Stranger in the Lake(50)
“Hang on, hang on.” He steps closer, his bare feet swishing against the tile. “Do you think I had something to do with that woman’s death? Do you really think I would kill some stranger, then dump her under my own dock? Is that what’s going on here?”
I lift both hands from my sides. “You have to admit it looks bad.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I bite my lip and look at him, and I can see him go still. I see him thinking. The skinned opossum rattled him, got his bones humming before he pushed the subject away into...what? How did this conversation get so turned around? And why does having him home make me feel even more alone, this terrible slippery fear rising all over again? That Sienna washing up under the dock was only the start of this nightmare?
He shakes his head, hurt and disappointed. “I thought you were... I don’t know. Not immune to what people were saying, but I thought you were different. I thought you knew me.”
The skin of my face tightens, and the fire in my chest moves higher, scorching the back of my throat. My body is gearing up for a good cry. Tears hang in my eyes, but I will not let them fall.
“I do know you,” I say, my voice high and tight. “That’s why I lied about what time you got up. To give you an alibi.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did, Paul. Because think about it. If I’d said anything else, you’d be in handcuffs right now. Especially after Katherine and the evidence you left all over Jax’s cabin. Micah knew where you were the whole time.”
He watches me for the span of a few deep breaths, and I try to read his expression, but I can’t. Not with the room going foggy with my tears, not with Paul’s bruises and cuts and that one eye bulging like a rotten apple. It’s like looking at Paul in a fun-house mirror, ugly and unfamiliar. I have no idea what he’s thinking.
He moves to the end of the counter, picks up his cell from the charger and punches at the screen. In the bathroom’s silence, I hear Micah’s voice answer.
“Charlotte was mistaken about the time I got up yesterday morning. It was more like five fifteen, and I was out the door fifteen minutes later. I passed Billy Barnes’s place as he was coming out his front door, probably around six or so. Tell Sam if he wants a revised statement, he can drop by tomorrow sometime.”
He presses End, and the phone clatters to the counter. “I’m going to fix this.”
“I know,” I say, even though what I really want to say is how? How are you going to bring back that woman? How are you going to bring back us?
These past two days have tipped the emotional scales in our relationship, pitched some of the weight from him to me, and I’m not sure I like where we’ve landed. It feels unbalanced, precarious, wobbly. Like one of us could topple over the edge any minute, and it’s not just the way Paul is swaying on his feet.
“Can we finish this tomorrow? I’m beat.” He turns for the bedroom without waiting for my answer, then stops halfway there. “What time do we need to leave?” I frown, and his gaze flicks down to my belly. “Don’t we have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow?”
And suddenly, I realize why he hasn’t slept, why he busted his ass to make it back tonight instead of stringing his hammock between two trees. So he could be here for my doctor’s appointment. The one that, thanks to the eight inches of snow, has been rescheduled. The office left a message on my cell this morning.
“It’s moved to next week.”
He nods and turns for the bedroom, dropping the towel on the rack on his way out of the room, leaving me alone—yet again—with more questions than answers.
The first thing I think when I open my eyes is Paul. He’s tangled in the covers beside me, his breathing deep and even. He didn’t stir when I crawled in beside him, at some time just past one, which could have been thirty minutes or three hours ago. I feel around on the nightstand for my phone, check the time. 3:34 a.m. A sliver of a milky moon lights up the glass of the window.
I push back the covers and slide out of bed.
It’s not the thought of Paul that woke me, actually, but two little words that pressed up from somewhere deep, creeping through my subconscious to poke me awake. Extenuating circumstances. Paul used those words to explain away the things I don’t understand, secrets from his past he tends to keep locked up tight. In his head, on his laptop, behind the three hundred pounds of solid steel bolted to the wall in his study.
The safe was the one place that I didn’t look, a place I didn’t even think about looking. Paul’s mention of it was too hasty when he left, and so insulting I’d shoved it to the back of my mind. If it weren’t for his emergency chase after Jax, I’d never know the code. Whatever secrets Paul might be harboring, he’d stash them there, the only private place in this palatial home, stowed away behind a five-digit combination lock.
I slink down the stairs in my nightgown, not bothering to remember the code Paul rattled off on his way out the door. Not since he followed it up by telling me where he wrote the combination, on the inside flap of the Le Corbusier. The book Paul once told me he comes to regularly for inspiration.
“‘Mass. Surface. Plan,’” Paul had quoted, flipping proudly through the pages, and I nodded like it made any sort of sense. “‘The house is a machine for living in.’”