Chapter 1 - The Cold Water of Lake Brier
The morning air smelled of stagnant pond scum, diesel, and wet lilies. A cold breeze sliced through the chiffon and satin of my wedding dress, sending a violent shiver down my spine, but the tremor never made it to my face. My father’s laugh—a brief, dismissive bark of amusement that had so often punctuated Derek’s childhood disasters—hung in the air like a stain.
Derek was standing with his boots planted wide in the red Georgia clay, arms crossed over his chest, his hair whipped sideways by the wind coming off Lake Brier. He looked immensely pleased with himself. It was the exact expression he had worn at twelve when he threw my bicycle into a briar patch because I wouldn’t give him my allowance, and the same one he had worn at sixteen when he poured salt into my aquarium because I refused to do his algebra homework.
*“Go park it now, sis.”*
The keys felt heavy and wet in my palm. Red lake mud clung to the brass, slipping between my fingers. Behind me, thirty feet out in the black, murky water, the curved white roof of Grandpa George’s 1966 Volkswagen Beetle rested like the shell of a drowned turtle. Bubbles were still burping up around the luggage rack, carrying faint rainbows of oil to the surface.
I closed my fingers around the keys until the ridges bit into my skin.
“Derek?”
“What?” His tone was smug, full of the brittle swagger of a boy who had spent twenty-eight years believing that family meant a license to commit arson without anyone calling the fire department.
“Did you check the trunk first?”
The smirk on his face didn’t simply fade; it curdled. The muscles around his mouth tightened, pulling his lips into a flat, thin line. His eyes flicked from me to the half-submerged white roof, then back to my face, searching for a tell, a bluff, anything to prove that he hadn't just made an irreversible mistake.
“What’s in the trunk, Avery?” he asked. His voice was lower now, stripped of the theatrical bravado he’d used when he tossed the keys. “There’s nothing in the trunk. The spare tire’s in the front hood. The engine’s in the back. What the hell are you talking about?”
“The front trunk,” I said softly. My voice was completely steady, so quiet he had to lean forward to hear it over the lap of the water. “Under the liner. Behind the false firewall Grandpa welded in during the eighties.”
Derek’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. “You’re lying. You’re trying to mess with me.”
“Grandpa didn’t just keep tools in the garage, Derek,” I said, taking a slow step toward him. The hem of my four-thousand-dollar gown dragged through the weeds, picking up burrs and wet dirt, but I didn’t look down. “You wouldn’t know that, though. You only came into the shop when you needed forty bucks for beer or gas money to take your friends to Savannah. You never stayed long enough to watch him work the sheet metal.”
Behind me, the sound of gravel crunching under tires announced the arrival of another vehicle. A dark gray pickup truck came sliding to a stop on the access road, kicking up dust that swirled in the damp morning air. The driver’s side door slammed open with a crack like a pistol shot.
Nathan.
He was in his charcoal tuxedo, his tie undone at the collar, his hair disheveled from driving with the windows down. He didn’t look at the lake at first. He looked at me, his eyes frantic, sweeping over my mud-streaked dress and pale face, checking for blood, for injuries, for anything that might have physically hurt me.
“Avery!”
He crossed the distance between the road and the shoreline in three long strides, skidding slightly in the mud before catching me by the shoulders. His hands were warm, firm, and grounding.
“Are you okay? Did he touch you?”
“I’m fine,” I whispered, leaning into his chest for just a second to let the smell of cedarwood and crisp iron anchor me. “I’m entirely fine.”
Nathan turned his head then, following my gaze out onto the lake. I felt the breath leave him in a sharp, ragged hiss.
“Jesus Christ,” Nathan breathed. His hands dropped from my shoulders, balling into fists at his sides. He took two steps toward Derek, his frame suddenly towering, his posture rigid with an anger that was cold, calculated, and terrifying. “You pushed it in. You actually pushed it into the water.”
My father, Mark, finally stepped out from behind the tailgate of his sedan. He had his hands in his khakis, shoulders hunched against the wind, looking less like a patriarch and more like an anxious referee who had lost control of the game before the first whistle.
“Alright, let’s everybody just take a breath,” Dad said, his voice carrying that familiar, placating pitch that had smoothed over thirty years of broken windows, unpaid loans, and shattered promises. “Nathan, step back. This is between Derek and Avery. It’s a family misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding?” Nathan wheeled on him, his voice echoing over the flat surface of the lake. “Mark, he stole her car on her wedding morning and drove it into a reservoir! That isn't a misunderstanding. That’s grand larceny and felony destruction of property!”
“He didn't steal it!” Dad snapped, his face flushing crimson. The jovial amusement he’d worn minutes earlier had vanished, replaced by the defensive fury of a man whose golden child was suddenly under threat. “It was George’s car! It belongs to all of us! Avery was being stubborn, turning down seventy thousand dollars that could have paid off Derek’s business debts—”
“Derek doesn’t have a business, Dad!” I interrupted, my voice cutting through his excuses like a straight razor. “Derek has unpaid credit cards from three different casinos in Biloxi and a failed bar investment he lied to you about.”
Derek lunged forward half a step, his fists clenched. “Shut your mouth, Avery!”
Nathan put himself between us instantly. He didn't shout. He didn't raise his hands. He just stood there, broader and taller than Derek, his eyes dead and unblinking. “Take another step toward her, Derek. Give me a reason.”
Derek stopped, glaring, but the fear in his eyes wasn't just about Nathan. He kept glancing over Nathan’s shoulder, out at the white roof slowly sinking another inch into the silt.
“What was in the trunk, Avery?” Derek demanded again, his voice cracking slightly. “Tell me what was in the compartment!”
“Why do you care?” I asked, meeting his eyes. “You said it yourself: if you can’t have it, nobody can. You decided that car had no value unless you could turn it into quick cash. So whatever went to the bottom with it... that’s gone, too.”
“Avery,” Dad said, stepping closer, his expression hardening. “Stop playing games. If your grandfather left something valuable in that car—if there are bonds, or cash, or family heirlooms—that belongs to the estate. It has to go through probate. It has to be split evenly.”
“The estate was settled eighteen months ago, Dad,” I said. “Grandpa left the house to you, the savings to Mom, and the car to me. You signed the waivers. You didn't want the car because you thought it was a fifty-year-old money pit that leaked oil on your driveway. You told the attorney you didn’t care what happened to it.”
“That was before some idiot offered seventy grand for it!” Derek shouted. “She kept that from us! She knew what it was worth!”
“I didn't know what it was worth until Caleb Morgan showed up yesterday!” I shot back. “And even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered! I didn't keep it for the money! I kept it because Grandpa built that engine with his own hands, because he taught me how to rebuild a carburetor while you were passed out on the couch on Saturday mornings!”
A siren wailed in the distance.
The sound was faint at first, a rising pitch carried on the wind through the pines, but it was unmistakable.
Dad’s head snapped toward the highway. “Who called the police?”
Nathan didn't look away from Derek. “I did. The second Avery called me and said the car was missing from your driveway, I dialed the county sheriff. I told them a vintage vehicle had been stolen by an individual with a history of property damage.”
“Nathan, you cancel that call right now!” Dad ordered, his voice rising in panic. “You do not call the cops on family! Do you have any idea what this looks like? The wedding is in four hours! The caterers are at the church! People are flying in from Chicago!”
“Let them fly in,” I said, pulling my cell phone out of the small satin clutch I had dropped in the grass. “We aren’t having a wedding today.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the water seemed to stop lapping against the shore.
Dad stared at me as if I had spoken in tongues. “What did you just say?”
“We aren’t having a wedding today,” I repeated, looking directly into my father’s eyes. “I am not standing in front of two hundred people pretending that we are a loving, functional family while my brother stands in the front row smelling of lake water and lake mud. I am not letting you walk me down any aisle, Dad. Not today. Not ever.”
“Avery, don’t do this,” my mother’s voice came from behind us.
Lisa had arrived in her own car. She was already wearing her mother-of-the-bride dress—a soft, dusty rose lace that had cost three months of her substitute-teaching salary. Her hair was pinned in elaborate curls that were now beginning to unravel in the damp lake mist. She ran down the slope, catching herself on Dad’s arm, her eyes wide with terror as she looked at the water.
“Oh, Derek... what did you do?” she whispered, her hands fluttering to her throat. But then, as she always did, she turned her eyes to me. “Avery... sweetheart. Look at you. Your dress is ruined. Please, let’s just go back to the house. We can get you cleaned up. We can dry-clean the train. We can hire a wrecker to pull the car out later—privately. No one has to know.”
“Everyone is going to know, Mom,” I said.
“Avery, think about your brother!” she pleaded, tears welling in her eyes, spilling over her carefully applied foundation. “If he gets arrested for this, he’ll violate his probation from that fight last summer! He’ll go to jail! You can’t put your brother in jail on your wedding day!”
“I didn't put Derek in jail, Mom,” I said, holding out the muddy keys. “He drove himself there.”
The siren crested the hill, followed closely by the blue-and-white flashers of two patrol cars and the lumbering, heavy chassis of a county flatbed wrecker.
Derek stepped backward toward the tree line, but Nathan shifted slightly, cutting off his only clear path to the road.
“Don't run, Derek,” Nathan said quietly. “You’ll only make it worse for yourself.”
Derek’s chest heaved. He looked at the approaching cruisers, then at Mom, then at Dad, and finally at me. The arrogant, untouchable boy who had reigned over my childhood was gone, replaced by a desperate, trapped animal.
“Tell me what’s in the trunk,” he hissed, his teeth bare. “If you don’t drop the charges, Avery, I swear to God—”
“You swear to God what?” I asked, stepping right into his face, ignoring the mud that splashed onto my slippers. “You’ll push something else into the lake? You’ll ruin another day of my life? You’ve taken my childhood, you took every room in that house, you took Dad’s pride and Mom’s sanity, and today you took Grandpa’s car. You don’t have anything left to take from me, Derek.”
The first cruiser lurched to a halt in the gravel. Deputy Sheriff Vance—a man who had gone to high school with my father and knew the Collins family far too well—stepped out, his hand resting casually on his utility belt. He looked at the white metal roof sticking out of the lake, looked at Derek covered in mud, and then looked at me in my ruined bridal gown.
May you like
“Well, Mark,” Vance said, taking off his hat and scratching his forehead. “Looks like you folks are having quite the morning.”
---
