Page 19 of Stranger in the Lake

“What about Friday?” I say instead.

“What happens Friday?”

“The appointment with the doctor. The ultrasound.”

Paul grimaces. “I will do my best, my very, very best, to be back.” He pauses, glancing over his shoulder at the door. “But I can’t make any promises.”

“Then neither can I.”

Paul threads a hand around my neck and pulls me in for a kiss, then drops to his knees and presses his lips to my stomach. I stand there like a statue, the room spinning like the world has shifted on its axis and I don’t know how to stop it.

“I love you.” He pushes himself to his feet. “I’ll be home before you know it. Take care of yourself and our baby.”

“I love you, too,” I whisper, but he’s already gone—off like a rabbit released from a trap.

I watch him through the front window, backpack bobbing as he kicks into an easy jog up the drive, and think of my mother. Shoving Chet in my arms and leaving us in a trailer with nothing but crumbs. Ordering me to stop fussing, that she’d be right back. The way my lungs locked up when I looked through the window to see her dropping into some stranger’s car.

Now I sink onto a stool and look around Paul’s big, fancy house—a place with everything I thought I ever wanted, only now it feels empty and cold. It doesn’t take me long to realize why.

In the thirteen months I’ve lived here, I’ve never slept in this big house alone.

Paul and I were on our fourth date, halfway up the trail to High Falls, when he told me about Katherine.

“We met in college, at one of those dives that serves hot wings and PBR in pitchers. She was on a date with some other guy, but I didn’t care. He went to the bathroom, and I slid into his seat. Later she told me they were just friends, but it was obvious they were close. I assumed they were together.” He grinned over his shoulder. “I’m persistent, but then again, you already know that.”

I smiled, thinking back to the first day he walked into the gas station, how he made me ring him up three times—for gas, then for gum, then for a $100 prepay card I knew he’d never use because clearly he was the type of guy who could afford a monthly plan.I promise not to buy one of those, he’d said, pointing to a giant jar of pickled eggs I had to fish out with a ladle,but only if you tell me your name. He was persistent, all right, and already I was smitten. Our fourth date, and I would have followed him anywhere.

“We were married eleven years, all of them happy. Until one day, a Thursday, Katherine went for a swim. Her daily morning ritual, like me and my runs. She went out the back door, me out the front. Do you know her last words to me? ‘The raccoon pooped on the back deck again.’ I wish I could say it was something more poignant, but we talked about raccoon shit. If nothing else, I’ve learned never to leave someone without a proper goodbye.”

He didn’t look back this time, but I could hear the emotion in his words, the way pain had turned his voice vulnerable. Every other sound faded away—the water pounding the rocks below, my lungs sucking air, the blood thudding in my ears. It was just me and Paul on that hill, and his love for her was flaying my heart.

“I loved her for every day of our time together. I would have loved her the rest of our lives. That’s why all the talk afterward was so infuriating, so unbelievably appalling. Those people don’t know me at all. They didn’t see how I suffered.”

“God, Paul. I’m so sorry.”

He stopped in the middle of the path then, turning back. “No,I’msorry for burdening you with all this. But I know I’m the elephant in every room in this town. I know how people talk, and I wanted you to hear it from me, not them. Even though, obviously, it’s still a painful subject.”

Obviously. And he’d waited until he was here, leading me up a hiking trail, rather than face-to-face across a dinner table. A group of rowdy hikers came bounding down the trail, and Paul slapped on a smile for them, for me. By the time they disappeared into the woods, the moment had passed.

We started back up the hill, and that was when I knew.

The thing I wanted more than anything, theonlything, was for Paul to love me like he had once loved Katherine.

10

A half-dozen trips up and down the hill later and I am officially done. Spaghetti legs, freezer-burn lungs, skin tingling like I’ve been slapped all over. I can’t keep up with the thirst of Micah and the others, at last count seven hungry bodies who’ve sucked down the coffee faster than I can make it, along with five packs of cookies and two banana breads I dug out of the freezer, defrosted and slathered in cream cheese.

By now the body is long gone, laid out on some cold metal slab at Harris Regional, being poked and prodded by the medical examiner. The cops have made a mess of the back hill, a crisscross of muddy tracks and footprints fanning out from a blue party tent they erected over a flat spot at the bottom. They’ve dragged over a teak table and some chairs, arranged them around a firepit they coaxed into a roaring bonfire. It sends up smoke signals people can see for miles.Dead woman found here.Rubberneckers welcome.

The mess inside is not much better, wrappers and crumbs and coffee grounds scattered like dirt across the marble of the kitchen island. I swipe the trash into the can and the grounds into the sink along with my breakfast, a bowl of oatmeal now congealed into a gooey chunk. I shove it down the disposal, and the way it clings to my spoon sends a wave of nausea rolling through. Eat or puke, I can’t decide. So far this pregnancy hasn’t been much fun.

Especially since there’s no one here for me to share it with. I think of Paul, of his trek to find Jax, and the tears rise unexpectedly, hot and sudden. Paul has told me almost nothing about his former best friend, why the summer after their senior year Jax went off the deep end, walked away from his family and friends, and disappeared into the woods.

Paul’s silence makes it all too easy to believe the rumors. That Jax cheated Paul out of money or popularity, or he slept with one of Paul’s girlfriends. That there was a fight that got out of control, a fit of jealousy, a push too hard. That Jax hit his head, knocked something loose. That the devil made him do it. Lake Crosby gossip and speculation because the people who know—Paul and Micah and Jax—aren’t talking.

I hate that Paul left me here to deal with Micah and Sam, with work and clients, with his mother, who has surely spotted the smoke signals by now. I hate that in a few hours, the sun is going to sink behind the trees and everybody will pack up and leave. The windows will go black with night, and I’ll be in this big house all alone.

The front door swings open, and I jump. “Hey, Charlie, what’s with all the cop cars?”

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