Still Lake - Anne Stuart [5]
This was the least populated area around Colby. Years ago Stonegate Farm had been a prosperous dairy concern, but no cows had grazed on the wide green fields for forty years now. She’d bought the place from the last of Peggy Niles’s drunken sons, who seemed more than happy to get rid of it. It didn’t take her long to figure out why. Most people weren’t attracted to the site of a famous murder.
Then again, the Niles family had always been a shiftless lot, according to Marge Averill, her good friend. The husband had run off, the drunken sons had bled their mother dry, selling off pieces of the old place while their mother tried to make a go of it, renting rooms to the summer people. She made a decent living until the murders.
It was almost unbelievable that this perfect New England village had been witness to such violence, but Sophie wasn’t that naive. Any old town with a long history would have violent stories attached to it, and the Northeast Kingdom murders were far from the most colorful. A tragedy, of course, that three teenage girls had been murdered, but the case had been solved, a drugged-out teenage drifter had been convicted and sent off to jail, and if, twenty years later, some parents still mourned their lost daughters, then that was only to be expected. The very thought of losing Marty was enough to send Sophie into a mindless panic, no matter how determinedly obnoxious she was. Reality must be so much worse.
But the town of Colby had gotten over it, and it no longer mattered that one of the girls had been found down by the lake, the other two close by, or that all three girls had helped out Peggy Niles at the inn. Doc had even suggested, with ghoulish humor, that Sophie could capitalize on the inn’s morbid history and advertise it as haunted.
She could never do that, not in such a small town. And Doc Henley hadn’t been serious. He was the essence of a kindly, old-fashioned GP—he’d brought half the town, including the three murdered girls, into the world, and he’d pronounced a goodly number of them dead when their time had come.
Sophie sat down on one of the Adirondack chairs, resting her feet against a large boulder as she looked out over the stillness. Waiting for that elusive sense of peace to envelop her.
Something wasn’t right.
She heard the car on the graveled driveway, so attuned to the sounds of Vermont that she even recognized the irregular rhythm of Marge Averill’s aging Saab. She waved a lazy hand, not bothering to rise. Marge was middle-aged, friendly, with a ruthless streak beneath her sturdy exterior, and she’d been particularly solicitous to Sophie since she’d sold her the old Niles farm and its various decrepit outbuildings, probably because, Sophie suspected, she’d paid too much.
“Glorious morning!” she greeted Sophie, striding toward the edge of the lake with her usual determination. “How’s your mother doing?”
“Fine,” Sophie said. This was one of the real estate agent’s busiest times of year, and she wasn’t the sort who came calling if she didn’t have a damned good reason. “What brings you out here?”
“You’re not going to like it,” Marge said flatly, throwing herself down on another chair and shoving her gray hair away from her flushed face.
Sophie groaned. “What did Marty do this time?”
“Absolutely nothing, as far as I know,” Marge said, momentarily distracted. “No, it’s something I did, I’m afraid. I rented out the Whitten place.”
Sophie swiveled around, squinting in the bright sunlight across the shallow cove. That’s what was different. The old house was no longer deserted. The shutters were open, and so was the front door, even though there wasn’t a vehicle or a person in sight.