It’s not just a hunch. I know. I feel it in my gut.
It’s not Mae on the other side of the door.
Courtney
I pull the motel door closed behind us, gesturing for the kids to hurry as we make our way across the parking lot. The police car, the one that’s supposed to be there watching us, sits empty, and I imagine the officer inside the motel office looking for coffee or a place to relieve himself.
Outside, it’s calm and still, the sun still rising. The angle of it is low, so that the light comes sideways and through the trees. The street, a state highway, is only two lanes. Phone lines run the length of it with birds perched on the wire. There is a gravel shoulder on one side, which is where we walk in a single file line, me in the back so that I tell the kids to “Scooch over. Not so close to the street,” as the occasional car whizzes past. Each time, I wonder if the car is Elliott’s. He’ll go back to the motel room when he finds coffee, and when he sees we’re not there, he’ll come looking for us.
“Where are we going?” Cass asks.
“To the police station.”
“Why didn’t you just talk to the policeman at the motel?”
“I need to speak to Detective Evans.”
“Why didn’t we drive? Where’s Daddy?”
The questions are endless. I manage to placate Cass and Mae with excuses, but Wyatt doesn’t believe them so easily. He glances back, knows I’m not telling them something.
“Car,” he says, seeing it over my shoulder, and I feel my whole body stiffen, wondering again if it’s Elliott, imagining him leaving our cottage that night after I’d fallen asleep, going to Emily and Nolan’s cottage. Killing them, taking Reese. Rowing out into the center of the lake, where the depth is greatest, and then easing her over the edge of the canoe, weighing her down, sinking her in.
Was she alive when he drowned her? Or was she already dead?
Was the blood on his shoes hers? Or was it Emily’s or Nolan’s?
“Let’s move into the grass, closer to the trees,” I say, trying to control the tremor in my voice, pressing my hand against Mae’s back, who walks just ahead of me, though the trees are missing their lower branches and provide minimal protection. It doesn’t help that Wyatt has on a red sweatshirt and that he’s tall, standing out like a sore thumb. I want to tell him to take it off, to leave the sweatshirt behind, but I also don’t want to worry the kids.
Mae whines, “I’m tired. I can’t walk so fast.”
The car drives past, a dusty little blue sedan. It edges too near the shoulder, kicking up gravel as it goes, and I think how not twenty seconds before, we were standing on that gravel.
In the distance, from the opposite direction, another car comes, drawing nearer, its headlights bobbing with the bumps in the road. I imagine Elliott again, in the car, in the canoe early that morning, blood on his shoes, maneuvering Reese over the edge and into the water without so much as a splash.
“Can we go a little faster?” I ask, pressing harder on Mae’s back as the car approaches, wondering if I should instead tell the kids to run.
Reese
Things move quickly now.
They happen fast, before I can speak, before I can process what’s happening. Before I can reason with her, before I can beg, before I can say to Emily what I’m thinking, that I’m scared and that I know it’s not Mae on the other side of the door.
I try grabbing for her hand again, but it gets around mine this time. It drifts further out of reach. I watch as she moves toward the door. As she reaches for the handle, I feel a scream well up in me that won’t come out, that can’t come out because it’s trapped. I squeeze my eyes shut tight and bury my face in my hands.
I can’t see anything with my eyes closed.
The turning of the dead bolt startles me. I moan, but if Emily pauses, if she looks back, if she hesitates at all, I don’t know.
The door rasps as it opens. The cool nighttime air rushes in.
Outside, the sound of bugs gets louder.
Emily’s voice is bewildered when she speaks.
“Can I help you?” she asks, her voice formal and cold in a way that confirms all of my beliefs.
It’s not Mae at the door. It’s someone she doesn’t know.
