Page 13 of Stranger in the Lake

Aw, hell.

I should have insisted on going on that boat with him. I should have known the dead woman would be a trigger. There’s something distinctly different about being told there’s a body and seeing it for yourself, feeling the horror—especially for Paul. He tries very hard not to talk about Katherine with me, but there’s no way this isn’t digging up old wounds, pulling at painful threads. As awful as this is on me, for him this has to be a million times worse.

Micah gives the signal, and Paul starts the engine, swings the boat around, inches forward on the throttle and motors away, careful not to leave a wake.

Micah’s descent down the ladder is just as quick. Quiet, too, all but the sucking in of a hard breath before his head disappears below the dock.

I shiver and inch closer, stepping right up to the lake’s edge, doing the math. Fifteen seconds to swim under the dock to her, another fifteen to drag her out, maybe more. Behind me, the techs are antsy, too. They shift their boots in the dirt at the top of the tarp, their arms loose by their sides. The body bag is spread across the ground behind them. I stare at the empty water and hold my breath, the glare of snow and daylight rippling across the lake’s surface making my eyes burn. What’s taking him so long?

Micah’s head reappears from under the dock, his hair slicked back, his face fish-belly white. So is the hand he’s got hooked around the dead girl, who he carefully wrests from under the dock. He hasn’t flipped her over yet. She floats facedown beside him in steady dips and bobs, white hair skimming the water.

Thanks to the cold and the dead weight, it takes him way too long to drag her to shore. He frog-kicks and drags his free arm through the water, his breath wet and sharp with effort, but he’s still a good thirty feet from shore.

Hurry up hurry up hurry up.

The waiting tightens the back of my throat.

“Get back,” Chief Hunt snaps, and I look down to see one of my boots has landed inside the tape. “I don’t need you contaminating the crime scene.”

I move a few steps back up the hill.

Paul jogs up, panting lightly from his sprint back from Micah’s dock, right as Micah makes land. He plants his feet on the lake’s slippery bottom and shifts her so she’s in front of him, steering her carefully to shore. The techs run down the hill, wading a good couple of feet into the water.

“Grab her under the arms,” Micah says, his voice tight, his teeth chattering loud enough to be heard clear across the lake.

“Gently,” Chief Hunt yells. “Be careful with her, for crap’s sake.”

Between the four of them, they guide her up and out of the water, sliding her carefully onto the tarp. She settles at an awkward angle, hair hanging on either side of her face like a slick white curtain, smothering all but a sliver of porcelain jaw.

Micah hugs his sopping arms around his belly and leans over the body, careful not to drip on her. “I can’t tell if this rigor is from mortis or the temperature, but the ME will know. Skin’s intact, as far as I can see. Clothes and shoes look expensive.” He’s so cold his body is practically vibrating.

I rush down the hill, shaking out the towels on the way.

Sam stops me at the edge of the tarp with a hand in the air. “Stay back,” he says, but he passes the towels to Micah.

He wraps one around his shoulders, but tosses the others on the ground. He turns to the two techs. “Okay, let’s get her into the bag. Sam and I lift her up, and y’all slide the bag underneath. You two—” he points a finger at the recruits, flinging them with icy water “—hold the bottom edge of the tarp so whatever’s on her doesn’t wash back into the lake. Everybody clear on what they’ll be doing?”

Head nods all around. Everybody moves into position. Chief Hunt moves to where he can get a better look.

“One...” Micah wedges an arm under her hips. “...two...three.”

What happens next is a blur of hurried movements and moving limbs, of male grunts and shouted orders. From their voices, I get that it’s not her weight but her rigidity that’s making the task difficult, and they handle her like a piece of their grandma’s best crystal. They lift her body in the air like it weighs nothing, cradling her to their chests and shuffling until she’s hovering over the body bag. I try to get a peek at her face, but they’re clustered all around her, a wall of shoulders and backs, and I’m standing at the wrong end. All I see are the bottom half of her pants and her shoes. Micah was right; they do look expensive.

Brown suede ankle boots with a thick stacked heel, not too high, fastened with a dark leather strap at the top. Like nothing in my closet, or anything I’d ever buy for myself—too prim, far too impractical on these muddy hills. City shoes.

Something slips across my mind, something important, but I’m too much in shock to catch it.

“Gentle now,” Micah says.

They lower her into the awaiting body bag, tucking her hands and feet inside. I take in their words with a silent sigh of relief. They don’t know her. A stranger from out of town.

I toss a relieved look to Paul, but he doesn’t look up. He’s standing at the top edge of the tarp, staring down at the woman nestled in shiny black plastic. His face is as white as the terry cloth slung over Micah’s shoulders, and I wonder whose face Paul is seeing—this woman’s, or Katherine’s?

“Oh, baby.” I shove past the other officers, moving up and around to the other side of the tarp. “Oh, Paul.”

“I’m fine,” he mumbles, his face a death mask. He takes a step backward, his sneakers slipping on a patch of rock and dirt. “I’m fine.”

He’s not fine. This is Paul from last March, when he took to bed claiming to be under the weather, when I brought him hot tea and chicken soup that he left untouched on the nightstand, on a day I later found out was Katherine’s birthday. This is him pretending to be asleep so I wouldn’t worry, even though under the covers his entire body was trembling. Most days, it’s just me and Paul in our relationship, but for a few days a year, on her birthday or their anniversary or the anniversary of her death, there’s a third. The beautiful, funny, sexy, smart, perfect ghost of Katherine.

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