“I don’t know. Maybe because we’re here.”
“You decided to reveal this secret you’ve been keeping from me all this time—because we’re here?”
“I didn’t see it as keeping a secret from you. I saw it as something I shouldn’t inflict on you.”
“Who did you tell? A friend? A therapist? You must have told someone.”
“A therapist, naturally. Around the time we met. When I was doing the training for my clinical certification. I thought therapy would be an ideal way of dealing with it, since in a sense it would allow me to keep it to myself.”
“Did it work?”
“I thought at the time that it did.”
“But . . .?”
“But now I think the process gave me the illusion of having dealt with what happened—and the conviction that I never needed to talk about it to anyone ever again. That’s what I meant when I said that I didn’t think of it as a secret. I just thought of it as a part of the past that belonged in the past, and talking about it in the present would have no purpose.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I don’t know. All I know is what I felt when Jack held up that Adirondack route map on his phone screen at our kitchen table, and I realized how close we’d be to Grayson Lake.”
“You felt some attraction to the place?”
“Oh God, no. The opposite. I felt sick. I almost had to leave the room.”
“But you volunteered to come here. You said yes before I did.”
“Because at that moment I realized I hadn’t dealt with anything. As awful as that moment was, I felt I was being offered an opportunity.”
They stood side by side in silence, looking out over the snow-covered lake.
She sighed. “It happened thirty-two years ago. But it never really ended. Maybe because I could never be sure why he did what he did. Maybe because I never came to terms with my guilt. Maybe because they never found his body. Maybe—”
Gurney interrupted, “They never found his body?”
“No. Which revived all the old talk about the evil in the lake. Which is why the people who used to come every summer stopped coming. Which is why the little town eventually died—why it’s like the way it is now.” She let go of his hand for the first time since they’d gotten out of the car and began rubbing her own hands together.
“What old talk about the evil in the lake?”
“Remember the story Norris Landon told us about the girls in the canoe that capsized long ago—how one of them drowned, and they couldn’t find the body?”
“Right—until the skeleton turned up in Wolf Lake five years later.”
“Well, that girl drowned right here in Grayson Lake. And when Colin drowned here, too, and they couldn’t find his body, it brought the old drowning story back; and people started calling it Graveyard Lake.”
“Because of that, people abandoned their houses?”
“Not right away. Graysonville was a marginal sort of place. Never far from poverty. Most people depended on renting rooms or cabins to summer vacationers. I suppose the idea of children drowning and their bodies disappearing took hold of people’s imaginations, and they stopped coming. The town, never much to begin with, gradually collapsed.”
“The Devil’s Twins. Isn’t that what Landon called the pair of lakes he claimed were linked through some chain of underground caverns?”
“Yes.” A flock of small birds came flying wildly out of the woods and veered out over the lake, swooping and tumbling like autumn leaves in a gale.
She took his hand again in hers. “What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know. A jumble of things.”
“Do you wish I hadn’t told you?”
“Maddie, I want to know whatever you want to tell me. Anything. Everything. I love you.”
“No matter what?”
“No matter what.”
She nodded, still looking into his eyes, still holding his hand. “We should start back. The snow is coming. I can feel it in the air.”
He looked up at the sky. The clouds were thickening and darkening now, and above the frozen lake a hawk was circling unevenly in the rising wind.
CHAPTER 26
When they crested the last ridge before Wolf Lake, the stored-message tone rang on Gurney’s phone. Checking the screen, he discovered two messages—one from Jack Hardwick and one from a caller with a blocked ID.
“Look out!” cried Madeleine as a deer bounded out onto the road ahead.
Gurney jammed on the brakes, missing the deer by inches.
“Pay attention to the road and give that to me.” She extended her hand for the phone. “Do you want me to play the messages?”
He nodded, and she tapped an icon.
As usual, Hardwick didn’t bother to identify himself, but his raspy voice was unmistakable. “Hey, ace, where the fuck are you? We have significant shit to discuss. One—I delivered that letter to the house in Staten Island, slipped it under the front door, with all those contact options. Two—I didn’t have a clue about that twenty-nine mil for Hammond. But there’s some kind of explanation, right? Three—I got a present for you, nice practical gift. I plan to be passing through the Adirondacks tomorrow, so let’s pick a spot to get together. ASAP. Related to that, you know what’s on my mind right now? The Baryshansky case. Think about it.”
The Baryshansky case? For a moment Gurney was baffled by the reference to the big Russian mob investigation a decade earlier. Then the relevant piece of it lit up like an alarm. That was the case in which the mob had managed to hack the cell phones of two senior investigators in the Organized Crime Task Force. The obvious implication was that Hardwick suspected that the security of their phone conversations had been compromised.
“What is it?” asked Madeleine.
“It sounds to me like Jack has surveillance concerns.”
“What does that mean?”
He wanted time to think through the possibilities. “I’ll explain later; let me pay attention to the road. Don’t want any more deer surprises.”
Madeleine asked if he wanted her to play the next message.
“Not right now.”
After they’d arrived at the lodge and were standing under the portico, she handed him back his phone. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“I got the impression that Jack thinks he’s being bugged.”
“That he’s being bugged? Or that both of you are?”
“He wasn’t clear about that. But I’m pretty certain my own phone is safe.”
She gave him an anxious look. “What about our room here at the lodge?”
“It’s possible, but I doubt it.”
“Is there a way of finding out for sure?”
“There are detection devices. I’ll discuss it with Jack.”
“Who would be spying on us?”
“Conceivably Fenton, but I doubt it.”
“Who then?”
“Good question. Hardwick knows more than he told me on the phone. I’ll set up a face-to-face with him to clarify the situation.”
She looked worried. “So what do we do now? Go upstairs to our possibly bugged room? Pretend we’re happy little campers?”
“Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we need to do.”
“What are we supposed to talk about? Or not talk about?”
“The main thing not to talk about is any suspicion that we’re being monitored. If our room or phone is bugged—” He stopped in mid-sentence, remembering that he had a message on his phone he hadn’t listened to yet. He located it and tapped the icon.
The voice was young, female, and frightened. “Hello. I was hoping you’d answer. The letter said you’d be there. Are you there? Can I give you my number? Maybe it would be safer if I called you back. Okay, so that’s what I’ll do. I’ll call you at . . . exactly . . . umm . . . four o’clock. Okay?”