Page 218 of It Happened on the Lake

He took the tiny listening device downstairs and walked outside. It was late afternoon, a chill in the air. The rain was holding off for the moment but was threatening in the slow-moving clouds easing across the sky.

He should never have gotten involved with Beth Alexander.

Angry at himself and the world in general, he hurled the microphone as far as he could throw it. The bug plunked into the water, immediately sinking. “Good riddance,” he muttered, though it was really too little too late. The damage had been done.

Ramming his fists into his pockets, he looked farther across the lake to the island. Where lights glowed from windows in the darkening afternoon. Where he’d spent so much of his time as a kid. Where Harper now resided.

His jaw slid to the side and he wondered about her. She was divorced and had a teenaged daughter. And she’d tried to save his mother from a horrid, mind-numbing death. But what else was there about her that he didn’t know?

Did she still like chocolate? He remembered Harper eating the chocolate layer first when his mother served slabs of Neapolitan ice cream cut straight out of the carton. Was Harper still a fan of the Beatles and have a crush on Paul McCartney? Had she followed Peggy Fleming’s skating career with the admiration she’d shown as a girl? Did she ever get the horse she’d wanted—what was it? A cross-bred Arabian stallion like the horse in Walter Farley’sThe Black Stallion?

Most importantly, Was she still in love with Chase?

Annoyed at the turn of his thoughts, he kicked at a pebble on the deck, sending it flying into the distance.

Levi’s relationship with Harper had once been innocent, then complicated, and now didn’t exist. Except that she had called and left a message on his office phone, saying she had some things belonging to Chase and wanted to return them to him.

Too little too late. Whatever the items were, Levi didn’t want them. Twenty-year-old mementos of a life that was long dead were of no use to him.

The past was long over.

And if his mother’s note could be believed, Chase was dead.

Killed.

Or was the note Cynthia left him just the rantings of a crazy, grief-riddled old woman?

Who knew?

Hopefully Rand and the local police would figure it out.

One way or another, it was time to put what happened to his brother to rest.

He stretched, cracked his neck, and watched as a pair of ducks landed on the water, gliding across the surface, creating perfect wakes and quacking to each other while a bullfrog croaked from its hiding spot. The air had a chill in it, the promise of coming winter.

It could be peaceful here.

And it could be chaos. Another glance at the massive house on the island and he caught a movement. A woman backdropped by lamplight.Harper’s silhouette in the windows, he thought. The distance between the point and the island was too great for details. He couldn’t make out her features, but he assumed the slim woman appearing in one window and then the next was she. The way she moved brought back memories. Forbidden recollections. Taboo thoughts. He’d always found her attractive, not just physically but spiritually as well, if you believed in that crap.

Levi usually didn’t.

But with Harper, he’d always bent the rules.

As he stared at her, a part of him twisted inside and yearned for a happier, less complicated time.

“Dreamer,” he muttered, turning his back on the lake and all the memories that were better left forgotten.

He went inside to the cluttered kitchen, where boxes were still unpacked and his mother’s things were everywhere. The coffeepot and blender on the counter, vases of dying plants in the windowsill, an ashtray near the burners of the harvest gold stove, magazines and newspapers piled near the back door. Vestiges of a life that stopped twenty years before.

He reached into the side-by-side refrigerator and yanked a beer from the six-pack he’d brought earlier. He cracked it open, then drank half the bottle before setting it on the counter and getting back to work unpacking the car.

As he pulled two boxes from his trunk, he saw Rand’s Jeep parked in the drive of his A-frame. Also an old orange Pinto was sitting at the end of the street, someone inside.

He noted no vehicles were in sight at the Alexander house next door. He figured no one was home. The house was too still. No lights shone from the windows, and their dog wasn’t in his usual spot on the front porch. No sign of their son Max, or anyone else. Though Beth usually parked her BMW in the garage, Craig’s pickup was always front and center when he was home.

Not today. Not yet.

Good.