Page 3

“I’ll let you two ladies talk,” Dad said, backing himself out of my office and shutting the door.

I gestured to a green velvet chair against the wall. Slowly, Geneva took it. She clutched a small purse against her torso as if it were a shield. “I don’t like that term,” she said. “The Deadwater Five.”

“My father is …” I started. Geneva waved me off before I could complete the sentence.

“He’s right,” she said. “It still follows me everywhere. Ms. Gale, I don’t want to be here. But I need help and I don’t know where else to go. I have to talk to someone about the Deadwater Lake murders again. We weren’t the Deadwater Five. We were best friends. I don’t know why I survived. I don’t know why he didn’t kill me like the others. I should have died that night too. I know this is gonna sound crazy, but I’m convinced someone out there thinks so too.”

Chapter

Two

Deadwater Lake got its name from a group of submerged, petrified white pine trees on its north end. Over thousands of years, mineral-rich water seeped into the wood, slowly changing living tissue into stone. Today, they stood forty feet tall with only the top fifteen feet above water.

I’d never been on the lake myself. Though I’d heard stories about its eerie quality for years. As I stared into Geneva Bell’s deep brown eyes, I wondered if she knew those ghosts firsthand.

“I don’t even know where to start,” she said.

“Well, as I said, I didn’t grow up in Helene. Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

She nodded. She would do a lot of that. A nervous habit, along with the way she fidgeted with a beaded bracelet on her left wrist.

“It surprises me,” she said. “I had to move away from here to leave all of this behind. To go somewhere people didn’t stare at me with looks of pity or fear or even disgust. Like they blamed me for surviving. Believe me, I’ve blamed myself plenty.”

“That sounds terrible,” I said. “Why don’t you just tell me what you’re comfortable with? What is it you think I can do?”

“We were eighteen,” she said. “Five of us. We’d been joined at the hip since junior high. None of us could really grasp the fact that we’d all scatter to the four winds after graduation. It’s ironic now. I was the only one of us planning to stay in Helene and go to community college for a year. Everyone else was going so far away. Annabelle got accepted to Northwestern. Maisy was going to the University of Florida; her dad lived in Gainesville. Emily was going to take a year off to travel. She was actually planning to backpack through Europe. I was so jealous. Sarah was joining the Army. That’s why we picked that exact weekend. The first weekend in August. Sarah had to report for basic training the following Tuesday.”

Geneva’s eyes misted. She’d gone somewhere in her head. She looked happy, wistful. It only lasted a moment.

“Sarah was the one with the money,” Geneva continued. “She paid to rent the cabin for three nights. Have you ever been out there? Have you ever seen it?”

“No.” As Geneva spoke, bits and pieces of things I’d heard over the years filtered through my mind. Yes. There had been a cabin on the lake. It was on a tiny peninsula, secluded from the other properties along the lakeshore. That’s where I heard the stories about hauntings. It wasn’t the lake itself.

“The Drummonds owned it. They’re the family that owned all that land south of here. They sold a bunch of it off to developers. Then a huge tract went to one of the cell phone companies to put in a tower in the early ’90s. They made a fortune off that, too.”

My father represented a Drummond some years ago. I knew that because it was one of the files I had to close out. A DUI.

“Anyway, the Drummond cabin was something else. Six bedrooms. Six thousand square feet. Three stories. At one time, there was a separate pool house. That’s gone now. It was a wedding venue a long time ago, too. I’d never stayed anywhere so nice before.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I didn’t realize how much Sarah’s family was paying to rent the place. A thousand bucks a night. I found that out much later. She asked us to chip in. But she only asked me for a hundred dollars. She took pity on me and I never would have known.”

Geneva started to cry silent tears. I reached over and grabbed a box of tissues from my desk. I had cause to keep them there for clients far more than anyone might realize. But the bread and butter of my business was to verify whether spouses were cheating on each other ahead of a divorce filing. It wasn’t glamorous, but it paid the bills.

“Friday night was great,” she continued. “The Drummonds had kayaks in the separate shed. We were out on the lake for a couple of hours. Then we grilled out. We just talked and talked. I don’t think there was a story we didn’t tell about how we grew up together. Then Saturday morning, we made breakfast. The weather was beautiful. Eighty-eight degrees and pure sun. We laid out. Had wine coolers. I honestly have never had so much fun in my life before or since. Isn’t that odd? But those two days were the best of my life. People think it makes me sad to remember that weekend. Of course it does. But you know what my gut reaction is? The first emotion I have? It’s joy. I want to go back.”

“It’s not strange,” I said. “I think it’s probably healthy that you can hold on to such a wonderful memory.”

She laughed. “That’s what my therapists say. I’ve been through six or seven over the past twelve years.”

“I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through,” I said.

“We went to bed that night late,” Geneva said. “We’d been drinking all day but I was sober. The last alcohol I had was at maybe nine o’clock. We went to bed around one in the morning. We all slept in our own rooms. I was on the first floor. Annabelle was across the hall. Sarah and Maisy took the bedrooms upstairs. Emily took the basement bedroom. There was another one. An attic loft. But we didn’t use it.

“Anyway. I think it started about two thirty. I don’t know for sure. I’ve been asked that question a thousand times. What did I hear? What did I see? The answer is very little. They said Maisy and Sarah were killed first. I don’t know what they might have heard. I kind of remember hearing some banging around. Like heavy footsteps above me. Sarah was directly above me. They said he went to Emily next.”

As she talked, I stole a glance at my phone screen. Geneva wasn’t looking at me. She barely seemed to remember I was there. I did a quick browser search on the Deadwater Lake murders. At least fifty articles popped up. There had been an episode devoted to it on one of the long-running true crime shows. A couple of podcasts more recently. But the Wikipedia page that pulled up first was for Derrek Sidney. The so-called Adonis Killer. My heart did a somersault. It wasn’t something I’d studied. But he’d been given that moniker, as I recalled, because of his good looks and the fact that one of his killings took place at the Adonis Apartments in Cleveland.