Still Lake - Anne Stuart [19]
“Must be your new neighbor, Gracey,” he said easily. “I’m Richard Henley, but most folks around here call me Doc. And this is Mrs. Grace Davis. Welcome to Colby.”
Griffin took his hand. There was still a lot of strength in the old man, and not a trace of a tremor. He was only slightly stooped from age, and he could look Griffin in the eye. “John Smith,” Griffin introduced himself. He really should have picked a more interesting alias—John Smith was just too damned plain to be believed.
Gracey didn’t seem to have any doubts. “How nice,” she said in her soft, fluty voice. “What brings you to Colby, Mr. Smith? To this end of the lake in particular?”
He didn’t know whether or not he’d imagined the intelligence in her eyes—it was at sharp odds with her wispy voice and manner. If she was Sophie’s mother she couldn’t be much older than her mid-sixties, maybe even younger. She looked more like a candidate for a nursing home.
“Looking for peace and quiet, Mrs. Davis,” he said. “I thought this seemed like a nice, boring place to spend a few months.”
“The snow will fly in three months’ time,” Gracey said in a singsong voice. “I don’t think you’ll want to be here then.”
“Why not? I’m not afraid of a little snow.”
“Probably because the old Whitten place isn’t really winterized,” Doc said in his genial voice. “If you’re planning to stay on past the frost you’ll need to find someplace a little more habitable—you surely wouldn’t want to put that kind of money into a rented house. Though I can’t imagine why you would want to stay—jobs are scarce around here in the off-season. Most folks have to commute to Montpelier or Burlington.”
Griffin smiled faintly, not about to offer any more information despite Doc’s careful prying. “I’ll deal with that when I have to,” he said easily. “In the meantime I’m just here for the serenity.”
Doc turned to look out over the lake, his eyes narrowing in the sunlight. “Looks can be deceptive, my boy. This town isn’t nearly as quiet as it seems. Most places aren’t.”
It was a perfect opportunity, and he’d be a fool to let it pass him by. “What do you mean?”
“Murders,” Gracey announced with ghoulish delight, pushing her flyaway gray hair away from her face. “Lots of unsolved crimes in the Northeast Kingdom, including peaceful little Colby.”
Griffin shrugged. “You mean the teenage girls who were murdered twenty-five years ago? Someone mentioned it to me. But they told me they caught the killer.”
“Twenty years ago,” Doc corrected him. Griffin knew exactly how long it had been since Lorelei, Valette and Alice died. To the day. “And they caught the boy, all right. Sent him to jail, but he got out a few years later on a technicality. There are some who say he wasn’t the killer, anyway—that he got railroaded.”
That was the first Griffin had heard of it—it had seemed as if the town was out for his blood. He was lucky the Northeast Kingdom didn’t go in for lynching, or he wouldn’t be here right now. “Really?”
“Then there are others who believe he killed those three girls and more besides, and sooner or later he’ll come back here, to finish up what he started,” Doc said.
Griffin didn’t even blink. “Well, what’s taking him so long? He’s probably dead himself by now.”
“Not that boy,” Doc said. “He’s a survivor. Nothing was gonna get that boy down, not prison, not nothing.”
“Do you think he did it?” Griffin asked. The moment the words were out of his mouth he realized it was a mistake.
Doc focused his pale blue eyes on him for a long, unsettling moment. “I don’t know. There were times when I thought that boy was pure evil. Then there were other times when I thought he was just a lost soul. I suppose he could have killed them. But I think he would have had to have been out of his mind on drugs or something to have done it.”
Not much help, Griffin thought grimly. And now Doc was staring at him with an odd expression on his face, as if he could see past the wire-rimmed glasses and the curly hair and the clean-shaven face, see past twenty years into the face of a boy who might be a killer.
Doc shook