Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (red white royal blue TXT) 📗

Javier Esparza’s warm baritone voice glides through me like waves of summer heat, so welcome right now in this cold place. He sounds husky. “I love you too. You okay?”

It’s in my voice, the creeping dread. Must have been for him to ask. I make an effort to shove it away. “Yes,” I say. It sounds convincing. “Is it late for you right now, or early?” I don’t know where he’s deployed for his weeks of Marine Corps reserve training; I often don’t. Safer for him that way. He’s in the hands of the marines right now. They could have taken him anywhere.

“Querida, where I am, it’s late morning already. I forgot it would be so early, but this is my slot. We don’t get a lot of choices.” He’s been gone only a few days, and I already miss him so bad I feel he’s been gone a year. “Everything okay there? You sound like you’re outside.”

“I’m on a case,” I say. “I—” Tell him. But I’m weirdly reluctant now that he’s on the phone. I feel fragile and out of control and he feels so very far away. I glance at the deputy, who’s taken shelter again in his cruiser with the heater running. The coroner, standing by. I take a couple of steps away as the tow truck cranks gears again, metal on metal. My gaze fixes on the slow emergence of the car from the pond. The back bumper breaks the surface, and the roof of the car. Ripples flow sluggishly. “I need to tell you something,” I say. I walk off a little bit, farther from the noise, farther from the ears. “I’m not sure it’s the right time, but . . . I don’t want to wait. Javier . . . we’re pregnant.”

The time lag feels like it has extra weight this time. Like he’s speechless, not just far away. “Wait, what? We’re—Kez! Oh my God!” The delight in his voice fills me up, drives away the cold and the desolation. I feel it like I’m standing in sudden sunlight. “Kez, baby. We’re going to have a baby.” His voice goes shaky on that last bit. Big strong marine, reduced nearly to tears. “You okay? Really? Damn, I wish I was there. I wish I could just be there.”

“You will be,” I tell him. “I’m okay. So’s the baby. I’m setting up a doctor’s appointment in the next couple of days. I’ll send the sonogram to your phone so you can see it when you get to turn it on again.” For now, his phone is off. Safety reasons, again.

“Kez.” He sounds more somber now. “You don’t sound that happy. Are you? Happy?”

“Very,” I say, and I hear the emotion in the single word. “I want this so much. It’s just . . . it’s a bad one, this case. It’s hard to be completely happy right now like I should.”

“Sweetheart. I’m sorry. You do what you gotta do, Kez. I love you. Always.”

“I love you too.” I let the silence run a bit, warm and sweet, then see the tow truck’s finally got the right tension, and the back wheels of the car are starting to come up the slippery side of the pond. “Be safe, Javi. For me and the baby.”

“You be safe too. Get some rest if you can—” The connection drops in the middle of the last word. I’m used to that; communications from some of the places he goes are difficult. I’m just lucky he was able to connect at all.

The predawn morning is colder with him gone. I exhale slowly, trying to avoid that ghostly puff of mist, and watch the tires as they roll up the bank. The sedan is finally out of the water. The tow truck driver is better than we probably deserve to have, out here at this hour. He manages to get it completely out, on the road, and then unhooks and backs his rig away. “You want me to wait?” he asks. Not me, of course. The deputy.

“Please,” I say. “If you don’t mind.”

He shrugs. “They pay me by the hour.”

Water cascades from open windows and runs in streams from the door seals. All four doors are shut. I force myself not to look in the back as Winston adjusts the lights around the new site, and I focus on the exterior. It’s not a new car, but it looks well kept. No damage. It’s a pale beige, a color most people avoid these days, but maybe I’m unkind—maybe it’s more of a light gold. Hard to tell in the work lights, which are harsh for a reason.

The deputy and coroner both look at me. I step up and help Winston unroll a clean blue tarp that we position on the driver’s side so it’ll catch anything that comes out; he gives me paper foot covers I snap on over my shoes. I glove up and approach the leaking bucket that was once a vehicle.

I lean in the open window to take a look at the seats. There’s still at least a couple of feet of murky water trapped inside.

“Help me with the mesh trap,” the coroner says, and I hold my end of the fine net; he rolls it under the car, holds his side, and uses a gloved hand to carefully pop the passenger side door open as I open the driver’s side. Swamp comes out in a firehose gush, but is quickly down to a muttering trickle. He pulls the net to his side carefully to preserve any potential evidence that will have been trapped in it, and takes it off to the side to go pick out anything that might decompose if left damp: paper, particularly. I move the work lights so they shine on the interior of the car. I still don’t look in the back, though it pulls at me like a magnet; I can see the unfocused pallid forms out of