Chapter 10: Fox Lake

Rowan drove the hour and ten minutes to Fox Lake in fifty.

His dark grey sedan ran silent at ninety. Not a hum from the plate.

He had taken the dealer's chrome frame off it two weeks ago, because it buzzed above sixty.

He had told me that twice since Tuesday.

He said nothing now.

I sat beside him with the red notebook on my knee, not writing, and watched a flat grey country go by.

The lake house sat at the end of a gravel road, a low cedar-and-glass box among bare oaks.

The water showed steel-colored behind it.

A black gate stood across the drive, with a keypad and a small camera on a pole.

Rowan put in the code with two fingers that wouldn't quite hold still. The gate swung back.

A green hatchback was parked by the porch, with a university parking sticker.

"Her car," he said.

"Stay behind me."

"It's my house."

"Then stay behind me in it."

The front door wasn't locked.

I pushed it open with my elbow and listened.

No radio. No kettle. A fridge humming somewhere. A smell that I knew the instant it reached me, sweet and old and wrong.

"Rowan," I said, without turning. "Go back to the car."

"No."

"Please."

"No," he said, very quietly. "I hired her."

I walked through the living room in my flat shoes, keeping to the edge of the rug.

My sleeve was pulled down over my hand.

The study was off the far end, through a pair of open doors.

A woman sat in the leather chair behind the desk.

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