“Emily.” Her hazel eyes bored into me, so calm and earnest, greenish in the evening light. “Those things aren’t true. We didn’t leave anything in the suite. Nobody was tracking our car. And no one saw us doing anything. But even if they did, you’re forgetting the most important reason I’m not worried.”
My eyes felt like storm clouds—heavy drops threatened to fall. “And what’s that?”
She lifted my phone and held the dark screen out to me at face level. I frowned at it, then shook my head, confused.
“No—look into it,” she said. My focus shifted to the ebony mirror, streaked with oil and with a spidery crack webbing out of the left corner. Then my focus slipped one level deeper, and I saw the image, like a Magic Eye picture: myself, my own face, young and sweet-looking. We used to joke that while Kristen had Resting Bitch Face, I had Resting Happy Face—strangers always stopped me to ask for directions, and men on the street never told me to smile （instead finding other egress for their harassment）。 I understood: This was not the face of a murderer. I rolled my lips inward and leaned away.
“Now, we’ll turn our phones back on and you’ll check your work emails and that’s the end of that. Okay?”
Her nonchalance unnerved me, and repulsion fluttered in my torso. But the urge to strain away from her felt different this time. Less primal, more cerebral.
I gazed at the antler chandelier, then nodded, because there was nothing more to say. But for once, her confidence wasn’t reassuring. It felt obstinate, unearned.
And it couldn’t drown out the loudest line from that article, the phrase already looping in my brain: desperate for answers.
Kristen, of all people, should know that desperate souls stop at nothing to get what they want.
CHAPTER 22
I woke early and blinked into the filtered light; birdsong wafted through the open windows and I closed my eyes again, savored it, knowing something bad was brewing, too, though I didn’t remember what.
I couldn’t hold it off for long, and my eyes snapped open at the frigid thought: Paolo’s body, policemen like ants poring over the Elqui Valley. The land out there did look like anthills, come to think of it. Fox-colored and sandy. Perhaps to the right-sized giant, the Andes were little mounds teeming with two-legged insects.
Last night I’d briefly considered asking Kristen to take me home, but that wouldn’t accomplish much; Kristen was the only one who could commiserate, and I’d rather be despondent here at the lake than in my darkened apartment. Now I tossed off the covers; there was nothing to do but go on with my day. I’d carry my coffee out to Grandpa’s Pier. Bring some reading material, something to occupy me when thoughts of Paolo inevitably popped and frizzled in my mind.
As the coffee maker burbled, I perused the wooden bookshelf in the living room. An entire section was devoted to religious titles: devotional Bibles and books by millionaire televangelists and a dog-eared copy of The Purpose Driven Life. A bound workbook of daily devotions from King of Kings, the church where Nana and Bill were congregants, with a large crucifix on the cover. I thought back to my conversation with Aaron—how he’d liked the built-in community. My own brushes with organized religion had been minimal; when I went to the occasional youth-group outing at the local megachurch in high school, it was more out of yearning for new friends than interest in a higher power.
I’d liked most of what I’d picked up during those youth services, though—how Jesus hung out with sex workers and lepers, all his Zen-like kōans about turning the other cheek, giving a man the shirt off your back, not pointing out the speck of sawdust in someone’s eye when there’s a log in your own. He seemed like a cool guy, nonjudgmental. Very different from how Kristen described King of Kings Lutheran Church and School. What a name.
I found a Stephen King （ha） book in the back and stepped outside. Small ferns bowed along the shaded footpath, giving the site a Jurassic feel, out of time. I paused to dig a pebble out of my shoe and grabbed a tree trunk for support. It was a pine, its pretty skin cracked and valleyed like a pan of crinkle-top brownies, and so old the lowest boughs were a few feet over my head.
I spotted something on the bole of a tree a few feet deeper into the forest. Squirrels scattered as I picked my way over to it. Around hip height, there was a change in the trunk’s texture:
KC
+
JR
At least, I thought it was a JR. A heart enclosed the carving and I sank my finger into it. It looked old and weather-beaten; I’d been to this cabin perhaps a half dozen times and I’d never noticed this before. Kristen Czarnecki…and a pair of letters viciously crossed out, hacked at with an ax or saw. A childhood crush? I made a mental note to ask about it and headed for the dock.
Johnboats dotted the lake, olive green and boxy. I reclined on a dew-slick folding chair and listened to the sounds of morning: wind rattling the reeds and lush boughs overhead, the splashy kerplunk of lures hitting the water, the sucking smacks of water lapping at the dock. A critter—a chipmunk, maybe, or a mouse—skittered through the brush behind me, and a fish jumped opposite a fisherman’s line, ruffling the smooth reflection.
What a disconnect. The outside like visual Valium, my insides prickling with dread.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
I heard the slap of the screen door, and then the crunch of Kristen making her way down the path. She appeared, mug in hand.
“Morning!”
“Thanks for making coffee.” She eased into the seat next to mine, careful not to spill her brimming cup. I studied her as she took a sip and gazed out at the water. So unbothered by last night’s revelation, as if this were normal, learning that experts just excavated the body you buried. My stomach contorted. God, for one glorious, glimmering moment yesterday, I had convinced myself that Kristen and I were on the exact same page. Couldn’t we time-travel back to that?
We watched the fishing boats for a while. Someone caught a pearly rainbow trout, and the shouts of the men in the skiff sounded as if they were mere feet away. Funny how lakes do that—warp the dimensions of everything around them.
“What is that?” Kristen stared at the air just above her shoulder, seemingly at nothing. Then I spotted it: a caterpillar, perhaps an inch long, squirming like a worm on a hook. Tufts of white fur sprang from a black body.
“It’s a hickory…something. Pretty rare in the Midwest, I think. Hey!”
Before I could stop her, Kristen lifted a twig and sliced it through the air above the caterpillar, sending it tumbling to the dock.
“Why’d you do that?”
She looked genuinely confused. “It was stuck in a spider’s web.”
I groaned. “Kristen, it was trying to spin a cocoon. That was its own silk.”
She leaned over and searched the deck for it, then shrugged. “It was probably going to turn into an ugly moth anyway.”
I didn’t tell her she was right.
* * *
—
Clouds rolled in, gray-blue and engorged, so we headed into town. Kristen parallel parked with confidence, then rooted around for an umbrella in the back seat. Through the rain-spattered windshield, I took in the businesses along the main street: a café, a pizza joint with beer signs glowing in the windows, an improbable barber-and-computer-repair-shop combo. Kristen led us up the front steps of a refurbished home, and the front door jangled as we stepped inside Second Chance Antiques.