Daughters of the Lake(22)

Valerie demanded to know why he hadn’t just taken the scene—as unfortunate as it was—as the opportunity for them to come out of the closet as a couple, as it were. For the past few months, he had told her he was simply waiting for the right time—well, wasn’t this it? Was he really going to leave his wife and marry her, as he had promised? If not now, when? Were they really going to have a life together?

When Kevin said that they needed to put all those plans on hold now, for the sake of propriety, Valerie watched his lies evaporate into thin air like fog rising from the lake. That this man would choose his mousy, boring wife over her elicited a rage deep inside Valerie’s wounded soul the likes of which she had never experienced.

But Kate knew none of this on the morning that Stan asked her to reconsider her resignation.

“Sure, Stan,” she said to him. “I’ll think about it and call you in a few weeks, then.” But she knew she’d never go back to the paper. Her work there was wrapped up in her relationship with Kevin. She couldn’t possibly continue in her job without her marriage, too. And with every day that passed, she realized what a mistake that marriage had been.

After Kate and Simon finished laughing and crying about the scene at the Tavern, Simon took Kate’s hands.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m going to say something that sounds very callous and mean.”

“That’s nothing new,” she snorted.

“Seriously,” he said, squeezing her hands. “Don’t get mad at me for bringing this up, but you got quite an inheritance when Granny died, just like I did.”

“And?”

“And—I certainly hope you got a pre-nup.”

“It’s written on stone tablets, I think,” she chuckled. “That was the one thing my dad insisted on when I told my parents we were getting married after such a brief courtship.”

“Thanks, Uncle Fred.” Simon smiled. “What are the terms, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“It stipulates that, in case of a divorce, our marital assets would be divided—what we earned and accumulated together after our marriage, in other words—but the trust was off-limits.”

Simon had a dark thought. “What about if you died?”

“The trust would go to any children we had. If we had no children, half would go to Kevin and half back to my parents.”

Simon squinted at her over the rim of his coffee cup.

“I didn’t want to leave him with nothing if he were a grieving widower.”

As Simon brought their dishes into the kitchen, he was suddenly very glad his cousin had come to Wharton. He made a silent vow to keep her safely under his roof until those divorce papers were filed.



Johnny Stratton’s team was running into a brick wall with their investigation of the murder. They knew only the cause of death. Nothing more. No missing persons reports, no clues as to who the woman was, who killed her, or how she had ended up in the lake. Kevin Bradford’s polygraph proved that he had nothing to do with this woman or her baby—DNA results might tell them otherwise, but those weren’t in yet.

There was no love lost between Johnny and Kate’s husband, but Johnny was literally breathing easier since he saw the man’s polygraph. If Bradford didn’t know this woman and wasn’t the father of that baby, then Kate had no motive for killing them.

Still. He knew Katie was hiding something. He had seen it clearly in her eyes that morning at Fred’s kitchen table. It was a cloud, the same cloud he had seen seep into the eyes of hundreds of liars even as they were professing the truth. If it were anybody else, he would have kept after her until she told him what it was. But Katie Granger? He was tempted to just let sleeping dogs lie. And because of that, he knew he needed to step back from this case. He was too close.

He dialed the number of the precinct in Wharton.

“Nick Stone.”

“Stone! It’s Johnny Stratton. How are you settling into police work in a small town?”

“Keeping Wharton safe from jaywalkers and speeders,” Stone said, a chuckle in his voice. “And getting to know everyone in town. It’s a nice change, actually.”

“That’s the spirit,” Johnny said, knowing why the cop had requested a transfer from the city. “But I’m calling to change all of that, I’m afraid. I’ve got a murder case I need your help with.”





CHAPTER TEN

Great Bay, 1901

October 30

Dear Jess,

I find myself wondering about you constantly. I’ll be walking through town thinking, Does he like his courses? Has he made friends? What is the university like? Most of the time, I’m not even looking at what’s in front of me, so entranced am I in the world that I am imagining for you. I’m even wondering about what you’re eating. Do they have different, wonderful foods in the city that we don’t have here?

As you can see, I’m still a curious cat.

Life at home is the same as it has always been, with one major difference: you are not here. You can’t imagine how odd the same old life seems without someone who was always there by my side. The school year has started, as you probably know, and our new teacher, Mrs. Patterson, is fond of piling on the work.

I have reluctantly had to put the bicycle away for the winter. I’ve so enjoyed it these months, even though my father says it’s not ladylike.