Книга - Still Lake

Still Lake
Anne Stuart


It was a dream come true.Buying a run-down farm in a beautiful Vermont town is the start of a new life for Sophie Davis. She moves her mother and half sister out of the city, hoping it will help both women sort out their lives. And for Sophie, turning Stonegate Farm into a country inn is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. She doesn't even mind that the farm was the scene of a murder twenty years ago….When a stranger moves in next door, Sophie believes the peace she has built for herself and her family is being threatened. Because there's something different about John Smith. It's clear he's keeping secrets…and that he's come to Vermont, for a reason. And that reason has something to do with Sophie and Stonegate Farm.Now her dream is becoming a nightmare. Who is John Smith? Why does he make feel so out of control? And why is she beginning to suspect that this mysterious stranger will put in jeopardy everything she's dreamed of–maybe even her own life?




“I’m Sophie Davis,” she said, and her voice matched her dress. Light, musical, annoyingly charming. “My family and I are running the old inn. I brought you some muffins to welcome you to Colby.”

He took them and set them on the railing in front of him. He needed to dredge up some semblance of charm, but something was stopping him. He didn’t want her thinking she could just drop in. He valued his privacy, especially when he wasn’t planning on being particularly public about who he was or why he was here.

“Thanks,” he said, then realized he sounded less than gracious. He glanced over at the old Niles place. “Seems like a strange time to open an inn.”

“We’ve been working hard to get it ready. The place was abandoned for years, and it’s taken us a while to get it in any kind of shape.”

Empty for years, he thought. He could have had a dozen chances to come back, find the answers he was looking for. He’d been too busy trying to forget.

“When did you say you opened?” he asked.

“Two weeks.”

Two weeks. Two weeks to get inside the old place before it was overrun with tourists. Two weeks to see if there were any secrets left.




ANNE STUART

STILL LAKE









STILL LAKE




Contents


Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22




Prologue


Summer, 1982

Colby, Vermont

When he awoke there was blood on his hands. The sheets were tangled around his sweating, naked body, his mouth tasted like copper, and there was blood on his hands.

He sat up, cursing, pushed his long dark hair away from his face and looked blearily out into the morning sunshine. It was early—he hated waking up before noon.

And he sure as hell hated waking up covered in blood.

He stumbled out of bed, heading toward the back door to take a leak. He looked down and saw he had streaks of blood on his body. He leaned against the door and closed his eyes, groaning.

He slept in one of the tumbledown cabins by the lake, but it didn’t have a shower, and there was no way in hell he was going up to the big house like this. No way in hell he was going to stand around with some animal’s blood on him. He must have hit a deer last night, driving home, though for the life of him he couldn’t remember a goddamned thing.

He pulled on a pair of paint-spattered cutoffs and headed down to the lake, as fast as his pounding head would let him. He’d smoked too much, drunk too much, the night before, and he needed it to wear off, fast. The cold lake water would clear his head, bring his memory back. When he got back to his room he’d finish packing and get the hell out of there. He’d had enough of small-town Vermont.

Even in August the lake was icy cold, shocking the hell out of him. He let out a shriek as he dived beneath the surface, but he kept going, letting the frigid water flow around him, washing the blood from his hands, from his long hair, from his thick beard.

He surfaced twenty yards from shore, tossing his long wet hair over his shoulder, and squinted into the sunlight. There were more people than usual up at the inn—Peggy Niles must be in seventh heaven. She’d be wanting him to fetch and carry, even though he’d told her he was leaving. Maybe he’d just skirt around the back of his place, grab his stuff and get the hell out of there before he could change his mind. Lorelei had told him to get lost, and he wasn’t the kind of man who stayed in one place for too long. Winter was coming, jobs would be opening up in Colorado, and he was ready for the life of a ski bum.

He dove back under the water, heading toward shore with long, easy strokes, circling around past the small sandy beach and the long wooden dock he’d built a few months back.

When he surfaced again, he saw a pile of clothes floating at the edge of the water, among the cattails that he’d spent half the summer trying to get rid of. He recognized the garish striped shirt that was one of his favorites, and he wondered who the hell had taken his suitcase and thrown it in the lake. Probably Lorelei—she’d been pissed off big time when he told her he was leaving, but then, she hadn’t given him one good reason to stay. Not that he could even imagine one.

He moved closer, squinting. He was slightly nearsighted, but he never wore glasses except for his prescription sunglasses, and God knew where they were back in the mess of his room. The clothes were floating, half in, half out of the water, but he didn’t recognize the white shirt. He didn’t own any long-sleeved shirts.

He stopped moving, waist deep in the chilly water, and his skin froze. And then he moved, fast, running through the water till he reached her side, turning her over to see her pale, dead face, and the sliced throat, like a jester’s grin, curving beneath her jaw.

They loomed over him, coming out of nowhere, waiting for him, and he couldn’t move, frozen in the chilly water with Lorelei’s body in his arms.

“Thomas Ingram Griffin, alias Gram Thomas, alias Billy Gram, you’re under arrest for the willful murder of Alice Calderwood, Valette King and Lorelei Johnson. Anything you say…”

He didn’t listen to the words. He looked down at the girl in his arms, the girl he’d held last night, the girl whose blood had stained his hands.

And he began to cry.




1


There was only one major problem with trying to save the world, Sophie Davis decided as she stuffed half a blueberry muffin in her mouth. No one wanted her help.

The kitchen at Stonegate Farm was deserted, and Sophie perched on one of the stools, hiking her flowing chintz skirt around her legs as she devoured the rest of the muffin, no mean feat since it was one of those wickedly oversize ones, with enough fat to clog the arteries of a family of four. She was a firm believer in the tenet that calories consumed in private didn’t count. There had been three muffins left from breakfast. She reached for the second one.

It wasn’t as if anyone else wanted them. Her mother, Grace, barely ate enough to keep alive, and when her half sister, Marty, finally dragged herself out into the daylight she’d refuse everything but coffee and cigarettes.

Sophie could sympathize with the cigarettes. She’d given them up four months ago, and in return she’d added fifteen pounds to her already generous frame. And she never spent a day without thinking longingly of one last smoke.

She broke the second muffin in half, putting the rest back on the English stoneware plate in the vain hope she wouldn’t succumb to temptation. Sugar and butter were an entirely satisfactory substitute for nicotine, but unfortunately she could see what they were doing to her body. The cigarettes had been turning her lungs black, but no one was looking at her lungs. If she kept on at this rate she’d be out of size twelves before long and into fourteens. She took the second half of the muffin and shoved it into her mouth.

She needed to get her life back under control. The first year of a new business was always bound to be a bit shaky, but Stonegate Farm was the perfect location for a country inn, and Sophie had energy and enthusiasm to spare. For years most of her decorating and baking had been only in theory, research for the syndicated column she wrote while she lived in a small apartment in New York. Marty called her the poor woman’s Martha Stewart, which Sophie would have taken as a compliment if Marty hadn’t been sneering when she said it.

And now she had this early nineteenth-century farmhouse on the edge of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, a dream location for a dream profession. It was a huge, rambling old house, with half a dozen bedrooms and an extra wing off the back that might be salvaged and eventually turned into even more guest rooms. Everything had seemed so simple when she’d mortgaged her life and her soul to bring Marty and Grace up here.

Not that Grace was particularly thrilled. She’d never been the bucolic type, but her last bout with breast cancer had left her surprisingly weak, and for the first time she admitted she needed help. She’d accompanied them, reluctantly, insisting that as soon as she regained her strength she’d be off on her endless travels. Four months later Sophie knew she wasn’t going anywhere.

This time it wasn’t the cancer. As far as she could tell Grace had made it through this second reoccurrence with flying colors. But in the past few months her mother had gotten more and more forgetful. Grace had never been much of a deep thinker—Marty and Sophie’s mutual father had called her Spacey Gracey with equal parts malice and affection. But her current situation was serious enough that Sophie had gotten worried.

Not that there was anything she could do about it. Doc had been her best friend and confidant since she arrived there, and he’d basically shaken his head. “I don’t know whether she’s having tiny strokes or if it’s early-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” he’d said. Grace had flatly refused to go into the hospital for testing, and Doc had told her there’d be time enough if things progressed.

Marty, with typical teenage charm, resented everything about the inn, including the fact she was expected to help out. She resented her older sister even more, but then, that was nothing new. And Grace was getting more and more forgetful, so that she drifted through their lives like a ghostly stranger, old before her time. Which suited Marty just fine. It was bad enough that Sophie had dragged her to the back end of beyond—why did she have to bring the old lady along, as well? Wasn’t this torture enough? she’d demanded.

Sophie eyed the last muffin. If she ate three of them she’d feel sick, not immediately, but soon enough. It didn’t matter, she wanted that muffin, and no one was around to watch her.

She was just about to reach for it when she heard someone outside the kitchen, and she pulled her hand back guiltily.

Grace wandered into the room, her gaunt figure dressed in mismatched clothing, the buttons on the raveling sweater awry. Grace, who’d always been so particular about her designer clothing and her hair. She looked twenty years older than her actual age of sixty. Marty came in behind her, not looking particularly pleased.

“I made muffins,” Sophie said cheerfully, ignoring the fact that only one remained.

“How nice, love,” Grace said in her soft voice. She had made a vain attempt at putting her long, graying hair in a bun, but strands of it stuck out at strange angles, and Sophie knew it would come down in a matter of minutes, leaving Grace looking even more disheveled. “I think I’ll just have some coffee.”

“You need to eat, Mama,” Sophie said. “You know what Doc said.”

Grace stopped to look at her, an odd expression in her hazy blue eyes. “Don’t believe everything everybody tells you, Sophie. People aren’t always what they seem.”

“I’m not…” Sophie began, used to Grace’s increasing paranoia, but her mother had already poured herself a mug of black coffee and wandered off, leaving Sophie alone with her sister.

Marty headed straight for the coffeemaker without a word.

“Good morning to you, too,” Sophie said, then could have slapped herself. Sarcasm didn’t make anything better.

Marty didn’t even bother glancing at her. She poured her coffee and took a deep gulp of it, studiously ignoring her.

“Did you put the new towels in the closet?” Sophie tried to keep her voice light and nonconfrontational. God knows Marty could find something to take offense at in the most innocuous of conversations, but Sophie did her best to avoid conflict whenever she could.

Marty kept her head buried in the crossword puzzle she was perusing. This week her short-cropped, spiky hair was black, tinged with fuchsia at the tips. She’d need to bleach it again when she went to her next phase. Sooner or later she wouldn’t have any hair at all, a prospect that Sophie regarded with mixed feelings. At least she could hope that not too many incipient bad boys would want to impregnate a bald-headed seventeen-year old. “You told me to, didn’t you?” Marty said in a hostile voice.

Sophie sighed, controlling her frustration. “I need your help, Marty. You need to contribute your share to the running of this place if we’re going to make a go of it. It’s nearing the end of summer, and you know we need to open by foliage season if we’re going to recover some of the renovation costs. I’ve already got reservations for September….”

“Why should I care? It was your idea to drag me off into the middle of nowhere, away from my friends. I’m not interested in running a bed-and-breakfast, I’m not interested in being locked up in the country with you and that crazy old bat, and I’m not interested in helping you.”

It was a good thing she hadn’t gone for that third muffin, Sophie thought—the second one was already doing a number on her stomach. “That crazy old bat is my mother,” she said. “I know she’s not yours, but I have a responsibility to her. Do we have to go over this every single day, Marty? Why don’t you go find someone else to harass?”

“I don’t have a problem with anyone but you, and I’ll keep after you until you listen.”

“I listen,” she said patiently. “I know you miss your friends, but, Marty, those people are no friends to you.”

“How would you know? I haven’t noticed anyone flocking around you. Face it, Sophie, you don’t know how to make friends and you’re jealous that I have so many.”

“Your so-called friends are nothing but trouble.” Another mistake, Sophie thought the moment the words were out. It just gave Marty more reason to fight back. How did her little sister always manage to get her back up?

Marty gave her a sour smile. “Then I fit right in with them, don’t I?”

“Please, Marty…”

“The goddamned towels are in the goddamned linen closet. Teal and beige and ivory and lavender and every other damned color you seem to think is necessary,” she snapped. “All set for your goddamned guests. Now, leave me alone.”

She slammed out of the room, taking her coffee and the paper with her. Sophie watched her go, a tight hand clamping around her heart. She reached for the third muffin.

It didn’t look as if things were going to get any better in the near future. Marty had been sullen and depressed for the last few months, ever since they’d arrived in Colby. Sophie had hoped and prayed that getting her away from the city would give her a new start. That sunshine and country air and hard work would start to make the difference.

So far things hadn’t improved noticeably. While Sophie did her best to manage a strained smile and ignore Marty’s sullen hostility, she wasn’t really made for sainthood. Tough love, she reminded herself, like a litany.

They were a mismatched family, the three of them. Grace had divorced her stodgy, Midwestern husband when Sophie was just nine, put her only child in boarding school and taken off for parts unknown. Sophie’s father, Morris, had quickly remarried, sired another daughter, Marty, providing a stifled, antiseptic existence for Sophie on her vacations. All that had changed when Marty was nine and her parents died in a car accident. Family was family, and Sophie, fresh out of Columbia, had taken her sister under her wing and provided a home for her in Grace’s rambling old apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street. Losing her parents at a young age had been bound to have an effect on Marty, but globe-trotting Grace and stay-at-home Sophie had done their best to fill that void, and succeeded marginally well. Until the last year and a half, when Marty had gone from one disastrous incident to a worse one, and Grace had been diagnosed with a recurrence of breast cancer. It had been downhill from there.

She finished the muffin, then pushed away from the table before she could go searching for more comfort food. She’d been working nonstop for the last few months. Stonegate Farm hadn’t been run as an inn since the early 1980s and the entire place had been abandoned for the last five years. Just clearing out the debris had been a massive undertaking, and the decorating and painting—not to mention structural repairs that had taken what little money Sophie had left—were a Herculean effort. She’d finished the main building, but the wing off the back was outright dangerous, and she’d boarded it up until she could decide whether to try to salvage it or to tear it down completely.

For the time being she had enough on her plate with the main part of the farm. She couldn’t afford much help—and Grace was too scattered and Marty was almost more trouble than she was worth to be of much use. The inn was close to being ready for its grand opening, and Sophie’s nerves were stretched to the breaking point. Every room was booked for the foliage season, and if she managed to carry this off then her worries would be over. Wouldn’t they?

She moved to the multipaned window over the sink, glancing down to the lake. The cool stillness of it called to her, and she tried to resist.

She ought to get to work, she knew it, but for some reason she couldn’t quite manage to exert herself. It was a beautiful morning in late summer—the windows were open, letting in a soft breeze, and overhead the sugar maples stirred and whispered. She’d been working so damned hard in the six months they’d been in Vermont—surely she deserved a day off? A day where she could lie around and do crossword puzzles and smoke cigarettes as Marty spent her days when Sophie wasn’t hassling her.

Scratch that, no more cigarettes. And she’d really rather curl up in a hammock with a stack of cookbooks and another muffin….

She’d eaten the last one, without even realizing it. It was a good thing she favored loose-fitting clothing that covered a multitude of dietary sins. Unlike her skinny sister, who liked to show as much skin as she could.

Lazing in a hammock on a warm summer day wasn’t for the likes of her, not this summer. Maybe by next year, when the inn was flourishing and she could afford to hire more help, she could take the occasional day off and enjoy the peaceful country existence she’d been fantasizing about all her life. In the meantime, there was work to be done if she was ever going to get the place ready for the invasion of guests in two weeks’ time. Not only that, but she had a column due on Friday, and she hadn’t even started it.

She probably ought to give up the writing, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Letters from Stonegate Farm, the column she wrote for the small Long Island magazine, kept her grounded, reminded her that she was living her dream. After years of telling bored women how to make their own pasta, how to turn empty milk jugs into elegant plant containers, how to turn a tract home into a rural charmer or a fairy-tale palace, she was finally able to put it all into practice. And before long she’d have an appreciative audience, instead of a moody teenage sister and a mother who didn’t seem to notice anything at all.

The day was going to be unseasonably warm for mid-August. The sun was already bright overhead, and Sophie pushed the sleeves of her dress up past her elbows. Maybe she’d take just a short walk, down to the edge of the lake, soak up the last bit of quiet. Here, at the north end of Still Lake it was relatively secluded, even at the height of summer. The only other house nearby was the old Whitten cottage, and it had been closed up and deserted for years. Sophie owned the rest of the area, as well as the outbuildings, which included the sagging barn and the old cabins. Those were past saving, and when she could afford it she’d have them torn down. Eventually this place would be pristine and perfect, teeming with paying customers. For now it was a silent oasis amid the summer bustle.

Whether or not she actually wanted crowds of people here was something she didn’t allow herself to consider. It was the only way she could afford to live here, and she always tried hard to be a realist. If taking care of hordes of strangers meant she could live in the country, then she’d accept the price, willingly. Besides, it would be nice to have an appreciative audience for a change.

She pushed open the door, heading down the sloping lawn to the lake, feeling momentarily peaceful. The water was still and dark, seemingly untouched by the frenzied activity at the busy south end. Still Lake was a large, meandering body of water, and if one came upon the north end one might think the peacefulness of Whitten’s Cove was all that existed. It wasn’t until you got near the end that you saw the wide fingers of water that stretched off toward the west and the south, out of sight of Sophie’s quiet expanse of lakefront.

This was the least populated area around Colby. Years ago Stonegate Farm had been a prosperous dairy concern, but no cows had grazed on the wide green fields for forty years now. She’d bought the place from the last of Peggy Niles’s drunken sons, who seemed more than happy to get rid of it. It didn’t take her long to figure out why. Most people weren’t attracted to the site of a famous murder.

Then again, the Niles family had always been a shiftless lot, according to Marge Averill, her good friend. The husband had run off, the drunken sons had bled their mother dry, selling off pieces of the old place while their mother tried to make a go of it, renting rooms to the summer people. She made a decent living until the murders.

It was almost unbelievable that this perfect New England village had been witness to such violence, but Sophie wasn’t that naive. Any old town with a long history would have violent stories attached to it, and the Northeast Kingdom murders were far from the most colorful. A tragedy, of course, that three teenage girls had been murdered, but the case had been solved, a drugged-out teenage drifter had been convicted and sent off to jail, and if, twenty years later, some parents still mourned their lost daughters, then that was only to be expected. The very thought of losing Marty was enough to send Sophie into a mindless panic, no matter how determinedly obnoxious she was. Reality must be so much worse.

But the town of Colby had gotten over it, and it no longer mattered that one of the girls had been found down by the lake, the other two close by, or that all three girls had helped out Peggy Niles at the inn. Doc had even suggested, with ghoulish humor, that Sophie could capitalize on the inn’s morbid history and advertise it as haunted.

She could never do that, not in such a small town. And Doc Henley hadn’t been serious. He was the essence of a kindly, old-fashioned GP—he’d brought half the town, including the three murdered girls, into the world, and he’d pronounced a goodly number of them dead when their time had come.

Sophie sat down on one of the Adirondack chairs, resting her feet against a large boulder as she looked out over the stillness. Waiting for that elusive sense of peace to envelop her.

Something wasn’t right.

She heard the car on the graveled driveway, so attuned to the sounds of Vermont that she even recognized the irregular rhythm of Marge Averill’s aging Saab. She waved a lazy hand, not bothering to rise. Marge was middle-aged, friendly, with a ruthless streak beneath her sturdy exterior, and she’d been particularly solicitous to Sophie since she’d sold her the old Niles farm and its various decrepit outbuildings, probably because, Sophie suspected, she’d paid too much.

“Glorious morning!” she greeted Sophie, striding toward the edge of the lake with her usual determination. “How’s your mother doing?”

“Fine,” Sophie said. This was one of the real estate agent’s busiest times of year, and she wasn’t the sort who came calling if she didn’t have a damned good reason. “What brings you out here?”

“You’re not going to like it,” Marge said flatly, throwing herself down on another chair and shoving her gray hair away from her flushed face.

Sophie groaned. “What did Marty do this time?”

“Absolutely nothing, as far as I know,” Marge said, momentarily distracted. “No, it’s something I did, I’m afraid. I rented out the Whitten place.”

Sophie swiveled around, squinting in the bright sunlight across the shallow cove. That’s what was different. The old house was no longer deserted. The shutters were open, and so was the front door, even though there wasn’t a vehicle or a person in sight.

“Damn,” she said.

“You can’t blame me. We haven’t had any interest in the place for half a dozen years, and then suddenly the lawyers handling the estate call to tell me they’ve rented the place out from under me, and he might be wanting to buy. I couldn’t very well come back with a higher offer from you without talking to you, and there was no keeping the guy from showing up.”

“I’m not in any position to buy it right now and you know it,” Sophie said. The third muffin was sitting like a rock in the pit of her stomach. “Everything I have is tied up in Stonegate Farm.”

“Look, chances are this deal will fall through. No one has stayed on at the Whitten house for more than a few weeks, and there’s no reason this man will be any different. Just be patient. He’ll hear about the murders and get spooked.”

“I didn’t,” Sophie said.

“And we both know that women are much tougher than men,” Marge replied. She squinted into the bright sunlight toward the old house. “Look at it this way—you can’t even see the Whitten house unless you’re down here by the lake. And besides, he’s not bad-looking, to put it mildly. We don’t get that many single men around here over the age of thirty.”

Sophie followed her gaze. In the dazzling sunlight she could now see someone moving around at the side of the old house, but he was too far away to get a good look. Besides, he was the enemy. She wanted the Whitten house, almost more than she’d wanted Stonegate Farm. It was part of her plan, to turn the north end of Still Lake into a serene little enclave that would soothe the body and soul. She didn’t want strangers around, getting in the way of her plans. She most particularly didn’t want ostensibly good-looking male strangers, not when she had a vulnerable younger sister around.

She turned back, frowning. “Who is he?”

“He says his name is John Smith, believe it or not. Someone thought he might be a computer nerd, planning on setting up business around here. Someone else thought he might be some kind of financial consultant. That should last about six months, max. No one can make a living around here unless they’re independently wealthy.”

“I’m planning to.”

“That’s different,” Marge said blithely. “You and I live off the tourist industry. We’ll make out just fine. Now, if Mr. Smith were a carpenter or a plumber it would be a different matter. Not that we haven’t got more than our share of carpenters around here. Anyway, I wanted to warn you in case you decided to go wandering around the place. He’s got a year’s lease with an option to buy, but I bet he’ll be out once the snow flies. Or once he hears about the murders.”

He’d disappeared behind the old house, leaving Sophie to look after him thoughtfully. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe he already knows.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sophie shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems funny he’d rent at this end of the lake, when you’ve told me there are several places open around the south end, including some places that haven’t been abandoned for years. Why would someone want to come to a decrepit old cottage, sight unseen?”

“Beats me. I just take the rent check,” Marge said. She rose, brushing a stray leaf off her twill pants. “Tell you what, maybe I’ll do a little investigating. He’s too young for me, but I never let a little thing like a decade or two stand in my way, and I’m getting tired of sleeping alone. Unless you’re interested.”

“No,” Sophie said flatly.

“You haven’t even had a good look at him.”

“Not interested. I’m having a hard enough time keeping my own life under control—I don’t need complications and neither does Marty.”

She didn’t miss Marge’s brief expression of sheer frustration. Marge had made no secret of the fact that she didn’t approve of Marty or the way Sophie treated her.

“Marty can take care of herself if you’d just let her,” Marge said.

“She’s done a piss-poor job of it so far.” She waited for Marge to tell her she’d done a piss-poor job, as well, but Marge said nothing. She knew she didn’t have to.

“I gotta get back to work,” Marge said, pushing herself off the bench. “Doc said he might come by later. Bet he’s curious about your neighbor, even if you aren’t.”

Sophie smiled reluctantly. “Doc’s an old gossip and we both know it. If the man has any secrets, Doc will ferret them out.”

Marge cast a final, longing look toward the old cottage. “He’s a fine figure of a man, I’ll say that much,” she said, smacking her lips. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“Short of evicting him, I don’t think so.”

“Just keep Marty away and everything should be fine,” Marge said. “In another few weeks you’ll be too busy to worry about unwanted neighbors and so will your little sister.”

“I always manage to find time to worry.”

“Well, stop it,” Marge ordered.

“Yes, ma’am. Maybe I’ll bring Mr. Smith some muffins to welcome him to the neighborhood. That way I can see whether or not I can find out how long he really plans to stay.”

“You bring him some of your muffins and he won’t want to leave,” Marge said blithely. “My cooking would drive him clear back to…to wherever it is he came from.”

“I suppose I could poison him,” Sophie said thoughtfully. “That’s one way to get rid of him.”

“Don’t joke about murder, Sophie. Not here.” There was no missing the seriousness in Marge’s voice. “People have long memories.”

“Do they?” She glanced back over at the Whitten house, looking for her unwanted neighbor.

He was nowhere to be seen.




2


The place hadn’t changed much in almost twenty years, Griffin thought. A few more tourists crowding into the general store, fewer parking spaces on the town common. There was a gift shop in the once-deserted mill, and a new Scottish woolens store was opening up in the center of town, catering to the wealthy summer folk. And there was a new owner out at Stonegate Farm, planning to open as an inn in September, just in time for the leaf peepers.

No, it hadn’t changed. They were still the same overbred, overeducated scions of Harvard and Yale and Princeton, still the same locals who smiled and waited on them and despised them behind their backs. Except there were more of them.

Why the hell had he come back here? He hated this place, with its bucolic charm and small-town nosiness. Twenty years ago it was the first place that had ever felt like home in his rootless life. He’d found out just how hospitable a place it was when he’d ended up railroaded for a murder he wouldn’t believe he’d committed.

No, he didn’t give a damn about Colby, Vermont, or the people who lived there. He only cared about the truth.

He wasn’t interested in running into any old acquaintances who might happen to remember him, but he’d managed to avoid almost everyone when he picked up a few necessities in town and headed out to the Whitten place. That was another change—two decades ago you couldn’t walk out of Audley’s General Store without being quizzed as to where you were renting, what brought you to Colby, how long you were planning to stay, and who you were related to. The summer people added where you went to college to their list of questions, and he’d had his answers primed. But they’d taken his money without even glancing at his face, and he’d left the old-fashioned country store with a six-pack of Coke and a block of Cabot cheese and no one paid the slightest bit of attention. He was almost disappointed.

The woman at the real estate office had looked flustered when she handed him the key, and he got the feeling she wasn’t too happy about his renting the place. Tough shit. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he didn’t give a damn if the place had been cleaned, if the water was on, or if squirrels had taken up residence in the chimney. He just wanted to get there and lock the doors behind him, so he could feel safe once more.

It was an annoying weakness, and he hated it, but all the will in the world couldn’t make it go away. He always felt that way when he came to a new place. Maybe someday he’d get over it, but for now he locked the doors and windows and kept the world at bay. It was better that way.

It didn’t take him long to get settled. The road to the Whitten house was rutted and overgrown, discouraging the curious, and the house looked abandoned. He pried open the shutters, then opened the windows to the fresh mountain air. The water had been turned on, after all, and if the living room cushions showed recent evidence of mice he could live with it. He swept the place out, cleared off a dusty harvest table in the living room and carried in his laptop computer before he bothered with groceries and suitcases. At least he’d learned to keep his priorities straight in the last twenty years.

He put the Coke and the cheese in the warm refrigerator, plugged it in and went out onto the front porch. The chairs were stored in a corner, so he sat on the railing, looking down the weedy lawn to the lake. His last sight of Colby, Vermont.

He glanced up at Stonegate Farm across the stretch of water. It looked prosperous—the new owners must have put a great deal of money and energy into it. Now he had to figure out a way to get inside without arousing any suspicions.

It would have been a hell of a lot easier if he had the faintest idea what he was looking for. He didn’t remember much about that night, and twenty years hadn’t improved his memory.

But he’d been up at the house—he knew that much. Back in the closed-off wing that had once served as the town hospital. And he hadn’t been alone.

Maybe that was the last time he’d seen Lorelei alive. Or maybe he’d been the one to kill her—cut her throat and carry her down to the water.

If so, there’d still be traces of blood somewhere. Something, anything that could tell him what happened that night. Maybe just being there would jar his stubborn memory.

Being back in Colby had done zip so far, except make him feel unsettled. If he couldn’t sneak his way into the old inn he’d try talking his way in. If worse came to worst, he’d break in.

If that didn’t do any good, he’d start taking a look at the rest of the town. How many of the same people still lived there? How many remembered the murders?

Sooner or later he’d find the answers he needed. The good people of Colby might think it was over and done with, the chapter closed.

It wasn’t closed, and he knew it better than anyone. By the time he left there’d be answers. An ending. All the questions answered, the dead buried, the ghosts settled.

By the time he left he’d know the truth. He’d know who killed Alice Calderwood, Lorelei Johnson and Valette King. He’d know whether or not it was him.

It was early evening when he saw the woman coming across the stretch of rough lawn beside the house, and for a moment he thought he was imagining things. He’d spent the rest of the afternoon airing out the old place, tossing mouse-eaten cushions and ancient newspapers into the trash, making a stab at the cobwebs. He’d found two chairs that managed to survive the years of storage and pulled them onto the porch, and he was sitting there, a can of Coke in one hand, his feet propped up on the railing, when she appeared out of the woods.

His emotions were mixed. On the one hand, he sure as hell didn’t want people walking in, unannounced, particularly women like this one. She was pretty in a pink-and-gold sort of way, dressed in a flowery thing that was too long and too loose on her body. All she needed was a huge hat and white gloves and she’d belong at a goddamn garden party.

Except that, instead of a teacup, she carried a plate of what looked very much like muffins. And he, a man who needed nothing and nobody, decided not to scare her off. He had his priorities, and food was definitely one of them.

Besides, she was coming from the old inn. Maybe he wouldn’t have to make much effort to gain access at all. Maybe the answers would be delivered, like a plate of muffins, right to his doorstep.

Griffin knew well enough he should rise from his indolent position and greet her. He hadn’t had a stern mother to teach him any manners, there’d been just his father and him, moving from place to place until he was fifteen and his father died. After that he’d been on his own, but he knew what was proper, anyway. He stayed put, though, still wary, as she climbed the short flight of steps onto the front porch.

He didn’t like pretty women, he liked women with character. He liked them sleek and smart like his former fiancée, Annelise. No nonsense, no sentiment. This one had stepped out of a house-and-garden magazine, smelling of flowers and fresh-baked bread, sweet and soft and warm. He just looked at her, deliberately unwelcoming.

“I’m Sophie Davis,” she said, and her voice matched her dress. Light, musical, annoyingly charming. “My family and I are running the old inn—I’m afraid we’re your only neighbors for the time being until the place opens up this fall. I brought you some muffins to welcome you to Colby.”

He took them and set them on the railing in front of him. He needed to dredge up some semblance of charm, but something was stopping him. Maybe it was the complacent normalcy of the young woman standing there. She belonged in a different world from the rootless one he had always lived in—hers was a land of tidy homes and secure families. He was big, rough, sweaty from opening up the house. She was smaller and irritatingly perfect.

He also didn’t want her thinking she could just drop in. He valued his privacy, especially when he wasn’t planning on being particularly public about who he was and why he was here.

“Thanks,” he said, then realized he sounded less than gracious. He glanced over at the old Niles place. “Seems like a strange time to open an inn.”

“We’ve been working hard to get it ready. The place was abandoned for years, and it’s taken us a while to get it in any kind of shape.”

Empty for years, he thought. He could have had a dozen chances to come back, find the answers he was looking for. He’d been too busy trying to forget.

“Besides,” she added, “autumn is the busiest time around here. Even more than summer or skiing season. We’re already completely booked for September and half of October.”

“When did you say you opened?”

“Two weeks.”

Two weeks. Two weeks to get inside the old place before it was overrun with tourists. Two weeks to see if there were any secrets left.

She was staring at him oddly. No wonder. She was probably used to men fawning all over her. He roused himself. If he only had two weeks, then he’d better make the most of every opportunity, whether he was in the mood to or not, and it wouldn’t do to rouse her suspicions.

“Can I get you something to drink, Mrs. Davis?” he asked politely, rising from his chair. He towered over her. He didn’t like short women, but then, she wasn’t really that short. It was just the damned sense of femininity about her that bugged him. She probably wasn’t even thirty yet, but she had an old-fashioned air that annoyed him. He didn’t want her staying, he hadn’t had time to get acclimatized yet. But if she owned the inn then he’d be a fool to drive her away so quickly.

She didn’t look too happy to be here, either—she was looking for a chance to escape. “It’s Sophie,” she said. “I’m not married. And I really need to get back to the inn. I just wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood. When we open you should come by for dinner.”

She looked as if she’d rather eat worms than feed him. He’d failed to charm her, which was no surprise. She was looking at him as if she were Little Red Riding Hood and he, the Big Bad Wolf. She wasn’t far off.

“Sure,” he said. Lying. In two weeks’ time he’d be gone. With or without the answers he needed. “Thanks for the muffins.” It was a curt dismissal, one she couldn’t fail to notice.

Her smile was brittle. “Anytime,” she said, turning her back on him and heading off his porch, out of his life. Her flowered skirts flounced in the breeze.

He sat back down in his chair, watching her go, and his eyes narrowed. He didn’t trust her, but then, he wasn’t in the habit of trusting anyone. No one could be that squeaky clean. She said they’d been working on the place for months. What kind of secrets had she uncovered? What had she obliterated? He’d waited too damned long to face his past. He wasn’t going to wait any longer, and no pink-and-pretty hausfrau was going to get in his way. No matter how tempting she was.



“Bastard,” Sophie muttered beneath her breath, making her way through the overgrown path to the inn. There was nothing worse than a good-looking bastard in the bargain. Sophie had to admit Marge was right about that. He was tall, with the rangy kind of body she’d always found particularly appealing in men. His features were interesting rather than pretty—a bony nose, high cheekbones and a strong chin gave him the look of an ancient Roman bust. He was about as animated. His eyes were dark behind the wire-rimmed glasses, and his mouth would have been sexy if it had been employed in something other than a frown. His hair was too long—a tangle of gray-streaked dark curls, and he had the personality of a python.

There was a watchful stillness about him that made her nervous, and she’d never been the paranoid type. But she couldn’t rid herself of the notion that John Smith was looking for trouble.

It was just as well he was unfriendly, because when it came to good-looking men Marty didn’t particularly care about age differences. She’d probably take one look at Mr. Smith’s elegant, classical face and fall madly in love. Sophie could only hope he was equally unwelcoming to Marty.

In the best of all possible worlds he’d provide enough distraction for Marty to cheer up. She was still mourning the loss of her latest boyfriend, an unpleasantly tattooed young man known as “Snake,” and so far her seclusion at the north end of the lake had kept her away from any possible substitutes. Sophie wasn’t naive enough to think country boys were any safer than city boys, but if Marty developed a harmless crush on their unwelcoming new neighbor it might manage to keep her energized and out of trouble.

Assuming Mr. Smith would be just as unwelcoming to a nubile young woman as he was to her.

Sophie had no delusions about her own charms. She was nothing above ordinary—average height, average weight verging dangerously toward plumpness, average features, ordinary hair. She’d never been one to inflame men’s passions, and given Mr. Smith’s reaction, that wasn’t about to change. Which was fine with her—right now she was far too busy with the inn and her motley family to be distracted by an unfriendly stranger with the face of a renaissance angel. She’d done her duty, baked him muffins, and with any luck she wouldn’t have to see him again. The solitude of the Whitten place and the stories about the murders would drive him away, fast.

There was no sign of Marty when she got back to the inn, though she could hear the muffled thump of music Marty seemed to prefer. At least she was keeping the volume down so the tender musings of Limp Bizkit and company didn’t spew out over the tranquillity of the lake.

Grace was sitting in her room, rocking back and forth in the old wicker chair, that too-familiar vacant expression on her face, and a new wave of guilt assailed Sophie. Her mother’s deterioration had been rapid once they’d come to Vermont—she’d even stopped reading her beloved true-crime books. They lay piled in the corner, heaped on tables, and not even the newest, most gruesome entries into the field could entice Grace’s once-avid mind. She simply sat and rocked, a sweet smile on her face, looking decades older than her actual years.

“You didn’t eat much,” Sophie said, taking a seat beside her.

Grace turned to look at her. “I wasn’t hungry, love. You shouldn’t worry so much about me—I’m fine.”

“Did you take your medicine? I bought you some ginkgo biloba that’s supposed to help with memory.”

“What’s wrong with my memory?” Grace asked.

Sophie bit her lip in frustration. “You’ve just been more forgetful recently.”

“Maybe some things are better off forgotten,” Grace murmured. “Now, don’t you worry about me, Sophie. I hear there’s a gorgeous young man down at the Whitten place. You should be thinking about him.”

Her mother never failed to surprise her. “How did you hear about him?”

“Oh, there’s not much I don’t know about this place, even if it seems like I’m not paying attention,” Grace said. “So why don’t you put on something sexy and go welcome him to the neighborhood?”

“I already did. I just came back. I have to tell you he wasn’t particularly pleased to see me.”

Grace’s eyes were surprisingly critical. “You consider that something sexy?”

Sophie glanced down at her flowered skirt. “I didn’t say I was going to wear something sexy—that was your idea. It’s not my particular style, anyway. I like flowery, flowing stuff.”

Grace shook her head despairingly. “You’ll never get a husband that way.”

“Who says I want a husband?” Sophie replied. “You didn’t enjoy yours much while you had him.”

“You and I are very different, Sophie. You need a good-looking man to distract you from being so damned responsible all the time. You need to fall so much in love that you stop behaving yourself and go a little wild. You need children so you stop fussing over me and Marty. We’ll be just fine.”

“I’m not in any hurry,” Sophie said, trying not to sound defensive.

“Dearie,” Grace murmured in her soft, sweet voice. “You need to get laid.”

Sophie tried to stifle her shocked laugh. Not that Grace had ever been shy about passion. She’d always been a free spirit, and during her years of travel she’d always been with one man or another. But with Gracey a ghost of her former vibrant self, the earthy suggestion sounded ludicrous.

“As you said, you and I are very different, Mama. I tend to keep my…libido under control.”

“Straight-jacketed is more like it,” Grace said with a sniff. “Are you so sure you know what you’re doing?” She sounded surprisingly sharp.

“What do you mean? Doing without sex?”

“This course you’ve set your life on. You’re not even thirty years old and you’ve moved to the back end of beyond to work like a dog on this old place. There are no eligible men around, no movies, no bookstores, nothing to do but work on this old house and take care of your family. Don’t you deserve a better life than that?”

“There aren’t any eligible men in New York—they’re all either gay or married,” Sophie said. “And I think this is a very nice life, indeed. I want to take care of you, Mama.”

Grace shook her head. “I’m sixty years old, Sophie. I don’t need taking care of. I think you should sell this place,” she said. “Go find your own life.”

“I wouldn’t find a buyer—not at this point. Once I prove it’s a going concern then maybe people would want to buy it, but right now I’m afraid we’re stuck.”

Grace’s expression changed, slowly, as if a veil was being pulled over her mind. “Of course, love,” she murmured in that vague tone. “Whatever you think is best.”

Whatever you think is best. The words echoed in Sophie’s ears as she wandered out onto the wide front porch. The moon had risen over the lake, and the night was clear and cool. The overstuffed, refurbished glider sat in one corner, beckoning her, and she wanted to go and curl up on it, tuck her hands beneath her head and stare at the night sky.

She had paperwork to do. She had bread dough to make, so that it would rise overnight in the refrigerator. She had laundry and menus and a column to write. She had to spend at least half an hour worrying about Grace and Marty, and she had to do it all without a cigarette.

She’d come to Vermont hoping to simplify her life. To get back to basics, to concentrate on day-to-day living. So how had it all gotten so incredibly complicated?

She looked down toward the Whitten house. From this vantage point she could barely see it in the woods, just a faint light shining through the trees. There was something about the mysterious Mr. Smith that didn’t seem right. If he’d moved to Colby to set up some kind of year-round business he’d made a stupid move. There wasn’t enough work to support him. And Mr. Smith didn’t strike her as a particularly stupid man.

He didn’t strike her as a Mr. Smith, either. There was something more going on, and unlike her mother, Sophie had never been fond of unsolved mysteries.

It was probably simple enough. He might have vacationed here when he was a child, or maybe he had a college friend who’d spent time in Colby. The small town was a closely guarded secret. Its pristine beauty depended on limiting the flow of tourists—locals had been known to jokingly suggest they put border guards on the Center Road to keep too many strangers from coming in. It had been sheer luck that Sophie had heard about the town from a writer friend.

Somehow or other Mr. Smith had found his way to Colby, to the Whitten house. It would be easy to find out what or who had brought him to town, to her very doorstep.

And she had every intention of finding out. Then maybe she wouldn’t have to waste time standing on her front porch, staring out into the darkness, thinking about him and what secrets lay behind his cool, dark eyes.

For now she needed to concentrate on getting the inn up and running, and forget about the beautiful, mysterious stranger who’d moved practically into her backyard. In a month or so he’d be gone.

And she’d be here, taking care of her guests, running her inn. Being happy. Or at least serene. Sometimes that was the best she could hope for.




3


Griffin didn’t sleep well. Not that he’d expected to—being back in Colby was nerve-racking, and staring down at the lake gave him the creeps. Enough so that he couldn’t quite bring himself to break into the old inn to look around while everyone slept. He was going to have to get over that, and fast, if he was going to accomplish what he needed to do.

He opened the casement windows in the bedroom under the eaves. No screens, of course, but it was long after blackfly season, and with luck the mosquitoes wouldn’t be too bad. If worse came to worst he could go down to Audley’s and get some screening to tack up. But he’d lived through worse than a few mosquito bites—besides, insects tended to have the sense to leave him alone. He just wished he could say the same for people.

There was no coffeepot in the ramshackle kitchen. He found a stovetop percolator, but half the innards were missing. He should have just bought a jar of instant coffee, but he never considered the powdered stuff to be worth drinking. Right now he was ready to change his mind.

He knew where he could find coffee, of course. And probably more blueberry muffins like the ones his visitor had brought over last night. It would give him the perfect excuse to get his foot in the door. Surely a neighbor would be willing to share a cup of coffee with a desperate man? Maybe he should apologize for being so unfriendly yesterday, try to worm himself into her good graces. It wouldn’t hurt to try the easy way of getting inside the old building.

The only thing he could remember from the night that Lorelei died was being up at the inn. He and Lorelei used to sneak into the abandoned wing at the back and fuck like rabbits. They’d had too many close calls in the tumbledown cabin by the lake, and Peggy Niles considered it her duty to keep the girls virtuous. She’d had a fanatically religious streak, and Griffin had always figured it would be easier to just avoid her rather than arguing about his right to screw anything that would lie still long enough. He was counting on finding something—anything—in the old wing to jar his memory. If that didn’t work, he’d try something else, but it was the obvious place to start. And in order to get in there, he was going to have to get into Miss Sophie Davis’s good graces. Even if that was the last thing he wanted to do.

He didn’t like the thought of going up there without caffeine already fortifying his system, but he didn’t have much choice. It was that or head into the next town over to the old diner, and he wasn’t in the mood for grease and canned coffee. Two weeks until the place opened, she’d said. He hadn’t come for a vacation—he might as well start now.

The path between the houses was narrower than he remembered, overgrown in places. He tried not to think about the last time he’d walked the footpath, and who’d been with him. It was more than twenty years ago—why couldn’t he pick and choose what he remembered and what he forgot? He would have been perfectly happy not to remember Lorelei clinging to his arm, laughing up at him, stumbling along beside him. He would have given anything to remember what happened that final night in Colby, when he woke up and found himself covered in blood.

He’d forgotten the smell of the countryside, the clean, fresh scent of the lake, the sweet resin of the pine trees, the incense of growing things. He’d loved it here once—stayed here longer than he’d stayed anywhere after his father died and he’d been tall enough to pass himself off as an adult. In fact, he’d been much better off without dear old Dad, who’d been a little too fond of the bottle and belt. The old man spent his time either belligerent or mournful. Or passed out. Still, he’d been the only family Griffin had ever known with his mother long gone, and he’d loved him, anyway.

But it was easier to find work, a dry place to sleep, decent food, when you didn’t have an old boozer trailing after you.

Funny thing was, he couldn’t remember where his father was buried. His mother was buried with her family in Minnesota, but he couldn’t remember where he’d ended up laying the old man to rest. That bothered him.

His father had died in Kansas or Nebraska. One of those big, flat states, in a small town, and Griffin had just managed to beg, borrow and steal the money for the funeral expenses. He never could afford a stone, but it didn’t matter. He was never going back.

He hated returning to places, especially this particular one. There’d been one point when he was fool enough to think he could spend the rest of his life in Colby. He’d been young, with just a trace of innocence left. The Vermont legal system had knocked that out of him, fast.

Of course, that was before he and Lorelei had gotten involved. Back then he’d never had much sense when it came to women. Lorelei was trouble from the word go. She was thin, lithe and sexually voracious. So voracious, in fact, that one man hadn’t been enough for her, and probably not two, either. He’d known he was sharing her, and he’d told himself he didn’t mind. He would have liked to know where she went on the nights she didn’t creep into the decrepit cottage down by the lake, but she wouldn’t tell him and he stopped asking. He didn’t want to care enough to feel jealous, but he’d been a kid, and sooner or later it had all boiled over.

He remembered that much. Remembered the screaming fight they’d had, which too many people had overheard. But he couldn’t remember anything else. If she told him who else she was seeing. If she’d said anything that would lead him to the truth.

And he couldn’t remember if, in his adolescent outrage, he’d put his hands on her and killed her.

That’s what a jury had believed, no matter what he’d said. That he’d killed her, and his so-called blackout was only a convenient ploy to get off the hook. But no one knew he’d been in the old wing that night. Hell, even he hadn’t remembered until five years later, and by then all he wanted to do was forget.

Now he was ready to remember, ready for the truth. No matter how ugly.

He’d had no reason to kill the other two girls. He’d barely known them, just managed to flirt with them at the Wednesday night square dances. Well, there had been a one-night stand with Valette, but that hadn’t amounted to anything, and most people didn’t even know about it. Valette had certainly managed to forget it in short order.

In the end the police hadn’t even bothered trying to pin the other two murders on him, satisfied that they could tie him to Lorelei and put him away for the rest of his life. They’d been found far enough away—Valette in a cornfield and Alice by the side of the road. The police never bothered to wonder how unlikely it would be to have two killers in a town the size of Colby. Two who preyed on pretty teenage girls. They’d been happy enough to railroad Thomas Ingram Griffin. It was just a good thing the death penalty was outlawed in Vermont. And there hadn’t been enough energy for a lynch mob.

He’d worried someone would recognize him once he came back, but he decided they probably wouldn’t. It had been easy enough to track down the twenty-year-old newspapers, to look at the grainy photograph of the boy he once was. Hair past his shoulders, a beard covering half his face, a James Dean kind of squint that obscured the fact that he needed glasses. The picture they’d regularly run was a doozy—taken when they’d slapped handcuffs on him at the edge of the lake. He was wearing cutoffs, and you could see his tattoo quite clearly if you bothered to look. He was going to have to remember to keep his shirt on. The snake coiling over one hip would be a dead giveaway.

Without that, no one would be likely to connect the reclusive, bespectacled Mr. Smith with the murdering teenage vagrant. He wore khakis and cotton now, without rips. His beard, something he’d cultivated quite assiduously to hide his too-pretty face, was long gone, and the face that was now exposed was too full of character to be called angelic. His hair was shorter, with streaks of premature gray, and if anyone could still remember the troubled kid they’d locked up, they’d see only a passing resemblance in the face of Mr. Smith. If they bothered to look at all.

He was counting on them to not look. And to not remember. Over the years he’d discovered that people pretty much saw what they wanted to see, and no one would be looking for the lost soul of a once-convicted murderer in a well-heeled tourist.

Stonegate Farm had improved in the last twenty years, though he found that hard to believe. The peeling white clapboard had been painted a cheerful yellow, and baskets of flowering plants, not too many, not too few, hung from the porch. The windows were spotless, shining in the sunlight, the once-wild lawn was tamed into obedience, and even the old barn looked like it was being worked on. The old wing stretched out back, spruced up with a fresh coat of paint, but he couldn’t see past the smoky windows. It looked boarded up, impregnable, a mixed blessing. At least the new owner hadn’t gotten around to messing with that part of the place, thank God. There was still a chance he might find something that could lead him to the answers he needed to find.

Someone was sitting on the porch, watching him, and he saw a pair of long, bare legs swinging back and forth.

“Who are you?” It was a teenage girl, probably not much older than Lorelei when she died. She had fuchsia-streaked black hair, a ring through her eyebrow, a skimpy bathing suit showing off a too-thin body, and a belligerent expression on her face. Presumably this was Sophie Davis’s sister. No wonder the older sister looked worn out.

“John Smith. I’m renting the house in the woods.” He deliberately didn’t call it the old Whitten place—there was no reason a stranger would know its name. “I wondered if you happened to have a spare cup of coffee?”

The girl shrugged her thin shoulders. “Sophie usually makes a pot—go on in and help yourself. I’m Marthe. With an e. Like the French.”

“You sure your sister wouldn’t mind?”

The girl’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “How do you know she’s my sister?”

“Logic,” he said, climbing up onto the porch. The decking had been painted a fresh gray, while the porch ceiling was sky blue with fleecy white clouds stenciled on it. “She told me she was living here with her mother and her sister, and I’m assuming if you were hired help to run the bed-and-breakfast you wouldn’t be sitting on your butt.”

“Maybe I’m taking a break. You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?”

“I gave them up. How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Eighteen,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Next January.”

“Sorry, I’m not about to contribute to your bad habits.”

She leaned back, surveying him slowly. “Oh, I can think of much better ways for you to lead me astray.”

He laughed, without humor. “Honey, I’m much too old for you.”

“I’m willing to overlook a few drawbacks,” she said in a sultry voice. “How’d you meet my sister?”

“She brought me some muffins to welcome me to the neighborhood.”

The girl’s laugh was mirthless. “Watch your back. She wants the Whitten place, and she doesn’t care how she gets it. You don’t want to end up floating facedown in the lake.”

The macabre suggestion was like a blow to the stomach, but Sophie’s sister seemed blissfully unaware of the effect she’d had on him. Or the imperfect memories she’d resurrected, of another body floating facedown in Still Lake.

“She doesn’t strike me as the murderous type,” he said carefully, leaning against the porch railing.

“Things aren’t always what they seem,” the girl said cheerfully. “For instance, does this place look like the scene of a savage murder? Not likely. You’d be more likely to die of boredom than having your throat cut. Perfect peace and quiet.”

“That’s what I’m looking for.”

“You wouldn’t have found it twenty years ago,” she said with ghoulish enthusiasm. “There was a serial killer around here, and he murdered three teenage girls. Raped them and cut apart their bodies. It was really gruesome.”

“It sounds it,” he said in a bored voice. His memory wasn’t that bad—there’d been no rape, and only Alice had been mutilated, though the autopsy had revealed that all three girls had had sexual relations within twenty-four hours prior to their deaths. “Did they ever find the guy who did it?”

“How’d you know it was a guy?” Marthe said suspiciously.

“Most serial killers are men. Besides, you said they were raped.”

Marthe shrugged her thin shoulders. “Gracey would know the details—there’s nothing she loves more than true-crime thrillers. Of course, she’s gotten so addled she doesn’t even remember her own name, but if you’re curious maybe she might come up with some details.”

“Not particularly,” he said, lying. “I was more interested in coffee.”

The girl hopped up from her perch on the railing, twitching her flat little rump in what she obviously hoped was a provocative fashion. “I’ll show you,” she offered. “We’ll just have to hope we can avoid Sophie.”

The kitchen of the old place had been completely redone. The painted cabinets had been stripped back to bare oak, the floor was a rough-hewn tile, the stove was one of those huge restaurant-style-things, and the countertops were butcher block and granite. A far cry from Peggy Niles’s fanatically clean surroundings—he always thought her kitchen was like an operating room. Spotless and scrubbed, even the homey smells of cooking hadn’t dared linger in its pristine environs. Only the door to the old hospital wing remained the same. Locked, probably nailed shut as it had been back then, albeit it was covered with a fresh coat of paint.

This room was far more welcoming than its original incarnation. Or maybe it was just the smell of fresh coffee and muffins that gave him a deceptive sense of peace. Smells were one thing that could always betray you, make you vulnerable to old emotions. He’d fought against them all his life.

There was no sign of Sophie Davis, and he didn’t know whether that was a consolation or a regret. She wouldn’t like her nubile little sister twitching her underclad butt around him, and he wasn’t any too fond of it, either. He was as healthy as the next man, but Miss Marthe Davis left him completely cold. Maybe because he’d never been particularly interested in teenagers.

“So what are you doing today, John?” she asked in an artless voice.

Like a fool, it took him a moment to remember that was the name he’d given her. “Cleaning up the house I rented. I didn’t give them any warning when I was coming, and the place is a mess.”

“I could help. If there’s one thing I know how to do nowadays, it’s clean houses,” she said with a moue. “I’m sure you could do with a little company.”

“Actually I’m fine….” he began, but she’d already twitched her way out of the kitchen.

“I’ll just go put something on,” she called back to him. “I know Sophie wouldn’t miss me.”

“Hell,” he muttered. There were hand-thrown pottery mugs on the counter, and he took one, filling it with coffee. He drank it black, and he almost snarled when he took his first sip. He should have known that Sophie Davis would make the kind of coffee most men would die for.

He should have poured the rest out, left the deserted kitchen and headed straight for Audley’s General Store and the instant coffee section. He didn’t usually succumb to temptation, but for some reason being back in the place where he’d let his appetites run wild seemed to be doing a number on his iron self-control. The least he could do was drain the mug and get the hell out of there, before Martha Stewart found him.

Too late. Just outside the kitchen, he heard footsteps coming from the old hallway, and he froze.



The last thing Sophie Davis expected to see when she walked into her kitchen was the enigmatic Mr. Smith. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, his long, elegant fingers wrapped around a huge mug of coffee, and the dark eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses were cool and assessing.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, too startled to remember her manners.

“Your sister offered me a cup of coffee,” he said. She didn’t like his voice. It was slow and deep and sexy, at complete odds with his cool manner. And then his words sank in.

“You met Marty?” She tried to keep the note of suspicion and worry out of her voice. For a brief moment she’d thought Mr. Smith would provide a harmless distraction for her younger sister. In the full light of day, in her bright and airy kitchen, she knew instinctively that Mr. Smith was far more dangerous than she’d ever imagined.

“Yes,” he said, giving nothing away. He seemed entirely at ease, drinking her coffee and watching her.

“She’s not even eighteen years old, Mr. Smith,” she said sternly.

“So she told me. Not that I was interested. Nubile nymphets aren’t exactly my style.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him. “What is your style, Mr. Smith?”

He cocked his head. “Is your interest personal or academic?”

The question startled her, but she met his gaze stonily. “I’m trying to look out for my little sister.”

“And who looks out for you?”

No one at all, she wanted to say, but she kept her mouth shut. If this was John Smith’s idea of making small talk she preferred his taciturn persona. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I have a lot of work to do today, and I don’t have time to spend socializing.”

“Is that what we’re doing?” he said. There was an undercurrent of amusement in his rough voice. She didn’t like it when men found her amusing.

“I’ll be happy to send you home with a thermos of coffee. We’re set up to offer them to our guests.”

“You mean you’ll be happy to send me home and you don’t care what you have to do to get me there,” he corrected her. “Trust me, Ms. Davis, I’m absolutely harmless.”

“Sure you are,” she muttered. “You underestimate the effect of those brooding Byronic looks on an impressionable teenager.”

“Brooding Byronic looks?” he echoed, his horror unfeigned.

“I’m ready!” Marty appeared in the kitchen door, dressed in a micro skirt and tube top.

“Ready for what?” Sophie demanded.

“I’m going to help John open up the house,” she said with sunny ingenuousness. It was almost enough to make Sophie waver—there were times when she thought she’d do anything if Marty would just smile.

But that didn’t include sending her off with a good-looking stranger. “No, you’re not,” she said flatly. “I need your help around here, and I’m sure Mr. Smith is entirely capable of handling the Whitten house on his own. If he needs any help I can give him the names of a couple of people who work out of the village.”

“I don’t need help…” he began, but Marty broke in, stamping her foot like a spoiled child.

“You’re always trying to stop me from doing anything I want. You don’t want me to have any fun! You’d just as soon lock me up in a convent and throw away the key.”

Sophie took a deep breath. “When did you decide that cleaning old houses was fun? You’ve been complaining since the day we got here—why in heaven’s name would you want to volunteer to do any more than you’ve grudgingly agreed to do here?”

“Maybe because I want to?”

“And what’s a convent got to do with it? Were you planning on helping him open the house or having sex with him?”

Smith choked on his coffee.

“You hate me!” Marty cried in a fury. “Well, I hate you, too!” And she stormed out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

Sophie didn’t want to face her unwelcome guest. She should have gotten used to Marty’s scenes by now, but she hadn’t slept well the night before, and for some reason Mr. Smith made her uncomfortable. “I’m sorry about that,” she said, heading for the coffee and pouring herself a mug, determined not to look at him. “My sister is at a difficult age. She’s got a lot of problems to work through.”

“Does she? She seems fairly typical to me. All teenagers are a pain in the butt.”

She glanced over at him. “You’re a father, Mr. Smith?”

“No. I just remember what it was like. Don’t you?”

“Not particularly. I was too busy being responsible to behave like a selfish adolescent. I didn’t have time to rebel.”

“Maybe you should try it when you get a chance,” he said evenly.

“I’m just as happy to have skipped that part of growing up.” She glanced out the kitchen window toward the lake, not wanting to look at him any longer.

“I’ve found that you can’t really skip parts of the process. Sooner or later they catch up with you and you have to go through them, anyway.”

“Let’s just hope I’m immune to that particular theory. I don’t have the time or the inclination to act like a giddy, lovesick brat.”

“Maybe you don’t know what you’re missing,” the man said, setting his empty coffee mug down on the counter. He’d chosen her favorite mug—the teal blue one shaped like a bean pot. She had the gloomy feeling that she’d never be able to drink from it again without picturing his long, elegant fingers wrapped around it. His mouth on it. There was no way around it, the man had the sexiest mouth she’d ever seen.

“I’m better off that way,” she said. Wondering why the hell she was even discussing this with him. She knew he was watching her out of his cool, dark eyes, even though she was determined not to meet his gaze.

“Maybe,” he said. “In the meantime, since your sister’s otherwise occupied, would you consider coming over to the house and taking a look? Give me some idea what kind of help I’ll need, maybe give me a few names?”

She stared at him in shock. Yesterday afternoon he’d looked as if he’d be more welcoming to a horde of Vikings rather than his neighbor. Now he was suddenly being relatively pleasant, asking her for help.

The problem was, she didn’t trust him. “I can give you the names, anyway….”

“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 the 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 water 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?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said wryly.

Without thinking she started up the long, narrow stairs to the second floor. There were four bedrooms and a bath off the center hallway. The claw-footed bathtub was stained with rust, the old linoleum on the floor was cracked and torn. Three of the bedrooms were abandoned, smelling of mice and mildew, the fourth was relatively more habitable.

It had a fireplace, as well, probably connected to the same sorry chimney. The old iron bed was high and wide, covered with quilts and a myriad of pillows that had somehow survived the mice. The casement windows stood open to the lake, and an old wicker chair had been drawn up close. There was a book open on the floor beside it, and she moved closer, curious. Then she realized that Mr. Smith had followed her up the stairs and was leaning in the doorway, watching her while she poked around his bedroom.

“Looks like the roof needs replacing,” she said calmly. “Or at least mending.”

“Oh, really?”

The man was very annoying. He either said too much or too little. “Look at the watermarks on the ceiling by the fireplace,” she said. “The flashing needs fixing. And there are some stains near the window. Maybe ice dams, but since this house isn’t used in the winter that’s probably not it. No one shovels the roof in the winter, so it’s most likely weakened from the weight of the snow. You need someone to come and check it out or the whole thing might collapse on you while you’re lying in bed.”

Damn, why had she said the word bed? she thought hastily. Without thinking they both turned to contemplate the bed. “We wouldn’t want that, now would we?” Mr. Smith said. “Who do I call?”

She was still curious about that thick tome by the side of his chair, and she had no intention of leaving the room until she read the title. “Hank Maynard fixes chimneys. Zebulon King does carpentry, and you can probably get his wife and son to come in and clean the place if they’re not too busy working for the other summer people. They’re a little odd, but good workers.”

“Summer people? Is that what I am?” He sounded amused at the notion.

“Those are the people who come in the summer and leave when it gets cold. You’re a summer person.”

“What makes you think I’ll be leaving?”

She ignored that. “How’s the plumbing?”

“Aren’t you going to check?” he asked. “You’re very thorough.”

She refused to blink. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“The water’s rusty, but the pipes seem to work.”

She moved around the chair, too damned close to the bed, ostensibly to look at the casement windows. The framing seemed in good shape, and the glass was still intact. She glanced down at the book, then stepped back hastily.

“Finished?” he asked pleasantly.

“Finished. I’ll write down those names and phone numbers for you. The first rush of summer business is over, so they should be able to help you. I imagine Marge Averill can send the bills to whoever still owns this place.” She looked up at him. “You really ought to find a more comfortable place to rent. This place is in lousy condition—anyone would be a fool to buy it.”

“What makes you think I’m interested in buying it?”

A wave of relief washed over Sophie. “Silly of me. No one would want to buy this place….”

“Except you, obviously. Don’t worry, Sophie. I’m not here permanently. You’ll have your privacy back before long.”

She still didn’t trust him. “In the meantime I’m not sure how safe this place is. Maybe you ought to see about renting the Wilson place on Black’s Point—”

“I like it right here.” He moved out of the doorway, just enough to let her pass. She had to brush against him in the narrow, dark space, and she didn’t like it. She found she was holding her breath until she got past him.

She was sitting at the table, scribbling down notes, when he came up behind her. She concentrated on her list, ignoring him, until he spoke.

“So what happened to the Whitten girl?”

She glanced up at him. “I imagine she just got bored with the place and took off. Just because there were murders here a long time ago doesn’t mean that it will happen again. Most young women need a little more adventure than Colby can offer.”

“Don’t you?”

“I’ve never cared much for adventure,” she said in a calm voice.

“When did she disappear? Before or after the killer got out of jail?”

She turned to face him. “You seem awfully interested in our old murders, Mr. Smith.”

He shrugged. “Just curious.”

“Curious enough to be reading a book called Encyclopedia of Serial Killers?” she shot back. “You’re as bad as my mother.”

“Your mother likes to read about serial killers? How very interesting.”

“She used to like true-crime books. Now she doesn’t read much of anything.” She rose from the table. “Those names should get you started. That is, if you’ve decided to stay.”

“Oh, I’ve decided. Nothing could make me leave here until I’m good and ready to go.”

It was far from the best news she’d ever heard. There also wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it. “I need to get back to the inn,” she said.

“Of course you do. You’ve been very…neighborly.”

She didn’t glare at him, as much as she wanted to. She headed toward the door, uncomfortably aware of his eyes on her. She paused. “I wouldn’t drink the water from the tap if I were you. Buy some bottled stuff at Audley’s. I think they get the water straight from the lake here.”

“I don’t mind a little gasoline.”

“That would be the least of your worries. I’d hate to think of how sick you’d be if you picked up something organic. Stomach bugs can be downright nasty around here.”

“Now, why do I have trouble believing you care?” he murmured.

“If you were doubled over in your bathroom you’d be out of reach of my sister, but I don’t think I could in good conscience let that happen,” she said in her coolest voice.

“It’s not your sister I’m interested in.”

She almost thought she’d misunderstood him. She stared at him across the room, but he didn’t even blink. Finally, she gave in to her cowardice, letting the screen door slam behind her as she made her escape down the path.




5


Why the hell had he said that? Griffin picked up the sheet of paper and squinted at the names, then took off his glasses to get a better look. Instead he found himself analyzing her handwriting. He would have thought she’d have a tight-fisted, crabbed style of writing. That, or something with too many curlicues and even smiley faces over the Is. Instead she had a bold, slashing script, a little hard to read, but strong. He glanced up at the screen door, half expecting her to still be there. She was long gone.

Not his type, he reminded himself. He liked his women skinny and sophisticated, with short skirts and long legs and no emotion. He wasn’t interested in a chintz-wearing domestic goddess who viewed him as the Big Bad Wolf come to chow down on her little sister. Particularly when Sophie Davis was much more succulent.

The thought was unbidden and quickly dismissed. He didn’t have the time or the inclination to spend thinking about getting beneath his neighbor’s flowered, ruffled skirts, even though he was obscurely tempted. He needed to find out what he wanted to know and then get the hell out of there. Telling her he was thinking of buying the Whitten place was just a bluff, to see her reaction. There was no way he’d tie himself to a town like Colby, not with his history. No matter how much it called to him. It was nostalgia, not destiny. Hell, he didn’t even believe in destiny, or much of anything at all.

In the meantime, though, he was going to have to make himself more comfortable, and getting rid of mouse turds and being able to make a decent cup of coffee were two major requirements. Not to mention making sure the roof didn’t fall in on him while he was lying in bed with…

Lying in bed alone, he reminded himself sharply.

Shit, maybe it was the air around Colby. Maybe he hadn’t just been a randy young drifter, maybe the air had an aphrodisiac quality. Because truth to tell, he’d been hard ever since he’d seen Sophie Davis look at his rumpled bed, and he knew better than that.

Get in, do the job and get out. It had always been his mantra in life, and this situation was no different. He needed to concentrate on finding out what happened twenty years ago, not waste his time being distracted by animal instincts he’d long outgrown.

He leaned back in the old chair, looking at the decrepit cottage with new eyes. So Sara Ann Whitten had disappeared some time while he’d been in prison? He tried to remember her but came up blank. The Whittens had been an older couple, and their daughter must have been too young to catch Griffin’s predatory eye at the time.

He glanced around the room. In the wake of Colby’s burgeoning revival as an exclusive vacation spot, this place would be worth a fortune. Instead it sat by the lake, abandoned, for years on end. According to the real estate agent the title on the old house was murky. The parents were dead, and the daughter had been missing for years. There was no one around to care enough to have the girl declared dead, no one who cared enough to see to the old house. The town fathers had finally decided to rent it to cover some of the unpaid taxes, but sooner or later it would be sold at auction.

What would make a young girl run away? Granted, northern Vermont was about as far off the beaten track as you could get, but to never return, never tell anyone where you were going, seemed unlikely. Particularly when a murderer had roamed that very area.

Too bad for Sara Ann Whitten, but he really wanted to believe she was murdered, her body buried somewhere. Because that would prove without a doubt that he hadn’t killed anyone, that there’d been a serial killer loose who happened to prey on the young women of Colby’s year-round community. Or at least it would prove it enough to give him peace of mind.

He reached for his notebook, shoved the list of names inside, then started writing. Number one, get into the hospital wing and see if anything jarred his memory. Number two, find out anything he could about Sara Ann Whitten. When she disappeared, who she was involved with at the time, what people thought happened. See if she had any friends still around who might have heard from her.

Number three, search the Whitten house for anything that might suggest what happened to her.

Number four, find out if any of the murdered girls’ families still lived in Colby, and figure out whether or not he could talk to them without them realizing who he was.

Number five. Keep away from Sophie Davis and her randy sister and her gaga mother with the too-sharp eyes. And try to avoid Doc Henley, as well.

And all that would only be a start. He figured he’d give it a couple of weeks if he was lucky, maybe less if the weather turned cold early. He couldn’t spend too much of his life looking for answers that he might not find. He’d already lost five years he wasn’t going to get back. Finding the truth would simply enable him to let go of it and get on with things. Maybe.

No time like the present to get to work. He pulled out his cell phone and punched in numbers before he realized there was no signal. Nada.

He flipped the paper over to Sophie’s side, and wrote beneath her list, Get the goddamned telephone turned on. Then he shoved his cell phone back in his pocket.



“He’s a reporter.”

“I beg your pardon?” Marge gave her a strange look. “Who is?”

“John Smith. If that’s even his name. He’s doing research on serial killers, he’s got law books and medical books and case studies all over his bedroom.”

“His bedroom?” Marge said blankly. “How the hell did he get you in his bedroom so fast? I thought you were the Virgin Mary.”

Sophie gave her an irritated look. “I was helping him out.”

“Sure you were.”

“He wanted my advice on what needed to be done around the Whitten camp, so I showed him. I told him to have it done and have them send the bills to you.”

“Like hell you did,” Marge said in horror.

“Like hell I did,” Sophie agreed placidly. “Whenever the town finally decides to sell the old place you’ll get the money back. In the meantime it can come out of the rent.”

“The town’s garnishing the rent for back taxes.”

“Then tell them to sell it to me.”

“You can’t afford it right now.”

“Good point,” Sophie said morosely, stabbing her slice of peach pie. The two women sat on the porch. “And that man probably can. He said he wasn’t interested in buying it, but I don’t believe a word he said. There’s no way a stranger would just show up here toting a bunch of books on serial killers if he didn’t have some kind of agenda. And why the hell would he want to buy it? He was just trying to scare me. Though why would he want to scare me?”

“He told you he’s really a reporter?” Marge broke in on her rattled musings.

“Of course not. And I could be wrong—instead of a reporter he could be writing the kind of true-crime thrillers my mother used to devour. I bet if I look through her stacks of books I’ll find one with his picture on the back cover.”

“As long as it’s the back cover and not the front,” Marge said. “You know, it seems to me that you’re the one whose imagination has gone into overdrive. Lots of people read about serial killers.”

“Then he’s probably a very rich writer,” Sophie said grimly. “Which means he can afford to buy the house out from under me.”

“I think you need to take a deep breath and calm down,” Marge said, pushing her empty plate away from her. “And you need to stop feeding me your food. I’ve gained fifteen pounds since you moved here.”

“So have I,” Sophie said mournfully. “And I can’t afford it.”

“Tell you what. Get your mother and sister to help with the cooking. That way no one will be tempted to eat much.”

Sophie made a face. “Great idea. Then I’ll be flat broke in a matter of weeks.”

“I thought you were already flat broke.”

“Close to it.”

“So why are you wasting your time worrying about the Whitten place and your Mr. Smith?” Marge asked, practical as always.

“Not my Mr. Smith!” she protested. “And maybe I just want to be distracted from my problems.”

“And maybe you’re more interested in Mr. Smith than you want to admit. There’s no question he’s a very attractive man if you like that sort.”

“What sort? Tall, dark and loathsome?”

Marge grinned. “Yeah, you keep on thinking that way, missy. If you ask me, the man’s hot, and you’d be a fool not to do something about it.”

“The only thing I’m about to do is check on my mother and sister. Mr. Smith can snoop around all he wants—I’m planning to ignore him.”

“As you’ve ignored him so far? Good luck, babe,” Marge said lazily. “If you’re really not interested in him I’ll have a crack at him. He’s too young for me but I can be open-minded.”

Sophie opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again. Marge was baiting her, and the awful truth was, Sophie was rising to it. She didn’t want Marge sleeping with her mysterious neighbor. She didn’t want anyone having him. She wanted him to simply disappear, as Sara Ann Whitten had so long ago, so she could concentrate on important things like her family and her extremely shaky business venture. She didn’t have the time or energy to waste on a stranger with a hidden agenda.

“Feel free,” Sophie said breezily. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. He’s probably only here to research a new book on the Colby murders, and he doesn’t care who he uses.”

“I think you’ve got one hell of an imagination yourself, Sophie. You ought to start writing fiction instead of columns on the perfect strawberry jam and how to turn your lawn mower into a planter.”

“I plead guilty to the first, but not the second. And speaking of which, I need someone to help with the garden and the mowing. Jeff Pritchard went back to college early. Can you think of anyone?”

“I’ll send Patrick Laflamme over,” Marge said, sounding amused at the notion. “He’s the only one I can think of who’s strong enough to resist Marty’s siren lures.”

“Is he old and ugly? Anything less would be too dangerous.”

“Sorry, he’s young and cute. He’s also tough enough to ignore Marty. Don’t worry about him—he’s got good old-fashioned Yankee values and a mother who’d put the fear of God into anyone. He won’t lead your sister astray.”

“I’m more worried about the other way around,” Sophie said grimly.

It was late afternoon by the time Sophie got back to her kitchen. The weeds in the perennial garden couldn’t be ignored any longer, and then there was laundry to do and Marty to harass into eating something. Sophie was always terrified that Marty was going to become anorexic, but in fact she ate enough. Her reed-thin body just never showed it. Which just went to show how unfair heredity was. Sophie’s mother Grace had always been slender and willowy, while Marty’s mother had constantly battled her weight. Sophie should have been the one to inherit a skinny metabolism.

She was planning on making another peach pie, a dire mistake since she’d end up eating most of it, but she couldn’t let all those wonderful peaches go to waste. Marty had left her dishes in the sink, as usual, and she was lying down by the lake, courting skin cancer at an early age. Sophie just shook her head and put the dishes in the dishwasher, then reached for the earthenware crock she kept her flour in when she noticed the yellowed newspaper on the counter.

At first she thought it was some kind of flyer, but as she looked closer she realized it was an actual copy of the Northeast Kingdom Gazette from long ago. Twenty years ago, in fact. And the headline read “Murder in the Kingdom.”

Sophie’s appetite for peach pie vanished. She poured herself a cup of coffee, shuddering slightly at its strength, and picked up the newspaper with careful hands. Tucking it under her arm, she went out onto the side porch, setting her coffee down on the windowsill behind her and curling up on the hanging glider. It was a beautiful day—a soft breeze was blowing across the lake, bringing with it the scent of pine resin and cool water, and the sun was bright overhead. Sophie stared down at the newspaper, at the grainy pictures, and started to read.

The account was relatively straightforward, devoid of conjecture and sensationalism, which wasn’t surprising, considering the reporters and owners of the paper had lived in Colby for generations and knew all of the families involved. It was one thing to splash murder pictures all over the front page when you didn’t know the helpless victims, another when they were your neighbors and friends.

There was a photo of the killer. Alleged killer, as they referred to him, and in fact, he might still be alleged since apparently he’d gotten off years later. Thomas Ingram Griffin looked like almost any drifter from twenty years ago. Long hair and beard, dazed but defiant expression on his face. The photo was faded from age, and it hadn’t been the best of quality in the first place, but for some reason he looked vaguely familiar. Sophie shrugged. The man would look completely different twenty years later. He’d be clean shaven, clean cut, probably forty pounds heavier. If he was even still alive.





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