Micah stares at me from the opposite couch. “I thought you said you didn’t remember anything.”
“I didn’t. I don’t. It’s just snippets, really, but…”
But now I can’t tell what’s real and what’s my mind twisting up on itself. The image of Micah is so vivid it feels almost tangible, but dreams are like that too sometimes, those blurry moments right before you’re good and awake. Our mother scrounging around for liquor and drugs, that was a constant, and there were always people hanging around the trailer park, there to do business with Bobby. Maybe I’m seeing something that wasn’t there, putting Micah’s face on another person’s body. I was only six. How real can it be?
Come on, Bobby. Just one little hit.
Mama said it, I’m positive. I squeeze my eyes shut and new pictures flash behind my eyes, turning from black and white to technicolor. Mama’s red underwear. A grubby yellow blanket. Expensive blue jeans.
My phone lights up on my lap, Chet calling from the car, but I let him go to voice mail. Those first blurry memories have broken through the darkness, knocked something loose in my brain, and I don’t want to let go of the images.
“My mom wanted some of Bobby’s cigarette. No, not a cigarette. A joint. She was begging him for a hit, and he laughed at her. He pushed her down in the dirt.”
“Jesus, that scrawny lady… That was your mother?”
“And the baby in my arms was Chet. He was a really light sleeper. The noise from Bobby’s place was constantly waking him up.”
Micah laughs, a strangled sound. “Damn. I thought maybe I’d seen you working the register at the gas station, or busing tables in town or something.” He shakes his head slowly, not bothering to wipe away his surprise. “But I should have known because you look just like her—minus the bad skin and tweaker teeth. Oh my God, your mom was a tweaker. Too strung out to notice she was outside in her underwear while her babies were bawling on the stoop.”
Micah’s tone hits me wrong—too high and mighty, and I shift on my chair.
“Bobby laughed at her, and so did you.”
There’s a voice in my head screaming at me to just let it lie. To shut up and pick up my phone, silent and dark on the cushion next to me, to tell Chet to hurry. But the memories have edges now, and this one’s too big, too consequential to keep inside.
“What can I say? We were real shits back then.”
“Not Jax,” I say, and suddenly I understand. This is why I’ve never been afraid of him, why when he showed up—a raggedy fugitive on my back deck—I opened the door without hesitation. “Jax got mad. He felt bad for me.”
“No, he felt sorry for you. There’s a big difference.”
Micah’s words knock me like a slap, even though it’s true. Jax did feel sorry for me that night. I get a lightning-quick glimpse of the look he gave me from behind the wheel of Bobby’s car, the sudden lurch of the car shooting forward only to go nowhere. I hear the laughter, the shouting. I shake my head, trying to string the images together in a way that makes sense, but I can’t. None of it makes any sense.
But still.
If I hadn’t said anything just now, Micah wouldn’t have, either. He would have gone right on acting like he’d never met poor, sad Bobby. He would have gone right on blaming Paul and Jax. The mood changes in an instant, the seriousness of where this discussion is headed settling like a rash on my skin.
“And Paul? Was he there, too?”
Micah nods. “Passed out on the back seat of Bobby’s car.”
And that’s when all the pieces fall into a place, a combination of memory and conjecture.
A secret under water for twenty years.
Paul, almost drowned.
Jax, saving his life.
“Micah, what did you do?”
There’s a breath where I think he’s going to deny it, a pause that hangs heavy in the air. I hear the percussive tick of a clock somewhere off in the kitchen, the smooth hiss of my own breath.
“I got in the car with a drunken idiot who crashed us into the cove. That’s what I did. And you can stop looking at me like that. None of this would’ve happened if Jax hadn’t been such an asshole. Leaning over cliffs, chugging tequila, driving like a maniac. This is his fault. Not mine.”
I imagine it then, the squeal of the Camaro’s tires, smell the rubber burning against asphalt, feel the weightlessness as the car takes flight. A car as solid as Bobby’s would have hit the water and sunk fast. If Jax had just enough time to drag up one person, if he could only choose one, which would it be—the trailer-park drug dealer, or his lifelong best friend?
If this is true, if I’m right, then so was Paul. Pitts Cove was a long-term investment, just not in the way he wanted me to believe. It had nothing to do with rerouting State Road 32 or turning swampland into an exclusive lakeside community. For Paul, buying up Pitts Cove was about keeping old bones buried not just for Jax but for himself as well.
And those bones would still be down there if that recreational diver hadn’t swum up on his car and swiped that gold necklace as a trophy. No wonder Paul reacted like he did when I found him talking to Sienna, or the next day, when she washed up dead under the dock. Even if he wasn’t the one who put her there, even if all he was trying to conceal was his hand in Bobby’s death, Paul would have known what identifying her could lead to.
And Micah. Micah is a Lake Hunter, for crap’s sake. What, did he strap on his tank and flippers and sink to the bottom of Pitts Cove every couple of months just to check in on Bobby? To report back to Paul and Jax that he was still down there, untouched and undiscovered?
“This is going to come out, Micah. Y’all had to have known that the second Sienna showed up here, the truth about Bobby would come out.”
“Not if we’d kept our mouths shut, like we planned. We made a pact that night. We swore we’d never tell a soul.”
“I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed.”
“Why? Because of some girl with a necklace?”
“Because of a dead girl with a necklace. And I’m guessing you’ve seen her Twitter feed, so you already know about the podcast. There’s got to be notes or recordings or something on her phone or laptop or uploaded to some website. Probably all of the above.”
Micah watches me with those same eyes, that same serious stillness. His voice is eerily low. “Maybe. But they’ll have to find it first.”
The air in the room turns heavy and solid, like the barometric pressure outside. Micah knows every crack and crevice at the bottom of the lake. If he’s done what he’s implying, then he stashed her things somewhere deep and dark, somewhere no one will ever find them.
“And besides. I was at home the night Bobby disappeared. There’s pictures of me at the dinner table, Dad and Mom and me. Dad’s always been real good about documenting family moments. He writes the place and date on the back of every photo.”
I don’t believe him, not for a second. No way in hell Chief Hunt is that sentimental. If those pictures exist, which I’m sure they do, the dates were fudged exactly for this purpose—to serve as an alibi. Micah’s been planning to let Paul and Jax take the fall alone, and his father is helping him.
Which means Chief Hunt is in on this, too.
Micah leans to his left, sliding his still-full mug onto a side table. “You know, when Paul came home that first day, telling me about this woman he met while getting gas, I was thrilled for him.” He says it like a compliment, his voice warm and affectionate, but I’m not fooled. I see the way his shoulders have gone stiff, that muscle ticking in his jaw. “You didn’t see him that first year after Katherine died, how those rumors tore him apart. Diana was ready to put him on suicide watch. It was that bad. But then you came along, and he started smiling again.”
“Twenty years. You sat on this secret for twenty years. You and Paul literally stood by and watched a man go batty from the guilt. And for what? To save your own skin?”
“Oh, come on. Jax was never a friend. He was someone I tolerated because Paul liked him. And it’s not like we planned it or anything. This wasn’t premeditated. We were young and we were stupid, and may I remind you once again this was Jax’s fault. Jax was behind the wheel. He was driving.”
That feels right, Jax behind the wheel. Only…my head explodes with images, with sounds. An argument threaded through with blaring music and laughter. Fists flying.
Thunder booms overhead at the same time a bolt of lightning splits the night, turning darkness into day like God flicked on a flashlight, there and gone in an instant. Barely long enough for me to pick out a cluster of trees, a pile of slick firewood on the back deck, a drenched Jax—right before everything goes black.
Jax.
Something prickles up the back of my neck—shock, disbelief, a disturbing kind of unease. What is Jax doing here? How long has he been watching? I stare at the glass, searching for his shape in the shadows, but all I see is the reflection of the room, Micah twisting around on the couch.
“What?” he says, turning back, studying my face. “What did you see?”
“Nothing. The storm’s close, that’s all. That lightning hit right outside.”
The room goes deathly quiet, an empty, heavy sound that expands and fills me with dread. I think about what I should do now that I know the truth. I could run. I could leap over the couch and arm myself with a kitchen knife. But I can’t make my body move because it’s Micah. Paul’s friend and mine. The one person who never made me feel unwelcome on this side of the hill. When he smiles at me, I smile back, half wondering if this is a dream.
“I thought you were different than her,” he says, and I’m guessing we’re back to Katherine. “The way you look. Where you come from, your white-trash upbringing. But the more I got to know you, the more it made sense. You and Katherine are a lot alike, you know. You’re both smart. Relentless. So goddamn righteous. You won’t be able to sit on this secret, will you?”
“Katherine knew?”
“Paul told her. That asshole broke the pact we made that night, that we’d take this secret to our graves. But Paul blabbed it to Katherine. She was trying to talk us into turning ourselves in. She gave us a motherfucking deadline. That’s what they were fighting about. What we all were fighting about.”
On the other side of the glass, the woods light up with a streak of lightning, followed by a boom that shakes my bones with meaning.
Fury flashes across Micah’s face, flaring his nostrils, pressing his mouth into a thin line. “I don’t take kindly to ultimatums. Ask any of my ex-girlfriends.”
It’s not an admission but his words still wash over me like a wave. Could Sam have been right? Were those marks on Katherine’s ankle really fingerprints?
I picture Micah swimming up underneath her with his flippers and a tank strapped to his back. Nobody would have looked twice when he walked into the water in his dive gear. He would have been invisible to everyone but Katherine. My cheeks tingle with shock, burning like they’ve been slapped, leaving me gasping.
“You didn’t. You wouldn’t.”
He pushes to a stand, and I think about Chet in his car, somewhere between here and town. How long ago did he leave? How long before he gets here? Micah is so big, so strong. Fast, too. There’s no way I could outrun him. My fingers creep across the cushion, but Micah gets there first. He grabs my phone and tosses it onto the opposite couch.
When he turns back, everything about him is hard. His face. The set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. His voice when he glares down at me.
“She didn’t give me a choice.”
“Oh my God. Micah! Katherine was your friend. Your best friend’s wife. And you killed her for what—to save your own skin?”
“Well…yeah. That’s exactly why I did it—that and because of her ultimatum. It was either that or go to jail, and I am not going to jail. Do you know what they’d do to the son of a police officer in there?” He shakes his head, a slow side to side. “No way. I am not going to jail for Jax’s mistake. Not happening.”
How did Micah do it? How did he drink our beer and do flips off our dock and pose for pictures with his arm around Paul’s shoulders and a smile that said everything was just fine?
“What kind of monster are you?”
It’s probably stupid to say it out loud, but I’ve already tipped irreversibly off course here, soared well past the point of no return. If Micah has gone to all this trouble to conceal being in the car with Bobby, he’s not going to let me go. These truths, the worst ones, die here with me tonight.
There’s only one way for this to end.
I blink, and he’s yanking me up off the couch by my bicep, sloshing tea all over his designer mohair couch. I struggle to break free, but he’s like a brick wall, his grip hard and unyielding.
“Charlotte, stop. I’m not going to hurt you.”
But I already know Micah Hunt is a liar.
One chance, that’s all I get.
I use the only weapon I have. I swing back an arm, send the mug thunking hard against his temple. The impact vibrates up my arm, douses us both in hot tea, but it was a direct hit. Micah growls in pain, in anger.
The backhand to my jaw is both shocking and disorienting. The world goes upside down and I go flying. My foot catches on a leg of Micah’s coffee table, and I hurtle over it and crash to the floor, rolling across the carpet in a messy heap. My mouth fills with a warm gush of blood, and some of it trickles out of me and onto the carpet, bright red liquid soaking into his custom Berber carpet. Evidence, I think, right before my head connects with a wall. If nothing else, they’ll get him for me.
And then…
Nothing.