Page 55 of Stranger in the Lake

“Well, duh. What did you think, that she came here for Katherine?” Chet’s eyes go wide with realization. “Oh. You did, didn’t you?” He laughs, a breathy sound. “That would have been awkward.”

“Not funny, Chet. This is serious. We need to tell Sam.”

Chet shrugs. “I’m sure he already knows. Once we plugged in her last name, she wasn’t all that hard to track down. A couple of clicks and he’ll end up like we did, right here on her Twitter profile. As a matter of fact, he’s probably already been and gone.”

I click on the hashtag, #deathinthedeep, and the Tweets fall into a neat column. Dozens and dozens of them from @SiennaAnne.

June 13, 1999: drug dealer and all-around bad guy Bobby Holmes disappears without a trace. When the cops closed the case without a body, the general consensus was good riddance. Nobody cared, for twenty years. #SkeletonBob #deathinthedeep

Bobby Holmes deserves more than fifteen minutes of fame. He deserves justice. Was his death an accident or a crime? The truth depends on who you choose to believe. #SkeletonBob #deathinthedeep

New details in the Bobby Holmes case, coming soon to a podcast near you. Not as open and shut as the police would like us to believe. #SkeletonBob #deathinthedeep #thetruthiscoming

I keep scrolling, but it’s more of the same. Tweets as advertising, meant to drum up interest for a podcast that didn’t yet exist. Unless there are recordings somewhere—her cell phone or laptop, maybe. At the very least, there would be notes, interviews, an electronic trail.

I frown, my gaze skimming the Tweets. “But Bobby Holmes wasn’t killed. He crashed his car into the water and drowned.”

“Mama was convinced he was in witness protection, remember? She was like, ‘Wherever that boy is, it ain’t some shithole town in Montana. Bobby’s smart, and he knows how to negotiate. He’s probably living large on the beaches of Mexico by now.’”

Chet grins at the memory, but I don’t want to go there. Our mother was always spouting off some stupid conspiracy theory, the more ridiculous, the better. For her, Bobby Holmes was a hero, a street-smart whiz kid who knew how to work the system. It didn’t matter a lick that he was a criminal, as long as he never got caught—unlike her husband, whose own incarceration was such a disappointment.

“My point is, nobody’s calling his death a crime, not even the police. Bobby landed in the lake by accident.”

Chet tilts his head, frowning. “Still. Now that we know he was at the bottom of Pitts Cove all this time, it doesn’t feel like the cops looked very hard. Wouldn’t he have busted through a guardrail or left skid marks or something?”

“There are always skid marks on that curve.”

“True. But when they happen at the same time that a person goes missing, seems like you’d have to try real hard not to put two and two together.”

Chet’s right, and he and Sienna have landed on a point all those ghost hunter shows missed: that nobody tried very hard to find Bobby Holmes. Without him blaring heavy metal music out the windows of his Camaro or squealing his tires in the church parking lots, the town settled back into its slower, quieter ways. For everybody but his sister Jamie, Bobby’s disappearance wasn’t so much a mystery as it was a relief. They were perfectly fine with forgetting he ever existed.

And then up came that rusted-out Camaro, dredging up another fifteen minutes of fame—this time for his bones. The assumptions people made were not kind. Bobby was wasted when he skidded out of that curve. High and drunk and too far gone to swim his way out. A victim of his own bad karma. That’s the thing about people like Bobby—it’s easier to write them off when you already thought of them as disposable.

Only, Sienna didn’t write him off. While Bobby’s death had faded to a memory for everyone else, she was digging up new details.

I point to the column of Tweets. “New details, plural. What do you think she means?”

“Let me see that thing.” Chet grabs the phone from my hands and clicks to another column, scrolling through a long line of Tweets and replies. “See all the checkmarks on these profiles? That means these guys are legit. Big-time podcasters with thousands and thousands of followers, and she was in full-on Twitter conversations with them. Talking shop, picking their brains, asking for advice, stuff like that. Especially this guy Grant. They seem like good Twitter buddies.”

He pulls up a thread, a lively back-and-forth that at times is downright flirty. She asks what he’s working on, questions him on his equipment and how he handles hostile witnesses, about a conference coming up in the spring. She offers to buy him a drink. He suggests dinner instead. Her answer is a kissy-face emoji and two clinking glasses of champagne.

“Message him,” I say. “Ask him what he knows. Maybe she told him something.”

Chet scrunches his nose. “Worth a try, I guess.” He opens a private message window. “What should I say?”

I reach for the phone and start typing.

Hi Grant, you don’t know me, but I noticed your conversation with Sienna Sterling and thought you should know she died this past week. Murdered and found in the same lake as the Skeleton Bob she came here to research. My sister was the one who found her.

Chet reads it, then shrugs. “He might not have any clue what I’m talking about.”

I hit Send, and the message reappears a split second later in a bright blue bubble. “Or he might know exactly what you’re talking about.”

26

On the way home, Chet takes a detour on 64, rolling to a stop at a 1970s ranch of dark brown brick.

“Are you sure this is the place?” I take it in through the windshield. Landscaped yard, a fresh coat of paint on the door, lacy curtains hanging in the windows, everything neat and tidy. Either Jamie Holmes won the lottery, or her brother, Bobby, was selling a lot more than drugs.

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