Chapter 28 Annie
The drive to the boathouse had never felt longer.
The twists and turns on the rutted road just kept coming, and Annie’s stomach tightened around each one as they climbed through the rain.
“Cold, hard math,” Jake said from the driver’s seat. “First rule of any female homicide, you always start with the boyfriend or husband. Always. Nine cases out of ten, that’s who did it.”
Annie had a feeling he was saying the words more to convince himself than to sway her, and she didn’t answer as she watched the windshield wipers swiping back and forth, clearing the gathering rain from the glass.
“I don’t want to believe he’s capable of something like this. I love him. He’s like a brother to me, but the stats are overwhelming. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t at least rule him out.”
Annie nodded to give Jake some sign that she was listening, but said nothing.
Overwhelming was the perfect word for it.
She was overwhelmed with sorrow for the grieving mother and father in that filthy blue house behind them.
Overwhelmed with confusion as the details of Jamie’s recent life and sudden death raised more questions than answers.
But mostly, she was overwhelmed, yet again, with doubt about the man who lived in the boathouse.
Daniel had lied to her before. Brilliantly.
Smoothly. Convincing her that he was someone else entirely before revealing the truth about his past. Whether she liked it or not, she had been duped by him.
Fooled. And a selfish, heartsick part of her wanted to ignore that he was the obvious suspect to start with.
Of all people, Daniel Barela was a man who knew how to live outside the boundaries of what society deemed normal.
He had told her his version of how he had fled his hometown, but that’s exactly what it had been; his version, and she’d taken him at his word.
But what if Gary Dunn had been the one telling the truth at the press conference all those years ago?
Daniel clearly knew how to lie. And he knew how to hide. Did he also know how to kill?
In the driver’s seat, Jake cleared his throat, and Annie slid him a sideways glance. Daniel had fooled him, too, and if the investigation led where she feared it might, there would come a point when she would have to decide whether to betray Daniel’s trust.
The familiar NO TRESPASSING signs appeared one by one, overbright against the rain-drenched tree trunks to which they were nailed. Annie’s gaze jumped from warning to warning as they neared the gate that she already knew would be locked.
Who are you? she wondered, not for the first time as the signs flew past. Who are you, really?
The gate was indeed closed and locked, and Jake pulled right up to it, pressing a closed fist against the horn for several seconds.
The door of the boathouse did not open, and Annie watched the windows for movement inside, but they perfectly mirrored the clearing, giving nothing away.
Jake shifted into park and opened the door.
Leaning out of the car with one foot on the ground, he cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Daniel!”
His shout echoed across the clearing, and when it was met with silence, he ducked back inside and turned off the engine. “I don’t think he’s here.”
“He might still be down at the Wards’ place. The stable’s huge, it probably took more than a few days to figure out where the wiring went wrong.”
Jake nodded, slipping his arms into his jacket before stepping out of the car. Annie followed, sparing a quick glance at the low clouds scraping the tips of the pines with mist.
The downpour had lightened considerably, and the firs around the clearing hung heavy with moisture, their lower boughs resting on the ground, higher branches shedding excess drops with a wet, tapping patter that filled the air.
For several moments, Jake stood in front of the gate with his hands on his hips, lower lip moving in and out of his teeth. He stared at the silver padlock that barred entry into the clearing, and after one long exhale, he nodded.
“Come on.” He propped a shoe on the gate and started to climb.
“Jake.” Annie reached for his arm. “We can’t just barge in without a warrant, you know that.”
Jake stared down at her, jaw working as the falling mist coated his hair.
“I won’t go inside the boathouse without his permission, but you and I both know that this isn’t just cut-and-dried law enforcement anymore.
I’m not only here as a cop, I’m also the guy who discovered Jamie’s body, and I’m Daniel’s best friend. The lines are blurry, Annie.”
There was pain in his eyes. Pain and worry.
He didn’t want Daniel to have anything to do with this any more than Annie did.
They had long since strayed from the black-and-white investigation of Hannah Schroeder’s case and were deep into the gray area of Jamie’s—where the distinctions between neighbor and victim and friend and suspect were harder to define.
Annie met Jake’s gaze for a moment, then nodded, following him up and over the gate.
The boathouse was dark and shadowed where it sat tucked under the fringe of the dripping woods, and Annie was struck by how forlorn it looked.
In sunlight, the building was cozy and quirky, beloved for its shabby-chic furniture and its leaning stack of firewood.
It was an extension of Daniel himself, damaged and rebuilt stronger, a stubborn survivor of the past that had burned down behind it.
But there was something sinister about the sight of it now, sitting alone, with water streaming from the corner gutters and the lower wall stained with rain.
Annie trailed Jake to the side door, where he hesitated with his hand on the knob. He held it for a moment, then let go and knocked instead. Again, he called Daniel’s name loudly, and Annie held her breath, listening for sounds within, but the dripping of rain from the trees was too loud.
“Not home,” Jake murmured, turning around to scan the clearing over Annie’s shoulder. “Where do you think he keeps his canoe?”
“Over there.” Annie turned to indicate the woods on the western shore. “He dug a little place on the embankment to slide it into the water. He hasn’t sealed the inside yet, so he keeps it upside down under a tarp to protect it from the weather.”
She’d said too much, and Jake looked at her curiously, but if he was wondering how she knew all of that, he didn’t voice it.
“Show me,” he said instead, and Annie led him to the spot where the canoe lay between two firs, covered by a blue tarp—dimpled with rain.
Jake slid the tarp away. “Help me roll it over.”
They each took an end, turning the heavy canoe upright onto its hull.
The rough wood was familiar under her hands, and Annie pushed back hard against the memory of her one and only voyage out on the lake in this vessel, a day that had started joyful and filled with laughter and ended with the unraveling of yet another lie Daniel had told her.
When the canoe was righted, Jake reached out a hand and ran it along the hollowed-out inside of the log, rustically chipped by the hatchet and still smelling sharply of pitch.
When he lifted his hand again, Annie’s heart sank.
On his fingers were several small wood shavings, tiny, sharp little splinters, like those Doc Porter had removed from Jamie’s shorts.
“I wondered,” Jake murmured. “The second I saw those wood shavings at the morgue.”
He turned to look at Annie in the weak light beneath the trees.
She nodded. “Could be,” she said, though her mind was already spinning, explaining it away.
The wood shavings on Jamie’s shorts could have come from anywhere. The fence that bordered the Boyd property, the lifeguard chair at the pool, even the diving board. The lab results weren’t back yet. This didn’t prove anything.
“There’s nothing else, though.” Annie leaned close to examine the inside of the canoe. “No blood or fabric. No hair or fibers or anything else that I can see.”
Jake wiped his fingers on his pants. “That’s true.”
There was no hope in his voice, and when Annie looked up to search his face, he didn’t meet her eyes.
A change had come over him, a change that made her heart ache.
The childhood innocence that had survived its way through to adulthood in his features had gone, and Annie felt instinctively that she would never find it there again.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get it covered up.”
Together, Jake and Annie rolled the canoe back the way they had found it and wrapped it with the tarp, then walked along the shore to the boathouse.
Annie followed Jake as he rounded the building, stepping past the waterfalls of rain that cascaded from the gutters.
What he was searching for, she couldn’t tell, but he examined the earth carefully as he walked, and when they reached the dock, he climbed up with a grunt, Annie followed after, avoiding the rain-soaked, wild-haired reflection staring back at her from the lake-facing windows.
“Look for anything out of the ordinary.” Jake scanned the dock. “Anything that doesn’t belong.”
Annie nodded, but aside from the deck chairs and the propane tanks, the dock was empty.
There were puddles gathered on the warped boards, and she stepped around them to the corner where the skiff was nudging the piling, the inch of water in the bottom of the boat sloshing gently.
Nothing. There was nothing out of the ordinary. There was nothing at all.
She lifted her eyes. The lake was alive with the falling rain, thousands of tiny drops landing softly on the surface, setting it dancing with a sound like wind among leaves, and she couldn’t help pausing for a moment to take in the haunting beauty of it.
It was lovely. And if this rainy day had fallen earlier in the month, she’d probably have been curled up with Daniel on the other side of the windows, instead of standing out here on the dock.
Beneath the sound of the rain, an engine growled, and Annie whipped her head toward the gate. A vehicle was revving over the sloping hills, and she strained to separate the sound from the patter of drizzle around her, but couldn’t discern whether it was the Ranger or not.
Jake stepped up beside her, searching the trees on the far side of the clearing.
Annie took a breath. “Should we—”
He held a finger in the air, cutting her off.
The sound grew louder, rising with a gust of wind that peppered Annie’s face with cold raindrops, then tapered abruptly into a steady growl as the vehicle idled somewhere just out of sight.
She turned, sharing a long look with Jake as the sound went on and on, then the motor revved once more and the sound fell away. Whoever had come driving up the road had turned around to drive back down.
“Think it was him?”
Jake nodded. “Probably. I’ll bet he saw the cruiser at the gate and got spooked. Although, it might have been Ronnie, coming up here to make good on his words.”
A beat passed, and Annie asked, “Should we follow whoever it was?”
“No. Let’s look around here for a few more minutes. I don’t want to miss anything while we have the place to ourselves.”
Annie glanced up at the sky. Afternoon was sliding away into evening behind the clouds, and the gray day would lose its meager light soon.
She joined Jake in looking around the dock and soon found Daniel’s drawing pad tucked out of the rain between two of the propane tanks under the window, the outside edge damp where the drizzle had reached it. She snatched it up and flipped it open.
She’d looked through Daniel’s work several times, always with the conviction that his art told her more about who he was than his words ever could.
He brought pencil to paper with such confidence, such self-assurance, and all of the emotion that he never quite managed to translate from his heart to his mouth.
The sketches flipped past, one after the other, a black-and-white blur.
There was the maned wolf, and the mountain, and Annie herself, laughing with her braid flipped over her shoulder.
The book was nearly full, filled to the penultimate page, and as the paper flipped beneath her thumb, revealing the very last drawing, Annie’s breath caught in her throat.
It was Jamie. Daniel had drawn Jamie swimming across the lake with her long golden hair plastered to her back.
The sketch was beautiful in his sure, dark style, each stroke of the pencil deliberate and used to great effect, but there was something wrong with it.
Something flawed. There, in the direct center of the drawing where Jamie’s strong left arm met the water, her elbow bent gracefully mid-stroke, the sketch was smudged, as though it had been rubbed.
Touched. As though someone had dragged a wet thumb across it.
The hair on Annie’s arms lifted in a rash of goose bumps.
“Jake.”
He crossed the dock, peering over her shoulder as she pointed to the smudge on the drawing.
“Charcoal pencil,” she said.
It was audible, all of the air leaving Jake’s lungs at once, and Annie could not turn to meet his eyes. She would bet a year’s salary that the substance on Jamie’s thumb had come from this pad.
Jamie had stood right here and touched this paper on the night she died.