No. The sound, I realized, was the wind shaking the tree leaves above me. I turned my attention back to the steps. Squinting, I saw that they ended about twenty feet below, though the only light, I realized, was coming from above. It was hard to imagine that Alice was down there in near darkness, and yet the wineglass suggested she might be.
I took two steps down. And two more.
And then I saw her. She was sprawled facedown on the dirt, a few feet from the start of a wooden dock. Her legs were splayed and her body inert. She was wearing dark pants and a thick burnt-orange sweater.
“Alice!” I yelled, and tore down the last steps.
I crouched beside her. With the little bit of light that reached us, I could see that the left side of her face was actually pointing out, toward the left. Her eye was closed. I laid my hand on her sweater and shuffled it back and forth, trying to rouse her.
“Alice, can you hear me?” I said, my mouth next to her ear.
No acknowledgment. I called her name again, twice, but she didn’t move.
I slid my purse off my arm and dug frantically through the bag, finding my phone and switching on the flashlight. I trained the beam on Alice. Her neck, I could see now, was at a terrible, unnatural angle, her chin raised too high, like thatof a deer killed by a car on the highway. I leaned closer again and listened for her breath. Nothing.
Please, I begged, don’t let her be dead. Not Alice.
I focused on my phone and tapped 911. With the other hand I carefully grasped Alice’s wrist.
“What is your emergency?” the operator asked. I blurted out the details, stumbling once as I tried to recall the exact address.
“Is the victim breathing?” the operator asked.
“Not from what I can tell,” I said, my voice catching. “And I can’t find a pulse. But... I can’t be a hundred percent sure. Send an ambulance. And the police.”
Because my gut was telling me it wasn’t an accident.
The operator said she would stay on the call with me. I told her I couldn’t hold, but would wait for the ambulance. I wanted the chance to investigate the situation with both hands free.
I rested my palm on Alice’s back and jiggled again. No response.
“Alice, it’s me, Bailey. Hold on, help is coming.” But I was almost positive my words were pointless.
I trained the beam of light around her body again. There was no sign of blood, nothing to suggest she had bled from her head or anywhere else. My best guess was that her neck was broken. But not because she’d tripped on the stairs. She wouldn’t have been heading down to the dock when she was supposed to be making me dinner—and without even flicking on the lights below? I thought of the kitchendoor, left weirdly ajar on a cool night. Someone came to her house, I told myself. And then they pushed her.
I rose to a standing position and directed the beam around the ground, farther away from Alice this time. No scuff marks in the dirt, no indication of a struggle. The killer might have shoved her down the stairs so that she broke her neck in the fall.
Alice’s words from this morning echoed in my head again. “A clue... And it’s scary as hell.” Had the murderer figured out that Alice was on to him?
I jerked the beam back toward Alice, dragging it down to her left hand and then her right. There was no sign of cut marks or anything resembling stigmata. I stared for a moment at her weathered fingers, remembering the ragged cuticles. A sob caught in my throat.
From far off on the lake came the roar of a motorboat gunning across the water, then fading. I was engulfed once again in silence. But then another sound broke through the night. Not the trees this time, though.
It was the sound of footsteps. Someone was walking across the patio, ten or so feet above me.
Chapter 16
IFROZE, STRAINING TO HEAR.ANOTHER SCRAPE, THEsound of a shoe or a boot on the patio. Someone was definitely up there, near the top of the stairs.
I backed up fast, into the shadows, and dropped onto my haunches, pressing my body tight against the embankment.
If Alice had been pushed, it seemed unlikely that the killer would still be on the property. Unless he’d come back. To make sure she was dead? To dispose of her body somehow? Tomarkit?
I stayed squatting, my eyes riveted to the steps. Another scrape. But farther away this time, I thought, as if the person was reversing direction.
After a minute, there were no other sounds from above and I sensed that whoever had been there was gone. I turned my gaze back to Alice and felt an urge to howl in despair.
Finally the whoop whoop of an ambulance pierced the night. I struggled out of my crouch and then charged up thesteps, two at a time. As I reached the top, I spotted two male EMTs hurrying through the house.
