Stranger in the Lake Page 4

  “Sorry it took me so long. I was halfway to Sylva when you called.” Micah lumbers across the kitchen, taking in my hair thrown back in a messy ponytail, my makeup-free face and rumpled clothes. “Damn, girl, you look like hell.”

  The comment is typical Micah, and I make a sound in the back of my throat—part laugh, part relief. He wraps me in one of his hugs, and tears prick at my eyes—and not because of the pregnancy hormones. He’s warm and he smells nice, and I’m just so damn glad he’s here.

  He cranes his head back to look at me. “How you holding up?”

  I shake my head, pressing my face into his chest. “Paul’s on a run.”

  By now Micah knows me well enough to hear all the words I’m not saying. That my husband’s not here at the worst possible time, that he doesn’t know what happened because he never takes his dang phone, that I could use a little emotional support. He holds me for longer than he has to, waiting for me to be the one to untangle us.

  When I do, he digs out his phone, pulling up the number for his father on his screen. “Hey, you think you could get some of your guys to sweep the roads around Nantahala Peak for Paul? He’s gonna need some advance warning before coming home to a crime scene.”

  I smile a silent thank-you. Micah’s father is police chief—the only cop in the station from this side of the hill. Both men know that a house full of cops would trigger old trauma in Paul.

  Micah’s conversation with his father turns testy, a regular occurrence whenever those two talk. Never mind that Micah is the best underwater criminal investigator in hundreds of miles, he’ll never be good enough for Chief Hunt, who, from the sounds of things, would rather wait for a team of divers he’s called in from Asheville to move the body. Micah turns up the heat, arguing he’s already here, standing by in his wet suit, and I flash a grin at his little white lie. Another reason why I like Micah Hunt; his daddy issues are even worse than mine.

  He hangs up, tossing his phone onto the counter. “You know, I’m really starting to wonder if he’s been paying any attention at all. He just told me to send him my qualifications.”

  I laugh, because Chief Hunt only need consult a newspaper. Weighted-down bodies, weapons flung from a bridge, some rusty hunk of metal that solves a forty-year-old crime. If it’s down there, Micah has dredged it up and held it up for some camera. He’s semifamous, and not just in these hills. Last year, USA TODAY ran a front-page feature on Lake Hunters for their Life section.

  I hand him his coffee, and he sinks with it onto a counter stool. “So, you want to fill me in on what happened?”

  “Okay. Well, when I got up this morning, I realized I left a couple of things down in the boat, so—”

  “What time was that?”

  Behind me on the kitchen charger, my cell phone springs to life, buzzing with a string of incoming texts. I ignore it, and so does Micah.

  “What time was what, when I got up?”

  “No. When you went down to get whatever it was you left in the boat.”

  “Oh. Sometime just after six thirty, I think. The sky was still dark, but it was beginning to lighten up at the bottom. I yelled for you on the way up the hill, but I’m pretty sure you were already gone.”

  He sips his coffee and nods, both as confirmation and as a sign for me to continue.

  “Anyway, I didn’t see her until I was climbing out of the boat. She was facedown under the dock, and like I told the operator, she looked like she’s been there a while. I didn’t touch her.”

  My cell phone starts up again, the ringtone for my brother, and Micah tips his head in its direction. “You need to get that?”

  I shake my head. “It’s just Chet.”

  Micah knows Chet, too, and he can probably guess what he’s calling to say. A long-winded account of some self-inflicted disaster, a desperate plea for a loan—and he always calls it a loan even though everybody on the planet knows he’ll never pay me back. Like everyone else in this mountain town, Chet thinks I’ve hit the jackpot.

  I step around the counter to my phone, tap the screen to Ignore and flip the side button to Silent. Two seconds later, it lights up again.

  I let it clatter back onto the charger just in time for Micah’s next question. “Were y’all home last night?”

  “Yes. We got home around five, I think. Maybe a little later. We came by boat, and before you ask, she wasn’t there when we docked. Paul was driving, and he would have seen.”

  I think back to how carefully he slid the boat up to the dock, how he leaned over the edge to tie the ropes and hoist me out, and I’m sure of my answer. I didn’t notice anything in the water, but Paul would have. He pays attention to everything.

  “Okay, so how about once you were inside? Did either of you hear anything out of the ordinary on the lake? Voices. Splashing, maybe, or the hum of a boat engine?”

  “It was cold, and there aren’t that many boats still out on the water, so I definitely would have noticed the sound of an engine.” I pause, trying to remember. “I don’t think so. Did you?”

  The question is a valid one. Micah’s house is at the top of the cove, and though it’s tucked behind some trees and sits back farther from the waterline, the back deck offers an uninterrupted view down the length of the lake. If anybody’d been out there on the water, or even smack in front of our dock, he would have seen and heard it, too.

  “No. Didn’t see anything, either. No boat lights, or the flickering of a flashlight.”

  Again, I shake my head. “But we went upstairs earlier than usual. I don’t know what time, exactly. It was dark, I remember that much.”

  Dark falls early behind the pines, but still. Thanks to our champagne celebration, we went to bed soon after supper.

  Micah is gearing up for his next question when the front door opens and in runs Paul, covered in sweat and mud. He sees me and skids to a stop, leaving orange and brown smears on the hardwoods. The mud is caked down his entire right side, from his hair all the way down to his shoes like he slid feetfirst down a clay slide, and there’s a cut above his right eye, smack in the middle of a nasty purple lump.

  “What happened to you? Are you okay?”

  “Are you?” He takes me in with wide, bulging eyes. “I saw the cars outside and I thought...” A tremor makes its way up his spine, and he slumps against a table, leaning on it with a filthy palm. “Jesus.”

  Paul’s reaction might seem extreme, if he hadn’t been here before, returning from a run to find a horde of cops fishing a body out of the water. Only the last time it happened, it was summer and the body belonged to his wife. She drowned during an early-morning swim.

  “Are you okay?” I say, moving closer. “That cut looks—”

  The words dissolve into a squeal when he snatches me to him, jerking me against his body, hard with cold and fear. “You could have warned me, asshole,” he says to Micah over my head. “Those cars out there about gave me a heart attack.”

  I press my palm to Paul’s chest, where his heart thumps hard against the skin. His remark may have carried a hint of jest, but his tone didn’t. It came out sharp and angry, but Micah doesn’t take the bait. That’s another great thing about Micah Hunt; he never takes the bait—except maybe with his father.

  His voice is calm and matter-of-fact. “I had my father send someone out looking for you, but I’m guessing by your reaction they didn’t have much luck. Take your phone with you next time like a normal person, so people can reach you in case of an emergency.”

  Paul’s eyes narrow on the last word. He releases me, sending me a look heavy with meaning.

  “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” I smile to let him know I understand he’s not just asking about me. He’s asking about the baby, too. I push up on my toes, leaning in for a better look at the cut, dirty and oozing fresh blood down his brow. “Honey, this looks bad. It’s deep, and it needs to be c
leaned.”

  “It’s nothing. It barely hurts.” He dabs a sleeve to his brow, winces when it comes away red.

  Micah steps closer, squinting at Paul’s forehead. “Charlotte’s right. That looks like it could use some iodine and a stitch or two. What happened?”

  “The trails were icy, and I slid straight down Fontana Ridge. Looks worse than it is. Somebody want to tell me what the hell is going on?” Paul says, losing patience. “What’s the big emergency?”

  “Charlotte found a body under your dock.”

  It’s not how I would have delivered the news, so abrupt and matter-of-fact. Paul should be sitting down first. He should get a warning that what’s coming is bad, that it will reopen old and aching wounds. As Paul’s best friend, Micah should know this.

  Paul doesn’t blink. He looks at me, then back to Micah. “Who?”

  It’s the question all of Micah’s earlier ones were leading up to, the one he didn’t get to ask before Paul busted through the door. Who is the stranger in the lake?

  “I don’t know,” I say, my gaze bouncing between the two men. “When I found her, she was facedown. All I could see was her back and hair. It’s long and blond.”

  Which could describe half the women in this town. Fewer when you add in the dead woman’s build—thin, petite—but still. I can think of a dozen possible names, right off the top of my head, and that’s not even taking into account all the tourists who come through this place. It’s no longer high season, the summer and fall months so busy you can’t get a table at the restaurants in town, but the winter is still bustling. Floridians, mostly, traveling north in search of some snow. That woman down there could be anyone.

  “Could it have been an accident?” I say, my mind scrambling for an explanation. “I mean, it’s too cold for her to have been swimming, but maybe she was boating and fell over the side. Maybe she just...I don’t know...hit her head or something and drowned.”

  Micah’s eyes fix on mine, and they almost seem to glow. They probe into mine like searchlights, slamming me with the message he doesn’t say aloud.

  Not an accident.

  She didn’t drown.

  And that’s when I feel it. The bottom opens up, the earth drops out from under me. I think about who could have put her there and why, and my skin tingles with dread. Something very bad has happened, right outside our door.

  Again.

  I look at Paul, and he feels it, too. “Show me.”

  6

  Paul and I march down the back steps in silence, our coats pulled tight against a mean kind of cold, one that doesn’t typically happen until months from now, with gusting winds and temperatures stuck in the teens. The kind of cold that chafes the skin and burns the inside of the nose.

  Above our heads, a thick layer of overstuffed clouds spits an occasional spell of swirling snow, dousing the mountain’s browns and greens and golds. My gaze tracks to the lake, churning silver peaks on water that’s a gloomy, bottomless black. I think of the poor woman under the dock and shiver.

  He pulls me to a stop on the last step. “Are you okay with this?” He tips his head to the lake, white clouds whirling from his lips. “With seeing her again, I mean. I can clear things with Sam if you don’t think you can handle it. You don’t have to be here.”

  The truth is, I’m not looking forward to seeing her again. It was bad enough the first time, and the closer we get to the dock, the more the presence of her lodges underneath my ribs, gnawing at me from the inside. Honestly, I’m barely holding my shit together.

  But I also know I need to be here, holding Paul’s hand when they pull that poor woman out of the water. Lake Crosby delivered another woman to Paul’s dock, to his door, and I can already hear the whispers worming their way through the hills. I already know what people will say.

  “I’m more worried about you,” I say. “This can’t be easy.”

  His hand shakes in mine, and I’m pretty sure it’s not from the cold. Paul needs me here, standing next to him when they pull her out, if for nothing else than a reminder I’m still safe and here.

  He swings an arm around my shoulders and pulls me into his warmth, planting a kiss in my hair. “Don’t tell Micah, but I’m kinda freaked out. I just hope it’s a stranger, and not—” He hears himself and winces. “Oh, God, that sounded awful. I just meant...”

  “I know what you meant. I hope it, too.”

  The wind lifts a curl from his forehead, the end matted with blood and sweat, and I get a clear and close-up view of the cut on his brow. He tried to clean himself up with some water and soap in the bathroom upstairs, but he didn’t do a very good job. His efforts only smeared the blood and dirt around, shoved the gunk deep into an even deeper gash.

  “As soon as we’re done here, I’m taking you to urgent care. Even with stitches, you’re going to have a nasty scar.”

  My words disappear into sirens wailing in the distance. More cops on the way, and it’s a good thing, because the ones here have their hands full. Sometime in the past few minutes, a crime scene tech has arrived, stepping over the yellow tape strung around a U-shaped chunk of yard. Another is crouched low to the ground just outside it, reattaching the tape to branches or weighting it down with rocks, fastening it around wooden stakes he hammers into the frozen ground. They might as well be wrapping the dock in flashing neon lights.

  Crime scene. Do not cross. Death happened here.

  A chill runs down my spine, and my gaze scans the yard, the shoreline. I feel the cops watching us, feel their disapproving sneers and silent judgment, even though every time I stare back, they turn the other way. I feel their eyes everywhere.

  Or maybe it’s just Sam, his face pressed to a camera he fetched from Lord knows where, clicking away. He aims the lens at the wooden planks, the rocky path leading down to the water, the boat and the lake and the shoreline littered with rocks and tangled tree roots. At Paul and me, huddled close enough to share body heat.

  “Where is she?” Paul asks, his gaze locked on the slice of lake between the boat and the dock. Micah stands in the very middle, talking to someone on his cell. There’s nothing surrounding him but water.

  “You can’t see her from this angle. Not with the boat where it is and her so well under the dock. If I hadn’t happened to look down when I’d been climbing out, I wouldn’t have seen her, either.”

  Sam straightens, looking up the hill to where I’m standing, just outside the crime scene tape. “Hey, Charlie, what shoes were you wearing this morning when you came down here?”

  I point to my snow boots, wag one around above the dirt. “These.”

  He moves closer, stepping carefully over a couple of markers placed in the soil. “Let me see the sole.”

  I hold on to Paul’s shoulder for balance and show Sam the bottom. There’s a piece of gravel lodged in one of the thick treads, but otherwise they look fresh out of the box.

  He nods. “Looks like the one I spotted. Ground’s probably too cold for it to be recent, but we’ll take a casting just in case.”

  I shove my hands deep inside my pockets and frown. “What, do you think she marched into the lake from our backyard or something?”

  The sirens are louder now, echoing across the water, the cars coming around the bend on the opposite side of the lake. Five, six minutes, tops.

  “Just covering all the bases,” Sam says, but his look tells me the real answer. He’s not looking for the woman’s prints. He’s looking for the prints of whoever put her in the lake, and in a yard Paul and I have walked through a thousand times. Sam’s gaze dips to Paul’s running shoes, but he doesn’t ask to see the tread.

  “Give it up, Sam. Paul was with me.”

  “Are you saying you know time of death?”

  “I’m saying whenever it was, Paul had nothing to do with it.”

  Paul threads a hand through my arm,
gives an insistent tug. “Charlotte, let it go,” he mumbles, even though I can’t. How can he stand being accused of something so vile, something he had no part in? How can he let Sam barge into his house, onto his property, and treat him like a criminal?

  Micah hollers across the dock. “Hey, Sam, can I get you up here with that camera?”

  With one last look in my direction, Sam turns for the dock, jogging up the wooden planks and handing Micah the camera. He loops the strap around his neck, moves to the edge and lowers himself to his hands and knees, leaning his entire upper body over the water.

  “Five foot five, maybe six, in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Light blond hair, looks natural. No roots. She’s wearing jeans and a sweater but no coat.”

  He’s right, I realize, something I didn’t pick up on in the shock of spotting her. She wasn’t wearing a coat when she slid into the lake. Even if she’d fallen in from a boat or another dock, she would have needed some protection from the cold. What happened to her coat?

  Micah lies on his belly and snaps away, scooting up and down the dock for different angles.

  “No scrapes or cuts that I can tell,” he says when he’s done, handing the camera back. “What I can see of her looks intact. Skin has a grayish cast, but that could just be from the water temperature. We won’t know for sure until we haul her out.”

  “What does that mean?” When Paul doesn’t answer, I glance over. “Does he think maybe she did drown?”

  “Maybe,” he says, but he doesn’t sound at all convinced. I pull one hand from my pocket, slide it around his freezing one and hold on tight.