Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(25)
This time we won’t run. This time I will trust Absalom’s false identities. This time I will bet on normal life for once, and not rip my children’s souls apart to save their physical bodies.
I don’t like it. But that has to be my decision.
“No, sweetheart,” I tell her. “We stay.”
Whatever comes, I tell myself, we aren’t running away from it.
I avoid any encounters for the next few days, quite successfully. Our runs around the lake are done at a pace that discourages others from chatting, and I don’t do any neighborly visiting. I’m not the cookie-baking kind of mother on my best days—not anymore. That was Gina, God rest her soul.
Lanny goes back to school, and though I wait tensely for the phone to ring, she isn’t in trouble again in the first few days. Or the next. The police don’t return for another chat, and slowly, slowly, my anxiety levels begin to gear down.
It’s the following Wednesday that I get a text from Absalom, marked with his standard ? as a signature. It’s just a web address, and I type it into the browser on my computer.
It’s a newspaper story from Knoxville, quite a bit distant from us, but it’s about Stillhouse Lake.
MURDER AT ISOLATED LAKE COMMUNITY STUNS RESIDENTS
My mouth goes dry, and I shut my eyes for a moment. The letters glow randomly against my eyelids, and I can’t seem to banish them, so I open and look again. The headline’s still there. Beneath, with no reporter byline, sits a story that must have been cribbed from a wire service, and I slowly scroll down past blinking reminders to subscribe, to read the weather, to buy a heating pad and a pair of high-heeled shoes. I finally arrive at the text of the story. It isn’t much.
When residents of the small town of Norton, Tennessee, woke to the news of a body in local Stillhouse Lake, no one expected it to be a murder. “We just thought it was a boating accident,” said Matt Ryder, manager of the local McDonald’s restaurant. “Maybe a swimmer who had a cramp and drowned. I mean, that happens. But this? Just can’t believe it. This is a good little town.”
“Good little town” describes Norton well. It’s typical of the area, a sleepy village struggling to reinvent itself for the modern age, where the Old Tyme Soda Palace occupies space next to SpaceTime, an Internet café and coffee bar. One caters to nostalgia for a time gone by. The other strives for all the conveniences of a much larger town. On the surface, Norton looks successful, but digging deeper reveals a problem facing many rural areas: opioid addiction. Norton, by best estimates of local law enforcement, has a significant addiction problem, and drug trafficking is common. “We do our best to control the spread of it,” said Chief of Police Orville Stamps. “Used to be meth cooking was the worst of it, but this Oxy and heroin problem is something else. Harder to find, and harder to stop.”
Chief Stamps believes that drugs could have played a factor in the death of the still-unidentified woman, whose body was found floating in Stillhouse Lake last Sunday morning. She is described as a Caucasian with short red hair, between eighteen and twenty-two years of age. She has a small scar that indicates removal of a gall bladder, and a large, colorful tattoo of a butterfly on her left shoulder blade. At press time, there was no official identification, though sources inside the Norton Police Department say there is a strong likelihood the victim is from the area.
Officials are keeping silent on the cause of the woman’s death, though they have classified it as homicide and are interviewing residents of the lakeside community—a formerly exclusive, wealthy area fallen, like most of the state, on harder times—to discover who, if anyone, might have information to lead to the identity of the victim or killer. They believe that the body was placed into the water after death and say the killer attempted to weigh it down. “Pure luck it didn’t work,” said Chief Stamps. “She was roped to a concrete block, but the propeller of the boat must have cut one of the ropes when he started the engine, and up she came in the end.”
The Stillhouse Lake area was known as a rustic retreat for locals until the mid-2000s, when a development company sought to reinvent the lake as a high-end refuge for upper-middle-class and upper-class families seeking lakefront second homes. The effort was only partially successful, and the gates to Stillhouse Lake are now open to anyone. Many of the wealthy have fled to more exclusive enclaves, leaving behind retirees, original residents, and empty homes sold at foreclosure auctions. While it’s known among residents to be a peaceful place, the influx of new residents—renters and buyers—has made some uneasy.
“I have to believe that somebody up there saw something,” Chief Stamps said. “And somebody will come forward to give us what we need to solve this case.”
Until then, nights on peaceful Stillhouse Lake will remain as they always have been . . . dark.
I roll my chair back, as if retreating from the article. It’s about us. About Stillhouse Lake. But even more than that, what strikes me is what likely caught Absalom’s attention as well . . . the way the killer weighed down the body. And the age and description of the victim—it rings some kind of bell, something distant, but I can’t lay hands on a memory to go with it.
It also sounds eerily like the young women Melvin abducted, raped, tortured, mutilated, and buried in his own watery garden.
Tied to concrete blocks.
I try to get control of myself, my racing mind. It’s a coincidence, obviously. Disposing of a body in water is hardly unique, and most smart killers try to weigh them down to delay discovery. Concrete blocks, I remember from Melvin’s trial, aren’t unusual, either.