He Thought I Had Nowhere to Go Until I Disappeared novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Last Bus to the Lake
Keeley reaches the lake house after dark and a stranger opens the door and says her name. Her grandmother wakes and asks if she got the letters.
The bus to Russells Point took an hour and forty minutes, and Corbin called me fourteen times.
Each vibration buzzed against my leg.
The first three calls were gentle.
The texts that came with them were gentler.
Keeley, please pick up. I'm not angry. We can fix this tonight.
By the sixth call he had stopped saying please.
You are embarrassing yourself. Come home before the neighbors see you've left.
By the tenth he wrote something that made my stomach turn.
You have nowhere to go and you know it. Stop this.
I turned my phone face down on my knee.
The woman across the aisle was eating peanuts out of a paper bag.
She offered me some without looking over, and I took a handful.
It was the first thing I had eaten since breakfast.
At the next stop, Alana texted again.
He's going to call Grandma Ardis. Don't let her answer.
I didn't reply.
I didn't understand why my cousin was warning me about my husband, and I was too tired to ask.
The bus let me off in front of a closed bait shop at twenty to nine.
The whole town was dark except for a gas station and one bar with its sign turned off.
It was thirty-eight degrees.
I had not brought a hat.
The lake house was two miles down the county road, and I walked them with my hands up my sleeves.
I knew every turn.
The mailbox shaped like a trout.
The dead oak where my father taught me to climb.
The long gravel drive, with its single yellow light at the end.
The house looked the same as it had six years ago.
Smoke came out of the chimney.
The porch swing moved a little in the wind.
I was on the third step when a flashlight came on from the side yard and pointed at my chest.
"Stop there," a man said.
I stopped.
He came across the grass without hurrying.
He was tall, with dark hair going gray over the ears and a flannel shirt open over a gray T-shirt.
He lowered the flashlight to my shoes, then raised it again to my face.
"Keeley Engberg," he said.
It wasn't a question.
"Who are you?"
"Nolan Hatch. I live in the cottage next door."
"Then you know I'm Ardis's granddaughter and I'm allowed on this porch."
"I know exactly who you are." His voice was flat. "You're seven months late."
"Late for what?"
He didn't answer.
He looked at the road behind me, then at my empty hands.
"No car," he said.
"I sold it today."
"No bag."
"I left in a hurry."
Something moved in his jaw.
"She's asleep," he said. "Her heart can't take a shock, so you don't go up those stairs and wake her."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good."
He unlocked the front door with a key from his own pocket and held it open.
I went in.
The kitchen smelled like woodsmoke and coffee.
He put a kettle on without asking me, and a bowl of beef stew went into the microwave.
I sat at the end of the long table where I used to do my homework.
The wall by the pantry was crowded with frames, the same as always.
My father at the dock with a walleye.
My mother laughing in a lawn chair.
And me at nineteen, soaked from the lake, with Grandma's arm around my neck.
Nobody had taken that one down.
"I can pay for tonight," I said. "I have twenty-three dollars."
"Nobody's charging you."
He set the bowl in front of me and a spoon next to it.
"Eat."
"Are you always this friendly?"
"Only to people who haven't answered a phone in six years."
I put the spoon down.
"I haven't ignored anyone's calls. I've been calling for six years."
"Eat your stew."
He leaned against the counter with his arms crossed and watched me finish every bite.
I was scraping the bowl when the floor creaked overhead.
Then there was a slow step, and the tap of a cane on each stair.
Nolan didn't move.
My grandmother came into the doorway in a pink robe with her white braid over one shoulder.
She was smaller than I remembered.
She looked at me for a long time with her hand tight on the cane.
"There you are," Grandma Ardis said.
I stood up so fast the chair went over.
"Grandma."
She didn't hug me.
She studied my face and did not say what she saw.
"You came on your own," she said. "Nobody told you where I was."
"No. I didn't know where else to go."
She nodded slowly.
Her chin shook once, and she steadied it.
"Did you get my letters?" she asked. "Nolan posted every single one."
"What letters?" I said.
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