Chapter 41 Annie
Annie?” Walt was staring at her curiously, one shoe untied, the laces stilled in his hands. “What is it?”
Annie could not answer. She had no voice. Tight, suffocating fear had stolen it. Just whisked it away, along with her ability to move and think. The lighter was still in her raised hand, her mouth hanging open as Walt waited for the words that would not come.
She had to speak. She had to answer him. Every second that ticked past in silence was confirmation that she’d figured out what he already knew. Walt was Jamie’s killer.
He did not rise from where he sat on the dock, but steadily met her gaze, his green eyes hooded. Slowly, he brought his hands together and knotted his shoelaces into a bow.
When far too much time had passed and the only sounds were the lapping of water and Annie’s heart beating wildly in her chest, he turned away and stared across the lake.
“Say it,” he said to the water.
Annie’s hip nudged the sill behind her as she took a backward step.
“Say it,” he said again, louder this time.
Annie’s mouth was dry as dust, her voice a hoarse whisper that did not belong to her.
“It was you?”
He turned to her again, and nodded, and the fear that held her became panic.
Pieces of the puzzle that had confounded her were flying into place, the full picture emerging at last as Annie stared at the man who had been under her nose this whole time. How had she missed it?
She remembered now, how she’d moved to the window that night at the sound of jogging footsteps, searching for Jamie in the yellow light spilling out through the open garage door.
Walt had been in the garage. Still awake.
Still working. He had seen Jamie run by that night, and he had followed her.
Walt, with his tattoos and his penchant for cigars that necessitated a lighter in his back pocket wherever he went.
Walt, an older man from her road, just as Ian had heard Jamie describe him.
She should have known that first morning at breakfast, when Walt said people in town were suspicious of Daniel because Jamie was found in a clearing in his woods.
She had never mentioned the word clearing, not to anyone.
No one but Jake had known that detail, and Jake hadn’t yet spoken to his parents about the case.
There was no other way Walt could have known unless he’d carried her body to the clearing and left it there.
“Why?” she asked, but even as the question left her lips, Annie knew the answer.
Walt gazed at her for a moment, then lowered his eyes to the dock. Shaking his head, he muttered something that Annie could not make out beneath the sound of the lake gurgling around the pilings.
“I’m a good person, Annie.” He lifted his face to hers.
“A good father and a good husband. Jamie was an indiscretion. A mistake. I let temptation get the better of me that day we were up here sawing the cedar, and she was willing, but when it ended, she didn’t have the maturity to keep it quiet.
I only followed her up here that night to talk to her, to try to reason it all out, but she wouldn’t listen. ”
He turned to look out at the water again, and anger burst through Annie’s fear like a fist. This man had damaged every single person that she cared about in this town.
“Laura’s tired spells,” Annie said to the back of his head, “she’s been having them for weeks.
She said on the phone that she slept like the dead that night.
Was that you? Were you drugging her with those sleeping pills in the bathroom?
Were you drugging your wife so you could sneak out at night and meet Jamie? ”
Her voice was taut with accusation, but when Walt turned to look at her—there was no emotion on his face. For a moment, he simply watched her, then, without a word, he rose to his feet.
How had she never noticed how tall he was?
This meek middle-aged man who preferred the quiet solitude of tinkering in his garage to conversation.
The father who sat with hunched shoulders at the breakfast table, smiling at his wife over his mug of coffee.
The former marine who was still every inch of six feet and sinewy with strength.
Annie’s eyes darted around the dock, but there was nothing with which to defend herself. The only objects at hand were the three propane cans lined beneath the window, too large and heavy for her to wield effectively, and the two Adirondack chairs, useless for the same reason.
“Listen to me, Annie.” Walt raised one hand in a gesture she supposed was meant to calm her. “I only wanted to talk to her that night, only to talk. What happened after that was her fault, not mine. I never intended to kill her.”
Annie’s anger swelled. He believed it. He honestly believed that Jamie’s murder had somehow been deserved, and the calmness with which he spoke the words infuriated her.
“I don’t care what you intended,” she shot back. “Jamie’s dead, and this town is broken because of it. Because of you.”
Walt took a step toward her, and Annie matched it with a sideways step of her own.
There were less than fifteen feet of space between them on the dock, and every muscle in her body went rigid with anticipation.
She was a deer in the woods, poised for the inevitable end of this, a flight through the trees for her life.
“I only meant to scare her into keeping quiet, I didn’t mean to kill her.”
Annie bristled at the lie. “No. You knew exactly what you were doing when you took her out in the canoe, and where you’d carry her body through the briars. You know this lake. Jake told me you used to take Laura rowing up here at night back when the two of you were dating.”
Walt stilled where he stood, and Annie could see the deliberation in his eyes. He was deciding what to do next. How to best eliminate the threat that she posed.
“Why did you move her?” The question still burned, needing an answer, even as Annie inched closer to the edge of the dock and the three-foot jump down to the gravel where she would break into her sprint toward the gate.
“Why not just let Daniel take the fall right from the start and leave her in the lake?”
Walt tilted his head, brows lifting as though the answer were obvious.
“I’m not an evil person, Annie. I didn’t want Daniel to take the fall for this any more than you did.
That’s why I took the trouble to move her body out into the woods.
In a perfect world, it would have been blamed on Justin Grimes the way it was supposed to, but that’s not how the cards fell.
The fact that Justin had already been caught was bad luck, but when all’s said and done, Daniel’s the outsider.
He never would have truly fit into this town, and it’s better for him to take the blame for this than for it to land on my shoulders and destroy my family.
I’m a deacon, Annie, a deacon of the church and a pillar of the community.
Do you have any idea what it would do to this town if the truth came out? ”
This man was a sociopath. A narcissist. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“Jake trusts you. Laura trusts you. I trusted you. How could you do this?”
She had reached the end of the dock, and her heels teetered over the edge. Just one quick twist and she’d be down on the ground, running for her life.
“You’re right, Annie.” He nodded slowly. “My family trusts me. This town trusts me. And they’ll go on trusting me once all this is over and done with.”
His voice was calm, his face stoic, and Annie knew it then. Knew it with a certainty that filled her veins with ice. Walt Proudy was going to kill her.
For one last moment, they met each other’s gaze, both unblinking, both full of defiance, then Annie turned and threw herself from the dock.
She hit the gravel hard and stumbled forward onto her hands, skinning her bare knees as her feet slid for traction.
Behind her, the old boards creaked as Walt lunged across the dock, but he was too late, she was already back on her feet with her sights on the gate gleaming across the clearing like a beacon of safety.
One of the propane tanks rattled as Walt lifted it from the dock, and Annie broke into a sprint, not daring to look back.
She heard it coming.
Heard it parting the air behind her, the very particles singing as the heavy can came sailing toward her, and she offered up a wordless cry for deliverance a moment before the tank slammed into the back of her skull and everything went black.