Stranger in the Lake(81)
Chet’s motor revs as he swings the car around, a four-point turn that flashes his headlights on the windows, shafts of light glowing against the glass. One window lights up, then the other, the letters pink and slimy and plain as day. I hold my breath. Come on, Chet. All you have to do is see.
Chet guns the gas, and the headlights flit away. The garage goes dark. Chet winds the Jeep back down the drive. I collapse to the floor, the tears coming hot and heavy. Chet’s gone. He didn’t see.
The door opens, silhouetting Micah in white light from the kitchen. He gathers his equipment from the floor and motions for me to follow. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
He looks down at the tank in his hand, the mask dangling from a finger. “Please don’t make this any harder than it needs to be.”
My wits and adrenaline, that’s all I’ve got left—that and a box cutter. I feel its sharp edges pressing into my waistline as I haul myself off the floor.
I drag my feet as much as I can on the hill, buying myself some time until we make it to the dock, though I can’t imagine what for. Micah is only a pace or two behind, too close to make a run for it, and I’d never make it very far, not with a gun pointed at my shoulder blades. The rain has mostly stopped, an intermittent patter interspersed with thunder rumbling in the distance, but the lawn is slippery and I’m still barefoot. I move in slow motion, feeling the outline of the box cutter against my skin. Sometime between moving from the garage and the back door, I’ve managed to slide it into my sleeve, but I’ll be dead before I can whip it out. I brought a knife to a gunfight, and a cheap-ass one at that. My only hope here is a miracle.
Or Jax.
I scan the hill for him, but if he’s here, he’s well hidden—and honestly, I’m not 100 percent sure it was really him I saw, standing on Micah’s back deck. The flash of lightning was so unexpected, so bright and sudden, my mind could have been playing tricks on me. Jax at the trailer park. Jax on the other side of the glass. It’s possible he was just part of the memories I was trying to conjure up at the time.
“So how does this work?” I gesture to Micah’s dock, a light brown U floating on the glittering black lake. Thirty yards, maybe, but not more. “Do I jump? Do you push me in? And how are you going to explain me wearing your sweats and some random woman’s sweater?”
“It’s Katherine’s.” I glance over my shoulder, and he laughs at the expression on my face. “She was always slinging her stuff around, leaving it everywhere. But to answer your question, they’ll probably assume you got it from Paul.”
“But...won’t people be suspicious? When I wash up under Paul’s dock, I mean.” We both know that’s where I’ll end up.
“Yeah, of Paul. Drowning women is his tactic. Not mine.”
“Only it is yours. Because you pretty much admitted to killing Katherine that way, and I’m guessing Sienna, too, probably. It makes sense, especially now that I know you hid her stuff.”
Silence Sienna, bury her electronics and jewelry somewhere it will never be found, let the currents sweep her to Paul’s dock. Like Jax said, that’s two. Problem solved.
“No, Jax killed Sienna. And before you ask, I know it was him because Paul wouldn’t have had the stomach for it. I love the guy, but he’s always been kind of a pussy.”
At the sound of his name, the reality that I’ll never see him again rises hot and urgent in my chest, but I swallow it down and keep moving. The low-hanging clouds above my head. The hill drenched in shadows and a sweet, drifting perfume. It feels like a dream. A nightmare. I focus on the light trickling from Paul’s house farther up the cove. On the piece of plastic and steel against my skin. I straighten my arm, and the box cutter slides out of my sleeve and into my hand.
I whirl around, terror bubbling in my throat. “Micah, please. Please don’t do this. We can figure something out.”
“I like you, Charlotte. You’re a lot of fun, and I meant it when I said Paul’s been his old self since he met you. I hate what this is going to do to him.”
“Then don’t do it! I’ll go find Chet and we’ll leave town. I swear! I’ll never speak about this again.”
I’m lying, of course—to him, to myself. There’s no way I could leave this place, no way if I did that I could ever live with that lie. It would be doing exactly what I’m accusing Paul of, sitting on an awful, unforgivable secret. If Micah knows me at all, he will see right through this lie. He’s already told me too much. He can’t afford to let me go.
“I really wish you hadn’t remembered that night,” he says, reading my thoughts, and this is it, I tell myself. This is where you die.
He’s urging me forward when I slide the box cutter into his side. It cuts through his skin like butter, just slips right in. He jerks in surprise, and the thin metal snaps in my hand. Three, maybe four sections of blade, stuck in his stomach—not deep enough to hit an important organ. Barely far enough to draw blood.
“You stabbed me.” His voice is incredulous. His gaze falls to the bright orange handle in my hand, my thumb rolling out the last segment of blade. “With a Stanley knife.”
“It’s a box cutter. And I wish I’d aimed for your neck.”
Micah laughs. “You’re insane. You know that? I’m really going to miss hanging out with you.” He snatches the box cutter from my fingers and gestures to the dock with his gun. “Now go.”