Still Lake

by Anne Stuart

  “Do I bother you, Ms. Davis?”

  She had no choice but to meet his gaze. He was taunting her, and she was half tempted to tell him just how much he bothered her. And why.

  But that would be stupid. There was no question at all that the man was extremely attractive, with just the sort of romantic looks that would appeal to an angry, vulnerable teenage girl. If Sophie was to keep Marty safe from temptation, she needed to know her enemy, and Mr. Smith was giving her the perfect opportunity. She couldn’t quite figure out why, but she’d be a fool to miss it.

  “I told you, call me Sophie. And no, you don’t bother me,” she added with deceptive breeziness. “I’ll be happy to come back to the Whitten place and help you figure out what kind of work you’re going to need to have done. I believe in being a good neighbor.”

  “Oh, me too,” he said, and Sophie wondered whether or not she imagined the faint note of amusement in his voice.

  “Just let me check on my mother and tell Marty where I’m going.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea? Your sister was already pretty pissed at you.”

  “Marty’s always mad at me,” Sophie said with a sigh. “I’m used to it. Why don’t you wait for me out on the porch and I’ll be with you in a minute? Things seem pretty quiet around here for now.”

  He glanced toward the door that Marty had slammed on her way out. “All right,” he said, and headed out into the morning sunshine.

  But Sophie had the firm belief that the mysterious Mr. Smith wasn’t nearly as agreeable as he was trying to make her think he was.

  And she wondered if she was making a big mistake.

  4

  Two people were sitting down by the lake, talking in low voices, the freshly painted Adirondack chairs glistening in the August sunlight. Griffin should have stayed on the porch—Sophie Davis wasn’t going to be pleased with him for not following orders, but he’d never been the dutiful sort. Besides, the couple sitting down by the lake looked old enough to remember what had happened twenty years ago. Assuming they weren’t part of the massive influx of newcomers that had crowded Colby’s once-pristine confines.

  He walked down the lawn at a leisurely pace. He was playing with fire—what if they took one look at his face and recognized him? It would stop his investigation cold. Anyone who cared enough about the case would know his conviction had been overturned after five years and he’d been released, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t raise holy hell if they realized he’d come back.

  But he hadn’t returned to Still Lake to play it safe. If it had been up to him he never would have come back here at all. He’d made a perfectly comfortable life for himself, and the huge, yawning question had been easy enough to ignore.

  Not for Annelise, his law partner and ex-fiancée. It was time for them to get married, she’d announced in her cool, emotionless tones. She was ready to have children, she’d informed him, and all he could think of was a hen getting ready to hatch. He’d had the wisdom not to share that particular image with her.

  After all, she was smart, she was gorgeous, she was sophisticated. She was sexually adept. They knew each other well, appreciated their better qualities and ignored their worse ones. But Annelise had no intention of breeding with a murderer.

  “You’ve got to find out what really happened back then,” she’d told him in no uncertain terms. “There’s no way we can concentrate on the future without settling the past.”

  He wasn’t particularly interested in the future, any more than he cared about his sordid past. One day at a time was more his style, but Annelise was a woman with plans, and very talented at getting what she wanted. This time her wants coincided with his. Twenty years had passed—it was time to find out what really happened. Time to put the past to bed.

  And then Annelise had broken the engagement. His cool, practical bed partner had fallen ridiculously in love with one of their clients, and by the time she chose to inform him she had already been married for two days.

  Not that he was pining for her. As a matter of fact, what really bothered him was how little he cared. That and the faint note of relief that she hadn’t made the mistake of falling in love with him. The very thought made him shiver.

  Onward and upward, he reminded himself, drawing closer to the lake and the two old people watching him with unabashed interest. He’d never seen the woman before—he was sure of that, though he certainly hadn’t been paying much attention to older women during his previous sojourn in Colby. She was thin, oddly dressed, with flyaway gray hair and a slightly vacant look to her. She could have been anywhere between seventy and ninety, though he suspected she might be younger. And then he met her eyes, and found himself drawn by the surprisingly sharp gaze in their blue depths.

  A moment later they seemed to glaze over. “Who are you?” she demanded, not rudely, but like a young child. “Doc, who is he?”

  Shit, he thought, as he realized who her companion was. Doc Henley was one person he’d just as soon avoid, at least for the time being. It was Doc who’d stitched up the cut running up his thigh, the result of his careless use of a scythe. It was Doc who’d checked him over while he waited in jail, to see whether the blood that still smeared his body was his own or somebody else’s. It was Doc who’d brought the three murder victims into the world, and Doc who’d pronounced them dead.

  He hadn’t changed much in the years between fifty and seventy. The white hair was thinner, the face had more lines, but the mouth was just as firm beneath his salt-and-pepper mustache. He still had wise, kind eyes, but they met Griffin’s without recognition, and he rose, holding out a hand in welcome. A welcome that would be quickly withdrawn if he’d known who he was.

  “Must be your new neighbor, Gracey,” he said easily. “I’m Richard Henley, but most folks around here call me Doc. And this is Mrs. Grace Davis. Welcome to Colby.”

  Griffin took his hand. There was still a lot of strength in the old man, and not a trace of a tremor. He was only slightly stooped from age, and he could look Griffin in the eye. “John Smith,” Griffin introduced himself. He really should have picked a more interesting alias—John Smith was just too damned plain to be believed.

  Gracey didn’t seem to have any doubts. “How nice,” she said in her soft, fluty voice. “What brings you to Colby, Mr. Smith? To this end of the lake in particular?”

  He didn’t know whether or not he’d imagined the intelligence in her eyes—it was at sharp odds with her wispy voice and manner. If she was Sophie’s mother she couldn’t be much older than her mid-sixties, maybe even younger. She looked more like a candidate for a nursing home.

  “Looking for peace and quiet, Mrs. Davis,” he said. “I thought this seemed like a nice, boring place to spend a few months.”

  “The snow will fly in three months’ time,” Gracey said in a singsong voice. “I don’t think you’ll want to be here then.”

  “Why not? I’m not afraid of a little snow.”

  “Probably because the old Whitten place isn’t really winterized,” Doc said in his genial voice. “If you’re planning to stay on past the frost you’ll need to find someplace a little more habitable—you surely wouldn’t want to put that kind of money into a rented house. Though I can’t imagine why you would want to stay—jobs are scarce around here in the off-season. Most folks have to commute to Montpelier or Burlington.”

  Griffin smiled faintly, not about to offer any more information despite Doc’s careful prying. “I’ll deal with that when I have to,” he said easily. “In the meantime I’m just here for the serenity.”

  Doc turned to look out over the lake, his eyes narrowing in the sunlight. “Looks can be deceptive, my boy. This town isn’t nearly as quiet as it seems. Most places aren’t.”

  It was a perfect opportunity, and he’d be a fool to let it pass him by. “What do you mean?”

  “Murders,” Gracey announced with ghoulish delight, pushing her flyaway gray hair away from her face. “Lots of unsolved crimes in th
e Northeast Kingdom, including peaceful little Colby.”

  Griffin shrugged. “You mean the teenage girls who were murdered twenty-five years ago? Someone mentioned it to me. But they told me they caught the killer.”

  “Twenty years ago,” Doc corrected him. Griffin knew exactly how long it had been since Lorelei, Valette and Alice died. To the day. “And they caught the boy, all right. Sent him to jail, but he got out a few years later on a technicality. There are some who say he wasn’t the killer, anyway—that he got railroaded.”

  That was the first Griffin had heard of it—it had seemed as if the town was out for his blood. He was lucky the Northeast Kingdom didn’t go in for lynching, or he wouldn’t be here right now. “Really?”

  “Then there are others who believe he killed those three girls and more besides, and sooner or later he’ll come back here, to finish up what he started,” Doc said.

  Griffin didn’t even blink. “Well, what’s taking him so long? He’s probably dead himself by now.”

  “Not that boy,” Doc said. “He’s a survivor. Nothing was gonna get that boy down, not prison, not nothing.”

  “Do you think he did it?” Griffin asked. The moment the words were out of his mouth he realized it was a mistake.

  Doc focused his pale blue eyes on him for a long, unsettling moment. “I don’t know. There were times when I thought that boy was pure evil. Then there were other times when I thought he was just a lost soul. I suppose he could have killed them. But I think he would have had to have been out of his mind on drugs or something to have done it.”

  Not much help, Griffin thought grimly. And now Doc was staring at him with an odd expression on his face, as if he could see past the wire-rimmed glasses and the curly hair and the clean-shaven face, see past twenty years into the face of a boy who might be a killer.

  Doc shook his head. “One of life’s little mysteries, I guess. Just like Sara Ann Whitten.”

  “Whitten?” Griffin echoed uneasily.

  “Seventeen-year-old daughter of the folks who owned the place you’re renting,” Doc explained. “She took off a couple of years after the murders. Just up and disappeared one day, and no one’s ever found a trace of her. If it weren’t for that boy being locked up they would have thought she’d been murdered, as well.”

  “But you said some people didn’t think he did it,” Griffin said.

  Doc just looked sorrowful. “No one knows what happened. Whether the boy was a mass murderer or just a jealous lover. Or maybe just an innocent caught up in a mess bigger than he could handle. It doesn’t matter—it was long ago, and folks around here don’t like to think about it. Let the past rest in peace.”

  Griffin said nothing. The past wasn’t resting peacefully, it was haunting him. And he wasn’t going to stop until he laid it to rest himself. No matter what the price.

  Sophie didn’t plan to waste any time—the sooner she got him off the property and away from Marty the happier she’d be. Not that Mr. Smith was Marty’s type—her sister tended to go for young and buff and brainless. Smith had gray in his hair, for heaven’s sake, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. Hardly the stuff teenage dreams were made of.

  And yet Sophie knew with a gut-sure instinct that Mr. John Smith would be just about irresistible to any impressionable young woman. Even she, armored and totally, determinedly uninterested, could feel the inevitable pull. All that mysterious, brooding beauty, even the hint of danger, was ridiculously tempting. Fortunately she wasn’t the sort to be tempted.

  He hadn’t waited for her on the porch, which didn’t surprise her in the least. He’d wandered down the lawn to the edge of the lake, and he was staring across the shimmering blue expanse toward the unseen village, his back straight and tall. And he was no longer alone.

  At least it wasn’t Marty this time, though the alternative wasn’t much more reassuring. Gracey was looking up at him, her gray hair tumbling to her shoulders, her mismatched clothing drooping around her too-thin body. Doc was there, as well, a small buffer, but Sophie almost took a header off the wide front porch in her haste to get down to the water’s edge.

  “You didn’t tell me we had a new neighbor,” Gracey said as she approached.

  Sophie bit her lip in frustration. “Yes, I did, Mama. We already discussed this yesterday, remember?”

  Gracey’s eyes brightened for a moment. “Oh, yes, love,” she said. “I remember now. I told you you needed to get laid.”

  Mr. Smith’s choking sound didn’t make the hideous situation any better. Doc had jumped in quickly, taking Gracey’s thin hand. “Now, Gracey, you know you’re not supposed to say things like that.”

  “But it’s true. Sex is very healthy for a young woman like Sophie. Besides, he’s very attractive. Isn’t he, Sophie?”

  Sophie tried not to cringe. “He’s not my type, Mama. Why don’t you go back to the house with Doc and…”

  “What do you mean, he’s not your type? You’re too picky.” She swung her wicked gaze to the silent stranger. “Tell me, Mr. Smith, are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Involved? Gay?”

  “No,” he said. The monosyllable was delivered entirely without inflection, and Sophie refused to look at him to see his reaction to her mother’s outrageousness.

  “You see!” her mother said triumphantly. “He’d be perfect. You go off and have sex with him and I’ll look after the inn. Marty can help me.”

  “Come along, Gracey,” Doc said kindly. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  Sophie didn’t wait any longer. She headed toward the narrow path through the woods, not stopping to see if John Smith was following. If he wasn’t, just as well. She’d keep going, hike out to the main road and circle back to the inn.

  He was close behind her—there was no escape. He waited until they were out of sight of the inn, almost at the edge of the Whitten place, before he spoke.

  “Why are the women in your family so interested in my sex life?” He sounded no more than vaguely curious, but Sophie wasn’t fooled.

  It was now or never. She stopped, turning to look at him. He was closer than she’d realized, and she had to look up. He was the kind of man you’d need to wear high heels around, so as not to let his height intimidate you. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you think I want to have sex with your seventeen-year-old sister, your mother thinks I ought to have sex with you, and I imagine Marthe probably has ideas of her own.”

  “Well, you can just ignore any ideas Marty might have. She’s an impressionable teenager. And ignore my mother, as well—surely you can see she’s got some kind of senile dementia.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I think she’s a lot sharper than she pretends to be.”

  “And you base that on what? Five minutes in her company? Or the absurd notion that I would want to go to bed with you?”

  “See? Obsessed with sex,” Mr. Smith said in a calm voice.

  “I’m not! We’re not.” She took a deep breath. “I have no interest in you at all, Mr. Smith, except to help out a neighbor in need.”

  “And to keep your sister away from me.”

  It would be foolish to deny it. “There’s that, too.”

  He nodded. “As long as you’re honest,” he said. “I don’t like lying.”

  “Neither do I, Mr. Smith.” Another man might have missed her slight emphasis on his anonymous name. He didn’t.

  His faint smile was self-deprecating, but he didn’t say a word. He just moved past her down the path to the derelict old house.

  A weaker woman would have simply turned and headed back home. Sophie squared her shoulders and followed him, pushing the tall grass out of her way as she kept his back firmly in her view. Not that she would have had any trouble finding her way. She’d explored the property around the abandoned Whitten house not long after they moved to Colby, and whenever things were overwhelming at the inn she’d disappear for a few hours, sit on the porch and watch the quiet glide of the wate
r as it moved past the rocky point of land just beyond the house.

  She took her time, and he was waiting for her on the porch when she got there. “Did you know I’ve got an option to buy this place?” he asked abruptly.

  She doubted she could keep the stricken expression off her face. “Why?”

  “I like it here. The peace and quiet. The remoteness.”

  “The house is a mess. I doubt it could be winterized, and there’s no way to earn a living year round…”

  “Maybe I could turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.”

  She stared at him in horror. “What?”

  His slight smile was far from reassuring. “I’m kidding,” he said. “Do I strike you as the hospitable type? I’m not sure I even like sharing this end of the lake with anyone, much less my house.”

  She took a deep breath. “No wonder you’re unattached.”

  “Are we back to sex again?”

  “No!” She moved past him, pushing open the torn and rickety screen door and walking into the old cottage. She’d never been inside before, only peered through the windows, but it looked and smelled just as she’d imagined it. The furniture was old and solid—a mission oak sofa and table that had probably been built at the same time as the house; a couple of sturdy rocking chairs; a wide table and chairs. The fieldstone fireplace held nothing but ashes, the bookshelves were crammed with the detritus of vacationers over the years—Reader’s Digest condensed books and paperback mysteries. The floor creaked beneath her feet, and the mice had gotten into the braided rug. And if the so-called Mr. Smith bought this old wreck out from under her she’d kill him.

  If there’d been any way to turn this place into a bed-and-breakfast she would have bought it in a snap. The Niles homestead was bigger, with more lake frontage and the good-size wing in back for when she wanted to expand. But the Whitten house called to her soul, a hidden little jewel in the forest by the lake.

  “What do you think?” he asked, oblivious to her covetous thoughts.

  “I think you need an army of people to come in and shovel out this place,” she said frankly. “The screens are torn, the chimney probably needs cleaning, the cushions have been chewed by animals. What’s the roof like?”