Page 39 of Stranger in the Lake

I shake my head. “It’s not you. It’s just...” I gesture vaguely to the laptop screen. “I was going through Paul’s computer. I don’t like what I found.”

Chet leaves a trail of snow and ice on his trek across the office, nodding knowingly. “Porn?”

“What? No, not porn.” I frown. “Stuff about Katherine.”

It takes him a second or two to place the name. “Wait—isn’t Katherine his wife?”

“Firstwife.Was.The wife he refuses to talk to me about, ever. She was loaded, Chet.”

“Well, of course she was. Her daddy was Pete-O-Pedic.” He sings part of a jingle anyone in fifteen counties would recognize: “‘Buy your mattress from a local dealer, get it for a little cheaper.’ Remember those commercials?”

I remember. They only played them every five minutes on the radio. Those stores were everywhere until Mattress King swooped in and bought Pete out. He died of a heart attack less than a year later.

Chet leans over the desk, craning his neck to see the laptop screen. “Whoa. No wonder you’re so bent out of shape. She’s hot.”

I snap the laptop closed. “Oh my God, you are literally the worst brother in the world.”

“What? She was. And how’d you get on his computer, anyway?”

“I know his password. Everybody here does. We all have the same ones.”

Chet points at me over the desk. “See? You’re good, then. A husband with something to hide is going to lock down his technology. One hundred percent.”

“Then why keep the pictures on his hard drive?”

“So what if he does? She’s not here, and you are. From where I sit, that means you’re winning.”

It’s such a maddeningly male thing to say and on so many levels. As if my love life is some kind of game, a competition to win Paul’s heart. As if the first wife’s death automatically guarantees the second wife’s security, like love is a matter of proximity and wives are interchangeable. But mostly, that I should just suck it up and let it go.

Chet studies me from across the desk. “I scrounged up some intel for you, but now I don’t know if I should tell you.”

“What kind of intel?”

“I swung by the B and B.” He leans in, lowers his voice to a shout-whisper. “I talked to Piper.”

“I thought you said nobody was out.”

“Not on the streets. They were all hunkered down in the bar, pounding Jack Daniel’s. Something like twenty people, all of ’em plastered. The place was a madhouse.”

“And? What’d Piper say?”

“Nothing. Not one goddamn thing, but Wade was there, too, and he sure was talkative.”

Wade. The guy leaning against the side of the B and B two days ago, when I came to town looking for Paul. The one who called me Charlie and Paul my old man.

Chet leans with both elbows on the desk. “Wade said he talked to Sienna the day before she died. She talked to a lot of people, apparently, and she was asking all of them about Jax. The cops are looking everywhere for him. They think Jax had something to do with Sienna ending up in the lake.”

Jax, who was looking for Paul hours before a woman washed up dead. I see him stepping out of the shadows at the back of the terrace, the skittish way he looked everywhere but at me.Tell Paul I need to talk to him.

“But according to Wade, it wasn’t just Jax she was asking about. She was also asking about Paul.”

The room goes hot. “My Paul?”

Chet gives me awho else?look.

“What about Paul? What did she want from him?”

Chet shrugs. “Like I said, Wade was baked. I couldn’t get much more out of him that made sense. You know how he tends to...”

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