Page 10 of Stranger in the Lake

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 hisdoor, 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.

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