Paul and I march down the back steps in silence, our coats pulled tight against a mean kind of cold, one that doesn’t typically happen until months from now, with gusting winds and temperatures stuck in the teens. The kind of cold that chafes the skin and burns the inside of the nose.
Above our heads, a thick layer of overstuffed clouds spits an occasional spell of swirling snow, dousing the mountain’s browns and greens and golds. My gaze tracks to the lake, churning silver peaks on water that’s a gloomy, bottomless black. I think of the poor woman under the dock and shiver.
He pulls me to a stop on the last step. “Are you okay with this?” He tips his head to the lake, white clouds whirling from his lips. “With seeing her again, I mean. I can clear things with Sam if you don’t think you can handle it. You don’t have to be here.”
The truth is, I’m not looking forward to seeing her again. It was bad enough the first time, and the closer we get to the dock, the more the presence of her lodges underneath my ribs, gnawing at me from the inside. Honestly, I’m barely holding my shit together.
But I also know I need to be here, holding Paul’s hand when they pull that poor woman out of the water. Lake Crosby delivered another woman to Paul’s dock, to his door, and I can already hear the whispers worming their way through the hills. I already know what people will say.
“I’m more worried about you,” I say. “This can’t be easy.”
His hand shakes in mine, and I’m pretty sure it’s not from the cold. Paul needs me here, standing next to him when they pull her out, if for nothing else than a reminder I’m still safe and here.
He swings an arm around my shoulders and pulls me into his warmth, planting a kiss in my hair. “Don’t tell Micah, but I’m kinda freaked out. I just hope it’s a stranger, and not—” He hears himself and winces. “Oh, God, that sounded awful. I just meant…”
“I know what you meant. I hope it, too.”
The wind lifts a curl from his forehead, the end matted with blood and sweat, and I get a clear and close-up view of the cut on his brow. He tried to clean himself up with some water and soap in the bathroom upstairs, but he didn’t do a very good job. His efforts only smeared the blood and dirt around, shoved the gunk deep into an even deeper gash.
“As soon as we’re done here, I’m taking you to urgent care. Even with stitches, you’re going to have a nasty scar.”
My words disappear into sirens wailing in the distance. More cops on the way, and it’s a good thing, because the ones here have their hands full. Sometime in the past few minutes, a crime scene tech has arrived, stepping over the yellow tape strung around a U-shaped chunk of yard. Another is crouched low to the ground just outside it, reattaching the tape to branches or weighting it down with rocks, fastening it around wooden stakes he hammers into the frozen ground. They might as well be wrapping the dock in flashing neon lights.
Crime scene. Do not cross. Death happened here.
A chill runs down my spine, and my gaze scans the yard, the shoreline. I feel the cops watching us, feel their disapproving sneers and silent judgment, even though every time I stare back, they turn the other way. I feel their eyes everywhere.
Or maybe it’s just Sam, his face pressed to a camera he fetched from Lord knows where, clicking away. He aims the lens at the wooden planks, the rocky path leading down to the water, the boat and the lake and the shoreline littered with rocks and tangled tree roots. At Paul and me, huddled close enough to share body heat.
“Where is she?” Paul asks, his gaze locked on the slice of lake between the boat and the dock. Micah stands in the very middle, talking to someone on his cell. There’s nothing surrounding him but water.
“You can’t see her from this angle. Not with the boat where it is and her so well under the dock. If I hadn’t happened to look down when I’d been climbing out, I wouldn’t have seen her, either.”
Sam straightens, looking up the hill to where I’m standing, just outside the crime scene tape. “Hey, Charlie, what shoes were you wearing this morning when you came down here?”
I point to my snow boots, wag one around above the dirt. “These.”
He moves closer, stepping carefully over a couple of markers placed in the soil. “Let me see the sole.”
I hold on to Paul’s shoulder for balance and show Sam the bottom. There’s a piece of gravel lodged in one of the thick treads, but otherwise they look fresh out of the box.
He nods. “Looks like the one I spotted. Ground’s probably too cold for it to be recent, but we’ll take a casting just in case.”
I shove my hands deep inside my pockets and frown. “What, do you think she marched into the lake from our backyard or something?”
The sirens are louder now, echoing across the water, the cars coming around the bend on the opposite side of the lake. Five, six minutes, tops.
“Just covering all the bases,” Sam says, but his look tells me the real answer. He’s not looking for the woman’s prints. He’s looking for the prints of whoever put her in the lake, and in a yard Paul and I have walked through a thousand times. Sam’s gaze dips to Paul’s running shoes, but he doesn’t ask to see the tread.
“Give it up, Sam. Paul was with me.”
“Are you saying you know time of death?”
“I’m saying whenever it was, Paul had nothing to do with it.”
Paul threads a hand through my arm, gives an insistent tug. “Charlotte, let it go,” he mumbles, even though I can’t. How can he stand being accused of something so vile, something he had no part in? How can he let Sam barge into his house, onto his property, and treat him like a criminal?
Micah hollers across the dock. “Hey, Sam, can I get you up here with that camera?”
With one last look in my direction, Sam turns for the dock, jogging up the wooden planks and handing Micah the camera. He loops the strap around his neck, moves to the edge and lowers himself to his hands and knees, leaning his entire upper body over the water.
“Five foot five, maybe six, in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Light blond hair, looks natural. No roots. She’s wearing jeans and a sweater but no coat.”
He’s right, I realize, something I didn’t pick up on in the shock of spotting her. She wasn’t wearing a coat when she slid into the lake. Even if she’d fallen in from a boat or another dock, she would have needed some protection from the cold. What happened to her coat?
Micah lies on his belly and snaps away, scooting up and down the dock for different angles.
“No scrapes or cuts that I can tell,” he says when he’s done, handing the camera back. “What I can see of her looks intact. Skin has a grayish cast, but that could just be from the water temperature. We won’t know for sure until we haul her out.”
“What does that mean?” When Paul doesn’t answer, I glance over. “Does he think maybe she did drown?”
“Maybe,” he says, but he doesn’t sound at all convinced. I pull one hand from my pocket, slide it around his freezing one and hold on tight.
Micah pushes to a stand, and he and Sam stand there for a minute, discussing the best way to proceed. Micah wants her out of the water, like yesterday, but I don’t see how. There are all sorts of obstacles in the way—the boat, the dock posts and floats, a patch of alligator weed Paul thought he got rid of last summer, spiky fingers reaching up from the water. There’s no direct way to get her on land without going around one of them. Micah eyes the distance to shore, a good twenty feet, debating the flattest, most gradual spot.
Finally, they come up with a plan.
Paul is to let the boat drift far enough away from the dock to not disturb her, then start the motor and steer over to Micah’s dock. Once the boat is gone, Micah will lower himself into the water, swim her as gently as possible to shore and slide her onto an awaiting tarp.
“That lake must be, what—fifty degrees?” I raised a wild-haired brother known up and down these hills for his talent for making dumbass decisions, but not even Chet would dip a toe in the lake this morning. Not in this weather, and not on purpose.
Micah shrugs. “More like forty, probably. And that’s what the wet suit and towels are for, so I can dry off as soon as I get out.”
“That’s crazy. You’re crazy. Even in a wet suit you’re going to freeze to death. You’re literally going to get hypothermia and die.” I look to Paul for support, but he lifts a shoulder. “Excellent. So you’re both completely out of your minds, and now we’re gonna have two dead bodies instead of one.”
“I’ll be fine,” Micah says.
Paul backs him up on it. “Seriously, Charlotte. He’ll be fine. In and out before you know it.”
I shake my head, roll my eyes. “What is it with you Southern men? Y’all aren’t made of rubber, you know. You don’t have nine lives.”
Something catches Micah’s attention at the top of the hill, and I turn to spot two more uniformed officers, new recruits the chief poached last month from the county sheriff’s office, hustling around the side of the house. They’re young, no older than me, which means they’re probably straight out of police academy. I wonder how many crime scenes they’ve worked. How many dead people they’ve seen. They’re about to get on-the-fly, on-the-job training.
Sam pulls a radio from a clip on his belt and calls up to them, rattling off a list of supplies they are to bring down from the cars.
He slides the radio back onto his belt. “Charlie, if you don’t mind, the towels?”
“I’ll get them,” Paul offers. “I need to grab the boat keys anyway.” He turns for the house, kicking into an easy jog up the stairs.
“There has to be a better way,” I say to Micah.
Micah shoots me a sideways look. “If you think of one, I’m all ears.” He sighs, and his voice softens. “Look, Char, I appreciate your concern, but somebody out there is wondering where this woman is and why she hasn’t called home to check in. My goal is to get her back to them as quickly and honorably as possible, while also preserving whatever evidence she’s still carrying. Even if that means I have to freeze my balls off to do it.”
He’s right, of course. If that were Chet or Paul under that dock, I’d want someone to cradle his head and swim him to shore, too. And I’d want him to do it now.
“You’re a good man, Micah Hunt. Crazy, but good.” I step back and let him get to work.