Though...I suppose it’s not technically an emergency—not anymore since she’s obviously dead. But the sooner the police know, the better chances are they can retrieve whatever evidence she might still be carrying. Micah told me once that the lake’s currents work like a washing machine, agitating everything in it. If there’s evidence on her body and the fabric of her clothes—skin under her fingernails, a hair that’s not from her head stuck in her sweater—it’s probably already been knocked loose.

The line connects, and I give the operator my name and address, describe the scene down at the dock. I sound remarkably calm, if not a little out of breath still. He tells me the police are on the way and asks me to stay on the line, but I tell him I have to go. Paul will be home from his run soon, and he’ll need my support. I think of him out there, jogging around the hills in blissful ignorance, and I hang up the phone.

There’s nothing I can do now but wait.

4

June 12, 1999
4:45 p.m.

Jax Edwards tromped through the woods behind his house, his rifle slung carelessly over a shoulder. Thanks to a week of nonstop rain, the air was so thick it had a weight to it, solid and sticky in his lungs. The damp brought out the bugs and turned the path into a tangled mass of branches and undergrowth, new shoots slapping at the bare skin of his legs with clammy fronds.

He probably should have changed into jeans. Better shoes, too, instead of these ancient sneakers, a holdout from his high school track days. He kept stepping out of them, kept having to double back to rescue one from where it got suction-cupped to a muddy spot in the path. Like most things these days, it really pissed him off.

The backs of his thighs burned, but it was a good kind of pain. The kind that came after hours of trekking through the forest, scaling trees and clambering up mountainsides. In his seventeen years, he’d explored every inch of these woods, looked behind every log and under every rock. He’d watched beavers chew bushes down to tiny nubs for their dam and almost stepped on two copperheads mating. Yesterday a deer let him come so close he could see the veins in its ears. Funny, when he first started coming out here, he thought it was because he wanted to be alone, but somehow, being out here with all these animals, with the wilderness...well, he never minded the company.