Page 21 of Murder Road

“Watering his heavenly grass.”

“Telling ghostly kids to get off his lawn.” I looked over at him, and I couldn’t help it. I leaned across the divide between the passenger seat and the driver’s seat and put my arms around his neck, kissing the warm, rough skin of his jaw where the stubble came in.

“April, I’m driving,” he said.

I didn’t answer. I kissed along his jaw and the skin of his cheek, then back toward his ear. I could feel the reassuring muscles of his shoulders under my arms, and I ran my fingers up the back of his neck, where the hair was growing in longer than the military would allow.

“I’ll get pulled over,” he protested, but he didn’t shrug me off.

I kissed beneath his ear and felt a small tremor go through him. The tension in his body, brought on by the conversation, fizzled gently away. His skin smelled like soap and the sweat he’d washed off from his run, like hot sunshine, and I breathed it in. “You have summer skin,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it’s summer.” He sounded resigned, but he liked it. He still hadn’t shrugged me off.

“Let’s pull over somewhere and park.”

“In Robbie’s old car?”

“Why not? He won’t care.”

“I’m not a back seat type of guy.”

I smiled against his skin. “Never?”

“Never.”

That was news to me, but I immediately knew it was true. Eddie really wasn’t a back seat type of guy. “I guess I have to wait, then.”

He lifted a hand from the wheel and circled my wrist with his fingers, halfway between a protest and a caress. “You do, because Hunter Beach is just up ahead.” He pointed to a sign that went by out the window.

I kissed him once more, feeling that tremor again, and then I reluctantly dropped my arms and slid back into my seat. The paved highway ended and the road turned to gravel, the Accord bumping like an amusement park ride. The trees pressed close to the narrow road, but up ahead I could see a blue stripe of water—the lake. We had arrived.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The entrance to Hunter Beach was marked by a hand-painted sign posted next to a set of steps leading down to the beach. There was only one other car here, a white van that looked like it had been driven through a bank of mud and had been in at least one accident. There was nothing else in this gravel clearing except the sound of gulls over the lake and the wind in the trees behind us.

I walked to the top of the steps and looked down. They were homemade steps, built into the slope with rough stones and old pieces of wood. At the bottom was the beach itself, the sand dark and rocky, the waves of Lake Huron cold and lively in the wind. The sun baked down hot here, but the wind lifted the hair from my neck and blew the mosquitoes down the shore.

I glanced at Eddie, who shrugged. Then he started down the steps. As I descended after him, I could see past the last of the trees farther down the beach. There was a cabin there, made of dark wood. Laundry flapped from long clotheslines behind it. Surrounding it were tents pitched in the sand, dark blue and brown and Army green. Closer to the water was a firepit lined with stones and surrounded by folding chairs. There was no fire in the pit, but I could see three people in the folding chairs, sitting and maybe talking. One of them turned my way as I came to the bottom of the stairs, and the other two followed suit.

I kept pace at Eddie’s shoulder as we walked toward the people at the firepit. I put my sunglasses on.

The people around the firepit were young—teenagers, or early twenties at most. There was a girl with long, straight brown hair, and another with a sandy brown braid. The third was a boy with long, dark blond hair in a tangle of natural curls past his shoulders. He was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of worn cargo pants. As we got closer, I saw the T-shirt had a graphic of Che Guevara’s face on the front.

“Hi,” the boy said as we approached. He was very relaxed in his old lawn chair, his knees sprawled open. The two girls didn’t speak. “Do you guys need directions or something?”

Eddie’s tone was polite. “Does one of you own this place?”

The three of them exchanged glances, and then they all laughed.

Beside me, Eddie didn’t stiffen. His body stayed completely relaxed. The stupid question had been intentional so that he wouldn’t seem like a threat.

Everyone underestimated my husband. Everyone but me.

“Do we look like we own this place, man?” the boy said. He held his arms out from his sides. “Okay, sure, this is my domain.”

“Honey,” I said in a soft voice, touching Eddie’s wrist. Playing the square right alongside him. I turned back to the three kids—kids who weren’t much younger than me. “Um, hi. We’re looking for some information? We’re not really sure where to start.”

“What do you want to know?” This was the girl with brown hair. She was wearing a spaghetti strap lace camisole under a pair of denim overalls. Her feet were bare.

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