Chapter 20
The lake was still when Noah got home.
No wind. No boats. The water held the last of the day's light in a flat sheet of copper that darkened at the edges where the mountains came down to meet it.
A loon sat motionless near the far shore, so still it looked painted on the surface.
The air smelled like pine and woodsmoke, someone burning brush on the far side of High Peaks Lake.
The temperature had dropped enough that Noah could see his breath when he stood on the porch and looked out.
He hadn't planned the evening. It assembled itself.
Callie arrived at six with a bag of groceries and the kind of expression that said she needed to not think about work for a few hours.
He didn't argue. He opened the door and she walked past him into the kitchen and started pulling things from the bag.
Chicken. Garlic. A lemon. A box of pasta.
A bottle of something red that she set on the counter without comment.
"You're cooking?” he said.
"Yeah, and you're helping." She smiled.
He sliced garlic while she seasoned the chicken.
He boiled water while she opened the wine.
They moved around each other in the small kitchen with the ease of two people who had been doing this long enough that the choreography was unconscious.
She reached past him for the olive oil. He stepped left without being asked.
Her hip brushed his as she turned from the counter to the stove.
Initially, neither of them mentioned the case.
They ate at the kitchen table with the window open and the evening air coming through the screen.
The food was better than it had any right to be, given that neither of them was much of a cook.
The wine was decent. The conversation was light and directionless, the kind of talk that fills space without trying to accomplish anything, which was exactly what both of them needed.
Callie told him about a call she had taken that morning from a tourist who wanted to report a "suspicious figure" on a ridgeline outside High Peaks.
It turned out to be a surveyor with a tripod.
McKenzie had driven forty minutes to check it out and came back with the man's business card and a look on his face she would not forget.
Noah almost laughed. The sound felt unfamiliar. There hadn’t been much of it in the house lately.
"How's he holding up?" Noah asked.
"McKenzie? He's McKenzie. Complains about everything, works harder than everyone, eats four sugars in his coffee and wonders why he can't sleep.
He's fine." She paused. "He's worried, though.
He won't say it. But the way he checks the ridgelines when we drive anywhere, the way he watches tree lines. He's thinking about it."
"Everyone is."
"That's the problem. The whole county is watching the hills. Hunters are calling in other hunters. A guy in Keene reported his own neighbor because the man was carrying a rifle case to his truck during deer prep. Turned out to be an eighty-year-old with a .22 and a grudge against woodchucks."
"That's going to get worse as hunting season opens."
"I know. Every report we follow up on is time we're not spending on the actual case. And every report we don't follow up on is a liability if something happens."
Noah refilled her glass. "How are you holding up?"
She looked at him across the table. "I'm tired. Not the kind you fix with sleep. The kind where you wake up already thinking about the thing you went to bed trying not to think about."
"I know that kind."
They cleared the plates. Noah washed. Callie dried. Normal was the one thing his life hadn't been for a long time. This felt close.
They took their wine to the porch and sat down.
The lake stretched out in front of them, dark now, the last light gone from the water.
Stars were appearing through the gaps in the canopy.
The loon was gone or invisible. Ed Baxter's porch light clicked on next door, the timer kicking in at the same time every evening.
The regularity of it was comforting in a way Noah wouldn't have noticed a month ago.
“So… about my lease coming up next month,” Callie said.
She said it the way she said most things. Directly. Without preamble. Looking at the lake, not at him.
“October, right?”
“October fifteenth.”
Noah took a sip of wine. “What are you thinking?”
"I'm thinking I spend four nights a week here and three at a place I'm paying rent on just to keep my mail organized."
"That does seem inefficient."
“Uh, huh.” She turned to look at him. “Look, I’m not asking for a ring, Noah. I'm asking if the spare room offer still stands. Or whatever we're calling it."
"We're calling it the spare room."
"Right. The spare room where none of my things are and where I never sleep."
He looked at the lake. "Bring your stuff."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
She turned back to the water. Neither of them said anything else about it for a while. It didn't need anything else. The decision had been made weeks ago in the space between what they said and what they did. The words were just catching up.
The woodsmoke from across the pond drifted over the water and reached the porch. Callie pulled her legs up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees. She was wearing one of his flannel shirts over her T-shirt, which was another thing that had happened without discussion.
"I saw Hugh on Sunday," she said.
Noah's hand tightened slightly on the glass. "At Gretchen's?"
"Yeah. She invited me to the family dinner.
He seemed good at first. Talked about the football season, told a story about the time he pulled over a state senator on Route 86.
Classic Hugh." She paused. "But then he told the same story again twenty minutes later.
Word for word. Same setup, same punchline.
And when someone pointed it out, he got quiet and left the room. "
"He does that."
"He repeated himself three times at dinner. Once more in the kitchen after."
Noah looked at the dark water. A fish broke the surface somewhere near the center of the lake, a small splash that rippled outward and then was gone.
"Early stages," he said. "He won't see a doctor. Says he's fine. Says his memory has always been like that."
"Has it?"
"No." He took a drink. "When I was growing up, Hugh could recite case numbers from twenty years ago.
Badge numbers. License plates from traffic stops.
The man had a memory like a filing cabinet.
Everything in order, everything accessible.
" He set the glass on the arm of the chair.
"Now he calls Ethan by Luke's name sometimes.
He told Gretchen last week he needed to get to the office, and she had to remind him he retired six years ago. "
Callie let the silence sit. She was good at silence. She understood that some things needed air around them before they could be discussed.
"It's getting worse," she said. It wasn't a question.
"It might be. Or it might be stress. The funeral. Luke. Everything that's happened since. Grief does things to memory."
"You don't believe that."
He didn't. Hugh's repetitions weren't grief.
They were gaps. Small ones. Barely noticeable if you weren't paying attention.
But Noah had been paying attention since the night he sat across from his father at the oak table and watched him ask about Mia's move twice in five minutes without realizing he'd already asked.
"Sometimes it feels like he's already saying goodbye to things," Noah said. "Not people. Just pieces of himself. Like rooms going dark in a house, one at a time. And he walks through the dark rooms and pretends they're still lit."
Callie looked at him. He hadn't meant to say that much.
"I don't know what I believe," he said. "I just know he's not the same."
"Are you going to talk to him about it?"
"I've tried."
"And?"
"He told me he was fine and asked me to leave."
Callie nodded slowly. She knew the Sutherland men well enough by now to understand that the conversation Noah had described was not a failed attempt.
It was the conversation. That was how Hugh communicated when he was cornered.
He denied and dismissed and closed the door, and the people who loved him stood on the other side and decided whether to keep knocking.
"Maddie could help," Callie said. "She's closer to him."
"Maybe. But Maddie has her own way of handling it. She smooths things over. Avoids the hard parts."
"Sound like anyone you know?"
He looked at her. She wasn't smiling but there was warmth in it. The kind of observation that came from someone who had earned the right to say it.
"Fair enough," he said.
His phone buzzed on the arm of the chair. A text from Mia: First exam next week. Criminal law. Wish me luck. He typed back: You won't need it. But good luck anyway. He showed Callie the screen.
"She's going to be fine," Callie said.
"I know. Doesn't stop me from worrying."
"That's the job description."
They sat with the wine and the dark and the sound of water against the shore. The woodsmoke thinned and then was gone, replaced by the clean cold smell of pine and lake water. Somewhere across the lake, a door closed. A dog barked once and stopped.
The stars were out now, more than you could count, the kind of sky that only existed this far from cities.
The Milky Way was visible as a pale band running north to south, and the mountains were black silhouettes cut out of the starfield like shapes in construction paper.
It was beautiful. It was always beautiful.
And tonight Noah let himself feel it instead of looking past it.
Noah thought about Kline for a moment.
He pushed it down. Not tonight. Tonight was the porch and the wine and the woman beside him who was about to move her things into a house she had already made her own.
"You know what I keep thinking?" Callie said.
"What?"
"That this is the first evening in weeks where neither of us has looked at a case file."
"Don't jinx it."
She smiled. He felt it more than saw it.
They stayed on the porch until the cold drove them inside. Callie rinsed the glasses. Noah locked the front door and checked the windows the way he did every night now, a habit he'd developed since the first shooting that he wasn't sure he'd ever lose.
Ethan's door was closed. Light underneath. Music playing softly, something Noah didn't recognize.
He stood in the hallway for a moment. Callie came up behind him and put her hand on his back. She looked at the light under the door, then at Noah, and said nothing. She didn't need to.
They went to bed. The house settled around them. The lake was silent outside the window. For a few hours, the investigation and the secrets didn't exist. There was just the dark and the quiet and two people lying close enough to hear each other breathe.
It wouldn't last. Noah knew that. The morning would come and the case would be there and the names would be waiting. But tonight was tonight, and he let himself have it.