Stranger in the Lake Page 3

  Carefully, I push to my feet. I step to the starboard side and lean my entire upper body over the side of the boat.

  It’s a woman, floating facedown in the water. I can tell from her hair, her slim shoulders and slight build, the designer jeans and thin black sweater. Her arms and legs are spread wide like motionless spider legs, her hands and feet disappearing into the murky water. It’s a stance that’s instantly familiar.

  Dead man’s float.

  The urge to vomit comes on hard and fast, and sweat breaks out on my skin, even though I’m still freezing. I swallow the sick down and tell myself this is not the first time I’ve seen a dead body. When I was twelve, my grandma dropped dead right next to me, right in the middle of ordering from the Home Shopping Channel. She was a bit of a hoarder, her trailer crammed full with crap she didn’t need and probably couldn’t afford, but the point is, I didn’t panic. I pried the phone out of her hand and called 9-1-1 without producing a tear, even though afterward I cried for days.

  But this is different. This time it feels like watching a horror movie, like seeing something forbidden and monstrous. Another faceless, lifeless woman bobbing in the reeds under our dock, only this time... Is it an accident? Or something worse? I watch her hair swirl in a gust of water and it’s like staring into the sun—painful but impossible to look away.

  Not here, under Paul’s dock. Not again.

  My blood runs hot and I glance up the hill, the world shifting back into focus. Should I flip her over? Drag her into the boat and perform CPR?

  Then again, I’m probably not strong enough to lift her out, and it’s too deep under the dock to wade in, not to mention too late. I’m no expert, but it looks like she’s been there a while. The skin that I can see—the tops of her ears, a sliver at the back of her neck—is waxy and luridly white, gleaming like it’s coated in frost.

  I decide to leave her be. I can’t help her, and as far as the lake is concerned, this is the end of the line. The currents that live in these waters, powerful undertows and swift updrafts that swirl up muck from the depths, burp everything up here, in the reeds under our dock. Whoever this woman is, she’s not going anywhere.

  I reach for my phone, only to remember that it’s dead. My gaze tracks up the hill, searching for a light in a window, maybe, or the ones that flank the back door. But our house is dark, and so is Micah’s farther up the cove. Nothing but a big black blotch behind the trees.

  With one last look at the dead woman, I climb out of the boat and shuffle carefully across the dock, then take off running up the hill.

  * * *

  There are seventy-six steps from the dock to the house, a steep hike of almost fifty vertical yards—half a football field. Paul chose the highest hill on purpose, and I’ll admit, the views are spectacular. Lake and forest and mountains rolling into a smoky blue sky that goes on forever.

  The climb from the dock, on the other hand, is a real buzzkill. Seventy-six slogging steps of muscle-burning, lung-wheezing hell. By the time I make it to the back door, I can barely breathe.

  It doesn’t help that the clouds are spitting snow again, or the whole time I was clambering up the slippery staircase, I was hollering for our neighbor Micah when I saw that the light above his back deck had popped on. I pictured him sipping a cup of coffee on the back deck, but then just as suddenly, the light faded and I realized it was a motion sensor. A bird, maybe, or an opossum scrounging for food set it off. I ducked my head and kept climbing.

  I bust through the door and race into Paul’s study, the closest room with a landline.

  I fall into the chair at his desk, a giant slab of walnut and brushed steel, with nothing on it but a lamp and a phone. Its surface is spotless, a gleaming example of Paul’s clean-desk policy that applies both at work and at home.

  I pick up the receiver and dial with freezing, fumbling fingers. Micah’s cell rings four eternal times, then flips me to voice mail. At the end of the beep, I start talking.

  “Micah, it’s Charlotte. I was just down at the dock, and there’s a body under it. A real body, a woman. I don’t know who she is or how she got there, but she’s clearly dead, so I didn’t dare touch her.” Saying the words out loud makes my stomach go eely with morning sickness, with shock. “Anyway, get over here as soon as you hear this, will you? I’m hanging up and calling 9-1-1 now. Bye.”

  Micah is our neighbor and friend, but also son of the police chief and badass diver specializing in underwater investigations and evidence recovery. Whoever I talk to at emergency services will be calling him next anyway. I hang up and dial 9-1-1.

  Though...I suppose it’s not technically an emergency—not anymore since she’s obviously dead. But the sooner the police know, the better chances are they can retrieve whatever evidence she might still be carrying. Micah told me once that the lake’s currents work like a washing machine, agitating everything in it. If there’s evidence on her body and the fabric of her clothes—skin under her fingernails, a hair that’s not from her head stuck in her sweater—it’s probably already been knocked loose.

  The line connects, and I give the operator my name and address, describe the scene down at the dock. I sound remarkably calm, if not a little out of breath still. He tells me the police are on the way and asks me to stay on the line, but I tell him I have to go. Paul will be home from his run soon, and he’ll need my support. I think of him out there, jogging around the hills in blissful ignorance, and I hang up the phone.

  There’s nothing I can do now but wait.

  4

  June 12, 1999

  4:45 p.m.

  Jax Edwards tromped through the woods behind his house, his rifle slung carelessly over a shoulder. Thanks to a week of nonstop rain, the air was so thick it had a weight to it, solid and sticky in his lungs. The damp brought out the bugs and turned the path into a tangled mass of branches and undergrowth, new shoots slapping at the bare skin of his legs with clammy fronds.

  He probably should have changed into jeans. Better shoes, too, instead of these ancient sneakers, a holdout from his high school track days. He kept stepping out of them, kept having to double back to rescue one from where it got suction-cupped to a muddy spot in the path. Like most things these days, it really pissed him off.

  The backs of his thighs burned, but it was a good kind of pain. The kind that came after hours of trekking through the forest, scaling trees and clambering up mountainsides. In his seventeen years, he’d explored every inch of these woods, looked behind every log and under every rock. He’d watched beavers chew bushes down to tiny nubs for their dam and almost stepped on two copperheads mating. Yesterday a deer let him come so close he could see the veins in its ears. Funny, when he first started coming out here, he thought it was because he wanted to be alone, but somehow, being out here with all these animals, with the wilderness...well, he never minded the company.

  The dense path gave way, opening up to a patch of velvet grass an army of gardeners mowed and raked and fertilized into perfection every Tuesday afternoon, blinding green against the glittering lake. The house in the middle was a faded gray shingle, big and square with shiny black shutters on the windows. It sat on the water, so close you could drive the boat right into the attached garage, a yawning hole carved into an extension of the house that stuck out over the lake like a long finger. When they were younger, his mom had installed a slide to the deck up top, and all summer long you could hear squeals and splashes as he and his sister, Pamela, took turns skidding down. Jax had never lived anywhere else.

  Now home was the last place on earth he wanted to be.

  He banged through the back door into the kitchen, where Pamela was preparing dinner. “Where have you been? Dad’s home, and he’s been calling all over for you.”

  Jax could hear him on the other end of the house, yelling at some poor sucker through the phone, ruining his Saturday afternoon. That call had nothing to do w
ith Jax. It was a business call, and an angry one at that. It was the one thing he and his father had in common, this constant, all-consuming rage.

  Jax leaned his rifle against the wall. “Hasn’t anybody ever told you? Lyin’s a sin, Pammy.”

  “I’m not lying. And what are you doing out there in the woods all day, anyway?”

  A year ago he would have brushed her off with Why do you care? You’re not my mother, but even Jax wasn’t that much of an asshole. Their mother was a sensitive subject these days. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  He pushed past her for the stairs, and she skittered after him. “‘The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.’ Pastor Williams says if we keep that verse in mind, we won’t feel so alone.”

  She was always doing that, flinging Bible verses at anybody who was close enough, waving them around like some magic potion for whatever ailed you. It was maddening, especially since up until a few years ago they’d been twice-a-year churchgoers at best—sunrise service on Easter morning and candlelight worship on Christmas Eve. Mom never hung crosses on the walls, never taught them to pray before meals or bedtimes. He’d lost count of how many times he’d heard his dad say goddamn.

  And then the diagnosis came—ALS, the quick kind—and his sister discovered the Lord. She let some pastor dunk her in a muddy cove of Lake Crosby, and then she wanted everybody else to do the same. To be “saved.” Mom humored her, even though she was in a wheelchair by then and probably could have drowned. He and his father watched from the shoreline, both of them stewing in a combination of frustration and hope even though every doctor, every specialist and quack they’d talked to told them his mom couldn’t be saved.

  At night, Pamela would huddle by their mother’s bedside for hours at a time, eyes screwed shut, lips moving in silent prayer like a chant. Mom might have had ALS but Pamela was diseased, consumed with what she swore was the healing power of prayer. For a while there, Jax had believed his sister’s nonsense in that way that if you wish for something hard enough, you become convinced it should happen. A miracle. It happened all the time in the Bible, right? That’s what Pamela promised, but his mom only got weaker.

  Jax tried not to roll his eyes. “Prayers only work if you believe, which I don’t.”

  Pamela blanched. “I pray for your soul, Jax Edwards. I really do.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  “I miss her, too, you know.” Her words stabbed Jax in the heart, and he felt that heaviness in his gut like a tapeworm, eating away at him from the inside out. He almost turned around, almost laid his soul bare until, as usual, his sister ruined the moment. “If you knew what was good for you, you’d drop to your knees and beg for forgiveness right this second. Don’t you want eternal life? Don’t you want to see Mom again?”

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  “It’s called faith. You should try it sometime.”

  Her words made him want to punch the wall, because he had tried, damn it. He’d prayed to his sister’s Lord for faith—how messed up was that? Every night before he fell asleep and a million times during the day, he’d beg for even a smidge of belief in this higher power his sister was always yammering on about, if for no other reason than the promise of some of Pamela’s peace. What a relief it must be to know that all this was just temporary, to think that life on earth was only an annoying stepping-stone to something better, a place where no one dies and no one has to miss anyone.

  But Jax didn’t believe in Pamela’s Lord, just like he didn’t believe in bigfoot or aliens or the tooth fairy. His mom was buried under a pile of dirt and rock at Whiteside Cemetery, not sitting like a guardian angel on his shoulder. How do you make yourself believe in something when you don’t? How do you convince yourself of things you can’t see? Jax had no freaking clue.

  He wanted his family back, damn it. Not just his mother but the way things used to be, when the house was filled with laughter and music and the smell of freshly baked cookies. He wanted the sister who didn’t preach at him all the time, and the dad who looked up from his computer for more than five seconds, a dad who bothered to be a father. He knew they were suffering, but damn it, so was he, and they were too self-absorbed to notice. He wanted to live in this big house full of people and not feel so alone.

  Oh, and while he was at it, Jax might as well admit that he’d really like to cry. A good son would have shed some tears for his dead mother, wouldn’t he? He would have stood at her graveside and felt something other than stone-cold fury.

  But so far, not one measly fucking tear.

  5

  Sam Kincaid is the first officer to arrive and the last person I want to see. I spot his familiar face through the front window, his eyes steady on the driveway as he zigzags his way down the snarled strip of concrete, and a flash of heat lingers on my skin like sunburn.

  He scrapes to a halt at the flat stretch of driveway, and I open the door, stepping out into the cold. I’ve changed into jeans and my warmest sweater, but I left my shoes upstairs. The wind has picked up since I raced up the hill, dipping the temperature into what must be single digits, carrying with it a heavy whiff of snow. Already my feet are like ice, the tips of my toes tingling with frostbite.

  Sam unfolds himself from the car, all long limbs and the surly expression I’ve gotten used to seeing take over his face whenever his gaze lands on mine. His siren is off, but the lights swirl with urgency, painting the house and the hill in blood red and bruise blue.

  “Charlie,” he says, greeting me with a formal nod.

  Like everybody else I grew up with, Sam knows that calling me Charlie is the best way to piss me off. I bite down on my lips and hold my tongue. If Sam’s looking to get a rise out of me, then I refuse to give it to him.

  “It had to be you, huh?” I say, folding my arms across my chest. “Of all the people Chief Hunt could have sent over, I guess he couldn’t find anybody else?”

  Sam slams the door with his hip, tugging a wool cap from his pocket against the cold. The Kincaid men are all bald as eagles, and whatever hair Sam has left he keeps shaved close to his head. This way, he once told me, he won’t have to know when it happens to him.

  “Come on. You’re kidding me, right?” Sam says in his solid, mountain man accent, the kind that says he hasn’t ventured far outside these hills. “Another body washed up under the Keller dock. You better believe I volunteered.”

  I clamp down on my poker face because the words sting. A year ago I would have called him on it. I would have punched him on the shoulder and told him to stop being such an ass. I sift through all the things I could say instead—that this is different and he knows it, that the first woman was an accident, a crazy, tragic fluke that despite Sam’s best efforts he couldn’t prove was a crime—but we’ve had this conversation before. Sam is a cop, which means he needs someone to vilify, to lock in a cell so Lake Crosby can feel safe again. He needs someone to play the part of the monster.

  And he thinks that someone is Paul.

  He steps away from his car, his big boots thumping on the drive. “You didn’t touch her, did you?”

  “Come on, Sam. You know I didn’t.”

  “I don’t know that. I used to think I knew you, but then...”

  “But then what?” I know what, but I want to hear him say it. I want him to look me in the eye and say those ugly words again. I’ve had five months to prepare for this. This time I’m ready.

  He holds my gaze for a second or two, then shakes his head and looks away.

  In a flash, an image of Sam leaning an elbow on my counter at the gas station, back when we were best friends. Of him chugging cup after cup of stale coffee, using it to wash down enough powdered doughnuts to win a county fair contest. Of me teasing him about his hollow leg as I rang him up, wondering with the other customers where he put it all. He joked that he burned off the calo
ries chasing bad guys.

  And just like that, I feel it, that pang of missing him. Despite all the ugly words he said. Despite all the tears I cried. I still miss the guy, damn it. I do.

  I shut the door in his face.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, the hill is swarming with cops. They march up and down the back steps with their bags and equipment, dumping everything onto the ground and stringing yellow tape around the edges of the water. They clomp up the dock and hang their upper bodies over the edge, shaking their heads and exchanging grim looks. They tip their faces up the hill to mine, watching from the living room window, and their expressions look much like Sam’s.

  I step back from the glass, a giant solid plate overlooking the lake and trees that stretch up into smoky blue mountains. Like most people from the muddy side of the mountain, those cops down there resent my newfound life. They think I’ve abandoned my friends and my family and my morals for the comforts of a fancy house up on a hill.

  Even worse, they make all kinds of assumptions about how I got here—by singling out a rich, older man and stalking him like prey, by offering up my body to a person I’m only pretending to love, by swiping aside every last lick of good sense to lay my head down next to a man everybody says got away with murder. Doesn’t matter that nobody could ever prove he had anything to do with Katherine’s death, or that he didn’t love her. As far as Sam and those cops are concerned, my sins are unforgivable.

  There’s a rap at the mudroom door, a creak as Micah pushes it open a crack. “Hey, Charlotte.”

  “In the kitchen.” I beat him there, pulling a cup from the cabinet and settling it under the spout, pressing the button without asking. When it comes to coffee, Micah’s answer is always yes.

  Micah is a big bear of a guy who looks more like an overgrown computer nerd than a master diver. Tortoiseshell glasses, a swoop of muddy brown hair, a nose that on anyone else would be too large but that somehow works on him. Like Paul, he was born in high cotton, with looks and charm and money from a long line of tobacco farmers on his mother’s side. But he’s the only one of Paul’s friends who’s never—not ever, not even once—made me feel like Paul’s slumming by choosing me, which in my book means he can do no wrong.