Chapter 18
The lake was perfectly still this morning, just as it was before the wind stirred it.
Its surface mirrored the early morning sky flawlessly, gray and pale gold with a hint of pink along the eastern tree line where the sun was rising behind the mountains.
Cole had been sitting here watching it for twenty minutes before he heard the screen door and footsteps on the boards behind him.
He didn’t turn around, just listened as Jewel settled into the chair beside him, hearing the distinctive sound of her pulling a blanket around herself, then her hands wrapping around her mug as she, too, looked out at the lake. For a while, neither of them said anything.
That was one of the things he had noticed, without truly realizing it, about how she could be so still. Not in the strained, effortful way of someone waiting to speak, but a genuine kind of quiet. The kind that showed she was truly present in the silence, not somewhere else behind her own eyes.
Then he made the mistake of looking at her.
She had her knees pulled up inside the blanket, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, and her green eyes fixed on the lake, with a stillness she had in the early morning before the day had asked anything of her.
The light was casting an unearthly glow on the angles of her face, and he fought the urge to get up, take her in his arms, and kiss her.
He looked back at the lake quickly before he did something he’d regret.
He realized he was getting better at that. The looking-away part.
She broke the silence first, sounding hushed. “She said please.”
He waited.
“When she asked me to hear her out, she said please. Ashley doesn’t say please—she demands, she pushes, and she makes you feel like you owe her something. But yesterday, she said please, and she meant it.”
“And that changes things for you?”
She looked at the lake. “I don’t know yet, but it makes her vulnerable. Whatever she wants to say, she’s afraid of something. And I don’t think it’s me.”
He thought about the picture the Johnsons had painted for Jewel across a lunch table in a sunny clearing.
About Robert in a corner booth in Syracuse, laughing.
She’ll break. When she told him that last night, he’d felt something move through him—something similar to rage but quieter, colder, and more calculated.
He clenched his hands around his mug. “You know she’s been feeding him information. Everything she knew about the investigation. Everything she knew about you.”
“Yes.”
“And about me.”
“Yes. Everything I told her and everything she observed on her own. I imagine he knows just as much about this investigation as I do.” She said it simply, without softening it.
He looked at his coffee. “How long do you think Ashley and Robert have been together?”
She shook her head. “I keep going back to that. The Johnsons said it looked established, not new. I don’t understand how they found each other. I don’t know if he approached her or she went to him. But I believe it’s been long enough for them to have planned everything carefully.”
The lake had begun to catch the first hint of a breeze, small ripples moving across its surface from left to right, disturbing the reflection in long, traveling lines.
A cold fear clutched at his heart. “I don’t want you meeting with her alone.”
She looked at him sideways. “Cole—”
“I mean it. Not on a trail, not somewhere without people around. Not after what the Johnsons told you.”
“It’s the weekend of the fun ride. Most of the camps around here are filled because of it.
Frost Pocket will probably be packed with people and riders coming and going all morning.
” Her voice was patient but firm. It was the voice she used when she’d already thought something through and was now explaining it to someone who hadn’t quite caught up.
“There will be tons of people and horses everywhere. Ashley won’t do anything in the middle of that. ”
“Ashley probably didn’t plant that bracelet in my barn alone.”
“Maybe not. But trust me, Robert won’t drive all the way from wherever he is just to stand in a field full of horse people on a Sunday morning.” She looked at him with those clear, steady eyes. “I’ll be fine.”
Logically and practically, he knew she was right.
But he still didn’t like it. He sat pondering for a while, aware of the irrationality of his worries, and tried to determine how much of his concern was genuine and how much was something he didn’t want to admit.
That feeling had been growing quietly since the night she told him about going to Albany—the sense of helplessness when he couldn’t do what he felt he was supposed to do.
He pressed his hand against his side, over the still-healing area.
It had been two weeks since the surgery.
He was following everything they’d told him—every restriction, every slow step back to activity—and he was slowly getting better.
He could feel it. But getting there wasn’t the same as being fully healed, and the gap between those two things had never felt wider than it did right now, knowing she was about to walk into something he couldn’t be part of.
“You’re doing it again.”
“What?”
“That thing where you go all quiet, and your jaw does that.” She gestured at his face.
“My jaw doesn’t do anything.”
“Cole.” There was a note of affection in her voice.
He exhaled and looked back at the lake. “I just—” He stopped. Then started again. “If something happens and I’m not there, what then?”
She shifted in her chair, pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Nothing will happen. Ashley just wants to talk. And even if it were something more than that, you can’t be there for everything. That’s not what this is.”
No? Then what was this? He wasn’t sure he wanted her answer, so he left it alone.
Instead, he asked, “She obviously wants to talk to you about something, but are you going to ask her anything?”
She looked down at her coffee, and he watched her organize her thoughts—saw that moment when her expression subtly inwardly shifted as she arranged them into order.
“Yeah, I’m going to ask her everything. All of it at once.
How long she’s known Robert. Whether she was watching us and reporting back to him.
Whether it was her we saw that night. About the bracelet, if she had it, and how it got from wherever it was into your barn.
” She paused. “And about Vivian. What she actually knows about what happened to Vivian, other than what she’s been performing for everyone’s benefit. ”
“She’ll lie.”
“She probably will about some of it. But people who are afraid don’t lie as smoothly as people who aren’t. And she was afraid last night. I could tell. I think something shifted for her. Maybe she’s starting to wonder what she’s actually involved in.”
“And you think she’ll tell you the truth because of that?”
“I think she’ll reveal more than she intends to. She’s not a professional at this. She’s a woman who got involved in something that made sense to her at the time and has been becoming harder to control ever since.”
He nodded slowly. He believed her completely and without hesitation, trusting her competence wholeheartedly, but the fear lodged in his chest remained, unrelated to her abilities.
They sat for a little longer, watching the morning unfold.
The lake was fully awake now, its surface shimmering in the light, and somewhere across the water, a loon called out once and was answered from further away.
Beck would be up within the hour, and the day would start properly, and this strange, suspended feeling that the early morning had, just the two of them, the lake, and the coffee going cold in their mugs, would fade away.
He wished it wouldn’t.
He looked at her, at the blanket around her shoulders, at her hair in the morning light, and at the shape of her profile, feeling all the unspoken feelings build up inside him like water behind a dam.
She turned to look at him, and for a moment, he had the sensation of standing at the edge of something with no clear view of what was below.
Then she looked back at the lake and said, almost idly, as if it were simply the next thought in a sequence rather than the thing that stopped his heart mid-beat, “At least when I get back home, Robert’s attention will have moved on to something else.
If he’s focused on Ashley now, he’ll hopefully leave me alone. ”
He was pretty sure she didn’t know what she’d just said. Or rather, he was pretty sure she knew exactly what she’d said but had no idea what it had done to him.
When I get back home.
He looked away. He watched the loon glide slowly across the lake’s surface, calm and confident in its path. He picked up his coffee, saw it had gone cold, and drank it anyway.
She was still planning to leave. Of course she was. She had a life elsewhere—a job, a house, a horse she’d need to move, an existence unrelated to Otter Creek, Beckett, or him, except that she’d stumbled into it and stayed longer than she intended.
He knew all of that. He’d known it from the beginning.
But it landed differently at six forty-five in the morning when she was three feet away and wrapped in one of his blankets.
“You’re probably right.” His voice came out even. He was grateful for that, at least.