Page 6 of Stranger in the Lake

Don’t you come unstuck, little guy. Don’t you dare.

I pause, waiting for what comes next. A dull cramping, a searing pain. I wait, not moving for the span of five full breaths, but there’s nothing but a throbbing in my upper back where I hit the hard edge of the seat.

Carefully, I push to my feet. I step to the starboard side and lean my entire upper body over the side of the boat.

It’s a woman, floating facedown in the water. I can tell from her hair, her slim shoulders and slight build, the designer jeans and thin black sweater. Her arms and legs are spread wide like motionless spider legs, her hands and feet disappearing into the murky water. It’s a stance that’s instantly familiar.

Dead man’s float.

The urge to vomit comes on hard and fast, and sweat breaks out on my skin, even though I’m still freezing. I swallow the sick down and tell myself this is not the first time I’ve seen a dead body. When I was twelve, my grandma dropped dead right next to me, right in the middle of ordering from the Home Shopping Channel. She was a bit of a hoarder, her trailer crammed full with crap she didn’t need and probably couldn’t afford, but the point is, I didn’t panic. I pried the phone out of her hand and called 9-1-1 without producing a tear, even though afterward I cried for days.

But this is different. This time it feels like watching a horror movie, like seeing something forbidden and monstrous. Another faceless, lifeless woman bobbing in the reeds under our dock, only this time... Is it an accident? Or something worse? I watch her hair swirl in a gust of water and it’s like staring into the sun—painful but impossible to look away.

Not here, under Paul’s dock. Not again.

My blood runs hot and I glance up the hill, the world shifting back into focus. Should I flip her over? Drag her into the boat and perform CPR?

Then again, I’m probably not strong enough to lift her out, and it’s too deep under the dock to wade in, not to mention too late. I’m no expert, but it looks like she’s been there a while. The skin that I can see—the tops of her ears, a sliver at the back of her neck—is waxy and luridly white, gleaming like it’s coated in frost.

I decide to leave her be. I can’t help her, and as far as the lake is concerned, this is the end of the line. The currents that live in these waters, powerful undertows and swift updrafts that swirl up muck from the depths, burp everything up here, in the reeds under our dock. Whoever this woman is, she’s not going anywhere.

I reach for my phone, only to remember that it’s dead. My gaze tracks up the hill, searching for a light in a window, maybe, or the ones that flank the back door. But our house is dark, and so is Micah’s farther up the cove. Nothing but a big black blotch behind the trees.

With one last look at the dead woman, I climb out of the boat and shuffle carefully across the dock, then take off running up the hill.

There are seventy-six steps from the dock to the house, a steep hike of almost fifty vertical yards—half a football field. Paul chose the highest hill on purpose, and I’ll admit, the views are spectacular. Lake and forest and mountains rolling into a smoky blue sky that goes on forever.

The climb from the dock, on the other hand, is a real buzzkill. Seventy-six slogging steps of muscle-burning, lung-wheezing hell. By the time I make it to the back door, I can barely breathe.

It doesn’t help that the clouds are spitting snow again, or the whole time I was clambering up the slippery staircase, I was hollering for our neighbor Micah when I saw that the light above his back deck had popped on. I pictured him sipping a cup of coffee on the back deck, but then just as suddenly, the light faded and I realized it was a motion sensor. A bird, maybe, or an opossum scrounging for food set it off. I ducked my head and kept climbing.

I bust through the door and race into Paul’s study, the closest room with a landline.

I fall into the chair at his desk, a giant slab of walnut and brushed steel, with nothing on it but a lamp and a phone. Its surface is spotless, a gleaming example of Paul’s clean-desk policy that applies both at work and at home.

I pick up the receiver and dial with freezing, fumbling fingers. Micah’s cell rings four eternal times, then flips me to voice mail. At the end of the beep, I start talking.

“Micah, it’s Charlotte. I was just down at the dock, and there’s a body under it. A real body, a woman. I don’t know who she is or how she got there, but she’s clearly dead, so I didn’t dare touch her.” Saying the words out loud makes my stomach go eely with morning sickness, with shock. “Anyway, get over here as soon as you hear this, will you? I’m hanging up and calling 9-1-1 now. Bye.”

Micah is our neighbor and friend, but also son of the police chief and badass diver specializing in underwater investigations and evidence recovery. Whoever I talk to at emergency services will be calling him next anyway. I hang up and dial 9-1-1.

Though...I suppose it’s not technically an emergency—not anymore since she’s obviously dead. But the sooner the police know, the better chances are they can retrieve whatever evidence she might still be carrying. Micah told me once that the lake’s currents work like a washing machine, agitating everything in it. If there’s evidence on her body and the fabric of her clothes—skin under her fingernails, a hair that’s not from her head stuck in her sweater—it’s probably already been knocked loose.

The line connects, and I give the operator my name and address, describe the scene down at the dock. I sound remarkably calm, if not a little out of breath still. He tells me the police are on the way and asks me to stay on the line, but I tell him I have to go. Paul will be home from his run soon, and he’ll need my support. I think of him out there, jogging around the hills in blissful ignorance, and I hang up the phone.

There’s nothing I can do now but wait.

4

June 12,1999

4:45 p.m.

Jax Edwards tromped through the woods behind his house, his rifle slung carelessly over a shoulder. Thanks to a week of nonstop rain, the air was so thick it had a weight to it, solid and sticky in his lungs. The damp brought out the bugs and turned the path into a tangled mass of branches and undergrowth, new shoots slapping at the bare skin of his legs with clammy fronds.

He probably should have changed into jeans. Better shoes, too, instead of these ancient sneakers, a holdout from his high school track days. He kept stepping out of them, kept having to double back to rescue one from where it got suction-cupped to a muddy spot in the path. Like most things these days, it really pissed him off.

The backs of his thighs burned, but it was a good kind of pain. The kind that came after hours of trekking through the forest, scaling trees and clambering up mountainsides. In his seventeen years, he’d explored every inch of these woods, looked behind every log and under every rock. He’d watched beavers chew bushes down to tiny nubs for their dam and almost stepped on two copperheads mating. Yesterday a deer let him come so close he could see the veins in its ears. Funny, when he first started coming out here, he thought it was because he wanted to be alone, but somehow, being out here with all these animals, with the wilderness...well, he never minded the company.

---