I gesture for Micah to follow me into the kitchen, where Chet is already popping open two Heinekens. On the island before him is what has kept him busy all afternoon—a thick wooden cutting board covered in onion peels and vegetable skins, surrounded by bottles and boxes and mixing bowls. Dinner, by the looks of things, a salad of broccoli and carrot and sliced almonds, thin strips of cucumber swimming in sour cream, two giant T-bones resting on a platter. Behind him, lined up like soldiers, two potatoes wrapped in silver foil sit on a rack in the upper oven.
“Wow, this is some spread,” Micah says, taking in the food, doing the math. Two of each means none for Paul.
“Chet’s practicing to be a chef. You should see what he does with pimento cheese. He makes it taste like dessert.” My words are too fast and my voice too bright, like a spotlight on the melting snow outside.
“Here you go, Sheriff,” Chet says, handing over the beer. “Got any news about Sienna?”
I widen my eyes at Chet—real subtle—but Micah doesn’t seem to mind the question. “Yep, but not anything I can tell the two of you. Dad’s holding a press conference tomorrow morning, though, so maybe give it a watch.” He tips the bottle at Chet, then me. “Cheers.”
I pour myself a glass of water, but I can’t drink. My stomach is in knots, my hand shaking the glass. I set it on the marble with a hard smack.
“I hear you took the boat to town.” Micah pauses to receive my nod. “Don’t do it again, okay? This entire end of the lake is an active crime scene. I put up no-entry signs at either side of the bend by Piney Creek, and if you see anybody out on the water between now and tomorrow morning, I want to know about it.”
“What happens tomorrow morning?”
“We’ll be back in the lake as soon as it’s light, looking at currents, trying to determine her trajectory from the moment she went in the water until we fished her out so we know where to point the sonar.” His eyes flash with excitement. For Micah, there’s no better day than one he gets to strap on his flippers and an oxygen tank and skim the lake bottom like a catfish, sifting through the silt for evidence. “We’ll be starting in the cove, though, so if anyone tries to sneak past us, we’ll see it.”
I nod, the tightness I’ve been carrying around all day releasing just a tiny bit in my chest. Micah and his divers will be out on the cove tomorrow, which means no more surprise visits from Jax, no more vile words carved into the snow.
Micah swivels his head to Chet, watching from the other side of the counter. “In the meantime, Dad says for you to stop harassing Piper.”
A red flush sprouts on Chet’s cheeks, and his gaze darts between me and Micah. His expression says fuuuuuuuuuck.
“I wasn’t harassing her,” Chet says slowly, thinking about every word before it comes out of his mouth. “Piper and I were just…talking. About stuff.”
Micah gives him a knowing nod. “What kind of stuff?”
Chet coughs into a fist. “Basically, she told me to leave her alone because she doesn’t want to go to jail.”
Micah laughs. “That’s what she told him, too, though nice to have it confirmed by someone who’s not Piper.” He leans a hip against the counter, reaching down to scratch a knee. “I ran into Gwen on my way out of the B and B. She was spitting mad. She said Paul missed some big deadline?”
Chet’s dip sours in my stomach, hardening into a painful lump. Micah talked to Gwen, who’d already told me she’d trudged all the way down to county GIS but couldn’t get the email to send. The signal was too weak, the files too massive. After all that work, they weren’t able to put the bid in. Gwen must have been livid, and I’m sure she gave him an earful.
I nod. “When Paul’s back, he’ll call them to explain, see if they’ll accept his bid a day or two late. Surely they can’t hold him responsible for the snow, or for a traffic accident that took down the internet. Isn’t weather like an act of God or something?”
Micah is silent for a beat or two, and I know what he’s thinking, that Paul didn’t miss the deadline because of the snow or the accident. He missed it because he took off on an errand so important that he forgot all about the bid he’d been working on for months.
Micah takes a long, pensive pull from the bottle, then settles it onto the counter. “You know, back in high school, everybody made fun of Paul for turning in his term papers a whole week early. Professor Paul, we used to call him, including the teachers. He never waited until the last second to turn in anything.”
There’s a question in there somewhere, but I’m not about to touch it. Micah is right. It’s not like Paul at all to miss a deadline. If I keep my mouth shut, I won’t have to tell another lie.
“Here’s another thing Gwen and I can’t seem to understand. How’s Paul scouting anything in this weather?”
I swallow, trying to keep my breath steady. I want Paul to be here. I want him to swing his arm around my shoulders and explain it his damn self. “He left before the snow hit.”
“How come he’s not answering his phone?”
“No reception, I guess. Either that, or he forgot his charger.”
Or both. Or he’s too busy lying in a broken heap at the bottom of some bluff.
The kitchen is a pressure cooker. Micah is playing us. He talked to Gwen, and he knows Paul’s history. He knows the way Paul thinks, what makes him tick, what would make him run off in such a hurry. The walls shrink in, the ceiling moves lower, and the hot air blowing through the vents hurts my ears.
Micah sets the beer on the counter with a sigh. “Charlotte, what do you say we cut the crap? Because I think you know exactly where that crazy-ass husband of yours went, and if it’s the place I think he’s gone, then you’d best be telling me so I can do something about it. You won’t hear it on the press conference tomorrow, but all signs point to Jax for Sienna’s murder.”
My body is tight with unreleased fear. Micah knows where Paul went, and he’s worried about him, which means I should be, too.
“Look, I don’t want this getting all over town, but the cops have been to Balsam Bluff.”
I frown. “What’s in Balsam Bluff?”
“Jax has a cabin on the western side.”
This is news to me. Jax has a cabin, and in Balsam Bluff no less. A popular hiking area crisscrossed with trails and picnic spots deep in the Nantahala National Forest, a good thirty minutes by car from here.
But the western side is undisturbed wilderness, an untamed, undeveloped forest where the few humans wandering the hills are either lost or up to no good. How Jax got away with erecting a cabin on government land is anybody’s guess. You can’t stake anything there without an act of Congress.
Chet doesn’t buy it, either. “Dude, that makes zero sense. For one thing, nobody has a cabin in Balsam Bluff. And even if Jax did live there, which he doesn’t, he’s not going to be anywhere near there by the time the cops arrive. You don’t find Jax. Jax finds you.”
“That may be so,” Micah says, “but they found Sienna’s coat in Jax’s cabin. Her scarf is MIA.”
I think of Jax, standing in the glow of the porch lights on the back deck, and something sparks in my chest. “What does the scarf look like?”
“Cashmere. Cream and knitted. With dangly things on the ends.”
“Fringe.” I close my eyes, and I see his neck, wrapped in the creamy material. I remember thinking the scarf was too pretty for his big frame, the pattern too complicated and girlie. I think back to when I saw Sienna in town, the scarf she had double-wrapped around her neck and stuffed into her black wool coat.
But the parts of it I could see were cream.
Jax knew her name. He was wearing her scarf.
I open my eyes, and Micah is watching me. “Jax is dangerous, Charlotte. Volatile and violent and completely unpredictable, and he has been for a while. The cops have evidence he murdered that woman, something I’m guessing Paul at least figured when he took off after him. That’s where Paul is, isn’t it? He went to warn Jax the cops were coming for him.”
I look at Chet, standing stiff like a soldier on the other side of the island.
You can’t tell Micah, Paul said on his way out the door. Promise me you won’t say a word until I get back.
In the end, though, I didn’t make that promise, did I? I was angry about him leaving, angry he might not make it back in time for my doctor’s appointment tomorrow, moved to next week because of the snow. He said he had to go, that we’d talk about everything when he got back.
But when will that be? Paul has been gone for far too long already. What if he’s hurt? What if Jax hurt him?
“There are cops from five counties crawling all over Balsam Bluff, looking for a man who’s considered armed and dangerous.”
There’s so much to latch on to here, but one word is ringing in my ears: armed. Jax owns a gun, which shouldn’t surprise me. This is North Carolina. Everybody owns a gun. But Paul is unarmed and Batty Jax has a gun.
Micah turns the bottle in a hand, scratching absently at the lettering with a thumbnail. “If Paul is there, if the cops see him and think he’s Jax, there’s no telling what will happen.”
Paul’s words echo through my head, just as surprising as when I heard them the first time.
Promise me you won’t tell Micah.
I grab on to Micah’s sleeve, the words tumbling out of me. “You have to find him, Micah. He left with his backpack and three days’ worth of supplies, but he should have been back by now. He—”
“I knew it.” Micah slams the beer bottle to the marble so hard foam shoots out the top. “I knew that idiot would be halfway to Balsam Bluff by the time I came up the hill. You’d think he’d learn, after looking down the end of Jax’s barrel as many times as he has, but Paul has always been such a goddamn martyr. One of these days this bleeding heart of his is going to get him killed.”
Just then, from the depths of the house, a door bangs open. Chet tilts his head, listening for the source of the noise, but I already know. I race to the railing and lean over the stairs to the lower level, right as the alarm pad chimes. A computerized voice fills the air: basement door open. It’s the only way in without a key, but only if you know the code.
There’s movement just out of sight in the downstairs hallway, the thump of something hitting the ground. And then, finally, a familiar slope of shoulder, a patch of filthy brown hair.
“Paul!”