Stranger in the Lake(15)
I rush down the hill, shaking out the towels on the way.
Sam stops me at the edge of the tarp with a hand in the air. “Stay back,” he says, but he passes the towels to Micah.
He wraps one around his shoulders, but tosses the others on the ground. He turns to the two techs. “Okay, let’s get her into the bag. Sam and I lift her up, and y’all slide the bag underneath. You two—” he points a finger at the recruits, flinging them with icy water “—hold the bottom edge of the tarp so whatever’s on her doesn’t wash back into the lake. Everybody clear on what they’ll be doing?”
Head nods all around. Everybody moves into position. Chief Hunt moves to where he can get a better look.
“One...” Micah wedges an arm under her hips. “...two...three.”
What happens next is a blur of hurried movements and moving limbs, of male grunts and shouted orders. From their voices, I get that it’s not her weight but her rigidity that’s making the task difficult, and they handle her like a piece of their grandma’s best crystal. They lift her body in the air like it weighs nothing, cradling her to their chests and shuffling until she’s hovering over the body bag. I try to get a peek at her face, but they’re clustered all around her, a wall of shoulders and backs, and I’m standing at the wrong end. All I see are the bottom half of her pants and her shoes. Micah was right; they do look expensive.
Brown suede ankle boots with a thick stacked heel, not too high, fastened with a dark leather strap at the top. Like nothing in my closet, or anything I’d ever buy for myself—too prim, far too impractical on these muddy hills. City shoes.
Something slips across my mind, something important, but I’m too much in shock to catch it.
“Gentle now,” Micah says.
They lower her into the awaiting body bag, tucking her hands and feet inside. I take in their words with a silent sigh of relief. They don’t know her. A stranger from out of town.
I toss a relieved look to Paul, but he doesn’t look up. He’s standing at the top edge of the tarp, staring down at the woman nestled in shiny black plastic. His face is as white as the terry cloth slung over Micah’s shoulders, and I wonder whose face Paul is seeing—this woman’s, or Katherine’s?
“Oh, baby.” I shove past the other officers, moving up and around to the other side of the tarp. “Oh, Paul.”
“I’m fine,” he mumbles, his face a death mask. He takes a step backward, his sneakers slipping on a patch of rock and dirt. “I’m fine.”
He’s not fine. This is Paul from last March, when he took to bed claiming to be under the weather, when I brought him hot tea and chicken soup that he left untouched on the nightstand, on a day I later found out was Katherine’s birthday. This is him pretending to be asleep so I wouldn’t worry, even though under the covers his entire body was trembling. Most days, it’s just me and Paul in our relationship, but for a few days a year, on her birthday or their anniversary or the anniversary of her death, there’s a third. The beautiful, funny, sexy, smart, perfect ghost of Katherine.
“What’s wrong?” At first I think Sam’s question is directed at me, until I see the way he’s watching Paul. I can see Sam thinking, processing Paul’s distress, landing on the most obvious reason. “Mr. Keller, do you know this woman? Do you know her name?”
Paul swallows, and then he shakes his head. “No. I just thought...”
“You thought what?”
A gust of sudden wind blows up the hill, whipping Paul’s hair. He looks at me, and his cheeks, already pink from the cold, turn even pinker. We don’t talk about Katherine; that is the unspoken agreement between us, and now here she is, standing between us like a live grenade.
“You thought what?” Sam says again.
I take a step to my left, blocking Paul’s view of the body. “Shut up, Sam. If you’d stop to think for one freaking second, you’d know what he thought. Just let it go, will you...”
The words die in my throat, because it’s then I happen to look down. To get my first good look at the face half-hidden beneath plastic and a weedy fall of wet hair. Milky skin with a smattering of freckles across her nose. Pale lips parted on a silent gasp. Sunken, clouded eyes open in a lifeless stare with pupils the color of a late-summer sky.
It’s the woman from yesterday, the one I found Paul talking to in town. The one who was trying to get her hooks in my Keller.
“Get to town,” Chief Hunt is saying to Sam. “Find out her name, where she was from, anything you can about who she was and what she was doing here, including where she was staying. Start with the hotels, and if they don’t know her, work your way through the rental agencies. Or on second thought, start there, at the agencies. If she came here looking for a quiet getaway, she’ll be in one of the cabins.”
Start with the hotels. The thought slices through my mind, but I somehow force myself not to say it out loud. Whatever that woman came to Lake Crosby looking for, it wasn’t quiet. I think of the way she looked at me yesterday, her strange reaction when I introduced myself as a Keller. A flash of surprise, and her gaze went immediately to Paul. “Keller,” she’d murmured, and something about the way she looked at him put me on edge. She knew the name, knew its significance in this town. I’m certain of it.