Stranger in the Lake(84)
I scream.
Micah pulls the trigger.
36
A gunshot on the lake sounds like the sky is cracking open, shattering your eardrums and swallowing up every other sound, ripping through your bones like a bullet.
Only it wasn’t my bone the bullet ripped through. It was Micah’s, and by his own hand.
Paul was on me in a millisecond. “Don’t look,” he shouted, covering my eyes, but he was too late. I already saw the way Micah’s limbs were splayed every which direction on the dock, how his eyes were open but the top of his head was a mush of hair and meat and white bone. I saw how Paul sank to his knees and vomited onto the lawn, how Jax’s body seemed to sway with the patch of grass he stood before. I saw it all.
And then the hill came alive with light and sound, with men shouting and waving guns and handcuffs, and I saw the look on Paul’s face when Sam read him his rights. It was like the clouds cleared and God shone a spotlight on all those things I’d missed before. That my husband was old. That he was full of secrets. That I was better off before he stepped up to my counter at the gas station, when I was so eager to claw myself out of that muddy trailer park, I didn’t realize I was trading one set of problems for another. Pretty things for a man still in love with his first wife. No, Paul didn’t kill Katherine, but his secrets are the reason she’s dead, and in my heart that feels unforgivable. There was a hint of truth to all those whispers in town. I should have listened.
“Paul told me he met Sienna the day before she died,” Sam says, watching me from the other side of the kitchen counter. Behind him, on the other side of the glass, the lake is high wattage in the early-morning sunshine. A glorious morning, one that makes me long for sunglasses.
Chet steps up beside me, but neither of us say a word.
Sam’s gaze sits steady on mine. “I just think it’s weird, don’t you? That Paul forgot to mention it the first time I asked him, I mean. He claims you found him talking to her in town, but that there’s no way you would have recognized her. Something about the distance or the angle, I don’t know which, and before you say anything, don’t. This is where you’re supposed to nod your head and agree.”
I don’t disagree, but I don’t nod, either.
Sam sighs, pushing at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. He’s still in the same clothes he was in last night, a flannel shirt and faded jeans as if he got the call as he was settling down to dinner. I’d say he slept in them, but the hollowed-out shadows under his eyes tell me he got about as much sleep as I did, which was none. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the dark stain on Micah’s dock. I smelled the blood and gunpowder and fear, the way bone and brain drizzled down like rain. It was so much easier to stay awake.
“Charlie, what do you say we cut the crap? I’ve got confessions on record from both Jax and Paul that make them accessories to manslaughter on top of a heaping pile of other charges. They’re going to prison, probably not as long as I’d like them to, but they’re going.”
“Is this the part where you say I told you so?”
“No. This is the part where I say if there’s anything you’re holding back on, then you should tell it to an attorney. As soon as we’re done searching Micah’s house, we’re coming here next.”
For some reason, his words rile me up, and my shoulders hike to my ears. “Why would I need an attorney when all of this is news to me? I don’t have anything to hide. I didn’t know about Bobby, about Katherine, about any of it. I learned all these things last night, like everybody else in this room. But if you’re looking for someone to blame, you may want to check with Chief Hunt and Diana, because from everything I heard, I’m guessing they knew all along.”
Sam runs it down for us, how Paul’s and Jax’s statements have opened the floodgates. How our old friends and neighbors from the trailer park are stepping forward one by one, claiming their eyewitness accounts were ignored or buried. How a power-hungry Chief Hunt actively participated in the cover-up, then twenty years later did it again, when Sienna’s investigation connected his son to Bobby’s death.
“We’re searching Chief’s house. Micah’s, too. If something’s there, we’ll find it.”
“No, you won’t. Micah told me Sienna’s things were somewhere no one will ever know to look. The bottom of the lake, probably.”
“Micah wasn’t the only one with motive and opportunity. So far, we haven’t found one person who can verify your husband’s alibi.”
Chet leans onto the countertop with both elbows. “Dude, you can’t be serious. Jax was wearing her scarf.”
Sam swipes a hand down his face, his fingers digging into his temples. “Jax was at his sister Pamela’s house the night Sienna was murdered. He tends to do that when the weather turns nasty, crashes at her place, then takes off as soon as the sun’s up. She’s already given a statement, and I believe her. The Pentecostals are pretty solid in their belief that lying is a sin.”
And Pamela lives all the way on the other side of the lake. A good twelve miles from the marina, maybe more. Too far for Jax to hike back and forth in one night.
Which brings us back to where we began: Micah or Paul. Both have motive. Both insist they didn’t touch Sienna, but an innocent man denying his guilt would use the same words as a guilty man. Their arguments would sound the same.