Beneath Bone Lake Read online

  His tone implied he would enjoy his workdays a hell of a lot better if “they” would. “We’ll need you to stay back, Ms. Monroe,” he went on, “so we can prepare for every contingency and focus on getting your family out safely, if it turns out they’re inside.”

  Balderach’s western boots crunched gravel as he strode back toward his SUV to make his call.

  Calvin Whitaker speared Sam with an earnest look. “Be best to take her to your place. Keep her inside and stay away from the windows until somebody comes for you.”

  Tell him you can’t get involved. Sam could hear his lawyer—a fighting gamecock of a man who’d grown up in a border barrio—as plainly as if Pacheco stood right here beside him. Tell him you won’t do it, ‘padre. Set your boundaries straight off, because I guarantee you, they’ll be watching. Watching and waiting for a chance to put your cojones in a wringer the second you step outta line.

  Before Sam could think of how to say no to a terrified young mother, Ruby stared Calvin down.

  “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here, Deputy,” she told him, arms folded across her chest. “This is my family, and my home. Zoe’s only four years old. She’s going to want her mother the second she comes out. And I’m going to be here for her. Right here.”

  “I’ve seen the way Misty watches out for your girl—never takes her eyes off her a minute.” Sam figured not even Paranoid Pacheco could fault him for giving Ruby a little reassurance. As long as that was the sum total of his contribution. “I can’t imagine her taking her car and leaving Zoe with the likes of that freak.”

  Sam tried not to picture the little blonde girl hiding beneath her bed or in a closet. Aaron Monroe’s little girl, which made her the closest thing to a niece that Sam would ever have. The thought struck like a gut punch, though he knew it was bullshit. Even if Aaron were alive, Sam couldn’t imagine being invited to a kiddy birthday party or a backyard barbecue. Or accepting if, by some miracle, he were.

  Ruby grimaced. “Misty and Zoe could still be inside, held against their will. And scared out of their minds, with all the barking and the shooting.”

  “Did you hear that guy?” Sam asked. “He didn’t react to Misty’s name when I asked.” Maybe he’d just been too stoned to respond, but was it possible the man didn’t even know her? As Sam thought about it, he realized the tattooed invader might not have been one of the people he’d seen on the Monroes’ porch last week. After all, Sam had been on the water at the time, playing the amiable host to a particularly difficult angler, so he hadn’t homed in on specific details.

  “At worst, you could get hurt out here,” Calvin told Ruby. “At best, you’ll be a distraction.”

  “Look, I’ll keep my distance. I won’t go any farther than”—she looked around, then pointed out a huge, moss-draped cypress tree slightly closer to Sam’s house than her own—“than that spot. But I will not be shuffled off, you hear me?”

  “I have a phone book inside,” Sam said, offering no more than any decent person would. “We can call some of Misty’s friends, see if your sister’s been in touch.”

  She shook her head. “Just bring me the book. We can call from out here.”

  “I can do that,” Sam said, half relieved she wasn’t budging.

  Apparently, Calvin had come to the same conclusion. “Just stay here, then. Promise me that.”

  When the deputy turned away, her hand shot out to snag his arm. “I will, if you promise me you won’t do anything—anything at all—to risk my daughter’s safety,” she said. “I’ve seen what happens when operations go wrong, somebody gets excited. And today’s supposed to—I haven’t seen her for a whole year.”

  Her lips went white as she pressed them together, trying to keep from crying. Sam gave her credit for that, for not compounding a terrible situation with hysteria. She might lack her sister’s flashier blonde beauty, but to his mind, Ruby’s brand of grit went a long way toward explaining what Aaron had seen in her.

  Flushing, Calvin stared down at her hand, then cleared his throat. “We’ll do our best,” he said before striding—or escaping—toward Balderach’s Suburban.

  Sam told Ruby, “I’ll be right back with that phone book and my cell. Somebody around here’s bound to know something.”

  He could at least help her make a few calls, he thought, even as his mind whirled through those possibilities he couldn’t offer: cellular phone hacks, triangulation, credit card traces.

  Possibilities that made his long-idle fingers cramp in protest; memories that lodged inside his throat like splintered glass.

  C HAPTER T HREE

  Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out:

  The element of water moistens the earth,

  But blood flies upwards, and bedews the heavens.

  —John Webster,

  The Duchess of Malfi, act IV

  A loon’s cry drifted off the water, echoing through the deep green cypress shadows like a lost soul’s lamentation. Ruby shivered and hugged herself against a damply cool breeze, a harbinger of evening. She couldn’t see the deputies and couldn’t stand to think about what they might be doing, what might be happening inside.

  But she could make out one weathered corner of the weekend lake house Aaron had inherited only months before his accident. One algae-stained corner and a section of a roof that clearly hadn’t been replaced last month, as Misty had reported.

  What the hell was going on here? Had her sister, the person Ruby trusted most in all the world, gone crazy? Or had something—or someone—compelled Misty to lie?

  Ruby’s chest constricted as she recalled the excuse her sister had given Myrtle Lambert for keeping Zoe out of day care. What if Misty had lied about that, too?

  What if DeserTek was involved in all of it, from the backpack’s theft to her missing family? If her failure to jump at the offer of a highly paid consulting job—a ridiculous offer for a woman who’d been driving buses—had been construed as a sign that she had damning information and meant to use it? Ruby pressed a hand to her mouth, nausea vying with a wave of dizziness. What if all of her suspicions about Carrie Ann’s death were true?

  Ruby sucked in a deep breath and forced herself to turn away, toward the recently remodeled house where Sam lived. With no sign of his return, she decided to try calling Hammett’s once more, to keep herself from going crazy.

  Paulie Hammett’s wife, Anna, answered, amid a clatter of utensils.

  “Anna, this is Ruby Monroe.” Ruby whipped past the obligatories, far too freaked for chitchat. “I’m looking for my sister. I need to get hold of her right away.”

  “Misty didn’t tell you she’d quit? A week ago last Friday.”

  “She quit? How could she have quit?” Misty had worked at the restaurant for close to ten years, since her junior year of high school. Unlike most of Hammett’s “girls,” she’d kept at it, too busy helping Ruby with their dying mother to attend college immediately after high school. And too practical to give up the stellar tips her long legs and sunny smiles attracted, tips she now needed to put herself through school.

  “Got crosswise with the old man about something,” Anna answered. “You know how Paulie can get sometimes. I asked him about it, but he just grouched at me to leave her be. Said she’d either come to her senses or she wouldn’t. He’s not crawlin’, not after the way she stormed out in front of customers.”

  “Misty?” Though Paulie had scared away plenty of waitresses in his time, Ruby had only known her sister to laugh off her boss’s moods.

  Anna lowered her voice. “You ask me, wouldn’t hurt that man to do a little crawlin’. Misty’s been here, what? Ten years? She’s practically family and always such a great friend to our Dylan. I give her a lot of the credit for gettin’ him on track again, back in that stretch where he was havin’ his troubles.”

  Before Ruby had left the country, she and Misty had received an invitation to his wedding. Ruby considered this, along with his solid reputation as a contractor, proof posi
tive that the Hammett family’s Peter Pan had finally grown up.

  “You know if Misty’s working someplace else now?” Ruby asked. “Have you heard anything at all?” The de facto nerve center for area politics and gossip, Hammett’s was a far better source of lakeside news than the paper. Since her sister was a fixture there—and a much-loved one at that—any post-meltdown sightings would be reported and analyzed more avidly than the last Super Bowl.

  “Not a word, but I’m surprised you haven’t got an earful by now. You’re back home, aren’t you?”

  “Sort of,” Ruby said, unwilling to go into the details, “but she didn’t meet me at the airport. So do me a favor, will you? Call me back if you hear anything. Anything at all. Please, Anna.”

  After eliciting a promise, Ruby ended the call as Sam jogged toward her, the area’s thin telephone directory in one hand, two water bottles in the other.

  He passed one of them to her and asked, “Who should we try first?”

  “Thanks.” She cracked open the plastic top but didn’t spare a moment for a sip. “I just got off the phone with Anna Hammett. She told me—”

  “Misty quit. I started to bring that up before. I—uh—I’m over there a lot. I have this deal worked out with Paulie. I pick up the tourists from their rental cabins, give ’em the eco-tour or take ’em fishing, birding, whatever they want.”

  This made sense to Ruby. Hammett’s used to rent boats to anyone who wanted to explore the labyrinth of cuts and bayous bordering the south end of the lake. But lost tourists were bad for business, drowned ones far worse—especially when their half-eaten bodies were recovered.

  “I can’t understand it. Why would Misty quit? Did this happen around the same time you started noticing these strangers hanging round the house?”

  A loud pop—then two more in quick succession—had her ducking behind a thick trunk, a reflex quicker than the conscious realization: gunfire. Sam crouched almost as quickly, peering in the direction of the sound.

  Ruby dug her nails into her palms, survival instinct warring with the marrow-deep conviction that Zoe was terrified or hurt and wailing for her mother. Sam latched on to Ruby’s shoulder, as if to hold her back. Before she could decide whether to be furious or grateful, a deep whumpff reverberated through her bones, a boom that sent a squawking flock of blackbirds rising from the trees.

  “Oh my God.” Ruby jerked away and started running.

  “Damn it, Ruby, hold on.” Sam caught her elbow and forced her to stop. “There could be more shooting.”

  She tried in vain to free herself. “That was an explosion.”

  She knew that sound. She knew it. Though the bus she’d driven was never hit, she had heard the improvised bombs and large artillery, had watched blasts rip open vehicles and collapse buildings. She’d seen the dead, too: women, children, sometimes whole families, along with the combatants. For one dizzying moment she was certain she’d drawn the war-zone violence home in her wake. She smelled the smoke of it and saw the glow of—

  Staring, Sam released her. “It’s your house.”

  Ruby followed him as he ran toward the department vehicles parked in front of the trees dividing their two properties. Both SUVs sat empty and untended, their lights flashing. Beyond them, the two-story lake house blazed, flames rolling and thick, black ash billowing from the blown-out ground-floor windows and the outward-flung front door. If anyone was inside—

  “Calvin.” Sam pointed out a crumpled form on the front lawn before running toward the younger deputy. Ruby was right behind him, keeping low to duck the worst of the smoke. Still, the heat pushed at her, its malice palpable in the prickling of her skin and the tightening of her lungs. Squinting, she scanned around for the other deputy, but seeing no one, she focused on the downed man.

  “We have to get him away from this,” Sam said, grabbing the broad shoulders and gesturing for Ruby to take Calvin’s feet.

  “Wait a second,” she said, seeing the weapon hanging loose in the deputy’s hand. Unwilling to risk leaving it, she picked it up and shoved it under her belt. “Okay, now.”

  They both lifted, carrying the limp form to the street side of Whitaker’s SUV, where its bulk offered some protection. While Sam called for more help on the radio, Ruby drew upon the primary assessment training she’d had in nursing school. First, she shook the injured man, calling, “Deputy Whitaker, say something. Calvin?” When he didn’t respond, she went straight to A for Airway—neck straight, head tipped back, mouth clear and unobstructed. B for Breathing—bending lower, she could hear him, rasping a little, but clearly moving air. C for circulation—no blood…

  The deputy groaned and coughed spasmodically, but before Ruby could go further, Sam yelled from the open door of the Suburban, “Shoot it.”

  Only then did Ruby register the savage barking. Turning her head, she saw a blur—a snarling gray shape streaking toward her. Without Sam’s warning, she never would have reached the gun in time. As it was, the huge beast was leaping, close enough to see the white teeth flashing only a few feet from her face as she fired twice.

  The mastiff, singed hair stinking, struck her, the momentum of its attack knocking her onto her rear end and causing her to drop the weapon. She stared as the animal’s jaws worked and its massive paws twitched before it went still, its long tongue lolling from a bloody mouth.

  Shuddering, Ruby scooted clear of it and peered around the front of the Suburban. A breeze rolled off the water, lifting a host of sparks like fireflies. She heard the crackling, roaring voice of flame, saw it reignite an eerie, second twilight. Thick smoke drifted their way, bitter-hot with wood ash. Eyes streaming, Ruby realized no one could get inside now.

  And no one could possibly get out.

  Zoe and Misty aren’t in there, aren’t inside: burning, screaming, dying. Instead, Ruby forced herself to picture the two of them on their way home, having somehow missed her at the airport. A tire maybe—only a flat tire had made them late—and Misty’s spare had been bad. She’d had trouble with the lug nuts, lost her directions…

  But what if she was wrong? Sick with fear, Ruby stood abruptly. “Maybe it’s not so bad in back. I need to check and—”

  “I’ll run back and do it. Stay here and do what you can for Calvin.”

  Afraid of what she might see behind the cabin, Ruby swallowed hard and nodded. As he jogged off toward the house’s lake side, she turned her attention back to Calvin, who was on his side and groaning, struggling to sit up.

  “Don’t try to move,” she said. “Help’s coming.” And with one last, heartbreaking glance in the direction of her burning house, she turned back to what needed to be done.

  As Sam rounded the corner of the blazing building, he prayed there wasn’t another of those gigantic dogs waiting.

  Instead, he found the deputy’s boots. A few feet from the flaming hole of the back door, Sam made out the smoldering, black soles and scorched, tooled leather. Bending low and choking on the acrid smoke, Sam grabbed Balderach by the ankles and pulled the man away.

  Too late, Sam realized the moment he blinked clear his vision. Balderach’s arms trailed limp behind him, his uniform shirt smoking. The thick mustache had burned off; the face was bubbling, peeling—Sam looked away from it, horrified but certain the deputy was past help.

  Hacking in the thick air, Sam moved back from the body, stepped away, and peered up at the second-story windows above the porch roof. As he struggled to catch his breath, he looked around for some safe way to climb up, at least to peer in, but the siding was ablaze now and every window glowing. Including the single upstairs bedroom, where Sam was nearly certain he saw movement….

  A feminine silhouette lurching forward and then dropping out of sight.

  “Misty?” he shouted as he stepped up on a flower box and onto the porch railing. The porch roof proved more challenging. Though it hadn’t yet caught fire, a piece of trim broke off in his hands and he nearly fell.

  On his third attempt, he swun
g a leg up, then pulled his body onto the sloped surface. By this time, those shingles nearest to the house’s outer wall were smoking, triggering more coughing as he edged toward the window.

  He stared in the direction of the soot-stained glass, but the only movement he saw from inside was the throbbing pulse of flame, its color muted by the swirling black clouds. If he kicked through the window, would the rush of oxygen cause the fire to leap out and ignite him, burn him to death like Balderach? The thought tightened Sam’s gut, but only steps short of the window, he was too damned close to back off—too much committed to give up the chance to help whomever he had glimpsed.

  As his foot sank into a soft spot, Sam fell hard, slid, and barely managed to stop himself from rolling off the roof. Cautiously, he stood again, then moved forward once more, feeling for depressions where the wood beneath the shingles might have rotted.

  Which put him about six feet away when a second blast blew a thousand shards in his direction and sent him flying backward.

  Flying, falling, and all too quickly landing a few feet from the deputy’s still-smoldering remains.

  C HAPTER F OUR

  We are the hollow men

  We are the stuffed men

  Leaning together

  Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

  Our dried voices, when

  We whisper together

  Are quiet and meaningless

  As wind in dry grass

  Or rats’ feet over broken glass

  In our dry cellar.

  —T. S. Eliot,

  from “The Hollow Men”

  April 5

  After three months in office, Justine Wofford still hated these meetings with her deputies, hated the awkward silences that followed her orders, the resentful looks, and the less-than-subtle attempts to call her experience and judgment into question. Exhausted from a night spent working and emotionally wrung out from their department’s loss, Wofford was in absolutely no mood for a challenge.