Stranger in the Lake(28)
Old times as in: before your mom died, before you became such an angry troll. If Micah had said it, Jax would have punched him in the face, but not Paul. For some reason Jax didn’t fully understand, he never got angry at Paul.
“And if we can’t find a party, we’ll just make our own.” Micah grinned and spread his arms wide. “We’ll be the motherfucking party.”
Jax sighed, slapping his hand in Paul’s. “Fine, but I’m driving.”
13
The rest of the afternoon flies by in a blur.
I make gallons of tea and coffee that, in a surprise move, Chet offers to cart down to the water. After the first trip I figure out why—so he can eavesdrop on the cops, trading hot drinks and homemade snacks for snippets of information he carries back up the hill to share with me.
Chet tells me that the Asheville divers arrived with cold-water gear and are taking turns scouring the lake bottom around the dock for evidence, but the waters are deep, the lake so dark they can’t see beyond their own flashlight beams. So far they’ve found nothing but a shoe and some old junk, and the chunk of hill cordoned off with crime tape and a neat grid of stakes and string hasn’t yielded any clues, either. If she came through our backyard, she didn’t drop any evidence.
When I’m not playing hostess or getting updates from Chet, I stand at the window and watch. Two men stand guard by the shoreline, gripping coiled leashes that snake into the murky water. Currents under the dock are a living, breathing thing. The ropes are there in case they get swept away, a tether that will guide them to shore.
But none of the men Chet overheard are holding out much hope of finding anything useful. Fifteen hundred acres of water in Lake Crosby, with craggy depths of up to three hundred feet. No wonder Micah wanted to get her out so quickly, and to preserve whatever evidence washed off onto the tarp. If something drifted off that woman into the water, it could be anywhere, and it won’t be sitting still. Needle, meet haystack.
Thanks to the cloud cover swirling with coming snow, darkness comes earlier than normal, at well before five. The pines and Fraser firs are quick to filter the light with their dense needles, and shadows clot under the trees. They creep ever closer to the house, the branches above leaning in to shut out the sky. This place is built for looking out, no curtains or blinds to block its showstopper views, but when the lights come on and the windows turn black with night, I always wonder who’s looking in.
Micah pops to the surface, then another diver. They move onto shore, shaking their heads and peeling off their wet suits, drying off with towels someone fetched from upstairs. The cops gather up their trash and toss dirt on the fire. They’re packing up for the day and, by the looks of things, leaving empty-handed.
Chet bangs through the back door moments later, his cheeks chapped from the wind. “All that for a big, fat nothing. Can you believe it? Wait’ll I tell the guys down at the bar.”
“Micah told us not to talk to anyone, remember? If anybody asks, we’re supposed to say ‘no comment.’”
“No. He told you to say ‘no comment.’” Chet peels off his coat, drops it on a hook and jimmies off one boot, then the next, letting them fall to the floor with a thud.
“Chet, you know as well as I do he meant you, too. You can’t go around talking about this all over town, not until we get the okay. You know how Chief Hunt is. If you mess up this case for him, he’s going to toss your ass in jail without a second thought.”
A flash of something crosses his face, fear mixed with resignation. “Oh, come on. It’s not like I can say anything that people don’t already know by now. By now there’s not a soul in town who doesn’t know about the dead tourist, or that Micah’s been searching for evidence all day.”
My phone beeps with a text from Micah. Done for the day. What do you want me to do with the towels?
My thumbs fly across the keyboard. Just leave them by the back door, I’ll take care of it. Go home. Get warm. All good up here.
I walk to the window and press my face to the glass, cupping my hands to see everyone’s gone, nothing but dark massing shapes of the trees and mountains against a slightly luminous sky. Paul is out there somewhere, in woods that come alive at night. Fox and coyotes and bats, tiny rodents that scurry between his legs as he crashes through. Night animals and people like Jax, who don’t mind the darkness.
Speaking of Jax, where is he? Has Paul found him yet? And how does he know where to look? Jax roams the hills during the day and sleeps in caves or rotted-out logs. He doesn’t exactly have an address.
The lake is a sea of swirling black, swollen and churning from a rainy fall. Even from here, even in the coming darkness, I can see the muddy streaks.
“I wonder why they didn’t shut down the dam.”
Lake Crosby isn’t a natural lake but a reservoir, its waters boxed in on the southern end by a dam that controls both water levels and underwater currents. The engineers are like gods, holding back the currents or letting them rip, manipulating everything with a flip of a switch. Their gate releases are a major happening in these parts, announced well in advance to give the falls watchers and adventure sporters time to plan. But the hike to the top of High Falls Trail is steep and overcrowded, a long line of suicidal crazies carting kayaks they use to shoot down the five-plus miles of class-four rapids. Once you’ve seen one thunderous tsunami barrel over a cliff, you’ve seen them all.