The Heritage’s patrons walked through the display, murmuring to one another. Occasionally, one would approach her, shake her hand, and congratulate her on the exhibition. They used words such as impactful and mesmerising, and she received at least three requests for her business card from other gallery owners and art critics.
Brandon inclined his head towards her and murmured into her ear, “They love it.”
Sam could only manage a weak, choked chuckle. It still felt unreal to her; in the eight days following her escape from the lake, she’d spent half of her time in the hospital and the other half assisting the police in their investigation. Even though the paintings had been returned to her a few days after she’d arrived home, she’d barely had a chance to look at them, let alone think about them.
She hadn’t made the decision to exhibit the paintings lightly. They depicted real events, from memories of a real life that had been lost. But Ian McKeller’s blessing had been the deciding factor. “You’re welcome to use the paintings. They’re as much yours as they are mine.”
Brandon casually bumped the back of his right hand into her left, and Sam felt a smile grow over her face as their fingers entwined.
Following their escape, she’d visited the ranger in hospital and celebrated the small triumphs with him as he was moved from ICU to the general ward then finally discharged. Following that, they’d worked together to help the police find the grey-eyed man’s cabin. Sam only had a vague idea of where it had been, but Brandon was familiar with the mountain’s landscape, and together, they’d been able to pin down the approximate location.
She’d found herself gravitating towards the ranger and his unassuming, steady kindness. His shy invitation for a date couldn’t have come soon enough.
Sam was slowly learning to trust him in a way she hadn’t trusted anyone since her mother’s passing. When she’d told him about the cadaver who had guided her dreams and saved both of their lives, he hadn’t scoffed or laughed like she’d been afraid he would, but accepted it with a quiet “wow.”
She’d been much more selective about what she’d shared with the police. Instead of telling them the grey-eyed man had been dragged into the lake, she said he’d fallen through the rotten wood. Everyone seemed content with that explanation; when his corpse was fished out of the lake, he’d had lacerations across his body and a substantial head wound. The coroner’s report said he’d hit his head while falling through the hole, and drowned.
It had taken some time to discover his name. In the end, Uncle Earnest’s guess had been half-right: although he was very much a human, the man was Michael Paluhik. He belonged to the trio of hikers to first disappear around the lake, and his body had, obviously, never been recovered
Friends had described Michael as quiet and shy, but his diary, a tattered book found on one of his cabin’s shelves, painted a very different picture. He’d grown up with impulses that he hadn’t understood and had struggled to contain. His diary talked about wanting to kill his mother, his siblings, and even his friends. The entries went into increasingly graphic detail about the ways he would do it, the expressions he could picture on their faces, and how he imagined their blood would taste.
He’d managed to control his urges until that fateful backpacking trip with his two closest friends. In the privacy of the woods, he’d murdered them both with his camping knife and dragged their bodies off the path so that the deaths would seem accidental when they were found. He’d taken a single memento from each body: their index fingers.
Knowing that his crimes would be uncovered if he returned to civilisation, Michael built himself a life inside the forest. He knew enough about wilderness survival to live off the land and find clean water, and he occasionally took the two-day hike to the nearest town to purchase anything he wasn’t able to build for himself.
According to his diary, the impulses had grown stronger with each passing year. At first, he’d only taken one or two lives a year, choosing from amongst the hikers he’d watched on Trail T1, which ran near his cabin and he considered his domain. But eventually, the cravings had grown so severe that he’d started killing every few months.
Sam would have been his nineteenth victim in eight years.
She still couldn’t understand how or why Ian and his companions had retained their autonomy after death. She and Brandon had bandied theories back and forth; Brandon had found an outdated webpage that talked about Harob Lake being home to otherworldly spirits, and thought that some sort of energy had sustained the victims’ awareness. Sam thought Ian, the last hiker to go missing, might have had some sort of spiritual aptitude, and his death had been the catalyst for its unleashing and had, in turn, woken the other bodies.
Either way, they owed Ian their lives. His funeral was scheduled for the following morning. Because they’d worked so closely with the police to retrieve his body, both Sam and Brandon had received an invitation to attend.
Even though the dead man didn’t have a high opinion of funerals, Sam was looking forward to seeing him finally laid to rest. She’d ordered a special bunch of liriope flowers, which had grown in abundance in the lake he had become so fond of.
Sam leaned her head against Brandon’s shoulder and felt her smile widen as he gently squeezed her hand in response.
THE END
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Dead Lake Page 9
