She nods. “Now you’re catching on. And playing Claire Novak was just too much fun.”
“Who?” Henry asks.
“The woman your wife’s been having an affair with. Or didn’t you know?” She laughs.
Henry remembers the conversation he overheard on the phone: Tess saying, “I’ll do it,” and a woman with an accent answering, “I knew you would.” It was Suz.
Of course she’d target Tess. Tess would have been the first person she went after.
But where is Tess?
Frantic voices float across the lake. It’s Suz!
“Care to do the honors?” Suz asks, pulling a book of matches from her pocket, holding it out to him. He shakes his head.
“Suit yourself,” she says. “Maybe you’re still too spooked after that fire burned down poor Tess’s studio. A terrible thing, wasn’t it? Funny how much damage a single candle and a few cans of turpentine can do.” She strikes a match, her face glowing like an orange demon behind it, eyes glistening as she holds the match to the antlers of the gas-soaked wooden moose.
“It was you,” Henry said, deflated.
The flames jump over the moose’s ears, down his head and neck.
Suz stands, perching at the bow of the canoe, says, “Henry, you poor fool, it’s always been me,” then dives into the water, smooth and graceful, as if she and the lake are one.
Chapter 80
EMMA’S MOVING FAST THROUGH the water, her cadence perfect. She’s almost to them, though she doesn’t know what she’ll do when she gets there.
She knows only that she has to save Danner and Francis.
Back on the shore, a man and woman are screaming something about Suz.
It’s Suz!
What is?
Maybe Daddy and Winnie know.
Emma remembers the photo of the four of them: her parents young and in love; the girl giving the finger; the other, dark-haired girl holding the gun. The Compassionate Dismantlers.
Emma wishes she could loop back in time to the morning she and Mel searched her dad’s studio. She’d put that photo back in the toolbox with the heavy black journal, lock it all up tight. Tell Mel to forget all about Operation Reunite.
Some things are better left alone.
Emma’s almost to the canoe when Winnie rises, lights a match, holds it to her face.
But this is all wrong. The woman in the boat doesn’t look like Winnie. Not now that her face is lit up.
Emma’s skin prickles.
They’ll burn.
The match hits Francis’s antlers, and the flames race over his head, following a trail down his great neck, over his shoulders, spreading across his wide back.
Winnie (or the person dressed up like Winnie) dives from the front of the canoe, making the whole thing rock; Francis the moose sways, dancing in the flames. Emma’s father clings to the sides, then lowers himself carefully into the water, like a stiff old man, one leg at a time. Her father, who never swims, who is petrified of bathtubs even, is soon kicking, thrashing his arms in a blind panic. He’s like a man who’s never learned to swim.
“Emma?” her dad says, then, just as she’s about to answer—to say, Yes, Daddy, it’s me—he goes under.
Chapter 81
WHEN SUZ DIVES OFF the front, it makes the canoe rock, nearly tipping. Henry drops the paddle, grips both sides of the canoe in a desperate attempt to stay upright.
What are his options? Swim or be burned alive.
He feels the heat as the moose’s head is engulfed in flames. The smoke blows back, hitting him like a wall, choking him, making his eyes burn. Slowly, carefully, he lifts himself out the canoe and slips into the inky water.
The panic he feels is incredible. He’s fighting with the water, flailing uselessly, exhausting himself. Then, he sees her.
There, just in front of him, is his daughter, exactly as she appears in his dreams. Emma, his Emma, is sinking down, her hair and clothing full of pondweed—a little girl playing dress up, with a necklace, boa, and tiara of slimy green stems, brown algae-covered leaves.
“Emma,” he calls, the word a desperate sigh.
He holds his breath and goes after her.
He swims blindly down, reaching out with his hands, not seeing anything.
Down, down, down he swims, sure he’ll touch bottom at any minute. He’s holding his breath, but his eyes are open. He sees his own arms, glowing and pale, moving in front of him; disembodied, creatures all their own.
Hands are grabbing the back of his shirt. He’s being pulled up.
No! he wants to scream. My little girl is down here!
He struggles against the hands, but he needs a breath, just one sucking gulp of precious air, then he can go under again.
He fights his way to the top, his rescuer still holding tight to his shirt. He surfaces, gasping for air, and hears Emma’s voice.
“Daddy!”
He turns, sees that it’s Emma clutching his shirt.
“But you went under,” he says, coughing and sputtering, reaching out to take her in his shaking arms.
“I thought you were drowning,” she says, gasping herself.
No. It was you. You were drowning.
He holds her against him, both of them treading water and shivering. Emma’s in shorts and a T-shirt. No flowing clothing. No long fronds of pondweed draped around her neck and woven through her hair.
Is it possible, Henry wonders, that your fears can take on a life of their own? Is this what ghosts are—things worried into existence, frantic energy manifesting itself in an almost physical way?
Suz, like a buoyant otter, is swimming playful circles around Henry and Emma.
“Thought we lost you there,” Suz says. “What happened, Henry? You used to be a great swimmer. Pretty sad. Having to be rescued by a little girl.”
Behind them the moose crackles and snaps as the flames spread.
But beyond the noise of the fire, there is another sound, a low howl, as if the moose is crying out in pain.
It’s almost human—buzzing and frantic: the static noise.
Treading water, Henry remembers the weight and heft of the Danner doll. The way she was laid out in his studio, waiting for him like some kind of sacrifice.
“Daddy!” Emma cries, nearly to him now. “You’ve got to put out Francis! Hurry! You’ve got to save Danner.”
Another humming groan from inside the moose.
Tess was the one who threw the rock that night. The one who’d drugged Suz’s drink. It was Henry who stuffed her clothing full of rocks and dragged her out into the middle of the lake, but it had been Tess who killed her.
He begins paddling madly toward the blazing moose carcass. Henry’s battling with the water, struggling to stay afloat and move forward. His face keeps bobbing under. He swallows great gulps of lake water, coughs and sputters.
“Danner!” Emma screams, swimming toward the burning moose at a steady clip.
Henry’s swimming muscles are stiff and out of practice, but soon he hits his stride, stops taking gulps of water. His body remembers and takes over, overpowering the crushing fear in his mind. He was always a strong swimmer. The strongest and fastest of the bunch.
“You’re too late, Henry,” Suz calls. She’s treading water behind him. “You’re fucking pathetic!”
The moose is throwing off too much heat. Its antlers have collapsed; its head is teetering forward, hanging by a thread. Flames have covered its back. The tail is nothing but crisp carbon and ash.
“A crime of passion,” Suz says. “You discovered your wife was having an affair with another woman and you snapped. So tragic! So sick and titillating and tragic! Gonna be on Court TV for sure!”
Henry swims closer to the moose, the truth moving through him like its own sort of fire. He turns back to Suz. “What have you done?”
Suz laughs. “Oh, Henry. The question is, what have you done?”
Emma is beside him now. “Danner, Daddy!” she squeals.
“Stay back!” he yells at Emma. And then, he holds his breath and goes under.
Eyes open. Black water. He dives down and forward, reaches ahead and up, grasping blindly until he feels the wooden hull. He’s under the boat now, and brings his hands up, grabs the edge of the canoe, fingers screaming from the heat, and yanks down with all his might. The canoe teeters, then flips. He slides through the water and comes up for air on the other side.
His lungs clog with the thick smoke. Pieces of burning moose have floated away from the smoldering carcass and sail like a tiny flaming regatta. The body of the moose, what’s left of it, is quickly sinking.
“Hurry, Daddy!” Emma yelps. She’s treading water near the sinking moose. He scans the wreckage, sees the moose is door side down. He grabs hold of it, the charred wood is hot but the flames are out. He’s trying to flip it over, to keep it from going down. With his left hand, he finds the door underwater. He takes a scorching breath and dives under, pulling at it. Then Emma is beside him, reaching for the door in the moose’s chest. The door that has jammed, won’t open. They’re both feeling along the edges, scrabbling and pounding. Henry has to rise to the surface for a breath, but Emma, Emma can stay underwater forever, she’s got gills, their daughter, and by the time Henry takes a stabbing breath and dives back under, he finds that Em’s got the door open. Now it’s her turn to go up for air.
The figure wrapped in rope is thrashing, fighting against him as he pulls it out of the skeletal wreckage of the moose. He loses his grip, the body slips away, sinking down. He dives deeper, groping in the dark water and grabs it again, yellow rope looped around his hands as they struggle to the surface where his lungs scream for air.
With Emma helping him, treading water, they awkwardly unravel the waterlogged rope mummy to reveal Emma’s doll. Henry rips at the cloth face, the terrible eyes stitched on, ink running like tears down the pillowcase face.
“Dad! No!” Emma shouts, but then she sees what’s underneath.
Tess is inside, her own eyes wide with panic, mouth duct-taped closed.
“Mom?” Emma says. “You’re Danner?”
Henry and Emma free her from the remaining rope and Danner doll suit, pull the tape from her mouth. She gulps at the air, coughing and retching.
“Henry,” she whispers at last. She’s naked against him. Shivering, but okay. She’s going to be okay.
She gives a little shriek.
“Shhh,” he says. “You’re okay. It’s okay now.”
“Suz,” Tess gasps as she looks out across the water. “She went under. She’s gone.”
And they all look to the place where Suz just was, scan the surface of the water for bubbles, ripples, anything, but she’s slipped away. All that’s left is the blond wig, floating.
Chapter 82
“I WAS SO CLOSE to piecing everything together,” Bill Lunde tells them. They’re huddled around Henry’s pickup, on the beach, waiting for the police to arrive. Tess has wrapped herself in a paint-splattered canvas tarp from the back of the truck. She’s shivering. Can’t seem to get warm. Henry is standing beside her, their bodies not quite touching. Every now and then, when she lets out a hacking cough, he reaches over and gives her shoulder a tentative little pat, something an old-maid aunt might do. Emma is sitting cross-legged on the big rock in the center of the beach. She’s holding a soaking-wet canvas gardening glove—all that remains of the Danner doll.
“I’d followed Tess out to Claire Novak’s and seen Claire sneaking around at the cabin,” Bill tells them. “I suspected she might be Suz, but didn’t have any hard evidence. And of course I had no idea that you all thought she was dead.”
Henry’s already explained that ten years ago, there’d been…an accident. “I swam her body out into the middle of the lake,” he told Bill. “I watched her go under.”
Tess still can’t believe it.
Suz. Alive.
Claire was Suz. It doesn’t seem possible.
Passion. That’s what’s missing.
She pictures Claire’s hands. Tries hard to go back in her mind and see Suz’s. Could they really be the same? Yes, she may have changed the shape of her face, the color of her hair and eyes—but shouldn’t Tess have known? Isn’t it possible to recognize someone by their hands, the small gestures it’s impossible to hide?
Was Tess that desperate for love, for someone to come along and actually understand her, that she was blind to the warning signs?
Pathetic.
“She’s the one who left the wig and clothes for me. Who’d been writing in my journal,” Winnie says. “It was Suz. Only not the ghost version.”
Bill nods.
“I can’t believe she’s been alive all this time,” Winnie says.
“Alive and harboring one hell of a grudge,” Bill adds.
Tess touches her bruised shoulder—the faint bite marks Suz left there.
Do you want to be saved, Tess?
“Did she say anything to you?” Henry asks Winnie. “When she came out to the cabin and tied you up like that?”
Winnie’s chin quivers. Her eyes fill. “She said we’d disappointed her. She couldn’t believe how easy it had all been. To set us up like this. To fool us.”
Henry turns to look at Tess, who has said nothing so far. What is there to say? What can she possibly add to all of this? She had been the one most fooled. The joke was on her.
Tell me your biggest secret. The one thing you’ve never told anyone.
“I think she was the one who sent the postcards,” Bill tells them. “Though I can’t figure out why she waited ten years.”
It’ll be like confession…I’ll absolve you of your sins.
Henry shakes his head. “When we were out on the canoe, she said it wasn’t her. But that whoever did send them had done her a favor.”
“It was me.” A weak voice from the edge of the group. “I sent the postcards,” Emma says. She looks so small, hunched there in her soaking-wet shorts and T-shirt. The little girl brought into existence by holes Winnie poked in a condom. The one good thing that had come out of that long-ago summer.
“Mel and I found the pictures and old journal in Dad’s studio.” She looks at her parents. “I thought that if I could get your college friends back…” Her chin starts to quiver and she looks down at the ground.
Tess steps forward, takes Emma in her arms, enfolding her inside the paint-splattered tarp, like a mother moth.
Flashing lights come bouncing down the old logging road. Bill insisted on calling the police, but Tess knows it won’t make a difference. They can search the woods around the lake all night—they’ll never find her. As always, she’s about ten steps ahead of everyone else.
Suz is gone.
[ PART SIX ]
LOOK IN THE MIRROR TO SEE WHAT YOU SAW
Chapter 83
HENRY’S ON THE FLOOR of his workshop, amid the sawdust and shavings: all that’s left of the canoe.
He’s got Suz’s journal on his lap. Winnie handed it to him yesterday just before she got in her pickup to head back to Boston.
“Suz left it for me that last day,” Winnie told him. “She must have taken it from your studio when she grabbed Emma’s doll out of the Blazer.”
Henry nodded. Over the past week, they’d put everything together. It had been Suz dressed up in the wig and old clothes, sneaking around. She’d burned Tess’s studio. She’d learned about the doll from Tess, knew how Henry hated it. Winnie told them that Suz seemed to know all about their plan to float the moose out on the lake with all her things inside and set it on fire.
“She must have been spying on us all the time. Listening to our phone conversations. She knew everything,” Winnie said. “I think she snuck into your house that night and moved the doll around, knowing it would freak you out to the point of wanting to burn it up in the moose. Then she stole the doll and returned it with Tess stuck inside.”
Tess, they’d learned from blood tests at the hospital, had been injected
with walloping doses of tranquilizers to keep her knocked out, hidden inside the Danner doll.
“Veterinary drugs,” the emergency room doctor told Henry. “It’s a lucky thing your wife is in such excellent shape—her heart could take it. Another person might not have been so lucky.”
Henry still didn’t understand how Suz had pulled it all off—it wasn’t possible that she’d planned for things to go the way they had. She had no way of knowing about the canoe or the doll when she’d first gotten to town.
“You know what Suz used to say,” Winnie told him. “Great art is all about improvisation.”
Henry had one hand on the door of Winnie’s pickup, in the other was the journal. He remembered Suz taunting them from the lake just before Tess hit her with the rock.
We’ll always have this summer to remember. To come back to. Part of us will always be here.
“Do you think we’ll ever see her again?” Henry asked Winnie just before she pulled away.
Winnie shrugged. “It depends,” Winnie said. “On whether or not she thinks she’s through with us.”
HENRY FLIPS THROUGH THE journal. Reads about the formation of the Dismantlers—how Suz pocketed the keys to the van so they’d be stranded at the gas station that long-ago December. As he turns the pages, he watches Suz falling in love with Winnie, determined to save Winnie from the boys and the cutting, even from herself. He reads about Suz’s plot to get him and Tess together, how she talked him into going out to the Habitrail tube to meet Tess that night by saying, “If you want to prove your allegiance to me, Henry, then go out there and hook up with Tess. It’s not forever. It’s just what works best for now.”
Last night, after checking on Emma, Henry stuck his head in to say good night to Tess. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at a sketch she’d done of Suz, crying.
Without a word, he sat down beside her, put his hand gently on her shoulder. She leaned into him, let him hold her. They stayed like that for a long time, not speaking, but together. Finally, too exhausted to sit any longer, they lay down together on top of the quilt covering the bed. He held her all night, listened to her fall asleep, breathed in the smell of her hair, felt her chest rise and fall.
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