The Storm King(6)

“Shit.”

“Exactly. I think she’s staying with her parents.”

Grams’s street was named not for the French emperor but for a species of gull. If Greystone Lake were shaped like a boomerang lodged against the western shore of the lake’s southern bulge, then Bonaparte Street was laced through the center of its length, with her house located halfway between the town’s center and its northernmost edge. Imposing mansions built in the late 1800s glittered along the Strand, while more modest homes like hers sat farther inland. The center of town comprised the Wharf and tourist district. Fishermen, rundown work piers, and old packinghouses took up the bulk of the Lake’s southern wing. The Night Ship was a dark blade struck deep into the waters close to the town’s northern limit.

Clouds now shrouded the sky, and the lake trembled in the growing wind. Nate guessed this would be the last of the sun they’d see for days.

Tom pointed out some of the changes to the Lake’s homes and businesses as they traveled the few blocks to Grams’s place. Familiar houses had been painted in new colors. Yards had been landscaped. Fences had sprung up, and new expansions loomed just shy of property lines.

These were all signs of a prosperous town, and this was good. A living place had to change. Families come, families leave, yesterday’s students become tomorrow’s teachers. This was natural and right, but heading toward his grandmother’s home, Nate found it wrenching. One day everything they did would be forgotten. One day everything they loved wouldn’t matter to anyone.

They parked in front of Grams’s little yellow house. Tom turned to him when Nate made no move to exit.

“Tommy, you know I’ve got to ask. I need to know what they know.”



Tom cleared his throat.

“Grams said hikers found her.”

Tom nodded. “During a cloudburst. Picked their way through the rocks, trying to get out of the downpour, and there she was.”

“What do they know?”

“Dad’s not letting me anywhere near it. But she—her body—there wasn’t much left. Fourteen years, Nate.”

A moment passed with nothing but the tick of the cruiser’s cooling engine to mark it. Nate had already known the scant information Tom gave him, but such conversations had to begin somehow. Easy questions blaze the path for the harder ones that must follow. Nate touched the glass of his window. Cold as the lake at dawn.

“He wants to talk to you, you know,” Tom said. “My dad.”

Tom’s father was Greystone Lake’s chief of police, as he had been for twenty years.

“I’ve been thinking about her mother,” Nate said. “Is it better to know for sure?” Since Livvy’s birth, Nate wondered what he’d do if she ever disappeared. If she vanished and was never seen again. This fear was always with him. Even in his most euphoric moments, it waited like a rock under the waves. When Nate sang Livvy to sleep, he could never decide if closure was better than hope. “I keep thinking about what I’m supposed to say to her.”

“Not to mention her dad.”

Nate’s response was a sound, the noise of an old scar torn raw.

“Grams must have told you.”

Nate could only shake his head. The car’s close air felt too thick to breathe.

“He’s been out for years. Parole. I thought you knew. I’d have told you if—”

“It’s fine. Doesn’t matter.” Nate said this as calmly as he could. He unbuckled himself and pulled at the door handle. He had to get out of the car.

He counted his breaths as Tom opened the trunk to pull out his bag.



“You don’t have to talk to him.” Tom’s expression was the one he’d worn so often when they were younger. A veneer of geniality over panic. “No one’d expect you to. Jesus, I really thought you knew.”

“It’s fine,” Nate said again. The breeze from the lake was brisk, and standing in it helped. “You just took me by surprise.” He smiled and patted his friend on the shoulder.

Nate took his bag, and they made their way up a short stretch of slate flagstones to the front stoop. Nate pressed the handle, but the door didn’t budge. He rammed his shoulder into it as if it might have warped in its frame. He’d opened this door a thousand times and never once found it locked.

“Hold up, Doc.” Tom dug through his pocket and slid between Nate and the door.

“She gave you a key?”

“I’m very trustworthy. Got a badge and everything.”

Tom unlocked the door, and Nate walked into the life he’d left behind.

Dried hydrangeas on a console beside a pile of unopened mail. The scent of lavender soap behind a smell of wood polish. The shuddering of the floor under his feet as the furnace thrummed.

He wandered the length of the foyer, looking around like a tourist in a museum. The colors of the place seemed to have faded. A wall he remembered as yellow was now cream, a forest green armchair toned down to olive. Though Nate was the same height he’d been when he graduated high school, everything seemed smaller. More delicate and somehow less real. As if the couch in the living room was more a concept of furniture than a place a person would actually sit.

A mosaic of photographs cluttered the far wall. At the center, an old black-and-white of his father, and the rest rippled from it. Shots of Nate’s med school graduation, his wedding, Livvy with a grin as big as the world.