The House Across the Lake(29)

I look down, hoping it will steady me. At my feet, rocking slightly on the porch floor, is the whiskey bottle, now mostly empty.

Jesus.

Seeing it brings a rush of nausea so strong it eclipses my pain and confusion and dizziness. I stand—somehow—and rush inside, heading for the small powder room just off the foyer.

I make it to the powder room, but not the toilet. All the poison churning in my stomach comes out in a rush over the sink. I turn the tap on full blast to wash it down and stumble out of the room, toward the staircase on the other side of the living room. I can only reach the top floor by crawling up the steps. Once there, I continue down the hall on my hands and knees until I’m in the master bedroom, where I manage to pull myself into bed.

I flop onto my back, my eyes closing of their own accord. I have no say in the matter. The last thought I have before spiraling into unconsciousness is a memory of the sound that woke me up. With it comes recognition.

I now know what I heard.

It was a scream.





NOW





Tell me what you did to Katherine,” I say again, twisting the towel that had just been in his mouth. It’s damp with saliva. An icky, warm wetness that makes me drop the towel to the floor. “Tell me and this will all be over.”

He doesn’t, of course.

There’s no reason he would.

Not to me.

Not after everything I’ve done. And what I’m still doing.

Holding him captive.

Lying to Wilma.

I’ll have a lot of explaining to do later. Right now, though, my only goal is saving Katherine. If that’s even possible. I have no way of knowing until he tells me.

“What happened to her?” I say after a minute passes and the only sound I hear is rain pounding the roof.

He tilts his head to the side, unbearably smug. “You’re assuming I know.”

I mirror his expression, right down to the thin-lipped smile that conveys anything but friendliness. “It’s not an assumption. Now tell me what you did with her.”

“No.”

“But you did do something?”

“I want to ask you a question,” he says. “Why are you so concerned about Katherine? You barely knew her.”

His use of the past tense sends a streak of fear down my back. I’m certain that was his intent.

“That doesn’t matter,” I say. “Tell me where she is.”

“A place where you’ll never find her.”

The fear remains. Joining it is something new: anger. It bubbles in my chest, as hot and turbulent as boiling water. I leave the room and march downstairs as the lights perform another unnerving flicker.

In the kitchen, I go to the knife block on the counter and grab the biggest blade. Then it’s back upstairs, back into the room, back to the bed where I’d slept as a child. It’s hard to fathom that that little girl is the same person now buzzed on bourbon and wielding a knife. If I hadn’t personally experienced the years between those two points, I wouldn’t believe it myself.

With trembling hands, I touch the knife’s tip to his side. A poke of warning.

“Tell me where she is.”

Rather than cower in fear, he laughs. An actual, honest-to-God laugh. It scares me even more that he finds this situation so amusing.

“You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing,” he says.

I say nothing.

Because he’s right.

I don’t.

But that’s not going to stop me from doing it anyway.





BEFORE





I wake again just after nine, my head still pounding but the spinning and nausea blessedly gone. Still, I feel like death. Smell like it, too. And I’m certain I look like it.

My mother would be appalled.

I am appalled.

As I sit up in a tangle of blankets, the first thing I notice is the muted rush of running water coming from downstairs.

The sink in the powder room.

I never turned it off.

I leap out of bed, hobble down the steps, find the tap still running at full blast. Two-thirds of the basin is filled with water, and I suspect excellent plumbing is the only thing that prevented it from overflowing. I cut the water as memories of last night come back in stark flashes.

The whiskey.

The binoculars.

The fight and the phone call and Katherine’s wave at the window.

And the scream.

The last thing I remember but the most important. And the most suspect. Did I really hear a scream at the break of dawn? Or was it just part of a drunken dream I had while passed out on the porch?

While I hope it was the latter, I suspect it was the former. I assume that in a dream, I would have heard a scream more clearly. A vivid cry filling my skull. But what I heard this morning was something else.

The aftermath of a scream.

A sound both vague and elusive.

But if the scream did happen—which is the theory working its way through my hungover brain—it sounded like Katherine. Well, it sounded like a woman. And as far as I know, she’s the only other woman staying at the lake right now.

I spend the next few minutes hunting my phone, eventually finding it still on the porch, sitting on the table next to the binoculars. After an entire night spent outside, there’s only a wisp of battery life left. Before taking it inside to charge, I check to see if I got any calls or texts from Katherine.