Page 42 of It Happened on the Lake

Frowning, Bruce pressed the call button on the bed. “I’m just tellin’ it like it is. No reason to sugarcoat it.”

“Geez.” Harper backed up a step. The horrid memory of Chase’s mother engulfed in flames flashed through her mind. “That’s harsh,” she told her father.

“Maybe. But it’s the goddamned truth.”

“Bruce, do not take the Lord’s name in vain!” Marcia actually stomped a booted foot just as Harper heard the elevator ding.

“Not the point, Marcia,” he argued stubbornly. “You and I both know it.”

Marcia shot Harper a glance that silently said,See what I have to put up with?

From his bed, Bruce asked, “Where’s the nurse? It’s time for my pain meds.”

Marcia’s lips curved downward. “It’s only been—”

As if hovering at the doorway, a twenty-something nurse bustled into the room. With short dark hair and glasses, she smiled brightly. “What can I do for you, Mr. Reed?” she asked, while pulling out a thermometer and placing it under his tongue.

Marcia spoke for him. “He wants his pain medication.”

Harper could relate.

The nurse glanced at his chart and the clock over the wall. “Not quite yet,” but to Bruce, who was starting to mumble a protest around the thermometer, she added, “Soon. Forty minutes.”

While Marcia shot her husband an I-told-you-so glance, the nurse removed the thermometer and placed a blood pressure cuff over his upper arm. Once she was gone, Harper glanced at the clock mounted on the wall near the television. “I’d better go. Beth’s probably waiting for me. She’s giving me a ride back to the house.”

“Beth Leonetti?”

“Alexander.”

He frowned and ran a hand over his unshaven jaw. “That’s right. She married that son of a bitch. They got married and somehow ended up with the house on the lake. Cut her brothers out completely.”

Again, Marcia feigned surprise at her husband’s assessment. “Ouch.”

Harper said, “Craig’s a contractor now.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Still, he frowned, fingers scraping against his whiskers. “So he says. But if you ask me, it’s not that much of a business and wouldn’t exist without his wife supporting him. I just don’t trust him. I knew him as a kid. You did, too,” he said to Harper. “He and his father—what was his name, the gardener?”

“Martin,” Marcia replied.

“Right. Martin. Didn’t like him much. And his kid? That Craig is a sneaky son of a bitch. If you ask me, some of those cats that went missing when Olivia was alive? I think he shot them.”

“What?” Harper said, horrified.

Her father was insistent. “That son of a bitch had a damned pellet gun and was always killing birds and moles and whatever. The cats would’ve made easy targets.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marcia said. “Dear Lord, Bruce, just shut up about it, would you?” To Harper she whispered, “It’s his medication talking.”

“I heard that!” Bruce said. “It’snotthe medication. It’s the damned truth,” he insisted, shooting his wife a narrowed glance. “Craig learned it from his old man, a mean son of a bitch if there ever was one. Used to take a strap to his kid, for all the good it did.”

“Enough!” Marcia pronounced.

Bruce snorted and looked out the window where rain was peppering the glass pane. “It’s all a fact.”

“Pure fiction, you mean,” Marcia argued.

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I wouldn’t trust Craig—or Martin, for that matter—as far as I could throw them!”

Harper had taken a step back. Didn’t want to think that Craig had purposely wounded or killed any of Gram’s cats. But the truth was that some had vanished over the years. Earline, the ever-hissing one with only one ear, in particular had just disappeared. And another one—Long John, the silver tabby. Hadn’t he hobbled home with a BB in his hip?

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