Stranger in the Lake

by Kimberly Belle

  And then up came that rusted-out Camaro, dredging up another fifteen minutes of fame—this time for his bones. The assumptions people made were not kind. Bobby was wasted when he skidded out of that curve. High and drunk and too far gone to swim his way out. A victim of his own bad karma. That’s the thing about people like Bobby—it’s easier to write them off when you already thought of them as disposable.

  Only, Sienna didn’t write him off. While Bobby’s death had faded to a memory for everyone else, she was digging up new details.

  I point to the column of Tweets. “New details, plural. What do you think she means?”

  “Let me see that thing.” Chet grabs the phone from my hands and clicks to another column, scrolling through a long line of Tweets and replies. “See all the checkmarks on these profiles? That means these guys are legit. Big-time podcasters with thousands and thousands of followers, and she was in full-on Twitter conversations with them. Talking shop, picking their brains, asking for advice, stuff like that. Especially this guy Grant. They seem like good Twitter buddies.”

  He pulls up a thread, a lively back-and-forth that at times is downright flirty. She asks what he’s working on, questions him on his equipment and how he handles hostile witnesses, about a conference coming up in the spring. She offers to buy him a drink. He suggests dinner instead. Her answer is a kissy-face emoji and two clinking glasses of champagne.

  “Message him,” I say. “Ask him what he knows. Maybe she told him something.”

  Chet scrunches his nose. “Worth a try, I guess.” He opens a private message window. “What should I say?”

  I reach for the phone and start typing.

  Hi Grant, you don’t know me, but I noticed your conversation with Sienna Sterling and thought you should know she died this past week. Murdered and found in the same lake as the Skeleton Bob she came here to research. My sister was the one who found her.

  Chet reads it, then shrugs. “He might not have any clue what I’m talking about.”

  I hit Send, and the message reappears a split second later in a bright blue bubble. “Or he might know exactly what you’re talking about.”

  26

  On the way home, Chet takes a detour on 64, rolling to a stop at a 1970s ranch of dark brown brick.

  “Are you sure this is the place?” I take it in through the windshield. Landscaped yard, a fresh coat of paint on the door, lacy curtains hanging in the windows, everything neat and tidy. Either Jamie Holmes won the lottery, or her brother, Bobby, was selling a lot more than drugs.

  “This is it,” Chet says with a nod. “I brought her groceries just last week.”

  I look over, surprised. “I didn’t know you still visited Miss Jamie.”

  He shrugs. Like me, Chet is no stranger to soup kitchens and donation boxes, so he knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end. The shame, the hopelessness, the constant butting up against stereotypes of stupidity and laziness. He may have clawed his way to the other side, but so far, he hasn’t been able to make it stick. He doesn’t have the money to be buying groceries for himself half the time, let alone another person—and yet he did, he does, for Jamie Holmes.

  “You little bleeding heart, you.”

  He rolls his eyes, shoving open the door to a blast of cold. “Just don’t go blabbing it all over town, will you? I have a reputation to protect.”

  The two of us pick our way across the grass to the front door, where Chet knocks hard enough to crack the wood. Jamie Holmes is a little deaf.

  A little lame, too. I can hear her limping on the other side of the wood, the whomp swish, whomp swish as she makes her way across the room. I hike my bag higher on my shoulder and give her all the time she needs.

  “Well, well, well,” she says, and loud enough they can hear her in town. “If it ain’t Miss High and Mighty and her baby brother, Chet. How y’all doin’?”

  She softens her words with a grin, and there’s a hole where a tooth used to be—the third that I can spot. I take in her rumpled clothes, her gray skin and uncombed hair, the clear tube hanging from her nose like a skinny mustache. It trails down her chin and snakes around her left side, disappearing into the oxygen tank she drags with her everywhere. Jamie is only fifty, but thanks to the bum knee and faulty heart valve, she looks twice her age.

  “Hi, Miss Jamie,” I say. “You’re looking good.”

  She laughs, a painful hacking sound. “Liar. Now get your skinny tails in here before you let in all the cold.”

  I wait for her to step back, which takes a minute. Jamie’s tank is in the way, the wheels snagged in the shaggy carpet. Chet leans around her to turn the thing around, a sleek piece of metal and plastic on caster wheels. Once she and her tank are pointed in the right direction, I follow her in and shut the door.

  Jamie limps into her living room, a cramped space on the front side of the house crammed full of durable, mismatched furniture. A gilded coffee table next to a modern wing chair, an LED floor lamp, a leather couch buried under discarded clothes and junk, newspapers and food cartons and crumpled lottery scratch-offs. I shove everything aside and sink onto a corner. Chet perches on the armrest.

  “Can I get y’all some tea or lemonade or something?” She parks her tank next to a plaid La-Z-Boy.

  “We’re fine, thanks. How are you feeling?”

  “Oh, like crap.” She collapses into the chair and gives a hard yank on the handle. The footrest pops up like magic, revealing ankles swollen to twice their normal size, meaty white skin cinched by the elastic of her sweats. “I’m panting like a dog in heat, and I haven’t felt my toes in a decade. How do you think I feel?”

  I’d ask what the doctors say, but Jamie doesn’t see a doctor. She doesn’t take medication, either, at least not regularly. Whatever money she has is not spent on medical care, and she probably shouldn’t be driving. If she can’t feel her toes, she sure as hell can’t feel the brake pedal.

  And yet...my gaze lands on her oxygen tank, the latest, lightest model. Maybe Medicaid, but what about the yard and paint job outside? What about all this furniture? I glance around the room, taking it in, clocking the electronics—an iPad, a laptop, a sixty-inch flat screen on the wall, and that’s only the pieces I can see. Miss Jamie hasn’t worked in years. There’s no way she can afford all this.

  Miss Jamie waves a hand through the air. “Are y’all gonna tell me what brought the two of you all the way over here, or are you gonna make me guess? Though I’ve been watching the news. I know it was you who fished that poor lady from under the dock, wasn’t it?”

  “It was. And we’re here because there’s a rumor going around Lake Crosby that she was here because of Bobby.”

  I say it slowly, gently, because I was standing on the shore the day they dredged Bobby from the depths of Pitts Cove. I saw the way she dropped to the dirt and worked herself into a coughing fit so violent that even the paramedics looked spooked. My gaze lands on an old picture of him, hanging from a nail rammed into the wall. The crooked teeth, close-set eyes, greasy dirt-blond hair I remember hanging out the window of a bright yellow Camaro. As tragic as his death was, his sister was the first thing I thought of when I saw his name on Sienna’s Twitter feed, what dredging him up all over again is going to do to Miss Jamie.

  She shifts in her recliner, agitated. “God, the people in this town. You’d think gossip was an Olympic sport. Twenty years and they’re still making up tales about poor Bobby.”

  “Actually, the rumors are coming from her,” Chet says. “The lady Charlie found under the dock. Sienna Sterling was her name.”

  I lean forward on the couch. “She didn’t happen to stop by here, did she?”

  Miss Jamie shakes her head, her gaze bouncing between us. “I don’t get many visitors these days, no. What would she want to talk to me for?”

  “On Twitter, she was calling Bobby’s death a crime.”
r />   “Well, of course it was a crime. It was a crime the cops took five whole days to file a missing persons report, and even then they didn’t spend more than ten minutes looking for him. They came back two days later with the nonsense that he ran off. Case closed. But I know my Bobby. He wouldn’t have just up and left. Not without telling me. Not without something real scary chasing him out of town.” She reaches down and twists a knob at the top of the tank, and air hisses through the tubes. “Or somebody.”

  “Why do you think they waited so long?”

  Jamie is quiet for a minute, all but a high-pitched wheezing coming from her lungs. “I know you know Bobby’s business.”

  I nod. That’s one part all the gossips got right. Drugs. Bobby dealt all kinds of drugs.

  “And I know you know where we lived at the time.”

  Another nod. In a pimped-out trailer on the ugly side of the lake, smack in the middle of what’s now the parking lot for a frozen yogurt shop. That’s how I know Miss Jamie, because she moved into Bobby’s trailer shortly after he disappeared. Chet and I lived four doors down.

  “Then you know why the cops didn’t much care when he disappeared. What’s one less piece of trailer-park trash to them? Especially one who wasn’t exactly operating on the right side of the law. Those ghost shows always make him out to be an idiot, but that ain’t right. My Bobby had brains. He had street smarts.” She taps a finger to her temple. “A genius IQ. Whatever charges the cops flung at him never stuck.”

  “What about the rumor Bobby was chased out of town by another drug dealer? That had to have come from somewhere.”

  “Yeah, from mean ole Chief Hunt, though he was Officer Hunt at the time. That man always had it out for Bobby. Whooping his siren at him in town. Doing drive-bys during peak business hours. Showing up here, hauling him out of bed just to rattle his cage. Chief’s the one who planted that story in people’s ears, you know, so he didn’t have to explain why he wasn’t actually doing anything to find Bobby. For a while there, I suspected Chief of doing it himself. I thought he was the one who made Bobby disappear.”

  I can see why. Chief Hunt climbed the law enforcement ladder because of two things: the status that came with his wife’s wealth, and the strong-armed way he went about cleaning up Lake Crosby’s streets. He closed up all the meth labs, tossed the drug lords in jail. He patrolled the streets, pulled over anybody who even looked like they were thinking about a drink. People joke about having to drive all the way to Sapphire for some decent weed, but it’s the truth—and all thanks to Chief Hunt’s iron fist.

  “Sienna suggested there were some new details in the case,” I say.

  Jamie frowns. “What kind of new details?”

  “That she didn’t say. But apparently she was planning to reveal them in a podcast. Have you heard anything about it from the police?”

  “What, you think Chief Hunt’s coming over here to fill me in? That jackass don’t tell me jack. When those divers found Bobby, I learned it from the news. The news, Charlie. Chief didn’t even have the decency to come over here and tell me himself. It’s like he’s forgotten I even exist.”

  Talk of Bobby has worked her up something good, turned her wheezing into something that pulses worry in my chest. I look around for a landline in case we need to call for an ambulance, wondering if the cell tucked in the pocket of my bag will do me any good on this side of the mountain, where service is spotty at best. I glance at Chet, and he looks worried, too.

  I scoot to the edge of the couch. “Things are about to get ugly, Miss Jamie. I don’t know how much of it will be true and how much of it is gossip, but I remember what it did to you last time around. You stay strong, and call me anytime you need to talk, or if somebody shows up here looking to take advantage. I’ll send Chet here over to chase ’em off.”

  He nods. “Gladly. And I’ll bring you some of that seven-layer dip you like so much, too.”

  She pitches back in her recliner, tilting herself almost horizontal, looking up at us over her heaving belly. “You two turned out a whole lot nicer than your mama did. Anybody ever tell y’all that?”

  “Only once or twice.” Chet grins, pausing to pat her ankle. “You take care of yourself, Miss Jamie. I’ll see you next week.”

  I’m at the door when my curiosity gets the better of me. “Miss Jamie, who does your landscaping?”

  “Huh?” Her head lolls my way, her eyes at half-mast. She waves a hand through the air, but it’s sloppy. She’s losing steam fast. “Oh, hell if I know. They come through here with their blowers and their weed whackers, and then they’re gone. Never ask me for a penny.”

  I smile. “Do you have a sugar daddy on the sly?”

  Another phlegmy laugh. “Not hardly.” She pats the tank next to her like a favorite pet, her fingers resting on the knob. “I keep waiting for Amazon to figure out they’ve got the wrong address and take everything back, but they never do.”

  “Sounds like you found yourself a guardian angel.”

  She closes her eyes and sighs. “If you see him, tell him what I could really use is a new heart.”

  As we file out the door, my hand goes instinctively to my stomach, and I’m struck with the thought of how fragile we all are, how vulnerable and temporary. How one moment we can think we have it all, a home and a family and good health, and the next—poof—it’s all gone.

  27

  Chet and I return home to a kitchen full of people—Paul and Diana and Micah and Chief Hunt, standing in a cluster by the island—and an air thick with sudden silence. The kind that comes after wrangling words and heated voices. The kind they stopped hurling around the second we walked through the door.

  Paul turns, watching me with that beat-up brow and blackened eye, an angry kaleidoscope of black and purple and red. His expression sucks up all the air in the kitchen.

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  I dump my bag and keys onto the counter and look around for clues, but there’s nothing but marble on the countertop between us, and in a house where visits revolve around topped-up glasses and trays overflowing with finger foods. But whatever this occasion is, Diana is dressed for it. Full makeup, silky top, leather motorcycle jacket over dark jeans, her hair slicked back into a high ponytail. She looks like a Charlie’s Angel, cougar edition.

  “I’m here to talk to Chet,” Chief Hunt says, and a memory flickers. Of a younger version of him busting in our door, tackling my father to the ground, hog-tying his hands and feet. I was only six at the time—too young to remember the details, but that doesn’t mean my bones don’t still shake at the image of their bodies hitting the floor, that I don’t hear my father’s grunts or taste the fear and shame climbing up my throat. Memories are strange that way. They don’t have to be real to feel visceral.

  But my fear of Chief Hunt, the way the sight of him sends my heart flapping around like a caged bird against my ribs—that is 100 percent real.

  Chet parks his boots at the edge of the room. “Did Annalee send you? Because I told her I’d pay her back.”

  “This isn’t about Annalee, Chet. This is about Sienna Sterling.”

  “Okaaaay.” His gaze flicks around the room. When it lands on mine, I recognize alarm and something else that makes my skin prickle. I recognize fear, the same kind I’m feeling. “What about her?”

  “A witness is on record saying she saw you coming out of Ms. Sterling’s room in the B and B at some time just before eight on Tuesday morning. One day before Ms. Sterling was killed.”

  Chet doesn’t move. He just stands there, stock-still and wide-eyed, for a good five seconds. My breath turns solid and I stare at him—say no say no say no. Chet doesn’t shake his head, but he doesn’t nod, either.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe, what?” Chief Hunt scowls, stepping closer, looming in the kitchen. “Was that you coming out of her room Tuesday mor
ning or not?”

  “It was more like seven thirty, but yeah. It was me.”

  “Chet!” I say, too loud and far too flustered because I want to strangle him. I think of the conversation we had downstairs on the couch, the way he swore they didn’t sleep together. Hiding his shenanigans from me is one thing; hiding them from the police is another thing entirely. He had to know this would come out at some point.

  “Interesting. Especially since you told one of my deputies the last time you talked to Ms. Sterling was at the bar the night before. Monday night.”

  Chet winces. “That’s ’cause once we got upstairs, we didn’t do much talking.”

  “So you lied.”

  “I didn’t lie. Not technically.” Chet looks at me for backup, giving his head a nervous shake. “I told Sam we didn’t talk, and we didn’t. We did...other stuff. But after I left her room, I didn’t see or speak to her, like, at all that day. I didn’t even know she was the one y’all fished out of the lake until Sam showed me her picture.”

  “Did you have any contact by phone or text? And I’d suggest thinking real hard before you answer because we already have her phone records.”

  Chet’s shoulders slump, and he sighs. “She gave me her number at the bar that night. That’s how I knew to come up. She texted me her room number. There’s not a single guy on the planet who would’ve said no.”

  Chief Hunt sticks out a meaty hand. “Show me the string.”

  “That’s private.”

  Chief Hunt rolls his eyes. “There are a million ways I can go about getting those texts, son, and every single one of them only makes you look more guilty, not less. You might as well just show me. Unless you have something to hide.”