Page 12 of It Happened on the Lake

O n days like this Rand Watkins hated his job.

He parked his Jeep in the hospital lot, pocketed his keys, and wished to high heaven that Harper Reed hadn’t shown up in Almsville again.

Because she had always been trouble.

Most likely always would be.

Why couldn’t she just inherit her fortune, sell the damned island, and stay in California? Or wherever.

He slammed his door shut and half ran past the life-sized statue of St. Catherine.

Inside, the hospital was a hodgepodge. Old and new.

Redbrick and mortar from the turn of the century.

Concrete and glass from the sixties. The most recent addition, now nearly twenty years old, was a modern wing of concrete and glass that had been erected in large part due to an endowment from the Olivia Dixon Foundation.

He made his way to the information desk, where a fussy-looking receptionist with teased hair and thick eyeliner was positioned in front of an oversized portrait of Olivia Dixon.

The receptionist pasted on a fake smile at his inquiry, then directed him to Harper Prescott’s private room on the third floor.

He already knew where the Intensive Care Unit was.

He stopped there first to get an update on Cynthia Hunt.

It wasn’t good. With burns over fifty percent of her body, she was comatose and soon being transferred to a burn unit at a Portland hospital.

What was left of her hair was singed, and she was wrapped in bandages, her chances for survival slim according to the doctor he spoke with.

Rand hoped, for her sake, she never woke up.

He’d known her all his life.

She’d been his neighbor growing up, the mother of his best friend.

He couldn’t count how many nights he’d spent in the Hunts’ rec room playing ping-pong or darts or just screwing around and playing records on their jukebox.

Cynthia had always been there with pitchers of Kool-Aid or cans of soda and countless bags of potato chips.

“You boys, keep it down,” she’d always say with a smile.

Those had been the happy days.

Before all the tragedy.

And now . . .

Reduced to this. He sent up a rare prayer to a God he’d left behind in the hot jungles of Vietnam, then left the ICU.

He made his way to the elevator and got off on the third floor.

Minutes later he was rapping softly on the open door of Harper Reed . . . no, Harper Prescott’s private room.

She lay in the bed, gazing out the window at the gray day beyond and obviously lost in thought.

The last time he’d seen her had been twenty years before, when they were just kids. He on his way to war, she still in high school, Chase Hunt missing.

“Harper,” he said as he rapped his knuckles on the open door again, a little more loudly.

She turned on the pillow, her face older than he remembered it, of course, her skin pale, her cheekbones more defined, her blue eyes more serious than they had been when she was a girl. A bandage swathed her chin, and there was bruising on her forehead, another bandage near her eye.

“Rand?” Her voice was stronger than he expected. “Rand Watkins?” Her eyebrows pinched together. “What’re you doing here?” She straightened in the bed and fussed with the neckline of her hospital gown.

When he flipped out his badge, she caught her breath. As if he’d startled her. Eyeing his ID, she said, “You’re with the police?” She looked up to meet his gaze, and something inside of him shifted. Something he didn’t want to think about.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “For about a dozen years now.”

“But I thought . . . I mean, didn’t you hate the fact that your dad was a cop?”

“Guess I changed my mind.”

Creases appeared on her forehead, and she let out a little sigh. “So, I guess you’re here because of last night.”

“I thought you might want to tell me about it.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction, as if she didn’t quite believe him. But he knew the feeling. As a teenager he hadn’t trusted the cops even though his dad was a detective. But he wasn’t alone. Since he’d joined the force, he’d sometimes sensed that same distrust from both criminals and victims.

Harper was no different.

He had to remind himself of that fact as he heard a pager calling for Doctor Sanchez in the hallway outside the open door.

“How is Cynthia?” Harper asked.

“Don’t know.”

Again, that skeptical glance. More playing with the neckline of the drab gown. She swallowed, looked away, and whispered, “It . . . it was awful.”

“You recognized her?”

She nodded, swallowed hard, and looked away, back to the window, but he guessed she wasn’t seeing the ridge of bare-branched trees rimming the parking lot.

No, she was caught somewhere else, in the memory of the night before.

“I was at the house on the island,” she said and he nodded.

“I really had just gotten there, hadn’t even unpacked.

I saw the fire as I passed by the window, and I couldn’t believe it.

I mean a fire in the middle of the lake?

So I looked through one of my grandfather’s telescopes.

At that point I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.

But then I saw the boat was on fire and someone was on board. I recognized Cynthia.”

“So what did you do?”

“Called 9-1-1. And then, I took off down to the dock and swam. There was no boat, so . . . it was the only way I could get to her.” Her eyebrows drew together, forcing little lines between them as she replayed the scene in her mind.

“I yelled at her. Told her to jump. Screamed at her. But she ignored me and kept hurling things into the water. Pictures and albums and all kinds of stuff. It was bizarre . . .” She cleared her throat, her voice lowering.

“Really, really awful.” Her fingers were twisting the fabric of her gown.

She paused, closing her eyes, reliving the horror.

He waited, and she drew in a long breath. Finally she said, “I think they brought her here, but no one’s telling me anything.”

“How did you get here?”

“Ambulance, I guess. I don’t remember it.” She motioned to the bandage over her eye. “I remember getting hit by something and kind of sinking, barely coming to. Someone pulled me out of the water. The next thing I knew I woke up here. I’ve asked about Cynthia, but no one’s telling me anything.”

He decided she needed to know the truth. “I talked to the doc. It looks like they’ll be transferring her to a burn unit in Portland.”

“But she’s going to make it,” she said eagerly.

Hedging, he said, “We can only hope.” Then he changed the subject. “So what do you think happened out there on the lake?”

“You mean, why was she out there? Don’t know.

” Harper frowned and shoved her hair from her face, the movement stretching the IV line attached to her wrist. “As I said, I’d just gotten back to the house when I saw her.

You know the rest. I called for help, then swam out to her.

Maybe it was stupid, but I just reacted, Rand.

Didn’t really think about it. Someone needed help. ”

“You knew she was down there?”

“As I said, I saw someone . A woman, I thought, then I recognized her. But she freaked out when she saw me. Even more than before.” Harper closed her eyes and shook her head, her body shivering at the memory.

For a few seconds there was silence in the room, then she whispered, “I can’t do this.

” When she opened her eyes again, she met his gaze. “I can’t. Not now.”

He thought about pushing her a bit, but he backed off.

“I’ll need a formal statement.”

“Yeah, I know.” Nodding, she wrapped her arms around her middle, again stretching the IV. “I’m supposed to get out of here today, I think. I don’t know when.”

“I’ll be at the station most of the afternoon.”

He tried to read her expression. Couldn’t.

He wondered if she was hiding something, masking her emotions.

Not that he’d ever been able to read her and now, with a bruise forming under her eye and her chin and forehead bandaged, her hair stringy and face pale, he had no idea what she was thinking. “I’ll see you then.”

Once more, a shadow passed over her eyes.

For a quick second Rand remembered the night everything changed, when Levi Hunt was on his old man’s doorstep and he’d caught a glimpse of Harper cowering in Levi’s truck, the night his best friend had disappeared. Never to be seen again.

Harper’s grandmother had died that same night.

A tragic coincidence?

He’d thought so. Tried to convince himself. After all, Olivia Dixon was old, her health deteriorating, and there was a chance that Chase had disappeared by choice.

Maybe. But he wasn’t sure. That was the trouble with being a cop. There were always more questions than answers, more doubts than certainties, more lies than truth. And always, underlying it all, suspicion.

“I’ll see you later then,” he said and walked out of the hospital, memories of the tragedies twenty years ago tangled with the questions about the here and now. Connected? Probably not.

Cynthia Hunt had suffered in the past two decades, her mental and emotional stability seeping away. The story was probably just as Harper recalled.

But he had to make certain.

Like it or not, that was his job.