Lake Season

by Denise Hunter

  His book—his very first book—hit the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. And ever since, his house had been trying to convince him to reveal his identity to the general public.

  The pressure was on yet again. This time Rosewood Press wanted to reveal his identity during a live interview on Newsline Tonight on August eleventh, the date of his next release.

  He’d already rejected the idea, but they weren’t giving up so easily. Well, neither was he. Better to remain in hiding than to risk disappointing the now-millions of readers who expected the author to look and act like one of his super-masculine heroes. Besides, he was already selling like gangbusters and had even gotten a movie deal. What more could the publisher want?

  Was it this elevated pressure causing his block? Or had he finally just hit the wall? He’d pushed on in the past to great success, but for some reason he couldn’t seem to break through this time around. He was starting to feel like a hack, and that wasn’t exactly helping the situation.

  He took the last of the stairs, looking both ways, half hoping for a glimpse of Molly. His heart sped a bit in anticipation, but she was nowhere to be found.

  He heard male voices coming from the kitchen area, as well as the sound of hammering. He exited through the front door, disappointment weighing his steps. He was only eager to see her because she was a fresh dose of much-needed inspiration.

  As he stepped outside, the cool morning air washed over him, heavy with the fresh scent of lilacs. Birds tweeted from a nearby branch. He’d have to stop in at the visitors’ center and get a list of animals and plants native to the area.

  He was opening the door of his rental car when a voice called his name. He turned to see Molly traipsing down the porch steps. A pair of shorts revealed tanned legs, and a blue T-shirt hung on her small frame.

  “Wait up!” she called.

  His memory hadn’t exaggerated her natural beauty or her show-stopping smile. And there was that dimple again. His respiration increased, his heart rate kicking into a higher gear.

  Take it easy, buddy. And for goodness’ sake, no statistics today.

  “Hi, Molly,” he said, then cleared the frog from his throat. “Good morning.”

  “I was hoping to catch you before you left,” she said as she neared. The sunlight glittered off her hair, which was pulled back into a messy bun. “Did you sleep all right? Did you find breakfast?”

  “I slept wonderfully. And the food was good—best breakfast I’ve had in weeks.” Also the only one he’d had in weeks.

  Her eyes lit with pleasure. “Thank you. It wasn’t much. We’ll be offering several options once we open—and Miss Della is a much better cook than I am.”

  Something happy bloomed inside him at finding the right words to say. “I’m sure that’s not true. I mean, your muffins were pretty good.”

  He winced. Three “goods” in thirty seconds. Where was a thesaurus when he needed one?

  Her laughter was like a melody he wanted to hear over and over again. “I’m glad you liked them.” She tugged at the frayed hem of her T-shirt. “I uh—I was talking with my brother last evening, and we decided we’d like to offer you a complimentary stay. Since we’re not technically open and all.”

  He sensed trouble beneath her perky tone and too-bright smile. “Complimentary?”

  “Gratuitous. On the house. Free of charge.”

  His lips twitched. “I know what complimentary means.”

  “Of course you do. I’m sorry.” Her cheeks turned rosy.

  He was mesmerized by the sheepish look, but also hated himself a little for putting it there.

  “It’s just the inn is an awful mess and such an inconvenience right now.”

  “Is everything all right, Molly?”

  “Yes, it’s fine. Really. We’d like to do this for you. Please.”

  “That’s really nice, but . . . I’d prefer to pay my own way. And I’d like to support your efforts here. It’s a noble thing you’re doing—opening your parents’ inn.”

  She scratched her neck and looked past him toward the shops across the street. “Listen, Adam . . . I’m going to be completely honest with you. I might have been a wee bit presumptuous in checking you in as a guest. We haven’t gotten our lodging permit yet, and I’m afraid the health department would frown on that.”

  Why hadn’t he thought of that? Likely they’d withhold the permit altogether. “I’ve put you in a bad spot.”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s completely mine. But it turns out we could be in a lot of trouble for checking in a guest before the inspection is done.”

  He held up his hand even as disappointment wriggled through him. “Say no more. I’ll go get my things now.”

  “No, no!” Molly stepped in his way. “I don’t want you to leave—where would you even go? If you’re just a friend staying here, free of charge, everything should be fine. It’s only a couple days, after all.”

  “I don’t feel right about that, Molly. I’m taking up your time and energy and your space, not to mention jeopardizing your business.”

  “The room’s just sitting there anyway. It’s no trouble.”

  “I could pay you under the table, cash.”

  She was already shaking her head. “We don’t want to chance that.”

  She obviously wanted him to stay, despite the risk. It was written all over her face and in her earnest eyes, not to mention her hopeful tone.

  But he really didn’t like feeling indebted to anyone.

  “I know we just met.” Her eyes were wide and bewitching, those flecks of color sparkling. “But I feel as though we’re already friends.”

  His heart gave a squeeze at her sweet honesty. She was really special; his first assessment of her was right on target. How was he supposed to turn her down now?

  Besides, she was right. Where would he go? Miles away to Asheville, where he’d have to travel the treacherous mountain roads every day?

  His breath leaked out in a long steady flow, like a bike tire with a small puncture. “Okay. That’s very generous of you. If you’re sure it’s all right, I’ll stay.”

  Her smile was reward enough. “It absolutely is. That’s great, Adam, I’ll—”

  “But only if you let me service my own room. And no more breakfasts—as good as it was, I can fend for myself.”

  Her face fell a little at the compromise.

  “That’s my final offer.” He gave her a steady look. As much as he wanted to be near his new muse, he also had to be comfortable with the terms.

  She pursed her lips, calling his attention to them. The top one was artfully arched, and a beguiling crease ran down the center of the full lower one. They were rosy, though he couldn’t detect even a hint of lipstick.

  “Okay,” she said finally, backing away. “It’s a deal.”

  He pulled his eyes from her lips, his face heating at having let them linger too long. He nodded. “Great.”

  “Thanks, Adam. Have a super day, and let me know if I can be of any help.”

  “Will do,” Adam said. She was already helping even more than she knew.

  five

  Molly stood over Grace’s shoulder at one of their eight dining room tables, peering at the laptop.

  Grace opened up a window and leaned back. “These are the ones Mama wanted.” She almost had to yell to be heard over the sound of the Sawzall buzzing in the lobby, where Levi and a friend were installing a window. There’d been plenty of grunting and complaining as they tried to cut through the native timber.

  “Are you sure?” Molly asked.

  “I found it saved to a file.”

  They were looking at the paper menu inserts that would be placed in holders on each table. The template with its decorative flower border and the inn’s logo front and center did look like something their mother would’ve chosen.

  “How long will it take to get them?”

  “Three days if I rush it.”

  “Let’s do it. Once we have th
e daily menu down, it’ll just be a matter of printing them up from here, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  They were so close to being ready—just hammering out last-minute details. Fortunately, their parents had been planning for the inn a long time. They’d hit estate sales and inn foreclosures the past couple years, gathering luxury towels, linens, and tableware. In fact, they’d been returning from such an excursion when they had the accident.

  Once the siblings had finished remodeling upstairs, they’d just had to purchase odds and ends, install mini-splits to heat and cool the rooms, make room for a large linen closet to accommodate towels and supplies, and install a heavy-duty washer/dryer set.

  “She also planned to have the day’s weather forecast on each one,” Grace said.

  “Attention to detail. Mama was all about that.” A bit of melancholy settled around them like a lead cape.

  “Yeah, she was.” Grace turned those baby-blue eyes on Molly. “Do you think they’d like what we’ve done?”

  Sometimes she forgot how young her sister was. Molly wrapped her in a hug. “I think they’d love it. And they’d be so proud of how we’ve worked together, you know?”

  “It’s been kind of rewarding, bringing their dream to life.”

  Molly heard an unspoken but at the end of the sentence, so she waited. They’d all had their bad days, when grief crowded out the good memories. She’d been proud of how Grace had risen to the occasion.

  “It’s just . . . It’s been a good distraction. But what if, once it’s done, and we don’t have that to focus on anymore, all the sadness comes flooding back?”

  Molly squeezed her again. “Oh, honey. The sadness is natural, and you’ve been processing it even though you’ve been busy. We all have. And anyway . . .” She injected a hint of humor into her tone. “If you really think you’re going to be less busy once we open . . . girl, you’ve got another think coming.”

  Grace gave a wobbly smile.

  “Molly!” Levi called from the lobby, his tone demanding. The Sawzall had finally stopped, but she could hear other construction noises.

  Grace rolled her eyes. “Better answer the master.”

  “What is it?” Molly called as she made her way out of the dining room, through the living room, and into the lobby.

  “You’re going to want to see this.”

  “What?” She prayed it wasn’t a problem that would further delay the opening. Or cost more money. Nothing made Levi grumpier.

  Erik, Levi’s friend, was busy unwrapping the new window, which was propped against their check-in desk. They’d cut through the plaster and some of the lath, but the exterior wood still remained in place.

  “Look,” Levi said, pointing into the opening. “The old mail slot.”

  Molly gasped as she took in the sight. Indeed it was a letter slot from the days when the post office had occupied this space.

  “That’s so cool.” She moved aside as Erik began prying the lath away from the lower wall.

  “The exterior part of the slot must’ve been covered over years ago.”

  “There’ll be a metal piece on the outside then, right? Can we salvage that part?”

  Levi hitched a shoulder. “Don’t see why not. Just don’t tell the historical committee. They’ll probably want us to leave it put. Frame it in gold and add a bronze plate for posterity’s sake.”

  Keeping the historical committee mollified had cost the Bennetts precious dollars. Even the new windows had to meet their exact specifications—and this last one had to be ordered twice.

  A large section of lath crumbled down. Erik and Levi began picking up pieces of splintered wood and tossing them into the trash barrel.

  Molly stepped in for a closer look at the slot, her imagination running wild with thoughts of all the letters that had come through that opening between 1957 and 1976 when the post office had been housed here.

  Her eyes fished through the darkness beneath the slot where the lath had yet to be pried away, and something caught her eye. A square of white, wedged against the inside wall. She reached into the space, wincing as her hand made contact with spider webs. Curiosity beating back the horror of a possible encounter with an eight-legged creature, she felt around until her fingers found what they’d been seeking. She pulled the paper from the depths and out into the light.

  An envelope. She flipped it over and found it addressed and stamped. Her heart thudded in her chest at the find.

  “What’s that?” Levi asked.

  “A letter! It was wedged inside the wall. I wonder how long it’s been there.” She dusted the dirt and webs from the envelope. “There’s no postmark.”

  “Well, open it and find out.” He went back to the work of prying the lath from the wall as if—hello—they hadn’t just found an old lost piece of mail.

  She clutched the envelope to her chest. “I can’t just open it.”

  “Sure you can. Slide your finger under the flap and lift it up.”

  “But . . . what if it’s private?”

  “Whoever wrote it is probably dead by now,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Your sensitivity is unsurpassed.”

  “And yours is off the charts. Open the thing. It’s probably just a payment for a bill or something.” He shot Erik a look that clearly said Women.

  Erik snickered, and she shot a look at the back of his head. Men.

  Molly scanned the envelope. It was from a Miss Elizabeth Van Buren, whose return address was right here in Bluebell, on Church Street. It was addressed to a Mr. Benjamin Schwartz in Tennessee. The blue ink was slightly faded, the script neatly slanted to the side. She looked closely at the stamp, which bore the American flag.

  “It’s a five-cent stamp! Can you imagine?”

  There was a loud splintering sound as Levi pried more lath away with the crowbar. “That would date it between ’63 and ’67.”

  Erik chucked a piece of lath into the garbage. “How do you know that?”

  Molly stared at the envelope. She didn’t know any Van Burens. “He collected stamps as a child.”

  Erik snickered.

  “Shut up,” Levi said. “It was a brief and unfortunate hobby during my awkward adolescence.”

  Molly wondered what the letter said. Maybe it was just a boring old thank-you note or something. Maybe Elizabeth and Benjamin were distant cousins, and the letter was full of trivial details of her daily life.

  Or maybe, her inner romantic sang with a clear, compelling voice, it was a declaration of undying love—one that had never even been received.

  “Are you still dithering over that letter?” Grace asked as she entered the bedroom, pulling the holder from her ponytail.

  Said letter was sitting on Molly’s bed where she’d left it when she went to take a shower and get into her pj’s.

  “Just open it already. You’re building it up so much in your mind it’s only going to be a big fat disappointment.”

  Molly ran her fingers through her damp hair as she studied Grace. She hated that her little sister was so cynical at the tender age of eighteen. If anyone had reason to be jaded it was Molly.

  “Not everything winds up being a disappointment,” Molly said. “Life can bring good surprises too, you know.”

  “Well, you’ll never know if this is going to be one of them until you open it.”

  Work on the house had kept Molly busy all day, but not so busy she hadn’t come up with at least two dozen possibilities for the contents of the letter, each one more fanciful than the next. Honestly, sometimes a big imagination was nothing but a curse.

  She sank onto her twin bed, the mattress giving under her weight, and picked up the envelope. It was light in her hands and not very thick—probably only a single sheet of paper, she’d already surmised.

  The mattress dipped as Grace sat at the foot of the bed. “Go on, open it so you can pick up your Nathaniel Quinn novel and get on with your life.”

  “Skye thinks I should open it too.�
�� Her friend would’ve ripped it open the instant she’d found it. She’d come up with another dozen possibilities about the letter’s contents, all of them more realistic than Molly’s.

  “You should.”

  Molly gave the return address a lingering look. Grace was probably right. She was going to be horribly disappointed after daydreaming about it all day. She wanted desperately to know what was in the envelope, but there was also a niggling voice that said it was none of her business.

  “Tampering with mail is a federal offense,” Molly murmured.

  Grace gave her a long look.

  “Fine,” Molly said finally and handed it to her sister. “You read it then.”

  Grace rolled her eyes and made a big production of gently sliding a finger under the flap and slowly, so slowly, parting the seal.

  Molly’s heart was thumping in her chest. Her sister was right. She was being ridiculous. Her romantic streak and love of history had combined to tempt her with this old lost letter, which was, in fact, probably just some big cosmic joke.

  Grace withdrew a pale pink sheet of unlined stationery. Both sides were filled with the same neat script as the envelope. She took her time smoothing out the page and then began reading aloud.

  “My dearest Ben, I can’t begin to tell you how grieved I’ve been since you left. I ache, as I have never ached in all my nineteen years, not only for myself but on your behalf. I know Daddy’s words hurt you to the core. I know the hopelessness you must feel at his rejection. I feel it too. It’s that hopelessness that made me act the way I did, say the things I said.

  “I don’t know what the future holds, my darling. I only know that I don’t want to face it without you. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I didn’t mean it, and my eyes have wept buckets of tears for the regret I feel.

  “I should’ve told you I’d wait for you, that even war couldn’t separate us. Instead I acted like a spoiled child, and now I fear I’ve lost you forever, and that is more than I can bear.”

  Grace flipped the paper over.

  “And this is why I will say what I should have said that night. I love you, Benjamin Schwartz. There is nothing I won’t give up for you, including my family, my inheritance, and everything that I know. If you will only tell me you feel the same, I will wait for you to come back to me. I will wait four years or however long it takes, and we will become husband and wife as my heart has longed to do all along. Forever yours, Lizzie.”