Maybe it’s all part of the trick.
Emma is still peeing, it’s the pee that goes on forever, when Winnie steps out of the woods, making her way to the beach.
“You’re late,” Emma’s dad calls.
Winnie approaches the canoe but keeps her head down, as if she’s studying the ground.
In a low voice, she asks about the doll.
“I got it. It’s in the moose,” Emma’s dad tells her.
The betrayal takes Emma’s breath away. How could her father have taken Danner, how could he and Winnie be doing this terrible, unspeakable thing?
Winnie nods, unties the rope from the tree, and pushes the canoe out, then climbs in the front. Emma’s dad gets in the back, behind Francis. They each pick up an oar and begin to row.
Emma rises, pulls up her shorts, waits for them to get a ways out, then slips into the water silently, determined to stop them, to do whatever it takes.
Chapter 76
PUSHING OFF IS EASIER than he thought it would be. And the canoe stays upright. There’s room enough for Winnie up front, and Henry tucked in back, behind the moose, which reeks of gasoline. They row in silence toward the middle of the lake, going right to the spot where he swam out with Suz, and let her sink, clothing full of rocks. Where she went under and was never seen again. He remembers how he treaded water there, watching her sink, following the white ghost of her hair down, down, down until it was a tiny speck, like the reflection of a star.
His paddle slices the water. Henry looks at the ripples it leaves, thinks he sees a face underneath. Suz looking back at him, her face framed in starlight.
He believes that somehow, Suz has become the lake. Her spirit is all around them, lapping at the sides of the canoe, teasing, taunting, telling them she’s got them right where she wants them.
“I thought you were going to burn the clothes and wig,” he says to Winnie. If he peers around the left side of the moose, he can see her back. The blond wig glowing like a beacon. He closes his eyes. Listens to the sounds the water makes.
“And where’s the journal? I thought you were going to put it in the moose.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Winnie?”
She doesn’t respond. Just keeps on paddling, a little harder now.
Henry feels his throat constricting around the gasoline fumes. He glances back toward shore. It’s a long way. He’s not sure he’ll make it. Too much of a swim for a man who is so afraid of water. He wishes he had worn a life jacket. Or never let Winnie talk him into this to begin with.
He thinks he sees something in the water. A duck or a loon maybe. Moving slowly toward them.
Suz, he thinks, some irrational part of his brain taking over. It’s Suz.
He makes himself look away, paddling harder, faster, his eyes fixed on the hind legs of the moose, amputated at the knees. He thinks he hears a muffled moan from inside it.
A muffled voice. No, voices. Definite voices.
The static noise.
But they’re not coming from the moose. There are voices calling from shore, from the beach behind them.
Henry’s paddle cuts into the water. He turns and looks back toward the beach. It’s still coming at them, the thing in the water.
And what Henry thinks of now is not a loon, or a duck, or even Suz. What he imagines is the frogs left in the aquarium—a tank full of pale, bloated bodies. Somehow, in his mind, it’s those frogs who are chasing him—swollen, stinking, and vengeful.
Metamorphosis, babycakes.
There, beyond the frogs, back on the beach, are two figures, jumping up and down, flapping their arms, calling out. They look like puppets: far away and unreal. A woman with blond hair in flowing clothes. And a man waving a flashlight through the air.
The blond woman looks like Winnie, which is all wrong—Winnie is in front of him, rowing. The man, Henry thinks, might be Bill Lunde.
They’re calling his name desperately.
And they’re saying something else.
Something about Suz.
“It’s Suz,” they’re yelling.
But they’ve got it wrong—this is just Winnie dressed as Suz. Even though she said she was going to burn the clothes and wig. Just Winnie.
“Winnie?”
Henry peeks around the moose at Winnie, who has turned to face him, smiling. Only now, she looks straight at him so that he can see her face, and he realizes this is not Winnie at all.
“Oh my god,” he stammers.
It can’t be. It isn’t.
But some part of him knows the truth.
“Surprised?” she asks. “You haven’t seen anything yet, babycakes. I’ve saved the best for last.”
Chapter 77
THERE WAS A LOUD rapping at the cabin door, and Winnie screamed against the duct tape over her mouth, thrashed against the ropes so that her chair rocked on the floor. Bill Lunde burst in. Winnie was almost satisfied to see Bill looking shocked for once, seemingly unsure of the next move. He froze for two or three seconds, strode over to Winnie, pulled the duct tape from her mouth.
“Suz,” she gasped. “Suz is here! She looks totally different, but it’s her. She’s here! She’s alive!”
“I know,” Bill said. “But where is she now?”
“Out on the lake with Henry. Oh my god, what’s she going to do to Henry?”
“I followed Henry from his house. I must have missed the turnoff for the lake. I just assumed he was coming here,” Bill explained as he cut Winnie loose. He pulled her up from the chair, out the door and toward his truck. “Come on!” he told her.
“No!” Winnie said. “It’s faster if we go on foot. We’ll get there in half the time. There’s a path just over here.”
She led the way, going fast at first, slapping branches out of the way. Soon she was hesitating, losing sight of the trail. Bill had a flashlight, but everything was so overgrown it was impossible to make out a path.
“Goddamnit,” she hissed. “It’s been ten years since I’ve come down here at night.”
She remembered their last march down to the water in the dark, Suz in the lead. Winnie was pressing her gun into Spencer’s back, but, in between barked commands, they were laughing. It was a joke. Nothing bad was going to happen. It was just Suz kicking things up a notch, giving them a night to remember.
Winnie and Bill scrambled and stumbled through the dense undergrowth.
“We’ll be too late!” Winnie said, her voice high and squeaky.
Bill found the path.
“This way,” he said.
A flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, he led them down through the woods to the beach. The trees thinned and the packed dirt under their feet turned to sand. Henry’s truck was there, pulled up to the edge of the water, tailgate down. The lake lay in front of them—not the shimmering quicksilver water Winnie remembered from that summer, but something black and bottomless that gave no reflection, just absorbed the light of the stars, swallowed it down deep.
And they were too late.
Henry and Suz were out in the middle of the lake, just reaching the place where they’d watched him let her go ten years before, her clothing stuffed full of rocks.
There was nothing to do but start screaming.
“It’s Suz!” Winnie called, her voice cracking, near hysteria.
Chapter 78
WHEN TESS WAKES UP, the first thing she thinks is that she never finished her story for Claire. She never got the chance to say how things ended. How they watched Henry drag Suz, snarling and twisting, into the lake that night and how, when he let go of her, he started to cry.
“What, aren’t you going to drown me?” she said, treading water as he swam away, back toward shore. “What’s the matter, Henry? Did you really believe I was pregnant? No such luck, babycakes. Poor, poor Henry. In love with the wrong girl. But it’s okay. We’ve gone beyond that, haven’t we? We’ve dismantled relationships. Love and sex. We’ve moved above it. Beyond it. Don’t you s
ee? We can leave here now and go off and lead our pathetic little lives changing diapers and being married to the wrong person, but we’ll always have this summer to remember. To come back to. Part of us will always be here.”
And that’s when Tess threw the rock. She’d picked it up when Suz and Henry were struggling for the gun and had been holding it tightly in her hand. She hadn’t intended to throw it. It wasn’t a premeditated act, as they say in all those television courtroom dramas. She felt as if she was throwing the rock straight into the future that Suz was describing; that the future was this horrible, senseless world encased in a delicate glass globe and all she wanted was to shatter it before it ever had a chance of coming to be.
The rock was the size of a grapefruit and smooth. It flew from her hand like a perfect pitch in the final inning, right into the strike zone. She never knew she had such a good aim.
Tess watched in what felt like slow motion as it sailed out over the water and caught Suz on the left temple. There was a loud cracking sound, then Suz slipped under, silently.
Tess stood frozen, arm extended, fingers open, as if she was expecting the rock to come back.
Winnie screamed. Spencer said, “Jesus!”
Henry, who had reached the beach by then, ran back into the water and dove in. It took him several long minutes to find her and when he did, he grabbed her, swam back, and carried her in his arms to the beach where he laid her down in the sand. Her face was covered in blood from the deep gash on her temple.
“I don’t think she’s breathing,” Henry said.
“Do something!” Winnie wailed.
“Does anyone know CPR?” Spencer asked.
Henry crouched down, pounded Suz on the chest, and gave her three quick breaths on the mouth. It didn’t look quite right to Tess, but what did she know? Just what she’d seen in movies. Henry did it again—pound-breathe-breathe-breathe, pound-breathe-breathe-breathe—and again for what seemed like a long time. Tess looked on expectantly, waiting for the part where Suz’s chest would convulse, and she would puke up lake water, look around, dazed, maybe even say, “What happened?” But the minutes passed and Suz lay limp and pale in the moonlight. Henry felt both wrists for a pulse.
“I think she’s dead,” he pronounced. He said it so calmly, so matter-of-factly that Tess didn’t believe he could possibly be serious.
Winnie wailed. Spencer wrapped his arms around her, and held her tight while she fought against him. Spencer, who should have been gone, who should have taken off running after the shot was fired, but for some reason hadn’t.
“We have to get help,” Tess said. She was sure that if she could just get to a phone, someone would come, some miracle man with medicine, bandages, and electric paddles would bring Suz back to them and they’d all laugh later about what a close call it had been. They’d say Suz had dismantled death.
Tess started walking back toward the path. She would go to the cabin, get in the van, and go to the store. There was a phone there. She’d dial 911. Tell them there’d been an accident.
“Tess,” Henry was holding her arm, gripping it so tightly she’d be black and blue for a week, pulling her back to the beach. “Stop. We have to think this through.” His breath was fiery and tequila scented. He looked at her as if she was a stranger.
“You killed her!” Winnie screamed, and Spencer held tight to her, whispered Shhh into her hair as if she was a child who’d just woken up from a terrible nightmare.
“I…,” Tess began, “I didn’t mean to.”
This was not happening. It could not be happening. Her arm was hurting where Henry’s hand clenched it, and she tried to break away.
“I didn’t mean it,” Tess said again quietly. She didn’t know who she was talking to.
“This is totally fucked up,” Spencer said.
“Everyone just shut up and let me think!” Henry barked. He let go of Tess and went to sit on the big flat rock in the center of the beach. The sacrificial stone, Suz always called it. Tess stood over Suz’s body, watching for a sign of life, some inkling that Henry had been wrong. She kneeled down in the sand, put her ear against Suz’s chest, listening for a heartbeat. All she heard was Spencer behind her, trying to get his lighter to work, flicking it with his thumb over and over without getting a spark. Tess moved her head up, put her cheek above Suz’s mouth, feeling for breath. Suz’s lips were cold, bluish in the moonlight.
“The way I see it, we have two choices,” Henry said at last, sounding altogether too sober. “We can go call the police and explain what happened. In this scenario, Tess would probably go to jail and maybe the rest of us too. Once they started their investigation and found out about some of the stuff we’ve done, we’d all be in some pretty deep shit. The Compassionate Dismantlers would be put under a microscope and I don’t think any of us want that. Suz wouldn’t have wanted that.
“Choice number two is that we put her in the lake. We weight her down and swim her out to the middle.”
“We can’t just sink her in the lake!” Winnie shrieked. “People will ask where she went. You can’t just make someone disappear like that! We can’t do that to her!”
“No one will come looking,” Henry said. “Shit, all she’s got is that one aunt who couldn’t even bother coming to graduation. It’s not like Suz kept in touch with anyone. We’re the only family she’s got. If anyone ever asks, we say she took off hitchhiking to California. Besides, I think this is what she would want. Think of how much she loves this place. Now she’ll be a part of it forever.”
Henry began picking up stones from the beach, filling Suz’s clothes with them, and since no one stopped him, he continued.
“Do you have to do that?” Winnie asked, sobbing.
“We’ve got to weight her down. So she won’t float.”
Tess fell to her knees then, twisting her right hand with her left, feeling the sand and grit the rock had left on her palm.
Slowly, Henry carried Suz into the water, then swam on his back, her body resting on his chest and belly, out to the middle of the lake. They looked like two lovers doing the backstroke on a moonlit night. Suz’s head bobbed on Henry’s shoulder. It looked to Tess, squinting out at them, as if when Henry let Suz go, she went down smiling.
THE FIRST THING TESS thinks of when she wakes up is the story she never finished. The next thing she thinks is that she smells gasoline. And she can’t breathe. Slowly it dawns on her that her mouth is taped closed. Arms and legs tied. It’s dark. She’s wrapped up tight in some sort of shroudlike sheet. And she’s on the water. Floating. Bobbing up and down in some kind of boat. She’s just cargo.
She remembers drinking the wine Claire gave her. And then Suz stepped into the room. Or someone dressed as Suz.
She has a very fuzzy memory of waking up again in a different room, hearing voices. Or one voice. The voice getting louder.
“She’s waking up,” it had said. Tess had forced her eyes open and saw Suz leaning down with a needle, felt a stinging in her arm.
Tess hears voices again now. They are muffled but recognizable. It’s Henry and a woman. What are they saying? Something about dismantling love? But no, that was a conversation years ago. A conversation with Suz.
Tess starts to scream against the tape, but it only comes out as a sad little moan. And she thinks of that stupid riddle the moose told Spencer all those years ago. The riddle her daughter just re-told her. You’re in a cement room with no windows or door. All you have is a table and mirror. How do you get out?
She wonders where her table and mirror are. How she’s going to make a hole to crawl through.
Chapter 79
“SUZ?” HE’S SQUINTING AT her, not quite believing. This isn’t the Suz he remembers: the one in the photos, the one Winnie has been running all over town dressed as. Her face is different, cheekbones more pronounced, nose slightly smaller.
“The new and improved, babycakes!” she says.
And yes, it is her. He’d know that voice anywhere, li
lting, teasing.
“But I don’t…I mean, I can’t…,” he stammers.
She laughs. It’s that throaty, seductive Suz laugh he’s remembered each night in his dreams. His nightmares.
“My greatest accomplishment—I dismantled myself. Let Suz Pierce die that night and started over. It’s amazing what a little cosmetic surgery can do, isn’t it? Colored contacts, some hair dye, capped teeth.”
“How?” Henry gasps. “You were dead.”
She shakes her head. “No, Henry. Just unconscious. A little sluggish from the Vicodin Tess dumped in my drink. Mix that shit with booze and it’s pretty much roll over and play dead—slows your heart and breathing way the fuck down. I came to as I was sinking, and started swimming underwater, pulling these fucking rocks out of my clothes—nice touch, Henry—as I went. When I couldn’t hold my breath another second, I surfaced and was clear on the other side of the lake, away from you idiots.”
Henry stares at her in disbelief, remembering how he had searched for a pulse on her wrist, her neck. Her skin was damp and cold. Frog skin. Her chest did not rise and fall.
“I thought I was all done with this place, but a couple weeks back, I got this postcard. My cousin Nancy forwarded it to me from my aunt’s. She called me a week later to tell me about Spencer. Icing on the fucking cake, right?”
“You didn’t send the postcards?” Henry asks.
Suz shakes her head.
“Well, who did?” he asks.
She shrugs. “You got me, babycakes. I thought maybe it was you. But it doesn’t matter now. The way I see it, whoever sent them did me a favor. They gave me the perfect opportunity to come back for one final act of dismantling.”
Henry’s head is spinning. He’s trying to focus on her words, to connect the dots to see the full picture at last.
“You left the notes for Winnie in her journal. Gave her the clothes and wig. You wanted us all to think it was her.”
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