Lake Country (19 page)

“Be right back,” he said.

As he turned to go, Bryce said, “Hey, do me a favor.”

Toby waited.

“Leave the phone,” Bryce said.

Toby put the phone on the table. Whatever. He’d buy a new phone. An even better one. With a different number. Maybe a different area code. Someplace warmer.

“And the truck keys,” Bryce said.

At that, Toby glanced up too quickly. Over the rim of his coffee mug, Bryce gave him a wink.

Shit
. “The keys?” Toby said. He stood there as his heart sank slowly, settling down somewhere in the silt at the bottom of his stomach.

Bryce sipped his coffee. “Something wrong?”

Toby didn’t know what to say. After feeling for the past few hours like he’d been shuffling along through some kind of long, bad dream, everything seemed to tighten into high-def clarity all at once. Now was the time, Toby thought. Wasn’t it? If he was going to do
it—ever in his life—now was the time for Toby Lunden the Numbers Guy to take a stand.

He looked away.

Bryce sipped his coffee.

Toby dug out his keys. Put them on the table next to the phone. He’d walked maybe half a dozen steps away from the booth when he heard Bryce call out behind him, “Thanks, partner.”

Mike carried her all the way out on his back.

It was tough going at first, but coming out of the marsh he found a deer path that cut through the woods on a line more or less back to Rockhaven. He took to the path and the ground evened out beneath them. If not for the dark and the cold, and the smell of mud and pine trees, and the ache in his overstressed knee—not to mention the sting of a well-cared-for Rapala fillet knife making shallow hash marks on the side of his neck every time he stumbled or misjudged his footing—he might have been a high school jock giving his cheerleader girlfriend a piggyback ride down the midway at the county fair.

At one point they had to leave the deer path, which gradually meandered in the wrong direction. Shortly after that, they lost the spotlight’s battery altogether. But Mike could already see the western shore of the lake through the trees by then.

He expected to see police flashers as well. In his mind he’d imagined returning to the same kind of scene at Rockhaven that he’d left behind in St. Paul.

But no. They emerged from the woods to find a solitary cabin across a peaceful lake in a sleepy moonlit
clearing, not far up the shoreline from the grove of staghorn sumac still faithfully concealing Juliet’s blood-smeared canoe.

He felt her arms tighten around his neck. “Where’s your truck?” she said.

These were the first words either one of them had spoken since striking out from the marsh, and Mike had fallen out of conversation mode.

He was utterly gassed. His back and neck and shoulders screamed with the strain of carrying her, and his knee felt like someone had gone to work on it with a hammer. He hadn’t wanted a Vicodin—or a handful—so badly in as long as he could remember. For the past couple hundred meters he’d been daydreaming about the last gulp of Old Crow Darryl had left behind in the cabin, and now that the cabin was in sight, he found himself physically salivating.

“My what?” he said. It was the best he could come up with.

“Your truck. You said you came in the white pickup. Where is it?”

Across the lake, he could see her little Subaru sitting dark and deserted in front of the cabin. All the lights still burned in the cabin’s ground-floor windows as he’d left them.

Mike thought of Darryl waiting for him on the lake road. It had been at least two hours since they’d split up. A big part of him wondered if Darryl had waited around at all. It was approximately the same part of him that hoped Darryl hadn’t.

“It’s around back,” he lied, too exhausted to lift the truth at this point. “Where you climbed out the window. We can’t see it from here.”

It wasn’t a very good lie, but it seemed to be enough for her. He felt the extra tension leak out of her arms as they released their tourniquet grip on his neck. She was at the end of her rope, just like he was. She wanted to believe things.

“I need to let you down,” he said. “Hook your arm over my shoulder. I’ll help you walk the rest.”

They hobbled out of the timber together like a pair of plane-crash survivors. Slowly they made their way along the shoreline to the canoe. Mike spied a log near their spot that would do for a bench. He helped her sit, then went to work hauling the canoe out of the brush, down to the water’s edge. He dropped the dead spotlight into the canoe and took out the single oar. When he was ready, he went back to Juliet.

Before he could say a word, she shook her head firmly, gripping her arms.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“I don’t want to go back there.”

Aw, no
, Mike thought.
Not this now. Please
.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s safe, I promise.”

She sensed she was being pushed and hugged her arms tighter.

“Juliet,” he said. “Listen.”

“Nope.” She shook her head again. “Definitely not going back there.”

Mike released a long, weary breath. He felt like he weighed hundreds of pounds, and all of them were sore.

With effort, he crouched down in front of her, assuming more or less the same position he’d taken back at the fallen pine tree. He patted her on the sides of her legs. He rubbed some warmth, or at least some
friction, into her cold bare shoulders with his cold grimy hands.

She didn’t protest. After carrying her all that way with her hot breath on his neck, touching her in such a familiar way hardly seemed like a breach of personal space. In fact, it was starting to feel to Mike like they’d known each other longer than they had.

“Hey,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to go back there either.”

“I didn’t think I was going to be leaving that place at all,” she said. Her voice caught a tremble, but she took a breath and shook it out. “Do you know what that feels like?”

“I have some idea,” Mike said. “And that’s the God’s honest truth. If you want, I’ll tell you about it. When we’re on the road out of here.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. “I’m sure as shit not going back.”

“Juliet. I get it,” Mike said. “But listen to me. You’re hurt, and right across this water there’s all the first-aid stuff we need. I can disinfect those cuts and wrap your ankle nice and tight, get you warm and dry. Patch you up.”

“I’m not going to die,” she said.

“No,” he agreed. “Not tonight, you’re not. But.…”

“Where is he?”

“Where is who?”

“You know who I mean,” she said. “You said I don’t have to worry about him anymore. How do you know that?”

Mike realized he’d worked himself into a corner. What could he possibly tell her in this situation?
Don’t worry about it, the guy’s a buddy of mine. I know I said I didn’t know him, but actually we go way back. He went a little nuts there for a minute, but I’m pretty sure he’s okay now
.

He didn’t want to keep lying to her, but he didn’t want to be sitting here in the mud when the cops came roaring up the lane either. All Mike wanted was to get the hell across the lake, get a drink, boost her Subaru, and get them out of Rockhaven.

The lie that would best help him achieve this objective had already popped into his mind. He used it with a guilty conscience, if not with much hesitation.

“He’s dead,” he told her. “Okay? That’s how I know.”

Juliet Benson stared at him. But her shoulders loosened. She said, “He’s dead?”

“Yes.”

“You … you killed him?”

“He had a gun, just like you said.” It sounded preposterous to Mike’s own ears, but it was working. “I did what I had to do.”

Her hands drifted into her lap. The knife dangled loosely in her fingers. She looked out across the water, toward the cabin. She looked at Mike. She said, “He’s still there?”

“You won’t have to see him,” Mike said, the impromptu fiction unfolding without conscious effort on his part. Had he already planned it out on some level, knowing they’d come to this conversation eventually? “Why do you think I took the truck around back?”

Juliet went limp. He had to reach out and steady her before she tipped facefirst off her log.

When she’d regained her composure, found her equilibrium again, he peeled a grubby clump of hair away from her eyes and said, “Easy does it.”

She looked right at him and said, “Who
are
you?”

At least he didn’t have to lie to answer that one. “I’m a very tired guy,” he said.

She surprised him then. She reached out and grabbed his hand.

Mike gave her hand a squeeze. “You okay?”

She nodded. “I’m ready.”

He helped her down to the water and into the canoe. When she was settled in the bow, he climbed in after her, grabbed the oar, and pushed them off the bank. In the gloom, he could still see the cut through the cattails, and he poled them through. In no time they were gliding in open water.

“Barlowe Lake Ferry at your service,” he said between paddle strokes. He sounded like a cornball, but he didn’t care. He was feeling good now. “Reasonable rates, and we almost never capsize.”

Her chin appeared over her shoulder. “Barlowe?”

“My last name,” he told her. “Mike Barlowe.”

Her chin swiveled away, and he was looking at the back of her head again. She said, “Very glad to meet you, Mr. Barlowe.”

The general mood had taken quite a turn in the past few minutes. For both of them. “Pleasure having you aboard, Miss Benson,” he said.

They’d just reached the narrow middle of the peanut-shaped lake when the mood abruptly changed again.

Behind them, in the distance, there came a faint sound through the timber. As the sound grew louder,
Juliet Benson shifted her whole body sideways in the bow seat and cocked her head, listening.

But Mike had already identified the sound they were hearing. It was, unmistakably, the sound of a vehicle coming up the lane, and he felt a strange combination of tension and release. This was the sound he’d been waiting for since he realized that he’d forgotten to call Hal back home at the Elbow. This, or the whop of helicopter blades.

He had just time enough to wonder why he didn’t hear sirens when the approaching vehicle emerged into view and took the long curve around the far end of the lake.

Mike felt his heart sink at the sight of the Power Wagon barreling toward the cabin. Already on alert, Juliet Benson went straight as a board, sitting up so quickly that the canoe bobbed.

Mike stopped paddling. For a free-floating moment they watched the truck together: his missing white pickup, not missing anymore. Not parked behind the cabin but gleaming like a beacon as it followed the lane, trailing exhaust and rock dust in the moonlight.

“You goddamn rotten fucker,” he heard her say, and all at once the canoe yawed violently starboard. When Mike looked to the bow, it was empty.

Instinctively, he swept the paddle wide through the water, righting his balance, even as he heard the splash off his port. It sounded like someone had heaved a steamer trunk overboard.

Next he heard a high, garbled cry. More splashing. Coughing. Sputtering.

He spotted her four or five feet out, flailing at the water, gasping for breath. The way she was struggling,
she seemed to have no sense of her own orientation, and Mike knew exactly why.

The lake temperature at this time of year couldn’t have been much more than fifty degrees; the shock of jumping over your head into water that cold could make you forget your own name, let alone how to coordinate your limbs. Juliet Benson had just given herself a billion-odd-gallon dose of the same medicine Mike had given Darryl earlier, dumping that bucket of water in his lap.

“Christ,” he said, and got himself together. With one careful draw of the paddle, he angled the bow of the canoe so that he could slide near without plowing into her. “Juliet! Calm down. Grab the paddle.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. Mike braced himself in the canoe and reached out to grab her by the arm, trying to prepare himself for the quite likely possibility that he was about to end up in the lake with her.

He got her by the meat of her biceps, under her armpit. He propped his free hand on the gunwale, spread his legs as wide as he could manage, and pulled her toward the hull.

He felt a hot bite across the back of his wrist. A shock of pain went shivering up his arm. Mike sucked in a breath, letting her go and pulling his hand away from her out of reflex. He saw watery rivulets of blood already streaming from a gash across the outer knob of his wrist bone.

She cut me
, he thought dimly. Despite the shock of the cold lake water, the girl had somehow managed to hang on to the knife. He almost couldn’t believe it.

And now she was swimming. Back toward the tree
line, in the direction they’d come. Away from the cabin.

“Juliet!” he called out. “Hey!”

She didn’t stop to see what he wanted. On the cabin-side shore, Darryl parked and got out of the truck, turning toward the lake. His silhouette assumed a quizzical posture.

Perfect
, Mike thought, and started paddling after Juliet.

She was a good swimmer. But she was also exhausted, and the water was cold. And he doubted she could kick very well with her bad ankle. Even buoyed by adrenaline, after twenty meters she was running out of gas in a hurry, and Mike grew concerned. All this trying to swim away, he yearned to explain, was actually robbing her of body heat instead of generating it, her heart pumping blood from her core to her extremities, to be quickly cooled by the April lake water.

He took a wide arc and piloted the canoe a meter or so in front of her, across her path. “Juliet, come on,” he said. “This is nuts.”

He half-expected her to go underwater and try to swim beneath him, but she changed course instead, now moving parallel to shore. She wasn’t thinking anymore. Only fleeing. Another bad sign.

Mike sighed and paddled along with her. “Come on,” he said. “Knock it off.”

“Screw you!” she called back. She swallowed a mouthful of lake water and came up sputtering and coughing again. “Stay away from me.”