Depth of Lies

by E. C. Diskin

  “That’s for sure,” Kat said with a grin.

  The women returned focus to the picture of their group on Facebook. “Why didn’t you tag the others?” Kat asked Tori.

  “Evelyn’s not on Facebook. Or if she is, I’ve never found her.”

  “Can’t tag me anymore,” Lina said. “I quit the ’Book.”

  “Really?” Kat asked. “How are we supposed to keep in touch?”

  Lina laughed. “You’re going to text and call me like a real person.”

  “You getting tired of my nonsense posts?” Tori asked.

  Lina smiled. “I just don’t want my kids and friends to be faced with those reminders of my birthday when I’m gone. It seems cruel.”

  Kat struggled with how to respond and, instead, squeezed Lina’s hand. “You said you’re feeling better.”

  “I am,” Lina said.

  Suddenly, Kat wasn’t so sure. She looked at Tori.

  “I am, I swear, ladies,” Lina added. “I’m a planner, that’s all.”

  “You’re not gonna die,” Tori said, tapping her shoulder.

  “We’re all gonna die, Tori,” Lina said.

  CHAPTER 24

  March 29

  SHEA PARKED THE CAR IN front of Georgia’s and found her and Tess outside, sitting on the sidewalk, drawing chalk animals on the concrete.

  “Hey, neighbor,” Georgia said. “What are you up to?”

  “Hey.” Shea looked at little Tess, oblivious and engrossed in her own drawing. “I’m sorry to interrupt. Tess, this is beautiful. Did you do this all by yourself?”

  “Mommy helped me,” she said.

  “Well, you’re both really talented. Georgia, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Sure,” Georgia said. “Wanna sit with us?” She patted the sidewalk beside her.

  “Actually, could we talk in private a minute?”

  Georgia looked at Tess before looking back at Shea. “Is this about Dee’s daughter? I already heard, and I just told Tess.”

  “What are you talking about?” Shea asked.

  “Gina’s peanut allergy. But she’s going to be okay,” Georgia said, patting Tess while she said it. “She used to babysit Tess, so Tess was a little worried. But they got there in time, and everything is going to be fine. Dee is leaving today to be with her.”

  “I should call Dee,” Shea said, looking off in the distance.

  “You okay?” Georgia asked.

  Shea silently shook her head.

  Georgia put her arms out. “Help me up.”

  Shea took Georgia’s arms and pulled her to standing. “I just need to talk.”

  “Tess,” Georgia said, “how about we take a five-minute break?”

  “Mom, no. You promised.”

  “I know. I just need to speak with Shea for five minutes. Come on, you can go get a snack. Something to hold you over until dinner.”

  “Okay.” Tess jumped up and ran for the house.

  “Food,” Georgia said. “Does the trick every time. What’s goin’ on?”

  Shea handed the newspaper to Georgia. “He’s dead.”

  “Who?”

  Shea didn’t answer but gave Georgia a chance to read and look for herself.

  “Oh my God,” Georgia finally said before putting her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God, Shea. What does this mean?”

  Shea shook her head. “He was okay when we left him, right?”

  “We don’t know that. Oh my God, we don’t know that, Shea. He was bleeding badly, and we did nothing!” Georgia looked back at the house. “I’m going to lose my family!”

  “No, you’re not. Of course not. It was an accident. It’s not your fault.”

  “It’s your fault!” Georgia suddenly shouted. “Why didn’t you let us go to the police?”

  “I know we didn’t do this. We couldn’t have.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” Georgia said, collapsing back onto the sidewalk.

  Shea fell to her knees beside her. “Georgia, don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to you. You were protecting me.”

  Tess suddenly reappeared on the sidewalk with two cookies in hand. “One for you and one for you,” she said, handing them to Georgia and Shea. “I had one, too. Ready, Mommy? We need to finish.”

  “Thanks, Tess,” Shea said, getting up. “Georgia, I’m gonna handle this. I promise. I’ll call you later, okay?”

  Georgia didn’t reply. She kept her eyes on the sidewalk and wiped her eyes.

  Shea returned home to find Ryan in the kitchen making pasta.

  “Surprise,” Ryan said, waving his arm toward the dining room, to two place mats, utensils, plates, and a couple of candles.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “I know, it’s not even five o’clock. I thought a surprise early dinner might be fun since we never ate.”

  “Wow.”

  “I’ve got some french bread in the oven, too. You must be starving.”

  “I . . . I just got some bad news,” she said, standing frozen in the doorway.

  Ryan stopped stirring and turned off the burner before walking over to Shea. Tears welled as she considered what might have happened to Blake, what it could mean. Ryan reached out and pulled her in for a hug. “Tell me. What’s going on? Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.”

  Shea wrapped her arms around him, holding tight. She didn’t know what to do—tell the police, tell Ryan? What if the police were still investigating Blake’s death?

  No, she thought. She hadn’t done anything. It was dark. Her mind was swirling.

  “Talk to me,” Ryan said.

  She pulled back and looked at his face. “It’s Dee. Her daughter, Gina. The one at Indiana University. She’s in the hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “Her peanut allergy. Some contamination. It was a close call, but she’s going to be okay. I should go.” She started back toward the door. “I want to see Dee before she leaves town. I’m sorry.”

  “It’ll keep. Don’t worry about it. Go. Keep me posted.”

  “Thanks for this,” she said, waving toward the kitchen.

  Shea sat in the car in the grocery parking lot. She should call Dee. She stared at her phone and began writing a text instead.

  D—So sorry about Gina. Please call if I can do anything.

  There was so much more to say. So much that had never been said. They had not spoken in almost two months.

  IMMF, she wrote. All her friends knew it meant I miss my friends. The acronym was usually used in conjunction with an impromptu happy hour suggestion, but hopefully Dee would understand. They needed to talk.

  After hitting “Send,” Shea began searching the Internet for more news about Blake’s death. The article Tori had showed her said nothing about there being an investigation, she realized, reading the story again. Maybe it was a totally unrelated accident. She continued to type search terms, looking for clues, pulling up stories of other lake accidents. She searched for stories printed in the days after their visit and found a video clip of a local news story that ran two days before Thanksgiving. The anchor said only that Blake was missing, as was his boat, after an outing on the island with friends over the weekend. A search was underway.

  She found a story from a local paper printed several days later about the search being halted because of dangerous lake conditions but saying that, officially, it remained a missing-person case. There were no other news stories about him.

  She searched his name on Facebook and found his page. His profile picture was now simply a shadow of a man’s image, perhaps a symbolic indication of his death, but hundreds of family pictures remained, confirming that she’d found the right man. Shea scrolled through them—vacation shots and T-ball games, two beautiful young children and a wife. She couldn’t reconcile the husband, father, fisherman, and friend to so many with the man she met, the good-looking flirt who had snapped when she pulled away, whose grip bruised her arms, whose tequila breath, hot on her face,
spewed insults and threats when she’d fought back.

  Closing out of the pictures, she scrolled farther down the profile. He had more than four hundred friends. Shea wasn’t connected to any of them, so she couldn’t access their names or profiles. There was nothing else on Blake’s page. She moved the cursor back to the search bar and searched his name again, both with a hashtag and then an “at” sign to find any recent mentions of him within the Facebook universe. She found several in the last four months: people offering prayers for the family, people asking for help in the search after he first disappeared, a few poems posted as offers of hope.

  The most recent mention had been posted just yesterday. Someone had shared a picture of a beautiful old lighthouse, along with a notice of a memorial service to be held in Blake’s honor. The notice said that it was finally time to say good-bye. The service would take place at the South Bass Island Lighthouse on April 1, at three o’clock in the afternoon. Dozens of people had posted their intention to be there.

  The lighthouse. Blake had told her about it while they sat together at Rudolph’s. He had said the views of Lake Erie from the tower were spectacular. It was one of his favorite spots on the island. He’d wanted her to see it. That was what he’d said when they kissed by the bathroom. It was clearly a ploy to go somewhere remote. “It’s dark,” Shea had said. “What would we possibly be able to see?”

  “The stars,” he’d answered.

  Stupidly, she’d let him pull her out of the bar. When they got outside and Blake began looking around for a taxi or available golf carts to rent, she knew it was a bad idea. Too remote, too difficult to return to her friends. She’d convinced him to show her his boat instead. The dock was nearby, on the other side of the park. “Come on,” she’d said. “I can’t leave my friends for that long.” He’d pouted a little but relented, and they had walked hand in hand toward the water like a couple. God. It was so stupid.

  But maybe that was what happened to Blake. Maybe after she and Georgia ran off, he’d decided to take the boat over to the other side of the island to see the lighthouse from the water.

  CHAPTER 25

  April 13

  KAT WAS ON THE COUCH, finishing a glass of wine, when her phone lit up with a text from Tori. So, Tori wrote.

  So, what? Kat replied.

  Have you heard from Mary or the bartender? Are you crazy? I can’t stop thinking about it!

  Actually, Kat had stopped thinking about it. She and Lina had finished dinner, and after Lina went to bed, she’d allowed herself to get absorbed in a TV show for the last thirty minutes.

  Kat didn’t want Mary or the bartender to recognize Charlie’s picture. The idea of someone taking Shea’s life suddenly felt far more horrific now that they were looking sideways at their own friends. The fleeting concern that Shea could have intended an overdose was too painful to believe, both because of the despair that would mean she’d felt and because it would mean Kat had been so oblivious to her friend’s pain. The tragedy of an accidental death was not much easier. But now, the reality that someone could have killed her—robbing her family of a mother and wife, robbing her closest friends of her company—brought with it such pain and anger, Kat wasn’t sure how to handle it.

  She checked the mail app on her phone. Mary had responded.

  Kat read her reply, closed the mail, and returned to Tori’s text, sharing the news with Tori.

  Tori replied immediately. Betsy’s game just ended. I’m coming over right now.

  Twenty minutes later, Tori rang the bell, and Kat jumped up to get it. Lina was already asleep. It was clear the constant war inside her body was draining whatever energy she could muster.

  Tori dropped into a seat at the kitchen table. “So, what do you think?”

  “I think we’re never going to know what happened, and my head hurts. Charlie was not the guest.”

  “Though it’s still possible he was the man from the bar. This feels like one of those abduction mysteries. If you don’t figure it out within days, it’s not likely to get solved. It’s now been almost two weeks since Shea died. Wow.”

  Time had both sped up and slowed down. It was as if Kat’s life had stopped since she’d returned to Maple Park. She’d been here almost a week, and her new life in Texas felt frozen. But nearly two weeks had passed since Shea left this world, and it still felt as fresh a wound as it did the day she got the news.

  “This is what I can’t get past,” Kat said. “Someone, who she referred to as a friend, knows something. She left the bar with a man, and she unlocked her door that night. We’re not talking about a Best Western. It’s not like she was walking out to fill an ice bucket. She let someone in, right? And if Mary locked up within twenty minutes, then that someone was probably the other guest.”

  “Who we now know was not Charlie.”

  “Maybe it was a friend of Blake’s,” Kat said. “Anyone who went to the memorial could have been staying at the inn, too. Maybe we should notify the police of this. Maybe they’ll try harder to find out who that guest was.”

  “Or, maybe, the guest had nothing to do with any of this,” Tori said. “If it was Charlie with her at the bar and they fought and she went inside with the other guest, he could have just followed a few minutes later and knocked on her door. It was twenty minutes after Shea went to bed that Mary said she locked up. And if it was Charlie, and he was in her room, he could have left at any point in the night. He could have simply unlocked the front door and left.”

  She had a point, Kat realized. “No one would know anyone else had been there, because Mary expected the front door to be unlocked when she got up the next morning. The other guest left early to fish.”

  “Oh, God,” Tori said, slapping Kat’s knee.

  “What?”

  “What if it was Ryan?”

  “What? Why?”

  “If he thought Shea was having an affair, he certainly wouldn’t be honest about it now. It would make him look suspicious. He needs everyone to assume that he and Shea were doing great, that he’s the mourning husband.”

  “But he is mourning,” Kat said. “Even Shea said they were doing great. That’s what she said to Lina at her chemo, remember? And she didn’t tell any of us that there was anything going on.”

  “I think we’ve already established that we didn’t know much about what was going on with Shea the last six months.”

  “You should have seen Ryan today. He’s a wreck. He’s not sleeping, the house is a mess. I think he’s falling apart. He . . .” She stopped herself.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. He was kind of drunk. He’s been buying crap online in the middle of the night. I feel bad for him.”

  “So much for his financial problems,” Tori said. “Personally, if I killed someone, I don’t think I’d sleep too well, either.”

  “Ryan said he and Shea were planning to move, that he knew all about Shea looking at real estate. I think we’re going a little nuts. He also said he is certain there was no affair.”

  “You asked him?”

  “I didn’t have to. He was emphatic that neither of them had ever cheated.” Kat didn’t tell Tori what she’d learned from Mack. It wouldn’t be right.

  There was a good chance that nothing they had learned mattered and that wondering if Ryan or Blake’s friends or anyone else had been there was nothing more than wild speculation. Shea might have chatted with a stranger at Rudolph’s. She might have unlocked that door because she heard a noise that turned out to be nothing—or Mary’s memory of locking the dead bolt that night could be mistaken. Shea might have simply fallen asleep. Nothing could be worse than becoming a murder suspect, or even a person of interest, when you’ve done nothing wrong. Kat could ruin lives if she spoke to police. She had to be certain.

  “Let’s talk to Evelyn,” Tori suggested.

  “Why?” Kat asked.

  “Shea obviously confided in her, certainly more than she did with us. She made that comment about Shea’s pills
not being about shoulder pain. I got the sense she knew something, like Shea said something. And you saw her at the island after we met Blake’s friends. She seemed like she didn’t want to share Shea’s secrets with us. Maybe Shea would have told Evelyn if she was having an affair.”

  It was true and it stung a little, but it was a good idea.

  “But I gotta get home. And you’ve got to go back downtown in the morning?”

  “Yep. And I’m supposed to go home tomorrow afternoon. Tori, if Evelyn doesn’t have any answers and I have to return with all this looming, I’m going to go crazy.”

  “I know. Me, too. We’ll talk to her tomorrow.” They hugged at the door.

  CHAPTER 26

  March 30

  SHEA WOKE TO A TEXT from Georgia suggesting they go for a walk. She quickly agreed and got dressed.

  “Listen,” Shea said as the women began to walk away from Georgia’s house, “I’ve been thinking about this nonstop. Blake was drunk. He was on his boat, and if he decided to go out into those rough waters after we left, it is not our fault.”

  “But I told you we needed to report what happened,” Georgia said. “Don’t you see, if we reported it, he’d be alive. Whatever happened to him after we left would not have happened if we had just called the police.” Georgia could barely get out those last words through the tears. “How am I supposed to live with this? What if he stumbled and fell into the water? What if he was so disoriented he untied the boat? Hitting him could have caused his death.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Shea said.

  “I can’t sleep. Do you know what I found out?” Georgia asked.

  “What?”

  “I could get in huge trouble because of this, not you. Me. Even if I didn’t mean to kill him. If he died because I hit him, I could go to jail. I looked it up. You can get up to five years for killing someone, even if it’s accidental.” Georgia stopped walking. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Shea hugged her. “Nothing is going to happen. This is my fault, Georgia. There’s a memorial for Blake on Saturday. I don’t know why it’s happening now, after all this time, but we’re going to go pay our respects along with probably hundreds of others. We can find out what everyone believes happened. Blake may have even been with his friends after we left. We have no idea. Georgia, you might be worrying over nothing. I’m sure this was simply a tragic boating accident and we’re freaking out over nothing.”