The Storm King(41)

Nate just managed to raise his mouth to a less-grim line when the chief returned from the ICU.

In the years Nate had known him, he’d only seen the man’s stoicism slip a few times, and this was one of them. Grams looked as bad as her condition suggested, and the chief had known her since his own youth. Of course he was shaken. She was his best friend’s mother. But by the time he got to Nate, he’d regained his composure.

“She’s a tough lady, your grandma,” he said. “But you’ve been up all night. Must need some air. Let’s go for a ride. May as well get that talk out of the way.”



The man strode for the automatic doors, and Nate understood that this wasn’t a request.

“See you later, Nate,” Owen said. “Be careful out there.”

“I’ll let you know if anything with Grams changes.” Tom’s face was a complicated mosaic of grief and sympathy. But there was something else there, too. Something in the tautness of his mouth and the intensity of his friend’s eyes that Nate couldn’t place. It could have been some iteration of Tom’s dread at the sight of his bloody hands. Nate wasn’t sure. When he raised a hand in farewell, Tom matched it with his own.

Dawn should have come, but there was little sign of the sun. Clouds gouged the sky from one end of the horizon to the other. Rain lashed at the streets as wind ripped at the trees.

The chief had parked under the ER’s overhang, so they avoided the worst of the rain. The interior of the car was cold, and under his raincoat Nate’s clothes were still damp from Grams’s lawn. Next to him, the chief’s face was stone.

The air in the car was faintly scented with plastic and soap. Within it, Nate couldn’t smell the rain or mud or shredded foliage. He could feel the wind only so much as Medea rocked the cruiser. The car was a tiny pocket of the raging world where temperature and breeze could be adjusted at the turn of a dial. This should have brought comfort, but it didn’t.

In one of the Lake’s stories, Nate felt he’d be entering the middle section. This was the crucial stage where agendas were unveiled and true characters revealed. The action here could break in any number of ways. Nothing was assured, because in the Lake the good guys didn’t always triumph. Few of its stories had heroes to begin with.

These were fraught chapters, but it was in these pages that Nate believed he had a shot at learning what he wanted so badly to discover.

Chief Buck hadn’t uttered a syllable since putting the car into drive. The rasp of wipers pawing at the windshield was the only sound in the tight space.



While their conversation would surely be about Lucy, its shape depended upon what the chief knew, or believed he knew. But Nate found the chief’s silence suggestive. His years of dealing with sick children and their terrified parents had taught him that it usually took only a small thing to put a person more at ease. A crooked smile. A stupid joke. A question that had nothing at all to do with whatever catastrophe that had fallen from a clear sky to expose the cardboard underpinnings of their lives. So it was clear to him that the chief didn’t want him at ease.

They were driving down the flooding streets toward a performance, and Nate guessed it starred everyone’s least favorite half of the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine.

The chief wanted Nate off-balance. He saw Nate as being out of his element, exhausted, and dulled with shock, and he intended to make the most of it. Nate expected traps to be set and trip wires to be strung. And it was true that the story of their long-ago high school graduation was a perilous narrative, overgrown with long-thorned brambles and pockets of pitch-black. Traversing it with a hostile escort at his heels was dangerous. It was a history easy to become ensnared in. It was a story that bit back.

But Nate didn’t let himself worry.

He’d been known to pull off a solid Bad Cop himself.





“TELL ME HOW it all ended,” Lucy said. Her hand was in Nate’s hair, resting flush against his scalp. “Tell me about the last day.”

His stubble bristled against her belly as he smiled. He’d told Lucy many stories about the Night Ship, but something about this one particularly thrilled her.

“In 1964 the pier was gearing up for its—”

“Stop!” Lucy tightened her hand into a fist, pulling the waves of his hair into taut bands. “You know that’s not how I like our stories.”

Nate laughed into the curve of her ribs, then rolled off her and pulled on his jeans. It was mid-June, but the planks of the Night Ship were cold in the early morning. In the dawn, the lake glowed like the sun.

“Just June,” he said. He peered around the cavernous dark space of the dance floor as if uttering her name might conjure the woman herself. Like all legends, the details varied from telling to telling, but the bones remained the same. “How does that old rhyme go?” he asked. Like the best ghost stories, the Night Ship’s tales weren’t merely told, they were performed.



“Just June made all the boys swoon, cost you just a dollar to bring her to your room,” Lucy sang. It was a children’s verse, but on her lips it sounded like an invitation.

“They say Just June grew up in the Night Ship, that she and her twin sister were the daughters of one of Morton Strong’s prostitutes,” Nate continued. “Since the father could have been anyone, she was known only by her first name. ‘June what?’ her clients would ask. ‘Just June,’ she’d answer.” Nate threw open the door to the boardwalk. He was usually more careful in daylight, but it was so early that not even the Daybreakers were out yet. He turned to look at Lucy, lying on her side in a puddle of clothes. The cool breeze on his bare chest, the sun of a new day, and the sight of her made him feel like he could live forever.