Bitterroot Lake

by Alicia Beckman

  Peggy stared at her, the envelope from Mrs. Pennington of Cincinnati now forgotten in her lap. “And who—who was this girl? You said her name.”

  “Anja. It’s spelled A-n-j-a, but Caro described her as the Laceys’ Swedish housemaid, so we’re saying the j as a y.”

  “Anja,” Peggy repeated. “And she died tragically?”

  “We think so, but we’re speculating, based on Caro’s comments. Nic’s in town, asking questions about the murder. Holly went along to see what she could dig up in the old records that might help us identify Anja and what happened to her.”

  “I thought all those files were online these days.”

  Sarah held out her hands. “No phone, no internet.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Those nincompoops haven’t come out to fix the line yet? Well, come in and use my Wi-Fi if you need to.”

  As long as she didn’t set foot in the studio.

  “And how are the loans related to this Anja’s death?” Peggy asked.

  “Not sure they are, except that Caro was involved in both. They might have pooled their money to send the girl’s body to her family and that got them started. We don’t know.”

  “Her body.”

  “If we’ve put it together right, she drowned in the lake.” Sarah took the rolled-up photo from the coffee table. “We found this photo of a house party the Laceys threw during the Christmas season of 1921. Some of the names are written on the back—by Mrs. Lacey, we presume—though they’re pretty faint. Con and Caro were at the party, but it isn’t Caro’s handwriting. This is Anja.” She pointed at the ghostly blonde in the somber uniform, with the wild eyes and the coronet of braids, then glanced at her mother.

  Who had gone as pale as the ivory linen envelope in her hand.

  * * *

  “You knew her,” Sarah said a few minutes later, trying not to hover as Peggy settled into a chair outside on the deck. “You recognized her.”

  Peggy spoke with her eyes closed, her face lifted to the sun. “After your father died, three years ago, I came out here for a few days’ respite. In all the years I’ve been a McCaskill, I don’t think I’d ever spent a night alone in the lodge until then.” She opened her eyes and accepted the frosty glass of hibiscus iced tea Janine handed her. Janine took the chair next to Sarah’s.

  “That’s when I saw her,” Peggy continued. “Anja, though I didn’t know her name until today. But it was her face. And those blond braids—so distinctive.” She paused for a sip. “The first night, I got a vague sense of someone. It didn’t mean anything. The second night, it was more unsettling, but still unclear. I didn’t get the real sense that she was coming to me for a reason until the third night.”

  “Three nights?” Sarah’s voice cracked. Her mother had just described the same sequence she’d experienced earlier this week, from a vague image to a tug to a compulsion. From an unsettled sensation to a full-blown nightmare. Way back when, she’d only seen Anja once. Had she been too oblivious? Was the danger closer now? Why was Anja, if it was her, getting more insistent?

  “What aren’t you telling me, Sarah?”

  She told her mother about her own dreams. “At the time, twenty-five years ago, I was certain the girl in the nightmare was Janine, because Lucas had been pestering her all weekend, and he was clearly bent on trouble. Now I’m convinced that the girl I saw then is the same girl I saw this week. And the same girl you saw.”

  Peggy reached for her hand, fingers cool from the iced tea. “When I went back to town, the dreams stopped. The only person I told was Pam Holtz. She’s so sensible. She assured me I was just overwrought, worn out by those last few weeks with your father.”

  What Sarah had thought, too, at first. But it was more than that. Both the nightmare this week and the nightmare twenty-five years ago were demanding something. She’d ignored the message back then. She couldn’t ignore it now. But first, she had to figure out what she was being asked to do.

  “Makes sense,” Janine said from the chair next to Sarah’s. “Anja worked for the Laceys, and we think this is where she died. She had no connection to the house in town.”

  “When I got back from Seattle,” Peggy said, “after Jeremy’s funeral, I came out for a couple of days, intending to start cleaning so we could use the lodge this summer. You and the kids.”

  Peggy’s eyes drifted shut and Sarah had almost decided she’d fallen asleep when she opened them.

  “She came to me again.” Peggy’s voice was soft and distant. “Different this time. Not the nightmare you had, though I knew it was the same girl I saw after your father died. This time, she let me see her face. She wanted me to see her face.” She tightened her grip on Sarah’s fingers. “I never imagined she would terrify you like that. If I’d had any idea, darling, I never would have suggested you come to the lodge.”

  “You couldn’t have known. You knew about the attack, but not the dream. You had no reason to think she—Anja—had appeared to anyone besides you.”

  “All this is why I haven’t let you girls into my studio. I’ve been trying to paint what I saw. That’s why I went back to town after only one night, so I could paint her. Why I’ve spent every minute I can working. These pieces”—Peggy hesitated—“aren’t like anything else I’ve done. You’ll think I’m nuts. Or nuttier than ever.”

  “Mom, you know I think your work is terrific.” Over the years, she’d booked several shows for her mother in an upscale gallery on Seattle’s Eastside and sold pieces to friends.

  “Your show in Missoula practically sold out opening night,” Janine said.

  “The point of a landscape, for me, is to capture the light and movement in a way that gives people an emotional connection to the place. Similarly, in portraiture, I want the viewer to see something essential about the subject and connect to it emotionally. But these paintings …” Peggy paused. “They go a step beyond. It’s not me providing emotional content for the viewer. It’s my emotional connection to what no one else can see. Does that make any sense?”

  “Yes,” Janine said.

  Not one bit, Sarah thought. Not one bit.

  But then, neither had anything else in the last twenty-one days.

  27

  “So, we were right,” Holly said. “Not that we can prove it.”

  The four friends and Peggy gathered in the kitchen after Holly and Nic returned from town, so Janine could hear what they had to say while she cooked. Once again, she’d refused help. Easier, Sarah suspected, to do it all herself than direct the rest of them, especially in an outdated space nothing like the commercial kitchens she was used to.

  “Turns out records clerks love a good mystery,” Holly continued. “And the county was small enough back then to make searching a breeze.” She laid a photocopy of a State of Montana Standard Certificate of Death on the table.

  Sarah summarized what the form called the “personal and statistical particulars.” “Anja Sundstrom, age twenty-one, born in Sweden, drowned in Bitterroot Lake on Sunday, January 1, 1922. Single, a resident of Whitetail Lodge, Deer Park. Informant, Frank Lacey, Whitetail Lodge. It asks for parents’ names and birthplaces. Mother is blank. Father, Carl Sundstrom.”

  “I always forget,” Nic said. “This lake doesn’t freeze over, does it?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Some of the shallow bays freeze, but not up here. Too deep.”

  “Does it say what happened to the body?” Janine asked.

  “Buried in Valley View Cemetery, Deer Park,” Holly replied. “We interpreted Caro’s journal entry to mean that she threw herself in the lake because of whatever happened at the house party. But in this column”—she ran her finger down the right side of the form, filled out with a finer-nibbed pen, in a compact backhand—“the medical doctor says cause of death was drowning, and where it asks ‘accident, suicide, or homicide?’ he wrote ‘accident.’”

  Sarah frowned. “You saying he didn’t want to call it suicide? Why—stigma?”

  “Maybe. Look
at the time of death. One thirty AM. Or maybe it was an accident,” Holly speculated. “She was just running. Trying to get away, not noticing where she went.”

  Or not caring.

  Sarah sat back, stunned. She’d been right about her dream—her nightmare. No one went swimming in a mountain lake at one thirty in the morning on the first day of the year. Not even a hardy Swede. Especially not a servant, expected to work late and early when guests meant extra household duties. Anja had come back to lead her to the truth.

  “There was an investigation,” Nic said. “If you can call it that.” She laid a single photocopied sheet on the table, another printed form completed by hand. “Not easy to decipher, but the upshot is the sheriff was called to Whitetail Lodge in the early hours on New Year’s Day after the body of a lodge employee was found in the lake. Frank Lacey was interviewed, and the body delivered to Massey and Sons, Undertakers. End of story.”

  “What was she wearing?” Sarah asked, sure she already knew. “Who saw her last? What was her mood? Had she been upset about something? Was anyone else present when she went into the water?”

  Nic glowered. “Methinks the good sheriff left a few things out. Whether he was lazy or protecting someone, I have no idea. If he made any notes, they’re long gone.”

  “Would the undertaker have records?” Janine asked.

  “The Masseys sold to the Newmans ages ago,” Peggy said. “Their building was destroyed in a gas explosion when you girls were babies. Flattened the whole block.”

  “We may never know what happened to Anja,” Nic said. “But at least we know her last name and date of birth.”

  “Oh, we know,” Sarah said. “We may not know the details or who drove her to her death, but we know.”

  One dream, one tragedy, she could dismiss. But not all this.

  “What did you learn about Sarah Beth?” She poured herself a glass of iced tea and took a long swallow, the cold constricting her throat with a pang.

  “Diphtheria,” Holly said. “Ten days after Caro’s dream.”

  It was as if the house itself, every log and timber, every window and shingle, even the deck where they sat, gave a collective shudder.

  “But not here, in the lodge,” Sarah said, perching on the edge of her chair. “Even Caro couldn’t have hung onto the lodge, much as she loved it, if her little girl died here.” She pictured the baby book, so lovingly tended. The dress. The funeral roses.

  “No,” Holly said. “In the hospital, in Whitefish. Different county, but the clerk found her death certificate for us and printed off a copy. That was before the hospital in Deer Park was built—remember Caro’s comments in her journal about fund-raising?”

  “You kids were born in the McCaskill wing,” Peggy said. “It was torn down when they built the new hospital. Mary Mac was so angry she refused to give them any more money. You know how she was.”

  “Fierce,” Sarah said. “Despite her sweet look. Grandpa used to say her needlework was an excuse to stab things without getting sent to jail.”

  “She scared me half to death,” Peggy confided. “Unlike Caro. But she was generous, too, and once she saw that I made John Patrick happy, she completely accepted me.”

  Like Jeremy’s parents when they first met Sarah.

  Two dreams accounted for. Three, including her first dream, the day before Lucas—

  “Oh my gosh, I forgot to ask.” She threw an apologetic look toward Janine, then turned to Nic. “Did you get an answer from the prosecutor? They aren’t going to file charges, are they? And did you reach your daughter?”

  “Yes. We hope not. Yes.” Nic ticked off fingers in the air. “Bottom line, the meeting with the principal is moved to next week. Tempe insists she’s got everything under control.”

  “And the kid?”

  “Keeping his distance. Now that the principal and his parents are involved, I think he’ll back off. Too chicken for revenge. Or maybe she’s right and the other kids think he’s a dipstick who deserves a dose of his own medicine.”

  “You should be there,” Janine said. “You don’t need to stay here and babysit me. This crew can do that.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen at school before next week,” Nic replied. “As for charges, like I told Janine earlier, the prosecutor acknowledges that they don’t have any direct evidence to incriminate her—just her admission that she was there and that she fled the scene. Bottom line is, we’ve agreed that Janine can go home, but she’ll keep me posted on her whereabouts and make herself available for additional questioning any time she’s asked.”

  “So she’s not in the clear,” Peggy said.

  “It’s as good as we can hope for, until they have evidence incriminating someone else. They confirmed that they have other targets, but we can only guess who. Lucas Erickson was not a popular man.”

  “Didn’t stop Connor from doing business with him,” Sarah said.

  “You know about that?” Peggy said.

  “Not the specifics, no. Routine stuff, I guess.” But her mind wasn’t on lumber. It was on the lodge, and murder.

  * * *

  “I’ve asked too much of you,” Peggy said as Sarah pointed the car up McCaskill Lane late that afternoon. “The lodge is too much.”

  Yesterday, she would have agreed. Today, though, a sense of mission had come over her. It wasn’t just that the house was asking her to protect someone.

  The thought struck her with the force of certainty, despite its oddity. The house itself, Whitetail Lodge, wanted her protection.

  Breathe. Breathe. She slipped a hand off the wheel and squeezed her mother’s.

  “Both hands, Sarah,” her mother said, but not before squeezing back.

  She drove slowly, avoiding the ruts. What would regrading the road cost?

  She grunted, remembering that the phone company service tech still had not shown up.

  If Peggy was nutty, painting her dreams, was she nutty, too, thinking the house was asking her to save it? Blame the shock and grief. Her therapist would respond with soothing comments, suggesting that labels weren’t helpful and that perhaps the dreams were messages from her subconscious, pointing her in a healing direction.

  Oh, God. She was nuts, putting words in the mouth of a woman who wasn’t even here.

  Though if she were, that’s what she would say.

  She might also say that Sarah herself needed Whitetail Lodge. The way Caro had needed it, after the deaths of the Swedish housemaid and her own young daughter.

  Sarah had let her ties to the lodge fray. The source of so much childhood happiness, the place where she and Jeremy had fallen in love. The place where she and her friends had broken their promises to each other.

  Could she mend all that?

  “No idea yet who’s decorating the cross?” Peggy asked as Sarah drove past the roadside memorial. Sarah recapped their theories, but her mother had no good explanation.

  On Lake Street, she passed the brick hotel, the FOR RENT sign in the first floor window. “Oh, darn it. I meant to ask Becca about that space.”

  “You thinking of opening a restaurant?”

  “Not me. Janine.” At the lift of her mother’s brows, she explained. “She’s making noises about moving back here. Holly thinks I could help, but she won’t take money from me.”

  “Proud,” Peggy said. “Like her mother. I wish I’d been a better friend to Sue. You can find a way.”

  Now there was a challenge if she’d ever heard one.

  * * *

  Sarah parked in front of the Victorian, wondering how to ask her mother to show her what she was working on.

  “I suppose you want to see the paintings,” Peggy said.

  “If you’ll let me.”

  “Why not? Since the dreams are coming to you, too. Maybe you can tell me what they mean.”

  Sarah followed her mother through the house. Peggy’s style had evolved over the years, always relying on a strong sense of line and movement. Her ten thousand hours pain
ting water had paid off, and when galleries hung work showing reflections, whether of mountains, grasses, or trees, they sold quickly.

  What to expect now, though? The refrain of the day: no idea.

  In the upstairs hallway, her mother opened the studio door and stood aside. Three feet into her old bedroom, Sarah stopped abruptly. This painting was unlike anything she’d ever seen.

  Big, eighteen or twenty by forty, resting on the sturdy wooden easel. Rich, dark colors—reds, blues, and greens—receded into the background, paler splashes at three corners creating the impression of shadow and pulling the viewer in. Off-center, as if on the edge between the deep woods and the deeper lake, stood a pale figure in white, the soft fabric of her nightdress billowing around her legs. Shadow draped the woman’s face as she looked over her shoulder, at something or someone behind the viewer. Her light hair flowed loosely down her back and her arms and hands seemed ready to push against a danger she knew would overwhelm her.

  “That’s her,” Sarah whispered.

  “I know.” Peggy slid an arm around her waist and Sarah leaned into her mother’s embrace.

  A few minutes later, they sat outside, on the wide front steps that faced the lake. Peggy had shown her several sketches working out the composition and two smaller finished canvases portraying similar scenes, but with the female figure glazed over, almost hidden, in layers of green and midnight blue.

  “The effect I was after was like when Monet changed the composition of Woman in a Garden and painted over two of the original figures. You can still see them ever so faintly.” Peggy pressed her hands against the invisible air, miming the disappearing figures. “In the first two pieces, I’d made her too distant. I knew it. I knew I had to keep painting, as if she was pushing me, until I truly saw her. Thanks to the photograph you and your sister found, I know I have.”

  “What does she want? What is she telling us?”

  “I think she simply wanted me to know her story. Because we own the lodge.”

  “Do you know if anyone else ever saw her? Grandma? Any of the men in the family?”