Depth of Lies

by E. C. Diskin

  “Got it.”

  Shea left, grabbed a ticket, and rushed to the ferry just as the crew prepared to remove the gangway.

  Standing at the bow, Shea held the railing, looking out at the water toward the islands. It was brisk, but the water shimmered under the bright sun. The view, so calm and inviting, was a strange contrast to her last trip here. The November trip had been plagued by rough waters, the pain of feeling like her marriage was collapsing, and her drunken determination to even the score. She didn’t want to think about it, or Blake, or what she would say if she saw any of Blake’s friends at the memorial. She wasn’t even sure she’d remember them.

  Instead, she focused on how beautiful it was out here, and how amazing it might be to start over with a little house, maybe a boat, kids and grandkids, a whole new life. She was not going to let Evelyn’s comments ruin her plan. Nothing could ruin this plan. Please let this be the end, she thought to herself. Please let this man’s death have nothing to do with me or Georgia.

  Once the ferry had traveled a good distance from shore, it picked up speed, pushing against the choppy water. A few swells crashed against the boat, causing spray on the deck, and Shea went inside for a seat. The boat was only a quarter filled. She sat facing the stern and looked out at the ferry terminal still visible in the distance. She hoped Evelyn would make it to the memorial. She really didn’t want to be there alone.

  CHAPTER 32

  April 14

  KAT HUNG UP THE PHONE with Evelyn and rubbed her eyes. Everyone was holding secrets, each of them making Kat feel worse. Evelyn had broken down almost immediately as she told Kat what happened. Evelyn was certain that her comments about Dee and Ryan must have pushed Shea over the edge. She said the car had become silent after she’d shared what she knew. Evelyn felt like she’d let down the one friend who’d been so good to her in the last year. Shea needed a friend for that trip, and Evelyn had failed her. It sounded as if Evelyn believed it might have been suicide, after all.

  It wasn’t Evelyn’s fault, getting so sick in the terminal, but Kat’s reassurance hadn’t eased her guilt. She said she’d felt sick for nearly forty-five minutes and couldn’t stomach the idea of getting on the ferry. She also admitted to being a little heartbroken that Shea was planning to move away. She didn’t much feel like browsing real estate. It wasn’t rational, she said, but she’d eventually texted Shea an apology for getting sick, rented a car, and returned to Maple Park.

  When Evelyn found out that Shea had died that night, she couldn’t bear to tell anyone what she’d done. She didn’t think anyone would forgive her for leaving, for not joining her like she’d promised, for sharing unproven allegations about Dee and Ryan. And Shea had told Evelyn at a Christmas party that in her drunken stupor on the island, she’d recalled Evelyn’s suggestion that women with cheating husbands give them a taste of their own medicine. The very idea that Shea’s flirtation with Blake had gone so wrong, and that she’d been the one to suggest it, even as a joke, left Evelyn beyond consolable.

  Kat couldn’t get her head around the idea that Dee had been with Ryan. Dee had sat with Kat in Lina’s kitchen just two days earlier, talking about the whole swinging fiasco like that was all there was to it. Could she trust Dee? Had she said all that to Kat because she was afraid that Kat and others might suspect her after she’d seemed so hostile when they were in Catawba?

  All of these revelations made Kat feel worse. Shea could have succumbed to a tragic impulse, she realized. She certainly had reasons. She might have caused Blake’s death; she might have just learned that her husband and close friend had been lying. Even if it wasn’t true, it could have devastated her.

  Kat stood at Ryan’s door. It was ridiculous that she was paying him a third visit, especially after they’d already said good-bye, but after speaking with Evelyn, she had no choice.

  When Ryan opened the door, a cell phone to his ear, Kat didn’t bother with the pleasantries. “I have to tell you something.”

  “I gotta go,” he said, abruptly ending his phone call. “What’s going on?”

  “Evelyn went with Shea to Put-in-Bay on April first.”

  “What?” He stumbled back, as if her words had assaulted him. “How could she not say anything?”

  “Can I come in?”

  Ryan silently walked to the kitchen, and Kat followed. She sat at the kitchen table. Ryan went to the fridge and pulled out a beer. He raised one toward her, silently offering, but she waved it off.

  “Evelyn didn’t say anything because she feels responsible,” Kat said. “She thinks she might have said something that upset Shea. Well, more than upset her, really.”

  Ryan said nothing. He was leaning against the island counter, his eyes glazed, burrowing a hole in the tabletop.

  “Ryan, Evelyn told Shea that you’d had an affair. With Dee.”

  The name Dee seemed to pull him from the trance. “What? God dammit! I told you, Kat—”

  Kat raised her hand. “Ryan, I know. Evelyn said she’d made an assumption. She felt terrible for putting that in Shea’s mind. Apparently, Evelyn got sick in the terminal and never caught up to Shea on the island. She knows that if she had, this might never have happened.”

  He sipped his beer. He didn’t say anything.

  “It’s all so crazy, Ryan. All of us—Georgia, Dee, Evelyn, me. Everyone is torturing themselves with the what-ifs and the guilt. We all feel like we failed her.”

  Ryan didn’t look at Kat. His eyes remained fixed on the table in front of her as he spoke. “Why would you feel responsible? You weren’t even here.”

  “Shea called me the night before she left. She wanted to talk. I ignored it.” Kat started crying. “I’m so sorry, Ryan.”

  “You think you have the market cornered on guilt,” he said, finally looking at her. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m going home, Ryan, but I couldn’t leave without telling you everything. You have a right to know.”

  He swigged his beer. “Well, thanks for stopping by.”

  Kat didn’t move. “There’s more. We know why Shea went to the island two weeks ago. Last November, when the girls went to Put-in-Bay, Shea was upset about you, and she left the bar with a man.”

  Ryan looked away like he didn’t want to hear it.

  “They went to his boat. Apparently, they kissed, and when Shea resisted taking it further, things got violent.”

  “What are you telling me?” He was staring at her, not blinking, holding her gaze. She could see his fear, the dread of where this was headed.

  “We don’t know everything, but either Shea or Georgia hit him over the head, and then they ran off.”

  He looked away and drank some more.

  “Anyway,” Kat continued, “a few weeks ago, Tori read about that man in an Ohio paper. He’d disappeared the night Shea was with him. He died. And it seems that Shea was concerned that she could have been responsible. His memorial was on Put-in-Bay. On April first. That’s why she went. We assume she wanted answers. It doesn’t even matter now. Obviously, Evelyn was the friend Shea referred to when she spoke to the innkeeper. And now, we know why she might have been so upset. I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you all this.”

  “Stop!” he yelled. “I can’t listen to this anymore.”

  Kat stood slowly, taken aback by the outburst. She’d never seen him so angry.

  “You should go,” he said.

  She walked to the door, suddenly afraid to speak, and stepped outside when he opened the door.

  He closed it behind her, and she stood, stunned, unable to move. A moment later, she heard a glass shatter inside the house.

  CHAPTER 33

  April 1

  3:55 p.m.

  AFTER SHEA GOT TO THE island and checked in, she drove the inn’s complimentary golf cart through the winding streets to the far side of the island.

  Blake was right, she thought, pulling up toward the old redbrick lighthouse. It was different from any she had seen before.
It looked like a stately, century-old home that just happened to have a lighthouse tower attached to it. A large expanse of green grass separated the house from the road, and it stood near the rocky edge of the island, the deep-blue lake surrounding all but one side of it. There were several cars and a few golf carts parked along the road leading to the lighthouse, and Shea watched a few mourners walking toward the building. The service was probably over, but she was obviously not the only one arriving late. What now? She suddenly panicked. Was she to eavesdrop on conversations? How would she introduce herself to these strangers? And how did you know Blake? someone might ask. Oh, he tried to rape me the night he died. My friend hit him over the head and we ran. Yeah, that would go over well.

  She walked over to the large placard in the yard to read about the lighthouse. Anything to avoid walking inside. CONSTRUCTED AND FIRST LIT IN 1897, it read, THE SOUTH BASS ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE WAS IN CONTINUOUS OPERATION UNTIL 1962 . . . She couldn’t read anymore. She couldn’t wait any longer, but she kept looking down the street, hoping a taxi would round the bend and drop Evelyn. She wanted a wingman. She sent her a text. Hope you’re feeling better. You catch a ferry yet? We have room #1 btw. See u soon.

  “Hello,” a woman said, coming up beside her.

  Shea turned to the voice. “Hi.”

  “Are you here for the memorial?”

  “I am,” Shea said.

  “Such a tragedy,” the woman said. “But what a beautiful place, right? And it’s a perfect day. I think it’s almost sixty degrees.”

  Shea smiled. “I was just thinking that, too. Well, I better go in.”

  “Me, too,” the woman said. “I just want to read the history of the building first.”

  Shea began walking toward the house. That went fine, she thought. No third-degree questions. Nothing to fear. She was right to come. This wasn’t her fault. Or Georgia’s. But a man had died and she had known him, for better and worse. She was just paying respects. And if anyone asked, she knew him from college. She was sure a guy like that knew a lot of women.

  The front door was on the far side, facing the water, but a large mass of people was entering and exiting the building through the glassed-in narrow porch that extended along the width of the back of the building. Once inside, Shea followed the crowd through the kitchen, which looked untouched since the sixties, and into the large adjoining dining room, complete with ten-foot ceilings, a fireplace, and an antique piano in the corner. The table, topped with white cloth, presented a beautiful array of food for the forty or fifty people, and along the fireplace mantel, pictures of Blake and his wife and children sat perched, as if this was their family home.

  Most of the visitors were standing in the adjoining living room to greet Blake’s family. She would avoid that room. To see his wife, the mother of his kids, mourning a man whom Shea might have—well, not really, well, what? I didn’t kill him, she screamed inside her head. Maybe his wife knew he was a pig. Maybe he was a serial cheater and she’d just been waiting for the right moment to leave him, waiting because of the young kids, the complications, the pain of breaking up a family. Maybe he beat her, she told herself. Maybe the woman in there was shedding tears of relief.

  Get some food, Shea thought. Look busy.

  With a plate full of appetizers, Shea meandered into the front hall. Several poster boards were filled with pictures of Blake and family and friends. Kids ran through the rooms, seemingly oblivious to the occasion or just incapable of being sad when there was cake and other kids, a lighthouse tower to climb, and an enormous expanse of green grass outside.

  Shea stood in front of one of the poster boards, looking at the pictures, examining the life of this man she barely knew. It was a seemingly idyllic family. But to her, he was a stranger. These pictures were no more revealing than the thousands of Facebook posts she’d seen and shared over the years. They were the best shots, the thin shots, the good smiles, the better sides—just like the fiction of reality TV—edited and shaped and framed in the way people wanted to be seen.

  A couple of women stood behind her, pointing toward photographs, while speaking to each other. They referenced the kids in the photos by name. “I don’t know,” one woman said to the other, as Shea began to eavesdrop, “I just told Jerry that I had no interest in getting a boat. He had a hard time arguing, since we had this on the calendar.”

  “Yeah,” the other woman said, “but Blake was drinking. Everyone knows you can’t drink and drive. Boat or car. It’s not like we refuse to buy cars, right?”

  Shea stood frozen, listening. That was all anyone thought. And why wouldn’t they? He got drunk with his friends, his boat turned up on an island, and he obviously disappeared into the lake. None of this had anything to do with her. Her guilt, and Georgia’s panic, was silly. Blake had died almost five months ago, a tragic boating accident, and it was just a coincidence that she’d been with him that night. Nothing more. The weight lifted from her shoulders, and she took a breath as the women behind her walked away.

  Shea popped one more appetizer in her mouth and tossed the plate into the garbage can. Those women had been like angels with a message. Suddenly, she felt like a funeral crasher, here for free food and strange voyeurism, and she turned toward the front door. There was no need to stay. A little boy ran past her, yelling back that he was heading for the tower. Shea stopped. Blake had said the view from the tower was beautiful.

  Shea followed the little boy out the front door, onto the other glass porch, to a spectacular view of the lake. How fantastic it must have been for the lightkeepers who lived here over the years to have had that view every day, watching waves crash onto the boulders along the shore, watching the boats, sitting along those rocks and casting a line. Even during the cold winters, she envisioned an amazing view. Tori had once remarked that Lake Erie sometimes froze over entirely. It was the shallowest of the Great Lakes. Tori said she’d even read a blog posted by some guy who had walked across the lake to Canada a few decades earlier. That was a little more adventure than Shea needed, but Tori’s pictures of the lake in winter looked like the moon or some other cosmic frozen tundra.

  The entrance to the light tower was right here, inside the glassed-in front porch. The little boy she’d followed out had already climbed up and down and run off before she stepped inside. She marveled at the curved redbrick walls, partially covered in plaster, as she started her ascent up the sixty-foot gray metal circular stair. But hearing the pounding of feet on metal, she looked up. It seemed impossible to pass someone on such a narrow stair, so she waited for the people coming down to reach the bottom. “How’s the view?” she asked one of the men as he arrived on the ground.

  “Incredible,” the man said. “It’s such a clear day.”

  Shea made it to the top and stood inside the old light, fully encased in glass and protected from the elements. There was a small platform with a railing that encircled the giant light. A few others were standing outside, though there was little room to maneuver. She went to the railing and looked out. Blake had been right. Why was it that the sight of water made everything in the world seem okay? She wanted to look at water every day. Suddenly, she could hardly wait to jump in a golf cart with Evelyn and see the homes she’d viewed online.

  “Hey.”

  The voice came from behind her. She turned.

  “You’re the woman,” he said. “You were with Blake at Rudolph’s.”

  CHAPTER 34

  April 14

  KAT LEFT RYAN, RETURNED TO Lina’s, and called Mack. It was five thirty.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this has taken too long. I’m coming home. I’ve stayed too long and I miss you. There’s a flight in a couple of hours. I’m going to try to get on it.”

  “I don’t think you should do that just yet,” Mack said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just bought a plane ticket. I’ll be in Maple Park by noon tomorrow. I’m going to pay my respects and take my wife out for a night on t
he town in one of our favorite cities. I happen to know someone who has an in with a luxury hotel downtown. I think I can get us a room.”

  Kat chuckled.

  “Then we’re going to invite some old friends to join us for brunch in Maple Park before we head home. Together.”

  Kat smiled and took another cleansing breath. At least she and Mack were going to be okay. They were a team again. “That sounds amazing, and I can’t wait to see you. But . . . I may have made it difficult for you to see all our old friends.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ryan just threw me out of his house.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure, really. I learned some things about what was going on with Shea and I thought he had a right to know. I thought it might help. But he freaked out.”

  “Don’t worry about it too much. I’m sure he’s not thinking straight these days. I’d be a mess if you suddenly died.”

  Kat hoped Mack was right, but something about that whole exchange with Ryan gave her a sick feeling. Like his anger came from hearing that Kat knew something. He hadn’t looked surprised by the information she shared. He hadn’t even reacted to the information that Shea went to the island for Blake’s memorial. He’d just looked angry. She didn’t know what to make of it. Could any of what Evelyn said been true? Was he suddenly horrified that Evelyn knew about him and Dee? Kat could hardly believe she was even entertaining the idea.

  “Mack, I know I’ve opened a can of worms here and it’s none of my business, but can we talk about that conversation you had with Ryan at the luau again? Can you please just try to remember everything Ryan said to you that night?”

  “It wasn’t a long conversation, Kat. I told you, I really didn’t want to know. Sometimes it’s just better not to know certain things about your friends.”