Just shy of ten o’clock on Tuesday morning, the smoke from the junkyard fire on Old Ladd Road began to move east. The junkyard had been burning for hours by then. Unstoppable, marked by that putrid column, black and billowing, that could be seen for miles—but now the column was a front, pushed by the rising wind. The wispy points of its poisonous fingers crept down the road and went drifting through the trees, toward the lake, and toward the lakefront, which was when Sheriff Dennis Ryan sent his deputy, Myles Johnson, to start clearing out the houses there. Fully expecting to find them empty, of course. Labor Day was a month gone, and with it the tourist season, such as it was. The nights were longer now, and colder, tinged with the promise of an early frost. That last weekend, pleasant little curls of wood smoke could be seen drifting above the houses, as the folks staying there lit their little fires against the evening’s chill.
The lake was quiet. No droning motors, no shouting kids. Nothing but the rustling of the wind, the musical trickle of water beneath the wooden docks, a single loon crying in the distance. The sheriff’s deputy knocked that morning at six houses, six empty houses with locked doors and vacant driveways, until the speech he’d prepared about the evacuation order died in his mind from lack of use. There were only two houses left when he pulled up to number thirteen, rolling his eyes reflexively at the name spray-painted on the mailbox. For a moment, he even considered skipping this one, thinking to himself that if Earl Ouellette’s junkyard burning to the ground was a solid start, then his daughter choking to death on its ashes would be an excellent finish. Only for a moment, of course; he’d assure himself of that later, as he drowned the day in a bottle of Jameson, drinking hard to dull the memory of the horrible things he’d seen. A fraction of a moment. Just a blip on the mental radar, really, and certainly not enough to count, for God’s sake. What happened to Lizzie had happened hours before he even knew he’d be coming down the shore drive, which meant it couldn’t possibly be his fault, no matter how much a small, guilty voice in the back of his mind kept suggesting otherwise. By the time he knocked, she was already dead.
Besides, he did knock. He did. He took pride in his job, in the badge he wore. Skipping the Ouellette house was just a petty impulse, an old grudge reminding him that it was still there; he wouldn’t actually give in to it. And besides, he realized, staring at the mailbox, there was Dwayne, Lizzie’s husband, to consider. Lizzie might not be alone in the house—or she might not be here at all. The couple sometimes had renters at odd times. More than sometimes. If there was one person who was likely to flout the norm, to let folks stay at the place past season just to squeeze a few more bucks out of the year, it was Lizzie Ouellette. Likely as not it would be some city folks with a high-priced lawyer who inhaled a lungful of toxic fumes, and then they’d all be in the shit.
And so, he pulled into the empty driveway at 13 Lakeside Drive, stepping out onto a thick blanket of pine needles that released their scent under his feet. He knocked at the door with the words “fire,” “danger,” and “evacuation” fresh again in his mind—and then stepped back abruptly when the door swung inward at the first knock. Unlocked, unlatched.
Renting to outsiders, out of season, was just like Lizzie Ouellette.
Leaving her door standing open was not.
Johnson crossed the threshold with his hand at his hip, thumbing off the safety on his weapon. Later, he’d tell the guys down at Strangler’s that he knew something was wrong from the moment he stepped inside—making it sound like some sixth-sense sort of thing, but in truth, any of them would have known. The air in the house was off, not knock-you-on-your-heels bad, but stale and scented with the low, sick notes of something beginning to rot. And that wasn’t all. There was blood: a trail of it, thick circular splats on the knotty pine floor just inches from his feet. The droplets, deep red and still glistening, skirted the corner of the cast-iron wood-burning stove, dribbled over the kitchen countertop, and ended with a smear on the edge of the stainless steel sink.
He moved toward it, fascinated.
It was his first mistake.
He should have stopped. He should have considered that a trail of blood ending in the kitchen sink must have a beginning worth exploring before he explored anything else. That he’d seen more than enough to know something was wrong, and that he should call in and wait to be told how to proceed. That he should not, for the love of God, touch anything.
But Myles Johnson had always had a curious streak, the kind that made caution a distant second thought. For most of his life, this had been a good thing. Eighteen years ago, as the new kid in town, he’d instantly earned the respect of his peers by testing the ancient, knotted swinging rope that hung in the north woods on Copperbrook Lake, grasping hold and leaping into space without hesitation, while the rest of the boys held their breaths to see if it would snap. He was the one who would wriggle into the crawl space under the house to investigate a family of opossums that had taken up residence there, or walk right up to the ancient clerk at the post office and ask why he was missing an eye. Myles Johnson would take any dare, explore any dark place—and until that morning, life had never given him a reason not to. The young officer who stood in the lake house that morning was not just an adventurous, inquisitive man, but still an optimistic one, buoyed by a subconscious certainty that nothing bad would happen to him simply because nothing bad ever had.
And the slick drops of blood, that ominous smear on the side of the sink, were too tantalizing a mystery to retreat from. He moved forward, skirting the blood on the floor, eyes fixed on the mess in the sink—because it was a mess, oh yes, and the smear was the least of it. As he got closer, he could see: it wasn’t just blood but meat, a splatter of small chunks and shards and gristle. There was something pink and wet and stringy peeking from the dark hole of the garbage disposal, and a smell like the back room of a butcher shop. And as Johnson peered at it, stretched a hand toward it, he felt the first small stirrings of a warning in his gut, and sensed the unfamiliar whisper of a new, strange voice saying, Maybe you shouldn’t.
But he did.
It was his second mistake. The one he’d struggle to explain to everyone from the sheriff to the forensic team to his own wife, who wouldn’t let him touch her for weeks no matter how avidly he scrubbed his hands—and the one he could barely comprehend himself, after the fact. How could he explain? That even in those final moments, as he moved to extricate the thing from the sink, he was just following the explorer’s instinct that had always served him well. That he was only curious, and still so sure that nothing bad could come of that.
After all, nothing ever had.
The pulpy pink thing in the sink glistened. In the bedroom at the far end of the house, a cloud of flies lifted briefly, disturbed by an unseen force, and then settled once again to their business—on a blanket, damp and stained with red, draped over the thing on the floor that didn’t move at all. In the air, the subtle scent of decay grew more pungent by half a degree. And just shy of eleven o’clock on that Monday morning, as the smoke from the burning junkyard began to creep between the houses at the westernmost cove of Copperbrook Lake, Deputy Myles Johnson reached two fingers into the garbage disposal and pulled out what was left of Lizzie Ouellette’s nose.