Beneath Bone Lake

by Colleen Thompson

  Rather than dropping the key ring into Sam’s outstretched hand, Hammett instead pulled off his gimmee cap to scratch a salt-and-pepper brush cut. “I gotta tell you, Sam, I don’t want to end up with any trouble over this. Anna won’t stand for it.”

  “You loaned me the cabin keys a while back,” Sam improvised, knowing that it was Paulie’s resistance and not his wife’s that must be overcome. “I must have copied them without permission. That’s what you’ll say if you’re ever asked about it.”

  Still, Paulie hesitated, shaking his head. “I’ve worked too damned hard to build this business. If people start thinking I’m somehow involved in this situation—”

  “Why would anybody think that?”

  Hammett rubbed his whiskers. “Well, Misty and I had a real blowup, in front of staff and customers and God and everybody, the day she walked out. That and the fact that I’m a fat old man with money and people’ve been speculating that Misty might have gotten herself in a family way.”

  “Pregnant? You’re saying Misty’s pregnant?” Sam had a feeling Ruby knew nothing about this.

  Paulie massaged the back of his neck. “Hell if I know, and even if it’s true, I couldn’t begin to guess who did the deed. All I know is gossip—nothing stops it. Not money, not influence, not the fact I’ve been faithful to my wife since I went all moon-eyed over that girl back in high school. And now I gotta worry over some waitress getting in a snit, maybe even takin’ off like this to spite me.”

  Sam shook his head. “Come on, Paulie. That was nothing. Everybody knows she was being touchy with everybody—and nobody’d ever believe that you and Misty—”

  “Thanks, dick-weed. That makes me feel a hell of a lot better.”

  “Because you’re a man of honor, that’s all I meant. And if Anna found out you were screwing with the help”—Sam made a snipping motion with his fingers—“let’s just say that meatballs would be the daily special.”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s what you meant.” Paulie glowered at him. “Why are you a suspect anyway? Why don’t you tell me that?”

  Sam grimaced. “What have you been hearing?”

  “Some people have been in asking questions. People with shiny federal badges, not to mention the usual county mounties and, God help us all, reporters, wanting to shoot my damned sign in the background of their stories. Even that asshole Roger Savoy has been out.” Paulie had never gotten over the deputy arresting Dylan for possession years before. “Surprised you haven’t had them swarming all over your house yet.”

  “What makes you think I haven’t?” Sam asked. The vans had disappeared, but he suspected they’d swarm back in greater numbers once someone got the bright idea to dig into his background.

  “Anna asked me point-blank if I thought you were involved.” Paulie broke eye contact. “If you might have it in you to hurt a sweet young lady and a little girl.”

  Sam turned away, looked out toward the clouds reflected by the water. A movement caught the tail of his vision, and he turned in time to see an old black woman with a cane pole lift that night’s dinner, a fat catfish, into a beat-up, wooden boat. Even from this distance, Sam could hear its muscular body thumping against the hull as the fish flopped. Could almost feel it struggling for life.

  “What did you tell your wife?” he asked quietly, sickened that two people he had known for decades, the same two people he had lived with, laughed with, would be asking themselves if the bad blood in him had won the day. After the foster system had cut him loose, the Hammetts had put Sam up for a while—despite the Monroes’ warnings to watch him like a hawk. Sam had been a source of cheap labor, Paulie had insisted gruffly, but there had been no mistaking his pride when Sam cobbled together enough scholarships and part-time work to go away to school. Sure, he’d squandered the opportunity, marrying ridiculously young and dropping out when the relationship unraveled a few turbulent months later. But when he’d finally gotten his shit together and made good in the high-tech world, Paulie and Anna had been thrilled to bursting, had even come to visit him a few times at the luxury condo he’d bought on Austin’s Travis Lake.

  Yet in the end, when push came to shove, he was still nothing but a McCoy to them. A freaking liability.

  “I told her you damned near got your ass blown to pieces trying to help a neighbor.” Paulie tossed him the keys. “And as far as I’m concerned, that’s all there is to your involvement.”

  Sam forced himself to look up into the older man’s eyes. “Thanks, Paulie. For everything.” Though that didn’t cover it by half, Sam couldn’t manage more. Clenching the key ring, he dropped it into his pocket. “I promise, I won’t give you any reason to regret it.”

  “Don’t you put it that way.” His voice rumbling like a bear’s growl, Hammett’s expression hardened. “Don’t you dare say those words.”

  Taken aback by the abrupt change, Sam stared at him. “What’s the problem?”

  This time, it was Paulie’s turn to look out toward the water, but not before Sam saw the suspicious gleam in his eyes. “Sorry, kid. It’s just that Dylan used to say that when he took my truck keys. Used to say it every time the little son of a bitch was about to go out on a bender. I always wanted to believe him, always argued with his mother. And half the time I ended up cleanin’ up another of his fucking messes.”

  “You two have another blowup?” Though Hammett’s son was more than ten years younger than he, Sam had always gotten on fine with Dylan. But father and son clashed as violently as storm fronts, though it was clear Paulie loved Dylan, in his fierce way.

  When Paulie wouldn’t answer, Sam reminded him, “Listen, your kid’s been straight and sober a long time now. Settled down with Holly, doing great work around town, from everything I hear—and you’ve gotta admit, he ripped a page straight from your playbook in terms of bringing in the business.”

  After buying his retiring boss’s remodeling business—almost undoubtedly with his parents’ money—Dylan had immediately changed its name to Tex-Appeal Exteriors and sprung for a huge sign featuring a winking, beefcake handyman holding one heck of a long tool. The sign had incited (or ex-cited, Sam suspected) some church ladies, whose angry buzzing drew reporters, resulting in a controversy that had attracted enough business to keep Dylan in the black for years.

  “My idea in the first place, that sign.” Worry tempered Paulie’s half smile.

  “People change,” Sam went on, “they reinvent themselves and make good. One mistake, or even a series of ’em, doesn’t have to mean the end.”

  Paulie’s gaze snapped back and locked on to his. “Is that what you’re doing now, Sam? Are you ‘reinventing’ yourself the way my boy has? Or are you sliding back into the same territory that got your ass arrested?”

  Sam gave him a hard stare. Wondering what he could say to Hammett’s question when he didn’t know the answer himself.

  C HAPTER S IXTEEN

  “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”

  —Ernest Hemingway,

  “On the Blue Water,” Esquire, April 1936

  On her way back to Dogwood with the laptop and other items Sam had asked for, Ruby’s cell phone rang. She fumbled for it, pulse rate soaring, as she pulled over near the bridge that crossed Cane Creek north of town.

  The phone’s screen said Private Number, which meant it could be him. The kidnapper, wanting an exchange she and Sam hadn’t yet had time to set up and a flash drive she didn’t have. Despite her shaking hands, she managed to shut off the car’s stereo and croak out a greeting.

  “This is Ruby Monroe.”

  “Are you being a good girl, Ruby Monroe?” came the man’s voice. In the background, she heard a child crying, not the frantic shrieks of immediate pain or terror, but the fretful whimpers of one who had been fussing for so long she had lost hope.

  “Is that my daughter? Is that Zoe?” When no answer cam
e, her fear and stress changed to fury. “Let me talk to her, you murdering bastard. Let me talk to both of them or I swear I’ll—”

  “You must be very cautious, very sensible about the way you finish that sentence, Mrs. Monroe.” His voice was positively glacial, a stark reminder of the brutality of Elysse’s murder. “Because I’ve never responded well to threats. Particularly not when my patience has been worn thin with all this insufferable noise.”

  Frozen to the marrow, Ruby stopped herself. Was Zoe sick or injured or simply scared and weary of confinement? “Let me speak to her. Please. I’ll make her stop crying for you. I promise, I’ll make things easier for you if you’ll only—”

  “You. Will. Have to wait. Do you understand me? Do you?”

  An image appeared in Ruby’s mind: the corpse she’d found in Elysse’s kitchen shrunk to childlike proportions. Ruby’s teeth chattered so hard that it was barely possible to speak. This man, this monster held her beating heart in his hands. “I do. So wh-when do you want to make the exchange?”

  “I’ll call again tonight. After I’ve arranged the details. In the meantime, keep avoiding the reporters as you have been,” he said with what sounded strangely like approval, “and keep your mouth shut about our talks or I will know.”

  “But I—” she began before realizing the line had gone dead.

  For several minutes, she sat rocking back and forth and rubbing her cold arms. Then Sam’s words came back to her, something he’d said about the kidnapper wanting her rattled and off-balance, too terrified to think.

  Maybe she hadn’t heard her daughter’s cries at all, but those of some other child. Or, if this man had been savvy enough to spoof a caller ID last night, could he have thought to record the weeping and replay it in the background to convince her Zoe was alive?

  Popping the heel of her hand against the car’s dash, Ruby gave an anguished cry, then fought to lock her fear down tight. Because as long as she allowed this terrorist to paralyze her, she wouldn’t be doing a damned thing to save the people she loved.

  Some thirty minutes later, as she followed the map Sam had drawn out for her, the wind flipped up the silvery green skirts of the hardwoods and showered the road with rust-colored pine needles. With every mile she drove, the clouds above contorted, twisting themselves into rumbling gray towers that presaged a thunderstorm.

  She hoped like hell the rain would blow past, since she’d hate to get caught on this pothole-scarred back road in anything heavier than a sprinkle. Low in places, with portions of its asphalt washed away from past floods, it made her wish she were out here in a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

  The sky’s growl deepened and she spotted a white flash to her right. Great.

  Frowning, Ruby drove right past the crossroad and had to back up to turn off in the same direction as the lightning. Ahead of her, overarching trees hugged a dirt track. Overhead, their branches writhed as if in pain. Though what looked like fresh tire tracks assured her that someone—Sam, she hoped—had passed this way not long before, she still worried she’d find herself in a mud hole, stuck and unable to comply with the nameless kidnapper’s demands.

  Farther in, the tree-cave cast her into such deep shade that the car’s automatic headlights came on to light her passage. A dark length dropped in front of her, and she stopped short, narrowly avoiding a bough as thick as her leg.

  Looking upward nervously, she blew out a shaky sigh and rolled slowly over the limb. Peering into the gloom, she kept her eyes peeled for the “Hamm’s Hideaway” sign that Sam had mentioned.

  According to what he’d told her, the place was a bayou fishing cabin, one of those weather-beaten shacks often passed down through the generations. Too dilapidated and isolated to make a worthwhile rental, Paulie had held on to it only out of sentiment—and as a place to smoke cigars and stare out at nothing without Anna getting after him. Probably a heck of a dump, Ruby suspected, if he wouldn’t let his wife set foot inside it.

  About the time the first, fat raindrops popped against the car’s exterior, Ruby glimpsed something red—Sam’s Yukon, behind the screen of trees. She never did spot the sign, but the SUV’s bright color led her like a beacon to a cabin perched tentatively along the curve of a meandering, wide stream, its muddy, green-brown water rippling with the wind.

  Like Elysse’s place, Hammett’s getaway was elevated. But that was where the resemblance ended. The cabin consisted of warped, unpainted boards weathered gray by the elements, except where it was stained green by algae. Spanish moss had webbed not only the overhanging live oaks, but the shack’s roof and porch as well.

  She parked, then popped the trunk and hurried to grab her purchases before the sky opened up completely. She’d expected to hear thunder, or the stillness that often preceded a big storm. Instead, a mechanical hum met her ears, the sound of a gas generator that explained the welcome, yellow glow she spotted through a grimy window.

  Sam emerged from inside and rushed down the steps. As he jogged toward her, he flashed a truant’s smile, his face still handsome despite the small Band-Aids he’d placed over his stitched cuts. “Hey, there. Let me get that for you before it really starts to come down.”

  No sooner had he spoken than the rain came in a torrent, pelting them with stinging drops as it rattled like a million pennies striking the cabin’s tin roof, the car, and both of them. Scooping up plastic bags and boxes and slamming the trunk shut, they raced for shelter, hurtling up the steps and running inside. They stopped, panting and dripping, on a patch of peeling linoleum in the center of a kitchen that, for all its dust and grime and musty smells, made Ruby think of her clean-freak grandmother.

  Once they’d put down their packages on the floor and on top of a square, wooden table, the two of them stared, each taking in the other’s drowned-rat appearance. To Ruby’s astonishment, they both burst out laughing.

  Laughing, like two kids on an adventure.

  Laughing, as if the exhilaration of a dash through the rain had washed their memories clean. Except hysteria edged this mirth, an explosion only a hairbreadth from helpless tears.

  Mortified, Ruby abruptly fell silent, and Sam sobered just as quickly, his gaze locked on to hers.

  Outside, the rain rattled off the roof and a window showing a slice of gray sky dark as dusk. Combined with their isolation and the weak illumination from an old tin-hooded lantern, the effect was to make the small room feel tiny, the moment intimate.

  “I’m sorry, Ruby.” Soaked to the skin, with his short hair flattened and his T-shirt clinging to the contours of his muscles, he looked genuinely contrite—and uncomfortably appealing. “I don’t want you to think I’m making light of any of this, but—hell, sometimes you have to laugh or completely break down. You understand?”

  Nodding, she said, “Yeah,” and struggled to stop thinking about the way she’d lit up inside at her first sight of his smile. Emotionally at sea, she couldn’t risk losing her focus for a moment.

  “Have a towel.” He pulled several from a cardboard box perched on the counter of an antique Hoosier kitchen cabinet.

  She gratefully accepted, and he took one for himself and used it. As she dried, she took in the white enamel cookstove and shelves stacked with various supplies, from canned foods and batteries to cleaning items. In one corner, someone had set a large red and white cooler.

  “Did you bring all this stuff?” she asked as Java danced an enthusiastic welcome near her feet.

  “Most of it,” he said. “I don’t want to waste time driving to town for supplies or risk being followed back here, so I tried to think of everything we might need for as long as a few days.”

  She rubbed the Lab’s soft brown ears with one hand, a reflexive act that did nothing to ease her worry. “I don’t think we have a few days. He called me, in the car.”

  She told Sam about her conversation with the man who claimed to have her family. Though she struggled to get out the words, she added her suspicions that he might have used another chil
d’s cries or a recording to make her believe that he had Zoe.

  “Go lie down,” Sam said to Java, who had gotten too insistent in her quest for attention. When the dog obeyed, he praised her, sounding pleasantly surprised.

  Looking back at Ruby, he asked, “Did you hear Misty, too? Did he mention her?”

  Ruby rubbed her arms. “No, I didn’t hear her, and he’s refusing to give details. All he does is make threats, and I don’t doubt for a second that he’s capable of anything. Anything at all. If you only heard that voice…”

  She shivered, and Sam pulled a larger, newer-looking towel from his box, which he wrapped around her gently. Using the absorbent tail of the white cloth, he blotted cooling moisture from her cheek, then cupped her jaw, caressed it lightly with his fingers.

  “We’re going to do this, Ruby. We’re going to do everything we can to track your family, get phone records, your sister’s financials, see if we can prove they’re somewhere else.”

  She looked at him intently, clinging to the gentle strength in his words, the assurance in his eyes. “How, Sam? Even with the laptop and the air card for the Internet, I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “It’s possible,” he told her. “Especially with the help I’ve come up with. The best kind of help.”

  “What kind?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Don’t sweat it. Just know that somebody’s on our side. Someone who doesn’t have to bother with technicalities or bosses or running to get every move approved by some judge.”

  She realized he was speaking of a criminal, yet she was still relieved. They could use any kind of ally they could get at this point. Particularly one whose actions wouldn’t make their way back to a bought-and-paid-for deputy or sheriff.

  “Meanwhile, we’ll use the laptop and that flash drive you bought to make a mock-up. You find a pretty close match to the one that’s missing?”