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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 hisproperty, 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 shediddrown?”
“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, likeyesterday, 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’rebothcompletely out of your minds, and now we’re gonna have two dead bodies instead of one.”
“I’ll be fine,” Micah says.