Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(58)

I watch him drive the big cargo van away, title in my hand, and then I turn and go back into the house.

It’s dark and quiet, and I silently double-check everything as I reset the alarm. The kids are used to the tones, and I don’t think it will wake them . . . but as I walk down to check on Connor, Lanny opens her door. We stare at each other in silence for a moment in the gloom, and then she gestures me in and shuts the door behind me.

My daughter curls up on her bed, knees up, arms circling them. I recognize the posture, though she might not. I remember finding her many times like this in the months after my release from jail after my trial. It’s defensive, though she makes it look natural enough.

“So,” she says. “They didn’t throw you back in.”

“I didn’t do anything, Lanny.”

“You didn’t last time, either,” she points out, which is flawlessly true. “I hate this. Connor’s scared to death, you know.”

“I know,” I say. I ease down on the bed, and she scoots her toes back so she isn’t touching me. It breaks my heart a little, but I’m eased a bit when she doesn’t flinch as I put my hand on her knee. “Sweetheart, I won’t lie to you. Your father knows where we are. I was planning to get us out of here, but—”

“But now there’s this dead girl, and the police know who we are, and we can’t go,” she says. Smart child. She doesn’t blink, but I see something glimmering like tears. “I should never have said anything about it. If I hadn’t—”

“Honey, no. You did the right thing, all right? Never think that.”

“If I hadn’t said anything we’d be gone by now,” she continues doggedly, right over me. “We’d be homeless again, but at least we’d be safe and he wouldn’t know where we are. Mom, if he knows—”

She stops talking, and the tears glisten harder, fatter, and break free to run down her cheeks. She doesn’t wipe them away. I’m not even sure she’s aware it’s happening.

“He’ll hurt you,” she says in a faint whisper, and she tilts her head forward to rest her forehead against her knees.

I move up next to her and hold her, my child, and she is a hard knot of muscle and bone and grief. She doesn’t relax against me. I tell her it’ll be all right, but I know she doesn’t believe me.

I finally leave her there, silent, closed into her protective ball, and go to check her brother. He seems asleep, but I don’t think he is. He looks pale, and there are dark, delicately lilac smudges under his eyes like the aftermath of bruises. He’s so tired.

So am I.

I close the door quietly, go to my own room, and fall into a vast, dreamless sleep with the silence of Stillhouse Lake pressed drowning-deep around me.



In the morning, there’s another girl floating dead in the lake.





8


I’m woken by a scream. I come bolt upright in bed, scrambling out even before I’m aware of being awake, stepping with the efficiency of a firefighter into my jeans and pulling a T-shirt on as I step into shoes heading to the door. I realize as I come out of my bedroom that it isn’t either of my kids screaming; their doors are flying back, too, Lanny looking bleary in her flannel robe, Connor still bare-chested in pajama pants with his hair sticking up on one side.

“Stay here,” I shout at them, racing to the front room. I sweep the curtains back and stare out at the lake.

The screaming is coming from a small rowboat drifting about twenty feet from the dock. There are two people inside it, an older man wearing a fisherman’s hat and utility vest, and a woman older than me with ash-blonde hair who’s recoiled against him. He’s holding her, and the boat’s violently rocking, as if she’s thrown herself backward so suddenly she almost swamped it.

I turn off the alarm and run outside, feet pounding on the gravel and then the wood of the dock, and I slow down when I see the body.

It’s come up from the darkness. This one is naked, floating on her stomach, and I can see long hair drifting like seaweed on the surface of the water.

The raw-chicken color of exposed muscles looks nauseating in the dim morning light, but it’s unmistakable. Someone has taken off most of the skin from her buttocks and the small of her back, and a broad stripe up to expose the alien white growth of her spine. But not all her skin. Not this time.

The woman suddenly stops screaming and lunges to lean over the side of the craft to vomit. The man hasn’t made a sound, and his move to steady the boat is automatic, the reaction of a man who’s been on the water most of his life but isn’t really here. Shock. His expression’s blank, and he stares straight ahead, trying to process what he’s seeing.

I take out my cell phone and dial 911. There isn’t any choice. This is at my door.

As I listen to the rings, I think about the inescapable, horrible fact that the body has been down there under the surface, waiting, slowly rising like a lazy, ghostly bubble until it finally breaks the water’s smooth hold. It floated there last night while I talked to Javier. It floated there while I slept. It might have been lurking farther below the surface on the night I sat on the porch with Sam Cade and drank beer and talked about Melvin Royal.

The woman in the boat throws up again, weeping.

I finally get an answer on the emergency line. I don’t think about what I’m saying, but I describe the scene, the location, give my name. I know I sound too calm, and that will hurt me later when people review the recording. They ask me to stay on the line, but I don’t. I hang up and pocket my cell instead as I try to think.