Beneath Bone Lake

by Colleen Thompson

  “Sunrise Happy Doodle, my ass,” Ruby grumbled. “This has DeserTek written all over it. Still seems weird to think Wofford wouldn’t know about those transfers attracting government attention.”

  “Wofford’s local law enforcement, and not especially experienced. Besides, I’ve spent a lot of time doing computer forensics investigations to catch embezzling employees, and if it’s taught me one thing, it’s that greed makes people stupid. All kinds of people from all walks of life. They start showing up at work in fancy cars and flashy outfits. Wearing Rolexes instead of their usual cheap digitals, buying vacation condos for their honeys. You wouldn’t believe the idiotic shit that people—”

  “Where are we going, Sam? You still haven’t told me.” “To the Hook-It-Cook-It.” Ignoring the tightening in his gut, Sam thought of the horseshoe-shaped, fiftiesera motor court he remembered so vividly, a collection of native-stone-walled relics. These days, he knew the rooms were rented almost exclusively to fifties-era fisherman and the occasional lost trucker, but it was the one place he could think of that might do. “I thought that place was closed down.” “Not as long as Opal Carmichael is still breathing.” “She is? That woman must be—Lord, she was ancient when my family moved to Dogwood.”

  It didn’t surprise Sam that Ruby knew Opal or knew of her. The woman might be pushing ninety, but she was also a Dogwood legend, famously opinionated and just as famously eccentric in her efforts to promote her business.

  Now that Sam thought about it, she could have been the prototype for Paulie Hammett. “She’s in amazing shape for her age, and better yet, she won’t bat an eye when I walk in shirtless and pay cash for a room. Takes a heck of a lot to ruffle Opal’s feathers.” At least, she’d never seemed troubled whenever Sam’s screwed-up family had bounced its unruly way back after an eviction. “She won’t tell anyone our business.”

  “But it’s so close to town,” Ruby protested. “Someone will see the car or spot us going inside. Paulie’s cabin—”

  “Paulie’s shack doesn’t have hot water or a working shower. It doesn’t even have a bed, just a nasty-looking mattress lying in a corner. No way am I taking you back there tonight, not in the shape you’re in. The Hook-It’s old, and it might smell like disinfectant, but Opal keeps it clean, and like I said—”

  “When the authorities realize you aren’t home, they’re going to assume you’ve run, Sam. They’ll hunt you down and catch you with that laptop and the cell phone.”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, Ruby. What I did today, it’s traceable if the right people start looking. And I can guarantee you, they will.”

  Ruby gave him a look that sliced straight through him. “When this is over, Sam—”

  “When this is over, I’ll be gone. I’m going to have to skip town soon as I can.”

  “Oh, Sam, I never meant for you to—Are you sure? If I explain why—”

  “Last time, I had good reasons, too. I was trying to help an older couple I know, trying to help get back the retirement money that was stolen from them. But the rationale didn’t matter then, and it’ll matter even less now.” He reached over and skimmed her jawline with his fingertips. “Listen, Ruby, don’t worry about me. This is about your little girl, that’s all.”

  “You’re doing it for Aaron, too, aren’t you, Sam? Because you really did care about him.”

  “Truth is, I hated the son of a bitch,” Sam stated flatly.

  “You—you hated Aaron, Sam? Why?” She sounded surprisingly troubled by the revelation.

  “Doesn’t matter, not at this point.” Stress might be pulling at the edges of his old scars, threatening to rip them open, but now was hardly the time to dredge up ancient history. “What’s important is, I don’t hate you or Zoe. And Aaron’s parents—no matter whose story they ended up believing—I owe both of them big time. This is just a fraction of the payment on that debt.”

  “Another time,” Ruby said, “I intend to make you explain that.”

  Sam passed a low-slung, mom-and-pop grocery, boarded and abandoned since the construction of a new megamart across town. Most of the businesses along this road had gone the same route, save for a Dairy Queen and the motor court, whose black-lettered yellow sign was missing not only bulbs but letters. “Why don’t you wait here while I go in and see Opal. And if anyone comes by, duck. If anybody sees you, they’ll call an ambulance for sure.”

  Her eyes closed, she nodded an acknowledgment.

  “Are you going to be all right out here?” he asked, wondering if he should call that ambulance himself.

  “Go ahead. I’ll be fine.”

  He hesitated another moment before he hurried inside, leaving the car idling.

  A CLOSED signed hung behind the fly-specked window, but Sam saw someone moving inside and the door opened when he tried it. A compactly built woman with a thick brown ponytail stood with her back to him, pulling items from the desk and loading them into cardboard boxes.

  “You come for a room, we’re closed now,” she called over her shoulder, speaking around the lit cigarette that dangled from her lips. “You come to rob us, there’s no money…but you’re welcome to as many of these buttugly decorations as you can carry off.”

  “Is Opal here?” Sam asked, eyeballing the web of tattoo art on the bare arm he could see. With its macabre mix of skulls, hearts, and daggers, it was weirdly beautiful, in a vintage biker art way. “I need to see her.”

  When the woman turned to look at him, he saw the flinch as she took in his shirtlessness and blood smears. Almost instantly, she recovered, her surprisingly young features hardening like concrete. “Get on out of here. Whoever you are, my grandmother’s not well—and she sure as hell doesn’t need your kind of trouble.”

  “I have to see her,” Sam insisted. “Old friend. One of the McCoys, you tell her.”

  She lifted a handgun from the box, a little automatic that she held as if she knew what she was doing. As she pointed it in Sam’s direction, her silver nose stud caught the light. “Maybe you didn’t hear me?”

  “Which one of the McCoys?” an elderly woman’s voice called from a back room separated by a beaded curtain.

  In spite of the circumstances, Sam smiled to hear it. “Miss Opal, it’s me, Sam. Sam McCoy. I need your help.”

  The beads rattled as she popped her head through. Her hair had thinned and gone entirely white, and the arms poking from the sleeves of her housedress looked more like twigs than human limbs, but Sam would recognize her smile anywhere. “Right answer. If you’d said you were your brother, I might’ve told my Trisha to shoot you.”

  “You promised me you’d go rest, Gramma.” The younger woman—Trisha, apparently—flicked a hard look in Sam’s direction. “And your eyesight must be worse than we thought if you can’t tell this is trouble.”

  Opal waved off her protest and felt her way toward the counter. “Come here, Sam. Come right up close and let me see you.”

  Trisha rolled her eyes, but her aim didn’t budge. “He’s bloody. He has no shirt. He could’ve killed somebody.”

  Her grandmother’s face puckered as she knotted a fist on one thin hip. “How many times have you told me you hate it when people judge you by your tattoo or all those holes you insist on punching through the pretty face your mother and the good Lord gave you?”

  Trisha rolled her eyes. “We’re talking blood, not self-expression.”

  “A woman’s been hurt,” Sam said, then spat out the first story that sprang to mind. “Her husband hit her. And he’ll kill us if he finds us. This was the only place I knew to go. The only place that felt safe.”

  “What did I tell you?” Trisha asked her grandmother. “This is trouble. I’m calling 9-1-1.”

  Before she could reach the telephone, the old woman moved quickly to grab it and warned her off with a look. “I’m not yours yet, Trisha, or those hospice people’s or the mortuary’s, either. I’m still my own, and that means I make my own decisions. For one more night, at least,
and this night, I intend to honor an old promise to a scared boy. So you put that gun away now, or I’ll disinherit you.”

  “Did you forget? You’ve disinherited me three times today already,” Trisha said with a wry grin.

  “Please.” Opal’s voice cracked on that one word, exposing grief and stubbornness and one last measure of pride.

  Heaving a sigh, Trisha lowered the weapon and nodded. “All right, Gramma. All right. Room Twelve’s cleaned and ready. I took care of it when we thought Nick could get off work to help us move you.”

  Grinding out her cigarette in an ashtray, she flicked a glance toward Sam. “My brother. Never met a family obligation he couldn’t wriggle out of.”

  Sam nodded, though he could only think of Ruby, out in the car hurting. “I was wondering, would either of you have any painkillers? And we could both use clean clothes.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Trisha said. “Anything else, Your Majesty? A getaway car maybe, or an alibi?”

  But Opal was already digging in the cardboard box. “I think—let me see. Here’s something. Some of those samples they mail out with the coupons. Could be a little out of date, but…”

  After glancing through the door to where the car sat idling, Sam accepted the two trial-sized ibuprofen packets and thanked her.

  “And I’m sure we can find you some old clothing,” Opal offered. “Our guests used to forget things sometimes. I’ve washed and boxed the last of them for the Goodwill people, but it’ll take me a few minutes. Trisha, honey, do you know where we left those?”

  Scowling, Trisha pulled a room key off the line of hooks on a wall behind the counter. “Go ahead and take care of your girlfriend. I’ll pick out a few things and leave ‘em in a bag or box outside your door.”

  “Thank you, both of you,” Sam said. “And if anyone comes looking…”

  “We won’t say a—” Opal started.

  Her eyes narrowed, her granddaughter interrupted. “You sure you aren’t the one who hurt this woman?”

  “Hell, no, I didn’t hurt her. I would never—”

  “I find out otherwise, all bets are off.” Trisha glanced down toward the handgun, where she had left it on the desk. “All bets and the safety. Got that?”

  Sam nodded. “Loud and clear.”

  Taking the key and pills, he stepped outside…only to find that the Corolla and the woman in it had both vanished as if they had been swallowed by the night.

  C HAPTER T WENTY-FOUR

  Parting is all we know of heaven

  And all we need of hell.

  —Emily Dickinson,

  from “My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close”

  “Where are you?” Sheriff Wofford’s voice hissed over the phone line. Or maybe the phone’s signal was only breaking up.

  Either way, Ruby shuddered and scooted lower behind the wheel, though the spot where she had moved the car, out of sight of two men she’d seen walking, lay hidden deep in shadow, between the back of the motor court and the overgrown wooded patch behind it.

  “You didn’t answer my last call.” The sheriff sounded exasperated as she went on. “And when I tried Mrs. Lambert, where you told me you were staying, she said you’d made some other arrangement.”

  “Sorry to put you to any trouble.” The words clotted in Ruby’s throat, sickening her as much as the blood drying in her hair. All she could think of were Justine Wofford’s diamonds, her expensive-looking suits. The fat bank accounts that indicated she’d sold out her integrity—and maybe even Ruby’s family. “I’m staying with another friend. What’s going on?”

  “What other friend?” Suspicion chilled the sheriff’s words. “I’ll need a name, Mrs. Monroe.”

  “Why did you call me?” Ruby pushed back. “Have you heard any more news? Gotten any leads? Or has your focus shifted to interrogating me?”

  There was a stunned silence on the other end, but Wofford didn’t take long to recover. “You’re with Sam McCoy now, aren’t you? After everything I’ve told you.”

  “Sam?” Ruby did her best to sound astonished. “Why would I be—no, I haven’t seen him. No.”

  She winced, hearing the deception in her own voice. She had never gotten away with lying to her parents, either.

  “You could be in danger, Ruby. I’m sure you imagine you know this man, but McCoy’s history—”

  “Sam’s been nothing but helpful.”

  “Just listen, for your own good,” the sheriff urged her. “Not only has McCoy’s brother been charged with big-time drug-running, but Sam had a long-running grudge against your husband. Sam tried to blame Aaron, but McCoy was charged with stealing three hundred fifty dollars from the Monroes when both of them were high school seniors.”

  Sam tried to blame Aaron. Ruby frowned at that, unable to imagine her husband taking money, especially from the kind of parents he could turn to for anything he needed. Unless…

  Jackie Hogan’s smoke-roughened voice haunted her, the cruel glee in the addict’s eyes as she’d spoken of her past relationship with Aaron. “Don’t worry. It was over in no time flat, once the stick turned blue.”

  Had three hundred fifty dollars been the price of an abortion? Ruby thought about the crosses and Last Supper print that had hung in the lake house before the renovations, thought of how her husband had never missed a week at church until his parents’ deaths. Knowing they would never understand his failing, had Aaron allowed Sam to take the blame for his sins?

  Ruby’s throat tightened. So had it been guilt that had prompted Aaron to stick up for Sam whenever his “theft” was brought up? Guilt over Aaron’s own misdeeds?

  Sam’s words pounded inside her head: “Truth is, I hated the son of a bitch.”

  If it was all true, no wonder. Still, she shook her head, thinking it was ridiculous to imagine Sam visiting vengeance upon a four-year-old child and the sister-in-law of her late husband. “That’s really the best theory you can come up with?” she asked Wofford.

  “It happened in the Monroes’ lake house. The one you own now.”

  “Owned, you mean,” Ruby corrected, flames leaping in her memory. “And whatever went on between them happened a long time ago. It has nothing to do with—”

  “Don’t be stupid, Ruby. Listen to me and I’ll be sure you’re kept safe.”

  Ruby’s mind flashed to the image of a silvery stream of bubbles rising from the bottom of Bone Lake. Had her dreams been her intuition’s warning, not that Misty and Zoe lay beneath the water, but that her own life was in danger from an unexpected threat?

  “I can’t be kept safe.” Ruby heard the sharp lash of her own hostility, but couldn’t contain it. “Can’t sit somewhere on my hands while you’re tossing off stupid theories and keeping secrets from me.”

  “All right, Ruby. If this is how you want to play it, I’m just going to go ahead and let you know what we’ve found.” The sheriff’s voice gentled. “I’d rather not have done it this way, but—”

  “You—you’ve found them?” Ruby felt a tearing start deep in her stomach and rip straight through her heart. “You have, haven’t you? You found my family, and they’re—they’re dead, aren’t they?”

  When Wofford explained the situation, Ruby couldn’t draw air enough to scream, couldn’t even react to the sudden pounding at the driver’s window just beside her.

  “Ruby?” Sam’s voice, though not his worry, was muffled by the glass. But right now everything seemed muffled.

  Silenced.

  Ruined.

  Lost.

  C HAPTER T WENTY-FIVE

  I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

  I lift my eyes and all is born again.

  (I think I made you up inside my head.)

  —Sylvia Plath,

  from “Mad Girl’s Love Song”

  Though Sam finally coaxed Ruby into unlocking the car door, she lowered the phone from her ear without saying a word or making eye contact. Sitting upright in the driver’s seat, she stared str
aight ahead, her gaze unfocused and her body still as death.

  “Did Best call again?” he asked, knowing how much each conversation with the man had cost her. When she didn’t answer, he gave her shoulder a light shake. “Ruby? Ruby, I need you to talk to me or nod or something.”

  She did nod, a movement so subtle it was nearly imperceptible.

  “Good, now let’s get you up. There’ll be a shower and a clean bed. Heavy curtains on the windows and a good lock on the door.” When she failed to respond, he let the dog out of the backseat. Returning to Ruby, he plucked her from the car and used his knee to bump the door shut. With a push of the key fob, the alarm chirruped reassurance.

  As Sam carried her to the door of the end unit, Ruby curled against his chest, her hand still clutching her pale green phone. Inside, he flipped a switch, igniting a pair of low-wattage lamps with paper shades. The rest of the room was much as Sam remembered from his childhood. Same rough, pine-planked walls, same yellowing acoustical tiles checkerboarding the drop ceiling, same thin, muddy-colored carpet, with darker, worn paths pointing the way between the tiny kitchenette and the cramped bathroom.

  A shadow, the ghost of his much-younger self ducked behind the queen-sized bed. Sam sucked in a sharp breath, a mistake, since the room’s odors triggered yet another avalanche of memory, every damned bit of it bad. Grimacing, he stepped inside and lowered Ruby into one of two off-kilter, wooden chairs.

  With Java wagging her tail beside him, Sam knelt down in front of Ruby and gently pulled the phone from her hand. She didn’t seem to notice when he laid it on a low, round table whose once-white top bore so many dark rings from coffee mugs and soda cans, they formed a subtle pattern on the surface.

  Ruby didn’t react, either, when he took both her icecold hands in his and looked her in the eye. The blankness he saw there frightened him.

  “Talk to me,” Sam pleaded. “Let me know I didn’t screw up bringing you here instead of the ER.”

  Her head shook slightly. “It’s fine.” The voice was listless, a soft murmur. “The room’ll do fine.”