The Storm King(78)

“Dad must already have all the evidence somewhere in that closet. Jesus, maybe he’s known this whole time!” Tom went to retrieve the gun. “You’d be doing me a favor. You don’t know what it’s been like, Nate. You can’t imagine. And the equations of pain. You always said that—”

“Listen, Tom—”

“You listen to me!” Tom screamed. He threw himself into Nate, pushing him hard enough to send Nate’s elbow through drywall. The bottle of bourbon shattered against the floor.

“Tom.” Nate heard something dangerous in his voice. It was a tone that should have warned his friend away, but then it might have been exactly what Tom hoped to hear.

Tom threw a punch, and Nate caught it with his palm. He twisted his friend into a choke hold and they both fell backward onto the coffee table, snapping two of its legs. Books and empty beer bottles crashed with them to the carpet.

“Stop it, Tom.”

Tom kicked at the air and sent the TV stand careening. The flat-screen tumbled and then broke against the floor. He jabbed backward with his elbows at Nate. The two of them struggled in a tangle on the shard-spangled floor, and it became hard to remember who was trying to hurt whom.



Tom had a few pounds on him, but Nate had strength and leverage on his side. He pinned his friend’s arms down and let him kick and writhe and yell.

Medea battered the windows as Tom slowly exhausted himself.

Even after his body went limp, Nate held him tight. The birdcage of Tom’s chest heaved in his grip. “You didn’t kill her,” Nate said, now sure that Tom could hear him.

“I did,” he panted. “I told you—”

“You said you couldn’t find her. But someone hid her in the headlands.”

Tom hesitated. “Someone must have found her body along the shore and panicked. They hid her so no one would blame them. It doesn’t matter how she got to the headlands. What matters is who killed her in the first place.”

“She didn’t drown, Tommy. She didn’t hit her head. She was strangled.” Nate loosened his grip and nudged Tom off him.

“Maybe I strangled her, too. Maybe I put my hands around her neck and squeezed right before I pushed her into the lake. I don’t know. I was so goddamned mad, Nate, I could have done anything. And MEs can get things wrong. Especially if the remains have been in the wild for so many—”

“She was raped. Her underwear was torn and stained with blood and semen. Did you rape her, Tom? Did you brutalize her so badly that you broke both of her wrists? Would you remember something like that?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Someone raped her, strangled her, then hid her body in a place where she wouldn’t be found for a long time. And that person wasn’t you. It wasn’t.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not. Her postmortem report’s in the locked closet in your dad’s office. Read it yourself. Your birth date’s the pass code.”

They lay on the floor in silence for what felt like a long time. Thunder shook the windows in their frames, and rain drummed their glass.



Tom’s eyes were wet, his eyes wide, his forehead creased. This morning, Nate would never have guessed Tom could keep a secret like this for so many years. It must have festered inside him like a malignant growth. No wonder he’d lasted only a semester at NYU.

Tom finally broke the silence with a noise like he himself was being choked. His body started to shake, and he rolled into Nate’s shoulder. He sobbed into Nate’s suit and the filthy carpet.

For fourteen years, Tom had been punishing himself for something he hadn’t done. He wept himself dry.

We are all strangers, Nate thought. Even to ourselves.

The walls glowed and dimmed. Through the windows, Nate watched Medea’s layers spiral across the sky. The shadows around the room shifted and deepened. Nate thought about how he’d gotten here, onto this stained carpet with the wreckage of his best friend beside him.

It’d be easy to stay here and wait for the hurricane to pass. But the real storm that plagued the Lake wasn’t the sort that would dissipate on its own. Taped windows and sandbagged doors wouldn’t be enough to keep the ones who mattered to him safe.

“I’ve got to go, Tommy.”

“Where?” Tom’s voice was small and muffled by Nate’s sleeve.

“Things to do.”

“Adam Decker?”

“I guess.”

“It wasn’t him.” Tom pulled his face away from Nate’s suit jacket. “He lied to my dad about where he was. That’s why his statement didn’t check out. He was with Emma. He knew we were dating, and he didn’t want to tell Dad she cheated on me.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me before I left for school. It was a onetime thing. He was all messed up after the fight, and I guess she felt bad for him. She was drunk and used to have a crush on him.”

“You’re sure?” This wasn’t at all what Nate wanted to hear.

“It wasn’t Adam.”



There would have been such pleasing symmetry to linking his old enemy to Lucy’s murder. Finding out that Adam had lied in his police statements had given Nate direction, and now he was back to where he started. He got up, brushed the dirt, lint, and fragments of glass from his pants and jacket, and slid into his raincoat.