Page 10 of Two Couples

SEVEN

SAMANTHA

Patrick and I stood on opposite sides of the swimming pool, pulling debris out of the water. There was a cover for the pool, but Emily had forgotten to close it the last time she’d been at the house to accept delivery of the furniture. After we pulled the body out of the water, there had been no time to close it before the storm lashed out at us with sudden fury.

Patrick and I hadn’t said more than ten words to each other, existing in a cool atmosphere of violent disagreement and misunderstanding. He was determined to call the police once the power was restored. He was absolutely certain it was the right thing to do. He had no sense of how I felt, and I couldn’t find the words to explain it to him. Maybe because my feelings weren’t straight in my own mind.

I knew I shouldn’t be living in the past, letting memories consume me. But it’s strange how the mind and memory work. The moment I saw his face, drained of life, it felt as if my brain simply stopped working. Then, my sister’s face superimposed itself over the one in the water. The feelings I’d had as an eleven-year-old girl flooded every part of my body and the two events felt as if they’d become one. Maybe it was the shock of death. Maybe it was the brutality of what had been done to a human being. I didn’t know why I was even trying to understand it. They say the body stores everything, especially trauma, so perhaps it was the simple fact—true for all of us—that my body had a mind of its own.

The power had flickered on briefly—long enough for Patrick to make a pot of coffee. The minute I was ready for a refill, the power had gone out again. Keith walked to the end of the driveway, searching for cell service so he could call the electric company. Since there was only a mild breeze and the sky was almost completely clear, it didn’t make sense that we were still without power. He returned to the house to tell us the recorded message stated their call volume was too high to answer. The message had listed areas that were out of power and attributed it to falling branches and uprooted trees.

The explanation made sense, but it was beyond frustrating. We’d foolishly jumped on our phones the minute the power flickered on, eager to catch up on the world we’d missed when the Wi-Fi was down. We should have been charging them. Not that it mattered. Until we had the Wi-Fi, the phones were close to useless.

I’d hoped Emily and Keith would help us clean out the pool. Working together would have eased the tension. It would draw us closer together again, establish us as a team, figuring out together what we should do about him—first dead, now missing.

I pushed thoughts of him out of my mind. His missing body wasn’t the scariest thing we were facing—it was that note implying the killer wasn’t finished! Recalling the two words on that note, over and over in the back of my mind, churning below every other thought I had, made me terrified to leave the house. It didn’t seem to have had that effect on Emily. She’d walked out the front door and over to the neighbors’ house absolutely certain that a connection with them would enhance our safety. I wanted to agree with her, but I wasn’t sure two women, living fifty yards away from us could keep us safe from someone who wanted one, or all of us dead.

Emily hadn’t returned yet. Keith had gone for a run. I suspected he was only running to look for other lakeside homes scattered among the trees, trying to find out if the power company was telling the truth when they said the outage covered the entire section of the lake where our home was situated.

“I’m sure the casinos have power,” he’d said, his tone sour.

“The casinos have generators,” Patrick had pointed out. “Besides, they’re close to a mile away from us. It’s a different part of the grid.” He said this with such authority, no one contradicted him.

I called across the pool to Patrick. “Should we cover it when we’re finished?”

He nodded.

The tarp that had functioned as a temporary shroud was still in a crumpled heap behind him. Neither one of us wanted to touch it. I wondered if Patrick would move it when we were finished, tossing it into the recycling. He probably thought it contained evidence, so maybe not.

Patrick walked around the pool and handed me the aquatic push broom he’d been using. “If you’ll sweep this side, I’ll go work on the driveway. Can you operate the cover?”

I nodded. I kissed his cheek and he smiled briefly before leaving the pool area, headed toward the side of the house.

Did that mean he finally understood my fear, the echoes of the trauma that never seemed to leave me alone for long? My reaction to seeing someone who had drowned might have been irrational because it was so tangled up with what I’d experienced when I was eleven. But it was also solid and real because of those two words—You’re next. No one else seemed to be as concerned about that as I was. Still, maybe his tender kiss meant Patrick was starting to feel that concern. Had he stopped worrying about doing the right thing for a dead man and shifted his focus to me—a living woman, the woman he loved?

It wasn’t as if I was a criminal. I wondered if that’s what he’d thought when I hadn’t wanted to call the police. It’s a horrible thing not to report an obvious murder, but surely he was starting to see that our lives, our safety, had to come first. Surely he would come to realize the police would assume one of us was a killer. What else could they think?

I’d only given the broom a single push along the shallow end of the pool when Patrick appeared, headed toward me in a slow jog. His face was twisted with concern. “Maybe you were right, babe.” He took the broom from my hands and let it fall onto the pebbled concrete. He put his arms around me, pulling me into a hug so tight it was hard to breathe.

“What’s wrong?” My voice was muffled against his chest.

He stepped back. “Come see this. I don’t know how… I don’t know when they could have… come look.”

I followed him around the side of the house and along the path leading to the front steps. He walked past the steps and the unfinished wood storage cubicle nestled between the stairs and the side of the house. It had never been dismantled after the fire inspector said it wasn’t permitted to store wood in a structure attached to the house. Patrick stopped in front of a narrow window that provided natural light into the stairwell.

Scrawled on the glass in black marker was a note, the angular upper-case letters looking as if they were shouting at me, the sharp points like daggers in my eyes.

DON’T GO TO THE POLICE OR YOU’LL WIND UP IN THE DARK, COLD WATER OF THE LAKE. I’M WATCHING YOU.

EIGHT

EMILY

Jordan’s warning had scared me—You need to tell them it’s not safe. They could be killed.

I knew she meant people outdoors in a thunderstorm could be struck and killed by lightning. But the expression on her face, the tone of her voice, made me think she was suggesting something more sinister. It almost sounded like a threat.

I didn’t believe she’d seen anyone in our pool area. The storm had been wild. The wind whipped the trees until they leaned over the house. It was blacker than black—the power was out, the moon and stars hidden behind thick layers of dark clouds, rain thundering down in sheets that formed a veil. Even when the rain and wind died back, the darkness had been absolute. It’s easy to forget how much human-generated light fills the night sky. Until power is lost, the darkness is hard to imagine.