Courtney
“What are you looking at?” Elliott asks.
I look up. He stands in the hotel room, wet, a towel wrapped around his waist. He’s shirtless, his hair standing on end like
he towel dried it, but didn’t touch it with a comb. Steam enters the room from the bathroom, suspended behind him like a cloud.
There is artwork on the wall, which feels so out of place in this squalid room. It’s something mass-produced and in a dime-store
frame that hangs at an angle, the plaster behind it cracked. The image looks cheap and unexceptional, a painting of a lake
that could be any lake in the world.
But a lake.
I think of the search I found on Elliott’s iPad just now.
Pearl Lake depth.
The thought comes to me like a knockout punch: blinding, unexpected and from out of nowhere.
I realize the one place no one has yet thought to look for Reese is in the lake.
“Sorry,” I say, feeling pain, a tightness in my chest all of a sudden, whispering, not for the kids’ sake but because I don’t
trust my own voice. I don’t trust it not to tremble if I speak at full volume. “I forgot to charge my phone last night. It’s
dead. I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed your iPad.”
“Of course not,” he says, running his hands through his hair, flattening it and pushing it back from his eyes. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
“What are you looking at?”
My throat tightens. On the screen before me, which, thank God, he can’t see from where he is, Reese’s teasing, sun-kissed
face stares back at me.
“Nothing,” I say, turning the iPad off before I have a chance to close out of Facebook or to clear my own search history.
“I was just mindlessly scrolling.”
“It didn’t look mindless. It looked pretty intent.”
He holds my eye for longer than is normal.
“No, not intent. Just out of it. I didn’t sleep at all last night,” I tell him again. “Did you say something about coffee?”
“Yeah. Just let me get dressed first, and then I’ll go see what I can find.”
After he’s gone, I get out of bed and pull the curtains back to let the early morning light into the room. I plug my phone
in to get at least a few minutes of charge, and then I shake Cass and Mae gently awake, leaned over them, whispering at them
to get up and get dressed, that we’re going to go for a ride.
I stare at Wyatt on the floor for a long time, trying to decide whether to take him or to leave him. And then another memory
slams into me of Emily and me one night, years ago, sitting too close together on the sofa, an empty bottle of wine on the
coffee table before us, having one of those no-holds-barred conversations where we held nothing back. “If anything happens
to Nolan and me, you’ll take care of our kids, won’t you?” she’d asked, sloping toward me, her face too close, her eyes wide
and watery, and I said yes, of course, asking that she do the same for Cass.
“Of course,” she said. “I’d take care of her like she was my own.”
I shake Wyatt awake. When he comes to, blinking the world into focus, he’s lost. He looks around, remembers where he is, what’s happening, that he’s on the motel room floor.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Can you get up?” I ask, urgency in my voice, though I try not to let the panic in too, and scare the kids. Elliott searched
online for the depth of Pearl Lake because he needed to find the deepest part to sink Reese’s body in so she wouldn’t rise
back up and be found.
What I don’t understand is why. Why would Elliott do this?
“Why?” Wyatt asks.
“We need to leave.”
“Where are we going?” he asks, his voice tired and testy but, at the same time, compliant. He pushes the blanket back and
gets up off the quilt, reaching for his clothes in his bag.
“To talk to the police.”
Quickly, I throw my hair into a bun, slip into a bra, grab my purse, and we go outside.
The parking lot is nearly empty.
Elliott has taken the car.