Page 38 of Stranger in the Lake

At Paul’s office, amber light trickles through the glass, the promise of warmth in the subzero air. I push through the door, and Gwen pops off her chair.

“Oh, thank God.” She rushes over, snatches the laptop from Paul’s bag. “T minus forty-nine minutes and counting.”

I sink onto the chair at my desk, watching her fire up the laptop and type in Paul’s password. Laptops around here are communal property, and Paul requires everyone to use the same password, exactly for moments like this one. I see from her expression the moment she finds the files, and then she clicks in an external drive and waits for everything to copy.

“How are you going to submit without Wi-Fi?” The logistics are something I hadn’t thought about earlier, in the stress of getting Paul’s computer across the lake. If Gwen doesn’t have internet to receive the files, she doesn’t have internet to send them, either.

“I called Patrick at the Department of Transportation. He said their satellite can be sketchy in weather like this, but I’m welcome to come down and try. Cross everything, ’cause it’s going to be a Hail Mary pass. Not even postal workers are out in this mess.”

“Thank you for doing this. I know Paul will really appreciate it.”

She puffs a sarcastic laugh, a phlegmy sound. “Yeah, well, he better, because when he gets back I’m going to kill him. This snowstorm has taken five years off my life. If I hadn’t put about a billion hours into this project myself, I would’ve blown it off, kind of like Paul is doing now.” The laptop beeps, and she yanks the external drive out and drops it in her bag. “Wish me luck.”

“Luck.”

She snatches her coat from the back of another chair and leaves in a huff of swirling snow. A blast of icy wind slams the door behind her.

I shrug off my coat, drape it over the back of my chair to dry and step to Gwen’s desk, where Paul’s laptop sits open. I smile at the wallpaper, a selfie of us, a close-up from a trip to Charleston last summer, all big smiles and tanned cheeks. The Cedar Hill files are lined up neatly along the right side of Paul’s head, and I skim them from top to bottom. His entire life resides on this hunk of plastic and metal. His correspondence, his finances, his calendar and to-do lists.

And the camera footage. The one Sam is sending a subpoena for.

The security website is bookmarked under House, the password the same one he uses for everything. It takes me a couple of minutes to figure out how to pull up the footage, then to limit the clips to the ones recorded after 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday. My heart gives a hard kick when it spits out dozens of clips. Why so many?

I click on the first one, at just past five, the one of Paul and me returning from town. I smile at the way he helps me out of the boat, with an easy tug into his arms. He swings me around and dips me over an arm right there on the dock. Something catches in my chest at the image of us, so happy and obviously in love. I think of Sam watching this same clip. Maybe then he’ll finally believe my feelings are real.

I move on to the next clip, working through them one by one, my shoulders relaxing a notch with each one. A deer on the edge of the lake. A fox shooting down the hill. Dark smudges moving on a dark screen, too faint to make out. But what’s clear is that in none of them is there a man, Paul or otherwise, tossing a body from the dock.

When I get to the footage of me heading to the dock in my nightgown, I switch to Paul’s email and send the log-in information to Sam. While I’m there, I scan the subject lines in his inbox. New product notices, sales pitches, detailed back-and-forths about current and future projects. Except for a couple of junk ads for penis enlargement surgery, nothing sticks out as unusual. The mailboxes are organized just as meticulously as you’d expect from a guy like Paul, the projects listed by name and date, the contents separated into subfolders. I scroll through them, clicking on a folder marked Personal, but there’s not much here I don’t already know. His house, his health insurance and tax assessments. I back out and close the program.

The finder is more of the same. Work projects filed by address and dates, personal folders with copies of passports and tax reports. I’m about to move on when I spot it, a folder marked Katherine.

Something tight and icy-hot spirals across my scalp at the sight of Paul’s first wife’s name, a yellow folder of memories and who knows what else sitting on his hard drive. I hover the mouse over her name, wavering between dread and curiosity.

If I open this file, I can’t unsee what’s in it. I won’t be able to pretend I don’t know. There’s no going back from this.

And yet I’ve already reached the point of no return, haven’t I, simply by seeing her name on his hard drive. Even if I don’t look inside this folder, for the rest of my life I will wonder what’s in it, this digital mystery stashed on his laptop.

And that, somehow, feels even worse.

I click her name, and there are two subfolders, Legalities and Memories. I don’t know which one is scarier.

The first file contains pdf documents, filed by name and date. Her birth and death certificates, their marriage certificate, bank statements and tax returns. Her will is complicated, trusts and properties and a whole bunch of legalese I don’t understand, no list of assets other than that they all went to Paul. I back out and click the most recent bank statement, a portfolio summary from J.P. Morgan, and my eyes bulge at the amount. Before Katherine died, her investments had a market value of almost six million dollars.

Maybe this is why we don’t talk about money, because if we did, he’d have to tell me that the majority of his wealth came from a former swimmer who sank to the bottom of the lake she did laps in every summer morning. It’s a hard pill for even the most trusting, most gullible wife to swallow. No wonder Sam thinks the worst. If I didn’t know Paul so well, I might, too.

I back out and keep scrolling, and a file catches my eye: Fertility Eval. A chart, a long list of medical tests and terms. It doesn’t take me long to get the gist. Katherine was infertile, something about ovulatory dysfunction and a diminished ovarian reserve, and I think back to Paul’s reaction on the boat, his obvious joy when he found out he was going to be a father, and an invisible fist punches into my chest and squeezes my heart. Finally something I’ve beaten her at, but it doesn’t feel like a victory. It feels like a tragedy, especially for Paul.

I shake it off and move on to the Memories folder, and it’s pictures. Thousands and thousands of them. Smiling. Kissing. Gazing lovingly into the other’s eyes. Capturing moments from the time they met, in grad school at Cornell, to the weekend before she died. Glamorous shots from their wedding, grainier shots at parties and on vacations, candid shots at home—Paul’s home, the one I can’t quite think of as mine because it’s her hyacinth bulbs that push through the dirt each spring.

I zoom in on a shot of her sunning on my favorite chair on the dock, and she really is lovely. Long and lean, with high cheekbones and eyes so aqua it’s hard to look away. I take her in, but it’s Paul’s face I concentrate on. He looks happy. Relaxed. I measure the edges of his smile, compare them to the one he aimed at me two days ago when I told him I was pregnant. Did he smile bigger with her? Was his face brighter?

And what was it Sam said?All you have to do is take off the blinders.

My eyes flutter shut, and I steel myself against something ugly and dark.

The door bangs open, and I jump so hard my body loses contact with the seat. Chet shakes off the snow and his coat, hanging it on the door handle.

“Deli was closed. Everything is, even the post office. It’s like a ghost town out there. What? What’d I do now?”

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