Stranger in the Lake(12)
But I also know I need to be here, holding Paul’s hand when they pull that poor woman out of the water. Lake Crosby delivered another woman to Paul’s dock, to his door, and I can already hear the whispers worming their way through the hills. I already know what people will say.
“I’m more worried about you,” I say. “This can’t be easy.”
His hand shakes in mine, and I’m pretty sure it’s not from the cold. Paul needs me here, standing next to him when they pull her out, if for nothing else than a reminder I’m still safe and here.
He swings an arm around my shoulders and pulls me into his warmth, planting a kiss in my hair. “Don’t tell Micah, but I’m kinda freaked out. I just hope it’s a stranger, and not—” He hears himself and winces. “Oh, God, that sounded awful. I just meant...”
“I know what you meant. I hope it, too.”
The wind lifts a curl from his forehead, the end matted with blood and sweat, and I get a clear and close-up view of the cut on his brow. He tried to clean himself up with some water and soap in the bathroom upstairs, but he didn’t do a very good job. His efforts only smeared the blood and dirt around, shoved the gunk deep into an even deeper gash.
“As soon as we’re done here, I’m taking you to urgent care. Even with stitches, you’re going to have a nasty scar.”
My words disappear into sirens wailing in the distance. More cops on the way, and it’s a good thing, because the ones here have their hands full. Sometime in the past few minutes, a crime scene tech has arrived, stepping over the yellow tape strung around a U-shaped chunk of yard. Another is crouched low to the ground just outside it, reattaching the tape to branches or weighting it down with rocks, fastening it around wooden stakes he hammers into the frozen ground. They might as well be wrapping the dock in flashing neon lights.
Crime scene. Do not cross. Death happened here.
A chill runs down my spine, and my gaze scans the yard, the shoreline. I feel the cops watching us, feel their disapproving sneers and silent judgment, even though every time I stare back, they turn the other way. I feel their eyes everywhere.
Or maybe it’s just Sam, his face pressed to a camera he fetched from Lord knows where, clicking away. He aims the lens at the wooden planks, the rocky path leading down to the water, the boat and the lake and the shoreline littered with rocks and tangled tree roots. At Paul and me, huddled close enough to share body heat.
“Where is she?” Paul asks, his gaze locked on the slice of lake between the boat and the dock. Micah stands in the very middle, talking to someone on his cell. There’s nothing surrounding him but water.
“You can’t see her from this angle. Not with the boat where it is and her so well under the dock. If I hadn’t happened to look down when I’d been climbing out, I wouldn’t have seen her, either.”
Sam straightens, looking up the hill to where I’m standing, just outside the crime scene tape. “Hey, Charlie, what shoes were you wearing this morning when you came down here?”
I point to my snow boots, wag one around above the dirt. “These.”
He moves closer, stepping carefully over a couple of markers placed in the soil. “Let me see the sole.”
I hold on to Paul’s shoulder for balance and show Sam the bottom. There’s a piece of gravel lodged in one of the thick treads, but otherwise they look fresh out of the box.
He nods. “Looks like the one I spotted. Ground’s probably too cold for it to be recent, but we’ll take a casting just in case.”
I shove my hands deep inside my pockets and frown. “What, do you think she marched into the lake from our backyard or something?”
The sirens are louder now, echoing across the water, the cars coming around the bend on the opposite side of the lake. Five, six minutes, tops.
“Just covering all the bases,” Sam says, but his look tells me the real answer. He’s not looking for the woman’s prints. He’s looking for the prints of whoever put her in the lake, and in a yard Paul and I have walked through a thousand times. Sam’s gaze dips to Paul’s running shoes, but he doesn’t ask to see the tread.
“Give it up, Sam. Paul was with me.”
“Are you saying you know time of death?”
“I’m saying whenever it was, Paul had nothing to do with it.”
Paul threads a hand through my arm, gives an insistent tug. “Charlotte, let it go,” he mumbles, even though I can’t. How can he stand being accused of something so vile, something he had no part in? How can he let Sam barge into his house, onto his property, and treat him like a criminal?
Micah hollers across the dock. “Hey, Sam, can I get you up here with that camera?”
With one last look in my direction, Sam turns for the dock, jogging up the wooden planks and handing Micah the camera. He loops the strap around his neck, moves to the edge and lowers himself to his hands and knees, leaning his entire upper body over the water.
“Five foot five, maybe six, in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Light blond hair, looks natural. No roots. She’s wearing jeans and a sweater but no coat.”
He’s right, I realize, something I didn’t pick up on in the shock of spotting her. She wasn’t wearing a coat when she slid into the lake. Even if she’d fallen in from a boat or another dock, she would have needed some protection from the cold. What happened to her coat?