Stranger in the Lake

by Kimberly Belle

  In between the words, a distant and ghostly wail carries across the wind and water.

  Sirens.

  If Micah notices, he doesn’t let on. “Her coat was in your cabin, dumbass. Charlotte saw you wearing her scarf.”

  “Yeah, because Sienna gave them to me. She didn’t want me to be cold.”

  Micah laughs, a sharp, angry sound. “Right. Next you’re going to say that wasn’t your necklace she was waving around town. That she—”

  “I told her the truth!” Jax stabs the rifle in Micah’s direction, his shout echoing over the water. “When she showed me that necklace, I confessed. I told her we were wasted. That for some reason I will never understand, we piled into Bobby’s car. That I was the idiot who drove us into the cove. She recorded the whole thing. I talked to her for hours and you know what? It was a goddamn relief to finally tell somebody.”

  There’s a long, stunned silence. Jax’s face is a shadow, just two white eyes glaring down the barrel of his gun.

  Micah sputters. “You stupid, demented, pathetic asshole. What the hell were you thinking? Do you know what the penalty is for manslaughter? There’s no statute of limitations on that shit.”

  Jax spreads his free arm wide. “Look at me, man. I’ve already lost everything I ever cared about. I’m already living in hell. I’m pretty sure jail can’t be worse than this.” He drops his arm, his tone flat and final. “It’s over, Micah. I’m done.”

  “No.” Micah’s voice rises in anger, in panic. “You idiots might be done but it is not over. We’ll say you traded your necklace for a joint. We’ll say Bobby stole it.”

  In Micah’s desperation, he’s not thinking clearly. By now too many people know—Chet and me and Sienna’s friend Grant. Micah looks across the cove, to the swirling blue and red lights painting colors on the trees and lake surface. Two, maybe three minutes, tops.

  Another voice floats down from the opposite side of the hill. “Micah. Put down the gun.”

  Paul.

  My heart alights, and I search the hill for his familiar form, finding it half-hidden behind a mountain laurel the size of a tree. I take in his stance, the glint of metal in his hand—his gun from the safe. Chet stands a pace or two behind, a ragged shadow in the darkness. There’s the flash of white teeth as he gives me a grin, and I can’t help it—I laugh with relief.

  Micah’s gun is steady on Jax, but his gaze swivels back and forth between the two, from Paul to Jax and back again, at the two guns pointed at his head. “Gentlemen, I believe this is what’s called a Mexican standoff. You know the first one to pull the trigger wins, right? Who’s it gonna be?”

  Silence. I hold my breath and wait for a shot.

  Micah lowers his arm, the gun dangling from a fist. “Fine. Fine. But I would just like to reiterate for the record that we wouldn’t be standing here right now if you bastards had just followed the plan. Sit tight, act normal, say nothing. Isn’t that what we agreed to do? But Paul here couldn’t keep his stupid mouth shut and Jax... Jax had to go and lose his marbles. Batty Jax. You can’t make this shit up.”

  “I can’t live this way anymore.” Jax’s voice cracks, weary with emotion, with what sounds like tears. When he steps out from behind the clump of grass, his rifle is pointed at the ground. “This guilt...it’s too big for me to keep carrying around. It’s too heavy. Every time I close my eyes, Bobby is right there. That...that look in his eyes when he couldn’t break free of the seat belt, the sound of his underwater scream when I went for Paul and not him. He grabbed my ankle, and you know what I did? I kicked him in the goddamn face and then I dragged Paul to shore.”

  I can see it. I can see what a burden it’s been for him. We all knew Jax was suffering; we just didn’t know from what.

  Micah laughs, a bitter snarl of a sound. “You stupid motherfucker. Even now, even all these years later, you still think this is all about you. My mom died. My father doesn’t love me enough. Paul’s my best friend, not yours.” Micah’s face goes ugly and mean, contorting with his awful words. “That’s always been your problem, but I’m here to tell you this time it’s not. This thing with Bobby, it’s not about you.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course it’s about me. I was the reckless one, the idiot who insisted on driving even though I couldn’t see straight. I was the one who leaned into that curve, took it way too fast.”

  Micah fills up his lungs and roars, “It wasn’t you, asshole.” Three quick puffs of air, sharp in the dark quiet, and I struggle to focus on his words, slipping through the hills like smoke. It wasn’t him, what? “Bobby’s car was a stick.”

  For the longest time, no one speaks. There’s just sirens and black night and Jax, breathing hard.

  He shakes his head. “No, it was—”

  “You wanted to drive,” Micah says. “Hell, you tried to, but you couldn’t. You killed the engine, about launched us all through the windshield. I wouldn’t stop laughing, so you dragged me out of the car and tried to fight me, but your punches never landed because you were too plastered.”

  The memories flicker, spinning and blurring before they fall into place. How Jax dropped behind the wheel. How the car lurched forward only to stop. The laughter, the fighting. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I understand it now. Jax didn’t push down on the clutch when he started the engine. I know, because the same thing happened to me once in Chet’s Jeep, right before he taught me how to operate a stick.

  Jax grunts. “No. That’s not right. I remember getting into the driver’s seat. I remember holding the wheel. It wasn’t a stick.”

  “Yes, it was,” Chet says, and all heads swing in his direction. The sirens are deafening now, screeching around the curves at the top of the hill, and he shouts to be heard above them. “Bobby’s car was a Camaro Z28 1LE. Chevy’s lightweight race car package. Built for the track, but most people buy ’em to drive on the roads. Especially roads like the ones around here.”

  Chet again, with his car facts, stuff nobody else knows or cares to retain.

  “So?” Jax’s voice is impatient.

  “So all LEs are manual transmissions. Chevy doesn’t make them any other way.”

  I stare at Micah, and oh my God. For twenty years, he’s kept this sickening secret that he’s responsible for the crash.

  No, it’s more than that.

  For twenty years, Micah has fed them this lie like a bowl of ice cream, scooping it up and shoving it down their throats often enough, and with enough passion that they believed it. He fooled his so-called best friends with this stitched-together story and held Jax’s sanity hostage. He let Jax believe that it was his fault, his crime, when all this time, it was Micah’s.

  My gaze flits to Jax—to poor, batty Jax, and it’s hard to see his face in the dark, but I see his stance. The way his arms swing up once again, the way he aims the rifle at Micah’s chest. I don’t need to see his expression to know what happens next.

  “Charlie, move,” Chet hollers, but he doesn’t have to tell me. I’m already scuttling farther up the dock, putting some space between Jax and his target, moving all the way to the edge. I don’t know how accurate a shot Jax is. Don’t want to be in range when he pulls that trigger.

  Micah puffs up his chest, spreading his arms wide. “Do it. Go on—shoot me.”

  Cars screech around a curve in Micah’s driveway, and I shudder at what Sam will think when he comes around the side of the house. Jax will look like the aggressor. Paul must be thinking the same thing, because he yells at Jax to put down the gun.

  Micah sputters, pounding a fist on his chest. “Right here. Somebody shoot me, damn it. Do it.”

  There’s commotion high on the hill, bodies spilling down it like an army of ants, voices shouting to get down, to put the guns down. Jax freezes, everything but his expression. He’s close enough I see it now. Not the anger I expected to see but a smile
—a real, actual smile. Slowly, smoothly, he lays the rifle on the grass.

  Revenge comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes the best revenge, the worst kind, is to do nothing at all.

  I see it too late, the way it creeps over Micah’s features—the hardness, that look of determined exhilaration. Daring death. Doing something crazy.

  His body shifts, and three things happen all at once.

  Jax lunges.

  I scream.

  Micah pulls the trigger.

  36

  A gunshot on the lake sounds like the sky is cracking open, shattering your eardrums and swallowing up every other sound, ripping through your bones like a bullet.

  Only it wasn’t my bone the bullet ripped through. It was Micah’s, and by his own hand.

  Paul was on me in a millisecond. “Don’t look,” he shouted, covering my eyes, but he was too late. I already saw the way Micah’s limbs were splayed every which direction on the dock, how his eyes were open but the top of his head was a mush of hair and meat and white bone. I saw how Paul sank to his knees and vomited onto the lawn, how Jax’s body seemed to sway with the patch of grass he stood before. I saw it all.

  And then the hill came alive with light and sound, with men shouting and waving guns and handcuffs, and I saw the look on Paul’s face when Sam read him his rights. It was like the clouds cleared and God shone a spotlight on all those things I’d missed before. That my husband was old. That he was full of secrets. That I was better off before he stepped up to my counter at the gas station, when I was so eager to claw myself out of that muddy trailer park, I didn’t realize I was trading one set of problems for another. Pretty things for a man still in love with his first wife. No, Paul didn’t kill Katherine, but his secrets are the reason she’s dead, and in my heart that feels unforgivable. There was a hint of truth to all those whispers in town. I should have listened.

  “Paul told me he met Sienna the day before she died,” Sam says, watching me from the other side of the kitchen counter. Behind him, on the other side of the glass, the lake is high wattage in the early-morning sunshine. A glorious morning, one that makes me long for sunglasses.

  Chet steps up beside me, but neither of us say a word.

  Sam’s gaze sits steady on mine. “I just think it’s weird, don’t you? That Paul forgot to mention it the first time I asked him, I mean. He claims you found him talking to her in town, but that there’s no way you would have recognized her. Something about the distance or the angle, I don’t know which, and before you say anything, don’t. This is where you’re supposed to nod your head and agree.”

  I don’t disagree, but I don’t nod, either.

  Sam sighs, pushing at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. He’s still in the same clothes he was in last night, a flannel shirt and faded jeans as if he got the call as he was settling down to dinner. I’d say he slept in them, but the hollowed-out shadows under his eyes tell me he got about as much sleep as I did, which was none. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the dark stain on Micah’s dock. I smelled the blood and gunpowder and fear, the way bone and brain drizzled down like rain. It was so much easier to stay awake.

  “Charlie, what do you say we cut the crap? I’ve got confessions on record from both Jax and Paul that make them accessories to manslaughter on top of a heaping pile of other charges. They’re going to prison, probably not as long as I’d like them to, but they’re going.”

  “Is this the part where you say I told you so?”

  “No. This is the part where I say if there’s anything you’re holding back on, then you should tell it to an attorney. As soon as we’re done searching Micah’s house, we’re coming here next.”

  For some reason, his words rile me up, and my shoulders hike to my ears. “Why would I need an attorney when all of this is news to me? I don’t have anything to hide. I didn’t know about Bobby, about Katherine, about any of it. I learned all these things last night, like everybody else in this room. But if you’re looking for someone to blame, you may want to check with Chief Hunt and Diana, because from everything I heard, I’m guessing they knew all along.”

  Sam runs it down for us, how Paul’s and Jax’s statements have opened the floodgates. How our old friends and neighbors from the trailer park are stepping forward one by one, claiming their eyewitness accounts were ignored or buried. How a power-hungry Chief Hunt actively participated in the cover-up, then twenty years later did it again, when Sienna’s investigation connected his son to Bobby’s death.

  “We’re searching Chief’s house. Micah’s, too. If something’s there, we’ll find it.”

  “No, you won’t. Micah told me Sienna’s things were somewhere no one will ever know to look. The bottom of the lake, probably.”

  “Micah wasn’t the only one with motive and opportunity. So far, we haven’t found one person who can verify your husband’s alibi.”

  Chet leans onto the countertop with both elbows. “Dude, you can’t be serious. Jax was wearing her scarf.”

  Sam swipes a hand down his face, his fingers digging into his temples. “Jax was at his sister Pamela’s house the night Sienna was murdered. He tends to do that when the weather turns nasty, crashes at her place, then takes off as soon as the sun’s up. She’s already given a statement, and I believe her. The Pentecostals are pretty solid in their belief that lying is a sin.”

  And Pamela lives all the way on the other side of the lake. A good twelve miles from the marina, maybe more. Too far for Jax to hike back and forth in one night.

  Which brings us back to where we began: Micah or Paul. Both have motive. Both insist they didn’t touch Sienna, but an innocent man denying his guilt would use the same words as a guilty man. Their arguments would sound the same.

  Exhaustion washes over me, dragging down on my skin and bones, turning my thoughts sluggish. How did they do it? How did they keep a secret that monumental for twenty long years, feeling it heavy over your head all day every single day? Knowing that all it would take was one tiny nudge for the whole thing to come tumbling down, cracking open for all to see.

  “And Diana?” I say. “How much did she know?”

  “Paul and Jax are pretty tight-lipped whenever her name comes up. They’re very protective of her.”

  Chet and I share a look. Of course they are. She’s been guarding their secret like a pit bull all these years. I’m sure as far as they’re concerned, silence is her reward.

  Sam gathers up his things, his keys and notebook and cell, and Chet walks him out.

  I sink onto a stool and think about what I’m going to do, now that the bottom is blown out of this marriage, now that I don’t have a job, a place to live, a bank account overflowing with cash. Maybe Paul didn’t kill a person. He didn’t shoot a bullet through another man’s heart or hold a woman under water until her breath ran out, but he still kept quiet about something so important, so momentous that for me there’s no way back. There’s no reset button on this thing.

  “So, I talked to Tim McAllister earlier,” Chet says, stepping back into the kitchen. “His grandma’s place at Shady Grove is up for rent now that she’s moved down to Florida, and he’s giving us the first look. Fully furnished, and the price is right.”

  “That’s because it’s in Shady Grove.”

  A pretty name for a hideous trailer park off Highway 73. Not so much a grove as it is a muddy clearing lined with a few dozen trailers, all of them run-down and propped up on grubby cinder blocks. They surround a cluster of cracked picnic tables and a rusty swing set, the seats and metal chains long gone. Any rental contract should come with a free tetanus shot.

  “I’ll take the couch, and I promise not to hog the bathroom or leave my crap all over the place.”

  Call me thickheaded, but that’s when the realization hits. This move is for me, too. I’m moving from this place to a trailer. I’m ending up right where I began wi
th a baby in tow.

  Chet reads the look on my face, and his voice softens. “It’s only for a little while. We’ll be out of there by the time the baby comes. I swear.”

  “How?”

  He shrugs. “We’ll figure out a way. We always do.”

  He’s right, even though a real McCreedy would be packing up all the valuables right now. She’d swipe the silver, stuff the cash from the safe in a bag and take off into the wind. She’d put this ridiculous sham of a marriage in her past, bail on this accidental pregnancy. If I were anything like my mother, I’d be long gone by now.

  But I’m not like her, which is why I’m leaving here with what I walked in with all those months ago. Two pairs of threadbare Levi’s, five polyester sweaters, some underwear and T-shirts and my most comfortable pajamas, stuffed into a Hefty bag by the front door. As far as I’m concerned, this part of my life is like Vegas: what happened here stays here, hanging from velvet hangers upstairs in the closet.

  All but one tiny memento, a little seed sprouting in my belly.

  I shimmy the diamond off my finger, place it on the counter next to the sink and turn to Chet. “Okay. I’m ready.”

  37

  The average person can hold their breath for somewhere around a minute. That’s sixty seconds for the clock to tick down and the scales to tip in your body. Oxygen levels plummet while carbon dioxide builds in your bloodstream, blazing like fire in your lungs until instinct kicks in, and you suck an involuntary breath. Air. Water. Either one will put out the flame.

  Paul or Bobby. That was the choice presented to Jax that night. His best friend or a drug dealer he barely knew. It wasn’t fair, and his decision wasn’t difficult. Jax chose his best friend, and if he had to do it all over, he’d choose Paul again in a heartbeat.

  What Jax wouldn’t repeat are all the things that came next, after he’d dragged Paul to shore and blown air into his lungs. After Micah had quit puking his guts into the bushes. After everybody had stopped flailing around and bawling. After all that, when the reality of what just happened set in and Micah said they didn’t have to go to jail. Sit tight. Act normal. Say nothing. For the rest of his miserable life, Jax would regret making that stupid pact.