Far back in the trees, a bullfrog chanted, and Annie whipped her head toward the sound, goose bumps rising on her arms. This forest, the most beautiful place in the world by daylight, was terrifying at night. It could hide anything and anyone, but it hid her, too, and on she ran.
After fifteen minutes of climbing, the firstNO TRESPASSINGsign appeared, glowing orange in the filtered moonlight, and Annie passed it,huffing with effort. A few minutes later, she reached the closed gate and the clearing beyond it, silent as a tomb.
She slowed to a walk and stopped at the gate, placing both hands on the cold aluminum as she watched the boathouse for any signs of life, just as Jamie must have done on the night she died. This was tracking, putting herself in the head of the creature she needed to understand and retracing its movements, one at a time.
Carefully, quietly, Annie climbed over the gate and stepped onto Daniel’s property.
She didn’t need to go to the dock. She needed to figure out what had happened next, once Daniel had gone back to bed after he told Jamie to leave. What had she done after that?
The wood shavings on her shorts had come from the canoe, and the water in her lungs from the lake. It made the most sense to start there.
Annie walked to the western trees where the covered canoe waited, dark and formless. She lifted a corner of the tarp and pulled it away, unsheathing the rustic boat beneath.
It took most of her strength to roll it onto its hull, then, moving behind it, she crouched, bracing her feet against the soft earth. The canoe was heavy, and her shoes slid in the mud as she shoved her weight against it, driving it toward the water with all of her might.
Inch by stubborn inch it moved, easing its way over the dirt until the bow slid soundlessly into the lake and the rest followed—lighter and easier as the water held more of its weight.
At last, it floated completely on the surface, and Annie grabbed the wooden paddle lying in the dirt and carried it into the water, wading in up to her knees before clambering into the canoe.
It was strange, being alone in the vessel. She could feel its weight beneath her, and the power of each pull of the paddle as she moved slowly out toward the center of the lake.
She drew even with the boathouse and stilled. The water glimmered with starlight, silken and lovely. Out here in the middle, in the quiet and the dark, Jamie and her killer would have been far enough from shorethat a muffled struggle would not have been heard by the man sleeping inside the boathouse.
Annie leaned out over the side of the canoe, peering into the dark depths of the lake—the last thing Jamie would have seen as her head plunged beneath the water. Closing her eyes, she imagined it, the awful minute of struggle, and the horrible, impossible truth that would have dawned in Jamie’s oxygen-starved mind as she tried to raise her head. The man holding her down in the water was too strong, and too powerful. She was going to die.
Annie tensed at the thought of those final seconds of strain, everything inside burning and bursting and crying out for air—and then the breath. The betrayal. The compulsive expansion of her lungs that pulled cold dark water into her body and stopped her heart.
And then what?
Annie sat back in the canoe, frowning.
Why hadn’t the killer simply left Jamie’s body in the lake?
Daniel was the only person who had a reason to move her, to tuck her body back in the woods in the hopes of the murder being blamed on Justin Grimes. Anyone else would surely have left the body in the water and let Daniel take the fall, unless… unless the killer knew Daniel and cared enough to protect him from blame.
Annie turned toward the southern shoreline as she ran both scenarios in her mind.
No. If Daniel had been the one who killed her, he would have had the luxury of privacy on his side. He could simply have dug a grave by daylight the next day and buried her somewhere along the shore where her body would never have been found. Why would he have hiked all that way around the briars to drop her in the woods or taken the trouble to load her body into his truck and drive it up by way of the ridge?
Annie turned toward the eastern wall of firs that bordered the lake. Beyond them, cloaked in darkness, were the briars.
There was something gnawing at her, something tugging at the edgeof significance in her mind, and as Annie sat bobbing gently up and down in the canoe, she realized what it was.
The creek…
On one of her woodland ramblings, she’d come across a small stream behind the Proudys’ property, spilling downhill with a sound like hushed laughter. That stream was undoubtedly fed by this lake. It was an outlet, and if there was an outlet, there had to be an inlet as well, water flowing down from the eastern mountain that kept the lake full. Wherever that creek was, wouldn’t there be a natural break in the briars? A short path through to the other side.
Heart thudding, Annie picked up the paddle again and dipped the blade into the water, propelling herself east. When she reached the shoreline, she beached the canoe quietly and climbed out, stepping past the low-hanging boughs of the pines to walk in darkness alongside the thick wall of brambles.
They were monstrous—four, five, even six feet tall in places, marching almost to the shore in lethal coils just behind the first row of trees. Annie could smell the berries, sour and underripe as she edged the thornbushes, looking for the break where fresh mountain water emptied into the lake.
She heard the creek before she saw it, a soft, trickling sound, and came upon it suddenly, her sneakers sinking into the soft earth and filling with cold water.
Annie jumped back, shoes squelching. The water was fanned out along the bank, sliding noiselessly beneath the trees and into the lake, unnoticeable, surely, by anyone who didn’t already know it was here.
She turned toward the briars where the stream cut through, tumbling down the gentle hillside in little cascades only inches wide in a much-larger creek bed that spoke of spring flooding, four or five feet across. It was a path—a tunnel that the brambles did not breach, could not breach, any adventurous little seedlings being washed away with every substantial rain.
Annie stepped into the black corridor, clicking on her headlamp for the first time as she carefully worked her way through the passage, shoessliding in the mud as she ducked beneath the stretching arms of thornbushes eager to reach their cousins on the other side. Step by step, she analyzed the path. Yes, it was narrow, but it was certainly wide enough for a person to pass through. Even a person carrying a dead body in their arms.
