Beneath Bone Lake

by Colleen Thompson

  “They tried. Again and again, but all they heard was how it was all loophole-legal. By the time they came to me, they were desperate, frightened—”

  “If you’d wanted to do something, you could have quietly steered them toward one of those media crusaders.”

  Sam didn’t say that he had tried that, didn’t bother explaining that reporters hadn’t been in the least interested until he’d leaked the California-based company’s internal e-mails…along with the principals’ financial records.

  “But, no,” Luke went on, “instead, you decide it’s your damned place to out our client, without ever once discussing it with me.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Sam said. “And I’m really sorry, Luke. I screwed up. And worse yet, I screwed over someone who used to be a damned good friend.”

  When he heard nothing in response, Sam thought he’d lost the cell phone signal, in spite of all the new towers put in place after the last hurricane.

  Finally, Luke answered. “Maybe I’m an idiot, but I still do consider you a friend, Sam. Maybe that’s why it hurt that you didn’t come to me before you went off half-cocked and dropped us both into a shit storm. You could’ve asked for help, man. Don’t you get that?”

  “Well, I’m coming to you now. I’m asking.”

  Instead of hanging up, as Sam more than half expected, Luke listened while Sam explained his present situation. As they talked, it felt almost like the old days, when the two of them had brainstormed over barbecue in Austin. But when Sam mentioned what he needed, his former partner blew up on him.

  “Haven’t you learned a thing from all this trouble?” Luke demanded. “What you’re asking—no way in hell. If it were only me, I’d think about it because it does sound like you’re getting a raw deal. But, Sam, I just can’t risk it, especially not with the way things are at home now.”

  “Is something wrong?” Sam’s stomach muscles tightened. “Susan and the baby—they’re all right, aren’t they?”

  “The baby’s doing great but not such a baby anymore,” Luke said, speaking of his son, Jake. “And Susan’s pregnant again, but the doc’s got her on bed rest. I have my hands full, I can tell you, keeping her from climbing the walls and taking care of a rambunctious three-year-old.”

  From Luke’s voice, Sam could tell his old friend didn’t count such work a burden. His family meant the world to Luke, and Sam respected his refusal to gamble with their future. Especially considering how damning it would look if he were caught helping the same disgraced partner whose prior illegal acts he’d disavowed.

  Once their conversation ended—more or less amicably—Sam wrapped the phone in plastic. His vision blurring from the pain pill, he dropped the phone inside an empty wood duck house. Since the ducks almost universally preferred the naturally occurring hollows of cypress trees to the state’s well-intended wooden shelters, he wasn’t too worried about disturbing a pair should he ever need to come back to retrieve the phone.

  Not that there was anyone else he’d trust to call. As Sam pondered how he might possibly pull off what he planned without outside help, the boat drifted ever nearer to the skeletal remains of a dead forest, the moss-covered bones whose thin fingers reached toward blood-tinged wisps of cloud.

  She’d been gone with Elysse’s car far longer than she should have, Ruby realized as she noticed the reddening of the western sky beyond the treetops to her left. Surely, Elysse must be worried by now, possibly even angry that Ruby hadn’t at least called her to say where she was.

  Guilt coiled snakelike, squeezing at her stomach until Ruby pulled to the roadside and reached for her cell phone. Yet she couldn’t force herself to call, couldn’t imagine sharing what she’d overheard Sheriff Wofford saying.

  Ruby’s throat knotted and tears threatened at the recollection of the way she’d excused herself—after telling the lie that she was all right—and then bolted from the sheriff’s office. Frantic, she’d jumped in the car and started driving back toward Cypress Bend Road and the ruins that had once been her lake house.

  With a defeated sigh, she dropped the phone back inside her bag and told herself she was nearly there already. She might as well finish what she’d started. Then she’d drive straight back to apologize to Elysse for being gone so long.

  A few minutes later, Ruby wandered near her ruined house, her nose clogging with the wet-charred stench. She thought of when she’d first moved here with Aaron, how they’d worked together so hard—doing everything from the painting, to woodwork, to tile repairs themselves for lack of money. They’d been so eager to make his parents’ neglected weekend house their first real home. She remembered when she’d walked, heart in throat, onto the back porch, to tell Aaron that their home test kit had read positive. She’d watched him nervously, worried since they had only recently argued about finances, but he had yelped with joy and lifted her right off her feet to kiss her. So many sacred moments lay here in the ashes, so many dreams destroyed. She had to forcibly wrench her thoughts from the past into the present, as ugly as it was.

  The authorities had driven stakes into the ground and roped off the area around the rubble, had posted official-looking KEEP OUT signs around the blackened heap. A moat of sorts surrounded it, deep puddles from the volunteer fire department’s efforts, which had served to keep the blaze from spreading to the trees. Deep footprints pockmarked ochre mud, from the boot craters of those who’d worked the scene to the smaller, shallower steps that must have come from the dogs they’d used to search for bodies.

  She realized now that she’d been out of her mind coming here. She would find only despair in the ruins of her life, not answers. So instead, she walked down to the dock and to the water, went to it for solace, as she had so many times in her life.

  As a dragonfly skimmed the tops of the lake weeds in front of her, she stopped short, then stared down at a strip of long brown grass, barely discernible in the deep-hued twilight. Shaped like a canoe, it marked the spot where Aaron’s old boat had been chained these past few years, upside down to keep the rain out. Had Misty gotten rid of it for some reason, or could it have been stolen last night?

  Shaking her head, Ruby gave up on the question. What did it matter anymore, if Zoe was dead? What had any meaning, if everything she’d worked for, everything she loved now lay beneath the surface of Bone Lake?

  “Bullshit,” she burst out, pouring all her defiance, all her will to fight into the two syllables. Because it was bullshit, contemptible and inexcusable to stand here drowning in self-pity while there was even a sliver of a possibility that her child and her sister still drew breath. So what if Sheriff Wofford was having the damned lake searched? She’d suggested earlier that Misty had simply run off with Ruby’s money and her daughter. The lake bottom was only one more theory, one more possibility to be checked out, then discarded. A hurdle—perhaps the last—on the way to a reunion, a reunion Ruby would be damned if she gave up on.

  It was time to stop this, time to get her pathetic ass straight back to Elysse’s, to call everyone they knew to join the search. Ruby thought of Myrtle Lambert and her prayer circle, Paulie and Anna Hammett and their many friends. She’d ask all of them for their help, make whatever pleas she had to, get down on her knees and beg on the television news. And she would follow up with the sheriff, hound her for more information, not only on this “Coffin,” but also concerning Misty’s call to Sam.

  All her life, Ruby had been the sort of person who felt better with a plan. Galvanized by this one, she ripped the car keys from her pocket and started walking back toward Elysse’s Corolla. But she didn’t get three steps before she heard the deep-throated rumble of a boat motor closing in behind her.

  Head swimming with the pain meds, Sam was nearly home when Java started fanning her tail furiously. Following the dog’s nose, he spotted a lone figure standing on the bank near the Monroes’ dock.

  “Oh, hell,” he said, assuming it was some law enforcement type who would demand to know what he’d
been doing. But as she turned, he recognized Ruby in spite of the dim light. Squinting, he realized she was waving at him—no, waving him toward her.

  He turned his bass boat, a sporty red and white model that cost more than the Chevy Yukon he had bought to tow it, and let it drift the final few feet before it bumped up against the old tires nailed to the dock at water level. After tying up, he shut off the engine and heard the subtler chorus of frog romance, insect battle, and bird business.

  As he climbed out of the boat and said hello, Ruby was standing at the grass’s edge, near the place the dock’s end rested. Though she said nothing, he quickly recognized her set, determined body language and the suspicion on her face.

  Growing up, he’d seen that expression way too often, had heard the whispers that went with it when he’d walked through local stores—always under observation—or past the teachers in the halls at school. It was the look that said they’d decided to give someone like him a wide berth, or else to go ahead and hit him with a preemptive strike before he had the chance to stir up trouble.

  But Ruby Monroe had never looked at him that way before, which meant, Sam realized, that Sheriff Wofford or Special Agent Felker or Acosta had been talking to her.

  “I would have thought you’d be in bed today,” she said, and in her voice he heard ambivalence: concern mingling with caution.

  “Might have been,” he said honestly, “if I hadn’t kept getting interrupted by Sheriff Wofford and those DEA guys. You talk to those two yet?”

  She shook her head but kept her eyes locked with his. Long-lashed, pretty blue eyes, he realized, though he’d never really noticed them before.

  “What did they say?” she asked.

  “They weren’t so much inclined to give me information as to try and get some. I did hear that the fire marshal’s thinking some people cooking up drugs might’ve accidentally set off the explosion.”

  “That’s more than anyone’s told me directly,” she said, “but I figured it was something like that. No news from the AMBER Alert yet, but I do know Misty wasn’t in that house—the medical examiner’s report made it official.”

  “That’s great news,” he said, his relief so palpable he felt dizzy. He wobbled and took a step to regain his balance.

  “Careful there,” Ruby warned, “before you end up going ass-over-teakettle into the drink.”

  Though “the drink” this close to shore only amounted to a foot or so of slimy, green-brown water, he stepped off into the grass, grateful he hadn’t humiliated himself by landing headfirst in the muck. “Guess maybe I wasn’t up to boating after all.”

  “Why on earth would you even try it if you’re that weak? Or did they give you something?”

  “Pain pills,” Sam admitted. “And I realize it was stupid to take off—”

  “Every bit as irresponsible as getting behind the wheel drunk,” she interrupted, but there was no heat in her words. “You okay now? You look sort of green there.”

  He felt it, too. “Maybe I ought to sit down for a minute.”

  When she took him by the hand, he tried not to like the feel of her fingers, smaller and much smoother, against his rougher skin. “Thanks,” he said, “but I think I’m doing…”

  Better, he’d been about to say, before the world careened around him.

  “Try the grass here. It’s dry,” she suggested. “And I don’t see any fire ants.”

  She settled down to sit near him, though out of arm’s reach. For a minute or two, they rested in silence.

  Finally, Ruby said quietly, “I have something to ask you.”

  Nodding, he closed his eyes against the dizziness.

  “Were you sleeping with my sister?” she asked. “And did you just happen to end up with her money?”

  Ruby watched as his face darkened. Watched as the hurt in his brown eyes was swiftly walled off behind growing anger. Fear pierced her ambivalence about him, and it struck her that she’d taken an insane risk, pushing him like this when there was no one else around.

  Jaw tightening, he growled, “No and no—and so much for goddamned gratitude. If I recall correctly, I scaled the porch roof of your burning house trying to save your sister and your daughter. Next time, I’ll mind my own damned business.”

  “I am grateful, and I told Sheriff Wofford if she had heard you last night, if she’d seen what you did, she’d know. She’d know the way I knew—”

  “The way you knew?” He shook his head, then winced and put a hand up to his temple.

  Seeing him in pain upset her, until she reminded herself of her conversation with the sheriff, the questions she had raised. “I didn’t buy it when she suggested you might’ve helped Deputy Balderach’s murderer escape last night.”

  “Someone escaped?”

  She nodded. “That’s how it looks—because Balderach was shot and your johnboat is missing.”

  Sam stared at her, the shock clearly written on his face. “He was shot?”

  “Before the explosion, they think. And your boat was gone, so—”

  “I thought it’d been impounded.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  Sam grimaced. “Well, anyone could’ve taken off in that one. It’s got an old pull-start motor. You don’t even need a key.”

  “I was here,” she said, “and I can’t see how you could’ve done it. There just wasn’t time.”

  “So why all but accuse me of stealing from your sister? Other than being a McCoy, what the hell have I ever done to make you think I’d—”

  “It’s not what you did,” she said, “but what you didn’t. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say anything about Misty calling your house?”

  “Calling?” Sam’s forehead creased, making him look genuinely confused. “When? I haven’t heard from Misty. If she’d called, I would have—”

  “Five forty-two a.m., March thirtieth, she called you. It was on her cell phone records, the last day anyone heard from her.”

  “March thirtieth…that would be…” His gaze slid away from hers. Frowning, he tapped his own fingers as he counted backward. “Last Monday, right?”

  She nodded. “Tomorrow, it’ll be a week. Surely, you haven’t already forgotten.”

  Sam snapped his fingers and looked back at her, his expression focused. “That would be the day I took out this pain-in-the-ass client. He wanted to go early, be out on the water by the time the fish got up for breakfast. So I was out already by then—I can show you my logbook.”

  “You keep written records?”

  Nodding, Sam explained, “Anna Hammett talked me into writing everything down so in case something ever happens on the water, people would know where to look, who I’m with, that sort of thing. And besides, it helps me with my taxes.”

  “Taxes?”

  “I’m not so much inclined to screw with Uncle Sam since I discovered he has teeth.”

  “Gotcha.” Ruby wrenched the subject back to Misty. “Did she leave you a message?”

  “No. No, she didn’t. But that was the same day—the last day, come to think of it—I remember seeing her. Both her and Zoe, out on the back porch with those people, like I already told you.”

  “You’re sure? About the message?”

  He didn’t hesitate an instant before answering, “Absolutely. And I can’t imagine why she would’ve called me, unless the raccoons found their way back in.”

  “Raccoons got in the house?”

  Sam nodded. “A couple at least, up in the attic. She knocked at my door one day last…I don’t know, must’ve been last fall sometime. She acted kind of embarrassed about asking for my help, ‘going all girly-girl’ was how she put it, but she said they were keeping her and Zoe up all hours, havin’ a hell of a party up there.”

  Ruby smiled a little at that, hearing her sister’s voice with her words. “So you helped her?”

  He shrugged. “Just made sure the overstuffed fuzzballs were gone, then nailed a board back over a hole I found. It was
no great shakes.”

  “Well, I appreciate it,” Ruby said.

  Java wandered to her and pushed against her hand, and Ruby automatically rubbed her ear.

  Sam’s gaze flattened. “So does that mean you’re through listening to Wofford’s bullshit? Because that’s all it is. They’re reaching, Ruby, looking for the easy answer. But not necessarily the right one.”

  Ruby stared at him, weighing her need, her instinct to believe against the knowledge that he’d had plenty of time to construct a credible lie. Plenty of time to practice telling it.

  “Aaron and I were close, for a long time,” Sam said. “We trusted each other. And his parents—whatever happened later, the Monroes saved my life.”

  “I was wondering when you’d bring them into this.” She scowled, thinking that this appeal could have been rehearsed, the playing of his trump card. “I can tell how important Aaron must’ve been to you from all your calls and visits. And the way you showed up at the funerals, first his parents’ and then his.”

  Diabetes had killed Shirley Monroe—who’d outlived her husband by only two years—just six months before Aaron’s accident. A whole family wiped out in short order…a much-loved family, judging from the number of friends and former foster children who had shown up at the services.

  But not Sam McCoy, though Ruby recalled he had sent flowers. Whining, the dog looked up at her, eager for some more attention.

  “You don’t want to believe me, fine.” Sam slowly rose, face flushing. “Why don’t you just come right out and ask me what you really want to know? Did I take Zoe and Misty somewhere? Did I murder them?”

  “You son of a bitch.” Her vision blurred with hot tears. “Don’t you sit there and use a word like murder. Not in connection with my family.”

  “I’m sorry I upset you. Maybe I was a little harsh. But I get to feeling pretty harsh when I’m unfairly accused. Especially of violence.”

  “I’m not accusing you,” she said, “but I’ll be damned if I’ll pussyfoot around any questions that need to be answered because you might get hurt feelings. Not with my daughter out there somewhere. Not with Misty missing.”