Page 101 of The Summer Guests

She’d already called Mike for backup, but the blood on the floor told her she needed to move, now. Pulse quickening, she climbed the stairs.

At the second-floor landing, she glanced both ways. Glanced first into Zoe’s room, then Susan’s. No one here. She moved into Brooke and Colin’s room.

There she paused, eyeing the dresser, where a top drawer hung open, a bra spilling out. It was a jarring note in a room where everything else was neat and orderly. In the bathroom she found yet another jarring note of disorder. Jewelry lay glittering across the sink counter, not laid out neatly but spilled haphazardly.

She heard footsteps thud into the house and thought:Mike’s here.

But it was Ethan’s voice she heard, calling out: “Susan? Susan, where are you?”

Jo emerged from the bedroom and saw him standing at the bottom of the stairs. He was staring at the floor. At the blood. “She’s not here,” said Jo.

His head snapped up to stare at her. “What’s going on? Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been calling her, but she doesn’t pick up.”

“Do you know where Brooke is?”

“Brooke?” He shook his head. “I just want to find my wife. I need to know if she’s—” He stopped, spun around to face the open doorway. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what? Ethan?”

But he was already out the door.

She scrambled down the stairs and ran out onto the deck. There she halted, straining to see into the night. There was only a sliver of moon in the sky, and the lights from the house had washed out her night vision. Where had Ethan gone? Then, from somewhere in the darkness, she heard a cry. A shout.

The pond?

Plunging blindly into the night, she made her way down the sloping lawn, stumbling through shadows toward the water’s edge. She could make out more and more details in the gloom: The distant sparkle of starlight reflected on the pond. The silhouette of the pine tree looming to her right. Just ahead, something was moving.

From the darkness, a figure emerged and staggered toward her, weighed down by the burden in his arms. A burden he was struggling to carry up the slope.

“Help,” Ethan pleaded. He wobbled, dropped to his knees. Gently he laid the body on the grass. “Help her.”

In the faint glow from the house, Susan’s face looked as lifeless as stone, her skin a milky white beneath a tangle of wet hair.Too late,Jo thought, but when she bent down and pressed fingers to Susan’s neck, she felt a quiver of a pulse. Or was she just imagining it?

She took a breath, bent down, and pressed her mouth to Susan’s. The lips were so cold, it was like kissing a block of ice. She blew, forcing air into the lifeless lungs. Repeated it again, then a third time.

Susan lay motionless, water trickling from her hair.

“No.No.” Ethan pushed Jo aside and pressed his mouth to Susan’s. Breathed for his wife, again and again. “Please, darling,” he begged. He grasped her face in his hands and forced another breath into her lungs. “Come back. Come back ...”

Even as Jo called for an ambulance, she knew it was too late. No matter how desperately Ethan pleaded, how many times he breathed for his wife, Susan was already gone. This ambulance ride would not be to the hospital, but to the morgue.

With a sense of resignation, Jo knelt down and once again pressed her fingers to Susan’s neck, expecting to feel nothing. But something throbbed there, faintly, beneath her fingers. Not her imagination. This was a pulse. A steady pulse.

Suddenly Susan shuddered. Coughed.

“Yes!” Ethan sobbed.

Together, they rolled Susan onto her side. Jo slapped her between the shoulder blades, slapped her with desperate, almost brutal blows. Susan coughed again, this time so violently that water splattered out of her mouth. She began to claw the air, as if still struggling to stay afloat in the pond, still fighting toward the surface. Her eyes flew open, and she looked around wildly.

“It’s me! I’m here!” said Ethan. “Darling, I’m here!” He trapped her face, forcing her to look at him. Only then did her thrashing stop. He pulled her into his arms and rocked her against his chest. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’s okay now ...”

“Where’s Brooke?” said Jo, but Ethan was so focused on his wife that he wasn’t listening. “Ethan, where is Brooke?” she repeated.

“By the water,” he finally managed to say. “They’re all down there.”

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