Page 143 of It Happened on the Lake

“I don’t know.” Levi rubbed his jaw, as he thought back. “But after he got back to the house, after seeing you up at the river. That’s where you were, right?”

“Uh-huh. The old logging road.”

“Right. Well, Chase came home all hopped up, almost looking for a fight. He and Dad, they got into it. I mean, really got into it. It got physical. You know, Dad had a temper and so did Chase. They were downstairs. Mom, too. I went down to break it up, but they were both seeing red. I got in the middle of it but ended up taking a punch or two and getting Mom out of there. Then I left. I thought ‘fuck it’ and walked around the lake. When I got back, things had quieted down, so I just went to bed. I thought Chase was in his room. His car was there.”

“But he took the boat out to meet Harper,” Rand said and noted that Levi’s statement hadn’t changed over the years.

“I think I heard him leave. I thought my old man would follow, but he didn’t, at least not that I know. I fell asleep—just before midnight, I think.”

“Did you hear him take the boat out?”

“No,” Levi admitted, apparently lost in thought. “I didn’t hear anything more until Harper woke me up later. You remember. She rapped on the window of Chase’s room, then we came over to your house.”

Rand did remember. He’d just gotten home when there was a knock on the door. His old man was already in bed and hadn’t wakened. Or had he? Now Rand wasn’t sure. The night had been a blur due to the amount of alcohol he’d consumed in a short period of time.

As Levi took his leave and from the porch Rand watched him return to the house next door, he had an uneasy feeling that everything they knew about that night might be a façade.

Chapter 36

Contrary to Beth’s dark prediction, Harper wasn’t attacked in her sleep that night, or over the next two nights.

No one had snuck into the house and hacked her to pieces.

Nor had they shot her at close range.

Nope, Harper was alive, her brother’s Bowie knife under her pillow, while the scissors and crucifix were in the sleeping bag with her, as they’d been for the past two nights. She would have loved to keep Gramps’s pistol with her, but despite searching the house over, she hadn’t been able to locate it.

Even with her lesser weapons around her, she’d slept fitfully, the noises of the old house piercing her brain. Creaking timbers, rattling windows, the sound of the train on the tracks just on the other side of Northway Road had caused her to wake with a start each time she’d dozed off.

Still no intruder had attacked her.

“Count it as a win,” she said to herself and stretched in her bed. It was still dark, only a little after six, dark enough to feel like midnight.

But she needed to get up. Face the day.

From the time she’d seen Beth drive across the bridge, she’d worked at getting this behemoth of a house in order. First she’d gone to the phone company and ordered a repairman to put in two new lines, one for her fax machine, the second for her computer. She’d picked up new copies of the white and yellow pages and had let her fingers “do the walking,” as the old advertisement had suggested.

She’d also called the two veterinarians in town and a cat shelter, each time asking about an unclaimed tuxedo cat. Unfortunately, she’d come up empty.

More and more she worried about Jinx, but she’d pushed her concerns aside for the moment.

As she was in and out of the house, most of the phone calls that had come into the house had gone directly to her answering machine, which turned out to be a good thing as she was able to avoid Rhonda Simms’s calls. Rhonda had left three messages, each one a little more terse than the one before, each asking for an interview.

“In your dreams,” Harper had said, erasing them all.

There had been hang-ups as well, which she’d attributed to the pushy reporter.

She’d hired a gardening crew to clean up the grounds and called a local housekeeping company. The manager had sent over two pairs of housekeepers. One set had started on the kitchen and main floor, while the second set began cleaning from the top floor turret room and worked their way down. They had worked long hours, and by six o’clock yesterday, the house was as clean as it was going to get for a while.

As soon as the turret had been scrubbed, vacuumed, dusted, and polished, Harper had been able to haul all of her equipment to her new office on the top floor. She’d boxed up her grandfather’s magazines, books, and cigar boxes and had them taken to the garage by one of the gardeners.

She’d made her appointment with the doctor at his office near the hospital and had all of her sutures removed. She’d found the time to call Dawn, leaving a message on her pager, and checked in on her father. Although she hadn’t actually talked to him, Marcia had conveyed that they were home at their condo in Portland and that Bruce was resting but would call her back.

So far she’d heard from neither her daughter nor her father and was running on the principle that no news was good news.

Fingers crossed.

Yesterday morning a locksmith had arrived to re-key all the doors and secure every window. She had a call into someone to check out the elevator and dumbwaiter, and a crew was set to come and clean the roof, gutters, and chimneys next week.

---