Page 11 of 15 Summers Later

—Ghost Lakeby Ava Howell Brooks

Madison

After greeting her dogs, Mabel and Mo, who were both eager to see her at the end of a long day, Madi settled the kitten into a small crate in her bedroom, still smiling about her encounter with Luke.

She had no idea if he would actually come that night to the Burning Tree. She hoped so. He really did need to let go.

The man was fiercely dedicated to his patients, his family and his community. She wasn’t sure he had even dated anybody since his wife, Johanna, died four years earlier. If so, he had kept it quiet from everyone, even his family. Madi was quite certain his sister would have told her, if Nicki had known.

What would she have done without him in her life? It was a question she often thought about.

For one thing, she never would have been able to open the rescue. Luke and his semiretired partner, Ray Gonzales, both insisted on providing care free of charge to the animals who wound up at the sanctuary. Whenever she encountered something unusual or out of her comfort zone, Luke was always willing to drop everything and come to the rescue.

Luke sat on the board of the Emerald Creek Animal Rescue Foundation and had also been instrumental in convincing Eugene Pruitt, a huge animal lover and conservationist, to donate his property for the animal rescue.

She owed Dr. Gentry a gigantic debt.

Her smile faded as memories pushed in. Her debt to Luke and the rest of his family was mammoth, so enormous she knew she would never be able to repay it.

She was continually amazed that his entire family—Luke, Nicki, their brother, Owen, their mother, Tilly, even Sierra—was so willing to accept and embrace her. By all rights, the Gentrys should hate her. Because of her, their family had suffered a loss so profound, they were still bereft, fifteen years later.

Why didn’t they hate her?

She had wondered that often over the past fifteen years. No one could blame them, especially after reading Ava’s stupid book, which painted the whole story in bitter, painful detail.

The reminder ofGhost Lakesoured her mood all over again.

She had been foolish to think everything would blow over. When Ava first told her about the book, originally written as her master’s thesis, Madi had stupidly assumed it would be one of those dusty academic tomes nobody ever bothered to read.

Yet one more thing she had been wrong about.

Instead, the world had embraced the story about two lost girls trying to survive amid people, groups and circumstances beyond their control.

Madi glanced at her watch. She still had two hours before she needed to be ready to go out that night with Nicole. That would give her plenty of time to stop by and drop off the dog food for her grandmother and maybe squeeze in a quick visit.

After making sure the kitten was now sleeping in her crate, she grabbed her truck keys from the wooden bowl on the counter.

While she typically used her own small SUV as it had better gas mileage, she loved every chance to climb behind the wheel of her grandfather’s old pickup truck. Driving it provided plenty of exercise, working the clutch and the gearshift, plus it was a moving advertisement for the sanctuary, keeping it fresh on the minds of townspeople and tourists alike. Only a few weeks ago, she had received a lovely Venmo donation given by a tourist couple from Virginia who had seen her out and about in the truck and subsequently researched the mission of the organization.

The evening was mild, with a light breeze blowing down out of the Sawtooths. The old truck did not have air-conditioning, so she drove with the windows down and the wind blowing through her hair. By the time she reached her grandmother’s house on Elkridge Drive, she felt almost sanguine about the world.

Her grandmother had a visitor. A small sporty SUV she didn’t recognize, with Oregon plates, was parked in the driveway behind Leona’s old four-door sedan. Madi parked in front of the house so she didn’t block the other car from leaving if the visitor needed to go.

She hefted the bag of dog food in both hands, ignoring the pain in her weak leg at the weight, then carried it up the long sidewalk to the house.

Madi propped the bag next to the door and walked in without knocking. Leona would have been offended, especially as this had been Madi’s de facto home since that summer fifteen years ago.

After college in Boise, she had returned to live with her grandmother for a few years, until she and Nicki rented a basement apartment together from a friend of Tilly’s about three years ago. They’d both been happy to move out of the basement to Gene Pruitt’s old farmhouse, despite all the work they still needed to do at the place.

To her surprise, Leona was not in the living room chatting with a friend, as Madi expected, or in the kitchen, sitting over a cup of coffee and a piece of huckleberry pie, though she did find Oscar, Leona’s German shepherd mix. She petted the dog, her concern growing.

Had she missed her grandmother out in the lush garden somewhere? She didn’t think so. And if she were in the garden, she would have had Oscar with her, since the dog loved being out in the yard.

Leona wasn’t in the living room, either, Madi found. As she stood trying to figure out the mystery, she suddenly heard muted voices from upstairs. It sounded as if they were coming from the bedroom Ava had used for the two years they had lived here together, before her sister left for college in Oregon.

With a vague sense of foreboding that seemed to spring up out of nowhere, Madi walked up the stairs, trying to identify the other female voice speaking with her grandmother.

As she reached the top of the staircase, her unease ratcheted up as the voice became clearer.

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