Lost Lake (Lost Lake, #1)(9)

That made her think of Lisette, who had been banging around the kitchen for the past twenty-four hours. Currently, the scent of rising dough and hot berries was being sucked through the old air-conditioning unit and spread throughout the main house. This was Lisette’s rebellion. She was cooking for guests who weren’t coming. It was as if nothing bad could happen if she just kept going. Like a wheel in motion, she seemed to think no one could stop her, or make her leave, once she started.

Eby gave up trying to plan her departure for now and sat behind the front desk with a crossword puzzle. She couldn’t do this alone. Lisette was going to have to help her. Eby would just wait for this hissy fit to pass.

The air conditioner turned off. The house ticked and settled. Eby sighed and set the crossword aside, then scooted her chair to the very edge of the desk, where she could lean back and see a corner of the window in the sitting room. She often did this, to watch a quiet corner of the lake. There were even scratch marks on the floor from years of pulling the chair to her daydream spot.

She was going to miss her daydream spot.

Giving up the money George had inherited fifty years ago had been the best thing she and George had ever done. But, as young and idealistic as they’d been, Eby still wished they’d squirreled a little money away, for times like this.

Times like this? She shook her head. She’d never in her wildest dreams imaged herself at seventy-six, forced to sell Lost Lake.

Seventy-six.

Good Lord, how did that happen? Yesterday, she was twenty-four making love under a bridge in Paris.

Suddenly, the front door flew open and two older women walked in in a gust of rose lotion and liniment oil. Eby gave a start and the front legs of her chair dropped to the floor.

“See? It’s still here,” said the woman with bright red hair. Makeup was caked into the fine wrinkles around her eyes, and she was wearing a cherry-print dress and four-inch red heels. She was helping a tiny old woman through the door. “She said she was selling it, not that it was gone. Can we go now?”

“No,” the elderly woman said.

The redheaded woman closed the door behind them and stopped to wave her hand in front of her face, as if to cool off. “Okay, what’s your plan?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” the old woman said. “All I know is that we didn’t know last summer was going to be our last summer, so we didn’t make it anything special. We’ve got to make this ending special.”

Eby stood. “Selma, Bulahdeen—you came!” Eby had called them just yesterday to cancel their reservations. They were two of the three summer faithfuls she had left, the old-timers who came back year after year. Eby watched the door, waiting for Jack, the third, to come in. But he didn’t.

“Bulahdeen called me after you canceled our reservations. She demanded I pick her up and drive her here,” Selma said.

“I couldn’t drive myself,” Bulahdeen told Eby. “They took away my license last year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Eby said. In her eighties, Bulahdeen Ward was the oldest of all Eby’s guests. She was stooping like a fiddlehead fern now, curling into herself, making her appear that she was charging at life headfirst. She and her husband, Charlie, both former professors, used to come together to the lake until a few years ago. Charlie developed Alzheimer’s and was now in a nursing home. Since then, Bulahdeen had been coming alone. She was a quiet force of nature, the peculiar southern lilt to her voice as old as low-country sand. Selma, tall and painted and standoffish, was Bulahdeen’s every opposite. They were an odd pair. Bulahdeen had somehow, somewhere along the way, decided that Selma was one of her best friends. Selma vehemently disagreed. Bulahdeen didn’t care.

“And you don’t have to make such a big deal of it,” Bulahdeen turned to Selma and said, pointing a bone-knobby finger at her. “It was on your way.”

“I live in Meridian. Mississippi. You live in Spartanburg. South Carolina. That is not on my way.”

“Don’t give me that. You had nothing better to do.”

“Speak for yourself, old woman. I’ve got another husband to catch.” Selma was sixty-five but told everyone she was fifty, and she claimed to be an expert on men, though having seven husbands might mean to some that she was an expert on getting it wrong. Selma had a reputation for flirting with all the men who stayed here in the summers, in an offhand way, second nature, like the way a bird naturally flaps its wings when it falls. Thirty years ago, she’d visited Lost Lake with her third husband. She soon divorced him, like all the others, but then she kept coming back. No one understood why. She never seemed to enjoy herself.

“We stopped by town for some supplies before we came here,” Bulahdeen said as she walked to the check-in desk.

“Supplies meaning Bulahdeen bought six bottles of wine,” Selma said.

Bulahdeen hoisted her purse onto the desk, then leaned against it with a deep breath. “When I mentioned to some folks about you selling this place, they seemed surprised.”

“Oh,” Eby said. “Well, that’s because I haven’t told anyone yet.”

Bulahdeen looked at her curiously. Her eyes were as cloudy as crystal balls. “Is it a secret?”

“Not anymore,” Selma said dryly, still standing at the door, ready to make an escape.

“No, it’s not a secret,” Eby said. “It just happened so fast. And, really, there’s no one in town I think would care. About the lake, I mean. Not anymore. The water park is now the biggest part of the town’s income. Lost Lake isn’t doing anyone any good anymore. Developing it will probably benefit Suley.”