Page 249 of It Happened on the Lake

But just one drink?

No!

Her eyes dropped to the blueprints with their yellowed pages, some ripped around the edges.

Maybe the key was meaningless. She fingered it and decided to give up, but as she started rolling up the pages, she caught a glimpse of the specs for the basement and stopped dead in her tracks. There on the drawings she saw the placement of the original furnaces, two huge wood-burning beasts with round, tentacle-like vents reaching upward to the myriad of rooms overhead. Next to the furnaces, lining two walls of the basement, were designated areas, huge open bins for storing and stacking firewood. Over the largest bin that encompassed one corner of the basement was the schematic for a chute that allowed the chopped wood, or coal, or anything else to be dumped into the basement as needed.

Like a storm cellar, it opened from the outside.

And it was locked.

She’d never seen it opened, not even as a child. In fact, shrubs and bushes had grown over the wing-like doors.

With a new sense of anticipation and urgency that could prove false, she ran out of the tower room, speeding down the stairs, the key in her pocket pressing hard against her thigh. In the kitchen, she grabbed a flashlight, then yanked her jacket from the coat rack near the back door and reminded herself that she could be wrong.

But it felt right.

Following the flashlight’s bobbing beam, she jogged down the gravel path that wound around the side of the garage. The path that had once been wider to accommodate the carts that carried wood when delivering fuel. The path where she’d spied Craig recently, his big dog trailing after him.

After rounding the corner, she found the rhododendrons and hydrangeas that flanked the storm doors, nearly covering them with their dripping branches and effectively camouflaging the entrance.

“Son of a gun,” she whispered, expecting that the old storm doors might be swollen or rotten from years of being exposed to the elements, but she fought her way through the tangle of limbs, extracted the key, and inserted it into the lock easily. It opened with a twist of her wrist. She pulled one heavy door open as far as the interlocking branches would allow and exposed the slide leading into the basement.

Access into the house.

Bending down, she shone her flashlight through the opening to examine the steel lining of the chute. It was free of dust.

As if it had been recently used.

Anyone who had a key could slide right in and bring with him a bat or a dead cat or anything else if he wanted to.

“You sneaky, slimy bastard,” she said as the wind picked up and she shut the doors again and locked them.

She would bet her inheritance that the person behind the pranks was Craig Alexander. His father, Martin, could have been given a secondary key as he had been the groundskeeper when Gram was alive. Craig could have found it. And she knew he sneaked around in the dark. She’d seen evidence of that when he’d surreptitiously slipped into the Hunt house at night.

Why would he try to terrorize her?

To get her to sell?

To secure the expensive listing for his wife?

To make Harper so anxious to get out of here, she’d hire him to make all the necessary repairs?

Really?she asked herself but knew the answer.

It all came down to money.

And her best friend’s husband.

She just had to prove it.

And the only way to do that was to catch him in the act.

Back into the house and up the stairs she went. Again, her hip started to ache, and again, she ignored the nagging pain.

In the tower room she didn’t bother with lights but walked directly to the window to stare across the lake to Fox Point.

No lights glowed from Rand’s A-frame, and even though Levi had moved into the house next door, the Hunts’ cottage showed no signs of life. She hadn’t seen a glimpse of Levi after their argument about Dawn and couldn’t imagine what their next meeting would be like.

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