“Where is he?”
I shook my head and was about to tell her I didn’t know, but then it hit me-the only place it would make sense for him to be.
“The lake.”
I threw the pickup into gear and began the race to get to Stan before he did anything to himself.
I drove fast. I took the shortest route I knew-out the other side of the precinct and along the narrow road we’d taken the night Stan set fire to the Plantagion warehouse. It took me fifteen minutes at high speed to reach the Loop and another two from there to get to the start of Lake Trail.
I had to take it slower from here because of the road. Everything in me screamed to go faster, but the one time I tried it the rear wheels lost traction and the pickup slid dangerously on a bend.
Two hundred yards from the end of the trail we found the Datsun. It had gone off the road, fortunately on the uphill side, and ploughed sideways into a tree. The passenger side was heavily dented. I stopped the pickup and ran to it, but it was empty. There was a small amount of blood on the dash in front of the passenger seat, but nothing that suggested serious injury.
We raced up the last short stretch of trail and flew out into the sunlight going way too fast. I had to wrench the pickup into a hard left turn and hit the brakes to avoid careening over the grass and onto the beach. Marla and I jumped out and scanned the lake and the land surrounding it.
I didn’t know where to look, what part of the place to scour for a sign that Stan still existed. The world around me was a frantic series of snapshots, shuddering as I turned my head, impossible to assimilate. I felt as though some dazzling light shone into my eyes, allowing me to see only the edges of what I looked at. But then my brain caught up and all the images smashing at the air around me slammed into place and I was able to see what was happening at the lake that day.
So late in the year the weather was too cold for people to be swimming and there were only two vehicles in the parking lot. Gareth and David’s bungalow looked closed and without movement, though a weak column of smoke rose vertically into the air from its chimney. Beyond the bungalow and the cabins the wooden jetty caught my eye. The small rowboat that usually lay upturned at its end was missing.
I looked across the water and saw the boat empty and drifting, about as far from the beach as it was possible to get-out near the sheer rock wall that held back the land on the opposite side of the lake. There was nothing around it, no desperately flailing swimmers, no churned and broken water.
I moved my gaze quickly back to the beach, wanting to find Stan and Rosie sitting cuddled together waiting for me to find them and solve the problem of their crashed car. But they weren’t there. The beach was deserted except for two elderly couples standing at the edge of the water. I started to look beyond them, further up the beach, but there was something wrong. The old people were not admiring the stillness of the water or enjoying the thin autumn sun on their faces. They were pointing and shouting and looking desperately about them. I knew then where Stan was and I ran across the grass and the coarse sand to the lake.
One of the women spoke to me first. She appeared to be in her seventies. The weathered skin of her face was drawn tight with worry.
“Two people just drowned.”
“A man and a woman?”
“Yes, yes! We saw them out there and they were rowing and then both of them just stood up and jumped into the water. They didn’t even try to swim.”
The man standing next to her interjected, “They were holding hands when they jumped.”
The woman nodded rapidly. “They were on the surface for maybe a minute, then they went under and they didn’t come back up. We couldn’t do anything. We’re old. We couldn’t do anything.”
The two men nodded and made noises of agreement. The other woman was crying.
“How long?”
One of the men shook his head gravely. “They went under at least ten minutes ago. We called the police. There was no one else here.” He gestured uselessly with the cell phone he was holding.
I did the only thing I could do, a thing I couldn’t stop myself doing. I took off my clothes and swam out to the rowboat. It was a distance of almost two hundred yards and I was not a strong swimmer and when I got there I was gasping and had to hold on to the side of the boat to rest.
What I was doing was futile. The boat would have drifted and there was little chance I was close enough to where they entered the water to make an effective search. And even if I was, the lake here was more than fifty feet deep and they had been under far, far too long. But when I had my breath back I dove beneath the surface of the cold water and swam down as far as I could, stretching my eyes wide to see, groping about me as the light grew dimmer. I found nothing, touched no trailing limb, no waterlogged torso. I surfaced and dove down again, and again, and again, until the world became a tumbling storm of white bubbles and dark water and a terrible hunger for air.
I was so weakened that I would certainly have run into trouble, but at some point the police arrived and two officers swam out and dragged me back to shore.
There were three police cruisers there, pulled up on the grass at the edge of the beach, and while my rescuers dried themselves, their colleagues took statements from the elderly couples and then from Marla and me. When they were finished with us they went over to the bungalow and questioned David, but he had been in the barn out back and had no idea anything had even happened.
The Oakridge police had no resources to make a search of the lake themselves, and because there was no question that Stan and Rosie could still be alive, they shut the scene down until a dive team could be brought up from Sacramento the following morning. The couples were allowed to go, crime scene tape was strung across the entrance to Lake Trail to close it to the public, and a cruiser was posted there as backup.
Marla and I, however, were far from finished for the day. We had to take the police out to Empty Mile and explain why a dead body with a bullet hole in it was lying on the ground in front of our cabin. And how it connected to Stan and Rosie’s drowning.
One of the detectives who joined the uniforms at Empty Mile was Patterson, the lead officer on my father’s disappearance. There was, I think, some cynicism in his surprise that I was now part of a murder investigation, but the fact that Millicent confirmed she’d seen Stan shoot Gareth and that Marla and I had had nothing to do with it didn’t leave him much option but to accept the version of events we gave him.
The business of the crime scene-the recording of evidence, the videoing of the surrounding area, the photographing of the body, the repeated questioning-took until the middle of the afternoon. Then, around three p.m., Marla and I and Millicent, so shattered by the loss of her granddaughter that she had to be helped to stand by one of the officers, were taken to the Oakridge police station to give formal statements.
The police had a confirmed culprit, or at least they would have when they could raise him from the bottom of the lake, and we weren’t treated as suspects. The only finessing Marla and I had to do concerned Stan’s motivation for the shooting, but this was simple enough. In a private moment at the lake before we told them about the shooting we’d agreed to say that Gareth had sexually propositioned Rosie a number of times and that it had finally pushed Stan over the edge. We said nothing at all about Jeremy Tripp.
The statements took about an hour and a half and when they were done we were driven back to Empty Mile. The cruiser dropped us at Millicent’s house and Marla and I helped her up the steps and put her to bed where she lay staring at nothing, her hands loose and forgotten on top of the covers. Marla made tea but Millicent didn’t want it and after a while it seemed that we were out of place there, intruders on her misery, and so we excused ourselves and left her alone, lying in the slowly darkening room, without family now in the whole of the world.
Marla and I were silent on the walk across the meadow, dreading the conversation both of us knew we had to have.
Gareth’s body was gone from in front of the cabin. In its place there were small traces of police activity-strips of marker tape, empty evidence bags, some small yellow plastic stakes hammered into the ground to show where the body had lain. There was birdsong in the air with the approach of evening, but rather than soften the scene about us it made the place seem forlorn and abandoned as though, along with the corpse, the police had taken away with them whatever it was that had made the cabin and the land around it feel welcoming and lived in.
Marla went through the door with her head bowed. She walked straight to the couch and sat down and started talking before I’d finished taking my coat off. Her voice was flat, but there was relief in it as well, as though
