Still Lake. Anne Stuart

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      “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 СКАЧАТЬ