Page 31 of Stranger in the Lake

I shake my head again. “No. No guns.”

Chet rolls his eyes and turns back to his coffee.

“Put on some clothes,” I whisper, frowning.

He ignores me, digging through the cabinet for a mug.

“You live in the middle of nowhere,” Micah says. “You should know how to use a gun.”

“I know how to use a gun, Micah. I just don’t want to.”

“Because she was at the receiving end of one once,” Chet hollers toward the phone, not helpfully. He knows I don’t like to talk about it, and it was twice, actually. The first by some scumbag who thought our father owed him money, and the second time at the gas station, a meth head who cleaned out the register.

“Stay in the house,” Micah says. “I’m coming down.”

The line goes dead, and I move to the front window just in time to see him coming down the hill, sliding from tree to tree, his coat flapping open behind him. He lands at the bottom with both feet, then takes off around the side of the house.

I hurry back to the mudroom and stare out the window, willing him to appear on the other side. I stare until my vision goes hazy from the swirling snow and the adrenaline, and maybe a little bit of panic—though I seem to be the only one. Chet is banging around in the kitchen behind me, pulling breakfast ingredients from the fridge and slapping them to the counter. I jump at the rattle of the coffee grinder, as loud and jarring as a chain saw.

I flinch when Micah appears in the window, covered in snow, fat flakes lodged in his hair and clothes. He motions for me to meet him at the mudroom door.

“What’s out there?” I say, once I’ve turned off the alarm.

Micah blocks the door with his body. “You don’t want to know.”

“The hell I don’t.” I stuff my feet in my boots and grab my coat from the hook, yanking it on as I push past him to outside.

“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He follows me around the corner, to the narrow passageway between the side of the house and the stairwell. Like the rest of the deck, it’s covered in a thick blanket of snow, all but a bright red patch at the top of the stairs where something has bled out, staining the snow and melting most of it away. Whatever this messy heap used to be, it was warm when it died.

I take in the bloodstained fur, the lumps of waxy fat, innards the color of raw chicken, and a surge of nausea has me sucking in a breath. I pull my coat closed, wrap it taut around me. “Oh my God, I think I’m gonna puke. What the hell is that thing?”

“A pretty decent-sized opossum, or at least it was, before something mauled it.”

“A bear?”

Wouldn’t be the first time one has wandered into our yard, though they don’t typically come this close to the house, not unless we’ve left out some food or garbage. And despite what people think, bears aren’t violent, not unless they’re provoked. No way an opossum, not even a rabid one, could have gotten a bear riled up enough to do this.

Micah bends at the waist, leaning over the carcass. “See here? See how this skin is cut away, these bones sliced clean in two? Hunting knife, I’m guessing. A fairly big one.”

The nausea folds into a new spasm, reaching with claws into my chest. I take a step back, grounding myself with one hand on the siding.

A big knife.There was an unidentified person on my back deck with a big knife. I think of Jax out here just last night, the warning he flung as a parting shot.Watch your back.Jax has a big knife, and he’s known for skinning bunnies on the benches in town, but he does that for food, not as threats or for his own sadistic pleasure.

Or so I’ve always thought.

The footprints have already grown faint, filling in with a fresh coating of flakes.

“I’ll get Sam to send somebody out. Maybe they can lift a print, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. By the time he gets here, everything’ll be covered, including this carcass. He’ll pick up what he can, but you’ll probably have to wait until things thaw out to get the treads really clean.”

Micah’s right. Even with a shovel and an ice pick, that much blood means the stain isn’t going away anytime soon. The deck will need a good hosing down, and with Paul’s industrial-strength pressure washer. Yet another mess for Paul to deal with when he gets back.

“Did you see what he wrote?” I swallow, the image of that awful word slashed through the snow bumping around in my brain. I press a palm to my stomach, greasy and empty.

“I saw.” Micah goes quiet, watching me. “It’s just someone looking to get a rise. Don’t let them.”

“As much as I hate to admit it, it’s kind of working. Is it...? What did they use to write it with?”

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