Stranger in the Lake(40)
I pull it out, tuck it under an arm. “Got it. I’ll email them over right now.”
“You can’t. The internet’s down in town. TV and landlines, too. Some bad accident on 64 cut the cables or something. I need them on a stick. Either that, or I need the whole laptop.”
My gaze goes to the window, a patch of swirling white blocking the view of the lake and trees. Gwen may have made it to the office, but for her it’s only a three-block walk. For me, the only way there is by boat.
I drop the laptop back into Paul’s bag and turn for the stairs. “I’m on my way.”
By the time Chet and I get to town, my clothes are soaked and my nerves frayed. I was wrong before when I thought we got a couple of inches. More like six or seven, and it’s nowhere near done. The snow is a swirling white curtain, turning the world opaque, and even slow going, moving through the snowstorm was like boating blindfolded. Three times I pointed the nose straight at the shore, pulling back on the gas just in time.
The dock appears in a wall of white, and Chet scrambles to throw out the fenders. We hit the wood with a jarring thud, knocking Chet clear off the bench. I clear the lines of water, cut the motor and clamber out on shaky legs.
Chet juts a thumb up the hill, the opposite direction of the office. “I’m going to see if anyone’s out. Want something from the deli?”
“A sandwich would be great. Thanks. Bologna with extra mustard and pickles. Oh, and a strawberry milk over ice. Tell them to put it on the company’s tab.”
He cocks his head at my unusual order, then heads one way while I head the other, a sharp gust of wind chasing me up the hill to town. It whips my coat taut and clears the snow at the top, where I pause to catch my breath. The streets are deserted, an eerie winter wonderland lined with buildings and white lumps the size of parked cars. I spot tracks, both human and car, already filled with several inches of powdery snow.
At Paul’s office, amber light trickles through the glass, the promise of warmth in the subzero air. I push through the door, and Gwen pops off her chair.
“Oh, thank God.” She rushes over, snatches the laptop from Paul’s bag. “T minus forty-nine minutes and counting.”
I sink onto the chair at my desk, watching her fire up the laptop and type in Paul’s password. Laptops around here are communal property, and Paul requires everyone to use the same password, exactly for moments like this one. I see from her expression the moment she finds the files, and then she clicks in an external drive and waits for everything to copy.
“How are you going to submit without Wi-Fi?” The logistics are something I hadn’t thought about earlier, in the stress of getting Paul’s computer across the lake. If Gwen doesn’t have internet to receive the files, she doesn’t have internet to send them, either.
“I called Patrick at the Department of Transportation. He said their satellite can be sketchy in weather like this, but I’m welcome to come down and try. Cross everything, ’cause it’s going to be a Hail Mary pass. Not even postal workers are out in this mess.”
“Thank you for doing this. I know Paul will really appreciate it.”
She puffs a sarcastic laugh, a phlegmy sound. “Yeah, well, he better, because when he gets back I’m going to kill him. This snowstorm has taken five years off my life. If I hadn’t put about a billion hours into this project myself, I would’ve blown it off, kind of like Paul is doing now.” The laptop beeps, and she yanks the external drive out and drops it in her bag. “Wish me luck.”
“Luck.”
She snatches her coat from the back of another chair and leaves in a huff of swirling snow. A blast of icy wind slams the door behind her.
I shrug off my coat, drape it over the back of my chair to dry and step to Gwen’s desk, where Paul’s laptop sits open. I smile at the wallpaper, a selfie of us, a close-up from a trip to Charleston last summer, all big smiles and tanned cheeks. The Cedar Hill files are lined up neatly along the right side of Paul’s head, and I skim them from top to bottom. His entire life resides on this hunk of plastic and metal. His correspondence, his finances, his calendar and to-do lists.
And the camera footage. The one Sam is sending a subpoena for.
The security website is bookmarked under House, the password the same one he uses for everything. It takes me a couple of minutes to figure out how to pull up the footage, then to limit the clips to the ones recorded after 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday. My heart gives a hard kick when it spits out dozens of clips. Why so many?
I click on the first one, at just past five, the one of Paul and me returning from town. I smile at the way he helps me out of the boat, with an easy tug into his arms. He swings me around and dips me over an arm right there on the dock. Something catches in my chest at the image of us, so happy and obviously in love. I think of Sam watching this same clip. Maybe then he’ll finally believe my feelings are real.
I move on to the next clip, working through them one by one, my shoulders relaxing a notch with each one. A deer on the edge of the lake. A fox shooting down the hill. Dark smudges moving on a dark screen, too faint to make out. But what’s clear is that in none of them is there a man, Paul or otherwise, tossing a body from the dock.
When I get to the footage of me heading to the dock in my nightgown, I switch to Paul’s email and send the log-in information to Sam. While I’m there, I scan the subject lines in his inbox. New product notices, sales pitches, detailed back-and-forths about current and future projects. Except for a couple of junk ads for penis enlargement surgery, nothing sticks out as unusual. The mailboxes are organized just as meticulously as you’d expect from a guy like Paul, the projects listed by name and date, the contents separated into subfolders. I scroll through them, clicking on a folder marked Personal, but there’s not much here I don’t already know. His house, his health insurance and tax assessments. I back out and close the program.