CHAPTER ONE
MICHELLE
I don’t know what caused me to wake that night. Maybe it was the storm that had produced a noise outside—a limb breaking in the wind or the crash of thunder. Perhaps I knew something was amiss.
Either way, as soon as my eyes opened, my body sensed the shift. Somehow, I knew that something catastrophic was about to happen. That our lives as we knew them were about to change. I felt it in my very core, no matter how impossible that sounds.
Adrenaline coursed through my body, as if I’d just awoken from a nightmare or the sound of someone in the house, but that wasn’t it. I sat up in bed, shaking and drenched in sweat as I reached out to wake Jude. I grabbed hold of his shoulder, rocking him back and forth until he stirred.
“Jude, wake up,” I begged in a hurried whisper.
He rubbed his eyes, rolling over to look at me with just one eye open. Then he looked at the clock on the nightstand and back at me with a start.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice gruff with sleep.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, my stomach tight with worry. I felt as if I were going to be sick. Tossing the covers back from my legs, I shivered as a chill ran over me, the cold air meeting the sweat on my skin. I moved to stand, scurrying across the room with intense trepidation.
Something is wrong.
Something is very, very wrong.
“What do you mean you don’t know? It’s nearly three in the morning. Where are you going?”
I pulled back the curtains, staring through the pane that had been spattered with raindrops from the ongoing storm. I squinted, glancing around our subdivision at the houses so similar to ours.
Southwest Acres was a small, elite subdivision just near the lake that ran through our town of Cason Glen. The six houses were nearly identical in layout and design, but different colors—varying shades of greens, browns, yellows, and blues throughout. We were surrounded entirely by woods, giving each home a private backyard. It had been designed as though the wilderness had come straight to our gates and stopped, leaving way for our tiny civilization.
We were only one of two subdivisions on this side of our lake, so we were guaranteed tranquility, safety, and, maybe most importantly, privacy.
Near the entrance of our cul-de-sac, I stared at the warm, amber light coming through the top window in the far corner of our mayor’s home. At such a late hour, every window in Southwest Acres should’ve been dark. What was he doing up? Did he sense, like I had, that something was terribly wrong?
“Enzo’s awake,” I told Jude, who was sitting up in bed staring at his phone while still lazily rubbing his eye with his palm. “Looks like no one can sleep tonight.” I ran my hand over my arm, trying to smooth the goose bumps. “I don’t know what’s going on, I can just feel it. Something’s wrong. I need to go check on Caroline.”
“Actually, you’re right. Something is wrong. Something happened down by the lake,” he said, standing from the bed with his phone pressed to his ear. “My phone must’ve woken you up. I don’t know how I slept through it.”
“What happened at the lake?”
He was silent for a moment, listening, then lowered his phone. “A wreck, maybe. Rodriguez is muffled in the voicemail. It’s…it’s hard to hear over the storm. Either way, I have to get down there and figure out what’s happening.”
“A wreck? Oh my god. Is anyone hurt? Could you hear that much?” I asked, shivering slightly.
He wasn’t listening as he zipped around the room, pulling on his uniform after he’d dropped his phone on the dresser.
“Jude? Did they say anyone was hurt?”
He buttoned his shirt and adjusted his badge, grabbing his tactical belt from the closet. “It doesn’t sound like they know yet. I couldn’t tell. I think he said someone crashed into the lake.”
“Oh my god. What will you do? The storm is too bad to search. It’s so dark…”
“I don’t know. If they’ve just crashed on the bank but off the road, that’s one thing, but if the car went into the lake…” He trailed off, stopping that train of thought. “We’ll have to see what the damage is before I start thinking ahead. The storm may have caused someone to lose control. Let’s just say a prayer it’s nothing terrible.” He zipped into the bathroom, swishing mouthwash quickly before turning to face me where I stood in the doorway, trying to make sense of it all. He kissed my lips, rushing past me while calling over his shoulder, “I’ve gotta go. I’ll call when I can.”
With that, he was down the stairs and out the door, and I was left alone. I wrapped a robe around my still-drenched clothing and walked down the hall, opening Caroline’s door slowly, just to peek in on her. To my relief, she was there. Safe and sound. She’d curled up into a ball in the center of her bed, the way she’d slept since she was an infant, both hands tucked under her face.
I smiled, feeling comfort at seeing that she was secure in her room, that no harm had come to her, and that my bad feeling must’ve had everything to do with a nightmare I couldn’t remember, Jude’s phone ringing, and nothing else. With that, I closed the door again.
Then I made my way down the stairs and started a pot of coffee to help me wake up. There was no point in trying to sleep. I knew I wouldn’t be able to until Jude made it back home. It was rare that I could sleep with him gone at all anymore, even when he’d taken the midnight shift. But the nights where he was called away were the worst.
As the sheriff of our small county of just under five thousand people, it wasn’t as if he was constantly being called away in the middle of the night or that he was typically in danger during a shift, but that didn’t make me worry any less when he was gone.
Once, I’d believed Cason County and, more importantly, our town of Cason Glen, was tiny and safe. We were supposed to be protected here. And, for the most part we were. But comfort was the enemy. It’s when you feel the safest that you’re the most vulnerable.
We’d learned that before. In our complacency, we realized evil lurks in the safe places, too.
The quiet places.
The moments of comfort.
The places you feel like nothing could ever harm you.
It waits. It watches. And, eventually, like it or not, it comes for you.
Knowing that, knowing that danger lurks everywhere and we could no longer let our guard down, everything had changed for me. Now, whenever he went out into the world, I felt like I was holding my breath every moment until he returned to me.
Once the coffee pot had brewed enough to fill a mug, I poured myself one, adding in a healthy amount of creamer and a dash of sugar, then sat at the island staring into space.
The house was silent, except for the steady tick, tick, tick of the clock on the wall. I watched the steam billow out of my mug, stirring the caramel-colored concoction mindlessly.
A noise came from across the room, and I looked up, forcing a smile when Caroline walked into the room, an oversized T-shirt hanging down to her thighs, her chestnut hair in a messy ponytail atop her head. Sometimes, it still surprised me to realize we had a teenager. There were days, moments really, when she rounded the corner and I still expected to see a girl half her height with chubby cheeks and bangs, rather than the young woman before me. When had that happened? Why did they grow up so fast?
“What’s going on?” she croaked, her voice coated with sleep.
I didn’t want to worry her. “Your dad was called to a crash. Nothing to worry about. I tried to be quiet. Did I wake you?”
She sank down on the barstool next to me. “I’m not sure. I woke up and was going to get a drink of water in the bathroom when I saw the light on down here.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. You can go back to bed if you wa—”
We were interrupted as my phone’s screen lit up on the island, the shrill ring echoing through the nearly silent house. I stared at Jude’s smiling face staring up at me and lifted it to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Michelle, it’s bad—” His voice was shaky and low. In the background, I could hear a siren and several people talking.
I stayed still. Steady. Trying not to let Caroline see the worry I knew must be etched on my face. “Who is it? What happened?”
“It’s Stephanie Dupont.”
My heart dropped, and I stood, walking from the kitchen quickly. When Caroline began to follow me, I held up a hand to stop her. Once in the living room, I lowered my voice. “No. Please tell me she’s going to be okay. The boys just lost their father, they can’t lose their mother, too—”
“No, Michelle, listen to me.” He shushed me. “She’s fine. Stephanie’s fine. She was getting off her shift at the bar, and she said she saw a car go into the lake.”
Relief hit me about Stephanie, but then new worries came. “I don’t understand. Whose car? Did you find someone?”
“No.” He cleared his throat and the sounds of the voices grew fainter. He’d walked away from the crowd. “No, not yet. I’m trying to decide how to handle this. I don’t see any other way around bringing in divers, but—”
“Divers?” My throat grew dry. “To search the lake?”
“And drones. Visibility’s low at this hour, but when daylight comes, we’ll have to commence the search. Anything else will look suspicious.” He paused, but I knew what he was saying. I was suddenly feeling lightheaded, my vision tunneling. “If they find the car, the search may end. It might be okay.”
“They can’t, Jude. There has to be another way. You…you have to stop them.”
He was silent, but I already knew what he was going to say when he finally spoke. “There’s nothing I can do. This is out of my hands.”
“You have to—”
“I need you to listen to me, Michelle. There’s nothing. Nothing I can do. We’re dealing with something too big for me to handle on my own, and there are already other officers here. Too many people are already involved, and we’re not halfway done. The state police will have to be notified. We’ll have to call in a diving unit, the aquatic search and rescue. I don’t have enough pull to cover this up even if I wanted to.”
I tried to think. There had to be something. “You’re the sheriff. If you can’t do anything, who can? The officers will listen to you—Rodriguez, Parker, Martin… Can’t you just talk to them? Can’t you say she was tired? That she must be mistaken?”
“Not unless she confirmed what I was saying, and she won’t. I tried to talk to her, to get a better understanding of what happened, but she’s certain about what she saw. If someone really did go down, I have a duty to find them. No matter what.”
“But, if you go through with this, you know what else they’ll find,” I whispered, my voice the lowest it had been.
“I know,” he said solemnly. “I don’t have any choice. There’s nothing tying us to—” He cut off then, and with his voice muffled, hand over the speaker, he called, “Be right there.” When his attention was back to me, his voice clear and crisp, he said, “Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll call when I can.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, cool tears lining my eyes.
“Nothing to do,” he said, his voice stiff and cold as he fought back against the fear I knew he must be feeling. “Just stay calm. I’ll call soon. I love you.”
“I love you too,” I whispered, my voice trembling so hard it was impossible to discern what I was saying.
I lowered the phone from my ear in time to hear, “Mom?”
When I spun around, Caroline was waiting there, waiting for answers I couldn’t give her. Answers that would ruin everything.
What were we going to do?
What the police found at the bottom of our community’s private lake, Lake Guinevere, would reveal the secret capable of destroying everything I knew and loved.
What could I do?
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