The good thing about living in a house of glass in the woods is that you know when someone’s coming. You hear the whir of a motor as they steer around a curve in the drive, murmured voices carried on the wind, the way the birds and chipmunks go still and quiet. It gives you just enough time to pat down your hair and slap on a smile before they step up to a door or a window.
The bad thing is there’s no hiding from the two strangers, peering through the glass.
A man and woman, both in their late fifties or early sixties, their faces far too grim and somber for a sunny Saturday afternoon. They could be anyone, and yet my gut knows exactly who they are.
I freeze at the edge of the foyer, taking in the woman’s white-blond hair, her birdlike build, her full lips and pale skin behind dark sunglasses. She clutches flowers to her chest, a spray of big white buds that falls over an arm.
Funeral flowers.
I open the door, and she nudges her husband with an elbow.
“My name is John Sterling, and this is my wife, Sharon. We’re looking for the owner of this house. I understand his name is Mr. Keller?”
He has an accomplished air about him—a doctor, an accountant, the owner of a chain of shoe stores—but with clenched fists and a sharp, angry edge. Grief in the form of fury, and I don’t blame him. If I were in his shoes, standing on the doorstep where my daughter washed up dead, I’d be pissed off, too.
“His name is Paul. He’s my husband. I’m sorry but he’s not here.” Neither is Chet, and I wish he was because I am not emotionally prepared for this. I’m not sure I’m equipped to comfort grieving parents on my own. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
The last sentence is the one I should have led with, I realize too late.
“Thank you,” Mr. Sterling manages with a jerky nod. His face is grim and rock hard. “Were you…were you here when it happened?”
I nod, trying not to wince at the memory of her pale skin, that one glass-blue eye staring into the sky. “I’m the one who found her. I called the police.”
Mrs. Sterling gasps, whipping off her glasses and staring across the pavement like I’m her daughter’s savior. Like I am the one who rescued her from the lake, except that I didn’t. By the time I got to her, she was already dead.
I stare into eyes the color of a weak sky, just like her daughter’s.
It’s to her that I make the offer. “Would you like to come inside?”
The Sterlings step across the threshold and pull up short, planting their shoes at the edge of the foyer rug and staring with obvious shock. Not at the house, at the size of the place or the way it looks ripped from a design magazine, but at the lake, glittering on the other side of the plate glass.
Mrs. Sterling sees it and bursts out crying. She clutches the flowers to her chest and just lets loose, a continuous sobbing that racks her body so hard I worry she might pass out. Her husband stands next to her, both hands shoved in his pants pockets, glaring out the window in grim silence.
I give them space, shimmying my cell from my back pocket, and text Chet.
Three little dots dance around at the bottom of my screen, and then:
My gaze creeps to the Sterlings, lit up golden by the setting sun, and I wonder what Chief Hunt has told them. I wonder if they’ve already been to the B and B, if they’ve talked to Piper. If they’ve heard what their daughter was doing on her last days in Lake Crosby…or more specifically, who. My thumbs fly over the keyboard.
“Chief Hunt said she was under the dock.” Mr. Sterling turns away from the glass, and for a split second, his expression matches his tone, glittering with accusation. As if I was the one to drag his daughter up from her watery grave like some kind of lake monster. He squints, watching me from across the room. “Is that true?”
His wife gives him a pleading glance over her shoulder. “Hush, John. I can’t do this right now.”
I slip the phone in my pocket and reach for the teapot, settling it on a tray with some cups and saucers.
“When, then? When would you like to do it? That lake out there was our daughter’s final resting place. It’s the reason we’re here.” His face is purple and his voice a cold, hard slap. I don’t blame him for being furious, but his anger seems more than a little misplaced. His wife didn’t do anything. She’s suffering, too. And clearly, she’s in need of some comforting.
He aims his animosity at me. “I need to know where she was exactly.”
Mrs. Sterling shakes her head, clapping her free hand over her ear. “I don’t… I can’t hear this right now.”
“I need to know, Sharon.”
“John, please.”
Chet and I are used to heated arguments. We’re used to slamming doors and loud voices and cuss words shouted over our heads. We’ve learned the best way to not get beaned with a plate is to stand still and keep quiet, and fade into the background.
But there’s no background here. Not in a house that’s basically one giant room, not with two grieving parents looking to me for answers.
“You should know that they handled your daughter with the utmost care. Especially the lead diver, Micah. He’s our neighbor, and a dear friend.” I don’t mention he’s Chief Hunt’s son, as that would only muddle things that have no business being muddled. I think of how he refused to bring her to shore any other way than by doing it himself, by plowing through the ice-cold water, even though he knew his father would refuse to give him any credit. “He could not have been more gentle.”
Mrs. Sterling is crying again, dabbing at her eyes with a sleeve. I eye the drooping roses in her other hand, the buds fainting over the crook of her arm. “Here. Let me put those in water.” I gather up the flowers, and she doesn’t protest.
“Does this Micah person know how Sienna got in there?” Mr. Sterling says, following me into the kitchen. “Do the police have a suspect?”
I lean the flowers in a pitcher I pull from the shelf and settle in the sink, then fill it with a couple of inches of water. “That’s a question for Chief Hunt, I’m afraid. I’m not up on the latest with the investigation. I only know what I saw on TV.”
Another lie, of course—the latest in a long string of them. But it doesn’t seem like a good idea to be spouting off his questioning of Chet or any of what Micah told me about Sienna’s jewelry, or that I saw her scarf hanging from Jax’s neck. Better to let the police decide which information they want to share.
“They won’t tell us anything,” Mr. Sterling fumes. “What kind of operation doesn’t tell the parents what they’re doing to find their daughter’s killer? This is ridiculous. It’s bullshit.”
It is bullshit, and I’m pretty sure his question was rhetorical.
I fill the teapot with hot water, drop in a bag of Lipton and carry everything over to the couches. “Please, let’s sit down.”
I point Mrs. Sterling to a couch, but the problem with a house that’s built around lake views is that there’s not a seat in the house without one. She sinks onto the cushion facing the kitchen, giving her a clear shot of Micah’s dock farther up the cove, but at least from where she’s sitting, she can’t see ours.
I sit at the opposite end, busy myself with the arranging of cups on the coffee table.
Mr. Sterling has too much nervous energy to sit. He paces along the edge of the carpet. “I told her to let it go. I told her this podcasting business was dangerous. If somebody got away with murder all those years ago, you better believe they’ll murder again.”
“I saw her Twitter feed, all the stuff about Bobby—Skeleton Bob. Why did she think he was murdered?”
“Because of the necklace.”
“John.” Mrs. Sterling flashes a glance in my direction. “We’re not supposed to talk about the necklace.”
I sink onto a chair and shuffle through my memories of the weeks after Bobby and his Camaro emerged from the depths, dripping in mud and gunk. After two recreational divers swam up on Bobby’s car, Micah and his boys brought it to the surface and turned the accidental discovery into a walking advertisement for his company. It was on every front page and television screen in the Southeast, and made Lake Hunters into a household name. Thanks to Bobby Holmes, Micah became a local celebrity.
But I’ve heard all the stories. I’ve read all the articles. None of them mentioned a necklace, and Sienna wasn’t wearing one. I tick off the jewelry Micah told us he’s combing the bottom of the lake for—hoop earrings, a pearl bracelet and watch, a ring. He didn’t mention a necklace. I’m certain of it.
“That necklace got our daughter killed. It’s the reason Sienna is dead.” He is pacing now, in long strides perpendicular to the couches, back and forth across the carpet. “I will shout about that thing in the town square if I have to. I won’t shut up until they find who did this to our daughter.”
His wife frowns. “We don’t know she’s dead because of the necklace.”
He stops abruptly. “Don’t be ridiculous. That necklace is a clue. Sienna always said that necklace was going to make her famous, and it did, didn’t it? Our daughter is famous, but it’s because she’s dead. Because she was murdered.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “What necklace, and how did she connect it to Skeleton Bob? Because there are thousands of people on the lake every summer. It could have come off a skier’s neck last decade, or somebody could have flung it out of a car ten minutes ago.”
“Because of Jeremy—he’s the diver who found the car. He took the necklace from the car and hung it around his neck. He wore it like some kind of trophy. But Sienna saw the engraving on the back, and she traced it to here, to the lake. That’s when he told her what really happened.”
I sit very still, a freezing cold finger climbing my spine. How many necklaces are there in the world? Billions, probably. But a necklace she could trace to Lake Crosby? What are the odds?
“What did the necklace look like?”
My voice sounds all wrong. Too high, quivering in my skull like an airplane going down because surely, surely they’re not talking about the same necklace.
“A dog tag with the town’s coordinates,” Mrs. Sterling says, and her words leach to the lining of my stomach. “You know. The intersection of longitude and latitude smack in the center of the lake. It was gold.”
Not just gold. Solid, weighty twenty-four-karat gold. Only the best for Diana’s boys.
Fresh tears are brimming in Mrs. Sterling’s eyes, and she buries her face in her hands. “I just can’t believe this is happening. We made it through childhood without her choking on a marble. She didn’t get shot up at school or die in some fiery crash when she got her license. Every time we reached this big milestone in her life, I thought, whew, we made it through another phase alive.” She looks up, her cheeks slick with tears. “And now this. How did this happen? Mrs. Keller, do you have children?”
I shake my head, try not to throw up. “No.”
“Well, be glad. Being a parent is a constant worry. It never goes away, ever. Not even when they’re grown and gone. It’s the burden of being a mother.”
I don’t even know what to say to that. My mother didn’t worry, not even a little bit, but I have bigger problems. Tell Paul I need to talk to him, Jax said, right before a girl with his necklace turned up dead, and Paul took off into the woods. Only a guilty man would do that. A man with something to hide.
“Where’s this necklace now?”
“That’s the problem,” Mr. Sterling says. “Nobody can tell us. Not the police. Not the people in the B and B.”
Mrs. Sterling nods, her summer-blue eyes boring into mine. “It’s gone. The necklace has vanished.”