Dead Before the Truth Revealed novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Cutler Lake

Ciara stages a drowning at dusk and watches the divers from a cabin window. Anthony wades in to his knees, and Camille smiles at the water for one second.

The Cutler Lake House was a plain cedar cabin with a loft, a woodstove and a dock gone grey from weather.

Edmund unlocked it, set down a bag of groceries and a prepaid phone, and did not stay long.

"Your car is at the turnout on Dam Road," he said. "I had a valet driver leave it there at midnight. By morning anyone passing will see it."

"And the boat?"

"The aluminum skiff on the beach is mine. It has a tilt motor and a bad bilge pump. Everyone who knows me knows I never fixed it."

He looked at me over his glasses.

"Are you sure, Miss Ellingwood? Once the sheriff writes it down, you will be a dead woman in every file in Illinois."

I thought of Camille's hand through the gap in my door.

"I'm sure."

At dusk I walked down to the water in my black coat with the phone Camille had wiped in my pocket.

The lake was flat and the color of slate.

It was the same water and the same stretch of shore.

The guardrail was just visible above the trees on the road.

I had not been this close to it in six years.

I did not let myself look at the place where his headlights had been.

I pushed the skiff out until the water reached my knees and tilted the motor halfway up.

I laid my coat across the seat and my nursing badge on the coat, and put the wiped phone beside the badge.

Then I took off my left shoe and set it in the reeds at the edge of the water, where a person might have stepped out of it.

My foot was freezing before I reached the dock steps.

I walked back to the cabin in one shoe and sat down on the loft stairs and did not cry.

In the morning I was woken by engines.

Edmund stood at the window with a pair of binoculars already in his hand.

"The deputy found the car at six," he said quietly. "The sheriff's boats are out. And the Kensingtons are here."

I took the binoculars from him and knelt on the sill.

Two black SUVs had stopped on the gravel above the beach, and men in wet suits were wading in by the skiff.

Anthony got out of the first car.

He wore the charcoal tuxedo from the gala, rumpled, and he had no coat.

He did not run. He walked down to the dock in a straight line with his hands at his sides.

A deputy said something to him and put a hand out.

Anthony stepped around the hand.

He sat on the edge of the dock and took off his shoes and his socks, one and then the other, and set them side by side.

Then he stood and walked into Cutler Lake.

He went in to his knees and stopped, in a tuxedo, in November.

The divers were calling to each other across the water, and he did not seem to hear them.

I had my fist against my mouth.

For six years I had wanted that man to look at me for one second, and he was looking at the lake.

"Miss Ellingwood," Edmund said. "Step back from the window."

"No."

The second SUV opened.

Constance came out first in a camel coat and sunglasses, and she stood on the gravel with her arms folded.

Camille got out behind her in a black wool dress and her hair pinned up, and she walked down toward the dock with one hand over her heart.

She stopped beside the deputy.

She said something short, and the deputy nodded and gave her his arm.

Then she looked past him at the skiff with my coat across the seat.

She looked at Anthony, up to his knees in the lake.

For one second, her mouth moved.

It was not a sob.

She smiled.

It was small and private.

It was the smile she used to give me across the kitchen when she had got the last piece of cake.

Then her face came apart on cue, and she put her hands over it.

"I saw that," I said.

"So did I," Edmund said, and for once he was not gentle. "Look at the dock."

One of the divers had waded out of the reeds.

He was holding up a black flat shoe, a left one, dripping, and he handed it up to the deputy.

The deputy walked it down the dock.

Anthony took it from him in both hands and stood holding it.

He turned it over once and looked at the worn heel I had been meaning to replace for a year.

His shoulders didn't move.

He did not cry. I watched his mouth.

"Ciara," he said to the lake, flat and hard. "Come up."

Behind him, across the grey water, nothing answered.

I let the binoculars fall into my lap, and Edmund took them without a word.

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