Page 183 of Serenity Falls

Someone grabs her arm, and she’s yanked up into a boat. Above her, a helicopter circles, the whirring blades deafening, searchlight painting the water silver. More lights blaze around the perimeter of the lake.

She hears Jerry’s voice again. ‘You’re okay, Sadie. You’re safe now. We got you.’

‘Dad?’

‘We’ve got teams heading out to get him.’

‘Down there, in the lake—’

‘What?’

She looks up at Jerry. ‘The ghosts. All the ghosts.’

56

Two Weeks Later

They count thirty cars. Two motorbikes. Fifty bodies.

It takes them five days to drain the lake. The huge basin left in the centre of the town looks like a meteor hit, leaving crushed metal and broken bodies in its wake. But that’s not what happened here.

The county police put up screens and try to shield the worst of it. But the area is too big to contain. People find places to look, forming a sombre cordon around the lake, staring into the giant mass grave.

The FBI believe the oldest cars were dumped in here not long after the town was founded – almost fifty years ago. But most were dumped later, after the mid-nineties, after Davey and Serena. They found her car. A yellow VW Beetle. There’s no body, or at least not in the car. There are plenty of scattered bones in the lake, the bodies dragged out and half eaten by gators. Identifying them all may take time.

All the accidental deaths in Serenity Falls are going to be re-examined. Stella will help. She’s kept records separate to the official ones.

The most recent bodies in the lake have only been there a few weeks. Chris and his family, the skin only just starting to peel from their bones, the bodywork on their car still glinting faintly in the sun.

There’s a smell around the whole town. Fetid, dank, bitter. I know it’s just the smell of the water and sludge from the lake, but I can’t help thinking it smells like death, and resolution.

I survive, obviously. Freya was a poor shot, thank God. I took the bullet in my upper arm. It hurt like hell. I bled a lot. But the doctors patched me up and sent me on my way with stitches and painkillers.

Davey wasn’t quite so lucky. A shot to the gut. He spent a couple of days in hospital, needed a few pints of blood. But thankfully, the bullet missed his major organs. He’ll live too. But both of us will carry the scars, in more ways than one.

Lorraine and Freya were taken away by men in black suits wearing black glasses and driving black sedans. Yeah, they really look just like they do in the movies.

Sadie and I were taken to a small grey room in a nondescript building and interviewed by different men in black suits (sans glasses) for hours. We told them everything we knew. They listened, made notes, then told us we should forget everything we knew if we wanted to leave the building and get on with our lives. Turns out neither of us has very good memories.

I signed a lot of forms, giving away my rights and probably my soul, and we were told that we were released from any contracts with Serenity Falls and free to sell our house and move back to the UK once the legalities were finalized. The men in black suits advised us strongly to do that. And never come back.

Sadie was quiet when they dropped us back at the house. I had expected her to rail against the injustice, truth being subdued, the real story covered up, but I got the feeling that youthful idealism had come bang up against hard, scary reality in that grey room.

It happens to us all. Maybe not in such an extreme way. But we all learn that life is about compromise. Principles are great things, but they are not absolutes. Life will bend them and sometimes crush them. By the time you reach my age you’re lucky if you’ve managed to hang on to a few slivers. It’s the best we can do and, ultimately, the best we can do is all we can do.

Turns out Jerry had been suspicious about Serenity Falls for a long time. A lot of what he had told me was true. He’d compromised his own principles for the sake of his wife, for the sake of their life here.

But one thing he hadn’t told me. His wife’s cancer had come back. And it was terminal. Millie only had six months to a year left. When Jerry found out, he’d got back in touch with one of his buddies in the state police, told them what he knew and what he suspected.

That’s when the FBI had got involved. Jerry had been feeding them information for the last few months. Of course, even Jerry didn’t know the full extent of what was going on in Serenity Falls. But still, Sadie and I have a lot to thank him for.

‘Don’t thank me,’ he told me when I called into his office.

‘You saved our lives.’

‘Yeah, and I wish I hadn’t had to. You and Davey and Stella. All of you. You fucked up my plans. If you hadn’t got involved—’ He broke off with an angry sigh.

‘You did the right thing,’ I say.