Page 32 of The Deepest Lake

“Matt, he had everything else right. He knew Jules had a job to get to in the morning. He knew she spoke Spanish. He knew she didn’t like to swim. He knew she was a nice girl.”

“A nice girl!” Matt laughs. “That’s pretty generic.”

“And that she had a nice local boyfriend, supposedly.”

Rose admits: she trusted Dennis’s gut instinct when he called Jules “nice,” but Rose didn’t extend the benefit of the doubt to the newly discovered boyfriend.

Matt looks off to the side, like he’s checking the time or pulling up an email or doing anything other than hanging on Rose’s every word.

She summarizes more simply for him. “We should be looking for a Guatemalan guy. Forget about the German.”

“The German had her book.”

“But that’s because Jules gave it to him!”

Matt turns his gaze to the camera again. “You told me Jules would never give away that book. You said she’d had it since high school. And when we got it back, we saw it was signed by the author. Jules wouldn’t have given it away.”

Rose growls with frustration. She knows Matt is going to end the call any minute. There’s no point talking to him about Jules’s writerly aspirations or the fact that she seemed depressed in her texts, like a person who might have given up on a dream—and yes, even given away a book, impulsively. He was never interested in those emotional details.

“Follow the money,” Rose says suddenly, retrieving those words from the first and only journalism course she ever took, at Northwestern. It was where she and Matt met. “Remember how Professor Jenkins used to say that? Follow the money. If this Paco guy was paid to leave town, it means someone bribed him to do so. Someone who didn’t want us hanging around San Felipe, asking questions. Like the police—”

“The police down there don’t have a lot of money to hand out.”

“Then someone else! But the police knew. They lied and said the drug dealer who sold something to Jules went to jail.”

She’s doing the math in her head. A new motorcycle, or even a shiny used one. Five thousand? Ten?

“And on top of that,” Rose says, steam building up again, “do you like how they were so vague about the drug? We don’t even know what it was. Just a party drug.”

“That’s political,” Matt insists. “They want to name something that tourists might have brought down, whether that means ketamine or ecstasy or something else. They don’t want to say cocaine or heroin, because those come from Guatemala.”

“Heroin!” Rose shouts. Catching herself, she whispers, “I can’t believe you’re suggesting Jules did heroin.”

“I’m not. I’m reminding you to flex a little intellectual muscle when it comes to culture and the government situation. Guatemala already has a bad reputation. It’s a ‘level three’ country, meaning reconsider travel, as I told you before you decided to go there alone.”

“As we told Jules,” she says, feeling the pressure of tears behind her eyes again.

“And hey, before you forget, the cops down there went beyond the call. They let us park the rescue boat in their guarded lot. They gave us day-and-night access to their interview room. They called in anyone we wanted to talk to.”

“Which made it so easy for everyone to meet and fill out statements in town. In a public place.”

“Well, yes. Obviously.”

“Instead of where Jules was, minutes or hours before she died. That row of expat houses down the lake from Eva’s house—the spot where the Canadian retiree said he saw a girl swimming. You should have talked to him at his house, not at the police station. You could have walked the beaches and talked to people who weren’t asked to come in. Maids, gardeners, whatever. People who didn’t see the flyers.”

She’s never said any of this before—never even put it into one private, coherent thought—because it hurt too much to admit their compounding errors. But the truth matters more. It’s what she owes Jules: the truth.

“Everyone saw the flyers,” Matt says, sounding not just tired now, but disdainful, like what he’s most tired of isn’t feeling demolished by paternal heartbreak but managing Rose. “Except, evidently, your beach buddy, who is too nearsighted to see a flyer but not too nearsighted to spot a man’s neck tattoo.”

Rose feels stranded, no longer part of an evidence-sorting team. Was it always this way? Was she just too distressed to realize Matt didn’t trust any of her intuitions?

“The white gloves,” she tries, grasping at straws. “We should have narrowed it down: size, type. If they belonged to some boyfriend who . . . who . . .”

She can’t say it: who might have killed her.

“We did, Rose,” he says quietly. “They were women’s, a very small size. Whoever wore those gloves probably couldn’t have subdued another person, if that’s what you’re still worrying about.”

“Did you tell me that?”

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