Sinister Summer

by Colleen Gleason

  He was looking at her with shocked eyes. “I see,” he said after a moment. “All right. All right, I guess I must have just…rushed things a little. Just…come to bed. We can just sleep. I want to be near you.”

  Diana nodded. She’d give him that, at least.

  And maybe, just maybe, in the morning she’d wake up next to him and things would be better.

  Sunday mornings were lazy ones at the Murphy household. Ethan finally rolled out of bed—to Cady’s immense relief—at ten o’clock, and staggered sleepily to the door to let the prancing dog out to do her business.

  He stood in the doorway, arms folded over his bare chest and enjoyed the feel of the morning breeze over his naked body. Yawning, he stretched one arm straight into the air, and let it drop to scratch his head, then to his rump, then to adjust his balls. It was heaven living in a place where you could walk in your back yard naked.

  Cady finished her business and decided she wanted to play, and Ethan, now fully awake, stepped off the porch onto the lawn. His yard was a half-acre of clipped velvety grass, studded with a few trees and surrounded by sky-scraping pines and heavy woods—and was less comfortable in the evenings than the morning because of the flies and mosquitoes. Wicks Lake glittered blue just down a small incline, between pines and maples and cottonwoods.

  “Come on, Cady, let’s go swimming.” He grabbed a pair of shorts that hung over a chair on the deck.

  At the suggestion, the lab dropped the stick with which she’d been dancing about, and tore down the incline, splashing gleefully into the water. Though he didn’t strictly need them, Ethan pulled on the shorts, then followed Cady down a cedar chip path. He knew better than to hesitate when he got to the bottom, so he dove off his dock into the lake.

  He surfaced, whooping from the shock, and whipped his hair back. Cady paddled up next to him, thumping against him with her paws (and occasionally, with a nail), then headed back toward the shore where she could chase a goose. Ethan swam out from the tree-lined, shady shore and turned to look back.

  His gaze went to the white clapboard house and its detached garage just a half-mile down from his. Jean’s house sat on a bigger hill than his cabin’s, and had a larger yard cleared of trees. Ethan could even see Diana’s pale gold Lexus sitting in the drive, presumably because Jean’s car was still in the garage.

  He floated on his back, narrowing his eyes against the sun. He tried to stop the mental image—but there it was: the ice-queen and her cardiologist, messing up those lacy pillows and embroidered sheets on that high Victorian bed.

  Disgust roiled inside him once again—anger for Genevieve, and annoyance with himself. Although Diana’s accusations had infuriated him at the time, he’d since come to realize that he didn’t give a rat’s behind what she thought about him…

  And he actually felt more than a bit smug, knowing that she thought the worst of him while he knew the worst of her.

  Ethan allowed himself to sink under the lake’s surface, then rise back up and let the water plaster his hair back. Cady was paddling back out to him, her nose just above the water, whuffling and snuffling. “Wanna go back?” he asked, then did a shallow dive, resurfacing several feet away.

  They stumbled to shore at the same time, Cady shaking herself from head to tail as Ethan tossed his hair back and wiped the water from his eyes. They hurried back to the house, refreshed and hungry.

  Just as they stepped onto the screened-in porch, Ethan heard his cell phone ringing from inside. He snagged a towel slung over a chair, pointed a finger at a dripping Cady and ordered, “Park it.” He looked at his phone and saw that Joe Longbow was calling. “Yo.”

  “Hey, buddy, get your lazy ass outta bed and let’s go catch us some walleye,” said Joe. “It’s practically noon.”

  “Hey, man, I’ve been up and swimming already.”

  “Great. Well, I hope you didn’t scare away all the fish. Bax and I—and that new guy, Declan—’ll be over in fifteen with the worms, brews, and sandwiches if you supply the boat and the poles.” Joe Longbow’s voice had such a drawl to it that even when he was furious, the end of the sentence didn’t catch up to the beginning until the next day.

  “Sure sounds better than what I had planned—which was mulching around the trees. Make sure you bring one of Mirabella’s corned beef sandwiches for me. A big thick one. With lots of dressing.” Ethan hung up the phone, feeling pretty content.

  Sure, the walleye or pike didn’t bite much at noon, but fishing was just an excuse to sit in the boat and relax with a couple of buddies, and jump in the lake when it got too hot.

  True to his word—for he drove faster than he spoke—Joe Cap, as he was commonly called, pealed down the gravel drive in his shiny, nick-free, black F10 pickup minutes later. Baxter James, creator of Baxter’s Beatnik Brews, sat in the front seat, holding onto the granny handle. In the hop seat behind was another guy Ethan didn’t know.

  Baxter was a little older than Ethan—mid-thirties—and hit at just under six feet tall. He kept his afro shaved almost to the scalp but allowed his precisely-shaped, trimmed-daily goatee and mustache to grow a little longer. He was a freelance journalist and wrote for several local papers, including the Grand Rapids Press, while trying to build his microbrew business on the side. So far, he’d been successful juggling both; but as Baxter often bemoaned, he’d like to have a woman in the mix to juggle too.

  The third guy was a well-built man about their age as well. He had dark auburn hair and broad shoulders. His short sleeves displayed muscles that would probably make the ladies swoon and had Ethan automatically flexing his own.

  “Declan Zyler,” said the newcomer, offering his hand to Ethan. “Appreciate you letting me come along today.”

  “Dec just moved here. He’s got a daughter at the high school and he’s going to be doing the single-dad thing.”

  “Well, I wish you the best with that,” Ethan said with a grin as they shook hands. “A teenage daughter sounds…fun.”

  Declan laughed and nodded. “Yeah. Talk about making my way blindly.”

  “That looks like it hurt,” Ethan commented when he noticed a burn on the guy’s forearm.

  “Hazard of the trade,” he replied. “I’m a blacksmith. Do a lot of restoration and repair.”

  “He just finished some work for Trib,” Joe Cap said, walking over with a handful of rods and a large tackle box in the other hand.

  “Hey, be careful with those.” Ethan was distracted as Baxter hefted out a large cooler that clinked with beer bottles and ice. “We don’t want any casualties.”

  “Only empty bottles,” replied Joe Cap. Almost fifty, happily married with three kids—and going gray to prove it, as he was often heard to say—Joe was an easy-going guy unless something threatened the peace or safety of Wicks Hollow. Then, as the town’s police chief, he drew on his experience as a Marine in the first Iraq war and handily took care of business.

  Taking the tackle box and three fishing poles, along with a net and a six-pack, Ethan looked at the older guy. “So you’re not on today, Joe Cap? Or is that all just for Bax and Declan and me?” He gestured to the beer. “Might be enough for the three of us.” He grinned.

  “Naw,” said Joe, adjusting his Tigers ball cap. “We had enough excitement down the station the last month, with Bella and Reggie’s till bein’ broken into, and Jean Fickler bein’ found, and a fender-bender down over on 69 with some drunk tourists, that I decided to give myself the day off. Helga’s on today.”

  The four men trudged down the incline with their supplies, with Cady tramping through the brush in a zigzag toward the lake.

  “Yeah,” Ethan said as he tossed the tackle box into a leaky dinghy that was only useful for fishing. His bright blue canoe sat upside down on its stand near the shore. “That’s too bad about Jean. I didn’t hear about it till I got back here.” He took and loaded the beer crate from Baxter, then a big-ass cooler with their lunch from Declan.

  “I didn’t know if you’d ge
t the message—where were you?” Joe said as he checked that the fishing pole lines were hooked tight. “The armpit of Brazil or something? I figured it’d cost too much to call your cell when you’re out in the jungle.”

  “Peru,” Ethan told his friend. “Macchu Picchu. It was pretty rustic there.”

  “You seen her niece here in town?” Joe pulled off the ball cap, scratched his head, then yanked the hat back down. “She’s pretty hot, and now she’s loaded, too.”

  Ethan stepped into the softly rocking boat. “Maybe hot looking, but she can freeze your balls with a look. Besides, I don’t think Penny would take too kindly to hearing her husband call another woman hot.”

  Joe actually looked a bit frightened at the thought, then his face shifted into a grin that matched his drawl as he settled in the prow of the boat. “Naw, Ethan, I’m not looking for me—I’m looking for you—and Baxter and Declan, here, too. Though Bax here’s been sniffing around that Emily Delton for a couple years now, huh? How’s it going, there, Bax?”

  “I keep hoping she’ll invite me to come up for a massage at the spa, but hasn’t happened yet,” replied the brewmaster with a mock wounded smile. Emily Delton owned a fancy-schmancy spa and salon on the edge of Wicks Hollow. Fiona raved about something they did there called an aromatherapy mud wrap, which to Ethan sounded sticky and stinky.

  “Doesn’t Emily have a teenager, too, Dec? Don’t know why you’d want to get involved with someone who’s got one of those, Baxter.” Cap spoke from experience, as he and Penny had seventeen-year-old twins and a fourteen-year-old. “But what about you, Murph? How long’s it been since you and Jenny split up? Two years? You’ve had that—what’d ya call it?—moratorium thing going on for long enough. You got t’be mighty lonely in that big old cabin.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Cap. My cabin’s not that big, and yes, I’m still staying far away from any females. Especially that ice-queen Diana Iverson. Cady and I are just fine all by ourselves.” Without waiting for Baxter to sit, Ethan shoved the boat away from the dock with enough force to set it rocking. “Besides, she’s got a boyfriend.”

  “Geez, be careful there, Murph.” Baxter glanced at him from under the brim of his sun-bleached cowboy hat as he sat down just before he tipped over the side. “Did you say she’s an ice-queen? What happened? She seemed nice when I met her.”

  “I thought so too,” Joe Cap drawled from his safer position at the front of the boat. “Quiet, and a little fancy, but nice enough.”

  Ethan chose a pole and unlatched the hook from its moor through one of the rings. Digging into a Styrofoam carton of rich black soil, he pulled out a squirming worm and wove it onto the hook. Then, setting it down, he gave the oars two powerful strokes, shooting them out toward the middle of the lake. “You meet her at the funeral?”

  “Yeah—you know, I was the one found Jean, and it didn’t seem right not to go.” Joe baited his own hook as he added as hastily as he ever did, “Not that I wouldn’t’ve not gone anyway, yannow. She was a real nice lady, and Penny liked her a lot.”

  “You said you don’t like the niece—but you weren’t at the funeral,” said Baxter, popping the top of one of his beers. The bottles were unlabeled, which meant they were a “mystery brew”—still in the testing phase. “When’d you meet her, Murph? Here. Try one of these—I’m doing an amber this month. Gonna call it Red Hart—hart like a deer, you know, not the one here.” He thumped his chest unnecessarily.

  Ethan took the bottle and set it between his feet so he could row. “I didn’t even know Jean died till I showed up at her house the other night. I surprised the hell out of the niece ’cause she didn’t take too kindly to me walking in like I always do.” Ethan folded the oars back into the boat and looked out over the sparkling lake as they slowed to a mere drift. The clapboard house glinted like a white beacon in the noon sun and he looked away.

  “I’ll bet she didn’t. Coming from a big city like Chicago, as she does,” Baxter said, giving him a side-eye. “She probably was a little taken aback by a strange man walking into her house.”

  Ethan frowned at his buddy as Joe Cap grunted in something like agreement and Declan gave a bark of laughter. Well, hell. He hadn’t known Jean wasn’t there, and that Diana was, for chrissake.

  The blacksmith dumped the anchor into the water with a minor splash and, with a quick flick of his wrist, sent a long, smooth cast over the lake. The fishing line glinted like a cobweb in the sunlight, then settled over and into the depths of blue.

  “So you found Jean, huh?” Ethan’s line soared in a different direction, and was followed by Bax’s expert cast, then Joe’s…and all was peaceful. The waves lapped gently against the side of the dingy. “How’d that happen?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t show for a doctor appointment on that Friday, and Gallagher got worried and called the station. I went down and got into the house and found her. Poor old woman—die alone like that. Looked like she’d been dead a while. At least a day.”

  “She died in her sleep is what Diana told me.”

  “Yep, so it appeared.”

  “At least she didn’t go through any pain,” Declan mused.

  “Nope. Hope not.” Joe’s attention was not fixed on the fishing line he owned. Nor his beer, Ethan noticed. His lips were pursed like he was gnawing on something.

  “Everything all right, there, Cap?”

  “Mm.” He thought about it for a moment, staring out at the lake. “She had a heart problem—documented in her medical records. There was no sign of struggle, of forced entry, of robbery...but something don’t seem right about it. It’s been bothering me…but I dunno what it is.” He sighed, then abruptly jerked to attention when one of the silvery lines shivered. “Bax, hell, wake up—you got one!”

  The other man jolted and grabbed his arching pole before it went overside. Ethan sipped his beer—the Red Hart was pretty good; much better than the raspberry stout he’d sampled last time Baxter tried to get fancy—and watched as his buddy began to manipulate the reel: in and out, in and out…pull’em in…slowly let it out…all in a natural rhythm that echoed the lapping of waves against the boat.

  Something about Jean’s death didn’t sit right with Joe Cap…which could explain why Ethan himself had felt so unsettled. Had something more sinister happened to Jean that night?

  Was that why those Tarot cards had been teasing Diana so much? He didn’t believe it was a coincidence that the same card had shown up three times. Not at all. The problem was getting Miss Facts and Logic to believe it.

  Hell, he thought as the tip of his pole began to bounce, if anyone were to bring a message from the grave, it would be Genevieve Fickler.

  The wind rushed through the Lexus’s moon roof, tossing Diana’s hair with the same abandon as her mind zipped through her thoughts. She was cruising at a speedy seventy miles per hour along Interstate 69 after dropping Jonathan off to catch his late afternoon flight.

  As she maneuvered the car around smooth curves and up and down slight inclines, Diana considered the other question that had been brooding in her mind since her dream yesterday: Was it possible? Had Aunt Jean been smothered in her own bed?

  And could it have been Ethan Murphy who’d done it?

  Keeping her lawyer hat on, and refusing to allow her dislike of the man—or her reluctant attraction to him—to color her thoughts, Diana considered the situation.

  First of all, she was basing this on a dream. A mere dream.

  But, yes, a terrifyingly real one. One that she’d had every night since she arrived in Aunt Jean’s house, even though she hadn’t immediately recognized it for what it was. And yesterday morning, she’d awakened with a certainty that even she couldn’t shake, using her logical, science-based mind.

  If it were true, if Aunt Jean had been smothered—murdered—who could have done it? And why?

  Ethan had known Jean well. Well enough to walk into her house uninvited. He obviously hadn’t known she was dead until Diana told him…but, th
en…if he had killed her and he knew she was dead, he would have walked into the house intending for Diana to think he had that kind of freedom. And playing dumb—as a sort of alibi?

  He said he’d been out of the country, but of course that might not be true. She wondered how she could find out for sure.

  Yet he knew where the house key was hidden—so obviously Aunt Jean had trusted him. Tapping her finger against the steering wheel, Diana frowned. Poor Aunt Jean…so gullible and trusting to be taken in by a pretty face.

  But now that she was dead, Ethan Murphy’s source of money would also be gone, for Diana knew he hadn’t been named in the will. She and the local animal shelter run by Melvin Horner were the only beneficiaries. So what motive was there for someone to kill Aunt Jean if they weren’t going to inherit any of her money?

  Ethan had been friendly to Diana—but not overly so, as if he were trying to inveigle his way into her good graces in order to keep the flow of money going.

  She grimaced. If he had meant to cozy up to her, he’d definitely blundered that part of it, for it seemed he only knew how to rub her the wrong way.

  He didn’t appear to have a very favorable opinion of her either, based on his seething words before he left Aunt Jean’s the other night: You’re a fool. You don’t deserve a bit of the pride and affection your aunt had for you.

  But, then again…she’d caught him studying her at the Grille last night. She wouldn’t lie to herself—that steady, avid gaze had caused her fingers to become clumsy and her heart to pump just a little faster.

  Even now, her heart fumbled a beat at the memory. That had been a dangerous look, coming from a dangerous man.

  So caught up was she in her train of thought that she almost missed the road leading to the north end of Wicks Lake. Slowing the car, she made the turn and forced her thoughts onto a different track. As she navigated along the paved two-lane road, Diana looked to her right and was just able to see glimpses of the dark blue of the sinuous lake. The sun was low in the sky, and dropping nearly as quickly as she was driving. Soon, she wouldn’t be able to see the water at all through the darkness.