Daughters of the Lake(82)

“You are so beautiful, so perfect. Jess, that bastard. He had the most perfect wife a man could hope for.”

Kate was undulating with the waves as the boat traveled farther out into the bay.

“It’s too late for you now, and it’s too late for Hadley, but your little girl is still alive. You understand, Addie, nobody can know my wife is insane. Nobody can ever find out she did this to you. It would ruin us. I promise you, Addie, that we will take good care of your baby just as I know you will take good care of ours.” More crying then.

Kate felt a bundle being tucked tightly under her arm, the folds of her nightgown wrapped over its lifeless face.

It wasn’t Addie’s baby that we found with her, after all. It was Harrison and Celeste’s.

“May God forgive Celeste for what she has done, may God forgive me for what I now do, and for what I will do. Rest in peace, Hadley Connor. Rest in peace, Addie Stewart. May this lake never give up our secret.”

And with that, Kate felt herself being shoved over the side of the boat and into the lake, where an enormous wave—there suddenly, from a glassy, calm surface—engulfed her. Undulating up and down, up and down in the soft, velvety water, taken with the whims of the wind and the tides. She was a seashell, a piece of driftwood, a loon floating lazily on the surface of the Great Lake. Nothing can hurt you here. You are with me now. I will keep you safe, here, with me, my daughter of the lake, until it is time. Kate was enveloped in loving arms and held close, wrapped in a watery blanket, falling down, down, down. Sleep, my daughter, sleep, until it is time.





CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Wharton, 1910

As Addie’s body was enveloped into the arms of the lake, many things were happening on land.

Harrison had left Celeste murmuring and cooing into the baby carriage on the lakeshore and dashed into Addie and Jess’s house, not sure what he was doing once he found himself inside. He was panicked, repeating Addie’s name, over and over again, in a whisper. The sight of her body sinking under the water would haunt him for the rest of his life. Damn that Celeste. How could everything have gone so wrong in just a moment? How could this possibly be happening?

His decision to switch the babies was, perhaps, ill conceived, but he did it in a moment of terror. A live baby for a dead one. How could the existence of Addie’s baby be explained without the mother? How could he possibly have found the baby without having murdered Addie? So many questions would be asked. Could Celeste be trusted to keep her mouth shut? No, it was easier this way. Both mother and baby gone. A clean break. Nobody, not even the household help, knew that Hadley had died that afternoon. An easy switch, no loose ends. It was as if fate had set things up perfectly.

Evidence. He should look for anything that might implicate Celeste in this crime. Was there any blood in the house? Where was the knife? He dashed around in a panic. Nothing. The house looked calm and peaceful, as though Addie and Jess might come walking inside at any moment. Nothing was out of place.

“Addie, your child will want for nothing,” he promised her, there in the darkness. “I will spend the rest of my life making up for what my wife has taken away.”

All this took just a few moments. Outside once again, he pushed past the still-murmuring Celeste and grasped the handle of the carriage. “Let’s go, Celeste,” he said, and the three of them walked into the fog, looking for all the world like an ordinary family taking a stroll together, instead of a woman who had lost her mind with grief, a misguided, deluded man who had committed, and would subsequently commit, the biggest sins of his life, and a baby who would go to her grave adoring a man who had stood by and watched her own father be convicted of a crime he did not commit.

When they reached their house that night, Celeste simply went to bed in blissful ignorance, remembering nothing but their delightful family walk on a cool evening. Harrison, after putting the wriggling baby into a crib where another had died just a few hours before, walked slowly up to the third-floor ballroom and into the turret. He closed the door and, satisfied that none of the household help would hear him, he sunk to his knees, finally allowing the unimaginable horror of what he had seen and done to wash over his body like a wave. He cried out with a primal sound of such desperation, need, and futility that his very being, every cell in his body, threatened to burst apart with the force of it.

Harrison did not know that at the very same moment, Jess Stewart had come home to an empty house. He would spend hours looking for his missing wife that night and the next day, knocking on Harrison’s door, running all over town in an increasing state of panic, sending cables to her parents and his, talking to everyone they knew and finally to the police. Jess Stewart would make the very same sound alone in his bedroom as the sun went down on the first day without his wife, taking his hope and will to live with it.

Harrison also did not know that Jess, who was consumed with guilt about his brief, ill-advised, alcohol-fueled affair with Sally Reade, at first suspected that his wife had left him because of it. He imagined that, in his absence, Sally had come to Addie with proof of the affair. But as the days passed and Addie was still nowhere to be found, Jess became more and more frantic that something terrible had happened to her. Was Sally involved? That woman, despite all the fun and life in her, was unstable. He confessed his affair to the police—in retrospect, not the smartest move—in the hopes that they would look to Sally Reade for answers. They did, briefly. When her father and her best friend confirmed that she was in Europe for a short vacation, the police looked instead in one direction for Addie’s killer. Directly at Jess Stewart.