At the end, not wanting to destroy another phone, I took it from my pocket and shoved it under the lounge chair, hoping it might stay dry enough to work when I returned.
Standing there at the end of the dock, toes on the edge, I took a deep, wet breath and looked out over the water. The rain hitting the surface with tiny explosions obscured everything.
I had no idea how deep the lake was and thought about those slimy things. What manner of snakes and frogs and other slippery critters were writhing in that darkness?
But I couldn’t let fear hold me back.
I jumped. The water was freezing. All at once, it stabbed every inch of my body. Arm over arm, clothing heavy, I swam into the fog. Slimy things brushed past my legs—seaweed and cattails or worse—and the exploding rain chafed the underside of my chin, but I kept swimming.
Soon, the grayness swallowed me whole, the fog so thick I could carve my epitaph into it. I couldn’t see more than five feet ahead of me, but I kept swimming.
After about fifteen minutes, I was exhausted and completely disoriented. The lake was larger than it seemed. I could have been in the middle, toward one of the banks, or maybe I hadn’t even passed the island at all, I couldn’t tell.
Or what if I had never even seen an island? What if the shack had been a reflection in my glasses? A trick of the mind? Or maybe just a glimpse of the far bank?
Keep swimming.
Dusk began its descent and the gray darkened. After another five minutes, my toes met a slippery resistance. Then they found something hard. A rock. A congregation of cattails and weeds broke through the fog. Land. It was either the farthest bank, or the island, I couldn’t tell which.
I crawled through the mud and climbed up onto the land, my soaked clothes so heavy I felt like I was still in the water. The ground was soft and fell away as I clawed my way out of the muck, but I kept moving. Freezing, shivering, I crawled farther into the fog.
Finally finding relatively firm ground, I stood and stepped left, but my foot squished into something deep and wet. I was indeed on an island, a small one, no bigger than a classroom.
Then something solid emerged from the gloom, the wood so old and gray it was blue.
The shack.
I stepped closer. Thin dark edges, darker than the wood, emerged.
A door.
There was no handle. I stuck out my foot and gave the bottom a tentative kick. The door swung open slowly, the ancient hinges, thoroughly corroded from constant moisture, creaking loudly.
The inside of the shack was a deep, black space. I stepped over the rotten threshold. The floor was bare and squeaked underfoot, but the walls, warped and smelling of mildew, held the fog at bay, enough for more shapes to emerge.
I lowered my glasses and wiped them on my sweater. It didn’t bring much clarity, but at least the room wasn’t muted by mist. Through the streaks on the lens, my brain took a moment to process the entirety of what I was looking at.
First, a set of cloven hooves.
Then above them, a wiggling, squirming figure.
A loud grunt.
I covered my mouth. “Oh my God.”
42
In the middle of the shack, chained to a support column, sitting in the same antique chair as the one in my room—except this one old and distressed—was a struggling man.
He was bound and gagged, his head thrashing from side to side. I recognized his terrible hair cut immediately, that ugly perpendicular mohawk like the plume from a Trojan helmet worn sideways.
Roman Caesar.
He grunted again. He was trying to say something, but his words were muffled by the rag in his mouth.
I hesitated to step any closer. This was the man who had killed Phyllis. Dimitri.
Matt Mettle.
Yet here he was, tied up in the same chair in which Chrissy had been bound.
Had Kendall caught him? Had those “painters” taken him here in the canoe?
Dare I let him speak?
I backed toward the door. Caesar thrashed harder, trying to tell me something. My best bet was to head back to the main cabin and try to dry off and get changed before Kendall returned. Maybe with a new car and a briefcase full of cash, I could try to get to the bottom of all this.
Yet, what if Caesar knew something about Chrissy? What if every second counted?
I stepped toward him, the floorboards groaning. The rain on the roof had quieted and I could hear his skin chafing as he squirmed and fought to speak.
I put up a hand. “Okay, okay, stop moving. I will remove the gag.”
He screamed into the rag.
“Shut up. I will only remove it if you keep quiet.”
He calmed down.
“Okay,” I said, my hands up, and stepped closer.
His body language protested, as if I were the enemy.
“Don’t even pretend you’re the victim here,” I said. “We both know what you did.”
He tried to yell something into the rag again.
“If I take that out of your mouth, you have to promise me you won’t yell.”
He nodded vigorously.
“Okay, now calm down. Don’t bite me.”
Cautiously, I reached around the back of his head and untied the rag, doing my best to avoid touching his scaly scalp. I had to dig my fingernails into the knot, but once it was loose, I jumped back so he couldn’t bite.
Caesar spat the taste of the rag off his tongue. “I turned my back on God.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I wanted to be a minister.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have hidden Molly in your hymnal.”
“I wanted to feel the Lord.”
I knew it. It was molly, not weed as Kendall had said. “You killed Matt Mettle.”
He squeezed his eyes at the memory as if he were in horrible pain.
“You were a nice kid in high school,” I said. “Weird, but nice. What happened to you?”
“When I said I turned my back on God, I didn’t
