Still Lake (4 page)

This room was far more welcoming than its original incarnation. Or maybe it was just the smell of fresh coffee and muffins that gave him a deceptive sense of peace. Smells were one thing that could always betray you, make you vulnerable to old emotions. He'd fought against them all his life.

There was no sign of Sophie Davis, and he didn't know whether that was a consolation or a regret. She wouldn't like her nubile little sister twitching her underclad butt around him, and he wasn't any too fond of it, either. He was as healthy as the next man, but Miss Marthe Davis left him completely cold.
Maybe because he'd never been particularly interested in teenagers.

“So what are you doing today, John?” she asked in an artless voice.

Like a fool, it took him a moment to remember that was the name he'd given her. “Cleaning up the house I rented. I didn't give them any warning when I was coming, and the place is a mess.”

“I could help. If there's one thing I know how to do nowadays, it's clean houses,” she said with a moue. “I'm sure you could do with a little company.”

“Actually I'm fine….” he began, but she'd already twitched her way out of the kitchen.

“I'll just go put something on,” she called back to him. “I know Sophie wouldn't miss me.”

“Hell,” he muttered. There were hand-thrown pottery mugs on the counter, and he took one, filling it with coffee. He drank it black, and he almost snarled when he took his first sip. He should have known that Sophie Davis would make the kind of coffee most men would die for.

He should have poured the rest out, left the deserted kitchen and headed straight for Audley's General Store and the instant coffee section. He didn't usually succumb to temptation, but for some reason being back in the place where he'd let his appetites run wild seemed to be doing a number on his iron self-control. The least he could do was drain the
mug and get the hell out of there, before Martha Stewart found him.

Too late. Just outside the kitchen, he heard footsteps coming from the old hallway, and he froze.

 

The last thing Sophie Davis expected to see when she walked into her kitchen was the enigmatic Mr. Smith. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, his long, elegant fingers wrapped around a huge mug of coffee, and the dark eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses were cool and assessing.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, too startled to remember her manners.

“Your sister offered me a cup of coffee,” he said. She didn't like his voice. It was slow and deep and sexy, at complete odds with his cool manner. And then his words sank in.

“You met Marty?” She tried to keep the note of suspicion and worry out of her voice. For a brief moment she'd thought Mr. Smith would provide a harmless distraction for her younger sister. In the full light of day, in her bright and airy kitchen, she knew instinctively that Mr. Smith was far more dangerous than she'd ever imagined.

“Yes,” he said, giving nothing away. He seemed entirely at ease, drinking her coffee and watching her.

“She's not even eighteen years old, Mr. Smith,” she said sternly.

“So she told me. Not that I was interested. Nubile nymphets aren't exactly my style.”

She wasn't sure she believed him. “What is your style, Mr. Smith?”

He cocked his head. “Is your interest personal or academic?”

The question startled her, but she met his gaze stonily. “I'm trying to look out for my little sister.”

“And who looks out for you?”

No one at all, she wanted to say, but she kept her mouth shut. If this was John Smith's idea of making small talk she preferred his taciturn persona. “I don't mean to be rude, but I have a lot of work to do today, and I don't have time to spend socializing.”

“Is that what we're doing?” he said. There was an undercurrent of amusement in his rough voice. She didn't like it when men found her amusing.

“I'll be happy to send you home with a thermos of coffee. We're set up to offer them to our guests.”

“You mean you'll be happy to send me home and you don't care what you have to do to get me there,” he corrected her. “Trust me, Ms. Davis, I'm absolutely harmless.”

“Sure you are,” she muttered. “You underestimate the effect of those brooding Byronic looks on an impressionable teenager.”

“Brooding Byronic looks?” he echoed, his horror unfeigned.

“I'm ready!” Marty appeared in the kitchen door, dressed in a micro skirt and tube top.

“Ready for what?” Sophie demanded.

“I'm going to help John open up the house,” she said with sunny ingenuousness. It was almost enough to make Sophie waver—there were times when she thought she'd do anything if Marty would just smile.

But that didn't include sending her off with a good-looking stranger. “No, you're not,” she said flatly. “I need your help around here, and I'm sure Mr. Smith is entirely capable of handling the Whitten house on his own. If he needs any help I can give him the names of a couple of people who work out of the village.”

“I don't need help…” he began, but Marty broke in, stamping her foot like a spoiled child.

“You're always trying to stop me from doing anything I want. You don't want me to have any fun! You'd just as soon lock me up in a convent and throw away the key.”

Sophie took a deep breath. “When did you decide that cleaning old houses was fun? You've been complaining since the day we got here—why in heaven's name would you want to volunteer to do any more than you've grudgingly agreed to do here?”

“Maybe because I want to?”

“And what's a convent got to do with it? Were
you planning on helping him open the house or having sex with him?”

Smith choked on his coffee.

“You hate me!” Marty cried in a fury. “Well, I hate you, too!” And she stormed out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

Sophie didn't want to face her unwelcome guest. She should have gotten used to Marty's scenes by now, but she hadn't slept well the night before, and for some reason Mr. Smith made her uncomfortable. “I'm sorry about that,” she said, heading for the coffee and pouring herself a mug, determined not to look at him. “My sister is at a difficult age. She's got a lot of problems to work through.”

“Does she? She seems fairly typical to me. All teenagers are a pain in the butt.”

She glanced over at him. “You're a father, Mr. Smith?”

“No. I just remember what it was like. Don't you?”

“Not particularly. I was too busy being responsible to behave like a selfish adolescent. I didn't have time to rebel.”

“Maybe you should try it when you get a chance,” he said evenly.

“I'm just as happy to have skipped that part of growing up.” She glanced out the kitchen window toward the lake, not wanting to look at him any longer.

“I've found that you can't really skip parts of the process. Sooner or later they catch up with you and you have to go through them, anyway.”

“Let's just hope I'm immune to that particular theory. I don't have the time or the inclination to act like a giddy, lovesick brat.”

“Maybe you don't know what you're missing,” the man said, setting his empty coffee mug down on the counter. He'd chosen her favorite mug—the teal blue one shaped like a bean pot. She had the gloomy feeling that she'd never be able to drink from it again without picturing his long, elegant fingers wrapped around it. His mouth on it. There was no way around it, the man had the sexiest mouth she'd ever seen.

“I'm better off that way,” she said. Wondering why the hell she was even discussing this with him. She knew he was watching her out of his cool, dark eyes, even though she was determined not to meet his gaze.

“Maybe,” he said. “In the meantime, since your sister's otherwise occupied, would you consider coming over to the house and taking a look? Give me some idea what kind of help I'll need, maybe give me a few names?”

She stared at him in shock. Yesterday afternoon he'd looked as if he'd be more welcoming to a horde of Vikings rather than his neighbor. Now he was
suddenly being relatively pleasant, asking her for help.

The problem was, she didn't trust him. “I can give you the names, anyway….”

“Do I bother you, Ms. Davis?”

She had no choice but to meet his gaze. He was taunting her, and she was half tempted to tell him just how much he bothered her. And why.

But that would be stupid. There was no question at all that the man was extremely attractive, with just the sort of romantic looks that would appeal to an angry, vulnerable teenage girl. If Sophie was to keep Marty safe from temptation, she needed to know her enemy, and Mr. Smith was giving her the perfect opportunity. She couldn't quite figure out why, but she'd be a fool to miss it.

“I told you, call me Sophie. And no, you don't bother me,” she added with deceptive breeziness. “I'll be happy to come back to the Whitten place and help you figure out what kind of work you're going to need to have done. I believe in being a good neighbor.”

“Oh, me too,” he said, and Sophie wondered whether or not she imagined the faint note of amusement in his voice.

“Just let me check on my mother and tell Marty where I'm going.”

“You sure that's a good idea? Your sister was already pretty pissed at you.”

“Marty's always mad at me,” Sophie said with a sigh. “I'm used to it. Why don't you wait for me out on the porch and I'll be with you in a minute? Things seem pretty quiet around here for now.”

He glanced toward the door that Marty had slammed on her way out. “All right,” he said, and headed out into the morning sunshine.

But Sophie had the firm belief that the mysterious Mr. Smith wasn't nearly as agreeable as he was trying to make her think he was.

And she wondered if she was making a big mistake.

T
wo people were sitting down by the lake, talking in low voices, the freshly painted Adirondack chairs glistening in the August sunlight. Griffin should have stayed on the porch—Sophie Davis wasn't going to be pleased with him for not following orders, but he'd never been the dutiful sort. Besides, the couple sitting down by the lake looked old enough to remember what had happened twenty years ago. Assuming they weren't part of the massive influx of newcomers that had crowded Colby's once-pristine confines.

He walked down the lawn at a leisurely pace. He was playing with fire—what if they took one look at his face and recognized him? It would stop his investigation cold. Anyone who cared enough about the case would know his conviction had been overturned after five years and he'd been released, but that didn't mean they wouldn't raise holy hell if they realized he'd come back.

But he hadn't returned to Still Lake to play it safe. If it had been up to him he never would have come back here at all. He'd made a perfectly comfortable
life for himself, and the huge, yawning question had been easy enough to ignore.

Not for Annelise, his law partner and ex-fiancée. It was time for them to get married, she'd announced in her cool, emotionless tones. She was ready to have children, she'd informed him, and all he could think of was a hen getting ready to hatch. He'd had the wisdom not to share that particular image with her.

After all, she was smart, she was gorgeous, she was sophisticated. She was sexually adept. They knew each other well, appreciated their better qualities and ignored their worse ones. But Annelise had no intention of breeding with a murderer.

“You've got to find out what really happened back then,” she'd told him in no uncertain terms. “There's no way we can concentrate on the future without settling the past.”

He wasn't particularly interested in the future, any more than he cared about his sordid past. One day at a time was more his style, but Annelise was a woman with plans, and very talented at getting what she wanted. This time her wants coincided with his. Twenty years had passed—it was time to find out what really happened. Time to put the past to bed.

And then Annelise had broken the engagement. His cool, practical bed partner had fallen ridiculously in love with one of their clients, and by the
time she chose to inform him she had already been married for two days.

Not that he was pining for her. As a matter of fact, what really bothered him was how little he cared. That and the faint note of relief that she hadn't made the mistake of falling in love with him. The very thought made him shiver.

Onward and upward, he reminded himself, drawing closer to the lake and the two old people watching him with unabashed interest. He'd never seen the woman before—he was sure of that, though he certainly hadn't been paying much attention to older women during his previous sojourn in Colby. She was thin, oddly dressed, with flyaway gray hair and a slightly vacant look to her. She could have been anywhere between seventy and ninety, though he suspected she might be younger. And then he met her eyes, and found himself drawn by the surprisingly sharp gaze in their blue depths.

A moment later they seemed to glaze over. “Who are you?” she demanded, not rudely, but like a young child. “Doc, who is he?”

Shit, he thought, as he realized who her companion was. Doc Henley was one person he'd just as soon avoid, at least for the time being. It was Doc who'd stitched up the cut running up his thigh, the result of his careless use of a scythe. It was Doc who'd checked him over while he waited in jail, to see whether the blood that still smeared his body
was his own or somebody else's. It was Doc who'd brought the three murder victims into the world, and Doc who'd pronounced them dead.

He hadn't changed much in the years between fifty and seventy. The white hair was thinner, the face had more lines, but the mouth was just as firm beneath his salt-and-pepper mustache. He still had wise, kind eyes, but they met Griffin's without recognition, and he rose, holding out a hand in welcome. A welcome that would be quickly withdrawn if he'd known who he was.

“Must be your new neighbor, Gracey,” he said easily. “I'm Richard Henley, but most folks around here call me Doc. And this is Mrs. Grace Davis. Welcome to Colby.”

Griffin took his hand. There was still a lot of strength in the old man, and not a trace of a tremor. He was only slightly stooped from age, and he could look Griffin in the eye. “John Smith,” Griffin introduced himself. He really should have picked a more interesting alias—John Smith was just too damned plain to be believed.

Gracey didn't seem to have any doubts. “How nice,” she said in her soft, fluty voice. “What brings you to Colby, Mr. Smith? To this end of the lake in particular?”

He didn't know whether or not he'd imagined the intelligence in her eyes—it was at sharp odds with her wispy voice and manner. If she was Sophie's
mother she couldn't be much older than her mid-sixties, maybe even younger. She looked more like a candidate for a nursing home.

“Looking for peace and quiet, Mrs. Davis,” he said. “I thought this seemed like a nice, boring place to spend a few months.”

“The snow will fly in three months' time,” Gracey said in a singsong voice. “I don't think you'll want to be here then.”

“Why not? I'm not afraid of a little snow.”

“Probably because the old Whitten place isn't really winterized,” Doc said in his genial voice. “If you're planning to stay on past the frost you'll need to find someplace a little more habitable—you surely wouldn't want to put that kind of money into a rented house. Though I can't imagine why you would want to stay—jobs are scarce around here in the off-season. Most folks have to commute to Montpelier or Burlington.”

Griffin smiled faintly, not about to offer any more information despite Doc's careful prying. “I'll deal with that when I have to,” he said easily. “In the meantime I'm just here for the serenity.”

Doc turned to look out over the lake, his eyes narrowing in the sunlight. “Looks can be deceptive, my boy. This town isn't nearly as quiet as it seems. Most places aren't.”

It was a perfect opportunity, and he'd be a fool to let it pass him by. “What do you mean?”

“Murders,” Gracey announced with ghoulish delight, pushing her flyaway gray hair away from her face. “Lots of unsolved crimes in the Northeast Kingdom, including peaceful little Colby.”

Griffin shrugged. “You mean the teenage girls who were murdered twenty-five years ago? Someone mentioned it to me. But they told me they caught the killer.”

“Twenty years ago,” Doc corrected him. Griffin knew exactly how long it had been since Lorelei, Valette and Alice died. To the day. “And they caught the boy, all right. Sent him to jail, but he got out a few years later on a technicality. There are some who say he wasn't the killer, anyway—that he got railroaded.”

That was the first Griffin had heard of it—it had seemed as if the town was out for his blood. He was lucky the Northeast Kingdom didn't go in for lynching, or he wouldn't be here right now. “Really?”

“Then there are others who believe he killed those three girls and more besides, and sooner or later he'll come back here, to finish up what he started,” Doc said.

Griffin didn't even blink. “Well, what's taking him so long? He's probably dead himself by now.”

“Not that boy,” Doc said. “He's a survivor. Nothing was gonna get that boy down, not prison, not nothing.”

“Do you think he did it?” Griffin asked. The mo
ment the words were out of his mouth he realized it was a mistake.

Doc focused his pale blue eyes on him for a long, unsettling moment. “I don't know. There were times when I thought that boy was pure evil. Then there were other times when I thought he was just a lost soul. I suppose he could have killed them. But I think he would have had to have been out of his mind on drugs or something to have done it.”

Not much help, Griffin thought grimly. And now Doc was staring at him with an odd expression on his face, as if he could see past the wire-rimmed glasses and the curly hair and the clean-shaven face, see past twenty years into the face of a boy who might be a killer.

Doc shook his head. “One of life's little mysteries, I guess. Just like Sara Ann Whitten.”

“Whitten?” Griffin echoed uneasily.

“Seventeen-year-old daughter of the folks who owned the place you're renting,” Doc explained. “She took off a couple of years after the murders. Just up and disappeared one day, and no one's ever found a trace of her. If it weren't for that boy being locked up they would have thought she'd been murdered, as well.”

“But you said some people didn't think he did it,” Griffin said.

Doc just looked sorrowful. “No one knows what happened. Whether the boy was a mass murderer or
just a jealous lover. Or maybe just an innocent caught up in a mess bigger than he could handle. It doesn't matter—it was long ago, and folks around here don't like to think about it. Let the past rest in peace.”

Griffin said nothing. The past wasn't resting peacefully, it was haunting him. And he wasn't going to stop until he laid it to rest himself. No matter what the price.

 

Sophie didn't plan to waste any time—the sooner she got him off the property and away from Marty the happier she'd be. Not that Mr. Smith was Marty's type—her sister tended to go for young and buff and brainless. Smith had gray in his hair, for heaven's sake, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. Hardly the stuff teenage dreams were made of.

And yet Sophie knew with a gut-sure instinct that Mr. John Smith would be just about irresistible to any impressionable young woman. Even she, armored and totally, determinedly uninterested, could feel the inevitable pull. All that mysterious, brooding beauty, even the hint of danger, was ridiculously tempting. Fortunately she wasn't the sort to be tempted.

He hadn't waited for her on the porch, which didn't surprise her in the least. He'd wandered down the lawn to the edge of the lake, and he was staring across the shimmering blue expanse toward the un
seen village, his back straight and tall. And he was no longer alone.

At least it wasn't Marty this time, though the alternative wasn't much more reassuring. Gracey was looking up at him, her gray hair tumbling to her shoulders, her mismatched clothing drooping around her too-thin body. Doc was there, as well, a small buffer, but Sophie almost took a header off the wide front porch in her haste to get down to the water's edge.

“You didn't tell me we had a new neighbor,” Gracey said as she approached.

Sophie bit her lip in frustration. “Yes, I did, Mama. We already discussed this yesterday, remember?”

Gracey's eyes brightened for a moment. “Oh, yes, love,” she said. “I remember now. I told you you needed to get laid.”

Mr. Smith's choking sound didn't make the hideous situation any better. Doc had jumped in quickly, taking Gracey's thin hand. “Now, Gracey, you know you're not supposed to say things like that.”

“But it's true. Sex is very healthy for a young woman like Sophie. Besides, he's very attractive. Isn't he, Sophie?”

Sophie tried not to cringe. “He's not my type, Mama. Why don't you go back to the house with Doc and…”

“What do you mean, he's not your type? You're too picky.” She swung her wicked gaze to the silent stranger. “Tell me, Mr. Smith, are you married?”

“No.”

“Involved? Gay?”

“No,” he said. The monosyllable was delivered entirely without inflection, and Sophie refused to look at him to see his reaction to her mother's outrageousness.

“You see!” her mother said triumphantly. “He'd be perfect. You go off and have sex with him and I'll look after the inn. Marty can help me.”

“Come along, Gracey,” Doc said kindly. “I'll make you a cup of tea.”

Sophie didn't wait any longer. She headed toward the narrow path through the woods, not stopping to see if John Smith was following. If he wasn't, just as well. She'd keep going, hike out to the main road and circle back to the inn.

He was close behind her—there was no escape. He waited until they were out of sight of the inn, almost at the edge of the Whitten place, before he spoke.

“Why are the women in your family so interested in my sex life?” He sounded no more than vaguely curious, but Sophie wasn't fooled.

It was now or never. She stopped, turning to look at him. He was closer than she'd realized, and she had to look up. He was the kind of man you'd need
to wear high heels around, so as not to let his height intimidate you. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you think I want to have sex with your seventeen-year-old sister, your mother thinks I ought to have sex with you, and I imagine Marthe probably has ideas of her own.”

“Well, you can just ignore any ideas Marty might have. She's an impressionable teenager. And ignore my mother, as well—surely you can see she's got some kind of senile dementia.”