Still Lake. Anne Stuart
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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