Page 14

I pulled out a chair and sat down, studying the pieces. They looked like disconnected splotches of color. I couldn’t see a single piece that might join with another. Emily and Keith had begun constructing the border. Even when I saw straight-edged pieces that fit the frame of the puzzle, I still couldn’t decipher where they might connect.

“What are you doing?”

At the sound of Patrick’s voice, I looked up. He stood at the entrance to the room. “I don’t know how you can sit there playing with puzzle pieces when an unidentified murder victim has gone missing and there’s not any investigation or notification to the people who are wondering where he is.”

Emily and Keith continued putting puzzle pieces together, acting as if Patrick hadn’t spoken. I stared at the disconnected array of colors and shapes. I could see Patrick from the corner of my eye. All he cared about were the feelings of someone who was dead. He was oblivious to how this had affected us. We all had legitimate reasons for not wanting to report what had happened.

It might have made us seem soulless and selfish and downright heinous, but we weren’t. Those threats scared us, while Patrick seemed immune to them. Maybe it was his career as a firefighter that sculpted his psyche, or maybe his psyche was one that made becoming a firefighter inevitable. He had enormous compassion and concern for strangers, while he seemed to struggle to find that for the people he loved. It wasn’t just me. It was also his coworkers, his family, and our friends.

Maybe the bravery he’d needed to cultivate had stripped away the kinds of fear that Emily, Keith, and I were feeling. He considered our concerns irrational. Trivial. Right now, we were scared that someone wanted to kill us. We were trying to douse that fear by pretending everything was normal. As he stood there, watching us with a look of disdain, the lights flickered, then came on. For a moment, we held our breath. After a minute or so, everyone sighed audibly.

“Good,” Patrick said. “Once the Wi-Fi reconnects, I’m calling to report this.”

I pushed my chair away from the table. “What will you say? There was a dead man in our pool but now he’s gone? That will be a hundred times worse.”

“It’s your fault we’re in that situation. If you hadn’t washed away that note, we’d have more for them to work with.” His tone was so sharp, I felt a physical pain. “It still needs reporting.”

“They’ll think you buried him, or did something to him,” Keith said. “They might not even believe there was a body. They’ll think we were high. You’re naïve if you expect them to believe anything we say. And that threat on the front window may have been crude, and almost clownish, but I’m taking it seriously.”

“Then we should get the police involved!” Patrick’s voice was growing louder each time he spoke.

“Did you read the note?” Keith asked. “It said don’t call the police.”

“I’m not taking advice from a cold-blooded killer,” Patrick said. “Is this how it is when you’re flush with cash? The laws don’t apply to you? Morality doesn’t matter?”

Keith laughed. “This isn’t about laws or morality.”

“What would you say, exactly?” Emily asked. “Think it through. We arrived and found a man’s body floating in our pool. We pulled him out just when the storm was starting. The next morning, he was gone. There’s a good chance they’ll laugh in your face.”

Patrick backed away from us, looking at us with disgust. “I’m going to search every inch of this property to find out if he’s buried here. Someone took the trouble to come back and move him during a thunderstorm. Don’t you even wonder who did this? Or why? Don’t you have any interest in knowing who that guy was?”

The room was silent, as if Patrick had sucked all the air into his own body and would use it to fuel his search. A moment later, Keith pushed his chair away from the puzzle table and left the room.

TEN

PATRICK

I couldn’t understand Samantha. I was completely baffled, and disgusted, by her best friend and the know-it-all attorney. Referring to them as her friends wasn’t great because they were supposed to be my friends too, but for the past twenty-four hours, I’d felt like I was living and sleeping in a house with complete strangers.

Every minute since we’d first seen that body in the pool had felt like a nightmare. In my nightmare, I was dealing with people disconnected from reality. They considered their unanimous viewpoint to be perfectly normal, rational, and expected. In my opinion, they were consumed by incredible self-centeredness and irrational fears. Who leaves a dead body overnight without telling anyone, as if it was nothing more than a deck chair they’d forgotten to bring in out of the rain?

Even Samantha. I knew the memory of her sister’s horrible death lived inside her, that it had altered her view of the world in a way that couldn’t be undone. But her stubborn insistence on connecting that trauma to this was impossible to understand. How could she not care about this man’s family? About seeking justice for his murder?

If that first note was directed at us, which I did not think it was, that still wasn’t enough to justify what was happening here. I’d tried to acknowledge their fears, but my words probably sounded fake. They thought all I cared about was justice. I did care about justice, but I also cared about this man’s family. His friends. It was so wrong. It didn’t matter that they were strangers. They would be left hanging for the rest of their lives, wondering why and how he’d vanished into thin air.

As I walked down the front steps, I glanced left. The words on the window had changed. I jumped down the last two steps and went to the window.

I’m watching you.

When had that happened? How could someone have walked up to our house in broad daylight, wiped off the old message, and written that? It could be interpreted as an addition to the warning not to call the police. I decided to take it that way. I also decided not to tell the others yet. I needed to find that body.

I went to the back of our SUV where I always kept a few tools. Facing disasters, many of them involving people trapped in cars or buildings, I liked to be prepared even when I was off duty. It was in my blood. I couldn’t pass by someone who needed help and turn my head the other way.

That guy’s body had to be here somewhere. The killer didn’t drive up with a truck and carry him away. I would have thought the possibility that the killer had returned to remove the body would have been more frightening to Samantha and her friends. They didn’t appear to have given any thought to why he might have been murdered on our property.

It was possible we’d arrived before the killer had time to remove the body. But if the plan was to remove it, why leave a vaguely threatening note? Two threatening notes? It made no sense to me. The first step toward resolving it was finding that body.

Tugging the canvas duffel bag out of the SUV, I felt my blood start to pump harder. If nothing else, it would be good to pour my pent-up anger into useful physical effort, something to help another person. It felt like I had purpose now, instead of sitting around, a victim of others’ fears.