Page 53 of Stranger in the Lake

“Oh, stop. I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” I pause, chewing on a lip. “This also seems like as good a time as any to tell you I’m pregnant.”

“Congratulations.” He says it with so much disgust, I actually flinch. “You don’t need that man to help you raise a baby, you know. The Charlie I used to know didn’t need anybody. She could do pretty much anything on her own.”

“Everything but get herself pregnant.” My wisecrack lands like a belly flop, and Sam looks away. “Come on, Sam. You know this baby was made out of love.”

“That may be so, but Paul is still a murder suspect. Billy Barnes didn’t see him on Wednesday morning.”

Billy Barnes. The man Paul claimed to have passed on his early-morning run. The alibi isn’t holding up. The revelation is like getting punched; I’m breathless from the shock. My gaze pulls to Sam, his face set in hard lines as he watches it all sink in.

“Did you plant that Kingsport reporter?” I say, suddenly livid. “Did you get her to start that rumor?”

Sam doesn’t seem the least bit offended at the accusation. “Here’s what you don’t get, what you’ve never gotten—that I’m not the only one with suspicions. In fact, I’d be willing to wager that most people with a functioning brain are seeing the same thing I’m seeing—a man who stood to gain more money than he could ever make in one lifetime with his rich wife gone. Sure, okay, I’ll admit he got away with it the first time, but two female bodies under the same dock? That’s too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.”

“You just told me you were looking at Jax for Sienna’s murder.”

“Okay, but ask yourself this—why is your husband running all over creation avoiding questioning? What has he got to hide?”

I look out over the lake, refusing to give Sam a reaction, even though his words strike a gong in my chest. All morning I’ve been thinking something similar.

“Did he tell you about the police report Katherine filed two weeks before she drowned?” My gaze whips to Sam, and he pauses, taking in my expression, which I couldn’t clamp down on fast enough. “He didn’t, did he? Somebody’d skinned a skunk and smeared it all over the leather interior of her car. She didn’t think much of it, either, at the time. Just needed a police report to make a claim on the insurance. The stank pretty much totaled it.”

That explains Paul’s face when I told him about the opossum, at least. What it doesn’t explain is why he failed to tell me about it. Because I saw his expression in the mirror. I know he made the connection.

Chet shuffles his feet, gravel crunching underneath the soles. “Sam’s right, Charlie. Things are lining up too tight. Maybe you should...I don’t know...put some space between you and Paul. Just until the dust settles.”

I shake my head—not because I don’t agree, but because I don’t want to. These are some of the same things Sam told me a year ago, and I hadn’t listened then, either—and not just because of his crappy timing. It was because of the words he used when he dragged me into that corner of the country-club kitchen, the way he’d said them with his lips curled in disgust. That Paul was a monster and a murderer. That I was an idiot and a fool. There’s not a bride on the planet who would have listened to all that ugliness.

For me, it was as easy as breathing. I chose Paul that day, and Sam here still hasn’t forgiven me.

He leans a hip against the freezing metal of his car. “If you’re not going to listen to Chet or me, at least talk to Micah. Ask him why he told me Paul and Katherine’s marriage had hit some rocks, that their relationship wasn’t as smooth as Paul would like everybody to think. That toward the end there, there was a lot of fighting.”

This time, I can’t hold back on my frown. Micah tattled on Paul to an officer of the law. He told a cop that Paul and Katherine were fighting in the months before her death. And not just a cop—Sam, who from the very start suspected Paul. Who would like nothing more than to slap on some cuffs and cart him down to the station. Micah had to know what he’d be implying with such a statement. Why would he say such a thing?

Unless it was true.The thought whispers through my mind before I can stop it, but I can’t go there. If that’s the case, if Paul and Katherine’s marriage was falling apart when she drowned, then how could I ever believe another word he says?

I feel myself losing it, that grip on everything I’ve been fighting so hard to hold together—my belief in my husband, my marriage—and so I do the only thing I can think of. I say what I brought Sam here for and, in doing so, take the heat off Paul and swivel the spotlight onto someone else.

“I hear you found Sienna’s coat in Jax’s cabin but that her scarf was missing.”

“From Micah, I presume.” When I don’t deny it, Sam scowls. “He shouldn’t be running around town talking up this case. He knows better. Next time you see him, tell him I said to keep his mouth shut.”

I roll my eyes and describe the scarf for Sam, every detail I can remember about the color and the fringe and the fussy pattern, the way it was long enough to be looped around a neck multiple times. I can tell by the way his eyes turn to slits that it’s hers. That scarf belonged to Sienna.

“How do you know all that?”

And there it is, my ideal opening. The perfect place to admit I saw it hanging from Sienna’s neck that first day. To step off this hamster wheel of lies and half-truths and come clean. Let the chips fall and trust they will fall the right way.

But that’s not how things work in a town like Lake Crosby, not with Sam steering suspicions. The story he would weave together from very few facts, the fabrication he so desperately wants me to believe. I refuse to give him the ammunition.

Because Sam is right about one thing. Iamstubborn. Sometimes it takes me a long time to learn my lessons, but I always learn them.

I turn for the car, revealing the only part of the answer he needs to know. “Because when Jax showed up at my back door, her scarf was wrapped around his neck.”

24

June 12,1999

10:36 p.m.

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