Still Lake

by Anne Stuart

  She was still stuck on the idea of him being a reporter, someone doing an update on the unsolved Colby murders. He was probably asking Gracey all sorts of questions, confusing her even more than she already was, sending her scurrying back to her dreamworld of serial killers and innocent victims.

  Sophie was going to have to have a word with him. Order him to leave her mother the hell alone. Gracey had enough problems without having some blood-sucking journalist confusing her even further.

  She’d make cookies, that’s what she’d do. Three-ginger cookies, and take them down to her reluctant neighbor. They could sit on his decrepit porch and she’d tell him, very politely, to keep away from her vulnerable mother. And at the same time, maybe she could find out for sure who he was and what the hell he was doing there.

  For heaven’s sake, it wasn’t as if she was truly scared of the man. She didn’t let people intimidate her, and if Mr. Tall Dark and Brooding wanted to be standoffish, that was just fine with her. As long as he left her family alone, they’d get along just fine.

  No, she’d face him, whether she wanted to or not, whether he frightened her or not. For some reason the notion was bizarrely irresistible, and she didn’t want to stop and consider why. To think about why the necessity of bearding the lion in his den was so appealing. Unless, at the advanced age of thirty, she’d developed a taste for lions.

  Vermonters woke too damned early, and they started work at an obscene time of day. Griffin hadn’t slept well—for some reason he kept thinking about Sophie Davis’s bare feet beneath that silly nightgown. He’d drifted off sometime around dawn, and it was only a couple of hours later that the barely muffled sound of the chain saw rasped through his sleep.

  He put one of the limp feather pillows over his head and groaned. He could have closed the window, but that would have meant getting up, and if he got up he might as well stay up. So he shut his eyes and his mind and willed himself back to sleep.

  Only to be jarred awake by the thunderous pounding on the front door below his bedroom. He cursed, loudly, distinctly, and hauled his ass out of bed. He ignored the fact that that peremptory pounding sounded like the police. He had nothing to fear from the police, hadn’t in years. He was a lawyer, for Christ’s sake, and unlike Annelise he didn’t even skirt the limits of the law. It was his own special challenge to get what he wanted within the confines of the system that had put him in a maximum-security prison for five years for a crime he didn’t commit.

  By the time he stumbled down the stairs he half expected to see old Zeke waiting there to arrest him. Behind the grimy lace curtains he could see several people standing on the porch, and he yanked the door open with a snarl.

  For a moment he thought they were some kind of religious fanatics on a door-to-door mission for Christ. The tall man at the front of the delegation looked like Abraham Lincoln without a sense of humor—a long, narrow, disapproving face framed with a gray beard; beady, disapproving dark eyes; a thin, cold mouth; and an expression of deep wariness on his leathery face. He looked like something out of a Stephen King novel, and if he was going to talk about being saved then Griffin was going to be very pissed off, indeed.

  “You Mr. Smith?” The question was terse, couched in the kind of thick Vermont accent that was rarely heard outside the Northeast Kingdom.

  “Yeah. Who wants to know?” He could be just as surly as his unwanted visitor. He could see a small elderly woman standing just behind the man, but neither of them were carrying a Bible, so maybe he was jumping to the wrong conclusion. Someone else hovered behind them, just off the porch.

  “Zebulon King,” he said. “That’s my wife and my boy. Marge Averill sent us out to work on the place. Seems you had some complaints.”

  Shit. He wasn’t sure anymore if he wanted locals prowling around his domain. And then something clicked in his brain—Zeb King was the father of one of the murdered girls. He’d testified at his trial some twenty years ago, all hearsay evidence that had been struck from the record but had done its share of damage, nonetheless. He remembered the man’s daughter, as well. Valette King had rebelled against her parents’ strict religious upbringing and slept with anything in pants. He’d spent a couple of nights with her, but she’d been too voracious even for his strong appetites, and he’d hooked up with the more pliant Lorelei. Valette hadn’t liked it, not one tiny bit, and even her father had known there was bad blood between them. And so he’d testified at the trial.

  It was twenty years ago, and Griffin hadn’t even recognized the man. He was in his sixties now, with that leathery, ageless look that came from working long, hard hours in the sun, buoyed by an unswerving, rigid faith in right and wrong. There was no way Zeb King could recognize him. But he still hesitated.

  “You gonna let us get to work?” King said, impatient. “We waited till a decent hour to come over here, but time’s awasting.”

  Griffin glanced at his watch. He’d traded his Rolex for a cheap Timex as part of his cover. Zebulon King considered eight o’clock in the morning a decent hour.

  Griffin unlatched the screen door and pushed it open. If he had any sense he would have sent them away, but the opportunity was too good to miss. Two people intimately connected with the murders had shown up on his doorstep, the only surviving relatives still in Colby. How could he refuse such an offering from the gods?

  Zebulon King strode into the living room, an old-fashioned wooden toolbox in one huge hand. His wife scurried after him, head down, dressed in some kind of faded dress with an equally faded apron covering her lumpish body. The apron was crisply starched.

  “You start in the kitchen, Addy,” Zebulon ordered. “Perley and I will see what’s up with the roof. Miz Averill says there might be water damage.” He made it sound like the plague had struck.

  Griffin didn’t bother to enlighten him. He’d spent the last truly free summer of his life doing carpentry and yard work for Peggy Niles—he knew one end of a hammer from another and knew just how bad the water damage was. Nothing that a skilled carpenter couldn’t fix in a day or so.

  He’d spent the first year in prison in the wood shop, as well. At one point he’d been good, damned good. He’d built a picnic table and a fanciful gazebo for Peggy just before he’d been arrested, and it had been some of his best pieces—more art than lawn furniture. The day he got out of jail he turned his back on woodworking and never picked up a hammer again. It was too deeply ingrained in the nightmare that had been his life.

  There were times when he missed it. Since he’d taken up residence in the ramshackle Whitten house he’d been itching to work on it—to replace a rotting windowsill, reglaze the windows before the panes of glass fell out. He hadn’t touched anything, though. He could hire people to do those things nowadays—he didn’t have to do them himself. And he didn’t want to remember the boy who’d found satisfaction and pleasure from the feel of tools in his hands.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. Zeb’s “boy” moved past him into the house, thirty-five if he was a day, looking just as grim and not nearly as smart as his father. “Just keep out of the bedroom for now. I’ve got work laid out and I don’t want anyone messing with it.”

  “We ain’t interested in your work,” Zeb said. “We’re just here to fix the place. And you keep away from my woman.”

  At that point Addy rushed into the kitchen. The woman was in her sixties, built like a sack of potatoes, with iron-gray hair tucked in tight little pin-curls that had probably never been in fashion in her entire lifetime. “I’ll resist temptation,” Griffin said dryly.

  Zebulon King wasn’t the sort to find humor in a situation. “See that you do.”

  The woman jumped a mile when he walked into the kitchen. She had already begun scrubbing the oilcloth-covered table, and she looked at him as if he were a hound from hell. Or the man who murdered her daughter.

  He had no idea whether she’d been at his trial. He hadn’t owned any glasses besides his shades, and his court-appointed, totally incomp
etent lawyer frowned on a teenage malcontent wearing sunglasses on the witness stand. For all he knew Addy King could have been sitting there glaring at him, memorizing his features and branding them into her soul with a fiery hatred.

  She looked too beaten down for anything that energetic. She focused on scrubbing the table while he started a pot of coffee for himself.

  “Gonna need new oilcloth,” she muttered in a barely audible voice.

  “Do they even sell oilcloth nowadays?” He made an effort to sound pleasant and unthreatening.

  She didn’t look up. “Audley’s does. Audley’s sells everything.”

  “How about a new life?” he muttered to himself.

  “What?” Her head jerked up. “I’m hard of hearing.”

  “Just talking to myself,” he said, leaning against the sink and staring out at the lake as it glistened through the trees. It looked deceptively peaceful, as if it had never held the blood-soaked body of his murdered girlfriend. Looking at it didn’t remind him of death and despair—it had a curiously tranquil effect on him. But he still hadn’t talked himself into actually swimming in it.

  He looked at the timid little woman. Her dour husband wouldn’t have been much comfort when she lost her daughter, he thought. She looked as if she’d never had much comfort in her life.

  He racked his brain, trying to remember what he knew about the King family. They’d been in Colby since the 1700s, but the blood had grown pretty thin by the twentieth century. “Lived here long?” he asked casually.

  “My husband said I wasn’t to talk to you,” the woman muttered, still scrubbing. The oilcloth tore beneath her fierce handling, and she let out a mournful cry.

  “There’s no harm in talking, Mrs. King,” he said. “And don’t worry about the covering—as you said, it needs replacing.”

  She looked up at him, with eyes filled with such deep sorrow that for a moment he felt ashamed of himself. Only a moment. “I don’t talk to strangers, Mr. Smith. I don’t trust them. I’ve lived in Colby all my life, and I know everyone I need to know.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly. The coffee was ready, and he poured himself a mug, black the way he liked it. She was a tough one, and he didn’t expect he’d get very far with her. He might just as well head out to the porch and drink his coffee in relative peace, despite the hammering that had started from behind the house, joining in with the distant buzz of the chain saw.

  He tried one more time. “That’s a fine son you have, Mrs. King,” he said, heading toward the screen door that was barely attached to its hinges. “It must be nice to have your children close to home when they grow up. You have any other kids?”

  Her reaction reminded him what a bastard he really was. Her tired face crumpled for a moment and her milky blue eyes filled with tears. “He’s the only one we were blessed with,” she said.

  He couldn’t bring himself to push her any further. He’d always been considered rapacious in court—he could destroy a witness in a matter of minutes, no matter how carefully they’d been coached or how firmly they believed in their particular truth. But he just couldn’t do it to a tired old woman who’d had enough pain. He wasn’t that much of a bastard, at least on this peaceful August morning. Maybe later.

  In the meantime he’d better make sure that anything incriminating in his bedroom was out of sight in case King or his son wandered up there. It wouldn’t do to have them find a pile of books connected to serial killers in general and the Colby murders in particular.

  He set his mug of coffee on the newel post and took the steps two at a time.

  For a moment he thought the upstairs was deserted, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Only to see Perley King standing in the middle of the room, peering at the notebook Griffin had left on the bed, a confused expression on his face.

  Shit, Griffin thought. I am totally screwed. And he cleared his throat, racking his brain for a plausible explanation.

  8

  “What are you doing?” Griffin said, and the man turned bright red, dropping the notebook on the bed.

  “I d-didn’t mean no harm,” he stammered. “I was just checking the water leaks by the chimney like my pa told me to do.”

  “By reading my private notes?”

  “Can’t,” the man mumbled.

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t read,” he said in a slow, expressionless voice. “Never had much call for it, I guess. Pa says I do just fine without. I can write my name.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Griffin said, crossing the room and picking up the notebook. It was opened to his list from the day before, written in his dark scrawl. Perley King seemed unperturbed, and Griffin had no choice but to believe him. If he’d understood the words on the notepad he wouldn’t have the pleasantly vacant expression on his face.

  He’d already upset a battered-down, grieving mother, Griffin thought. Why not move on to someone mentally impaired for good measure? Just so he could feel really good about himself on this warm summer morning.

  “You like living here, Perley?” What the hell kind of name was Perley, Griffin thought absently. The tall, shambling man/boy hardly seemed pearl-like.

  Perley squatted down by the chimney, poking at the wood with a screwdriver, checking for rot. “It’s okay,” he muttered. “Kind of lonely, though, since Valette’s been gone.”

  It shouldn’t be that easy, Griffin thought. He moved to the dresser, making a show of looking through the drawers. “Who’s Valette?”

  “My sister. She was real pretty. She went away a long time ago. Satan took her.”

  “Satan?”

  “She was a sinner, Pa said. We aren’t to speak her name ever again. But I miss her. She used to get after Pa when he beat me. Made him stop. But then when she was gone, Pa was saved and gave up liquor and he didn’t take the belt to me no more, nor to Ma, either, so I guess things are all right. She was pretty as a picture, Valette was.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Perley had given up stabbing at the floor and was now attacking the ceiling around the chimney. Sooner or later he was going to come upon the soft spot in the back, but Griffin wasn’t in any hurry to enlighten him.

  “I told you, Satan took her,” Perley said with great patience. “Mama said God wanted another angel in heaven, but Pa said it was Satan, and Pa’s always right. Still an’ all, I woulda thought Satan had enough to keep him company with them other ones.”

  Bingo. “Other ones?” Griffin prompted.

  “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” Perley muttered. “That was long ago, and we didn’t have nothing to do with it. Pa says it’s nobody’s business.” He stabbed at the wood, a steady, methodical jabbing motion. Was Valette the one who’d been stabbed to death? Griffin watched the rhythmic plunge of the long screwdriver with a kind of sick fascination.

  “It sounds very sad,” Griffin said, his voice noncommittal.

  “I go to her grave sometimes. Pa beat me when he caught me, even without the liquor, so now I go when he’s off on business. I’m not the only one who goes there. He does, too.”

  “He? Your father?”

  Perley shook his head slowly. “Nope. Satan. He goes to visit those girls and he leaves flowers on their graves. He was real sorry to take them, I know he was. He leaves them on other graves, too. That’s how I know which ones were taken by Satan and which ones by the Almighty.”

  Griffin managed to keep the excitement out of his voice. “So someone leaves flowers on the graves of the three murdered girls?”

  Perley didn’t stop his stabbing, didn’t stop to wonder how a stranger would know about the three girls. “More’n three. He took them,” Perley said patiently. “I didn’t say he killed them. And he leaves flowers on their graves. All of them. By the lake, in the village. I seen him there, sometimes, in the dawn, when he thinks no one is around.”

  A cold shiver ran across Griffin. “What does he look like?”

  Perley’s long screwdriver sank deep
into the rotten ceiling, and he let out a visceral grunt of satisfaction. “Found it,” he muttered. He moved to the casement windows and called out. “Pa, I found the rot!”

  “Coming, boy!” Zeb King was already on his way up the stairs, and it wouldn’t do for him to catch Griffin interrogating his slow-witted son. But he couldn’t just leave without getting the answer to his question.

  “What does Satan look like, Perley?” he asked again.

  Perley turned his innocent face to him. “Just like God, only different.”

  Great, Griffin thought, plastering a tight smile on his face as he scooped the papers from his bed, moving them out of sight just as Zebulon King walked in the room.

  “You bothering Mr. Smith, boy?” he demanded, eyeing them both suspiciously. “I told you you were here to work, not to flap your jaw.”

  “I wasn’t, Pa,” Perley said, hanging his head. “I was just telling him about some things.”

  “What things?”

  Shit, Griffin thought, steeling himself for disaster.

  “I told him about the fishing. He wanted to know where the best place was to catch a rainbow trout, and I told him.” Perley looked as guileless as a puppy. He might be simple-minded, but he could lie with the ease of an expert.

  “Takes more than the right spot to catch a rainbow,” Zeb muttered, making it more than apparent that he thought Griffin didn’t have the right stuff for such a task. “A man shouldn’t hunt for something he’s not ready to eat, and I reckon you don’t know much about dressing a rainbow, now do you?” His contempt was almost genial.

  As a matter of fact Griffin had caught many a rainbow trout during the last summer of his youth, and he was more than adept at cleaning and cooking them. “Just a thought,” he said. “I probably won’t get around to it, anyway.”

  “Too busy being on vacation,” Zebulon said with a barely disguised sneer. “We’ll be out of your way as soon as we can. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk to my boy. He’s a mite slow, and he can’t concentrate with someone yammering at him.”