Page 89 of It Happened on the Lake

“S on of a bitch!” On a step stool, reaching onto the top of the closet in the master bedroom, Levi yanked the tiny microphone out of the wall and held the small device in his palm.

He knew exactly what he’d found. He’d used a similar one in surveillance for some of his clients.

It was small.

State of the art.

Easy to install.

And accurate. It could pick up whispers from several feet away.

Favored by spies and private investigators, a newer model.

Ironic that it had been used on him.

And Beth.

He didn’t have to think too hard to know who had planted it.

And, he bet, if he went into Craig’s workroom at the Alexander house next door, he’d find earphones and a recorder.

“Damn,” he muttered, imagining Craig Alexander sneaking into this house and hooking it up.

Craig had spent the past twenty-odd years of his life working in construction.

He knew the trades. And he had the motive: Levi was sleeping with Craig’s wife.

A mistake.

It had been from the get-go.

Levi hopped off the ladder and wanted to grind the damned microphone under his shoe but figured he needed a harder surface than the green shag carpeting that still covered the floor of his parents’ bedroom.

Why hadn’t he listened to his gut?

He’d had the feeling that he was being watched but had convinced himself that he was just being paranoid, had spent too many years in the spy business. Even as he’d begun the short affair.

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’s The 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.

He carried the boxes inside, left them on the old couch, then spent nearly an hour sweeping the interior for more listening equipment, searching through the jumble of his things and his mother’s furniture and household items. From the basement where the old Wurlitzer sat unplugged and gathering dust to the attic where he found more boxes of junk.

He looked through old wire hangers, broken picture frames, and Christmas decorations from his youth, glass bulbs that glittered in what was then the new “Space Age” design. Straight out of the fifties.

But no more spy equipment.

Good.

Dusting cobwebs from his hair and grime from his hands, he returned to the chaos of the main floor.

The only neat area of the house was one corner of the living room where he’d stacked the seven boxes he’d hauled from Serenity Acres earlier this week, days after Director Allison Gray had laid down her edict of when the unit had to be cleared.

Fuck that. His mother had just died a horrible death, and he hadn’t been concerned with Serenity Acres’ time line or Allison Gray’s need to fill her room with another warm body.

Through the window, he saw the Alexanders’ house.

Silently Levi berated himself for getting involved with Beth. What had he been thinking? When she’d approached him about selling this house, she’d flirted a bit and he’d resisted. He hadn’t been interested.

She was married, for God’s sake, and that’s where he’d always drawn the line.

Before.

Hell, didn’t he have enough clients on his books to know that getting involved with a married woman was the kiss of death? If not literally, then financially and emotionally?

He sipped his beer and thought back. They’d met several times, at her insistence, and as they’d had coffee or drinks, she’d let it slip that things weren’t great between Craig and her. Money problems. She needed listings and sales, he needed new construction projects.

Levi had ignored her woes. She’d always been overly dramatic. Even in high school she got most of her news from tabloids at the check-out counter in the local grocery stores, so he’d discounted a lot of what she told him.

Even when she’d admitted that Craig had been unfaithful over the years but she’d stuck with him for the sake of their son, Max, Levi had only nodded and filed the information away.

Not his business.

Until it was.

Beth Leonetti Alexander was nothing if not persistent.

Once, when yet again they’d met and she’d tried to pressure him into listing the house, they’d had one too many drinks or possibly three or four too many.

In her efforts to convince him to sell, she’d not only mentioned the profit he would make on the lakefront cottage but also how it would help her and her son.

Max was a stellar student, but Beth had indicated she and Craig might not have any money to help Max with college.

In fact she was afraid they would have to sell their house and were under water with it.

They had borrowed extensively against their home on the lake in order to finance her purchase of the realty company and pump up Craig’s fledgling construction business, which had never really taken off.

He thought about their conversation as he took his beer upstairs and walked into the room where he’d found the bug.

Beth had admitted their financial dilemma brokenly to Levi that night, and he had caught sight of a tear tracking down her cheek.

She admitted that her marriage was over.

She was sticking it out until Max left for the university, then she and Craig would split, her dreams of happily-ever-after shattered long before.

Levi had tried to console her, placing an arm around her. She’d turned into him and kissed him, then, her lips salty from her tears.

And, damn it, he’d responded, kissing her back, feeling his blood rise, desire sparking.

They’d ended up in bed together. In this very bed , he thought, casting an angry look at the king-sized mattress and springs and the hobnail bedspread with its tufted pattern his mother had loved.

What had started out as solace had swiftly become passion and hot, raw sex, a physical release that had left them both breathless and gasping.

It had felt good, if tainted with a measure of guilt.

He should have ended it there.

Three weeks ago.

Before it had gone further.

But he hadn’t.

Nor had she.

Though he’d regretted sleeping with her the very next day, he hadn’t called and ended it. He had told himself it would never happen again, that it had just been a moment out of time. A mistake. One night.

But he’d been lying. Deep down, he’d known it at the time.

After all, his one night with Beth hadn’t been the first time he’d stepped over that blurry line of a secretive tryst, but he hoped to God it was the last.

Now, it seemed, they’d been found out.

Recorded, for God’s sake.

Today he would end their affair.

And if he ever did end up selling this place, he’d offer her the listing. It’s the least I can do , he thought, draining his beer and leaving his empty on the cluttered kitchen counter.

He headed outside to his car and continued hauling boxes inside.

It was time for a fresh start.

But first, he reminded himself as he carried in the final box and kicked the door shut behind him, he had to deal with Harper.