Still Lake. Anne Stuart
“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
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