Page 69 of This is Why We Lied

He grinned. “Is this a trick?”

She whispered a filthy curse, then continued her forward momentum.

Will wasn’t one to break a long silence. He also wasn’t going to argue with her. He kept his mouth closed as they slogged through a dense patch of brush. Sara’s sudden burst of anger wasn’t the only thing making the hike uncomfortable. He was sweating. The blister on his foot was rearing its ugly head. His hand was still throbbing with every heartbeat. He tried to tighten the bandage. Water dripped from the gauze.

Sara said, “You need to listen to me.”

“I’m listening, but I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

“I’m saying that I’m going to have to paddle the boat by myself to the other side of the lake so we don’t go around in circles for the rest of our natural lives.”

“At least we’ll be together.”

She stopped again, turning to face him. There was not even a hint of a smile on her lips. “He carries a switchblade. He cut a man’s chest to the bone. Do I have to tell you what organs are in your chest?”

He knew better than to joke this time. “No.”

“What you’re thinking now—that Dave is pathetic, that he’s a loser. All of that’s probably true. But he’s also a violent criminal. He’s not going to want to go back to jail. According to you and everybody else up here, he’s already got one murder on his conscience. Adding another isn’t going to faze him.”

Will could hear the naked fear in her voice. Now he got it. Her first husband had been a cop. The man had underestimated a suspect and ended up dead because of it. There was no good way for Will to tell her that same fate wasn’t going to fall on him. He was built differently. He had spent the first eighteen years of his life expecting people to do brutal and violent things, then the subsequent years doing everything he could to stop them.

She reached for his good hand, holding so tightly that he could feel the bones shift.

“My love,” she said. “I know what your job is, that you make these life and death choices almost every day, but you need to understand that it’s not just your life anymore, and it’s not just your death. It’s my life. It’s my death.”

Will traced his thumb along her wedding band. There had to be a way for them to both get what they wanted. “Sara—”

“I’m not trying to change you. I’m just telling you I’m scared.”

Will tried to split it down the middle. “How about this: once I have Dave in custody, I’ll go to the hospital with you. A place up here, not down in Atlanta. And you can take care of my hand and Faith can get a confession out of Dave and that will be the end of it.”

“How about we do all of that, then you help me look for Jon?”

“That sounds reasonable.” Will readily accepted the bargain. He had not forgotten the promise he’d made to Mercy. There were things that Jon needed to hear. “What now?”

Sara looked out over the water. Will followed her gaze. They were close to the equipment shed. Moonlight bathed the diving board on the floating dock.

She said, “I’m not sure how long it will take me to get us across. Twenty minutes? Thirty? I haven’t paddled a canoe since Girl Scouts.”

Will guessed back then she hadn’t been dragging the dead weight of a grown man who couldn’t hold a paddle. On the return trip, there would hopefully be two grown men. Which brought its own problems. Will’s water attack fantasy hadn’t gone past taking Dave down. He would have to hike the murderer out of the campsite rather than bring him back across the water. There was no way he was going to have Sara in a boat with Dave.

He said, “I want to check the shed to see if there’s any rope.”

Sara didn’t ask him what the rope was for. She retreated into silence as they resumed the hike, which was somehow worse than when she was yelling at him. He tried to think of something to say that would make her less worried, but Will had learned the hard way that telling a woman not to feel something was not the best way to stop her from feeling that thing. In fact, it tended to make her furious on top of feeling that thing.

Fortunately, the journey didn’t take that much longer. Sara’s flashlight caught the canoes first, all stored upside-down on a rack. The equipment shed was roughly the size of a two-car garage. The double doors had a serious latch considering the place was so isolated. The spring-loaded chain-grip slide bolt had a foot-long metal bar that had to be flipped over to release the latch. A spring safety latch looped through the end of the bar, pinning it to a hasp lock on the door.

By way of explanation, Sara said, “Bears can open doors, too.”

Will let her twist open the hasp, then he took over pushing the metal bar. The mechanism was tight. He had to put his shoulder into it, but finally, the doors swung open. Will caught a weird mixture of wood smoke and fish.

Sara coughed at the smell, waving her hand in front of her face as she walked into the shed. She found the light switch on the wall. The fluorescent bulbs revealed a neatly ordered workshop. Tools were outlined with blue tape on a pegboard. Fishing poles were on hooks. Nets and baskets lined an entire wall. There was a stone countertop with a sink and well-used cutting board. Two sets of scissors and four knives of varying lengths were hanging from a magnetic strip. All but one of the blades was slim and non-serrated.

Will was a gun guy, not a knife guy. He asked Sara, “Is anything missing?”

“Not that I can tell. It’s a standard set for cleaning fish.” Sara pointed them out from first to last. “Bait knife. Boning knife. Fillet knife. Chunk knife. Dressing scissors. Line snip.”

Will didn’t see any rope. He started opening drawers. Everything was arranged in sections. Nothing was loose. He recognized some of the fasteners from his own garage, but assumed they weren’t used on cars. He found what he needed in the last drawer. Whoever was in charge of the shed was too thorough not to have the basics: a roll of duct tape and heavy-duty zip ties.