Chapter 46 Jo
Chapter 46
Jo
Somewhere inside the house, a phone was ringing.
Jo paused on the threshold, gazing through the open doorway. That detail alone was alarming, that someone had left the door wide open. More alarming was the red drag mark on the floor. Blood?
“Hello?” she called out. “Susan?”
There was no answer. She stepped into the house, avoiding the blood smear. All the lights were on inside, as if the occupants had just stepped out and would return any minute. She glanced into the kitchen, then made a rapid sweep of the downstairs—living room, bathroom, Elizabeth’s bedroom. No one. She moved to the staircase and saw more blood, at the bottom of the steps.
The phantom phone, wherever it was, had stopped ringing. In the silence, she could hear her own heartbeat whooshing through her ears.
There could be a perfectly innocent explanation for the blood. An accident, perhaps. Someone tumbled down the stairs, slammed their head against the floor, and had to be rushed to the hospital. Such a mishap could happen in any home in America, but ...
Instinctively she drew her weapon. Called out, again: “Susan?”
She’d already called Mike for backup, but the blood on the floor told her she needed to move, now. Pulse quickening, she climbed the stairs.
At the second-floor landing, she glanced both ways. Glanced first into Zoe’s room, then Susan’s. No one here. She moved into Brooke and Colin’s room.
There she paused, eyeing the dresser, where a top drawer hung open, a bra spilling out. It was a jarring note in a room where everything else was neat and orderly. In the bathroom she found yet another jarring note of disorder. Jewelry lay glittering across the sink counter, not laid out neatly but spilled haphazardly.
She heard footsteps thud into the house and thought: Mike’s here .
But it was Ethan’s voice she heard, calling out: “Susan? Susan, where are you?”
Jo emerged from the bedroom and saw him standing at the bottom of the stairs. He was staring at the floor. At the blood. “She’s not here,” said Jo.
His head snapped up to stare at her. “What’s going on? Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve been calling her, but she doesn’t pick up.”
“Do you know where Brooke is?”
“Brooke?” He shook his head. “I just want to find my wife. I need to know if she’s—” He stopped, spun around to face the open doorway. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what? Ethan?”
But he was already out the door.
She scrambled down the stairs and ran out onto the deck. There she halted, straining to see into the night. There was only a sliver of moon in the sky, and the lights from the house had washed out her night vision. Where had Ethan gone? Then, from somewhere in the darkness, she heard a cry. A shout.
The pond?
Plunging blindly into the night, she made her way down the sloping lawn, stumbling through shadows toward the water’s edge. She could make out more and more details in the gloom: The distant sparkle of starlight reflected on the pond. The silhouette of the pine tree looming to her right. Just ahead, something was moving.
From the darkness, a figure emerged and staggered toward her, weighed down by the burden in his arms. A burden he was struggling to carry up the slope.
“Help,” Ethan pleaded. He wobbled, dropped to his knees. Gently he laid the body on the grass. “Help her.”
In the faint glow from the house, Susan’s face looked as lifeless as stone, her skin a milky white beneath a tangle of wet hair. Too late, Jo thought, but when she bent down and pressed fingers to Susan’s neck, she felt a quiver of a pulse. Or was she just imagining it?
She took a breath, bent down, and pressed her mouth to Susan’s. The lips were so cold, it was like kissing a block of ice. She blew, forcing air into the lifeless lungs. Repeated it again, then a third time.
Susan lay motionless, water trickling from her hair.
“No. No. ” Ethan pushed Jo aside and pressed his mouth to Susan’s. Breathed for his wife, again and again. “Please, darling,” he begged. He grasped her face in his hands and forced another breath into her lungs. “Come back. Come back ...”
Even as Jo called for an ambulance, she knew it was too late. No matter how desperately Ethan pleaded, how many times he breathed for his wife, Susan was already gone. This ambulance ride would not be to the hospital, but to the morgue.
With a sense of resignation, Jo knelt down and once again pressed her fingers to Susan’s neck, expecting to feel nothing. But something throbbed there, faintly, beneath her fingers. Not her imagination. This was a pulse. A steady pulse.
Suddenly Susan shuddered. Coughed.
“Yes!” Ethan sobbed.
Together, they rolled Susan onto her side. Jo slapped her between the shoulder blades, slapped her with desperate, almost brutal blows. Susan coughed again, this time so violently that water splattered out of her mouth. She began to claw the air, as if still struggling to stay afloat in the pond, still fighting toward the surface. Her eyes flew open, and she looked around wildly.
“It’s me! I’m here!” said Ethan. “Darling, I’m here!” He trapped her face, forcing her to look at him. Only then did her thrashing stop. He pulled her into his arms and rocked her against his chest. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’s okay now ...”
“Where’s Brooke?” said Jo, but Ethan was so focused on his wife that he wasn’t listening. “Ethan, where is Brooke?” she repeated.
“By the water,” he finally managed to say. “They’re all down there.”
“All? What happened?”
“Talk to Reuben.”
Jo stood up and headed down the lawn, toward the pond. The sliver of moon had now risen above the trees, and in the dim glow, she could just make out Reuben Tarkin’s silhouette, looming above two huddled figures at the water’s edge. And she heard a keening, so faint it might have been only the whisper of the wind.
It was Brooke, murmuring: “It’s her fault. It’s all her fault.”
Brooke did not look up as Jo approached, even as Jo came to stand right beside the trio. She just kept rocking back and forth, murmuring. Water lapped and splashed against the dock. From somewhere on the pond came the haunting cry of a loon.
“She was trying to drown the woman,” said Reuben. “I saw them, dragging her out of the house. When I got here, they had her head pushed under the water. I tried to stop it, and this one, she fought me like a damn crazy woman. Then the boy, he came after me too.” Reuben shook his head. “I might’ve gotten a little rough with him, knocked out a few teeth. Oh, they’ll blame me for it. The Conovers, they always blame me.”
“Not this time,” said Jo. This time, the Conovers would finally face the consequences. She looked down at the huddled figures. “Brooke?”
Brooke did not seem to hear her. She had her arms wrapped around her son and was rocking him back and forth as she kept murmuring, “It’s all her fault.”
“How is this Susan’s fault?” asked Jo.
“Not Susan. Hers! The whore. And her baby. She said there was a baby . I thought we were done with her, but she couldn’t stay away. She had to come back and ruin everything.”
She’s talking about the lady in the lake, thought Jo. The woman who’d been lying at the bottom of Maiden Pond all these years.
“I think your son’s been hurt,” said Jo. “Let me take a look at him.”
“No.”
“He needs attention.”
“ No. ” Brooke’s head snapped up and her teeth gleamed in the moonlight, white and feral. “He’s my son. I take care of him, only me .”
Jo glanced up to see flashing lights pulsating through the trees; Mike had arrived, and in the distance was the wail of the approaching ambulance. She would need Mike’s help to pull this woman away from her son, to book them both into the jail. And that would be only the beginning of the ordeals to come. There’d be reports to write and the Conovers’ lawyers to battle and courtrooms to navigate. But for a woman named Anna, justice would finally be served. For sixteen long years, through the cycling of the seasons, through hard freezes and spring thaws, Anna had lain hidden at the bottom of Maiden Pond, waiting to be found. Waiting for the moment a teenage girl, swimming on a warm summer’s day, would dive deep enough to glimpse the whiteness of bones.
Anna had waited long enough.
Jo took out her handcuffs.