Still Lake - Anne Stuart [18]
He walked down the lawn at a leisurely pace. He was playing with fire—what if they took one look at his face and recognized him? It would stop his investigation cold. Anyone who cared enough about the case would know his conviction had been overturned after five years and he’d been released, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t raise holy hell if they realized he’d come back.
But he hadn’t returned to Still Lake to play it safe. If it had been up to him he never would have come back here at all. He’d made a perfectly comfortable life for himself, and the huge, yawning question had been easy enough to ignore.
Not for Annelise, his law partner and ex-fiancée. It was time for them to get married, she’d announced in her cool, emotionless tones. She was ready to have children, she’d informed him, and all he could think of was a hen getting ready to hatch. He’d had the wisdom not to share that particular image with her.
After all, she was smart, she was gorgeous, she was sophisticated. She was sexually adept. They knew each other well, appreciated their better qualities and ignored their worse ones. But Annelise had no intention of breeding with a murderer.
“You’ve got to find out what really happened back then,” she’d told him in no uncertain terms. “There’s no way we can concentrate on the future without settling the past.”
He wasn’t particularly interested in the future, any more than he cared about his sordid past. One day at a time was more his style, but Annelise was a woman with plans, and very talented at getting what she wanted. This time her wants coincided with his. Twenty years had passed—it was time to find out what really happened. Time to put the past to bed.
And then Annelise had broken the engagement. His cool, practical bed partner had fallen ridiculously in love with one of their clients, and by the time she chose to inform him she had already been married for two days.
Not that he was pining for her. As a matter of fact, what really bothered him was how little he cared. That and the faint note of relief that she hadn’t made the mistake of falling in love with him. The very thought made him shiver.
Onward and upward, he reminded himself, drawing closer to the lake and the two old people watching him with unabashed interest. He’d never seen the woman before—he was sure of that, though he certainly hadn’t been paying much attention to older women during his previous sojourn in Colby. She was thin, oddly dressed, with flyaway gray hair and a slightly vacant look to her. She could have been anywhere between seventy and ninety, though he suspected she might be younger. And then he met her eyes, and found himself drawn by the surprisingly sharp gaze in their blue depths.
A moment later they seemed to glaze over. “Who are you?” she demanded, not rudely, but like a young child. “Doc, who is he?”
Shit, he thought, as he realized who her companion was. Doc Henley was one person he’d just as soon avoid, at least for the time being. It was Doc who’d stitched up the cut running up his thigh, the result of his careless use of a scythe. It was Doc who’d checked him over while he waited in jail, to see whether the blood that still smeared his body was his own or somebody else’s. It was Doc who’d brought the three murder victims into the world, and Doc who’d pronounced them dead.
He hadn’t changed much in the years between fifty and seventy. The white hair was thinner, the face had more lines, but the mouth was just as firm beneath his salt-and-pepper mustache. He still had wise, kind eyes, but they met Griffin’s without recognition, and he rose, holding out a hand in welcome. A welcome that would be quickly withdrawn if he’d known who he