Chapter 23 - WHAT WAS LEFT BEHIND
The lake did not give him back.
By midnight, the boathouse was illuminated by thirty emergency floodlights. Divers from the State Police underwater recovery unit plunged repeatedly into the black depths of Pike Lake, their searchlights visible as faint, ghostly green halos beneath twenty feet of freezing water.
Paramedics had reset Ethan’s shoulder on the hood of an ambulance, wrapping his chest in tight compression bandages. He sat on the open bumper, wrapped in an emergency foil blanket, holding Claire against his uninjured side.
Lily was asleep inside the heated ambulance cabin, evaluated by an EMT and pronounced completely uninjured—she had been given a mild over-the-counter pediatric antihistamine to keep her quiet, nothing more.
Miller walked over to the ambulance, his boots covered in thick lake silt. He looked utterly defeated.
"The current in this basin feeds directly into the lower falls," Miller said, taking off his wet cap. "We found his jacket snagged on an old submerged timber sixty yards downriver. No sign of the body. With water this cold and the undercurrent that strong... if he went over the weir, we won't find him until the reservoir is dredged in July."
"He said Richard is down there," Ethan whispered, his voice completely raw. He pointed toward the concrete pilings of the boathouse slip. "He said Evelyn buried Richard under the foundation in 2004."
Miller stared at the water for a long moment, then turned to his deputy. "Get the ground-penetrating radar team from Albany up here. Break up the concrete if you have to."
Sarah Vance stepped up to the ambulance. Her coat was soaked, her face pale. She carried a waterlogged black leather satchel she had recovered from the front seat of Julian’s abandoned vehicle.
"He wasn't acting on instinct, Ethan," Sarah said quietly, opening the flap of the satchel. "He had a master key to the Bedford Hills visitor registry. He’s been visiting Evelyn every Sunday for the last two months."
Ethan pulled back from Claire, his eyes widening. "You told me she had no visitors."
"She had no visitors listed under *Mercer*," Sarah said grimly, pulling out a stack of laminated visitor passes. "Julian was entering the facility under the identity of a state-appointed paralegal. Evelyn wasn't rotting in isolation. She was orchestrating every single move he made from inside her cell."
Claire looked up, her face streaked with tears and dirt, her jaw set with a rage that Ethan had never seen in her before.
"She will never stop," Claire said, her voice shaking with lethal certainty. "As long as she is breathing air, as long as she has a tongue to give orders, our daughter will never be safe."
Ethan stood up from the bumper. The foil blanket slid from his shoulders, pooling like silver liquid in the mud.
"Where is she right now, Miller?" Ethan demanded.
"Ethan, don't—" Miller started.
"Where is she?"
"Bedford Hills Medical Annex," Miller said quietly. "She had a mild stroke two days ago. They moved her from solitary to the infirmary wing on the third floor."
Ethan looked down at Claire.
For the first time in their marriage, there was no hesitation in Claire's eyes. No plea for mercy. No request to leave things to the justice system.
She reached out, took Ethan’s uninjured left hand, and squeezed it with cold, unforgiving strength.
May you like
"End it, Ethan," she whispered.
***
