Still Lake - Anne Stuart [1]
He moved closer, squinting. He was slightly nearsighted, but he never wore glasses except for his prescription sunglasses, and God knew where they were back in the mess of his room. The clothes were floating, half in, half out of the water, but he didn’t recognize the white shirt. He didn’t own any long-sleeved shirts.
He stopped moving, waist deep in the chilly water, and his skin froze. And then he moved, fast, running through the water till he reached her side, turning her over to see her pale, dead face, and the sliced throat, like a jester’s grin, curving beneath her jaw.
They loomed over him, coming out of nowhere, waiting for him, and he couldn’t move, frozen in the chilly water with Lorelei’s body in his arms.
“Thomas Ingram Griffin, alias Gram Thomas, alias Billy Gram, you’re under arrest for the willful murder of Alice Calderwood, Valette King and Lorelei Johnson. Anything you say…”
He didn’t listen to the words. He looked down at the girl in his arms, the girl he’d held last night, the girl whose blood had stained his hands.
And he began to cry.
1
There was only one major problem with trying to save the world, Sophie Davis decided as she stuffed half a blueberry muffin in her mouth. No one wanted her help.
The kitchen at Stonegate Farm was deserted, and Sophie perched on one of the stools, hiking her flowing chintz skirt around her legs as she devoured the rest of the muffin, no mean feat since it was one of those wickedly oversize ones, with enough fat to clog the arteries of a family of four. She was a firm believer in the tenet that calories consumed in private didn’t count. There had been three muffins left from breakfast. She reached for the second one.
It wasn’t as if anyone else wanted them. Her mother, Grace, barely ate enough to keep alive, and when her half sister, Marty, finally dragged herself out into the daylight she’d refuse everything but coffee and cigarettes.
Sophie could sympathize with the cigarettes. She’d given them up four months ago, and in return she’d added fifteen pounds to her already generous frame. And she never spent a day without thinking longingly of one last smoke.
She broke the second muffin in half, putting the rest back on the English stoneware plate in the vain hope she wouldn’t succumb to temptation. Sugar and butter were an entirely satisfactory substitute for nicotine, but unfortunately she could see what they were doing to her body. The cigarettes had been turning her lungs black, but no one was looking at her lungs. If she kept on at this rate she’d be out of size twelves before long and into fourteens. She took the second half of the muffin and shoved it into her mouth.
She needed to get her life back under control. The first year of a new business was always bound to be a bit shaky, but Stonegate Farm was the perfect location for a country inn, and Sophie had energy and enthusiasm to spare. For years most of her decorating and baking had been only in theory, research for the syndicated column she wrote while she lived in a small apartment in New York. Marty called her the poor woman’s Martha Stewart, which Sophie would have taken as a compliment if Marty hadn’t been sneering when she said it.
And now she had this early nineteenth-century farmhouse on the edge of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, a dream location for a dream profession. It was a huge, rambling old house, with half a dozen bedrooms and an extra wing off the back that might be salvaged and eventually turned into even more guest rooms. Everything had seemed so simple when she’d mortgaged her life and her soul to bring Marty and Grace up here.
Not that Grace was particularly thrilled. She’d never been the bucolic type, but her last