Stranger in the Lake

by Kimberly Belle

  My phone springs to life on my lap, a flurry of texts from Chet. I scroll through the messages.

  Sorry I disappeared on you, but you won’t flipping believe who I ran into.

  Grant! Sienna’s Twitter friend. And he had a LOT to say. He’s working on a podcast.

  Actually maybe I should tell you in person. It’s kinda bad.

  Leaving now, call you from the car.

  Paul’s been blowing up my phone FYI.

  That last one he follows up with an emoji with its mouth zipped shut, and I relax a little against the cushion. Chet is on the way, and Paul still has no idea where I am.

  “What about the investigation?” Micah says, dragging my attention away from my phone. “You must have seen the cops coming around. They didn’t question you?”

  I give him a rueful smile. “You think the cops came around? How cute.” I wrinkle my nose at his expression, bury it in my tea. “Sorry. I know he’s your dad and all, but that investigation was a joke. Nobody looked very hard for Bobby. They closed the case after only a couple of days. He wasn’t even officially declared dead until they found his skeleton in his car. Ask Jamie. She’s still salty about it.”

  “Who’s Jamie?”

  “Bobby’s sister. She lived in his trailer for a while, and she was always looking out for me and Chet, feeding us, letting us hang out at her place when our mother would go missing, which was all the time. I just saw her, actually. Somebody’s been buying her stuff, paying for her medical supplies, taking care of her yard service. My first thought was Jax, but where would he get the money?”

  “From the bank. He has stacks of it from the trust fund his mother left him.”

  “But then why would Paul give Jax all that cash and hand-me-downs? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You don’t remember anything else?”

  “Not really.” But even as I say it, I get a flash.

  Shut up, Charlie. Get your butt back inside.

  I close my eyes, trying to put myself back there, in that grubby trailer park on the ugly side of the lake, in the dirt yard littered with trash and cigarette butts and somebody’s smelly old sofa. I hear my own cries and Chet’s wails, get a whiff of pine tree and dirty diaper. I feel Chet squirming against my chest and the sharp pang of hunger tearing at my belly. The burn of shame, of disgust and self-pity when our mother was wasted again.

  Bobby laughed at her. I hear his mean chuckle, those ugly words he used to mock her. He called her a crazy bitch. I hear the words clear as day, and other voices, laughing. There were others, too, and they were laughing.

  I open my eyes, and two pictures swim in and out of focus, pulling apart then shimmering into one.

  Micah, seated on the couch across from me.

  Micah, doubled over in laughter at the trailer park. A younger version of him, but still.

  “Oh my God,” I say. “You were there, too.”

  33

  June 13, 1999

  1:42 a.m.

  The light is what Jax noticed first, bright and blinding and sudden, so sudden it made his eyeballs ache. A blazing light that turned night into day, like someone flicked a switch in the yard and inside that meth-head mother, turning her shirt and her skin see-through. Next, he noticed her face, the way her mouth went round and her eyes wide with fear. Then finally, he heard country music and the roar of a souped-up engine, a sound that had been there all along now that he thought about it, but that was the whole damn purpose, wasn’t it? The tequila was so that he wouldn’t have to think.

  Jax swung around, shading his eyes with an arm.

  “Mama, look out!” the girl screamed.

  The woman dived for the dirt, but Jax didn’t move. He just stood there, squinting into the headlights, thirty feet away and closing fast. He spread his arm wide, welcoming it.

  At the very last second, the tires cut right, sending a blur of shiny yellow carving a fat arc around him, kicking up dirt that rained on a trailer’s metal siding like pellets from a BB gun. He watched the car fly past, clocked it skidding across the yard until it came to a messy stop at the far end, parallel to the lit-up trailer. It was shockingly loud, a noise that bounced off the trees and ricocheted through the trailer park, shrill in Jax’s ears.

  Through the open windows he spotted Micah, laughing it up with the driver.

  Bobby, that was his name. The loser who flunked out in tenth grade. The freak who sold drugs under the bleachers. This was his car, his crazy Christmas trailer. He killed the engine and lit what Jax thought was a cigarette, until Jax noticed the way Bobby held in his breath. The pothead sampling his own wares.

  Micah unfolded himself from the passenger’s seat in a cloud of smoke, his movements slow and syrupy.

  “Where’s Paul?”

  Micah tapped a finger to the Camaro rooftop. “Passed out cold. Dude can’t handle his liquor.”

  That was because Paul drank like the teenager he was. Jax, too. But Micah... When it came to booze, he was light-years ahead. Drunk and high on who knew what and still relatively steady on his feet. Not like Jax, who couldn’t seem to stop swaying.

  The woman pushed past him, bare feet churning up the dirt. “Hey, Bobby. Gimme some of that. Just one little hit. That’s all I need. Just something to tide me over.”

  Bobby looked through the window with obvious disgust. “Put some clothes on, Francine. You do know you’re out here in your underwear, right?” He swung the door open and stepped out in redneck gear—boots and Levi’s and a leather jacket that hung from scrawny shoulders. His hair was greasy and so was his face, his forehead gleaming in the darkness.

  “Come on.” The woman lunged for the joint dangling from the corner of Bobby’s mouth. “I’m good for it. You know I am.”

  Bobby held her back with an arm, craning his upper body out of reach. “Back off, you crazy bitch. You still owe me for last time.”

  “I’ll pay you tomorrow, I swear.”

  “With what? We both know you ain’t got no money.”

  Jax looked over at the little girl, who’d sunk to the stoop, her face screwed up with tears. Jesus Christ. He hoped like hell he wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow.

  A familiar fire sparked in his chest. “What is wrong with you people? Stop laughing. Nothing about this is funny.”

  Micah either didn’t hear or he didn’t care. The woman was still swiping at the air. Bobby was still twisting away, holding the joint high above his head. Micah clutched his stomach and laughed and laughed, hooting like they were some kind of street performers.

  “Micah, shut up.” Jax banged on the hood of his Jeep with a fist. Micah was doubled over by now, wiping at his eyes, slapping his leg with hilarity. “Oh my God, you are such an asshole. How is this even remotely funny? This is tragic.”

  Jax’s voice broke on the last word, and here came the tears, damn it. More than three months after his mother’s death, in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a bunch of people he didn’t want to see. Fucking figured.

  Jax turned away in anger, in shame. He’d walk home. He’d sleep in the woods. He couldn’t stay here another miserable second.

  “It’s okay,” the little girl said, and for a split second, Jax thought she was talking to him, until she ducked her head and pressed her cheek to the baby’s forehead. “Everything’s gonna be okay. I’m gonna take care of you and we’re gonna be just fine, I promise.”

  That was it. Party over. Bobby’s shiny yellow Camaro was just sitting there, with the door open and the keys hanging from the ignition. A getaway car if he’d ever seen one. He leaned his upper body inside, spotted the keys and Paul, crashed on the back seat. His head was slung back, his mouth hanging open. And bingo—he was clutching that second bottle of tequila.

  Jax grabbed it and chugged. He chugged until his eyes watered and his brain clear
ed and his belly lit up with liquid fire, and then he dropped behind the wheel and reached for the keys.

  34

  Micah stares at me from the opposite couch. “I thought you said you didn’t remember anything.”

  “I didn’t. I don’t. It’s just snippets, really, but...”

  But now I can’t tell what’s real and what’s my mind twisting up on itself. The image of Micah is so vivid it feels almost tangible, but dreams are like that too sometimes, those blurry moments right before you’re good and awake. Our mother scrounging around for liquor and drugs, that was a constant, and there were always people hanging around the trailer park, there to do business with Bobby. Maybe I’m seeing something that wasn’t there, putting Micah’s face on another person’s body. I was only six. How real can it be?

  Come on, Bobby. Just one little hit.

  Mama said it, I’m positive. I squeeze my eyes shut and new pictures flash behind my eyes, turning from black and white to technicolor. Mama’s red underwear. A grubby yellow blanket. Expensive blue jeans.

  My phone lights up on my lap, Chet calling from the car, but I let him go to voice mail. Those first blurry memories have broken through the darkness, knocked something loose in my brain, and I don’t want to let go of the images.

  “My mom wanted some of Bobby’s cigarette. No, not a cigarette. A joint. She was begging him for a hit, and he laughed at her. He pushed her down in the dirt.”

  “Jesus, that scrawny lady... That was your mother?”

  “And the baby in my arms was Chet. He was a really light sleeper. The noise from Bobby’s place was constantly waking him up.”

  Micah laughs, a strangled sound. “Damn. I thought maybe I’d seen you working the register at the gas station, or busing tables in town or something.” He shakes his head slowly, not bothering to wipe away his surprise. “But I should have known because you look just like her—minus the bad skin and tweaker teeth. Oh my God, your mom was a tweaker. Too strung out to notice she was outside in her underwear while her babies were bawling on the stoop.”

  Micah’s tone hits me wrong—too high and mighty, and I shift on my chair.

  “Bobby laughed at her, and so did you.”

  There’s a voice in my head screaming at me to just let it lie. To shut up and pick up my phone, silent and dark on the cushion next to me, to tell Chet to hurry. But the memories have edges now, and this one’s too big, too consequential to keep inside.

  “What can I say? We were real shits back then.”

  “Not Jax,” I say, and suddenly I understand. This is why I’ve never been afraid of him, why when he showed up—a raggedy fugitive on my back deck—I opened the door without hesitation. “Jax got mad. He felt bad for me.”

  “No, he felt sorry for you. There’s a big difference.”

  Micah’s words knock me like a slap, even though it’s true. Jax did feel sorry for me that night. I get a lightning-quick glimpse of the look he gave me from behind the wheel of Bobby’s car, the sudden lurch of the car shooting forward only to go nowhere. I hear the laughter, the shouting. I shake my head, trying to string the images together in a way that makes sense, but I can’t. None of it makes any sense.

  But still.

  If I hadn’t said anything just now, Micah wouldn’t have, either. He would have gone right on acting like he’d never met poor, sad Bobby. He would have gone right on blaming Paul and Jax. The mood changes in an instant, the seriousness of where this discussion is headed settling like a rash on my skin.

  “And Paul? Was he there, too?”

  Micah nods. “Passed out on the back seat of Bobby’s car.”

  And that’s when all the pieces fall into a place, a combination of memory and conjecture.

  A secret under water for twenty years.

  Paul, almost drowned.

  Jax, saving his life.

  “Micah, what did you do?”

  There’s a breath where I think he’s going to deny it, a pause that hangs heavy in the air. I hear the percussive tick of a clock somewhere off in the kitchen, the smooth hiss of my own breath.

  “I got in the car with a drunken idiot who crashed us into the cove. That’s what I did. And you can stop looking at me like that. None of this would’ve happened if Jax hadn’t been such an asshole. Leaning over cliffs, chugging tequila, driving like a maniac. This is his fault. Not mine.”

  I imagine it then, the squeal of the Camaro’s tires, smell the rubber burning against asphalt, feel the weightlessness as the car takes flight. A car as solid as Bobby’s would have hit the water and sunk fast. If Jax had just enough time to drag up one person, if he could only choose one, which would it be—the trailer-park drug dealer, or his lifelong best friend?

  If this is true, if I’m right, then so was Paul. Pitts Cove was a long-term investment, just not in the way he wanted me to believe. It had nothing to do with rerouting State Road 32 or turning swampland into an exclusive lakeside community. For Paul, buying up Pitts Cove was about keeping old bones buried not just for Jax but for himself as well.

  And those bones would still be down there if that recreational diver hadn’t swum up on his car and swiped that gold necklace as a trophy. No wonder Paul reacted like he did when I found him talking to Sienna, or the next day, when she washed up dead under the dock. Even if he wasn’t the one who put her there, even if all he was trying to conceal was his hand in Bobby’s death, Paul would have known what identifying her could lead to.

  And Micah. Micah is a Lake Hunter, for crap’s sake. What, did he strap on his tank and flippers and sink to the bottom of Pitts Cove every couple of months just to check in on Bobby? To report back to Paul and Jax that he was still down there, untouched and undiscovered?

  “This is going to come out, Micah. Y’all had to have known that the second Sienna showed up here, the truth about Bobby would come out.”

  “Not if we’d kept our mouths shut, like we planned. We made a pact that night. We swore we’d never tell a soul.”

  “I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed.”

  “Why? Because of some girl with a necklace?”

  “Because of a dead girl with a necklace. And I’m guessing you’ve seen her Twitter feed, so you already know about the podcast. There’s got to be notes or recordings or something on her phone or laptop or uploaded to some website. Probably all of the above.”

  Micah watches me with those same eyes, that same serious stillness. His voice is eerily low. “Maybe. But they’ll have to find it first.”

  The air in the room turns heavy and solid, like the barometric pressure outside. Micah knows every crack and crevice at the bottom of the lake. If he’s done what he’s implying, then he stashed her things somewhere deep and dark, somewhere no one will ever find them.

  “And besides. I was at home the night Bobby disappeared. There’s pictures of me at the dinner table, Dad and Mom and me. Dad’s always been real good about documenting family moments. He writes the place and date on the back of every photo.”

  I don’t believe him, not for a second. No way in hell Chief Hunt is that sentimental. If those pictures exist, which I’m sure they do, the dates were fudged exactly for this purpose—to serve as an alibi. Micah’s been planning to let Paul and Jax take the fall alone, and his father is helping him.

  Which means Chief Hunt is in on this, too.

  Micah leans to his left, sliding his still-full mug onto a side table. “You know, when Paul came home that first day, telling me about this woman he met while getting gas, I was thrilled for him.” He says it like a compliment, his voice warm and affectionate, but I’m not fooled. I see the way his shoulders have gone stiff, that muscle ticking in his jaw. “You didn’t see him that first year after Katherine died, how those rumors tore him apart. Diana was ready to put him on suicide watch. It was that bad. But then you came along, and he started smiling again.”


  “Twenty years. You sat on this secret for twenty years. You and Paul literally stood by and watched a man go batty from the guilt. And for what? To save your own skin?”

  “Oh, come on. Jax was never a friend. He was someone I tolerated because Paul liked him. And it’s not like we planned it or anything. This wasn’t premeditated. We were young and we were stupid, and may I remind you once again this was Jax’s fault. Jax was behind the wheel. He was driving.”

  That feels right, Jax behind the wheel. Only...my head explodes with images, with sounds. An argument threaded through with blaring music and laughter. Fists flying.

  Thunder booms overhead at the same time a bolt of lightning splits the night, turning darkness into day like God flicked on a flashlight, there and gone in an instant. Barely long enough for me to pick out a cluster of trees, a pile of slick firewood on the back deck, a drenched Jax—right before everything goes black.

  Jax.

  Something prickles up the back of my neck—shock, disbelief, a disturbing kind of unease. What is Jax doing here? How long has he been watching? I stare at the glass, searching for his shape in the shadows, but all I see is the reflection of the room, Micah twisting around on the couch.

  “What?” he says, turning back, studying my face. “What did you see?”

  “Nothing. The storm’s close, that’s all. That lightning hit right outside.”

  The room goes deathly quiet, an empty, heavy sound that expands and fills me with dread. I think about what I should do now that I know the truth. I could run. I could leap over the couch and arm myself with a kitchen knife. But I can’t make my body move because it’s Micah. Paul’s friend and mine. The one person who never made me feel unwelcome on this side of the hill. When he smiles at me, I smile back, half wondering if this is a dream.