Paul held out a hand, his body poised to haul Jax off the lounger. “Come on, man. It’ll be like old times.”

Old times as in: before your mom died, before you became such an angry troll. If Micah had said it, Jax would have punched him in the face, but not Paul. For some reason Jax didn’t fully understand, he never got angry at Paul.

“And if we can’t find a party, we’ll just make our own.” Micah grinned and spread his arms wide. “We’ll be the motherfucking party.”

Jax sighed, slapping his hand in Paul’s. “Fine, but I’m driving.”

13

The rest of the afternoon flies by in a blur.

I make gallons of tea and coffee that, in a surprise move, Chet offers to cart down to the water. After the first trip I figure out why—so he can eavesdrop on the cops, trading hot drinks and homemade snacks for snippets of information he carries back up the hill to share with me.

Chet tells me that the Asheville divers arrived with cold-water gear and are taking turns scouring the lake bottom around the dock for evidence, but the waters are deep, the lake so dark they can’t see beyond their own flashlight beams. So far they’ve found nothing but a shoe and some old junk, and the chunk of hill cordoned off with crime tape and a neat grid of stakes and string hasn’t yielded any clues, either. If she came through our backyard, she didn’t drop any evidence.

When I’m not playing hostess or getting updates from Chet, I stand at the window and watch. Two men stand guard by the shoreline, gripping coiled leashes that snake into the murky water. Currents under the dock are a living, breathing thing. The ropes are there in case they get swept away, a tether that will guide them to shore.

But none of the men Chet overheard are holding out much hope of finding anything useful. Fifteen hundred acres of water in Lake Crosby, with craggy depths of up to three hundred feet. No wonder Micah wanted to get her out so quickly, and to preserve whatever evidence washed off onto the tarp. If something drifted off that woman into the water, it could be anywhere, and it won’t be sitting still. Needle, meet haystack.

Thanks to the cloud cover swirling with coming snow, darkness comes earlier than normal, at well before five. The pines and Fraser firs are quick to filter the light with their dense needles, and shadows clot under the trees. They creep ever closer to the house, the branches above leaning in to shut out the sky. This place is built for looking out, no curtains or blinds to block its showstopper views, but when the lights come on and the windows turn black with night, I always wonder who’s looking in.