Daughters of the Lake(45)

“Our great-grandparents are sitting with them in this shot,” Kate said. “They all look pretty young. Simon, you know when they were married, right? That might give us a date to go on.”

“I can’t rattle the year off the top of my head, but I can certainly find it in the old family Bible,” he said, pushing back his chair and making his way out of the room.

“Nineteen-oh-five!” Simon shouted from the library. “Harrison and Celeste were married in nineteen-oh-five!” He bounded back into the dining room.

“The date of this photo must be close to the same time, then,” Kate said. “Judging from how young Harry and Celeste are in the picture, I’d imagine it was taken shortly before or after they were married. Within, what, five years, I’d think.”

“You know . . .” Simon took a bite of French bread and considered this point. “Say this is really your woman. You’ve got a concrete date to start researching who she was. You won’t be stabbing in the dark, so to speak.”

“I can just start my search from 1905 and work forward from there,” Kate agreed.

“It tells you she lived around here,” Simon said, pointing to the photo. “Look, they were having their picnic on the lakeshore. You can see the house in the background.”

Kate eyed the photo and nodded.

“She might have just been visiting, though,” Simon backpedaled. “What if she and her husband were here on vacation when this photo was taken?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kate concluded. “They were obviously friends with Harry and Celeste, so her disappearance would’ve been newsworthy in this town on that basis alone. You don’t sit around yukking it up with the richest man in town if you’re a nobody. And she was murdered, that much we know, so it would have made the papers here. ‘Friend of the Connor Family Found Murdered.’ That’s big news in a small town.”

Simon took a sip of coffee and shook his head, furrowing his brows.

“What?” Kate asked.

“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself,” Simon said. “We know it was murder, because the police told us. But for all we know, this is the first time anyone has seen her body. She came out of the lake. It could be that, back then, people considered this a missing persons case.”

“A wife who ran off,” Kate mused. “You’re right, Simon. We just don’t know.”

Something began to seep into Kate’s body, weaving its way through her limbs like a thread being tightly wound around her. Tears sprang to her eyes.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?” Simon reached across the table to take his cousin’s hand.

“It’s just that, when Johnny couldn’t find any missing persons reports anywhere in the country that matched her description, I was so sad at the thought that nobody missed this woman and her baby,” Kate said. “And now I know that she had . . . people. Loved ones. Friends. Look at her. She was beautiful and happy and having a great time, right here at this house. That means people missed her when she died. These people.”

“Our people,” Simon said, squeezing her hand.

Kate looked at him. “What did you say?”

“Our people,” Simon repeated. “These are our great-grandparents laughing with her. These two couples are obviously friendly enough to sit around with a picnic basket and a bottle of wine and have a photographer there to document it all. That’s what the picture portrays, anyway. If this whole impossible situation is really happening, then the woman who has been invading your dreams and, by the way, washed up dead on your beach, was someone close to our great-grandparents. She was here, in this house.”

Kate looked around the room and felt a cool breeze whisper through her hair. She could almost see Harry and Celeste entertaining this young, handsome couple, right there in the same room where she and Simon now sat.

It felt as though she was caught by the intangibility of time. Could the past and present exist at once, in the same place? Were Harrison and Celeste living there now, entertaining visitors in the long-ago past? Were they enjoying dinners here in the dining room a century before as Kate and Simon were now? Was it all happening in the same moment, but a century apart?

“We found this photo in one of those old trunks upstairs,” Kate started. “If this woman and our great-grandparents were close friends, as we’re now postulating, it might stand to reason that there are more photos of her, or even news clippings about what happened.”

“That’s right,” Simon confirmed. “I saw a ton of old clippings in one of the trunks. I think Celeste might have been a scrapbooker.”

Kate’s mind was traveling in several directions at once. “I feel like I want to look into this further, but I’m just not sure what to do first.”

“Did you bring your computer?”

Kate winced. “I didn’t. On purpose. Kevin has sent me a thousand emails since we split up, and I didn’t want to be tempted to read any of them. I’ve got him blocked on my phone.”

“There’s a laptop set up in the library alcove for guests. You could start by doing a quick search online.”

Kate’s eyes danced and she raised her brows. “We do have a date to go on. I could just start searching for Harrison Connor, 1905 and see what comes up.”