“Well, this sounds good.” Simon raised his eyebrows and leaned forward. “What is it?”
Kate took a deep breath, wondering if she could actually utter the words. “It’s about something that’s been happening to me.”
“Will you just spill it?” Simon said, refilling Kate’s glass. “You know you want to talk about this, so just say it, already. How bad can it be?”
“The thing is, I’ve been having these dreams.” Kate exhaled, and then the whole story came out in one long, continuous stream. How she had been dreaming of a woman for the past three weeks, how she had found that same woman’s body washed up on the beach in front of her parents’ house, how she knew there was a baby in the folds of the woman’s dress.
She had said it all out loud, told someone else. The strange events of the past few weeks had been given voice. Her experience was a tangible thing now, the words forming substance and becoming something greater than simply a notion in Kate’s head.
“Well?” Kate asked. “What do you think?”
“Why doesn’t this kind of thing ever happen to me?” Simon wailed. “The dead simply don’t want to communicate with me, and I find it highly offensive.”
Kate laughed out loud. “Either that, or I’m just crazy. There’s that possibility, too.”
“It’s certainly bizarre, I’ll give you that,” Simon said. “You’ve had recurring dreams about a woman’s life. Looking in the mirror in the dreams, you see her face reflected back as your own. You’re her, in a way, in the dream. So it’s very personal, right?”
“Right,” Kate said. “It feels absolutely personal. Intimate. You’re right, it’s like I am her. Or she’s me. In the dreams, we’re the same person.”
“Are you absolutely sure it’s the same woman? The one dead on the beach and the one in your dreams?”
Kate nodded. “Completely sure. It’s her. There’s no doubt.”
“Do we know when, and how, she died?” Simon wondered. “She was in the lake, so, obviously she drowned, right?”
“I don’t know.” Kate winced as the words left her lips and a twinge of heat radiated in the small of her back. “Johnny Stratton is investigating.”
Kate gazed out of the window, looking down the street toward the water. The face of the beautiful, serene woman in her dream, superimposed over the harsh sight of that same face, dead, lifeless, on her beach, screamed inside of her head.
“Johnny’s already questioned me, sort of, in connection with all of this,” Kate went on.
Simon grimaced. “Why would he do that?”
“I reacted rather badly when I saw the body,” Kate admitted. “It seemed to him that I knew more than I was saying.”
Simon reached across the table and took her hand. “You didn’t tell him about the dreams, did you?”
Kate shook her head. “I haven’t told anyone but you. I’m sure he thinks I’m involved in this somehow, but I have no idea what I’m going to tell him when he starts asking more questions.”
“If only you knew who she was,” Simon mused, staring out the window.
With that, Alaska padded into the room, carrying her leash in her mouth.
“I guess you’re being taken for a walk,” Simon chuckled.
Kate stood up and stretched. “It’ll feel good to get a little exercise, actually,” she said. “Care to come along?”
A few minutes later, they were meandering through the darkened streets of Wharton. A whisper of autumn was in the air, and the chill refreshed Kate’s spirits.
Simon and Kate talked about other things for a bit, their parents, how things were going at the inn, but their conversation drifted to the dead woman on the beach again, almost as though she was calling them back.
“I want to find out more about who she was and who killed her, but I don’t quite know what to do first,” Kate said. “I can’t do any research without knowing more about her.”
“For starters, if you have any more dreams, try to pick up any sort of clue,” Simon offered. “Obviously she was a real person. Her body washed up on your beach. That’s as real as it gets.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
1901 Great Bay
Addie and Jess were inseparable. They ran through the fields and fished in secret spots known only to them. Addie swam in the big lake while Jess sat on the shore reading, wondering how this fool girl could possibly stand to languish in the frigid water. They talked about school and their parents and other children, babbling like siblings sharing secrets.
These years were so idyllic, in fact, that they made Jess forget about those dark images he had seen when he’d first touched Addie’s hand years earlier. They flew completely from his mind on one particularly lovely summer day—the blinding blue sky, the sun beating down on his crisp, white shirt, the slight breeze that smelled of lilac, even though the flowers were long since gone. Things might have been different, if he had heeded the warning instead of lost it, there on the lilac breeze.
That lovely summer afternoon, Addie was twelve years old, and she and Jess made their way through the forest on the edge of town to their secret place, Widow’s Cove. It was a small bay ringed by a high, rocky cliff, accessible only by a footpath through dense underbrush. Addie had found it the year before, when she was following a black wolf through the forest. She could never quite convince Jess that it had really happened, given the scarcity of wolves in those parts. No one had ever seen a black wolf in or near Great Bay, he kept telling her. But she insisted that it was the truth. How else could she have found that cove?
Addie imagined that wives might go there to mourn their husbands lost on the Great Lake, so secluded and hidden was the place. Jess wasn’t sure about all of that, but he had to admit that he loved coming here. It was a chance to be alone with Addie, without the watchful eyes of the community on them.
On this particular day, Addie and Jess lay side by side on one of the enormous flat rocks that dotted the shallow water just off shore. The sun was baking down on their backs. Addie could just reach the cool surface of the water with the tips of her fingers, if she stretched. The water was the color of jade.
At seventeen, Jess was much more grown up than Addie. Tongues wagged in town about the amount of time the two spent together. It got so people didn’t see one without the other. Doesn’t he have sweethearts his own age? Isn’t it about time he started looking for a bride? And while Jess’s friends knew better than to tease him about the little girl who was always underfoot, they secretly wondered why he wasn’t, at least, interested in girls his age from school. Jess was a baseball player and a good student, and with his wavy brown hair and deep-brown eyes, he had grown into quite a handsome young man. His friends knew he could date any girl in town. So why didn’t he?
But to Jess, dating someone other than Addie was simply a waste of time. He had been content to wait for the girl to grow up since the minute he had seen her in the lake on the day she was born. He knew then, just as she did, that they were a destined pair, made for each other.
As she and Jess lay on the rock, Addie rolled onto her side, ran one hand across the surface of the cool water, and looked at her reflection—vague, moving, shimmering, distorted. Life was changing, just as her reflection changed and moved in the water.