Bitterroot Lake

by Alicia Beckman

  “So,” Sarah prompted. “What happened?”

  “Someone took a baseball bat to our mailbox a few days ago. A bunch of our neighbors fly Pride flags in support of us, and a few let Tempe paint rainbows on their mailbox flags when she painted ours last summer for Pride Day, but their boxes were untouched. Which suggests it might have been random, or because I was on the news last week, testifying against expanded wolf hunting. Part of the state’s proposal to update the wolf management plan. We don’t know. Kim was pretty shaken by it. I know it’s not my fault, but it feels that way.”

  Sarah squeezed Nic’s hand. “People are idiots sometimes. I’m sorry.” She nodded at the letter on the table. “We have to tell Leo.”

  “And give him one more reason to think I killed Lucas,” Janine said.

  “We can’t blame him for sniffing around your life,” Nic said. “That’s his job. The longer he takes, the more time we have to convince him he’s wrong. But I’m still puzzled about the letters. Why anonymous? And they couldn’t have been mailed at the same time, not if Sarah’s arrived before she left Seattle on Sunday and Janine didn’t get hers until Monday.”

  Sarah didn’t care about that right now. She couldn’t sit, not one more minute, not with all this adrenaline, this anger, this fury racing through her. Bad enough, fucking shitty enough, to lose her husband—though he wasn’t lost; she knew exactly where he was. Dead, that’s where he was. She had a tube of ashes in the zippered compartment inside her tote bag, the only place she’d felt safe carrying it on the train ride.

  Bad enough, but then to have all this crap from the past rising up again …

  “Lucas wanted to scare us. Intimidate us. Make sure we kept quiet.” She pushed away from the table and stood. “Because we knew something that scared him. Something besides the assault. But what?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Holly said. “He’s dead. He can’t scare us anymore. He can’t hurt us.”

  “He can. He did. Why?” She looked at each woman in turn, her sister, her oldest friends. “He tore us apart. We can’t let him win.”

  They talked about her conversation with Renee Harper, about Nic’s interviews with Lucas’s neighbors, about Misty Calhoun Erickson. They dredged up every single reason the sheriff might cite to suspect Janine of murder. They drained the bottle and Holly opened another and even Nic had a second glass. But they came up with nothing.

  While she’d been in town, the others had cleaned the girls’ bunk room and started on the cabin Nic and Janine had claimed. Sarah dragged her suitcase up the stairs and set it on the trunk at the foot of her bed.

  In the bathroom, she was afraid to look in the mirror.

  Suck it up, Sarah. It can’t be as bad as you think.

  But it was. Her eyes were wild, her brows shaggy. Had she packed tweezers? Might be better off using pliers. Needle-nose—there had to be a pair on the workbench in the carriage house. Gad. She ran her fingers through her hair, rough with sweat and yesterday’s hair spray. It didn’t help. The circles under her eyes had grown steadily deeper and darker over the last six months, and they hadn’t improved in the last nineteen days.

  Should she stop counting? Probably. But not yet. Not until it stopped hurting.

  “You need a project,” her mother had said when she’d urged her to come to the lodge. Turned out Sarah herself was the project.

  And what about solving a murder? Truth was, she didn’t much care who shot Lucas Erickson. For all the grief he’d caused back then, and was causing now with his anonymous letters, he was better off dead.

  “Oh, Sarah, how can you say that?” she asked the shadow in the mirror. “The man had children. A mother. A sister.” That was reason enough to pray that Leo solved the murder soon.

  Who cared now why he’d sent the letters? He had no more power over them. She rummaged in her cosmetics bag. “Yes!” she said when she found the tweezers, then started plucking. Washed her face, brushed her teeth, and turned out the light.

  The dark, the night, the fear—she was done giving it power.

  * * *

  The scream woke her.

  “Sarah, Sarah,” her sister said, bare feet thumping on the floor between their twin beds. “It’s okay, Sarah. I’m here.”

  Oh, God. She grabbed her throat, rubbing it between the vee of her thumb and fingers. That was her screaming. The mattress groaned and sagged with Holly’s weight and Sarah bent forward, her sister’s hand on her back.

  Was someone else here? No. No, that had been in the dream. A young woman in a long white nightgown, her back to Sarah. Hurrying down the grand staircase, the thin white fabric fluttering behind her. Sarah squeezed her eyelids shut. The woman reached the main floor, her hand on the newel post, and glanced back, up the stairs. Sarah stared into the memory, the waves of terror flooding over her. Then the woman angled toward the French doors that opened onto the deck. That’s when she’d heard the scream. Her own scream.

  “Abby,” she said, gasping. “Where’s Abby? Where’s Noah?”

  “The kids are fine,” Holly said. “It was just a dream.”

  Sarah ran her hands over her face, pressing the heels into her eyes, then rubbing them with her fingers. The images were gone; the screaming had stopped.

  But the terror still lapped at her skin like the waves lapped the cobbled lakeshore.

  She’d said there was nothing left to fear, with Lucas dead. Was she wrong? Was the fear just in her mind?

  “You’re freezing,” Holly said, draping the thick cotton quilt around Sarah’s shoulders.

  “No,” she said. “No. I have to see where she went.” She pulled away, swinging her feet off the high mattress and onto the braided rug.

  “Who?” Holly called after her. “Sarah, stop. There is no one.”

  In the hallway, Sarah gripped the rail with both hands, then rocked back and collapsed onto her heels.

  “She was right here. I saw her. I saw her go down the stairs and out the door. I heard her scream.”

  Holly crouched beside her. “There’s no one here but us.”

  “I—heard—her. I saw her.”

  “Who? Who did you see?”

  Sarah raised her eyes to her sister’s, so like her own. So like her daughter’s.

  “No one,” she said. “It was no one. You were right. Nothing but a bad dream.”

  She couldn’t tell her sister the truth. She had only caught a glimpse of the woman in the nightgown, the woman running toward the doors and out to the lake.

  But while she didn’t know the face, she recognized the terror.

  THURSDAY

  Twenty Days

  17

  This time when Sarah woke, it was to the sound of rain.

  But why was she in Holly’s bed? An arm’s length away, in Sarah’s bed, Holly was fast asleep, cocooned in the Flying Geese quilt, the cat tucked behind her bent knees. Sarah pushed herself up, leaned against the pillows, and began to tease the middle-of-the-night events out of the cobwebs in her mind.

  The face. The screaming girl.

  Her fingers plucked at her chest. The thick cotton of her sweatshirt, not the wispy white nightgown she half-expected to be wearing.

  The three-legged clock on the nightstand said six fifteen.

  The dream—the nightmare—had been so vivid. As though she herself had been that terrified, panic-stricken girl.

  Her therapist said that people in dreams are often mirrors of ourselves, chosen by the subconscious mind to force us to focus on some aspect, some trait that the dream figure represents.

  No question what that girl represented.

  Déjà vu all over again, her mind alerting her to danger. Was it to her this time?

  But why? And from whom?

  Or was the danger from within, from her own emotions, as tangled as the bedcovers?

  After the nightmare, after she’d rushed down the hall in search of the mysterious figure, Holly had led her back to bed and crawled in beside her, wrapping her arms a
round her. Like when they were kids and one of them needed comforting. But at some point, she’d woken and switched beds. Now alone in Sarah’s bed, Holly uncurled and rolled onto her stomach, one arm under the pillow, legs bent as though she were running, or leaping.

  The way Abby slept.

  And the terror struck her again.

  Abby’s fine. She’s fine, a voice inside her said.

  How do you know that? You don’t know that, another voice said. She can’t reach you. She doesn’t have a father to call.

  Sarah rushed out of the bedroom to the landing and grabbed the rail, one hand to her chest. Slow, slow, slow. In and out, the way her therapist had told her to do when the panic attacks hit. Breathe slowly, try not to think, just focus on the breath.

  In, out. In, out. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the cat sitting in the bedroom doorway, watching her.

  “Go on,” she told the cat. “Janine’s up. I smell coffee. She’ll feed you.”

  The cat did not move.

  In the bathroom, Sarah rested her hands on the cool white porcelain of the pedestal sink. “Sarah Elizabeth McCaskill Carter,” she told the face in the mirror. “Get a grip. You are fine. Your daughter is fine.”

  The sharp, floral scent of the lavender soap calmed her as she washed her face. “You’ve got this. You’ve got this.”

  So easy to say in daylight. So hard to believe in the darkness.

  * * *

  But before she did anything else, she had to know whether the voices were right. Which voices to believe. Abby was an early riser, like Jeremy, who loved a morning run, also like him. And she needed to hear her daughter’s voice.

  She hiked up the lane, her bare feet slipping inside the tennis shoes, checking for reception every few hundred yards. The car would have been quicker, but she needed to move. When she got past the big bend, her phone pinged and her heart leapt. But it was just the morning check-in from the house sitter, followed by a text from a friend.

  She touched the screen and watched the phone icon vibrate. Heard the almost imperceptible catch as the call was answered.

  “Hi, Mom.” Bright and shiny, her Abby. Nothing was wrong.

  “Abby, honey. So good to hear your voice.”

  “Yours too, Mom. I’m out for a run with my roommate and the girls from down the hall.” More former high school runners. Sarah and Jeremy had met them last fall at parents’ weekend, slender, leggy colts like their daughter. “I gotta go, Mom. They’re getting away from me. I’ll text you later.”

  “Bye, honey,” Sarah called into the silence.

  Nothing was wrong.

  Nothing was wrong.

  “Ohmygosh, bacon,” she said a few minutes later, the kitchen’s linoleum floor chilly on her bare feet. “Second time this week. And coffee cake?”

  “I am the Cake Lady,” Janine said.

  “Great name for a bakery. If you ever wanted to open your own.” Sarah filled a heavy white mug with fresh coffee, then lifted it to her face. “Mmm. Cinnamon?”

  “Now you sound like Holly,” Janine said, her tone wary. “Talking about me opening my own business. Are you two conspiring?”

  “Great minds think alike?”

  “I don’t have any money. I took this week off to stay up here and solve this problem, but I’ve got to get back to work. And if I have to pay a lawyer—”

  “Janine, if you need money—”

  “I don’t want yours. Thank you, I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I don’t want people feeling sorry for me.” Her voice quivered.

  Tread lightly.

  “Where’s Nic?” Sarah asked, glancing around reflexively the way you do when you mention someone, as if they might be hiding underneath a chair or behind the breadbox. Or might walk in any moment.

  “She drove up to the highway to call Kim. To check in, and warn her to be on the lookout for a letter.”

  Her brain frazzled by the nightmare, Sarah had almost forgotten about the letter from Lucas tucked in with the condolence cards, and their speculation about why he hadn’t sent one to Nic. If he hadn’t.

  “Then she was planning to go into town,” Janine continued. “To take your letter to Leo’s office and snoop around. Absolutely refused to let me go along. Said she wanted to track down people willing to talk freely about Lucas and she could find out a lot more without me. I get it, but that left me stewing in my own juices. So—coffee cake. You can’t worry when you’re baking.”

  “She doesn’t know Deer Park like we do. Or like we think we do. She might see it more clearly.” Sarah cut a piece and sat, Janine across from her. She took the first bite. “This is so good. No wonder your license plate says Cake Lady.”

  “Thanks. Zak gave me that.”

  “Sounds like a great kid. Sitting here with you, in my grandmother’s kitchen, eating off the dishes with the mountains and the pink bitterroots—it’s like you said. Magic.”

  She took another bite, then set her fork down. “Nic and Kim okay?”

  “Yeah. But Nic’s work puts her in the spotlight in a way that isn’t always comfortable.”

  “Every marriage has its trade-offs and tensions. Comes with the territory.”

  Janine looked up sharply. “Not you two. Not you and Jeremy.”

  “Oh, yes, even us.” She picked up her coffee. Although their trade-offs hadn’t resulted in vandalism. “Especially when he was building the business and I was focused on the kids. The usual stuff. We worked through it.”

  “Of course you did. No big deal,” Holly said. Sarah hadn’t heard her sister come in. “The perfect couple. You even managed to go through a rough patch perfectly.”

  Sarah put the mug down heavily. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You want us all to be such great friends again, who confide in each other and help each other out.” Holly took a mug, twin to Sarah’s, off the drying rack and poured herself coffee. Leaned against the counter, crossed one foot in front of the other, and took a sip.

  Sarah glanced at Janine, watching the sisters warily, then turned her attention back to Holly. Not that she hadn’t felt the silent stings of her sister’s jealousy plenty of times, but why this, why now?

  “Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed—or the wrong bed, since you were in mine—and decide to take it out on me?”

  “You,” Holly shot back. “You act like the lodge is yours, and resent me for being here. You don’t know what’s going on in our lives. What worries Nic. That Janine doesn’t want to be bought off with guilt money, even if her legal fees would be pocket change to you, like the pennies your perfect husband leaves.”

  A slow burn crept up Sarah’s spine.

  The refrigerator hummed and the clock ticked.

  “Ever since we’ve been here,” she said slowly, “I’ve had the distinct impression that each of you had some secret you weren’t telling me. I tried to convince myself you didn’t want to add to my troubles. Since my perfect husband—who was pretty darned great—is dead. I knew I should appreciate your thoughtfulness, but instead it felt like you were pushing me away. Excluding me. Because apparently you think that I think I’m too good—too perfect—for you.” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood. “Well, maybe I am.”

  * * *

  Plop. Sarah crouched on the gravel beach below the lodge, rubbing two stones between her fingers. The beach at the wildlife refuge had the best skipping stones. These just plopped in the water and sank.

  She heard soft footfalls on the gravel but didn’t turn. Janine crouched beside her.

  “I’m not going to tell you not to be angry,” Janine said. “She was pretty nasty.”

  “She’s right, though. You three talk, you keep up. I’m the one who pulled away.”

  “Yeah, well. She’s got a lot on her mind. You know.”

  She shot Janine a sharp glance. “No, I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? She doesn’t tell me anything. She never came out when Jeremy was sick, not once.”
<
br />   “Did you invite her?”

  “She knew she was welcome.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  “She came out for the funeral and stayed at a hotel. We had room, even with both kids home, and Mom and Connor and his family there. Plenty of room, in my big, perfect house.” Sarah dropped one of the stones into her left palm and threw the other into the lake. Plop.

  “She lost her job a couple of months ago,” Janine said. “She didn’t want you to know.”

  “That’s what she’s been not telling me? What Mom’s been not telling me? We all see she drinks too much. Is that why she lost it, or the other way around?”

  “She applied to be director of the museum. So did one of the curators. The board chose him, and the first thing he did was fire her.”

  “Can he do that? Legally, I mean?”

  “Apparently, yes.” Janine tilted her head. “But it’s not an easy job to replace.”

  Sarah let the last stone fall onto the beach and got to her feet. Holly had worked at museums and art centers for years, most recently as director of operations, more of a business position than an artistic one. Sarah had done time on boards herself, including the board of a children’s art center, and thought Holly would make a great director. She was certainly good at telling people what to do.

  “But why didn’t she tell me?”

  “I don’t know.” Janine slipped an arm around her and they walked up the slope a few feet and sat on the slate steps that led from the deck to the beach.

  “Is she—I hate to ask this, but is she okay for money?”

  “I think so. They gave her a good severance package.”

  They’d all kept their bad news, their hard times, from her. To keep from bothering her, from upsetting her, while she had so much going on. Didn’t they know that keeping things from her made it worse?

  How much of the distance and silence was her own fault?

  And how did she fix it, now that she was on her own?

  18