Page 17 of Merciless Prince
Leah threw up her hands. “Okay, forget the Hellfire Club. I have the perfect idea for your paper. It’s interestingandrelevant to this area.”
I raised a brow. “Lay it on me.”
“Mirror Lake,” she said with a triumphant air. “It’s about five miles south of here. Have you ever been there?”
“Nope. Never heard of it.”
“Okay, strap yourselves in, because this is a long story. But trust me, it’s interesting.” Leah leaned forward again. “So, there used to be a town called Cochrane a few miles from here. Sometime in the 1930s, the demand for fresh water in this county was starting to outstrip the local supply, so the authorities decided to build a new reservoir. To do that, they had to flood the valley that Cochrane was built in.”
“Wait, they flooded an entire town?” Cooper asked.
“Yes. Obviously, they evacuated it first and paid for all the citizens to relocate. But yeah, there’s a whole town underwater now, including a cemetery and a church. It’s been submerged like that for almost a hundred years.”
“Is it all preserved down there?” I asked.
“Supposedly, yeah. But it’s very deep, and no one really goes there, so there aren’t many photos of the old underwater structures.”
“Why doesn’t anyone go there?”
“That’s the next part to the story,” Leah said, folding her hands in front of her. “The spot doesn’t attract many tourists because the government kept the intentional flooding story on the down-low for decades, seeing as a few of the locals weren’t too happy to be forced out of their homes. So not many people actually know about the underwater town. As for the locals… they all think it’s haunted.”
I raised a skeptical brow. “Haunted?”
“Yep. I mean, it’s just local folklore. I doubt it’s actually haunted,” she said. “But a lot of people think it is. I wouldn’t want to hang out there, either.”
“Why?”
“My parents took me and my sister there for a picnic when we were kids, because the lake is really nice to look at, and there’s a couple of hiking trails nearby,” she said. “Anyway, when the weather is dry and cold, the lake gets covered in ice that’s totally sheer and smooth. Like panes of glass. That’s why it’s called Mirror Lake. But we visited it in summer, so the first few feet of the surface were totally clear. I swear I saw something when I went down to the shore.”
My forehead wrinkled. “What was it?”
“A body.” Leah shivered and rubbed the sides of her arms. “I seriously thought I saw a dead woman with long black hair floating around in there. I ran straight to my parents to make them look at it, but it turned out to be a log covered in lake weeds.”
“So there wasn’t actually a body?” Cooper said, raising a brow.
“Well… no. But the place still creeps me out,” Leah replied in a defensive tone. “Also, a few of the hikers who’ve gone missing over the years disappeared from the trails near the lake. That’s one of the reasons people think it’s haunted. That and the underwater ghost town.”
“That would be a really cool subject for your paper,” Cooper said, looking back at me. “There’d be a lot of documentation on the reservoir project, too, because the local government would’ve kept records of everything.”
Leah nodded. “Exactly. So you’ve got a ton of valid sources to cite. Plus there’s the folklore aspect, which makes the story even more interesting.”
“Yeah, it sounds awesome,” I said, pulse racing with excited energy.
“Oh, shit,” Cori blurted out, eyes darting over to a clock that hung on the wall near a series of historical town photos. “We have to get back. Our next class is in ten minutes.”
“I’ll drive you,” Cooper said.
We quickly finished our drinks and food before heading out onto the street. The air smelled crisp and biting, and the sky was overcast. That was the one bad thing I’d noticed about Bellingham—the weather was frequently miserable.
Scratch that. It’s not the only bad thing,I thought as I spotted Killian across the road. He was heading toward a local bar with a couple of his friends.
As if he’d sensed my eyes on him, he turned his head over his shoulder to look at my side of the street. I ducked behind a tree and pretended to be deeply interested in a nearby real estate sign.
Killian turned back around and headed into the bar. I breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing I wanted to do was attract his attention again, even if he was sexy as hell.
That was a fact I was trying my best to forget.
On the way back to campus, I stared out of the car window, watching the trees on the edge of the road whiz by as I thought about everything my friends and I had discussed.
