Page 91 of It Happened on the Lake

“But you don’t know until you try,” Dawn reminded her.

“Riiight.”

Satisfied, Dawn headed up the back staircase. “Let’s go to the very top, okay?” she said and didn’t wait for an answer. She just started clomping up the steps.

Once in Gramps’s private room with its 360-degree view, Dawn mouthed, “Wicked.” Spinning slowly, she said, “Holy shit, Mom, this is so damned awesome.” She checked out the bathroom with its high windows and returned. “Retro, but fantabulous. Okay, okay, this is gonna be my room.”

“I thought it might be my office. You might notice the computer and typewriter I carried all the way up here.”

“Nah.” Dawn shook her head, her loose bun starting to unravel. “I’m staking my claim. There are like a million rooms you can pick from, but I want this one. And I’ll help move your stuff out of here.”

“I don’t know—”

“Oh wow.” Spying the tripod and telescope near the windows facing the lake, Dawn grinned.

She crossed the room in an instant and peered into the eyepiece.

“How does this work?” Fiddling with the viewfinder, she said, “Oh. Got it. Oh my God! This is so awesome! You can see . . . wow, you can see everything that’s happening across the lake in those houses over there. ”

“I guess.”

“You know . Come on, Mom, you have to have looked through this. I mean, who wouldn’t?” Adjusting the focus, she gasped. “Oh crap. You can see right into those people’s bedrooms.” Smothering a naughty smile, she said, “Don’t those people ever shut their blinds?”

Rarely , Harper thought but said, “I don’t know.”

“You could be like a cool spy or something!”

“I think it’s called a voyeur. And it’s definitely not cool.”

“Hey, there’s something going on at that end house that kinda looks like a cabin.”

“What?”

“Uh . . . People are moving out, I guess. Hauling stuff out of their attic.”

Harper squinted through the window. “Are they? I guess you’re right.

” She picked up the binoculars on a side table and trained the lenses on the last house on the lake.

Sure enough, she saw a woman and a man taking bags of things down the outside staircase.

At the base, they turned, their faces in profile and she recognized Rand Watkins, grim-faced, dark hair moving slightly as he walked, a younger woman with him.

She wondered what they were doing and remembered her short, pointed interview at the station and spying on him as he’d worked on the old files at his desk in the A-frame.

Was it all tied together somehow? And what about the time she’d caught him on a night boat cruise around this island?

Or was she making more of it than there was?

Or could it be that despite yourself, you’ve always found Rand Watkins more than a little bit intriguing?

That thought caught her up short.

Dawn, who had lost interest in the activity at the cabin, had moved the telescope, shifting the optical tube, swiveling it slightly on its mount. “Oh, and there’s a guy two houses down not wearing a shirt. Kind of a hunk for an old guy.”

“What guy?” she asked, then saw where the telescope was trained. On the Hunt house where Levi stood on the dock. “For God’s sake, Dawn, he’s my age. Not even forty.”

“Like I said, old.”

Harper trained her binoculars on the Hunt house, where she spied Levi in low-slung jeans and no shirt. His hair was damp, the muscles of his abdomen tight and visible until he pulled on a T-shirt.

For a second the back of her throat went dry.

Dawn asked, “You know him?”

“Uh-huh,” she admitted, clearing her throat. “He was in my class in school.”

“Yeah? Were you friends?”

“Yes,” she admitted with a trace of sadness. They had been friends once upon a time when they were kids full of hope and innocence and a shared love for adventure. “A long time ago.”

“Is he cool?”

“Sure.” There was so much more she could say about Levi Hunt, so much she could tell her daughter, but she said only, “He’s the son of the woman who died in the fire on her boat.”

“That’s the guy? And . . . wait, you dated her son. Is he the guy?”

“No, that one—Levi’s older brother, Chase—went missing.” She hesitated, on the cusp of divulging the truth, but was this the right time? No. She wondered if there ever would be a time that felt right.

But not today.

Harper set down her field glasses.

Dawn was squinting as she watched Levi.

Oh Lord. Something fragile inside of Harper broke. Time to end this. Harper started for the door. “Do you want to see the rest of the house?”

Dawn straightened. “Yeah, but remember, I claim this room.”

“Okay, you’ve got it.” Harper led the way down the narrow staircase. On the third floor, they stopped in Harper’s bedroom.

“You picked this one? Really?” Dawn asked, eyeing the sparse belongings. “What’s with the sleeping bag?”

“It’s temporary. I wasn’t sure how long I would be staying.”

“Aren’t there other beds here? With like sheets and stuff.”

“Nothing that isn’t twenty years old. I’ll probably have everything moved from California, once I clean this place out.”

They wandered through the servants’ quarters on the third floor, and Dawn tested the dumbwaiter and elevator again. Neither responded. “I’m not kidding, Mom, you really have to fix these!”

“Got it. Duly noted.”

“You know, this place is like a hotel.”

“An old hotel,” Harper said, leading the way down the stairs.

“Don’t you love it here?”

Harper admitted, “Sometimes,” but didn’t add that often she hated it.

On the second floor, Dawn wrinkled her nose at the musty scent that the cleaning people hadn’t quite eradicated. “It smells kinda funky up here.”

“I know. I think I need to really air the place out.”

“For sure.”

They wended their way through the rooms. In the final guest room, she stopped short and stared within.

“What’s with all the dolls?” she asked. Harper had stashed most of Gram’s collection here, out from underfoot.

The bed and floor were littered with the dolls, while others spilled out from the closet. “There must be a hundred.”

“Or more. They were Gram’s,” Harper said, eyeing the dolls she hadn’t yet put in the trash. “I’m going to donate them.”

“Why? I kinda like ’em. They add a creep factor. Especially the really old ones with the googly eyes.” She walked inside and stepped on an old baby doll that cried out. “Oh shit. See what I mean?”

“I wasn’t thinking about a creep factor motif,” Harper said from the doorway. She thought about Maude and Toodles with their chilling messages, how someone had moved them around in the middle of the night. How that same sicko had left a dead cat in the house. What perverted son of a—

“Oh! Wait. What’s this one?” Dawn wended her way through a pile of baby dolls to the bed. She pushed aside a brunette Bubblecut Barbie in a red swimsuit and tossed Midge in a two-piece out of the way to retrieve a pudgy doll with blond hair, freckles, and blue eyes, one half-closed.

“Chatty Cathy,” Harper said, remembering how delighted Gram was to show it to Harper when she was around ten.

“Oh God, I’ve heard about these!” Dawn said. She turned the doll over and pulled the ring just below the doll’s neck. “Does she talk?”

“She did. I don’t know now if—”

“Please take me with you,” Chatty Cathy requested in a surprisingly clear, high-pitched voice.

Dawn laughed.

“You can, you know. If you want the doll, she’s yours. Any of them are,” Harper said. “Take her. Take them all.”

“Oh sure,” Dawn said, smiling in amusement. Another pull of the string, and the doll requested a story. “These are all so cool. Mom, seriously, don’t get rid of any of them! Your grandma loved them.”

“That she did.”

“You know what you could do?” Dawn asked, replacing the doll on the bed next to a blond Ken doll wearing only red swim trunks.

“You could rent out rooms here. Everything is so retro and old. Creaky. Like if anyone wanted a ‘haunted hotel’ experience? Each room could have a doll or twenty in it. The house would pay for itself.”

“I’ll think about it,” Harper said dryly, though she didn’t see herself doing anything of the kind. An innkeeper she was not.

“Just don’t sell it, please!” Dawn pleaded. “Come on, Mom, you can’t!”

She could, but Dawn’s supplication touched her.

Despite the tragedies that were a part of the island and regardless of the silent intruder who stalked the halls of the house at night, she did love it here, and with each passing day, she felt more connected to this island where she’d grown up. “It’s a lot of house.”

“So what? Make it work. Isn’t that what—?”

“I always say. Yeah, I know. I said I’ll think about it.”

“That usually means no.”

Harper didn’t argue. She couldn’t because it was true.

She’d often promised to consider one of her daughter’s ideas and then immediately tossed it aside.

Which is just what she was doing now. “Well, we’re keeping some of these,” Dawn announced, picking up Chatty Cathy, a black Ken, and a baby doll that Gram had probably named, but Harper couldn’t recall. “I’m taking them to my room!”

“ My room. Remember, it’s my room,” Harper argued as Dawn flounced up the two floors to the tower room and presumably left the dolls in the tower.

Once she returned with a smug smile pasted on her pale lips, they made their way down the back stairs to the main floor and the parlor with its dark drapes, settee, and collection of eclectic furniture, teacups, ashtrays, and even a couple of baby dolls that Harper hadn’t yet rounded up.

“Geez, another telescope?” Dawn paused to look through the eyepiece and adjusted the focus. “What’s the deal? This one’s pointed at that Levi guy’s house, too.”

“Don’t know,” Harper lied.

“Well, he’s gone now. Or at least not outside where I can see him.” As she straightened, Dawn noticed the wineglass Harper had left on the table near the telescope. A slow grin lifted the corners of her mouth. “You’ve been spying, Mom.”

“No—” she started to argue, then admitted a partial truth. “Well, okay, I have looked through it. Yes.”

“Have you literally been scoping that guy out?”

“No. But I have seen him, and others.” She decided to come clean. “I know the guy in that A-frame, too. Next door to the Hunts.”

“Oh yeah?” Dawn was moving the telescope slightly.

“He’s now a detective with the local police department. Just like his dad was when we were growing up.”

“He went to school with you, too,” Dawn guessed.

“Right. But he was a couple of years older.”

“Doesn’t look like he’s home.” Dawn straightened. “So this—” She made a circular motion that Harper guessed included the house, island, lake, and point on the far shore, “—is kinda like a high school reunion for you?”

“Well, not quite, but the house on the other side of the Hunts’ was the Leonettis’. Beth Leonetti was my best friend in high school.”

“You said that before.”

“Right, well, she’s a Realtor now. And if I decide to sell this house once it’s fixed up, I’d ask her to help me.”

“Don’t sell it!”

“Are you going to live here?”

“Well, yeah.” Dawn nodded. “When I visit.”

Harper cocked her head. “Realistically? And how often would that be?”

“I don’t know, but just don’t put it on the market! Fix it up if you want to, but keep it. For now,” she said. “Don’t I have some say in it? Grandma says that once you die, everything goes to me, right?”

Grandma being Marcia. Every time she heard her daughter refer to Marcia as her grandmother, she felt her skin crawl.

“I’m listening to you now. And Marcia doesn’t have any say about what I—we—do with this place.

” Harper didn’t try to hide her irritation.

Marcia’s interest in the house and grounds, her proprietary attitude about Dixon Island, had always been a source of friction to Harper.

It had been Marcia, not her father, who had doled out the trust fund checks and paid all the bills, along with that sleazeball of an attorney, Lou Arista.

She was so lost in thought, Harper actually started when she heard the doorbell chime.

“I’ll get it,” Dawn said, and before Harper could stop her daughter, Dawn was racing to the front door.

“Wait,” Harper said, rushing after her, but it was too late.

Dawn unlocked the dead bolt and flung the door open wide.

Standing just outside was Levi Hunt.