Page 101 of It Happened on the Lake

H arper found one key on the ring that was a mystery. The only one that didn’t fit any lock she’d located. The key was old and tarnished and seemed original to the house, which was strange. All the exterior doors had been recently changed by the locksmith and were new, shiny, and bright.

Not this one.

But it had to go somewhere. Or at least had gone somewhere in the past.

She donned her rain jacket and walked around the exterior of the buildings, searching the boathouse, garage, a gardener’s shed, and even the tram’s carport for a lock she had missed.

Nothing.

Maybe it wasn’t anything, just an old forgotten key to a lock long gone, but she was curious and couldn’t help thinking the key might be important. It was a long shot, of course, but she thought maybe, just maybe, the key might help her figure out how the intruder had gotten into the house.

Since she failed on her perimeter check, she wondered if she were going about it the wrong way. Rather than start looking outside, maybe she could find the access point from the interior.

Earlier, Dawn had been fascinated by the elevator and dumbwaiter.

Yes, they were unique, but they weren’t functioning.

Hadn’t been for years, it seemed. She went to the elevator door on the main floor by the back stairs.

She considered the elevator shaft. Was it possible that someone had been able to get inside and climb the shaft, forcing the doors open from inside?

Starting from the top floor, she checked the doors for the elevator and dumbwaiter, but there was no way to get in, no scratches on either one, nor any other sign of someone forcing the doors open.

She worked her way down, and on each floor she found no indication that someone had used the lifts. As far as she could see, the shaft was impenetrable.

Except for a contractor who knew how things worked, someone who had tools.

Someone like Craig Alexander.

She didn’t trust that guy, even though he was married to Beth.

Who, Harper reminded herself, was having an affair with Levi Hunt, so obviously Beth and Craig’s marriage had serious problems.

As for the mystery key? She found no locks into which it fit.

“Forget it,” she told herself. It could well be she’d put too much emphasis on it. So she’d discovered an old key in a house that had been built at the turn of the century. So what? Maybe she was barking up the wrong tree.

But right now it was the only tree she had.

In the parlor Harper held the key up to the light shed by one of Gram’s Tiffany lamps and scrutinized the long piece of notched metal. She hoped beyond hope for some clue as to its identity. It didn’t look like any of the other keys, not even the ones she’d replaced.

So where was the lock?

Maybe it didn’t exist anymore.

Maybe it had been original to the house but replaced over the years and Gram had just kept the key.

“Give it up,” she told herself, peeling off her jacket and draping it over a hook by the back door.

The jacket slipped off and fell onto the boots that had been lined neatly under the coat rack—old boots that had sat in position for decades.

As she picked up her coat, another image flashed through her brain.

She remembered seeing the same row of boots on the night she freaked out searching for Chase.

One pair had been wet and puddling on the floor. They’d belonged to her father, and she recalled thinking how it had been odd to find them there as he’d been at the cottage with Marcia that night. Why had he left his boots at the main house? Where had he been, out sloshing through puddles?

However as soon as the questions flitted through her mind, she dismissed them.

Right now she needed to concentrate on the key.

She examined the key holder mounted on a shelf on the other side of the door. It was a small rack fitted with a tiny shelf and a row of cup holder hooks from which the keys to the car and outbuildings had always hung.

Had she ever seen this key dangling from one of the small hooks?

Did it matter?

Either way, she couldn’t remember.

She’d decided she was probably on a fool’s mission when she remembered the blueprints for the manor that Beth had found in the tower room the other day.

Maybe those yellowed schematics would provide a clue, if not for this key’s lock, then possibly to an entrance to the mansion that she didn’t know about.

Like a sally port in an old castle. A secret entrance.

What were the chances?

“Good? None? Slim? Dream on,” she said to herself but pocketed the key and rushed up the stairs, her hip reminding her that she wasn’t completely healed.

She didn’t care. In the tower room, she turned on the only lamp that was working, then unrolled the plans on her grandfather’s desk with as much enthusiasm as if she’d just discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls.

She anchored one side with a heavy ashtray, then went through each page carefully, eyeing the fading lines.

“Come on, come on,” she urged, searching for anything that would tell her where there might be a hidden lock.

If there even was one.

On each page, floor by floor, Harper searched. She ran her fingers over the pages where they showed exterior doors, studying the elevator and dumbwaiter and the landing in the garage attic which had a locked door. They seemed the most likely hidden entrances.

“Where?” she said, the key in her pocket pressing against her leg, seeming to mock her. “Where?”

Once through the plans.

Twice.

A third time and nothing.

She shoved her hair from her face in frustration even though, she knew, deep down, this was probably a wild goose chase, a way for her to do something, no matter how far-fetched, to stop the intruder, and a means to keep her mind off of Levi and Dawn and the mess of their lives.

She reminded herself that the damned key wasn’t the center of the damned universe. It might not even be a key to this house. She was just spinning her wheels, wanting to do something, anything to secure her home.

It had been an excruciating day.

Levi’s recognition that he was Dawn’s father and his insistence that Dawn be informed of that long-buried truth was wearing on her.

Rand’s news that Chase was dead, killed by his own father decades ago, should have been expected but had drained her emotionally.

Janet Collins’s murder, possibly by a drug dealer from the sixties and somehow connected to Chase’s death, was a worry and ate at her.

It had all been too much to take in.

Giving up, she walked to the window and stared out. From this bird’s eye view she saw the houses across the point, some with lights on, others dark. All with their own dark secrets, just like this old house.

She needed a drink.

No, no, no! She needed to be clearheaded.

But just one drink?

No!

Her eyes dropped to the blueprints with their yellowed pages, some ripped around the edges.

Maybe the key was meaningless. She fingered it and decided to give up, but as she started rolling up the pages, she caught a glimpse of the specs for the basement and stopped dead in her tracks.

There on the drawings she saw the placement of the original furnaces, two huge wood-burning beasts with round, tentacle-like vents reaching upward to the myriad of rooms overhead.

Next to the furnaces, lining two walls of the basement, were designated areas, huge open bins for storing and stacking firewood.

Over the largest bin that encompassed one corner of the basement was the schematic for a chute that allowed the chopped wood, or coal, or anything else to be dumped into the basement as needed.

Like a storm cellar, it opened from the outside.

And it was locked.

She’d never seen it opened, not even as a child. In fact, shrubs and bushes had grown over the wing-like doors.

With a new sense of anticipation and urgency that could prove false, she ran out of the tower room, speeding down the stairs, the key in her pocket pressing hard against her thigh.

In the kitchen, she grabbed a flashlight, then yanked her jacket from the coat rack near the back door and reminded herself that she could be wrong.

But it felt right.

Following the flashlight’s bobbing beam, she jogged down the gravel path that wound around the side of the garage. The path that had once been wider to accommodate the carts that carried wood when delivering fuel. The path where she’d spied Craig recently, his big dog trailing after him.

After rounding the corner, she found the rhododendrons and hydrangeas that flanked the storm doors, nearly covering them with their dripping branches and effectively camouflaging the entrance.

“Son of a gun,” she whispered, expecting that the old storm doors might be swollen or rotten from years of being exposed to the elements, but she fought her way through the tangle of limbs, extracted the key, and inserted it into the lock easily.

It opened with a twist of her wrist. She pulled one heavy door open as far as the interlocking branches would allow and exposed the slide leading into the basement.

Access into the house.

Bending down, she shone her flashlight through the opening to examine the steel lining of the chute. It was free of dust.

As if it had been recently used.

Anyone who had a key could slide right in and bring with him a bat or a dead cat or anything else if he wanted to.

“You sneaky, slimy bastard,” she said as the wind picked up and she shut the doors again and locked them.

She would bet her inheritance that the person behind the pranks was Craig Alexander.

His father, Martin, could have been given a secondary key as he had been the groundskeeper when Gram was alive.

Craig could have found it. And she knew he sneaked around in the dark.

She’d seen evidence of that when he’d surreptitiously slipped into the Hunt house at night.

Why would he try to terrorize her?

To get her to sell?

To secure the expensive listing for his wife?