Stranger in the Lake

by Kimberly Belle

  Paul frowns. “Okay, but did he also tell you they caught the guy? Some asshole who confused Katherine’s car for his cheating wife’s. The opossum was meant to scare you, yeah, but the message was intended for me. Micah told me what they wrote in the snow.”

  A headache starts up at the base of my brain, a low-slung throbbing of confusion. Paul always has an answer for everything, which means he’s either telling the truth or is exceptionally good at lying. I study his face, the light illuminating him in shadowy patches. The spiderweb of fine lines around his eyes, the deeper ones on either side of his mouth, the way the thinning scab is pulling on his brow. He looks at me, his eyes flecked with gold, and God help me, I want so desperately to believe him.

  But I don’t.

  “What about Jax? Why have you been helping him all this time?”

  “I already told you. I owe him my life. I owe him everything.”

  I’ve heard the story multiple times. Jax dragged Paul out of the lake by his ankles when they were kids. It’s why Paul won’t stick a toe in the lake, because he almost drowned, and Jax saved him. “Because he pulled you out of the lake? I know it scared the crap out of you, but—”

  “That’s not the time I’m referring to. I’m talking about another time. After Katherine.”

  He pauses, and I brace for whatever new bombshell he’s going to drop on me now. All this time I’ve been waiting for him to bring her up, and now here we are, and I’m not sure I want to hear it. This is the scary part.

  “Jax was there for me in a way no one else was. Not even Micah. You know how people were looking at me back then. God, like they’re looking at me now, at this dump of a restaurant. Like I’m pretty sure you’re looking at me, too.”

  I shake my head, hard, then stop myself. The denial happened automatically, like an old instinct, that instant before I realized that he was right. I have been looking at him like that. “I know you loved Katherine. I know that. But you never talk about her, and then I saw the files on your laptop. The pictures and the other stuff. The finances. Her infertility. And then I hear that all this time, I’ve been living in her house—”

  “The ownership was just a technicality. Our accountant suggested we put the house in her name, but I designed it. I laid the first brick. It’s just as much mine as it was hers.”

  “And yet I’m just hearing about this now.”

  “What do you want me to say, that I loved her? I did. I loved her. I’ve loved her since we were juniors in college. That’s why it is so infuriating that people would think I had something to do with what happened. Yes, I got a lot of money after she was gone, but I’d pay ten times that to have her back.”

  Even Paul looks shocked at the words that just tumbled out of his mouth. His back slumps and his face goes apologetic. He smothers my hand in his. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant I didn’t want her to die. I certainly didn’t cause it.”

  It’s true I don’t know everything about this man, but I know when he feels something deeply. Paul loved Katherine. If she were still here, I wouldn’t be. It’s as simple as that. And honestly, haven’t I known this all along?

  The food turns solid in my stomach. “Micah said you were fighting before she died.”

  Paul jerks in surprise. “He told you that?”

  “No, he told Sam.” I don’t have to add that’s even worse.

  Paul goes still, hurt and anger coloring his cheeks along with something else—confusion? He shakes his head, but he won’t quite look me in the eyes. “I mean, sure, we argued now and then, but nothing... Why would Micah say that, and to Sam, of all people? Micah had to have known what he would think.”

  “And Pitts Cove?”

  “You mean the deeds?” Paul pauses to receive my nod. “I own dozens of lots on multiple coves. It’s no secret that Pitts is one of them. Gwen knows it. The people down at the Register of Deeds know it. Those are public transactions subject to public knowledge, available for anyone who asks. It’s an investment, not some nefarious scheme to...I don’t know...bury some old bones.”

  “State Road 32 is the one Bobby Holmes used to drive into the cove.”

  “I know that. But Walsh Capital was petitioning the county to reroute 32 away from the lake. Walsh is basically the Walmart of developers. Fast. Flashy. Cheap. In and out like a plague of locusts. They wanted to scoot the road back and plop down a time-share. The kind with prefab condo buildings and a miniature golf course. Paddle boats shaped like swans and sunset lake cruises. Do you know what that would do to a place like Lake Crosby?”

  It would turn this town into a tacky resort destination and attract the wrong kind of tourists—the kind looking for cheap lodgings and fast food. The shops in town wouldn’t have customers plunking down hundreds of dollars for Chanel sunglasses, and the restaurants and country clubs and golf courses would sit empty. Everyone, from the business owners to the people scrubbing their floors and toilets, would suffer.

  “Seems the town council wouldn’t allow such a thing. You didn’t have to buy up all the land.”

  “I didn’t say rerouting 32 was a bad idea. Done right, it would create a big, flat, lakefront parcel accessible by a brand-new four-lane road. In someone else’s hands, someone committed to maintaining the look and feel of Lake Crosby and its surroundings, it could be a gold mine.”

  “In other words, you.”

  He lifts both hands from the table. Paul has always been a shrewd businessman.

  “But how come this is the first I’ve heard about it? If I hadn’t looked in the safe, I wouldn’t know about Pitts Cove or any of the other properties.”

  “None of this is a secret. There are copies of the deeds all over the office, in the file cabinets and on the server. I just don’t talk about them much because they’re long-term investments. I can’t do anything until I own all the land, and that takes time.”

  He looks me in the eye as he says it, and his words come without the slightest hesitation, not even the tiniest pause to think. So far, all his answers have come this way, and they all make a weird sort of sense. I want to believe it, but I can taste the lie buried underneath his words, the way this explanation is meant to deceive.

  “You own all the land on Pitts Cove,” I remind him. “Every single inch.”

  He nods. “True, but I can’t really do much with it just yet. The timing’s not exactly ideal.”

  “Because Pitts Cove is haunted?”

  He laughs, the first genuine one I’ve heard from him in days. “Come on. You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “No, but plenty of other people do. There’s not a soul around who doesn’t know what happened there, who’s been sitting on the lake bottom for the past twenty years. Nobody wants to live there.”

  He shrugs. “So I’ll sit on the deeds a little longer.”

  Before Paul, I thought being rich meant a full refrigerator. I thought it meant an insulated roof over my head and the ATM spitting out cash every time I tapped in my pin code. I never dreamed it meant sitting on a million-dollar investment until a collective memory fades. Who knows how long that will take? Maybe decades, maybe never. But Paul doesn’t seem the least bit worried.

  And he’s so good at this, at explaining away all this baggage he’s kept locked away for years. It’s part of what attracted me to him—not the baggage, but his battle scars. The way we’d both emerged from our respective tragedies, damaged but still breathing.

  Now, though, the answers seem too easy. The deeds, Katherine’s finances, his complicated history with Jax. I’m still missing an essential piece of the puzzle, and he’s still intentionally leaving it out. If Sam were here, he’d say it’s because my husband is a killer.

  I think back to our roadside chat earlier today, those ugly words he said about the man I married. That Paul doesn’t have an alibi for Wednesday morning. That he and Katherine ha
d been fighting before she died. That last one he’d heard from Micah—Paul’s lifelong best friend, the best man at our wedding—and he wasn’t the only one of Paul’s friends issuing a warning. Watch your back, Jax said to me, and I didn’t want to listen to him, either.

  I look at Paul—the man I love, the father of my unborn child, the man I stood before in a church and made such beautiful promises—and I can’t separate the truth from the fiction. What is real? I have no idea.

  “Are you cold?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “But you’re shivering.”

  I sit on my hands, but it doesn’t stop them from shaking.

  “Come on. Let’s get you home before you freeze.”

  Paul gathers up the trash, stacking everything in a neat pile, tossing it into the barrel a few feet away. When he returns, he reaches out a hand, and I let him pull me off the bench. Tessie Williams, a former friend who filled her belly with shrimp cocktail and champagne at our wedding, snickers with her boyfriend as we pass.

  We stop at the car, and I’m digging out my keys when he wraps a hand around my wrist. “Are we good?” No smile this time, but the message is clear. Do you believe me? Do you still love me like you used to?

  Before this week, I wouldn’t have had to think about my answer, not even for a second. From the first time Paul and I met at my gas station counter, my feelings for him haven’t wavered. Not when my friends stopped waving when I walked down the streets of town. Not when every restaurant like this one fell silent, even though it’s filled with folks who talk plenty behind my back. Not once have I ever doubted my love for Paul, or that marrying him was the right thing.

  But now... He steps up to me, so close I can feel his breath on my skin, his warm body pumping blood next to mine, my own cells responding. He looks like the man I’ve loved for fourteen months now, the one I fell for the instant he smiled across the counter, the one who can make me shiver just by touching me, but tonight the shiver is from fear. Fear I’ve made the wrong choice. Fear that by ignoring the rumors and pushing away all my doubts, I’m just as self-serving as my mother.

  Fear of Paul, of what he’s done.

  I look at him, and my heart revs with a heavy, cloying dread. “Yes, Paul. Everything’s perfectly fine.”

  I’ve gotten so goddamn good at lying.

  29

  June 13, 1999

  1:27 a.m.

  Jax opened his eyes, and the first thing he noticed was the quiet. No blaring music, no engine vibrating under his seat, no Paul and Micah arguing up in the front. Just crickets and the cool mountain air, blowing through the open windows. He shivered and sat up.

  “Hey, Paul,” he shouted. “Micah.”

  No answer. His friends were gone. Jax was alone.

  The door handle was like water in his fingers. He couldn’t get a solid grip. After three tries he somehow managed, shoving open the door and sliding out onto the dirt. He caught his balance, then turned in a slow circle, trying to get his bearings—hard to do when the world was spinning. He rubbed his eyes, searched for movement in the dark shadows. It was like looking through a dark, wispy fog.

  A trailer park. He was standing in the middle of a dark and grubby trailer park, one he didn’t recognize. Then again, why would he? He wasn’t friends with anyone who lived in one, didn’t run with that kind of crowd. The trailer-park kids weren’t exactly college-bound.

  He took in the square and stubby shapes, dozens and dozens of them lined up like boxy shadows, all dark but one, pushed up against the woods at the far end. That one was lit up like a fairground ride. Colorful Christmas lights, strung across the roof and around every window. A lava-red glow coming from underneath the cinder-block risers. Jax leaned forward on his toes and squinted. Was that a hot tub?

  “Hey, Paul. Micah.” He slurred their names into the nighttime sky, his voice bouncing around the hills. “Get your sorry asses out here!”

  A sleepy voice shouted from the darkness behind him. “Shut the hell up!”

  What time was it?

  He stuck his head through the driver’s window, but the car was dark. The engine was off, the dash black. He reached for the keys and swiped air. Excellent. Now what? He couldn’t walk home. He had no idea which way to go or how far. And it wasn’t like he could call a taxi in this sorry mountain town.

  So Jax did the only thing his tequila-saturated brain could think of. He laid on the horn. One by one, lights popped on all around him, the dark shapes coming to life. Somewhere to his right, a baby started crying. He leaned on the horn again, a long series of beeps that echoed through the hills.

  Somewhere around the fifth or sixth time, a door swung open and a woman tumbled out, shooting across the dirt in a tank top and red bikini underwear. Her bare legs were scary skinny and her hair wild, like she’d been sleeping in a wind tunnel. She marched right up to him and smacked him on the chest.

  “Goddamn it all to hell, you woke up the baby. Do you know how hard that kid is to get to sleep, and now your caterwaulin’ woke him up. Are you going to come in there and put him back down? Because I sure as hell ain’t. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Where to start? With his dead mom? With his missing friends? With this woman’s shouting that was only making her kid cry harder?

  “I’m so wasted.” He meant it as something like an apology, but this woman just rolled her eyes.

  “I got a nose. I could smell you from ten miles away.”

  Behind her, a girl appeared in the doorway. She was six, maybe seven, and cradling the wailing baby to her chest. She had that same crazy hair as the lady in front of him, those same skinny legs sticking out from a tattered nightgown. “Mama, I think he’s hungry.”

  The woman ignored her daughter, sizing him up instead. “Tequila?”

  “Jose Cuervo.” His tongue stumbled around the words, mushing them up and sticking the syllables together: “Hosaycuervo.”

  “Where?”

  “Where what?”

  “Where’s the tequila? It’s the least you can do for waking the baby.”

  It was then Jax felt a pang. Something wasn’t right with this woman. Her pupils were the size of dimes, the skin on her arms all scabbed up. Track marks or scratches or both. He looked beyond her to the girl, standing on the pile of cinder blocks that served as steps. The baby cried and cried.

  “Mama, he needs a bottle but there ain’t one.”

  “Shut up, Charlie. Get your butt back inside.”

  What killed Jax the most was that the little girl didn’t look surprised. She didn’t look sad or disappointed. She just looked...accustomed. This jittery-ass woman angling for Jax’s booze was her mother. This was their life. The girl just stood there, clutching her wailing baby brother against her chest, blinking at him with those Bambi eyes, willing her crack-whore mother to come inside and feed her baby brother. Jesus, somebody call child services or something.

  By now the woman was digging through his car, throwing doors open and rooting around on the floorboards, her skinny ass in the air while her baby howled. She emerged with the bottle of tequila—now empty. She grimaced and flung it to the dirt.

  “You got more, right?”

  Was this a dream? Was this woman really begging him for booze while her kids went hungry?

  He stared at the lady and her kids on the cinder-block steps, and he wondered which was worse: losing the mother who glued your family together or growing up with a mother like this one. The answer came to him instantly, along with a sour wave of tequila that landed on the dirt by his feet.

  These kids. These poor, miserable kids had it so much worse than Jax ever could.

  And this was how Jax knew he couldn’t be saved, why a hundred baptisms by Pamela’s crazy pastor into the waters of Lake Crosby couldn’t save his black and evil soul—because looking at that scraggly girl and
her wailing baby brother made him want nothing more than that second bottle of tequila.

  30

  The good thing about living in a house of glass in the woods is that you know when someone’s coming. You hear the whir of a motor as they steer around a curve in the drive, murmured voices carried on the wind, the way the birds and chipmunks go still and quiet. It gives you just enough time to pat down your hair and slap on a smile before they step up to a door or a window.

  The bad thing is there’s no hiding from the two strangers, peering through the glass.

  A man and woman, both in their late fifties or early sixties, their faces far too grim and somber for a sunny Saturday afternoon. They could be anyone, and yet my gut knows exactly who they are.

  I freeze at the edge of the foyer, taking in the woman’s white-blond hair, her birdlike build, her full lips and pale skin behind dark sunglasses. She clutches flowers to her chest, a spray of big white buds that falls over an arm.

  Funeral flowers.

  I open the door, and she nudges her husband with an elbow.

  “My name is John Sterling, and this is my wife, Sharon. We’re looking for the owner of this house. I understand his name is Mr. Keller?”

  He has an accomplished air about him—a doctor, an accountant, the owner of a chain of shoe stores—but with clenched fists and a sharp, angry edge. Grief in the form of fury, and I don’t blame him. If I were in his shoes, standing on the doorstep where my daughter washed up dead, I’d be pissed off, too.

  “His name is Paul. He’s my husband. I’m sorry but he’s not here.” Neither is Chet, and I wish he was because I am not emotionally prepared for this. I’m not sure I’m equipped to comfort grieving parents on my own. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

  The last sentence is the one I should have led with, I realize too late.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Sterling manages with a jerky nod. His face is grim and rock hard. “Were you...were you here when it happened?”