Thirteen
Her jade kimono wrap and an unceasing ache in his core ensured that Nate never fully accepted the goodbye note attributed to Lucy. For myriad reasons, he couldn’t believe that she’d run away.
Even after the search wound down, Nate circled the shore for weeks. He walked the headlands, paced the stony beaches, and paddled the boundaries of Blind Down Island and the unnamed outcroppings that dotted the colorless waters. The lake returns what it takes, but of Lucy there was no sign.
Each fruitless day wound him tighter. He dissected and analyzed his every memory of graduation. He played these forward and backward and in every conceivable sequence looking for something that made sense. He looped and repeated and obsessed upon every frame of that night until the memories themselves were buried under the thousand revisions and transcription errors of remembering. In the end, all he knew was that his fight with Adam had scared Lucy. Scared her enough to run from the glade to the Night Ship.
And then—
He didn’t know.
Nate tried to get the police and his friends to help, to investigate, to care, but after that note appeared they and the rest of the Lake bolted for the easy answer that it offered. Dismissing Lucy as a runaway was preferable to the alternative. They should have known better: Greystone Lake was as beautiful as any town, but the Night Ship and its history should have reminded them of how terrible the truth could be.
As that summer ripened, paranoia blossomed in Nate. It was as if everyone else in town had reached some unspoken agreement to turn the page on this chapter of the Lake’s story. He recognized that he was becoming increasingly obsessed. He saw the way people looked at him. If Lucy had indeed run away, then he surely bore some responsibility. If something worse had happened to her, then he was the most obvious culprit. His shaving and showering became erratic. Meals were forgotten and sleep became a stranger. Grams’s expressions lunged from disquiet to pure alarm in a way he hadn’t seen since the months that followed the car accident. Even Tom began to avoid him.
Week by week, strands of anger knotted like a cocoon around him. One morning, one of the Daybreakers said the wrong thing to him while he patrolled the shore. His vision went black streaked with red, and then he was bound to a hospital bed. The man who’d crossed him was also in the hospital, though not in its psych wing.
When he returned to himself, they sent him back to his old therapist, who gave him daily sessions and prescribed a course of medication. He was a few weeks shy of eighteen, a minor with curtailed rights under the close supervision of medical professionals, the police, and everyone else around him. The pills dulled him into a state that he could barely muster the energy to abhor, but they gave him the distance to think. From this vantage, Nate understood that he’d never find Lucy, yet would see her in the Lake’s every buckled curbstone and hear her in each gust that skimmed its pewter waters. Lucy was gone, but Nate was alive. He would continue to live, but only if he left this place.
So he told his psychiatrist and Grams what they wanted to hear. He went through the five stages of grief at a plausible pace. He took his pills like a model patient. He made a tearful apology to the dawn swimmer he’d sent to the ER—a performance convincing enough that the man dropped his crutches and braced his casted arm around Nate to pull him into a cathartic hug. Weeping into the guy’s shoulder, Nate watched the glances of relief exchanged between Grams and his doctor as they stood nearby.
With a promise to continue therapy in New York, Nate made it to Columbia a few weeks into the fall term. A challenging double major in biochemistry and English required a great deal of his time and rigor—a laudable use of his talents and energies, his doctors all agreed. However, his extracurricular regimen wasn’t the kind a therapist or anyone else would have approved of. While he buried himself in coursework during the week, he used the weekends to vent heat from the furnace that seethed inside him. Thunder Runs had once served this purpose, but abandoning them was the last promise Nate had made Lucy. There were other ways.
The city was gentler than its myths led him to expect. He’d hoped for muggers on every street corner and tempers with a hair trigger. The world had softened, but he had not. Some Saturdays he’d work his way through blocks of bars before finding someone too drunk to shrug off his provocations.
Brawling exorcised his rage, because the person Nate most sought to punish was himself. He didn’t know what had happened to Lucy, but he was certain that he bore a measure of responsibility for it. If he hadn’t scared her the night of graduation. If he hadn’t punctuated their time together with such extremes of fury and love. If he’d never dated her in the first place. Any one of a thousand untraveled pasts would have led to a present where Lucy was safe.
Each black eye and split lip helped him pay for this. With the number of injuries he sported in class, his professors must have thought him singularly clumsy.
As with the loss of his family, the wound of Lucy’s absence didn’t heal, but nerve by nerve it numbed. One winter, he met Meg, a 2L at the law school. There’d been other women, but not like her. Like Lucy, Meg was sharp and tough, and Nate could have filled a book trying to describe how kind, gentle, and funny she was. But those were just words. The heart of his love for her was a sensation that hummed from his center and did not falter.
Nate’s passion for Lucy had been real and intense and hungry, but with the distance of time, he began to understand that this was not the kind of love that tended to endure. It had been an unsustainable passion.
Like Nate’s rage, it couldn’t burn forever.
He assembled a new man. One who could live within the rules of this world. A man his parents and grandmother would be proud of. A man who deserved the love of someone like Meg. Nate hadn’t thought those askew equations inside him could ever be balanced, but somehow, variable by variable, they were. Or at least they seemed to be. Anger. Pain. Revenge. Guilt. These belonged to another life. These belonged to another Nate.
He finished his bachelor’s degree early and went right into medical school. There were years of happiness. There was professional success. There was Livvy.
Then they found Lucy’s remains in the headlands.
Nate opened the side door to the church, and a pulse of wind extinguished a cluster of nearby candles.
The church was neo-Gothic with high and narrow stained glass windows, lifeless in the gray day. The building had lost electricity, and promontories of candles assembled around the altar and along the aisles were its only illumination. Islands of light in drifts of shadow.
The congregation was larger than Nate would have guessed from the number of cars outside. Over half the church’s pews were occupied with figures cloaked in black.
Nate spotted Tom seated in one of the rearmost pews.
There was some anonymity in the darkness of the place, but Nate still attracted attention as he walked the side aisle. As faces turned to him, some became strangely lurid in the candlelight. He avoided eye contact, but he recognized former teachers, old friends, and members of Lucy’s extended family. By the time he reached the back of the church, the crowd’s muttering competed with the drumming of rain against the roof and windows.
Nate sat next to Tom, shook out his dripping umbrella, and removed his streaming coat. There was movement in the vestibule behind him. He got his first glimpse of the black box where what remained of Lucy would forevermore reside.
Seeing the casket, Nate’s thoughts flew to Grams. She was going to die, he realized. They would put what was left of her in a box just like this one. If not today then tomorrow or next week or next year. One by one the universe would pick them all off. Because the one certainty in life is that no one survives it.
While he contemplated the casket, Nate became aware of eyes searing into the side of his head. A trio of mismatched teenagers stared at him from across the aisle. There was a short chubby kid, a wan towheaded boy, and a pierced goth girl. A punch line waiting to happen.
They s
tared at Nate with their greasy faces. He recognized the way their eyes burned with the unalloyed revulsion of children. One glance and he knew them just as they knew him.
“That’s them.” Nate nudged Tom. “The vandals.” If the vandals’ mayhem had been somehow triggered by the discovery of Lucy’s remains, then it made sense that they’d be at her funeral.
“Evidence?”
“Look at them.”
“Profiling.”
Nate glared at the pew of teenagers. These were the children who’d landed Grams at the threshold of death.
He stared back at them, his gaze scorching and venom pouring from the points of his smile. He bore down on each of them until they looked away. It didn’t take long.
“If it’s them, they might know what happened to Maura Jeffers last night. Pete Corso, too. They’re all in the same crew.” No matter Tom’s awful morning, he was still a police officer in a town where a child was dead and another was missing. Nate thought he could use this as a lever to reveal answers to the questions that mattered to him.
“Maura was the girl who washed up on the shore,” Nate added, when Tom didn’t respond. “And Pete’s the boy who’s missing.”
“Yeah, I know who they are, Nate.”
“So do something, Deputy.”
Tom took out his phone and pretended to check his messages while he took photos of the teenagers.
The girl wore a large flower in her hair, incongruous with her vampire styling. A dahlia, either orange or red—it was hard to tell in the candlelight. Both boys had similar blooms slipped through the buttonholes of their shirts.
“What’s with the flowers?”
“Lucy had flowers in her hair the last time anyone saw her.”
“They were white. Calla lilies.”
“The stories the kids tell make it a dahlia. They leave them at the barricade now,” Tom said.
“What?”
“The way we used to leave glow sticks. Now they leave flowers, too.”
Nate loathed the idea that she’d become one of their stories.
“She hated dahlias.” This wasn’t true, but he said it anyway.
The power outage had turned the church’s organ into so many inert pipes, so the cantor struck up a hymn a capella. The congregation rose.
The family began their procession. With linked arms, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett led the way.
Nate had last seen Mr. Bennett in court, during his criminal trial. He’d seemed tall and powerful back then. Now he was shrunken and gray and overweight. A man with too-long hair, wearing a too-tight suit jacket. He gave no outward sign of being a destroyer of worlds.
The years had left their marks on Mrs. Bennett as well. Nate remembered her being as slim as a dancer, but she’d become stout. Her once fiery hair was mostly extinguished by strands of white.
Though it was impossible to imagine them any older than they’d been, Nate’s own parents would be about the same age as the Bennetts. He wondered if his mom would have let herself go gray or if his father might have developed a prosperous paunch. Nate didn’t have to wonder what his little brother would look like. He caught a glimpse of Gabe every time he saw his own reflection.
Nate savored the pain that came with working at these scabs, but he wasn’t able to indulge them for long.
The girl captured his attention as soon as he got a good look at her. When she’d poured him a pint at the Union yesterday, she told him her name was TJ. Tara Jane Bennett. Lucy’s younger sister. The last time Nate saw her she’d just finished kindergarten. Back then, she’d had the same auburn hair as Lucy. With that hair, Nate might have recognized her, but she’d dyed it black. Now that he understood who she was, looking at her was like seeing Lucy through a tinted window into an alternate dimension.
Compared to forgiving Mr. Bennett for killing her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, it would have been a small thing for Grams to offer a job to Tara. Why no one had thought to tell Nate that the girl worked there was a separate question. Another secret to add to the tally.
Tara’s brother, James, walked next to her. He still carried his mother’s coloring; the light from the scattered candles flared across his hair. The twins had been five when Lucy disappeared, which put them at around nineteen now. James was by far the tallest of the quartet making their way down the aisle. In the flickering light, his face was all planes and shadows.
As James passed, he turned to the trio of mismatched teens. The young man exchanged a nod with them, and things began to make sense.
James’s older sister’s body discovered. Knowledge of her friends and enemies, one of whom was probably her murderer. Violence, destruction, rage. This was a ballad of revenge—a tune Nate knew by heart.
“It’s him,” Nate whispered to Tom. “James Bennett. He’s the one behind the attacks. The fire at the Union. Loki. Everything.”
He was pleased to see a slash of anger cross his friend’s features.
“Dad gave him a job at the station one summer while he was in high school. He still comes around every once in a while if we need another set of hands.”
Nate had been in the chief’s office for fewer than thirty minutes before discovering secrets about that long-ago graduation night. What might James have found over the course of an entire summer?
“Do you know him?”
“Not really. I think he works at one of the places on the Wharf now.”
By now James had reached the front of the church. He waited for his sister to take her seat.
A phalanx of black-clad men rolled Lucy’s casket down the aisle. Its sides were polished to incredible reflection. Looking at it was like gazing into one of the lake’s death-still inlets. The candlelight glossed its surface, making it strangely luminescent in the dark space. A single handprint marred its side.
Nate had long been a creature of focus. If he knew one thing, it was what he wanted. But the Lake had robbed him of this certainty. He had to see Grams through her injuries. He had to return to New York to be a good husband to his wife and a good father to his daughter. He had to make sure these vandals meant him, his family, and his friends no further harm. He had to uncover what these teens thought they knew. He had to find out who killed Lucy.
But there was no way he could do all of this at once.
As her casket passed, Nate’s reflection stared back from its stygian wood. He forced himself to be present for this. Every single piece of him. He was here, and so were her lovelorn bones, and nothing else mattered. They were separated by layers of lacquer, inches of seasoned oak, and too many mistakes to count.
The pallbearers arranged the casket in front of the altar. The cantor finished the hymn, and the congregation sat. The priest spoke. Readings were given. There was no eulogy, and for this Nate was grateful. Funerals like this aren’t for the dead; they’re for the living. The half-stifled sobs from around the church made that much clear. Stray cousins and distant acquaintances mourned this chip taken from their own illusions of immortality. Their grief was lavish, but every tear they shed was spent on themselves.
For Nate, no words spoken by these people about Lucy could have been sufficient. He also couldn’t see past the fact that Lucy’s murderer was statistically likely to be among these mourners. These teary-eyed friends, family, and neighbors.
Though Adam Decker wasn’t in the pews. At six-five he’d be impossible to miss. The file in the chief’s closet said that Adam’s alibi for that night hadn’t held up to scrutiny. If he’d been lying about that, he could be lying about anything.
He raped her then he killed her.
The cantor broke into the recessional hymn “Amazing Grace,” which everyone knew. Voices rose and swelled together in the flickering church.
Tears filled Nate’s eyes as he realized that the funeral was ending. It was over.
He tried not to blink, but this didn’t keep his eyes from running. Her lips on a cold night. Her hair tickling his bare chest. A descent into the freezing lake, and the bur
n in his lungs as he clawed farther and farther from the light.
The congregation filed out. There was a grip on his forearm. Tom. Nate looked at his friend through his swimming eyes and was so glad not to be here alone. He’d contemplated staging a confrontation with one of the vandals, but now a quick exit was necessary. People stared at him as he and Tom worked their way down the side aisle. Lucy’s burial would take place later in the week on account of Medea.
He put on his coat and wiped at his eyes as Tom pulled him toward the door. The winds burst through the entryway, dousing ranges of candles. Someone clutched his shoulder from behind.
“I didn’t know if you’d come,” Mr. Bennett said. His voice was splintered like weather-beaten wood.
Nate couldn’t speak or breathe. He could only stare.
“I heard about your grandmother. I’m so sorry. She’s a good woman. A tough woman. If anyone can see their way through it, then it’s her.”
Here was the personification of so much of Nate’s pain, and he couldn’t think of anything to say to him. He felt as if he was floating three feet above his own body.
“I was hoping you’d be here. I thought, if one good thing can come from all this”—he gestured to the cavern of the church—“then it’d be to see you again.”
Nate forced himself to inhale.
“I need to offer amends to those I’ve hurt. And no one’s been more hurt than you.”
“ ‘Amends.’ ”
“There’s nothing I can do to replace what I took from you. I know that. I don’t expect your forgiveness. I don’t deserve it. I just wanted to tell you to your face that I’m sorry. I’m so incredibly sorry for taking your mother and father and brother away from you.”
Nate felt Tom’s gaze drill into the back of his head. Nate understood that he was supposed to say something here. He knew that much, but anything more than that escaped him.
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