Page 248 of It Happened on the Lake

So where was the lock?

Maybe it didn’t exist anymore.

Maybe it had been original to the house but replaced over the years and Gram had just kept the key.

“Give it up,” she told herself, peeling off her jacket and draping it over a hook by the back door. The jacket slipped off and fell onto the boots that had been lined neatly under the coat rack—old boots that had sat in position for decades. As she picked up her coat, another image flashed through her brain. She remembered seeing the same row of boots on the night she freaked out searching for Chase.

One pair had been wet and puddling on the floor. They’d belonged to her father, and she recalled thinking how it had been odd to find them there as he’d been at the cottage with Marcia that night. Why had he left his boots at the main house? Where had he been, out sloshing through puddles?

However as soon as the questions flitted through her mind, she dismissed them.

Right now she needed to concentrate on the key.

She examined the key holder mounted on a shelf on the other side of the door. It was a small rack fitted with a tiny shelf and a row of cup holder hooks from which the keys to the car and outbuildings had always hung.

Had she ever seen this key dangling from one of the small hooks?

Did it matter?

Either way, she couldn’t remember.

She’d decided she was probably on a fool’s mission when she remembered the blueprints for the manor that Beth had found in the tower room the other day. Maybe those yellowed schematics would provide a clue, if not for this key’s lock, then possibly to an entrance to the mansion that she didn’t know about. Like a sally port in an old castle. A secret entrance.

What were the chances?

“Good? None? Slim? Dream on,” she said to herself but pocketed the key and rushed up the stairs, her hip reminding her that she wasn’t completely healed. She didn’t care. In the tower room, she turned on the only lamp that was working, then unrolled the plans on her grandfather’s desk with as much enthusiasm as if she’d just discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. She anchored one side with a heavy ashtray, then went through each page carefully, eyeing the fading lines. “Come on, come on,” she urged, searching for anything that would tell her where there might be a hidden lock.

If there even was one.

On each page, floor by floor, Harper searched. She ran her fingers over the pages where they showed exterior doors, studying the elevator and dumbwaiter and the landing in the garage attic which had a locked door. They seemed the most likely hidden entrances.

“Where?” she said, the key in her pocket pressing against her leg, seeming to mock her. “Where?”

Once through the plans.

Twice.

A third time and nothing.

She shoved her hair from her face in frustration even though, she knew, deep down, this was probably a wild goose chase, a way for her to do something, no matter how far-fetched, to stop the intruder, and a means to keep her mind off of Levi and Dawn and the mess of their lives.

She reminded herself that the damned key wasn’t the center of the damned universe. It might not even be a key to this house. She was just spinning her wheels, wanting to do something, anything to secure her home.

It had been an excruciating day.

Levi’s recognition that he was Dawn’s father and his insistence that Dawn be informed of that long-buried truth was wearing on her.

Rand’s news that Chase was dead, killed by his own father decades ago, should have been expected but had drained her emotionally.

Janet Collins’s murder, possibly by a drug dealer from the sixties and somehow connected to Chase’s death, was a worry and ate at her.

It had all been too much to take in.

Giving up, she walked to the window and stared out. From this bird’s eye view she saw the houses across the point, some with lights on, others dark. All with their own dark secrets, just like this old house.

She needed a drink.

No, no, no!She needed to be clearheaded.

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