Daughters of the Lake
Wendy Webb
CHAPTER ONE
It was finally time for the lake to give her up. And so, one morning in late summer, her body washed gently into the shallows, as though it, she, had simply been floating in a peaceful, watery slumber. She was wearing a white gown, a long, billowing, delicate thing still tied with a bow at the neck, the sort of garment one might imagine wealthy women of the past wearing to bed. A tangle of auburn hair cascaded around her face. She was smiling slightly, and her startling violet-colored eyes were open just a bit, as if awakening from a dream. One arm was concealed beneath the folds of her gown. The other stretched out onto the beach, her hand grasping at the sand as if she were trying to pull herself ashore.
Her appearance was all the more remarkable since she had died nearly a century earlier.
No one who was alive when her body floated onto shore that morning knew anything about her, with the single exception of Kate Granger, who, by no coincidence whatsoever, was in a house that overlooked the very beach where the body now rested.
This dead woman’s loved ones were long dead themselves, their stories, and hers, as magical or as ordinary as they were, buried with them, disintegrating into the earth or the water, becoming a forgotten part of the landscape, just as this woman had been for the past one hundred years.
But some stories, especially peculiar, hidden ones involving murder and mystery, have a way of bubbling to the surface, especially when wrongs need to be righted. They make themselves heard despite efforts to keep them silent. All in the proper time. And now was the proper time.
At the moment the body washed ashore, Kate Granger was pouring the last of the pot of coffee into her mug before curling up with the crossword puzzle in the armchair that had been her favorite as a child. She was unaware her life was about to veer off in a very strange direction.
Her father, Fred, discovered the body. Fred had been walking this particular stretch of beach with his dog every morning for more years than he cared to admit. He gained a sense of peace during these jaunts, with the music of the water lapping at the shore. It was life giving to him in more ways than one.
He had found his share of items on this beach over the years, small things given up by the lake, blown into shore on the wind and the waves. There were the rocks, of course, stones that had been polished by the sand and the water until they shone like glass. They adorned the beach like seashells, gifts from this inland sea. Folks here wouldn’t readily admit it, but most thought these small stones somehow carried the spirit of the lake within them. People picked them up and carried them in their pockets or set them on their dashboards, windowsills, and desks for luck.
Rocks weren’t the only things Fred found during his walks. Even as a little boy, the lake would offer things up to him for his perusal, inspection, or enjoyment. One morning, after a particularly violent storm had reared up suddenly in the night, Fred found a piece of a lifeboat and knew that the lake had taken a ship with all its astonished hands to the bottom. Once, he found a canoe floating in the shallows, still containing a picnic lunch, two life jackets, and an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He did some checking around but never learned who owned the canoe or what the lake had done with them, but he knew better than to open that bottle of Jack. Still, he had never found anything like this. Never a person.
That morning had begun like any other, with Fred and his German shepherd, Sadie, descending the long, wooden stairway from his deck to the beach. Instead of running down the shoreline as she usually did, Sadie had just stood still. Tail down, head lowered, she’d stared out across the lake and growled deep in her throat, as though the lake’s very presence was menacing. Fred had called to her, “Sadie! Let’s go, girl!” But she wouldn’t move.
He had taken a moment to scan the horizon in the direction of Sadie’s gaze, and sure enough, he saw something floating there, but at such a distance, he couldn’t tell what it was. A piece of driftwood? An overturned kayak? As he’d watched it float closer to shore, Fred had begun to feel a knot in the pit of his stomach. That was no kayak.
He’d squinted into the sun as he’d reached into his back pocket for the cell phone that his wife insisted he carry on these walks and dialed Johnny’s number at the station.
“I don’t know for sure, John, but I think I’m looking at a body out in the lake,” he had said.
With the sheriff and an ambulance on the way, Fred had kicked off his shoes and, despite Sadie’s protests, begun wading into the frigid water. There was an outside chance this person was still alive. He should help. But as he’d moved closer, Fred could see that he was looking at something inanimate, already beyond rescue. Fred had stood ankle deep in the water and watched as she had floated to shore, his dog barking in warning. The sheriff had arrived a few moments later.
“What’ve we got here . . . ?” Johnny began, but his words stopped short. He wasn’t a praying man, but at that moment, his years of Catholic school kicked in and he crossed himself. Neither man spoke.
Johnny had been county sheriff for going on twenty-five years and was no stranger to a crime scene, and yet he just stood there, openmouthed, struck mute by the sight of the dead woman before him. He had seen a body or two in his time, but nothing quite like this. Maybe it was the perfection of her skin or the position in which she was lying, one hand grasping at the sand like that. Maybe it was the expression on her face. She just didn’t look dead, Johnny thought. Vision shone from those lifeless eyes . . . or did it?
His thoughts were hazy and random, and highly inappropriate for a crime scene. Johnny Stratton was thinking about true love. He went from the dead woman’s expression to his ex-wife’s sadly familiar morning sneer and then, more pleasantly, to Mary Carlson, his first love, a sweet-smelling, good-natured redhead he hadn’t seen since high school. Johnny remembered the feel of her thigh pressed against his as they drove around town in his dad’s old Camaro, the softness of her small hand as their fingers intertwined, her apple-scented perfume. He wondered, as he stood there on the lakeshore looking at this dead body, whatever had become of Mary. And then he shook off those thoughts. He was at a crime scene, for goodness’ sake.
Fred was similarly mesmerized. He was also thinking about his true love, the woman who was, no doubt, doing the breakfast dishes at that moment—his wife of forty-five years, Beverly. He was glad she wasn’t down on the beach to see this.
Kate broke their reverie.
She was hurrying down the staircase toward the beach. “Dad?” she called out. Her voice startled the two men; they snapped their heads in her direction. “Dad? I heard Sadie barking, so I came to see if you were . . .” Her words, too, trailed off as she drew closer. Kate took one look at the lifeless face of the woman on the beach and fell to her knees, hands muffling a scream that had no sound.
“It’s okay, honey.” Fred hurried to her side and put an arm around his daughter. “Johnny’s calling the coroner right now. Right, John? Come on, now. Let’s go back up to the house and let the sheriff do his job.”
“No!” Kate screamed in a whisper. She threw off her father’s embrace, and before either man could stop her, she lunged toward the woman on the beach and began tearing at her dress. As Johnny and Fred were pulling Kate away from the body, the three of them stopped yet again.