“Yeah. They want to come back, if you can believe that. Clean out Joe’s house. They think—it’s like they think things are going to get better now.” His mouth twisted. “I thought that too, last week, after everything quieted down again. Now I don’t know what to think.”
“No word from Rabbi Ethan?” This had begun weighing on me more and more, for some reason. If the rabbi took an interest, it would be the best of all possible worlds for Max and his family. And yet, now that I was here, I felt like I needed more time to figure things out myself.
“No word. Do you have his direct contact information?”
“I’ll give you Mordechai’s. I have to think that’s as direct as you’re going to get now.”
“K.” But he didn’t ask for the digits, didn’t pull out his phone, and I didn’t either. We left the house by way of the back door, crossing the wide veranda to thick wooden steps. An ATV sat at the back paddock gate, which stood open, and I glanced at him.
“Quickest way to get to the cottage, and I wanted you to see it.”
“Isn’t it a crime scene or whatever?”
“Not the house. Joe—where Joe was found was quite a bit off from it, and the house itself has already been gone through by the police, as much as they could. They told me not to touch anything, but that I could go through it and take pictures for insurance purposes, make sure nothing gets taken while everything is in limbo.”
We got into the ATV, and I clutched the sidewall as he started the machine. I’d never ridden on an ATV before, but it felt like what I expected a souped-up golf cart would feel. Wobbly and reckless, a grown-up’s toy. Unexpectedly, my mind went to the only true child in the house. “Where’d Sam go?”
Max sighed. “He’s with Mom and Dad. He’s been fine since that thing last week, but they don’t want him to have some sort of relapse if they’re not around to do something about it.”
“Oh.” Shame burned through me. I’d only watched the videos of Max’s mom and brother once—and without sound. Their faces had been enough. At first, I told myself that the screams of the ghost horses had been more than enough to convince me that something was seriously wrong at the Graham house. I hadn’t needed any more motivation to get “Mordechai’s” report done and to his office.
But after that, I didn’t listen to those videos out of simple fear. Fear of hearing Sam’s terror, or his mother’s. I didn’t evenlikethe mother, had felt her coldness almost immediately when Max had introduced us, but that didn’t mean that she should be left alone to fend for herself.
Because I’d known something wasn’t quite right out at the big, remote house. Wasn’t quite right, or wasn’t quite finished, either way. And I’d left.
We traveled the rest of the way to the lake cottage in silence. It was a pretty trail—wide and manicured, not at all the grown-over, enchanted-woods scenario I’d been imagining. The trees were flush with early summer growth, and the woods were cool without being chilly. Enough bright sunlight peeked through the overhang to make it seem normal instead of gothic.
The lake was bigger than I’d imagined it would be as well—I could see the other side of it, but at a distance, and we passed a dock with a pontoon boat on it, canoe snugged up beside it. It was all quite pastoral; the kind of place you’d want to bring friends to. It was nice, for a hotbed of infestation.
The lake house itself was also far more impressive than I’d expected. This wasn’t some “cabin in the woods” setup with weathered planks and a moldy roof. The Graham’s lake house was a long, rambling ranch home perched about three hundredfeet above a lake that was easily a half mile wide from what I could see. It curved out of sight around a forested bend in the shoreline. A large, grassy yard ran down to the water, and at the water’s edge sat a delicate gazebo atop a picture-perfect dock.
A small motorboat and two jet skis bobbed in the water. They both looked clean and well cared for. Everything about the place looked well cared for, actually, except the water itself. From here I could see the lake’s surface, and it was completely still—no ripples, no movement, like a sheet of hammered metal reflecting the sky. Even the boats at the dock sat motionless despite the breeze that lifted my hair. Nothing disturbed that water. Nothing living, anyway.
I shivered in the suddenly cool breeze.
“When’s the last time you were out here?” I asked Max.
“When I first got back, two months ago.” He cut the engine and sat looking at the house. “That sounds pretty negligent, I know, but I figured Emily would let me know if there was anything amiss. She’s here, by the way.” He gestured to the edge of the driveway, and I noticed for the first time the back of a car visible behind the house. “She comes out here a lot.”
I frowned. “She’s not going to take anything, is she?”
Max’s smile was weary. “I wish she would. Joe wasn’t much for getting rid of things. The house always seemed clean when I went inside it. But it was…crowded. C’mon, let’s get this over with.”
He didn’t bother to knock on the door but opened it wide while shouting out Emily’s name. Immediately I understood his “crowded” reference, and I stopped short, causing Max to bump into me. “Whoa.”
“Yeah.”
Ex-boyfriend Joe Bell was a hoarder. Not a disgusting one, exactly. I didn’t think that I’d find the desiccated corpse of a cat underneath all this mess. But that didn’t make it any less ofa mess. Every catalog delivered to this place over the past fifty years looked like it had been neatly stacked up in piles along the walls. In addition to the catalogs, there were ducks—dozens of them everywhere, the kind of low-rent sculpture that hunters used or country people displayed on their hearths to show that someone in their family at one time hunted waterfowl or thought theymighthunt them some day.
“Um, I guess he was a collector—and an artist too.”
Max snorted. “Yeah. Hang on.” He shouted Emily’s name again, but when there was no answer, he took off, leaving me in the middle of Duck Dynasty. It looked like half the carvings were commercial quality, while half were in varying stages of homemade, all the way back to Joe’s earliest attempts, if the strange wooden lumps by the hearth were any indication.
The other thing that stood out was the guns. Four separate gleaming cases filled the far wall of the room, with shiny rifles inside. Exclusively rifles, and all of them looking, once again, like hunting guns vs. any sort of Civil War replica stuff. Not that I’d really know what a rifle meant for hurting a human would look like, or if it would even look different at all. But though the guns were excessive, they didn’t have a desperate feel to them, not like the surrounding catalogs or the ducks did. It was almost like they were part of the background, silent sentinels awaiting their turn.
One of the cases was missing a gun.
I stepped over a pile of duck bills and moved toward that wall. The lock hadn’t been broken or the glass smashed or anything. The case was closed. Like Joe had simply selected that morning’s gun the way Claire selected her shoes, then gone out on his date with destiny.
