby isn’t a natural lake but a reservoir, its waters boxed in on the southern end by a dam that controls both water levels and underwater currents. The engineers are like gods, holding back the currents or letting them rip, manipulating everything with a flip of a switch. Their gate releases are a major happening in these parts, announced well in advance to give the falls watchers and adventure sporters time to plan. But the hike to the top of High Falls Trail is steep and overcrowded, a long line of suicidal crazies carting kayaks they use to shoot down the five-plus miles of class-four rapids. Once you’ve seen one thunderous tsunami barrel over a cliff, you’ve seen them all.
“The dam is shut down,” Chet says, flopping down on one of the matching white couches, plucking off his socks. If he could get away with going through life barefoot, Chet would throw away all his shoes. “There’s not been a release since July. The lake’s just choppy from all the rain.”
“So now what?”
Chet shrugs. “I heard one of the cops say it was time to call in the big guns.”
“Meaning?”
He shrugs again. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
I don’t know, either. The state police? The FBI? Earlier this year, when a couple of recreational divers swam up on a rusted-out Camaro containing a skeleton on the other end of the lake, Chief Hunt’s team got sidelined by state investigators. But that was because the divers called the media before alerting the cops, and some reporter had already connected the body to a decades-old missing persons case. Who are the big guns for a murder case?
I haven’t thought of that skeleton in months, even though for three weeks this past spring, it was all anybody could talk about. We’re a town that’s used to things living and dying underneath us, but the idea of a human trapped under our waters, a person rotting away in a car we didn’t know was there...well, it freaked us way the hell out.
I stare out the window into the fading light, watching shadows dance on the surface of the lake. That’s three back-to-back bodies the water has sent up from the darkness, three mysteries since I’ve lived near Lake Crosby’s shores. Decades apart, but still.
If I were a superstitious person, I’d call it an omen.
* * *
I don’t know what time it is when I come downstairs, only that it’s good and dark, the hills and the lake a smudge of blackness on the other side of the glass. Light from the kitchen shines on the back deck boards sparkling with frost, and I think of Paul, freezing in his hammock.
The dishwasher is already going, water humming through the pipes along with the shower under my feet—Chet in the guest bathroom downstairs. I’m cleaning up the last of the dinner mess, wiping down co
untertops and scrubbing cooked-on grease from the stove, when I feel it—a body stepping onto the back deck. A distinct but subtle vibration on the floorboards under my feet, there and gone in an instant.
I whirl toward the window, thinking about who it could be. Not Paul, who’s not been gone a day. Micah, maybe, swinging by for the promised check-in. Definitely not one of the cops; they left ages ago, and even if one of them came back, he’d ring the doorbell like a proper visitor.
More vibrations, more movement. My gaze tracks to the far end of the glass, bumping up against a wall between me and the stairs. Another ten steps at least. I wait, the footsteps sparking shivers of alarm up my spine.
I’m patting the counter behind me for my phone when it happens. A passing figure at the far corner of the window, a person stepping into view on the deck. A slip of mud-spattered pants, the cuff of a filthy sleeve, and then: Jax. Dirty, shaggy, bedraggled, batty Jax, lit up by the porch light. I feel a stab of relief, and then...fear.
Not fear for my safety, but for Paul’s. That something’s happened to him.
“Is Paul okay?” I say, shouting so he can hear me through the glass. “Did you see him?”
Jax frowns, the skin of his forehead crinkling up like ancient leather. The past twenty years have not been kind, the wind and sun and living outside. He looks old—ten years older than Paul at least.
I stare at him through the thin pane of glass, taking in every detail. His blond beard threaded with pine needles and leaves but otherwise surprisingly clean, the way his big shoulders seem sharp under his Georgia Tech sweatshirt, the hiking boots that look just like the ones Paul claimed to have thrown away. A hand-me-down scarf, creamy fringed wool and too dainty for his big frame, is wrapped around his neck. He watches me with eyes that are a pretty, bright blue. Is this the face of a killer?
Stranger in the Lake Page 9
