by Wendy Webb
Marie swallowed hard and continued. “I truly had forgotten about the old family story as the years went by, but when you were born, your affinity for the water . . . and now your dreams . . .”
Addie took a deep breath in. “I’m a daughter of the lake, too?”
Marie nodded. “I want you always to honor your great-grandmother and the lake by listening to the wisdom of your dreams. Promise me, Addie.”
“I will, Mama,” Addie promised.
“Now,” Marie said, “let’s talk about the dream you had last night. I have a feeling that together you and I can unlock what it was trying to tell you.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The next morning dawned crisp and bright in Wharton, but Kate’s head was fuzzy from too much wine the night before. What had Simon been thinking, opening bottle after bottle? What had she been thinking, drinking it all? She decided to take a walk along the shoreline with Alaska to clear her head before meeting Simon back at the inn for breakfast.
She recognized a familiar figure on the lakeshore, and the sight of him stopped her short. She thought of turning around and heading back up to the inn before she had to talk to him, but Alaska started barking at a small dog that was now running toward them.
Nick Stone whirled around. “Queenie! No!”
But the dog just kept coming. Kate pulled Alaska in tight. Malamutes were famously wary of, and even aggressive toward, other dogs, and because of their size and strength, they could easily kill with one bite.
Kate positioned herself between the small dog and Alaska as Nick ran toward them. But both of their efforts failed—and to Kate’s astonishment, the two dogs greeted each other like old friends. Sniffing, jumping, playing.
“Wow,” Nick said, eyeing Alaska. “That’s a whole lot of dog. Is she a malamute?”
Kate nodded. “She is indeed. And yours? Corgi?”
“My faithful companion, Queenie.”
“Not named for the most famous corgi-phile in the world . . .”
“Queen Elizabeth,” he said, laughing. “I didn’t name her. She’s a rescue.”
The two of them, their dogs running ahead, began walking down the shoreline together.
“Her original owner was an elderly lady who died a rather suspicious death,” he said, kicking a rock into the water. “Poison, as it turned out.”
“Oh no.”
“Yeah. It was ugly. The son-in-law. Anyway, Queenie ended up homeless. I was investigating the crime and—I don’t know. I took one look at her, sitting vigil so sadly by the body of her dead owner, and I just couldn’t let her go to a shelter. I took her home with me then and there. That was eight years ago. She hasn’t left my side since, through thick and thin.”
Kate smiled at this man, knowing how powerful an animal’s love and loyalty could be. She was glad he felt the same way.
“I’d have thought you were more the police-dog type,” she said.
He laughed. “I tried to convince them to send Queenie through the training, but the powers that be didn’t think that a corgi would instill the same fear in criminals as a German shepherd. I think they’re wrong about that, by the way. She’s small, but she’s a badass.”
Kate chuckled. “Any new developments on the case since we talked yesterday?” she asked.
“Not that I can say,” Nick hedged, not telling her about the DNA results they’d received late yesterday afternoon.
She stopped. “So, there is something.”
“There might be, but I’m not in the habit of blurting out details of a murder case to a random dog walker-slash-suspect in said case.”
Kate caught the note of teasing in his voice, but his words made her stomach flip. “I’m still a suspect?”
“Until we solve this case, everyone is a suspect,” he said, tilting his head toward an elderly woman making her way down the street with a walker. “Her, for example.”
Kate muffled a laugh. “I thought of something, actually, about that ninety-year-old nightgown,” she said.
“Did you, now?”
“I did,” Kate said. “It’s got to be vintage. I was thinking—since Anderson Mills was based here in Wharton, the thrift shop on Front Street might have carried the nightgown. Our woman might have bought it there. Somebody might remember her.”
“Not bad sleuthing, Miss Marple.” He grinned. “But unfortunately, no. They have carried some items from Anderson, but not for a long time. And nobody there recognized the woman in the photo or the nightgown she was wearing.”
Kate felt her spirits drop. “So you’ve been there already. I was going to stop in after breakfast.”
“Beat you to the punch, I’m afraid,” Nick said. “It’s good when the detectives are one or two steps ahead of the suspects, as a rule.”
Kate stopped. “You don’t really believe I had anything to do with this, do you?”
Nick gave her a sidelong glance. “In my gut, no,” he said. “And neither does Queenie, in case you were wondering about that. But, like I said—”
“I know, I know, everyone is a suspect until you solve the case,” Kate said.
“And now, I’ve got to get back to it,” he said. “Nice to see you again, Kate Granger.”
He set off, Queenie at his heels, but he turned back toward Kate. Walking backward a few steps, he said, “Maybe I’ll see you out here walking your dog again sometime soon.”
Kate could feel the heat rising to her cheeks. “Maybe!” she called, holding up a hand to wave. And then she turned back toward the inn, walking with a buoyancy in her step that she hadn’t felt in a long time.
She found Simon sitting at a table by the window in the dining room with a breakfast of goat cheese frittata, sausage, and steaming coffee, along with two mimosas.
“You are a very bad man,” Kate laughed, taking one of the flutes.
“Thought you could use a little hair of the dog,” Simon said. “I know I could. Head. Ache. I should know better. Red-wine hangovers will kill you.”
“Last night was fun.” Kate smiled and sat down. They squeezed each other’s hands. Kate was impossibly glad to be in Wharton with Simon. It had been much too long since they had really spent time together. Five years too long.
“Listen, I’ve had an idea,” Simon said. “You know we’re planning to tackle that third-floor restoration project this winter. A ton of old boxes are up there that I just haven’t had a chance to get to. I want to sift through them and find any suitable photographs or artwork or other things to display. You know I like to use original things from the house to decorate.”
“And?”
“And I’d love your help with that. Since you’re planning on staying in town awhile, I thought maybe I could steal you for the rest of the day. Maybe two.”
“I’d love that!” Kate cried. She could think of no better way to spend time than combing through old family heirlooms and artifacts of the past. Just the thing to take her mind off the present. “I haven’t been up to that third floor since we were kids.”
The cousins shared a grimace. When visiting their grandparents, young Kate and Simon had feared the third floor. The house had been inhabited by elderly people for so many years that the third floor, with the steep staircase leading up to it, had long since fallen into disrepair. It was dark, dusty, and filled with the ghosts of the past—more so than either child realized—and as such, was a perfect haven for goose-bumped childhood exploration.
One of their favorite games was a variation of “chicken.” Hand in hand, Kate and Simon would creep up the dark staircase, knowing that a ghastly portrait, propped haphazardly against a trunk, awaited them when they reached the top. It was the image of a particularly stern woman wearing a black dress and veil, like some sort of haunted bride of the dead. Neither child knew that it was a portrait of Celeste’s mother, who was hanging on to a peculiar dislike of the Connor children and their presence in a house she still regarded as her daughter’s and her daughter’s alone.
The game
was to see who could endure the gaze of the “lady in black” the longest. Usually it ended seconds after it began, with Simon and Kate flying—shrieking, breathless, hearts pumping—down the stairs, back to the normalcy and safety of their grandmother’s welcoming home. One day, however, the game went differently.
As Simon beat the well-worn path down the stairs, Kate remained in the room, unable to move, transfixed by the portrait’s gaze. Mysterious and threatening as it was to a nine-year-old girl, the woman’s flat image on the canvas—her dark, hollow eyes penetrating the veil; her stern countenance; her black dress; all of it—seemed to animate, there, before Kate’s wide eyes.
Kate heard the words, clear and forbidding.
“Get out. Get out of this house.”
Frozen to the spot, Kate gasped but could not take in any air. She felt as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. Kate tried to take a breath, and then another, then another, but nothing entered her lungs.
She found her feet and flew down the stairs in an instant, screaming in the high-pitched way that only young girls can manage, knocking Simon down when, it seemed, a full lifetime later, she finally reached the bottom.
“You win,” Simon said, simply.
“I don’t want to go up there again.” Kate was gasping, finally able to take a breath, feeling as though she had been nearly suffocated.
And that was the end of their third-floor games.
Now, with decades of sense and reason between her and that otherworldly experience, she was anxious to see what secrets the third floor held.
Kate took a bite of her breakfast. “I had intended to start trying to find more information about my mystery woman today, but, hey, Addie can wait.”
Simon looked at her for a long while. “What did you say?”
“When?” Kate was confused.
“Just now. What did you say?”
“I said that I was going to delve into this mystery today, but it can wait,” Kate said.
“No, you didn’t say that.” Simon’s eyes were wide. “I think you said, ‘Addie can wait.’ Who’s Addie?”
Kate was silent, searching her brain. “I have no idea,” she said, finally. “I wasn’t thinking. I just said it.”
Simon finished his mimosa in a gulp and set the flute down on the table. “Okay, that’s really weird.” He was excited. The two sat staring at each other. “Katie, do you think that’s her name? Your woman’s name?”
“I don’t know.” Kate rubbed her arms and shivered.
“Oh, that’s her name,” Simon said, holding out his arm to display goose bumps. “I can feel it.”
“Me too,” Kate said, her thoughts swirling back toward her dreams, the woman and her husband, her body on the beach.
“Addie,” Simon was murmuring. “What kind of name is that, anyway?”
“It sounds sort of old fashioned, doesn’t it? Could be short for Adeline or something like that,” Kate said. “Maybe it came up in one of my dreams about her, and it just slipped my mind. How else would I know it?”
“How else, indeed,” Simon said, raising his eyebrows with a mock sense of drama. “This little mystery just keeps getting better and better. You should come here more often. This is the most excitement I’ve had in months.”
After breakfast, Simon and Kate made their way through Harrison’s House toward the third floor. Kate loved these hallways. The walls were papered with a rich, red print and filled with family photos and portraits. The brightly colored decor—deep reds and yellows contrasted with the dark wood of the doors, doorframes, and moldings—allowed visitors to imagine this house in its heyday more than a century ago. Kate liked to think of her grandmother as a child in this house, growing up with all this opulence and beauty around her.
“We just haven’t had a chance to tackle the renovation of the third floor before now,” Simon lamented as they walked through the hallways. “We had intended to renovate one floor a year, but we got so busy so quickly . . .” As they reached a door at the end of the second-floor hallway, he fished an old-fashioned skeleton key out of his pocket.
“Original?” Kate wondered.
“Of course,” Simon replied. “I had all of the locks replaced on the guest bedrooms, but there was just something about these old keys that made me want to keep some of them around.” He held the key up for Kate to see.
“It really gives you a sense of how long ago this place was built,” Kate mused. “I haven’t seen a key like that in years. I can’t think of the last time.”
“I guarantee you, when you get upstairs, you won’t remember the last time you saw that much dust, either.” Simon laughed and put the key in the lock. It opened with a satisfying chock. Hand in hand, just as he had when they were children, Simon led Kate up the cobwebbed stairway.
The contrast was dramatic and immediate. The vibrant colors of the second-floor hallway faded as the pair ascended the stairs, which seemed as gray and dull as the thick coating of dust covering it all. Kate stopped halfway up the staircase and turned around, noting the odd juxtaposition of the reds and yellows in the hallway through the doorframe with the dull gray of the staircase on which they now stood.
“You know what this reminds me of?” Kate whispered to Simon. “The scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and Toto walk out of their black-and-white world into the rich colors of Oz for the first time. Only in reverse.”
“If you’re Dorothy, we both know who that makes me. I resent it.”
Kate laughed and gave her cousin a squeeze on the arm. They reached the top of the stairs, and Kate braced for her first view of the portrait in decades. It wasn’t there. She looked this way and that. Nothing.
“What did you do with the lady?” she asked her cousin.
“Oh, I brought her downstairs,” he said, brushing a cobweb from his shoulder. “She hangs over my bed now.”
Kate stared at her cousin, open mouthed. Simon shrieked with laughter.
“You are the most gullible person alive.” He shoved her arm, giggling. “As if I’d have that scowling shrew’s picture anywhere near me. I had Jonathan bring her down into the basement. I wouldn’t even touch her, and yet I didn’t dare throw her out.”
Only then did Kate realize she hadn’t yet seen Simon’s longtime partner.
“Where is Jonathan?” she asked. “With everything going on, I didn’t even think to ask. My God, I’ve been so self-absorbed. I’m so sorry.”
“He’s antiquing down south,” Simon said quickly. “We need some more furniture for this floor, and he needed a solo trip. And you’re forgiven for being self-absorbed. Now, let’s get to these boxes.”
Kate took hold of her cousin’s hands. “No. You love antiquing. You live for antiquing. You are never happier than when you’re haggling with an antique dealer.”
“And?”
“And—why didn’t you go with him?”
Simon smiled and squeezed her hands. “The dearest person in my world had her world fall apart, that’s why. When you called wanting to come here for a few days, I wasn’t about to say no. We had planned to be gone, so we didn’t book anybody in the hotel for these two weeks. And so, with no guests on the horizon, it seemed like the perfect chance to get some alone time, just me and you.”
Only then did it dawn on Kate she hadn’t seen any other guests, either. Self-absorbed indeed.
Tears tickled the backs of her eyes. “You gave up an antiquing trip with Jonathan for me?”
“Are you kidding? I’d give up stumbling across the Hope Diamond’s twin in an old trunk for you.” He furrowed his brow. “Well, okay. Not that. But just about anything else.”
The two shared a laugh. But Kate felt a twinge of guilt all the same.
“You’re so good to me,” she said.
“Of course I am,” he sniffed. “It’s what I do.”
Kate coughed and looked around. “Boy, you weren’t kidding about the dust up here,” she said.
To Kate, the room seeme
d to be the size of a high school gymnasium, or near enough. Rows of windows closed tight with indoor shutters lined the walls. Only a small amount of sunlight filtered through the slats.
At one end of the room stood a stone fireplace that reminded Kate of fireplaces she had seen in ancient castles in Europe. There was no hearth; instead the opening was at floor level and was nearly big enough to walk into. On each side of the massive fireplace, two doors stood closed and presumably locked. The room itself contained no furniture. Littered all over the floor was a collection of boxes and old chests, containing what Kate assumed were relics of the past.
Kate and Simon stood in silence for a few moments, taking in what was in front of them. “This is one huge room,” Kate whispered. “I didn’t remember it being so large.”
“It’s a ballroom,” Simon said. “I’ve always wanted a house with a ballroom in it. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask for, does it? A simple ballroom in which to hold cotillions, galas, and so forth. Everyone ought to have one.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t renovate this floor first,” Kate laughed. “Think of the parties you could’ve been hosting up here all of these years.”
“I know!” Simon cried. “Damn that practical Jonathan. It was his idea to get the moneymaking part of the operation going first thing.”
“What a bore,” Kate replied, and then she wondered, “Is the electricity working up here, or are we going to have to feel our way around in the gloom?”
“Oh,” Simon said. “That might have been a good idea, to flip the switch, as it were, for this floor. We had the whole house rewired, but I don’t have the juice turned on for this part of the house right now.”
“That’s okay, it’s a bright day. Let’s just open up some of these shutters, and we’ll have all the light we need.”
