Page 56 of It Happened on the Lake

“What?”

“Were you ever involved with Harper Reed?”

“Jesus. I said—”

“I know what you said, but it’s not the first time a friend has the hots for his friend’s chick. You know, a ‘Jessie’s Girl’ kind of thing. You’ve heard the song, right?”

“It wasn’t like that,” he said, knowing it was a lie. How many nights alone in his loft bedroom had he stared out the window to the island and fantasized about Harper Reed?

“If you say so.” Her eyes sparked with a naughty, knowing twinkle.

“I do.” And he felt his jaw tighten to the point it ached.

She drummed her fingers on the desk and dropped that particularly sharp topic. But she wasn’t done. “If you ask me,” Chelle said, “all those deaths associated with that damned family deserve another look.” Her eyes met his, as if daring him to argue, as if she was silently suggesting he was hiding something and that something had to do with Harper Reed. “I’m telling you, there’s something off about all of this.”

“I’ll pull the files,” he said. “See what’s there.”

“Maybe those cases, even if they’re closed, could use fresh eyes,” she challenged, and he could almost see the suspicious wheels in her brain turning. “You might be too close to it. The way I hear it, your family and the Hunts were thick as thieves, right? Your dad and Tom Hunt worked together, here. Were partners at one time.”

Obviously she had already looked into this.

She suggested, “And you and Chase were besties.”

What was she getting at? He said, “It was a long time ago.”

“I know.” She pinned him with her dark gaze. “So here’s a question for you: If Harper Reed hadn’t shown up here yesterday, do you think Cynthia Hunt would have been on that boat?”

“She didn’t know that Harper was back.”

“You think. But Harper’s father had a heart attack—what, a few days before—right? And . . . if you kept up, you’d know it was about the time she was going to inherit. It was in all the papers way back when.” She motioned to a clipped newspaper article from years before. “Not really a secret, so Cynthia could have figured it out. Or maybe Harper let people know. Or possibly, like the brother, Levi? He could’ve spilled the beans.”

“I don’t think he knew Harper would be back.”

“But you don’t know,” she pointed out.

“Cynthia Hunt was in a care facility. She was mentally declining.”

“But she got out, didn’t she? On her own. Made her way from Serenity Acres to the lake and started the boat, so she wasn’t mentally that far gone.”

“She set herself on fire. Pretty far gone.”

“You’re taking Harper Prescott’s word for it,” she said and plucked a dead leaf from one of the vines running from her desk down the side of the file cabinet.

“There were other people on the lake. They saw it.”

“Two night fishermen—is that even a thing? Anyway, they were out drinking for sure and fishing in the dark maybe. Neither guy is completely certain what actually happened. The other boats showed up later. So we’re taking one woman’s word for it, the same woman who gave us all the information on Chase Hunt’s disappearance and Olivia Dixon’s death. I think it all deserves to be checked out again.” She raised her eyebrows as if waiting for him to disagree.

He wanted to argue, God, he wanted to. He’d hoped that particular chapter of his life when Chase Hunt disappeared was closed, never to be reopened. Of course that wish was folly now. Harper Reed Prescott had seen to that. “I was there,” he reminded her. “I saw the fire from the house when I heard the neighbor’s dogs barking. I took my boat out.”

“But after it all went down, right?”

He gave a curt nod and heard the fax machine down the hall start spitting out pages.

“You and the rest of the neighbors,” she said, crushing the dead leaf in her fingers and tossing the bits into the trash under her desk.

“That’s right.”

She thought about it a second. “But the point is she came back because her dad has a heart attack. And all of a sudden Cynthia Hunt breaks out of some old people’s home, manages to get to her old house, takes out the boat, and sets herself on fire. All on her own?”

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