Page 49 of It Happened on the Lake

S ince Beth insisted on seeing “everything” from the lowest level of the manor on up, Harper complied, starting with the boathouse. Cut into the stone of the island, the boathouse was really a cavern that had been fitted with heavy crossbeams and a boat lift decades earlier.

Inside, the air was heavy and smelled dank, the odors of waterlogged rot and decay pervasive.

“Dear Lord, no one’s been down here in a while,” Beth observed.

A long while , Harper thought as she reached for the light switch.

Just one of the two dim lights fizzled on, casting more shifting reflective shadows onto the rough stone walls, offering little illumination.

Gramps’s old wooden Chris-Craft was raised on the lift, dangling awkwardly above the water, the boat’s hull obviously moldering, the straps supporting it disintegrating.

“Oooh, that’s too bad,” Beth observed, glancing around the dark cave-like room that echoed with her voice, lake water lapping at the rotting planks of the decking. “Someone would have loved that boat. It was a classic, I remember.”

“I guess.” Harper noticed the rafters, some covered by rat droppings, and the holes in the rock walls, easy enough for a rat to slide through.

She remembered the one Beth had killed after dropping Harper off from the hospital.

Where there was one, there was likely to be two, or ten, or a hundred.

She only hoped that Jinx, wherever he was, had started culling the herd, or in the case of rats the mischief, which was what a group of rodents was called.

She remembered it from some biology class she’d taken.

Beth, too, was surveying the boathouse/cave with a critical eye.

“It would take a lot to clean and fix this place if you’d even want to, and the boat lift is ancient .

. . I’m thinking the buyers might want to build a boathouse off the dock and maybe even seal this place off .

. . I’m not sure it could be brought up to code if a building inspector even looked at it.

Oh shit! Are those bats?” she said and nearly shrieked as she squinted up at a crossbeam over the boat.

“Probably.”

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” Beth said, backing up and nearly falling into the murky water. “No . . . oh God, no.”

“I thought you’d seen everything.”

“Everything but bats.”

“Okay, let’s go this way.” Harper took Beth by the elbow and opened a door to an area that cut farther into the island. Again, Harper flipped a switch and a light came on to expose a small room where out-of-date boating equipment was lodged. In one corner, a tiny bathroom had been added.

Beth still hunched down and, looking over her shoulder as if she expected a bat to come swooping down, took the time to peer inside.

“This just gets worse and worse,” she said, catching sight of a dry, stained toilet and shower with broken tiles and rusted fixtures, its pan chipped away by time and neglect, rat and bat droppings evident.

“Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick.” Beth backed away.

Harper explained, “No one’s used this in years.”

“I can see that. For good reason. It’s a dungeon.” She cast another worried glance over her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve seen enough.”

“This way.” Harper pointed to a door leading to a long tunnel that wound up shallow steps.

It opened to a wide area of the basement where small windows had been cut into the brick walls, allowing in some light, while two huge furnaces dominated the low-ceilinged room.

Once they were fueled by wood, but they had been converted to electricity years before.

Remnants of that day and age, in the form of stacked firewood, still remained, though the huge bins themselves were empty, the fuel chute no longer used.

Harper ushered Beth past the chute where the firewood had once been dumped to the stone steps leading upward.

“This is slightly better,” Beth said. “Emphasis on slightly.” Eager to get out of the “dungeon,” Beth hurried ahead, only to glance back as Harper lagged behind.

“You’re limping,” Beth said, her forehead furrowing. “From the other night, huh? God, that was awful!”

“It was, but it didn’t happen then. Months ago I tripped on a broken step.

” But she didn’t add that her husband had told her the stairs were fixed, that he’d personally nailed the broken board back into place.

Liar! Though all that remained of her injury was pain in her hip, the accident had been far more serious, and she had ended up with a fractured pelvis and three broken ribs, one of which had punctured her lung.

She’d been in a hospital in Bend for nearly a week, then recovering at home while seeing a physical therapist for months.

That trip to Bend had been part of a fool’s mission, Harper now knew. She’d driven to Bend, to Joel’s mountain-view home, to see if they could piece together their broken marriage as once again he and Melanie had broken up.

But the effort was as doomed as Humpty-Dumpty. And Harper had ended up taking the fall.

From the get-go things had been tense, made worse by the fact that her father and Marcia had driven from Portland and come for dinner one night.

Then, on day two, Harper had taken the tumble.

On her way down to the pool, she’d stepped on the broken stair and tumbled half a flight, her foot twisting in the railing.

It turned out that her marriage had been more damaged than her body.

Her broken bones eventually healed. As for wedded bliss?

Not so much. After her hospital stay, she’d discovered that he was still involved with Melanie, the woman with whom he’d had an affair while still married.

So—no, there was no reconciliation. The minute she’d been able to fly, she’d left her two-year-old Acura for her daughter to pick up, then flown back to California and her older Volvo wagon.

A week later, she’d signed the divorce papers that had been put on hold.

“Sorry about the hip. Ouch!” Beth was saying. “That’s why you have to maintain your property. It can be dangerous.”

Amen , Harper silently agreed as they made their way through a short hallway to a set of stairs that led to the garage with its gun cabinet, long workbench, shelves, and closets.

“Okay, okay,” Beth said, nodding to herself as she observed wide bays where Gram’s pink Cadillac and Gramps’s convertible, a 1959 Corvette, were parked, backed into their individual bays.

Beth was so intent on the cars that she didn’t seem to notice the dust that had collected everywhere in the space nor the papery hornets’ nest in a dark corner near the workbench nor the grime that coated the floor and windowsills.

Harper switched on the lights.

“Oh wow! These are classics,” Beth said with a low whistle. “I’m surprised they’re still here.” She ran a red-tipped finger over the Corvette’s smooth fender. “And in such good shape. Does it run?”

“It’s supposed to.”

“Craig will flip out when he sees this,” she mused, then glanced at Harper. “I assume it’s for sale, too? Either independently or as part of the listing?”

“Maybe, if I decide to sell.”

“Hmmm.” Beth squinted at the vehicles, making mental notes and appraising them. “The bike?” she asked, motioning to the third bay where a motorcycle stood upright on its center stand.

Harper’s heart twisted a bit as she looked at it. Evan’s pride and joy.

“It’s a Honda, right? I kind of remember when your brother got it. New at the time, like maybe 1966?”

“Yeah.” Harper nodded, thinking back, remembering Evan literally jumping for joy when he saw the bike for the first time, a huge red bow tied to one of the Honda’s grips.

All smiles, he took off on the motorcycle, speeding across the bridge, then onto Northway, where he disappeared, though Harper could hear the bike revving through its gears as he pushed the speed limit.

He returned fifteen minutes later, the bike speeding over the bridge to skid to a stop in front of the garage where she was waiting with Gram and her parents.

Harper said, “He got it for his birthday.”

“And every boy at Almsville High was jealous.” Beth bit her lip. “So it was barely driven, then?”

“Right.” The smile that had been teasing Harper’s lips at the memory faded away.

Beth touched the bike’s seat. “You know I had such a crush on him back then.”

“I did know.” It wasn’t like Beth had ever been anything but transparent or that she hadn’t whispered her feelings to Harper on every sleepover or lit up like a Christmas tree whenever Evan was around.

Beth sighed dramatically, just as she had as a lovelorn teen lying on Harper’s bed, staring at the ceiling, pouring her heart out. “But, of course, I had to get in line. A very long line.”

That much was true. In high school Evan had an extended list of girlfriends and an even longer one of wannabes. Good-looking and charming, with a “bad-boy” attitude, he charmed more than his share of girls, some older, some younger, and all, Harper suspected, with an eye on his bank account.

Pushing an errant strand of hair from her face, Beth added, “You know, I always thought that he’d found someone who caught his attention at that house next door to me, growing up.

The yellow one. Remember? At the end of the street and owned by the Musgrave family.

I checked on its ownership once, as I had a client who was interested.

Anyway, they, the Musgraves, never sold and own it to this day.

It’s still a rental, I think, but I haven’t seen anyone around for a while, so I’m not sure.

“But back in the day all kinds of college-age kids lived there. Kind of a commune, if you ask me. Before communes were even a real thing. But the hippie movement was kind of just getting started.” Harper had known as much. Chase had told her something similar.