Beneath the dock, Molly is wrapped in a comforter we purchased two days before Katrina was born, and is weighed down by our old Evinrude engine, an engine Jersey Simpkins had sold us, even when he knew it was temperamental.
An engine I saw when I was here three weeks ago, attached to our boat.
An engine Molly said Bruce Duper took care of.
An engine that Bruce Duper told me he’d removed from our Whaler.
I scream and all the air in my lungs rushes out and I know that it couldn’t have been me. I flail away at the water and know that I have tied my life to memories that never existed.
Bruce Duper has killed my wife and buried her beneath my dock.
Molly’s hair fans out and dances in the current and for a moment I think that everything is perfect, that Molly is as beautiful now as she will ever be. I crane my head back and stare at the surface of the lake. The sun cuts serrated lines through the water and then I am rising into the sun, my body pulled toward the surface.
“Help me get him up,” Sheriff Drew screams.
I feel arms around my chest, under my shoulders, pulling my arms.
“Get him onto the dock.”
Ginny and Leo yank me out of the water and lay me flat on the wooden slats.
“She’s down there,” I say.
“Sit him up,” Sheriff Drew says and Leo pulls me forward. The horizon rises and dips before me and I think that maybe I am hallucinating all of this, or that I’m asleep somewhere and that I will wake up in another world.
“He pinned her down with our Evinrude.”
“What?” Sheriff Drew says. “What are you saying?”
I turn and look for Bruce and find him standing beside me, staring motionless into the water. “On the Whaler,” I say, pointing toward my boat. “He put that Johnson on, see? She’s pinned under the dock, Sheriff. He pinned her under the dock with our Evinrude.”
“Calm down,” Leo says. “Okay? We’ll get this sorted out.”
Sheriff Drew walks over to the Whaler and inspects the engine. “Goddamn,” he says. “That’s a brand new engine. Bruce, is that true? Did you put this engine on her boat?”
“She was all alone out here,” Bruce says quietly, his back still turned to the sheriff. “You would have done the same thing, Morris.”
“When did you buy this engine?” Sheriff Drew asks.
“I don’t recall,” Bruce says.
“I didn’t kill her,” I say to Ginny. “I never hurt her.” Ginny brushes hair from my eyes and I see that she is frowning, that her face is older now, smaller, and for a moment I’m not sure I’m seeing anything, not sure my eyes are even open.
“Paul was here constantly, you know that, Morris.” Bruce turns around and faces the sheriff and I see something change in him, see a difference in his posture, see that the animal is gone from him, has left him with a cracking shell. “We used to find his footprints in the dirt, used to hear him talking to himself out in the trees. All I did was change out an engine, Morris. That’s all I ever did.”
“I’m sure that’s right,” Sheriff Drew says. He’s walking slowly toward Bruce now, his gait easy and familiar and I think that I have seen this before, a few days ago, as he came to question me. “But a man starts drinking too much, that affects him, doesn’t it? You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you, Bruce? You remember how your father got, don’t you? Now just tell me when it was you bought that engine and we can all get out of here. Safe and sound.”
Bruce stares at me, and I think he wants to cry, wants to sit down beside me and weep for a woman neither of us could have, his love for her useless now. He isn’t a bear at all. He is human as much or as little as I am.
“She was already dead,” Bruce says. He is looking at me but talking to the sheriff. “You know that? She was a ghost. I wanted to help her. I wanted to make her see things.”
“You could have,” I say.
“All we wanted was for you to be out of our lives,” Bruce says. “All I ever wanted was to be hers alone.”
“You don’t have to say anything else, Bruce,” Sheriff Drew says. “You’ve got rights.”
“Why couldn’t you have just stayed away?” Bruce says. “Why couldn’t you change? You had the chance. You had every chance.”
“She is all I ever wanted,” I say.
GINNY WALKS ME back into my house while Leo and Sheriff Drew take Bruce across the lake. She lays me down on the bed and rests her hands soft against my face. Less than fifty yards away, Molly waits for me. “Will they bring her back up?” I say.
“Of course, Paul,” Ginny says. “People are on the way right now. Just be still for me, okay baby?”
“Will they make her beautiful again?”
“Whatever you want,” she says. She leans in and kisses me on the forehead, and I realize for the first time what it feels like to have a friend, to have someone who loves you despite it all. “Just be still for me.”
I close my eyes and Molly is there.
She is asleep on the couch in the living room.
A fire burns in the hearth and the room smells like smoke and hemlock cones. I sit down beside her and put my hand on her cheek. Her skin feels smooth and warm and she opens her eyes and says that she was dreaming of me, that we were back in college.
I lift her up from the waist and hold her close, her body is so warm, and I kiss her hair and I tell her to go back to sleep, baby, just sleep. I stroke her neck and along her back and I whisper that she is as beautiful as the first time I ever saw her, that her lips are like velvet, that she has never been less than the greatest part of my life, that we’d always have time to dream, that I’m sorry, that we would always find a place to love each other, that I’d never stop.
I kiss her forehead and her cheeks and her lips and her neck and I know she is dead and that I am lost, and I kiss her mouth again and say take care of our babies, tell them that I love them, that they are blessed, that they have nothing to be afraid of. Just sleep, baby, just sleep. I’m going to hold you forever, until time doesn’t matter, until we are nothing but dust, until the earth, the sun, the moon are gone and there is no memory of us. I will still hold you.
I set her back down on the couch and stare long into her face. She is asleep again, so I take her face into my hands once more and run my thumb over her eyes and say that we wasted so many moments on madness, that all I wanted to do was sit in our clearing in the forest beneath the sunshine talking about the future, holding on to each other, rocking back and forth, never giving up hope, never letting go of the truth, and she was asleep and I crawled in beside her and pressed myself close to her, until I could only hear her breath, could only feel her heartbeat, and I know I can’t bring her back. And then she’s sitting up and smiling and we are holding hands and it’s ten years ago and we are children, just kids, dumb in love and happy. And then I know that I’m in shock, that nothing is right, that I’ve found the truth, that I found my wife, that truth is slipping, that I am slipping, that Molly’s slipping, that she’s gone, that we’re gone.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the many wonderful people who helped make the publication of this book possible. Foremost, I wish to thank uber-agent Jennie Dunham, who tells me and tells me but never says I told you so, for her in-depth reconstruction of this novel; Tom Filer for his passion, wisdom, and honesty; Judi Farkas for her unyielding faith and belief in my work and her uncanny ability to get it in the right hands; Mary Yukari Waters who told me to ground it and then I’d be on to something; all of Goat Alley for suffering through the rough drafts and the false starts and for telling me everything I didn’t want to hear and, certainly, Juris Jurjevics for shepherding this book and for having confidence enough to change it and to publish it. I was inspired by the works of anthropologists like Robert Trivers and Helen Fisher, particularly on the topic of reciprocal altruism; however, I am neither an anthropologist nor a doctor, so errors in either anthropology or medicine belong strictly to my desire to manipulate both
for my fictional desires.
Thank you also to the fine people at Soho Press for bringing this book back into print after a long time away, particularly Ailen Lujo who first suggested it, and Bronwen Hruska, for making it happen.
It is with great affection that I thank Nana and Papa Dave for bringing us all to The Lake. Much of this was written while remembering the precious hours Papa Dave spent on the water with me talking about life and death and about what happens to the people you love. I wish he were here to see this. And now, a decade since its original release, I am so pleased Nana was able to hold it in her hands for so many years.
Finally, I am blessed by Wendy. I wrote this book for you.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SOHO CRIME SERIES
Quentin Bates
(Iceland)
Frozen Assets
Cold Comfort
Cheryl Benard
(Pakistan)
Moghul Buffet
James R. Benn
(World War II Europe)
Billy Boyle
The First Wave
Blood Alone
Evil for Evil
Rag & Bone
A Mortal Terror
Death’s Door
Cara Black
(Paris, France)
Murder in the Marais
Murder in Belleville
Murder in the Sentier
Murder in the Bastille
Murder in Clichy
Murder in Montmartre
Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis
Murder in the Rue de Paradis
Murder in the Latin Quarter
Murder in the Palais Royal
Murder in Passy
Murder at the Lanterne Rouge
Murder Below Montparnasse
Grace Brophy
(Italy)
The Last Enemy
A Deadly Paradise
Henry Chang
(Chinatown)
Chinatown Beat
Year of the Dog
Red Jade
Colin Cotterill
(Laos)
The Coroner’s Lunch
Thirty-Three Teeth
Disco for the Departed
Anarchy and Old Dogs
Curse of the Pogo Stick
The Merry Misogynist
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave
Slash and Burn
The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die
Garry Disher
(Australia)
The Dragon Man
Kittyhawk Down
Snapshot
Chain of Evidence
Blood Moon
Wyatt
Whispering Death
Port Vila Blues
David Downing
(World War II Germany)
Zoo Station
Silesian Station
Stettin Station
Potsdam Station
Lehrter Station
Masaryk Station
Leighton Gage
(Brazil)
Blood of the Wicked
Buried Strangers
Dying Gasp
Every Bitter Thing
A Vine in the Blood
Perfect Hatred
Michael Genelin
(Slovakia)
Siren of the Waters
Dark Dreams
The Magician’s Accomplice
Requiem for a Gypsy
Adrian Hyland
(Australia)
Moonlight Downs
Gunshot Road
Stan Jones
(Alaska)
White Sky, Black Ice
Shaman Pass
Village of the Ghost Bears
Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis
(Denmark)
Invisible Murder
Graeme Kent
(Solomon Islands)
Devil-Devil
One Blood
Martin Limón
(South Korea)
Jade Lady Burning
Slicky Boys
Buddha’s Money
The Door to Bitterness
The Wandering Ghost
G.I. Bones
Mr. Kill
The Joy Brigade
Peter Lovesey
(Bath, England)
The Last Detective
The Vault
On the Edge
The Reaper
Rough Cider
The False Inspector Dew
Diamond Dust
Diamond Solitaire
The House Sitter
(Peter Lovesey cont.)
The Summons
Bloodhounds
Upon a Dark Night
The Circle
The Secret Hangman
The Headhunters
Skeleton Hill
Stagestruck
Cop to Corpse
The Tooth Tattoo
Jassy Mackenzie
(South Africa)
Random Violence
Stolen Lives
The Fallen
Pale Horses
SeichÅ Matsumoto
(Japan)
Inspector Imanishi Investigates
James McClure
(South Africa)
The Steam Pig
The Caterpillar Cop
The Gooseberry Fool
Snake
The Sunday Hangman
The Blood of an Englishman
The Artful Egg
The Song Dog
Jan Merete Weiss
(Italy)
These Dark Things
Magdalen Nabb
(Italy)
Death of an Englishman
Death of a Dutchman
Death in Springtime
Death in Autumn
The Marshal and the Madwoman
The Marshal and the Murderer
The Marshal’s Own Case
The Marshal Makes His Report
The Marshal at the Villa Torrini
Property of Blood
Some Bitter Taste
The Innocent
Vita Nuova
Stuart Neville
(Northern Ireland)
The Ghosts of Belfast
Collusion
Stolen Souls
Ratlines
Eliot Pattison
(Tibet)
Prayer of the Dragon
The Lord of Death
Rebecca Pawel
(1930s Spain)
Death of a Nationalist
Law of Return
The Watcher in the Pine
The Summer Snow
Qiu Xiaolong
(China)
Death of a Red Heroine
A Loyal Character Dancer
When Red is Black
Matt Beynon Rees
(Palestine)
The Collaborator of Bethlehem
A Grave in Gaza
The Samaritan’s Secret
The Fourth Assassin
John Straley
(Alaska)
The Woman Who Married a Bear
The Curious Eat Themselves
Akimitsu Takagi
(Japan)
The Tattoo Murder Case
Honeymoon to Nowhere
The Informer
Helene Tursten
(Sweden)
Detective Inspector Huss
The Torso
The Glass Devil
Night Rounds
The Golden Calf
Janwillem van de Wetering
(Holland)
Outsider in Amsterdam
Tumbleweed
The Corpse on the Dike
Death of a Hawker
The Japanese Corpse
The Blond Baboon
The Maine Massacre
The Mind-Murders
The Streetbird
The Rattle-Rat
Hard Rain
Just a Corpse at Twilight
Hollow-Eyed Angel
The Perfidious Parrot
Amsterd
am Cops: Collected Stories