Beneath Bone Lake

by Colleen Thompson

  Frowning, Ruby racked her brain for anyone else who might have some idea of Misty’s whereabouts. Finally, an idea struck: Call Sam McCoy, though turning to a near stranger—particularly this stranger—didn’t set well with her. Sure, Aaron had always stuck up for his foster brother, ignoring any whispers about “bad blood.” But that had been when McCoy was a big-shot computer security wizard and partner in his firm in Austin, not some disgraced felon who’d moved back to the area—after purchasing the house next door—to lick his wounds. She saw him in her mind’s eye: the dark hair so close-cropped it brought out sharp-looking honey brown eyes, and a fine set of muscles straining as he’d helped the movers manhandle a king-sized mattress off the truck only a couple of months before Ruby had left the country.

  “I could stand to help him christen that,” Misty had commented with a grin.

  “Don’t even think about bringing that criminal around my daughter,” Ruby had warned her. He’d been polite enough when they’d met briefly at the mailbox, but she’d heard of his conviction, even if he hadn’t actually served time. She knew, too, that the Monroes, whose patience had run as deep as their faith, had given Sam the boot a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, though she’d never heard why he was kicked out.

  Before she could lose her nerve, Ruby tried information: “Unincorporated Preston County, please, Dogwood area. I’m looking for a listing for a Sam or Samuel McCoy on South Cypress Bend.”

  “I have a business listing,” the operator told her. “At Forty-one South Cypress Bend. Could that be it?”

  “Has to be.” Since there was nothing else but state preserve within a half mile of her own place, Ruby scribbled the number on the back of her drink-and-magazine receipt and punched it into her phone.

  The machine picked up on the fourth ring before regurgitating a recorded message that took her by surprise. “You’ve reached the Reel McCoy, Bone Lake’s premier fishing guide. I’m most likely on the water at the moment, but if you’ll leave your name and number…”

  Fishing guide? Ruby frowned, wondering if she’d dialed the right number. But that address had to be his. She disconnected, feeling more anxious than ever about Zoe’s and Misty’s whereabouts.

  Frustrated, Ruby watched a fresh crop of passengers begin picking up their luggage. Any second now, she told herself, her sister would show up apologizing, with Zoe bouncing along at her side and shrieking with excitement.

  Imagining that moment, Ruby took a deep breath and filled her lungs with painfully sweet anticipation. Anticipation that ticked inexorably toward panic as she watched the steady stream of travelers welcomed home by loved ones, as she felt the minutes and the hours hurtling toward eternity.

  C HAPTER T WO

  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…

  —William Butler Yeats,

  from “The Second Coming”

  When blaring music pressed past the sound of his boat motor, Sam McCoy told himself it was none of his damned business. Better he should think about beating the encroaching darkness, getting off the water, and cleaning his catch. Keep his thoughts tuned to an evening filled with fried bass, cold beer, ESPN, and a warm shower, not necessarily in that order.

  So what if his only close neighbor, Misty Bailey, and her new “friends” wanted to spend another evening blowing out their eardrums with that noise? It wasn’t as if anyone had asked for—or would welcome—his opinion. Let Mama Bear deal with the current problem when she came back. Should be any day now, the way he’d heard it. Bass notes thumped, and Java, who stood on the johnboat’s flat bow, turned to whine at him.

  “What are you lookin’ at?” he asked the chocolate Lab, but the soulful brown eyes kept staring, begging for permission to jump ship.

  A few months back, Java had discovered the little girl next door, and it was love at first sight. Since that happy wag-and-squeal-fest, Sam had had a hell of a time keeping the young dog from wandering—make that galumphing—over to the neighboring cabin. Though Misty had carefully kept him at arm’s length, she had put up with the impromptu visits for her niece’s sake.

  For the sake of Aaron’s daughter… Sam’s stomach knotted at the thought, for he’d seen Aaron Monroe in Zoe’s face, in the child’s flyaway blonde hair, in her showstopper of a smile. Strange that the resemblance affected him, considering how pissed he’d been the last time he saw Aaron. Stranger still, since he’d never before warmed to kids, the sight of Zoe romping so happily with Java had reminded him of one bright spot in a past he’d worked damned hard to put behind him.

  As Sam stared in the direction of the Monroe house, he couldn’t help wondering. How was Zoe faring, now that her caretaker had apparently gone off the deep end? How could a little kid like that cope with all the noise? And not just noise, Sam imagined, for even by Bone Lake standards, the one woman and two men he’d glimpsed over there looked pretty rough. What if they were drinking, drugging, doing God knew what else around the little girl?

  What the hell could Misty Bailey—who was a knockout as well as whip-smart—possibly see in such lowlifes? Over at Hammett’s, where she waited tables part-time, she fielded better offers almost daily from good men with decent jobs, handling the kiss-offs with an easy grace that he admired.

  Even when he’d been the one summarily dismissed.

  So stay out of this, his better judgment warned him. Hasn’t sticking your neck out over other people’s business caused you enough trouble for one lifetime?

  The music shut off, and the sound of shouting drifted down from the Monroe place. This time, Java didn’t wait politely for Sam’s say-so. Instead, the Lab jumped into Bone Lake and paddled for the shore.

  “Damn it, dog, get back here,” Sam called after her, but it was hopeless. The Lab was swimming for all she was worth, making for the wooded shoreline nearest the Monroe property.

  Cursing, Sam maneuvered the small boat’s outboard to avoid the jutting cypress knees and follow the bobbing brown head toward the shore. The dog scrambled up the roots of a huge tree and shook, tail wagging, before racing in the direction of what had sounded like a man’s voice. As Sam tied up to the Monroes’ dock, he hesitated, then shook his head and followed, eager to grab his wandering dog and get back home.

  “Java, come,” he called, more to alert the human inhabitants to his presence than out of hope his exuberant young Lab would deign to listen. Moving from the dock onto the sparse lawn, he whistled and made his way uphill toward the house. His gaze swept the unscreened porch and the back of the faded cedar two-story, which was in dire need of a new roof. From inside the house, he heard what sounded like a couple of big brutes barking—though he’d never seen dogs here in the past. He noticed an odor, too, a strange, cat-piss stink that made him wonder if some animal had been spraying musk.

  Along the left side of the house, a shirtless man, all corded muscle and tattoo ink, stood near the driveway’s edge. His back was turned, probably because he hadn’t heard Sam over the barking from the house.

  “I told you to get lost, bitch,” the man yelled at someone inside a small, new-looking Chevy parked next to a mud-spattered black sedan. “Turn around and get the fuck out before I set my dogs on your ass.”

  Startled by his harsh tone, Java froze in her tracks only a few yards short of the man she’d meant to greet. Crouching low, the Lab whined, drawing his attention. When he turned toward her, Sam spotted the man’s handgun—saw him aiming toward the dog.

  “Whoa, whoa—hey, I’ve got her.” Sam edged forward, keeping his movements and voice deliberately slow and calm: the harmless neighbor. As concerned as he now felt for both Zoe and her aunt’s safety, he wouldn’t do anybody any good if he got himself killed.

  “What the—” The gunman jerked in surprise, eyes wild, before swinging the weapon to point straight at Sam.

  Sam raised his palms, as if they could stop bullets. “Sorry for the bother. Just let me get my pup, and we’ll be
out of your hair.” He could call the sheriff’s office from his own house, then wash his hands of the situation.

  With his arms shaking, the greasy-haired man blinked at him, displaying a crudely inked 666 in the hollow of his cheek. To Sam, he looked confused, seriously strung out on something. His bad teeth and dark-circled eyes told Sam this was no three-day drunk but a serious, long-term addiction.

  “I’m a friend of Misty’s.” Sam hoped the half-truth would tip the balance in the tattooed man’s addled brain. “Are she and Zoe around?”

  “Who the fuck’s Misty?” the man slurred.

  A woman shouted from inside the car parked in the driveway, “Deputies are coming. They’ll be here any minute.”

  Though he couldn’t see the face inside the little blue car, Sam thought it might be Ruby Monroe. Before he could react, her unwelcome houseguest wheeled around and hurled curses at her.

  Ruby executed a three-point turn that sent gravel flying, then peeled out of the driveway—an exit punctuated by three shots.

  “Java, come,” Sam urged, racing for the cover of the trees that separated his place from the Monroes’. The massive cypress trunks should offer him some shelter in case the gunman sent a hail of bullets his way.

  As Sam ran, he heard another shot—followed by a canine yelp.

  “Son of a bitch,” he snarled, turning reflexively with fists clenched. Java scrambled past him, bolting for home. Injured or not—Sam couldn’t tell in the dim light—the dog disappeared in no time, vanishing into the hundred-yard-wide buffer of trees between the houses.

  Sam ran after her, tripping over fallen branches in his hurry. By the time he emerged panting near his own boathouse, he was brushing stinging fire ants from his forearms as he looked around for Java.

  The blue car, which bore a rental sticker, idled in the street nearby. His heart lurched at the sight of the bullet hole piercing the rear window.

  He raced over to the passenger-side door, only to find Ruby staring at him through the lowering window. “What the hell—are you all right?” he asked her.

  “Where’s my daughter?” Her blue eyes were wide, her face pale. “Where’s Misty? And who is that crazy person?”

  Sam glanced back toward her place, opened the car door, and swung inside. “Drive down a ways and turn around. If trouble’s coming, I don’t want it sneaking up behind us.”

  “Okay, but what’s going—”

  “You sure you aren’t hit?”

  As she shook her head, her chin-length, light brown hair swung around a worried face. “Not hurt. What about you?”

  “I’m okay—and those deputies are coming, aren’t they?” Only two regularly patrolled this end of the lake, but he’d be glad to see them. “You weren’t bluffing about that?”

  “No, I called. Of course I called.” Her glance snapped from his face to her house to the road and back again. “Where’s my family? Misty was supposed to pick me up at the airport.”

  “I haven’t seen them in a few days.” But he was wondering, could it have been longer? He’d been busy guiding fishermen eager to take advantage of the spawning run. It might have been a week, Sam realized, since the last time he’d spotted Zoe or her aunt, and Misty hadn’t been at Hammet’s since she’d…A chill slashed up his backbone at the thought of what an armed drug addict could have done to them in that time.

  “I—I called Misty’s cell, but her number’s out of service. I tried your place, too, but you weren’t in.”

  “Out fishing.” Even when he wasn’t guiding, a rod and reel kept his hands busy. Kept his mind off the terms of his probation…mostly.

  “That man—that horrible man—who is he?” Ruby asked.

  “Sorry, no idea. I only went to get my dog.”

  “If he’s done anything to Zoe, if he’s touched a single hair on her head, I swear”—Ruby’s blue eyes burned with conviction, and her voice went strangely flat “—I’m going to kill him.”

  Sam more than half believed her, a gut instinct that had the fine hairs rising behind his neck. He supposed she’d seen some ugly shit this past year, overseas. Supposed it might have left her capable of killing a man. “I didn’t see your sister’s car there. I’ll bet she took Zoe somewhere,” he said, needing to ease Ruby’s desperation. For Aaron’s—or his parents’—sake at least. “Somewhere safe, away from those people.”

  “What people? There’s more than one of them? In my house?”

  He nodded. “A few days back, a week maybe, I saw three over there, kind of a rough-looking bunch. But your sister was with them. They were having a few laughs and beers on the back porch. Zoe was running around playing, didn’t look a bit bothered.”

  “God, where are those deputies?” Ruby gritted her teeth and turned again to look back up and down the road. “They should be here by now.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. Give them a few minutes, and try calling again.”

  There was an uncomfortable lull as both watched, until Ruby gasped at some movement in the roadside brush opposite the houses. Before Sam could shout at her to drive, a small doe broke from the trees. More deer followed her across the street and into Sam’s yard, two with fawns at their side.

  “Sorry,” she said. “For a moment, I thought…”

  The deer settled in to graze on the sparse spring grasses in front of his house, as they often did around dusk.

  “These people you saw at the house—” Her fingers jittered over the steering wheel as she spoke. “You didn’t recognize them?”

  He shook his head. “No, and I thought I’d met most of the folks living on this end of the lake. Maybe they’re from Dogwood,” he said, referring to the town proper, a twenty-minute drive north. “Or maybe they were passing through, just some people she met at Hammett’s while she was waiting tables. Except that Misty—”

  “She might tend to see the best in everyone, but I can’t picture my sister inviting strangers home,” Ruby interrupted, “especially not with Zoe around. I specifically asked her not to—”

  “People screw up,” he said. “They make mistakes and they learn from them.”

  If they get the chance…. Sam’s attorney had drummed that message into him. That this was the only chance he was getting. That he’d lose everything if he was too stupid—or too much of a McCoy—to take it.

  As Ruby studied him, her gleaming eyes reflected red and white. “Finally,” she said. “I thought they’d never get here.”

  Following her gaze, Sam blew out a relieved breath at the sight of two patrol vehicles, their lights flashing and sirens muted.

  “Better go fill them in,” Sam said. “They’ll need to know about the gun and dogs—you hear all that barking?”

  “I did. Right before that man ran out waving his gun around. Took ten years off my life.”

  “Damned lucky he didn’t take the rest of them while he was at it.” Sam fingered a hole in the dashboard between them. “You should’ve driven off and waited for help.”

  She shook her head and grimaced. “I know, but I thought—all I could think about was Zoe.”

  “Must’ve been a hell of a shock.” As the two SUVs approached, Sam opened his door. “I’ll tell the deputies what I know. Then I’ll have to see about my dog.”

  See to his dog and let the law handle whatever was going on inside the Monroe house. Try not to feel responsible, because this wasn’t any of his business. Try not to let the past tangle with the present, though hadn’t he risked that by moving back here in the first place? By moving right next door to Aaron Monroe’s widow? Abruptly, he wished he could go back a year and change that decision, tell the real estate agent to forget the great deal she’d found and look for something elsewhere. Wished he hadn’t, like a damned fool, been sucked in by sentiment.

  Java slunk toward Sam, her tail tucked and her brown eyes worried. He squatted down to greet her. “There you are. C’mere, Gator Bait. It’s okay. You’re going to be fine.”

  He ran his hands along
her flanks, her legs and belly, but to his relief, they didn’t come up bloody. Probably, the dog had yelped in fear instead of pain.

  The moment the first deputy left his Suburban, Ruby was on him, pointing to her house and saying, “There’s a man inside. He has a gun, and he could have my little girl there. My sister, too.”

  “He shot at both of us. Put a bullet through the rear window,” Sam told Deputy Calvin Whitaker, an overgrown, eager type in his midtwenties who had mooched a few fishing expeditions off him these past few months. “And there’re dogs inside the house. Big and vicious, from the sound of them.”

  “We’re here now.” With his attention trained on Ruby, Calvin looked as upright and earnest as an Eagle Scout. “So don’t you worry, Ms. Monroe. We’ll get this taken care of.”

  Deputy Oscar Balderach, a soft-bellied man in his late fifties, stepped down from his Suburban and took the lead questioning Sam and Ruby about the situation. Clearly concerned about the possibility of a young child in the house, Balderach was on his game as Sam had never seen him. Maybe he’d been saving himself for a true emergency.

  “I need to call this in, get us some backup,” Deputy Balderach said, his voice deep and assured. “Nine chances out of ten, this ol’ boy’ll give up peaceable and let us run him in to sleep it off. Or if he’s got outstanding warrants, he might try and scurry off for cover. But we can’t get caught off guard if it occurs to him to go the hostage route.”

  “Hostage?” A tremor passed visibly through Ruby’s body. “You can’t mean he’d take Zoe. Can’t you get some snipers, someone who can take him down before he—”

  “I understand you’ve just come back from the war,” Balderach said, “but in this part of the world, they don’t let us do preemptive killings.”