Chapter 15 Susan
Chapter 15
Susan
Oh my God. Oh my God.
Susan felt the ground sway beneath her, and she reached out to grasp Ethan’s hand. She heard footsteps behind her and turned to see Jo Thibodeau walking toward them, radio in hand, her face somber. Jo approached quietly, as if not to spook them.
“It may be nothing,” said Jo.
“Why are the divers going down?” said Ethan. “What did they find?”
“There’s an irregularity, on the lake bed. They’re just going down to take a look. Why don’t you both go into the house? This could take a while. I think you’d be more comfortable inside.”
“No,” said Susan.
“Please, Mrs. Conover.”
“ No! ” The word came out so shrill that Susan scarcely recognized it as her own voice. What frightened her most was the dead calmness of Jo Thibodeau’s words. As if she already knew what the boat had found. As if she was preparing Susan for the worst.
Susan looked at the pond, where the second diver had just splashed in. “What does that mean, an ‘irregularity’? What did they see?”
“Go inside. I promise, I’ll tell you as soon as I know more.”
How could the woman sound so cool, so collected? The sheer ordinariness of this day enraged Susan. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping in the trees, while her own world was about to collapse around her.
“Susan,” Ethan said quietly, “let’s go inside.” He took her arm. “Please.”
She let him walk her back up the path, let him lead her up the deck steps into the house. The rest of the family was in the dining room, where lunch was spread out on the table. Cold cuts and fruit salad and potato chips, which Kit was devouring with noisy crunches. How could they sit there, gorging, while outside, on the water ...
Elizabeth saw Ethan’s face and immediately asked: “What’s happened? Did they find something?”
“We’re not sure,” said Ethan. “The divers have just gone down.”
“Oh, no.” Elizabeth stood up and went to the living room window.
“The police want us to stay inside the house,” said Ethan.
“Why?”
“To keep us out of their way, I guess.”
“We’re not prisoners,” said Colin. He stood up and joined Elizabeth at the window. The rest of the family migrated there as well, all of them looking out at the pond, where the anchored dive boat was gently bobbing.
“It could be nothing,” said Brooke.
Ethan nodded. “That’s what the policewoman said. An ‘irregularity,’ on the lake bed. That could mean a tree branch, a rock. We should all just sit down.”
But no one moved. They remained at the window, staring at the water. Jo Thibodeau had told Susan the pond was only forty-two feet at its deepest, but that was deep enough to swallow a body, to hide any number of tragedies. She thought of lying at the bottom of that pond, sunlight filtering through the water above. She thought of swimmers splashing on the surface, never realizing what lay beneath them. She sagged against the window, her hand pressed on the glass, and wondered how long she could take this without screaming.
“The divers are back up,” said Colin.
Two heads had just bobbed to the surface. One of the divers reached up to pass a line to the helmsman aboard the boat, and the helmsman began pulling on the rope, hand over hand. Something surfaced from the water, something that was a bright, alarming yellow, in the shape of ...
A body bag.
No, thought Susan. No, no, no.
She bolted out of the house. She heard Ethan yelling her name, heard the screen door slap shut and footsteps pounding down the deck stairs. Jo Thibodeau swooped in, seemingly out of nowhere, and caught Susan’s arm just as she reached the water’s edge.
“Mrs. Conover! Susan!”
“Is it her? Is it my baby?”
The two divers had clambered back on board. The engine kicked to life, and the boat started motoring toward the ramp.
Jo ordered Ethan: “Take your wife back to the house.”
Ethan took Susan’s arm. “Come on, darling.”
Susan yanked away and began to run up the driveway, toward the road. Through the trees, she could hear the growl of the motor, the sound reflecting off the water and up the hillside. She was racing that boat, desperate to get to the ramp first. She kept running and running, along the same road that Zoe would have walked on the day she vanished, the same road that should have brought her home.
The boat engine throttled down.
She sprinted around the final curve, toward the ramp. Reached the parking lot just as the warden service boat slid ashore. The two divers jumped out, splashing into knee-deep water. They looked up, startled, as Susan sprinted toward them.
“Is it her? Tell me!” Susan cried.
“Ma’am,” one of them said. “You need to stay back—”
She shoved past him and splashed into the water. Grabbing the dive ladder, she hauled herself up, onto the boat.
“Whoa!” the helmsman yelled. “You can’t come aboard!”
But she would not be stopped. Even as she heard Jo Thibodeau shouting at her from the parking lot, even as the warden tried to block her. My baby. My baby is in there.
She dropped down beside the yellow body bag. Water was still trickling through the mesh, and brown puddles had collected beneath it. With shaking hands, she yanked on the zipper pull and peeled open the bag. She stared in shock at what lay inside.
“Finn, get her out of the boat!” Jo yelled.
Hands hauled Susan backward, but even as she was dragged away, her eyes were fixed on the contents of that bag. On the human skull, its sockets empty and staring.
Bones. There were only bones inside.
It was not her daughter.