Stranger in the Lake(9)
Sam unfolds himself from the car, all long limbs and the surly expression I’ve gotten used to seeing take over his face whenever his gaze lands on mine. His siren is off, but the lights swirl with urgency, painting the house and the hill in blood red and bruise blue.
“Charlie,” he says, greeting me with a formal nod.
Like everybody else I grew up with, Sam knows that calling me Charlie is the best way to piss me off. I bite down on my lips and hold my tongue. If Sam’s looking to get a rise out of me, then I refuse to give it to him.
“It had to be you, huh?” I say, folding my arms across my chest. “Of all the people Chief Hunt could have sent over, I guess he couldn’t find anybody else?”
Sam slams the door with his hip, tugging a wool cap from his pocket against the cold. The Kincaid men are all bald as eagles, and whatever hair Sam has left he keeps shaved close to his head. This way, he once told me, he won’t have to know when it happens to him.
“Come on. You’re kidding me, right?” Sam says in his solid, mountain man accent, the kind that says he hasn’t ventured far outside these hills. “Another body washed up under the Keller dock. You better believe I volunteered.”
I clamp down on my poker face because the words sting. A year ago I would have called him on it. I would have punched him on the shoulder and told him to stop being such an ass. I sift through all the things I could say instead—that this is different and he knows it, that the first woman was an accident, a crazy, tragic fluke that despite Sam’s best efforts he couldn’t prove was a crime—but we’ve had this conversation before. Sam is a cop, which means he needs someone to vilify, to lock in a cell so Lake Crosby can feel safe again. He needs someone to play the part of the monster.
And he thinks that someone is Paul.
He steps away from his car, his big boots thumping on the drive. “You didn’t touch her, did you?”
“Come on, Sam. You know I didn’t.”
“I don’t know that. I used to think I knew you, but then...”
“But then what?” I know what, but I want to hear him say it. I want him to look me in the eye and say those ugly words again. I’ve had five months to prepare for this. This time I’m ready.
He holds my gaze for a second or two, then shakes his head and looks away.
In a flash, an image of Sam leaning an elbow on my counter at the gas station, back when we were best friends. Of him chugging cup after cup of stale coffee, using it to wash down enough powdered doughnuts to win a county fair contest. Of me teasing him about his hollow leg as I rang him up, wondering with the other customers where he put it all. He joked that he burned off the calories chasing bad guys.
And just like that, I feel it, that pang of missing him. Despite all the ugly words he said. Despite all the tears I cried. I still miss the guy, damn it. I do.
I shut the door in his face.
Ten minutes later, the hill is swarming with cops. They march up and down the back steps with their bags and equipment, dumping everything onto the ground and stringing yellow tape around the edges of the water. They clomp up the dock and hang their upper bodies over the edge, shaking their heads and exchanging grim looks. They tip their faces up the hill to mine, watching from the living room window, and their expressions look much like Sam’s.
I step back from the glass, a giant solid plate overlooking the lake and trees that stretch up into smoky blue mountains. Like most people from the muddy side of the mountain, those cops down there resent my newfound life. They think I’ve abandoned my friends and my family and my morals for the comforts of a fancy house up on a hill.
Even worse, they make all kinds of assumptions about how I got here—by singling out a rich, older man and stalking him like prey, by offering up my body to a person I’m only pretending to love, by swiping aside every last lick of good sense to lay my head down next to a man everybody says got away with murder. Doesn’t matter that nobody could ever prove he had anything to do with Katherine’s death, or that he didn’t love her. As far as Sam and those cops are concerned, my sins are unforgivable.
There’s a rap at the mudroom door, a creak as Micah pushes it open a crack. “Hey, Charlotte.”
“In the kitchen.” I beat him there, pulling a cup from the cabinet and settling it under the spout, pressing the button without asking. When it comes to coffee, Micah’s answer is always yes.
Micah is a big bear of a guy who looks more like an overgrown computer nerd than a master diver. Tortoiseshell glasses, a swoop of muddy brown hair, a nose that on anyone else would be too large but that somehow works on him. Like Paul, he was born in high cotton, with looks and charm and money from a long line of tobacco farmers on his mother’s side. But he’s the only one of Paul’s friends who’s never—not ever, not even once—made me feel like Paul’s slumming by choosing me, which in my book means he can do no wrong.
“Sorry it took me so long. I was halfway to Sylva when you called.” Micah lumbers across the kitchen, taking in my hair thrown back in a messy ponytail, my makeup-free face and rumpled clothes. “Damn, girl, you look like hell.”
The comment is typical Micah, and I make a sound in the back of my throat—part laugh, part relief. He wraps me in one of his hugs, and tears prick at my eyes—and not because of the pregnancy hormones. He’s warm and he smells nice, and I’m just so damn glad he’s here.