“And don’t you go calling my mother,” he called to her back as she walked toward the kitchen.
Jake looked at Annie and shook his head. “Becca,” he said under his breath, as though the woman’s name itself should suffice for an explanation.
Annie took a sip of her water and nodded toward the stack of papers. “Anything in there about dental records?”
Jake thumbed through the stack, flipping past the printed photographs of the woman’s naked, maimed body on the stainless-steel table.
“Yeah, right here. Looks like he ordered them done. We should hear back in a day or two. Can’t come soon enough, honestly. I need to find out who she is. I hate that somewhere out there her mom and dad are just waiting for their little girl to come home…”
Jake’s words were choked with emotion, and he lifted his glass of water and took a sip, turning toward the window. He didn’t look up asBecca returned with his ginger ale, and Annie turned to stare out the window, too.
Cars passed. People passed. A boy with white-blond hair chased a black cat into a storm drain. On the other side of the glass, the town of Lake Lumin was going about its daily business. Tucked into these hills were men and women and families whose biggest concerns were which trees might fall in the windstorm forecast for the weekend, or how the Blazers would fare in the playoffs. This little village in the mountains had just been rocked to its very core, and only the coroner and two citizens in the Sky High Café knew it.
Chapter 12DANIEL
Daniel twisted the copper lead wire around the nail three, four, five times, then tucked the loose end under the ceiling panel, careful to keep it away from the other wires spanning the exposed beams like a tangled nest of snakes.
It was an absolute mess up here. Whoever had done the original electrical work in the Lake Lumin General Store twenty years before had taken shortcuts and left loose ends, stringing down feed wires to the wrong switches, some that needed to be flipped down instead of up to turn the lights on.
When Daniel had arrived that morning, the store owner, Phil, a dead ringer for Morgan Freeman, walked him into the bathroom to show him a quirk that left Daniel scratching his head.
A hair dryer plugged into the outlet didn’t work, but flipping the switch between low, medium, and high dimmed and brightened the fluorescent light over the sink. Daniel promised Phil that he’d figure it out and he had, tracking down a lighting and power circuit that had been mixed by mistake. Though it had meant an extra half hour of work, he’d gotten it done, and now he had just this last snarled knot of wires in the ceiling to deal with and he’d be home free.
Beneath him, in the eight aisles of the small store, a few people milled slowly through rows of packaged pastries and chips, overpriced Tylenol, and too many flavors of gum. They walked around Daniel’s ladder without glancing up, as though he weren’t here, half hidden in the ceiling, rewiring someone else’s shoddy electrical work.
He didn’t mind. He’d rather be ignored than antagonized. Twenty minutes earlier, Ian Ward and one of his many cronies had passed through the aisle where Daniel was working. The tatted-up friend had sniggered something under his breath that Daniel didn’t catch, miming kicking out the ladder from beneath him, but Ian was a bit more obvious as he shouldered the ladder on his way back to the register for cigarettes; not hard enough to knock Daniel off his perch, but hard enough to let him know that he wasn’t welcome.
Ian’s parents were the richest couple in town with their stable full of racehorses, and they’d thought they could buy their son the position as the town’s law enforcement officer when it was vacated, despite Ian’s not having any prior experience or municipal education. The Proudys had stepped up and petitioned for Jake, who did have the qualifications for the job, and had gathered the signatures of nearly half the citizens in town to back him. Daniel’s name was right at the top of the list, and Ian had naturally hated him ever since.
Daniel gave the last grounding wire a final twist and replaced the ceiling panel, climbing down the stepladder once a middle-aged woman clutching a bottle of Pepto-Bismol had ambled past. He tapped the notches between the rungs with a finger and folded the ladder together before lowering it to the floor.
“You done, Daniel?” Phil called from the front of the store.
“Yes sir.” Daniel straightened up and nodded in his direction.
“Well, help yourself to a Moon Pie and come on up. I’ll write you a check.”
Daniel nodded over the tops of the chip bags and returned the tools wedged in his pockets and waistband to the open box on the floor.
There among the wrenches and screwdrivers was a stray fishinglure, orange feathered, and Daniel reached into the box, grazing it with his fingertips. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. The lure reminded him of fishing, and of the lake, which brought his thoughts back to Annie.
He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her all morning, lost in reliving the hour they’d spent together last night on the water. It had felt like a dream, that boat ride across the lake, but just as she had laid out those sharp-toothed traps in the woods, in dialing her number he had set out a snare of his own and then immediately stuck his foot into it like a buffoon.
He could pin it down to the precise moment, the exact second that the trap had snapped shut. It was the moment that Annie had drawn her arm back and hit the water with her hand, sending blue sparks out across the lake and laughing into the night air with a sound like wind chimes. Right then, he’d known it. He was a goner. A moth to the flame. Inexplicably drawn toward something that had the power to destroy him.
“Check’s ready,” Phil called, and Daniel pushed himself to his feet. He walked to the front of the store and nodded in thanks.
“Don’t cash it until Monday,” Phil called out behind him as he walked back to gather his tools. “Sheila went a little overboard at the boutique this week.”
“Got it.”
Through the window, the glint of sunlight on copper hair caught his eye, and Daniel stopped, his heart leaping into his throat. It was her, Annie, walking side by side with Jake up the street, their heads tilted together in conversation.
As though in a trance, Daniel moved toward the window, reaching out to rest his fingertips on the glass. At the front of the store, Phil was droning on, grumbling loudly about his wife’s purchase of three pantsuits in different shades of blue when one would have done just as well for the Ladies Auxiliary meeting. Daniel made a noise of agreement, though his eyes stayed locked on Annie.
“She’s draining me dry, Daniel,” Phil said from behind the counter. “Slowly. Like a vampire. Remember that when the time comes for you to pick a woman. Be sure to check for fangs.”
“Okay,” Daniel agreed absently without turning around.
