Page 34 of The Summer Guests

“Ethan!” Colin called from downstairs. “Are you coming?”

Ethan glanced over his shoulder, then looked at Susan. “It might be good for you to get out of the house. This will only be for a few hours.”

“What if the police need to reach me?”

“They’ll call.”

“What if there’s no cell service up on the mountain? What if Zoe comes home and there’s no one here? Someone has to be here.”

“You’re right.” He sighed. “I should stay with you.”

“No, I’d rather you didn’t. Go, Ethan. It’s what you all came to do. It’s what your father wanted. I’ll be fine. I just need to be alone.”

“Ethan?” It was his mother this time, calling from downstairs.

“Go,” Susan said, waving her husband out of the bedroom.

She was relieved when he finally walked out of the room and down the stairs. She heard car doors slam shut, then tires crackling across gravel as the family drove away. Only then did she feel she could take a deep breath. For too many hours, she’d had to endure being closed up in this house with the Conovers, forced to tolerate their attempts at sympathy, their useless advice, their uneasy glances. Yes, they might mean well, but she felt suffocated by so much closeness.

Once again, she looked at her cell phone. It was practically grafted to her hand, this tenuous lifeline to her daughter, but she saw no new texts, no new voicemails. She couldn’t help herself; she called Zoe’s phone yet again, only to hear the same recording. How many messages had she left? The voice mailbox must be full by now. Was Zoe hearing any of them?Couldshe hear them?

Suddenly desperate for fresh air, she headed downstairs and left the house. Walked down the sloping lawn to the dock. It was another heartbreakingly beautiful day, the sun shining, the water as flat as mirrored glass.Where are you, baby?Not in this pond; they knew that now. No, Zoe the mermaid wouldneverdrown in water so calm, so benign; she could easily swim ten times the length of Maiden Pond. Instead, the bones of some other poor soul had been dragged up, someone who musthave been in the water for a long time, long enough to be forgotten.Here is where people come to disappear.

Staring across the sun-gilded water, she suddenly noticed the man facing her from the opposite bank. On the evening Zoe vanished, Susan had seen that same man’s shoulders silhouetted in the window across the pond. And yesterday, when the warden service divers were searching the water, he’d been there again. Watching. As they stared at each other, she felt rooted to the spot, unable to break off her gaze. Then a loon suddenly took off, wings flapping as it cut across the water between them, and the spell was broken. She backed away from the pond, away from the man’s stare.

She hurried up the lawn and back into the house. The door slammed shut behind her, and the gust sent papers flying off the coffee table. It was Ethan’s handwritten manuscript, now scattered across the floor. Thatgoddamnnovel. If he had not been so focused on his writing, if he hadn’t left the house to buy more paper, he would have been home when Zoe returned. He would have paid better attention to her. Who she was with, where she had gone. God, how she wanted to scoop up these pages and set them all on fire. She took a breath and swallowed back her rage. Bent down to collect them, not bothering to put them back in order. She plucked up the last scattered sheet and was about to place it on the stack of pages when her gaze landed on the sentence at the top of the page.

This is where it began. And this is where it all came to its bloody and inevitable end, in this poisonous house on Maiden Pond.

He’d never told her his novel was about Moonview.

She shuffled the pages back in proper order. Thank God he’d numbered them, or she’d never be able to reconstitute the manuscript. Another sentence caught her eye. She saw the names Corcoran and Connor and Nathan. Character names so close to Conover and Colin and Ethan that it was glaringly apparent he was writing about his own family, including their neighbors. The Groens next door were obviously the real-life Greenes, with a daughter named Helen, not Hannah. Herewas where reality veered wildly into fantasy, with raven-haired, beautiful Helen described as dangerously tempting, the spark that would ignite the firestorm to come.

Hannah as temptress. That much, at least, was clearly fiction. But the setting on Maiden Pond, the two brothers at odds with each other, and the iron-willed mother all felt uncomfortably close to reality, but a far darker, more sinister reality.

She flipped back to the first page of Ethan’s manuscript, when the fictional Corcoran family arrives at Moonview.

This is where it began. And this is where it all came to its bloody and inevitable end.

Someone rapped on the door. Startled, she snapped up straight in her chair.Zoe,she thought.Someone’s here about Zoe.

She jumped up and ran to answer the door, expecting to find Jo Thibodeau standing outside. Instead, a man loomed on the porch, a man with unsmiling eyes and a face weathered by a lifetime of hard winters.It’s him,she thought.The man from across the pond. The man who’s been watching our house.

“You’re Ethan’s new wife,” he said.

She swallowed, glanced past him, at the pond. Wondered if anyone would hear her if she called for help. “If you’re here to see the Conovers, I’ll tell them you came by.” She started to close the door, but he put up his hand to stop it.

“You didn’t even ask my name,” he said.

She took a breath and stood straighter. “What name should I give them?”

“Tarkin. Reuben. That’s my camp over there.” He pointed across the pond, to his ramshackle cottage. “My father used to work for the Conovers.”

“I’ll let Elizabeth know—”

“I’ve seen the family here every summer, watched those boys grow up. But I’ve never seen you before.” His gaze was so steady it unnervedher. As if his blue eyes were lasers, piercing straight into her skull. “Have they found your girl?”

She was so startled by his question, she just stared at him for a moment. “No,” she whispered.

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