In the Shadow of Lakecrest(64)

“Pull yourself together,” Hannah snapped. “I hope to God you didn’t share any of this nonsense with the police?”

“Of course not.”

“Then it should all sort itself out without causing a scandal.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Marjorie asked. “The scandal is that your own son thinks you’re a murderer!”

“Marjorie,” Matthew pleaded. He turned to Hannah. “I don’t care what you said to the police. Can’t you tell the truth to your own family?”

Hannah harrumphed, but her dismissiveness only spurred Matthew on. He sprang up from the couch.

“Tell me!”

Hannah stared back at him. A terrible silence hung over us like a bewitchment. No one moved or spoke for what felt like forever.

“I’ve always wondered why Marjorie and I are such a mess,” Matthew said at last, in a voice drained of all emotion. “It looks like I finally have an answer. I was raised by a monster.”

Hannah started shouting and Marjorie screamed back, and their words blended together in a cacophony of hate. I put my hands over my ears to block out the sounds. My chest began to shake with hysterical sobs, the screams coming so fast and hard I could hardly breathe. I gulped, desperate for air, and then it all went black.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


I woke up in bed, groggy and confused. Specks of dust floated in a ray of sunlight that cut across the room. With some effort, I pulled myself upright and looked out the window at the lawn and the water. The oppressive heat had broken, and my skin prickled as the quilt slipped down from my chest. I glanced at my nightgown, at the glass of water on the bedside table. My bedroom was this bright only in the morning. How long had I been asleep?

“You’re awake!”

Matthew stood up from an armchair pulled up beside the bed. His shirt was rumpled, his eyes puffy with exhaustion.

“What happened?” I asked.

Memories came back to me in disjointed images. Marjorie shouting. Matthew accusing Hannah of murder.

“Don’t worry,” Matthew said. “It’s all been worked out.”

Worked out? How was that possible? Dull with sleep, I tried to come up with the right words. “You saw your mother. In the Labyrinth, with Cecily.”

“So I did. But there was nothing nefarious about it. I misunderstood what I saw.”

Matthew smiled, but his calmness didn’t reassure me. “How?” I asked.

“Aunt Cecily and her pals liked to pretend they’d traveled back in time to ancient Greece. In the summer, whenever there was a full moon, they’d drink too much wine, scream like banshees, and dance around the Temple. ‘Release their inner spirits,’ as Mum put it to me. Completely harmless, but not the sort of thing you want the neighbors gossiping about.”

“You saw Cecily covered in blood!” I protested.

“I saw her covered in wine,” Matthew said. “They poured pitchers of it all over themselves. Once Mum explained, it all made sense.”

“You’ve said yourself you can’t trust your own memory! Your mother could have made up this whole story to cover up what really happened.”

“Kate,” Matthew said, shaking his head slowly. “Can you honestly see Mum as a cold-blooded murderer, lurking around the Labyrinth with a dagger? She’s telling the truth, because it all came back. What I saw happened on the night of the fête. That’s why I was up so late, why I heard Mum walking down the hall. I remember how hot it was outside and how my pajamas stuck to my skin. Aunt Cecily disappeared in September, months later. What I saw had nothing to do with her death.”

I still wasn’t sure what to believe, but Matthew seemed so certain. So relieved. “Mum did find me in the Labyrinth that night. I was confused and half-asleep, and she told me it was all a bad dream, thinking I’d forget. She had no idea my mind had twisted what I’d seen and turned it into something else. She feels terrible about it.”

I wondered if I’d made a mistake by not confiding in Hannah from the very beginning. If I’d been less suspicious—and less jealous—I’d have told her about Matthew’s dreams. She could have saved him months of misery and self-doubt by giving him this perfectly reasonable explanation. The only problem was that I wasn’t sure it was true.

“Once I calmed down and thought things through,” Matthew went on, “I realized Mum was right. There was so much about Aunt Cecily I never knew. So who’s to say what was going through her mind on the night she died?”

He took my hand and looked at me intently. “When we met, you thought I didn’t have a care in the world. And yet I’d come close to ending it all myself. Aunt Cecily could have been hiding the same kind of pain.”

It was possible, wasn’t it? My eyes fell on a newspaper folded on my bedside table.

“Have a look,” Matthew said, handing it to me.

The Chicago Tribune headline read, “Cecily Lemont: Eternal Mystery.”

I read the first few lines.



The results of a police investigation have found no evidence of foul play in the death of Cecily Lemont some seventeen years ago. Since the discovery of Miss Lemont’s body, Chicago has been abuzz with rumors about her mysterious end.