He nods. “Looks like the one I spotted. Ground’s probably too cold for it to be recent, but we’ll take a casting just in case.”

I shove my hands deep inside my pockets and frown. “What, do you think she marched into the lake from our backyard or something?”

The sirens are louder now, echoing across the water, the cars coming around the bend on the opposite side of the lake. Five, six minutes, tops.

“Just covering all the bases,” Sam says, but his look tells me the real answer. He’s not looking for the woman’s prints. He’s looking for the prints of whoever put her in the lake, and in a yard Paul and I have walked through a thousand times. Sam’s gaze dips to Paul’s running shoes, but he doesn’t ask to see the tread.

“Give it up, Sam. Paul was with me.”

“Are you saying you know time of death?”

“I’m saying whenever it was, Paul had nothing to do with it.”

Paul threads a hand through my arm, gives an insistent tug. “Charlotte, let it go,” he mumbles, even though I can’t. How can he stand being accused of something so vile, something he had no part in? How can he let Sam barge into his house, onto his property, and treat him like a criminal?

Micah hollers across the dock. “Hey, Sam, can I get you up here with that camera?”

With one last look in my direction, Sam turns for the dock, jogging up the wooden planks and handing Micah the camera. He loops the strap around his neck, moves to the edge and lowers himself to his hands and knees, leaning his entire upper body over the water.

“Five foot five, maybe six, in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Light blond hair, looks natural. No roots. She’s wearing jeans and a sweater but no coat.”

He’s right, I realize, something I didn’t pick up on in the shock of spotting her. She wasn’t wearing a coat when she slid into the lake. Even if she’d fallen in from a boat or another dock, she would have needed some protection from the cold. What happened to her coat?

Micah lies on his belly and snaps away, scooting up and down the dock for different angles.

“No scrapes or cuts that I can tell,” he says when he’s done, handing the camera back. “What I can see of her looks intact. Skin has a grayish cast, but that could just be from the water temperature. We won’t know for sure until we haul her out.”

“What does that mean?” When Paul doesn’t answer, I glance over. “Does he think maybe she did drown?”

“Maybe,” he says, but he doesn’t sound at all convinced. I pull one hand from my pocket, slide it around his freezing one and hold on tight.