“Do you want to swim?” she whispered.
“Mmm, you go.”
Laura barely came out of her dream, and then she was sleeping again. A spider no bigger than the head of a pin scampered over Laura’s shoulder, and Tish pursed her lips and blew it off. Laura murmured and turned over, balancing her head on the down of her forearm. Hair tumbled like a wild mask over her face. Her curving back was slick with sand. Her tattoo fluttered its wings at her.
Tish got up, glorying in the night wind on her body. She glided to the wet beach, where an inch of water pooled between her toes, and then stepped over moss and rocks as she dipped lower into the lake like a mermaid. As she got farther from the beach, the bottom fell away, and the deep water lifted her off her feet. She stroked lazily with her arms, floating. She turned over on her back, feeling cold fingers on her scalp. Her feet kicked and barely stirred a splash, nudging her body out toward the far center of the lake. The water was silk on her naked skin.
She wanted to shout for Laura to join her, but the beach was far away and black, and the silence felt sacred, as if she were in church. She let her feet dangle below her, swishing her arms to keep her face above the surface. When a mosquito whined in her ear, she allowed herself to sink. The lake enveloped her and roared in her ears. She drifted down, and when her chest demanded air, she sprang up with a flutter kick. Water dripped from her eyelashes, nose, and chin and ran from her hair down the middle of her back like the tickling caress of fingertips. She couldn’t hear, except for her own breath. She could barely see the angry ripples of the lake where she had disturbed it. A swampy dankness filled her nose. She was cut off from all of her senses, and she didn’t care. Out in the center of the lake, in a nether land between past and future, she realized she was happy. This was a moment unlike any other in her life. A moment without worry, only bliss.
As quickly as it had come, it wriggled through her fingers like a sea creature and never returned to her again.
Back on land, where the trees and water intersected invisibly on the half-moon of shoreline, she heard a noise. It radiated across the lake and landed in her ears and traveled through her body like shudders of thunder. Her head cocked in confusion. The noise repeated itself, dull and wet, a noise that had no business here in the woods. Her body became indescribably cold. She knew, without any glimmer of how she knew, that the noise was very, very bad.
Breaking the cathedral silence, she screamed, “Laura! Are you okay?”
There was no response, and somehow she knew there would never be a response. No musical voice. No laughter. No call from the shore. “I’m fine, silly, what’s the problem?”
Just a beating, pounding, thumping drumbeat. A killing beat.
She swam. She put her face in the water and clawed with her arms and kicked up waves behind her. She swam so far and so fast that her body scraped on the sand before she even realized she had scissored into shallow water. Panting, she stood up, wiping water from her eyes. Her mouth fell open, and when she tried to scream again, she couldn’t make a sound. She saw Laura’s body where it had been before, but nothing else was the same. Her limbs were sprawled and twisted. She smelled of copper and death. Beside her, thrown carelessly to the ground, was a silver bat.
Tish dived across the sand, crying, and wrapped her arms around the girl on the beach, rocking her like a baby, bathing herself in her blood, whispering in her ear, telling her to wake up, telling her how much she loved her.
Over and over.
Until they were both cold.
Tish wept silently into her hands. Maggie squeezed her shoulder while Stride opened his office door and signaled for a bottle of water. Tish took labored breaths and then straightened up and wiped her face.
“I didn’t expect it to hit me so hard,” she said. “I’ve held it in for a long time.”
Stride nodded. One of the secretaries brought in a bottle of water, and he twisted off the cap and handed it to Tish. She sipped it slowly.
“How did Cindy know you were there that night?” he asked.
“I was still on the beach when she arrived,” Tish murmured. “I hid in the woods, but she heard me behind her. I told her what had happened. I told her the truth about me and Laura.”
“Cindy never told anyone that she saw you there. Why did she protect you?”
“She knew I didn’t kill Laura.”
“That’s not a reason to keep quiet. You were a witness.”
Tish shook her head. “I didn’t see anything. Besides, Cindy wasn’t just protecting me. She was protecting her father, too. If people knew the truth about me and Laura, it would have killed him.”
“You should have talked to the police.”
“And say what?” Tish demanded. “For God’s sake, I was eighteen. I was scared out of my mind. I thought whoever killed her might think I could identify him. I thought people would blame me. To be gay back then meant you were a deviant, a child molester. I had already lost Laura, and I couldn’t bring her back. I didn’t know who did this. I didn’t have any information that would help the police. I just wanted to escape.”
“Did you touch the bat?” Maggie asked. “Will we find your fingerprints on it?”
Tish’s eyes flashed with anger. “You see? Even now, you’re wondering if I did it.”
“You were the last person to see her alive,” Stride told her.
“I never touched the bat,” Tish said. “I don’t care what you think of me now, but I’m telling you the truth. Finn confessed. He must have followed Laura that night and seen us making love. He must have been crazy with jealousy. So when I went into the lake, he lost control. For all I know, he was stoned and had no idea what he was doing.”
“I’d like to tell you that this changes things, but it doesn’t,” Stride said. “Maybe you can put this in a book, but Finn is never going to see the inside of a courtroom.”
“Is this because I lied?” Tish asked.
Stride nodded. “I happen to believe you, but a jury could easily conclude that you and Laura had a fight. That Laura met you to say good-bye and you couldn’t deal with it. That’s what a defense attorney will say. Or maybe Peter woke up, took the bat, and followed the trail. He was stalking Laura, we know that. He had the bat all these years. Who knows what he was capable of? There’s also Dada. He fled the scene. His prints are on the murder weapon. Don’t you see? We may know what happened, but we’ll never prove what happened. You’re going to have to be satisfied with that.”