Read HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down for Free Online

know,” he said. “I thought . . .”
    “You thought what? Come in, you’re soaked.”
    He realized that he was standing there, dripping, and that seemed to snap him fully out of it. Jared gathered himself and strode across the kitchen floor, leaving muddy tracks. He brushed past her without a word and stepped into the vestibule where the linen closet was. He opened the door and peered in. “Where are all the towels?”
    “I washed them.”
    “Why?”
    “Because they needed it. They were old. Musty.”
    He found a smaller one left behind, and took it out and began to daub himself around the face and neck, his back to her. “You should have come with me tonight,” he said, “if you’re going to get that bored.”
    “I wasn’t bored.”
    She could smell the booze on him; it hung like a cloud, mixing with the odor of cigarettes, and the wet, metallic smell of the rain. The storm continued to pound the small house. It was loud in the driveway, turning the dirt to muddy splashback. Off the front porch, over the embankment and down to the pond, she could hear the shhhhhhhhhhh of the rain pummeling the pond. She wondered if her loon was alright, if he’d taken cover.
    “What was in the Jeep?” she asked again.
    He was silent for a moment, still blotting himself with the towel. Then he turned around and faced her. She instantly felt constricted there in the small vestibule and she backed away into the kitchen.
    “I thought it was a raccoon,” he said, a lopsided grin on his face. The shotgun was still in his other hand, muzzle pointed down.
    “It wasn’t?”
    “No.”
    “Did it get away?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I mean, you saw it?”
    “I opened the hatch, gun ready.” Jared swung the barrel up, aiming it up the stairs, reenacting, crouching. “And the fuckin’ thing tore right past me. Scrambled, sort of. Like it had longer legs than a coon.” He stood up straight, lowered his weapon again and shook his head in the exaggerated way of a drunk telling a story. “Fuckin’ thing,” he said. Then he looked to the door to the back porch, as if considering going back out to look for it.
    “Well,” Elizabeth said, “it’s gone. Why don’t you come up to bed?”
    He looked at her, making up his mind, and again she noticed the fatigue beneath his eyes, despite how wide and alert they looked. He opened his mouth, hopefully to agree, to help Liz put an end to this disorienting day, but then his head jerked back around in the direction of the back porch.
    “Do you hear that?”
    She listened. All she heard was the rain. The symphony of it; its many different sounds as it poured down on wood, shingle, mud, pond water.
    “No,” she said. “What? The raccoon?”
    He said nothing, and held up one finger, the towel still clutched in his fist, the shotgun in his other hand. Now he swung the barrel up for a second time, catching it with his hand. The towel dropped as he started across the linoleum floor.
    “Jared. Come on, babe, it’s late.”
    “Shhh,” he hissed at her over his shoulder, and bent his knees, walking in a half-crouch.
    She was about to turn and huff up the stairs when she did hear it.
    There was a sound beneath the rain, constant, like a generator. No oscillation in the noise, just a flat, growl-hum. Like the sound of a chainsaw, only the chainsaw was sawing through something it shouldn’t be, like bone, like flesh . . .
    She watched Jared cross the kitchen floor in a kind of killer’s posture. It made her skin crawl, as if she didn’t know him, as if she’d never seen him before this night, and something seemed to pound on a door in the back of her mind, urgent to be let out, dying to be allowed into the light, into the air, before it killed her.
    Something she had buried, and buried deep.
    “Jared,” she said, “you’re scaring me.”
    He said nothing; he gripped the shotgun. He was almost at the door. The noise, the unnerving guttural hum was still there.
    Elizabeth stood, freezing, her