You will be a different person when you come home to stay, but I know that, no matter how much living you do without me, you will not forget.
Merry Christmas, Jess.
Your friend,
Addie
That night, Addie tossed and turned in her bed. Sleep would not come. She lay on the bed in her darkened room and looked out the window at the impossibly tall, thin jack pine trees swaying in the wind. A light dusting of snow covered their branches, which were illuminated by the full moon and a sky filled with stars. Addie watched as, every now and then, a stray cloud seemed at once to hang close to the earth and wisp over the moon. It was a perfect, crisp winter night, but her thoughts weren’t dwelling on the beauty of the landscape.
Addie was kept awake that night imagining the time when Jess would finally return home for good. Her eyes strayed over the snow-covered ground, and she thought of how wonderful it would be if Jess arrived right then, driving a horse-drawn sleigh. It’s not so unusual an idea, she thought. Several families in the small community kept horses, and though she didn’t have one of her own, Addie loved their soft coats and musky scent. She loved the way she could see their breath on winter days. They seemed so intelligent with their enormous, kind eyes.
Addie imagined that Jess would pull up to her window driving Mrs. Anderson’s dappled gray horse. Addie would run out of the house bundled in her coat, hat, and muff, and Jess would place a heavy blanket over the two of them for the ride. Off they’d go, over the snow-covered fields and up to the cliff overlooking the lake, where the sleigh would glide along silently, its runners whispering through the new-fallen snow. It was the warmth of this image, her favorite fantasy, that finally lulled Addie to sleep.
Dreams came then, dreams Addie didn’t understand. She saw a jumble of images that flashed into and out of view in rapid succession as though someone were flipping through a picture book. Jess walking down a city street, dressed in a dapper new suit. A woman laughing. Jess chatting with a man she didn’t recognize. A party. People clinking champagne glasses. Women wearing glittering ball gowns and dancing round and round in a ballroom.
Then everything faded into a white mist—fog. It was blinding until a face began to materialize, bit by bit. It was the face of an old woman with impossibly bright-blue eyes. She began speaking in a language Addie didn’t understand. “Ma petite fille chérie. Le danger vient.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After breakfast with Simon, Kate had taken Alaska for a long walk while she was thinking about her next move. She dropped Alaska at the inn before heading to the coffee shop downtown, where she ordered her favorite indulgence—a latte with a half shot of both almond and chocolate—and noticed a tall man staring at her from across the room. She smiled slightly, thinking she knew him from somewhere. But she couldn’t place exactly where. When she had coffee in hand and was turning to leave the shop, he rose.
“Kate Granger?” he asked, his voice startlingly deep.
“Yes,” she said after taking a sip of her coffee. “I’m Kate. And you are—？”
“Detective Nick Stone,” he said. “I’m working with Chief Stratton on the case you’re involved in.”
Involved in. Kate’s stomach seized up at the sound of it. “Are you here to take another statement?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” he said, nodding toward a table by the window. “But do you have some time to sit and talk?”
Kate followed him to the table, a silence falling between them as they sipped their coffees and watched the first tourists of the day appear on the street.
As they sat there together, that same feeling of familiarity took hold of Kate. A companionable silence, that’s what this was. She looked into his face, a face she knew but had never seen. His eyes were deep and brown, his skin the color of her latte. A slight black goatee framed his perfect mouth. He smiled, the kind of brilliant, high-wattage smile that movie stars flash on the red carpet, and Kate couldn’t help smiling back.
“So, what can I do for you?” Kate asked, finally, holding her paper cup a bit too tightly and spilling a little of her latte out the top as a result.
“We’ve basically run into a brick wall with this case,” Stone said. “We’ve got no leads, no missing persons reports that match the woman’s description. No murder weapon. No suspects. We’ve got very little to go on.”
Kate didn’t respond, not knowing where he was leading.
“I’m hoping you can shed some more light on it for us,” he said.
“Well, I’m sorry for your trouble seeking me out, but I don’t know anything more than I’ve already told Johnny,” Kate said, pushing her chair away from the table and rising to her feet. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this, but the chief brought your husband—ex-husband?—in for questioning,” Stone said.
“Kevin?” Kate was surprised at how the name burned on her tongue. “Why?”
“An unfaithful husband, a beautiful dead woman and her newborn baby . . .”
Kate sat back down with a thud. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“Fortunately, he checked out just fine,” he continued. “The chief gave him a lie-detector test. He didn’t like that too much.”
“I could’ve saved you the trouble,” Kate said. Whatever Kevin had done, he was no murderer. Or was this Detective Stone insinuating that she was?
“Your actions on the beach that morning made some fairly ugly thoughts cross the chief’s mind,” he said, in answer to Kate’s unspoken question. “We had to rule out both you and your husband as suspects.”
Kate shifted in her chair. “And now? What do you think now? Because this is ridiculous. I didn’t kill anybody. And Johnny Stratton knows it.”
“What do I think?” he asked, lowering his voice and leaning toward her across the table. “I think you know more than you’re letting on. I can see it in your eyes right now.”
Kate looked downward, not wanting to reveal herself even further, but she felt a blush rise to her cheeks.
Detective Stone continued, “Spend as many years as I have interrogating suspects, and you can tell when a person is lying. Or covering something up.”
Kate looked into the man’s eyes. She had no idea what to say.
“I work out of the precinct here in Wharton, and so the chief asked me to talk to you,” he went on. “Why don’t you just tell me whatever it is, Kate? Don’t you want to help us solve this case?”
Kate thought of the woman’s face, reflected in the mirror in her dreams. “Of course I do,” she said.
“Then now is the time to tell us what you know.”
Kate took a deep breath. This was getting out of hand. She and Kevin, suspects in a murder? Her dreams were one thing, but this was all too real. She needed to tell the truth, now. Yet, how was she supposed to do that? Psychic dreams? She was going to come off sounding like a wacko. First the cheating scandal and her rather public display at the Tavern, and now this. If people weren’t talking about her before, they certainly would be now if word got out. She stood up from the table and nodded toward the door.