Still Lake - Anne Stuart [65]
Instinct and common sense weren’t enough to put his mind at ease, though. Not when he couldn’t remember, not when he’d been convicted of the crime. It didn’t matter that the conviction had been overturned on a legal technicality—there was still enough doubt left in the back of his mind and he couldn’t move on until he knew the answer.
What if it was the wrong answer? What if, when he got back into the deserted section of the inn, he remembered something he didn’t want to remember? He’d been back in Colby for four days and all he’d accomplished so far was a quick midnight reconnoiter of the old grounds, looking for a way to break in. The windows were boarded up tight, and pulling off the planks would have made a hell of a racket. He was going to have to get in through the old kitchen door, which made things a little dicey since the queen of that particular kitchen hated his guts.
Hell, he had too many excuses. Maybe he didn’t want to remember. Maybe he wasn’t ready to live with the truth.
What if the truth about that night came back and he didn’t like it? What if he suddenly remembered killing Lorelei, and maybe even the others? How would he live with that knowledge?
He’d survive. There’d be no noble gesture of turning himself in and confessing. He’d done five years already, and he hadn’t been in his right mind if he’d actually been the killer.
There were too many loose ends. What about the other women, if indeed there were any? He needed to find out more about the girl in the old McLaren graveyard, with the fresh yellow flowers. He needed to check the other graveyards, see if there were other young women with unusual yellow flowers on their graves. If he couldn’t show his face at the inn right now he could at least do something to find the answers.
It wasn’t the first time he’d visited Lorelei’s grave. When he’d gotten out of prison he’d driven over here. He’d never been sure why—maybe he still couldn’t really believe she was dead. It was raining that day, and he’d stood at her grave and wept. The last time he ever had. He couldn’t remember if there were any flowers—the harsh words etched in granite wiped out everything else.
It was going to rain today. The clouds were scudding across the sky, ominous, depressing, and the first few drops were splashing down on the windscreen of his Jaguar when he pulled up to the tiny, picturesque graveyard by the edge of the lake.
Most of the year-round residents were buried in the village cemetery. This graveyard had mainly been populated by summer people for the last seventy years, but Lorelei’s family had been burying their kin there since the early 1800s, and Lorelei had been buried there, as well.
He saw the yellow flowers first, a splash of color against the lichen-stained granite stone. He walked slowly, ignoring the rain, stopping in front of her grave to look down. Not that he was any expert on flowers, but he didn’t recognize them among his spotty knowledge of various perennials. The one thing he knew was that they were identical to the ones at the McLaren graveyard, and they were fresh.
Lorelei’s family was long gone. Her mother had died when she was young, and her father died of cancer a few years ago. She had no siblings, no one left to mourn her. So who would have brought fresh flowers to her grave, and why?
He looked out over the rows of gravestones toward the lake, blinking in the ever-increasing rain. At least half the graves had flowers, ranging from wild roses to freshly cut flowers to gaudy, artificial memorial sprays. He walked down the center row of the small cemetery, ignoring the rain, until he found what he was looking for. One small stone with the same yellow flowers.
Marsha Daniels, age sixteen, born in 1957, died in 1973. No other information, just the telltale spray of flowers.
He scribbled the information on a scrap of paper, watching the ink run in the driving rain. And then he headed