The lake house had called to her for a reason. She still believed that. There had to be brighter days ahead. But she could not let herself get lost in town gossip or in Sadie’s fantasies.
Easier said than done, she thought as she pushed the last Xanax around in her palm. Her lifeline was fraying. Soon it would snap, and she would drift into the darkness.
It would not be pretty. She would be going off Xanax cold turkey. Her brain’s receptors would cry out for the relief they craved, but there would be nothing to feed them. Her mind would become a bundle of raw nerves, a twisted nest of hot wires. The anxiety that the pills had kept at bay for weeks would collapse upon her like a freak thunderstorm on a cloudless day. It would pummel her until she could not breathe. Her stomach would reject anything that was not the medication, forcing back any food or liquid in a rush of hot acid that would singe her throat as it erupted from her mouth.
She had only one true option, no matter how crass and unprofessional it seemed.
Closing her eyes, she cupped her palm over her open mouth and felt the pill drop onto her tongue. She savored its bitterness.
It’s an acquired taste.
The thought elicited a sharp, humorless chuckle. Then she swallowed it down.
She left Sadie playing upstairs. With her cell phone clutched in her hand, Kris marched down the back steps and across the stone path to the edge of the bluff overlooking Lost Lake. Everything seemed smaller. The dock was little more than a flaking wood board propped up on rotting posts over the still water. The cove was a narrow sliver off the main body of the lake, the opposite shore closer than she recalled. Even the red hills that met the horizon appeared lower and less impressive, like sloppy piles of unearthed rock on a construction site.
She lifted her phone into the air and checked its signal. Two bars flickered briefly to one, then back again. She hoped the connection would hold long enough for this one brief call.
Allison picked up on the third ring. Her voice was as wonderfully droll as ever, her sense of humor alive and well, but she seemed rushed, as if Kris had caught her at a bad time.
“Is everything okay there?” Kris asked her.
“Yeah. Yeah, of course. Just busy. Nothing to worry about.”
Whenever Allison told her not to worry, Kris worried.
She forced herself to push these thoughts away. Whatever was happening at the office, she would deal with in August. She needed to be here, now, tackling one problem at a time.
Kris turned away from the lake house and lowered her voice, even though she knew there was no way anyone—especially Sadie—could eavesdrop on her conversation.
“Hey, I won’t keep you. I just needed a favor.”
“What’s up?”
The story seemed to come from nowhere, but she knew it had been there for hours, maybe days, growing in the darkness.
“There’s a couple here that we’ve gotten to know. Super-sweet. Own the garage in town. And they have this bird dog, a pointer named Speck, that’s become more of a family pet. You know how that goes. But he’s pretty high-strung. Doesn’t take much to spook the poor guy. You should see him during a thunderstorm. Anyway, we were talking and I told them I could probably help them with that …”
Allison gave a sharp laugh, and Kris was sure she was about to call bullshit. Then she said, “Jesus, Dr. Barlow, you seriously can’t go anywhere without finding some pitiful animal to help.”
Kris chuckled, trying to sound at ease, all the while hating herself for the story she had concocted. “Yeah, well, it’s a really small town. The closest vet is in Fredonia, I think.”
“I’ll take your word on that,” Allison said. “So what do ya need?”
Kris felt her heart pounding in her chest. She knew there was no reason to worry. This was nothing. There was no way she could get caught. Yet in the fifteen years since starting her practice, she had never crossed a line like this. Not once.
You think this anxiety is bad, wait until the Xanax leaves your bloodstream. Then let’s talk.
She pressed the phone closer to her mouth and said in a low but casual voice, “I was wondering if you could overnight me some Prozac. Fifty milligrams twice a day. Let’s say a hundred count just to be safe.”
“That’s a big pointer. Definitely a house dog now. What are they feeding him, cupcakes?”
“Yeah, he’s put on some pounds,” Kris heard herself say. She suddenly felt far away from her own voice, as if she were back in the darkness, near the small door where her shadow lived. “You can send it to the lake house. 106 River Road. Pacington, Kansas. 67956. Can you get that out today?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Overnight.”
“Yeah. No problem.” There was a pause, then Allison asked, “Is everything okay, Dr. Barlow? You sound kind of—”
“Everything’s as good as it can be, Allison,” Kris said sharply, hoping her tone would dissuade Allison from inquiring further. “Thanks for doing this for me. I appreciate it.”
She hung up before Allison could respond. She slipped her phone into her back pocket.
On the other shore, a breeze twisted through the weeping willow trees, their drooping branches parting like stage curtains to reveal the back deck of the rustic cabin. The dark-haired woman was not there. Kris could not even sense the woman’s prying eyes.
She was completely alone.
Her scalp began to tingle, an unpleasant sensation that started at the top of her head and spread down her neck to her spine. It was as if thousands of fingers were tickling the underside of her skull.
It’s already happening. It’s the withdrawal, she told herself.
But she knew this could not be true. It was the town and the things she had learned and the creeping feeling that somehow she was a piece of the puzzle.
She saw herself, ten years old, staring over the side of the rowboat as the waves transformed her reflection into the face of a stranger.
The fingertips inside her head pressed harder, and Kris cringed, fighting it, desperate to keep the feeling from overwhelming her.
She was sick of it. The anxiety. The fear. She had come here to escape those things, but it was finally time to admit that this was not the same place she knew as a child. This was not the perfect haven that her mind had trapped in time. It was an abandoned place full of haunted people.
She could not let herself become one of them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE NEXT MORNING, Kris returned to the Book Nook. Hitch was exactly where she had last seen him, standing behind the counter by a stack of books and jotting prices in the corners of pages with a dull pencil. He looked up as Kris entered, and his eyes widened behind the square frames of neon-yellow glasses. His silver hair swooped down like a comma along one side of his oblong face.
“Welcome back, my dear!” he called out as if a lifelong friend had just walked in his door. “Where’s the young miss?”
With her shrink.
“With a friend,” she said.
Hitch winked as though this had answered everything. “Out on your own, eh? A little Mommy Time.”
“Something like that.”
Across the room, an elderly man shuffled past a doorway as he scanned the bookshelves. He glanced at Kris but did nothing to acknowledge her. Then he disappeared to the other side of the adjoining room.