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.
