“I got it, McHale,” Lucy said. Nate had dated Lucy for months before she’d managed to coax him into a boat of any kind. He still didn’t like the lake.
She retrieved the paddle, and he managed not to shudder at the slick cold on its rubber skin. Another reason he liked the exertion of rowing solo was that it left less time for him to dwell on the lake and how they so precariously rode its icy skin above its unfathomable dark. He pulled a chain to raise the launch door and turned the latch to lock it.
“It’s supposed to rain, you know,” Lucy said. As Nate pulled them free of the Night Ship’s shadow, her eyes lit like shards of sea glass. “They sent out an email about bringing umbrellas to graduation.”
“I saw it,” Nate said. “Occasional cloudbursts.” He knew where she was going with this. As he paddled, he looked at the web of scars on his bad arm. He tried to see past the healed flesh to the places where his bones had been pinned together in a patchwork that somehow held. Today, he detected only the faintest of aches. Before a storm—the kind of storm he looked forward to—his arm howled like sonar. The pain pulsed with the beat of his heart and the rhythm of thunder.
“I hope it doesn’t mess up the party at Jim’s house.”
“A little rain won’t stop the party. You might say some parties only really get started once the weather kicks in.” He smiled at her, but she shook her head.
“You told me the Thunder Runs would end once school was over.”
“School will be over. Tomorrow,” Nate said. They’d had this conversation before. When they began, Lucy had been as fired up by their storm-borne justice as the rest of them, but she’d gradually lost the taste for it. While she might suggest the occasional target, she hadn’t been on a Thunder Run with them in many months.
“Swear to me that this is the last one.”
“What happened to my bloodthirsty girl?”
“She grew up,” Lucy said. “And moved on. See that you do the same, or she might just move on without you.” Her eyes twinkled when she said this, but Nate knew the threat was not entirely unserious.
“It’s the last one. I promise. Then we’re done with the Thunder Runs and the Night Ship.”
“Cross your heart?”
Nate looked out over the lake’s mirrored surface. The sun had risen enough to dim the glory of the dawn. Blue had not yet filled the void, and the water Nate pulled them through was as colorless as the sky. “The reign of the Storm King is ended,” Nate said. “His foes lie vanquished, and peace dwells now in his realm along the shore.” He smiled, though saying this made him sadder than he’d have guessed. But nothing lasted forever. Soon they’d be in the city, where their lives would accelerate into a future they could scarcely imagine. To move on, some things had to be left behind. Lucy was right: The Storm King and his Thunder Runs had served their purpose. Now it was time to grow up.
He must have sighed, because Lucy was still watching him.
“What am I going to do with you, McHale?”
“If you run out of ideas, I can do some research,” he said. She smiled at that. He rowed in silence for a while. The lake was beginning to come to life. A fishing boat with its rails lined with yawning tourists cut through the water on their way to the lake’s northern bulge. Closer to shore, the heads of Daybreakers bobbed as they began their morning rituals.
“You have a plan?” Lucy eventually asked him. A rhetorical question. The Storm King always had a plan. “Nothing too reckless, right?”
“Moi?”
“It’s just that it would be a shame to spend your first night as a high school graduate in jail.” It was their usual repartee, but as before, Nate detected an undercurrent of gravity. “And nothing too complicated.”
After the early misstep of burning the Deckers’ house, they’d stuck to acts that could be plausibly blamed on storm damage or other natural occurrences. The most elaborate of these targeted a coach on the soccer team who’d been giving Tom grief. When an early blizzard struck over a weekend when the man and his family were out of town, Nate knew just what to do. Temperatures had plummeted, and the boys spent the night hosing down trees on the man’s property. As the layers of water froze, one of the trees finally shattered under its weight. It collapsed against windows and walls, and completely cut off the driveway. It’d taken them a brutal four hours in polar cold to accomplish this, but the gleaming wreckage they’d left behind had made it worthwhile.
“I’m not planning an ice storm or a fire or flood or anything like that,” he said. “Actually, I’m planning a gift.”
“A gift?” Lucy asked.
“For you.” He grinned at her as he pulled them the last lengths to the Vanhoutens’ dock. “This last one will be just for you.”
Nine
The chief maneuvered the cruiser to avoid the crest of another toppled tree. The ribs of its branches bristled like the skeleton of an alien creature.
Nate finally broke the silence within the car. “Has there been much damage?” The sun should have crowned the mountains, but the day was monochrome. The lake and its forests bled together in gradations of gray, the bleakest of watercolors.
“Some flooding. Downed trees. Parts of the foothills lost power.”
“Maybe they’ll reschedule the funeral.” Surely a murderer wouldn’t bring up his own victim’s funeral.
“Fourteen years. Don’t think they want to wait any longer.”
It seemed absurd for anyone to venture out into this weather. But for Lucy’s funeral, the backdrop was fitting. The town’s cemeteries were inland, but Nate imagined a gravesite prayer along the shore. Clinging black suit pants coated with mud to the knees. Dark umbrellas inverted and whisked away to join the clouds. A wall of the lake’s colorless water surging for the assembled. To wipe them away. To wipe them clean.
“Tom told me Mr. Bennett will be there,” Nate said. As hard as it was to believe, Mr. Bennett had hardly entered Nate’s mind in years. This was one reason why learning that the man had been released from prison had been such a shock. “Have you seen him since he got out?”
“The Lake’s too small to avoid someone like that.”
“Grams must have seen him, too.” Nate hated the idea of her running into him in the hardware store or at the grocery.
“Your Grams is a good woman. That man paid for what he did. That’s what she told me when he made parole.”
“Do you believe that?”
“More interested in what you believe, Nate.”
“I’m not angry at him anymore, if that’s what you mean. I’m not going to cause trouble. But I don’t plan to shake his hand, either.”
“That family’s been through a lot.”
“There’s a club for that. I’m on the board.”
“Money was always a struggle for them,” the chief continued. “Mrs. B did her best, but she wasn’t the same after Lucy disappeared.”
Three weeks ago, the chief would have said “run away” and not “disappeared.” The discovery of her body in the headlands had changed everything. In the span of a single wet afternoon, one of the Lake’s most treasured stories had taken another twist. The details of its ending were yet to be determined.
“I gave her boy odds and ends to do at the station. He was grateful, too. It takes character to take charity and be truly grateful, don’t you think?” Nate detected a hint of insinuation there.
“I’ll keep my distance, just the same.”
“The man’s burying his daughter today. Death rips people apart, but it can bring them together, too.”
A laugh erupted from Nate. Trapped within the confines of the car, it was a terrible sound. A father, husband, healer, and upstanding member of society didn’t make a noise like this. This choking gasp of scorn came from the darkest and deepest place inside him.
“Something funny?”
“My grandmother might not live out the day. We’re about to bury my high school girlfriend. And you want me to make nice with the man who killed my
family? Yeah, that strikes me as just about hysterical.”
The chief took his eyes off the road long enough to look Nate over. “It really does, doesn’t it?”
They traveled in silence the rest of the way to the Greystone Lake police station.
The wipers couldn’t match the deluge that fell from the seething sky. From the side window, Nate saw that the sewers were already overflowing. Torn leaves and branches accumulated along the curbs like detritus on a beach.
The chief pulled into his reserved space. This was as close to the station’s entrance as one could get, but every part of Nate not protected by his black raincoat was freshly soaked by the time he got inside.
The little station had been renovated since he was last here. There was wood laminate where there’d been linoleum. Light fixtures had been upgraded from fluorescents to the slightly warmer shade of LEDs. There were artificial plants, and an open plan had replaced rows of high-walled cubes.
Nate followed the chief through the reception and down a hallway. Apart from a single officer at the front desk, the place looked abandoned.
“In here,” the chief said.
It was an interrogation room.
“Sit,” the chief told him. “Be right with you.” The man closed the door, leaving Nate momentarily alone.
Nate didn’t like the small room. The chair was uncomfortable, and its seat was too low. The air was stale and the walls too close. This was all by design, of course. No one seated here was supposed to feel at ease. It irritated him how well it worked.
He wanted to talk to Meg. He needed to hear Livvy’s tiny voice. He needed them to help hold together this version of himself he’d constructed. But his phone’s display barely deigned to light.
When Chief Buck returned, he sat in the chair across from Nate and placed a cardboard storage box on the table between them.
“Do you have any objections to us recording this interview?” the chief asked.
Nate shook his head.
Chief Buck nodded to the mirrored glass and declared the date, time, and subject for the record. “Fourteen years ago, we interviewed you several times in connection to Lucy Bennett’s death.”
“In connection to her running away, actually.”
“At the time we believed she’d run away because—”
“Of the note she left her mother,” Nate finished. The note had shown up a few days after Lucy went missing. It’d been found under the Bennetts’ dining room table. One might suppose it’d been there all along and simply gone unnoticed in the chaos of Lucy’s disappearance. The letter itself had been vague and desperate and just what you’d expect from a teenage runaway. If you were inclined to believe Lucy was the kind of girl who’d flee her life, its few sentences would have confirmed the suspicion.
“Obviously, finding her body has forced us to reexamine the circumstances of her disappearance.”
“How do you explain the note?” Nate asked. Officially, the search for Lucy continued for weeks, but any urgency to the investigation had been sapped by the discovery of that letter. Nate wondered how much the chief now blamed himself for that.
“A ploy on the part of her killer, perhaps. A prank by children. A lot of people were in and out of the Bennetts’ house that week.”
“Surely you had the handwriting authenticated.”
“Why don’t you let me ask the questions, Nate.” The chief rubbed his eyes for some long moments. When he stopped and looked at Nate again, his face seemed freshly sharpened. He pulled six black notebooks out of the cardboard box and dropped them onto the table with a thud.
“These are Lucy Bennett’s notebooks. She wrote everything down. Everything.”
“They never found those,” Nate said, shaking his head. He and the others had worried about Lucy’s journals in the days following her disappearance. She was constantly scribbling in them. She never let even Nate read them. Everything might very well have been written in their pages. But she must have hidden them, because the journals never came up during the investigation, and Nate had searched for them himself.
“We only recently discovered them.”
“Really.” Nate didn’t believe it. They looked like the same kind of Moleskine notebooks Lucy used, but those were sold everywhere. The sheaves of cream-colored pages wedged between their black covers were worn, staggered like an old deck of cards. They clearly hadn’t been picked up at a bookstore yesterday, but Nate was sure this effect could be faked. The chief had anywhere from weeks to years to prepare for this conversation and ample time to construct useful props.
“They contain detailed accounts of your relationship with her and the crimes you committed at the time.”
“ ‘Crimes’?”
“Vandalism. Breaking and entering. Destruction of property. Criminal mischief. Arson.”
Nate laughed, and this time it was the laugh that he sometimes paired with his ready smile. Pure delight. Because only a great actor could be a good liar.
“It’s all in here, Dr. McHale.” The chief patted the stack of journals.
“If those are her journals and anything like that’s in there, they’re probably just notes for her novel. You know she wanted to be a writer.”
“The events in her account match the dates of fires and floods and other incidents of vandalism around town,” the chief said.
Having their Thunder Runs come to light was undesirable, but not catastrophic. They’d been minors, and the statute of limitations had run out for nearly all of their transgressions. The burning of Adam Decker’s house could cause them trouble, but this seemed unlikely.
“Nate?”
“Sorry, just trying to figure out what Lucy might have been working on. I mean, I guess if you’re talking about serious damage, like arson, it’d all have been public knowledge. If something in the Lake catches on fire, everyone’s going to know by the next day, way before they read it in the paper. Hell, in a town like this, someone gets into a fender bender while grabbing their morning coffee at the SmartMart, everybody’s talking about it by lunch time.”
“She’s not just mentioning incidents; she’s describing how they occurred and explaining why you perpetrated them. You targeted specific people due to personal vendettas and committed some serious property damage as revenge.”
“Vendettas? Come on, Chief. Like I said, Lucy wanted to be a writer. Maybe these were exercises for her.” Nate pretended to think it over. “It sort of reminds me of those found-footage movies, you know? Lucy loved those. Remember The Blair Witch Project? I realize the whole genre’s pretty played out now, but there were a couple months when people thought that movie was real. Lucy loved that kind of thrill. That something that should be totally unbelievable could be rendered in a form that made it convincing. It just requires a little suspension of disbelief. Because the thing is, people want to believe the unbelievable. Putting it together like a book, making it look like a real-life journal of a real-life teenage girl using actual people and genuine events. It’s an interesting angle, if you think about it. The author as protagonist adds to the mystique.”
The chief’s face was as blank as an untouched page. “What?”
“It’s pretty meta, especially for back then.”
“You’re saying these notebooks are some kind of creative writing project?”
“Lucy was very private about her writing. I’m sure people told you that. But what’s the alternative? That I ran around town wreaking mayhem? A one-man natural disaster?” He made it sound offhand. A throwaway line.
“Not alone, as you know. You carried this vandalism out with the help of your associates, John Vanhouten, Owen Liffey, and Thomas Buck.”
Nate thought he’d put on a good act of being unflustered, but when the chief listed his friends’ names he realized how much tension he’d been carrying in his shoulders. The chief had misstepped and in such an obvious way that it was almost disappointing.
“You all have a lot to answer for.”
�
�So do you,” Nate said. For his whole life, he’d held an image of Tom’s dad as the archetype of the perfect cop. Objective, just, tough, smart, relentless. But only human after all.
“Are those really Lucy’s journals?” Nate now thought they probably were. The idea of this tugged at him like a fish hooked on a line, though not for the reasons the chief might guess. Nate wanted to turn their pages and trace their words and navigate the channels of Lucy’s mind as inscribed by ink onto paper. If they were real, these pages were the most tangible things that survived of her.
“I said they were, didn’t I?”
“You did.” Nate massaged his temple. He was tired, but he’d only just begun.
The chief’s silence and the set of his mouth suggested that he knew something had changed in the dynamics of their interview, but couldn’t yet tell what.
“I’ve got to change my clothes,” Nate said, getting up from the chair. There were a couple ways to play this, but this feint seemed like the best tactic. This would divert them from the path the chief had chartered and take them into fresh territory, where all sorts of interesting things might be revealed.
“We’re not done here.”
“Yeah, we are. I haven’t been read my rights so I’m not under arrest. I can leave whenever I want. This interview isn’t even really being recorded, is it?” He turned to the room’s one-way mirror and knew there was no one behind it.
“I have more questions for you.” The chief grabbed his arm to restrain him, and this was a mistake.
The man’s rough grip propelled Nate to the edge of very dangerous country. For a moment, he faltered. For a moment, he forgot the person he’d assembled for the world to see. He tore the man’s arm away from him with a speed and strength that sent the startled police chief heavily back into his seat.
“No. I have a question for you.” There was a hint of the Storm King in Nate’s voice. A threat of thunder beyond the mountains. He leaned against the table, looming over the seated lawman. He was angry, and he’d forgotten how good this felt. “What else did you hide?”
The Storm King: A Novel Page 14