The corkboard caught her eye.Robert Brune's face stared back at her from its center—that fishing license photo, so ordinary, so harmless.The face of someone's grandfather.The face of a man who had killed at least twenty-three people over three decades and probably more.
Where are you?
The lake offered no answers.It never did.
Isla finished her tea, washed the cup, and went to bed.Sleep came slowly, reluctantly, fighting against the thoughts that circled through her mind like vultures around carrion.Monica Hayes.Vincent Carlisle.Maria Carlisle.A woman posed like a sleeping princess.A man hollowed out by grief.
And beneath it all, always, the persistent whisper of the lake.
* * *
The fog rolled in from the water like something alive.
Isla stood on the docks, her service weapon drawn, her heart hammering against her ribs.The night was thick with moisture, visibility dropping by the second, the sodium lights overhead reduced to smears of orange in the gray murk.Somewhere ahead—close, too close—she could hear footsteps.
She knew this place.Knew it the way you know a recurring nightmare, every detail etched into memory through repetition.The stack of shipping containers to her left.The coiled rope she'd nearly tripped over the first time.The gap between buildings where the fog was thickest, where the shadows seemed to breathe.
Six weeks ago.This was six weeks ago.
She was dreaming.She knew she was dreaming.But the knowledge didn't help, didn't change anything, didn't stop her feet from moving forward into the fog or her finger from tightening on the trigger.
The footsteps stopped.
Isla stopped too, straining to hear anything over the pounding of her own pulse.The fog swirled around her, cold and damp, tasting of the lake and something else—something older, something that had been rotting in the depths for a very long time.
And then he stepped out of the darkness.
Robert Brune looked exactly as he had that night—grizzled beard, weathered face, pale eyes that caught the light and reflected nothing.He was wearing the same heavy coat, the same work boots, the same expression of patient indifference.His hands hung loose at his sides, empty, unthreatening.
But his eyes.His eyes weren't indifferent at all.They were focused on her with an intensity that made her skin crawl, that made the gun suddenly feel inadequate in her hands.
"I know you," he said.His voice was low and rough, like waves scraping over rocks."I've always known you."
"FBI," Isla heard herself say."Don't move."
Brune smiled.It was the worst thing she'd ever seen—not cruel, not predatory, but genuinely warm.The smile of someone greeting an old friend.
"She talks about you," he said."The lake.She whispers your name when the ice cracks in spring.She's been waiting for you a long time, Agent Rivers."
"Shut up."Her voice cracked.The gun trembled in her hands."Get on your knees.Hands behind your head."
"You hear her too, don't you?"Brune took a step closer, and Isla couldn't make herself pull the trigger, couldn't make her body respond to the screaming in her head."Late at night.When you can't sleep.When you're standing at your window watching the water.You hear her calling."
"I said shut up—"
"She wants what we all want."Another step.He was close enough now that she could smell him—lake water and diesel and something colder, something that had no place in the world of the living."To be remembered.To be fed.To know that someone is listening."
The fog closed around them both, and Isla felt the ground shifting beneath her feet—not solid concrete anymore but something softer, something that gave way like wet sand, like the shore at the edge of black water—
"You'll understand soon," Brune said, and his smile widened."She'll make you understand."
The lake rose up behind him, impossibly high, a wall of black water that blotted out the sky—
Isla woke gasping, her sheets soaked with sweat.
The room was dark.Her apartment.Her bed.The familiar shapes of her dresser, her closet door, the window where gray light was beginning to seep through the curtains.Real.Solid.Safe.
She pressed her palm against her chest, feeling her heart race beneath her fingers.The same dream.The same nightmare she'd had every night since Brune had disappeared, sometimes with variations but always ending the same way—with the lake rising, with his voice in her ears, with the terrible certainty that he was right about something she couldn't quite name.
