Page 30 of It Happened on the Lake

She couldn’t explain why she was intrigued, but she couldn’t stop and turned her attention to the dock, but Craig had disappeared. She swung the lens to his office again, expecting he’d gone back inside, but no, he wasn’t visible and the slider was still closed, the room as he’d left it.

So?

Big deal.

But her stomach tightened as she searched the darkened dock and water.

“Where are you?” she whispered aloud and was about to turn away when she caught a small beam of light at the edge of the Alexanders’ dock. A flashlight? She couldn’t tell. As quickly as it appeared, it died.

Squinting at the area, she could barely make out a man—Craig, presumably—stepping into a canoe that was tied to his dock, then shoving off.

For a second or two she had trouble following him in the night-shrouded lake, but in a heartbeat she caught sight of him again as he turned on the flashlight for a second before cutting the light once more.

“What the hell are you doing, Craig?”

As the canoe passed behind the houses, she caught sight of his silhouette, a dark image cast against the vaporous incandescence of the street lamp on the other side of the Hunts’ house.

In the soft bluish glow, she watched him as he stepped lightly onto the Hunts’ dock.

He looped the canoe’s mooring rope around a cleat, then hopped onto the wooden planks.

Silently, her Doritos forgotten, she followed his every movement.

Stopping at the edge of the back door to the house, he reached up along the sill and her heart nearly stopped.

She knew he was searching for a key, the same key she had used decades ago when she and Chase had met in secret.

Her stomach nose-dived at the memory. “Oh God,” she whispered as he let himself in and didn’t bother with lights.

The flashlight flickered on again, and she followed its shifting beam from the kitchen through a short hallway before it vanished. The house was dark for a few seconds, then the bobbing light reappeared in the upstairs bedroom. Tom and Cynthia’s room.

Why?

He cut the light again, and before her eye could adjust to the darkness, the flashlight flickered briefly downstairs once more.

He slipped out the back door, locked it, and seemed to replace the key on the ledge above.

Then, quick as a cat, he hurried across the deck, dropped into the canoe, untied it, and was lost in the darkness once more.

Odd , she thought.

Maybe more than odd.

Something dark . . .

She checked the Alexanders’ house and caught sight of the kid’s head as he left his room. Beth was still in the kitchen. She took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, then headed toward the stairs.

Oh God, Craig was going to get caught.

Good.

Harper tightened the viewfinder just as Beth met her son at the top of the stairs leading to the basement. She paused to say something to the kid.

Craig was still outside, tying up the boat.

Beth started down the stairs.

Harper’s pulse jumped, and she bit her lip. She couldn’t imagine that Beth knew what her husband was up to. He’d been so furtive as he’d left.

Craig hopped onto the dock and hurried to the door.

His wife was out of sight, descending the stairs.

Harper’s pulse elevated.

Was Beth going to find him coming inside and ask what he’d been doing? Or did she know already?

Somehow Harper wanted that confrontation.

Under the bright lights, Craig was already at the door to his office, unlocking it, before nearly leaping to his desk. He managed to tear off the sweatshirt and stash it in a drawer as he settled into his desk chair.

Beth opened the door just as he was picking up a file folder and pen, pretending to be reading the contents of the folder while leaning back in his chair, clicking the pen as if distracted.

He wasn’t.

In an instant Craig Alexander transformed from clandestine cat burglar to concerned businessman and loving husband.

He looked up from the manila folder and grinned as Beth held up a beer.

Nodding in appreciation, he set the folder aside and they talked a bit—though, of course, Harper couldn’t hear any of the conversation.

She watched with bated breath as Beth gestured toward the outside, and for a second Harper was certain Beth had caught him coming and going, but as they stepped onto the deck, that didn’t seem to be the case.

Instead, Beth directed his gaze across the lake, to the island. Harper didn’t move a muscle.

Beth motioned toward the manor, her hand moving from one side to the next, as if discussing the finer and lesser points of the place.

She was a real estate agent, after all, and appeared to be giving her would-be contractor/husband the details of a possible job.

Craig hooked one arm over her shoulders and, with his free hand, sipped his beer.

There was a chance that they were not discussing the pros and cons of the island. Harper wasn’t certain Beth was lobbying for him to make repairs to this house. Maybe they were talking about Harper’s return to Almsville and the horror of the night before, though it didn’t seem so.

After a few minutes, Beth took her leave. Harper watched as Beth returned to the kitchen, opened the oven door, then checked her watch. Their son was nowhere to be seen.

But Craig was at his desk again, leaning back in his desk chair while he took a long pull from his beer.

The telescope was so strong she could read the bottle’s label, as well as catch the headlines of the January edition of Field and Stream in a nearby magazine rack. A buck with a large rack of antlers was the cover photo.

So where was the pistol he’d retrieved from the wall safe—the one that might be the twin of the one she found?

Was it in the pocket of his sweatshirt, now wadded up beneath in a desk drawer?

Or left in the canoe?

Or planted somewhere at the Hunts’ house?

If so, why?

She bit her lower lip and swung her telescope, sweeping Craig’s office/gym again.

Yes, the telescope caught all the minute details of the room, but it sure didn’t explain what he’d been doing.

“Nothing good,” she told herself as she saw him peer through the glass door again, angling his head so that his gaze swung upward and across the lake. To the island. To the house she was in. To the very room where she sat in the dark.

Craig reached for the phone, then wedged the receiver between his shoulder and ear. Still staring, he punched out a number.

A second later, the house phone began to ring.