Page 74

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 Covewasa 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 wouldstillbe 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.