Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(23)

I’m busy thinking about that as I disarm the system and open the door, but that train of thought hardly even leaves the station. There’s something different about him this time. He’s not smiling.

He’s also not alone.

“Ma’am.” The man standing behind him is the one who speaks first. He’s an African American man of medium height who has the build of a former football player, going soggy around the middle. He’s got a sharp-edged haircut and heavy-lidded eyes, and the suit looks hard-worn and off the rack on its best day. He’s got a tie on, too, a blunt, red thing that just slightly clashes with the gray of the jacket. “I’m Detective Prester. I need to speak to you, please.”

It isn’t a question.

I freeze in place and involuntarily look back over my shoulder. Connor and Lanny are both in their rooms, and neither of them has come looking. I step out and shut the door behind me. “Detective. Of course. What is it?” Thank God, I don’t have to fear for the safety of my children in that moment. I know where they are. I know they’re safe. So this, I think, must be about something else.

I wonder if he’s dug around and put the trail together to connect Gwen Proctor to Gina Royal. I hope to hell not.

“Can we sit down a moment?”

I indicate the chairs on the porch, instead of letting them inside, and he and I settle into them. Officer Graham lingers at a distance, watching the lake. I follow his gaze, and my heart speeds up with a kick.

The usual fleet of pleasure craft is absent today. Instead, there are two boats out near the middle of the calm surface, both painted in official blue-and-white colors, with light bars on top that strobe slow, red flashes. I see a diver in scuba gear pitch backward over the side of the second one.

“A body was found in the lake early this morning,” Detective Prester says. “Was hoping you might have seen something out there last night, heard something? Anything out of the ordinary?”

I scramble to order my thoughts. Accident, I think. Boating accident. Somebody out at night, drunk, tips over the side . . . “I’m sorry,” I say. “Nothing unusual.”

“You hear anything after dark last night? Boat engines, maybe?”

“Probably, but that’s not really unusual,” I say. I’m trying to remember. “Yes. I heard something around nine, I think.” Long after dark, which falls early behind the pines. “But there are people here who go out to enjoy the stars. Or do some night fishing.”

“Did you happen to look outside at any point? See anyone around the lake or on it?” He looks tired, but there’s a sharpness behind that facade, one I wouldn’t want to play around trying to avoid. I answer him as honestly as I can.

“No, I didn’t. I’m sorry. I was working really late last night on the computer, and my office window looks up the hill, not down. I didn’t go outside.”

He nods and makes some notes in a book. He’s got a quiet sort of confidence, the kind that makes you want to relax around him. I know that’s dangerous. I’ve been lulled into underestimating police before, and I suffered for it. “Anybody else in the house last night, ma’am?”

“My kids,” I say. He glances up, and his eyes flash dark amber in the sunlight. Unreadable. Behind that disguise of the tired, slightly frayed, overworked man, he’s sharp as a scalpel.

“Can I talk to them, please?”

“I’m sure they don’t know anything—”

“Please.”

It would seem suspicious not to agree, but I’m tense and anxious as hell. I don’t know how Lanny and Connor will react to being questioned again; they’d been subjected to many, many interviews during the course of Mel’s trial, and my own, and even though the Wichita police had been careful about it, it left scars. I don’t know what kind of traumas it will tear open. I try to keep my voice calm. “I’d rather not have them questioned, Detective. Unless you think it’s absolutely necessary.”

“I think it is, ma’am.”

“For an accidental drowning?”

His amber eyes fix on me, and they seem to glow in the light. I feel them probing into me like searchlights. “No, ma’am,” he says. “I never said it was accidental. Or a drowning.”

I don’t know what that means, but I feel the pit open under me, I feel the drop. Something very bad has just begun.

And I say, in half a whisper, “I’ll get them.”





3


Connor goes first, and the detective is gentle with him, good with kids. I see the gleam of a wedding ring, and I’m glad that he isn’t like the cops back in Kansas. My kids had developed a real fear of police, and for very good reason; they’d seen the anger of the ones who’d arrested Mel, an anger that had only increased as the depth and breadth of his crimes was revealed. Those police had known not to take it out on small children, but some of it had spilled over. Inevitably.

Connor seems tense and nervous, but he gives his answers in short, effective sentences. He hasn’t heard anything except—as I’d said—maybe a boat engine out on the water around nine at night. He didn’t look out, because it isn’t unusual. He doesn’t remember anything out of the ordinary at all.

Lanny doesn’t want to say anything. She sits silently, head down, and nods or shakes her head but won’t speak until the detective finally turns to me in exasperation. I put a hand on her shoulder and say, “Sweetheart, it’s okay. He’s not here to hurt anybody. Just tell him anything you might know, okay?” I say that, of course, confident that she doesn’t know anything, no more than Connor or I do.