“What are you doing here?” A male voice boomed through the darkness, and Kate opened her eyes once again. “Thank God I found you. What are you thinking going out in this fog? Where is—” Kate felt an electricity in the air. “Oh my God. Oh my good Christ, what have you done?” Kate felt hands on her arms, saw a face come into her line of vision. Her eyes couldn’t focus.
“My God, Addie, my God. Dear God. Is she—dead?” Kate felt a head on her chest, listening for her heart. He picked up her hand, felt for a pulse, and dropped it again. “I can’t hear anything. Her heart’s not beating. She’s dead, good God in heaven. Did you—did you kill her?”
“Why would I kill her? That’s a stupid thing to say.”
“Where’s the baby?” The voice was frantic. “Where’s Addie’s baby?”
“I put it in the carriage. Over there.”
“What?” More panic, rising. Moans, tears. “What in heaven’s name have you done? Why are you here? Why?”
“I came down here to show Addie the baby. Hadley wouldn’t stop crying, you know how she gets. So I went out for a walk. You know how that calms her. And I found myself here.”
“A walk? Celeste, what are you talking about? In this fog? Slow down and tell me exactly what’s going on.”
Celeste. Oh my God.
“Hadley is crying all the time.”
“Hadley? My dear—”
Hadley. That’s Grandma. Kate remembered well her father’s mother. They’re talking about Grandma.
“Listen, she’s crying now.”
“Where is Hadley, Celeste?”
“In the carriage, silly, where she always is. I put Addie’s baby in there with her. I found the poor thing in the water, floating away. She was in the water! Can you imagine?”
Kate tried desperately to get a look at what was going on, but she couldn’t see anything from where she was lying. Addie must be near death, Kate thought. She’s drifting in and out of consciousness. Silence. What’s happening?
“Celeste,” the voice said, with great tenderness. “You know Hadley is dead. Honey? Remember? She died a few hours ago. Look at me, Celeste.”
But Hadley lived. Kate was confused. Hadley is Grandma.
“Hadley isn’t dead. What are you talking about? She wouldn’t stop crying. So I put her in the carriage and went for a walk. I came down here.”
Kate heard a gasp. She heard Celeste, in a singsong voice, cooing, “Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top, when the wind blows—” Crying, in the distance. Muttering.
“Jesus Christ, Celeste. Wait here, for Christ’s sake. Don’t move.”
Several moments later, Kate felt a tugging on her legs. And then a thudding. She was in the bottom of a rowboat now. She saw a face appear in her line of vision, Harrison’s face.
“Addie, I’m so sorry.” Kate saw the tears flowing from his eyes. “Celeste had no idea what she was doing. She didn’t mean to hurt you. She’s not a bad person. Please forgive her. She has been insanely protective of Hadley—you know how she’s been—and when the baby passed away today, she must’ve snapped. Lost all her senses. How I wish I had been here to stop this abomination.”
Kate felt the motion of the boat on the waves. But she couldn’t move. She couldn’t turn her eyes, or her head. Addie was slipping away. Was she bleeding to death? Kate wasn’t sure. She tried with all her might to move her hands, even her fingers, but it was no use.
“You are so beautiful, so perfect. Jess, that bastard. He had the most perfect wife a man could hope for.”
Kate was undulating with the waves as the boat traveled farther out into the bay.
“It’s too late for you now, and it’s too late for Hadley, but your little girl is still alive. You understand, Addie, nobody can know my wife is insane. Nobody can ever find out she did this to you. It would ruin us. I promise you, Addie, that we will take good care of your baby just as I know you will take good care of ours.” More crying then.
Kate felt a bundle being tucked tightly under her arm, the folds of her nightgown wrapped over its lifeless face.
It wasn’t Addie’s baby that we found with her, after all. It was Harrison and Celeste’s.
“May God forgive Celeste for what she has done, may God forgive me for what I now do, and for what I will do. Rest in peace, Hadley Connor. Rest in peace, Addie Stewart. May this lake never give up our secret.”
And with that, Kate felt herself being shoved over the side of the boat and into the lake, where an enormous wave—there suddenly, from a glassy, calm surface—engulfed her. Undulating up and down, up and down in the soft, velvety water, taken with the whims of the wind and the tides. She was a seashell, a piece of driftwood, a loon floating lazily on the surface of the Great Lake. Nothing can hurt you here. You are with me now. I will keep you safe, here, with me, my daughter of the lake, until it is time. Kate was enveloped in loving arms and held close, wrapped in a watery blanket, falling down, down, down. Sleep, my daughter, sleep, until it is time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Wharton, 1910
As Addie’s body was enveloped into the arms of the lake, many things were happening on land.
Harrison had left Celeste murmuring and cooing into the baby carriage on the lakeshore and dashed into Addie and Jess’s house, not sure what he was doing once he found himself inside. He was panicked, repeating Addie’s name, over and over again, in a whisper. The sight of her body sinking under the water would haunt him for the rest of his life. Damn that Celeste. How could everything have gone so wrong in just a moment? How could this possibly be happening?
His decision to switch the babies was, perhaps, ill conceived, but he did it in a moment of terror. A live baby for a dead one. How could the existence of Addie’s baby be explained without the mother? How could he possibly have found the baby without having murdered Addie? So many questions would be asked. Could Celeste be trusted to keep her mouth shut? No, it was easier this way. Both mother and baby gone. A clean break. Nobody, not even the household help, knew that Hadley had died that afternoon. An easy switch, no loose ends. It was as if fate had set things up perfectly.
Evidence. He should look for anything that might implicate Celeste in this crime. Was there any blood in the house? Where was the knife? He dashed around in a panic. Nothing. The house looked calm and peaceful, as though Addie and Jess might come walking inside at any moment. Nothing was out of place.
“Addie, your child will want for nothing,” he promised her, there in the darkness. “I will spend the rest of my life making up for what my wife has taken away.”
All this took just a few moments. Outside once again, he pushed past the still-murmuring Celeste and grasped the handle of the carriage. “Let’s go, Celeste,” he said, and the three of them walked into the fog, looking for all the world like an ordinary family taking a stroll together, instead of a woman who had lost her mind with grief, a misguided, deluded man who had committed, and would subsequently commit, the biggest sins of his life, and a baby who would go to her grave adoring a man who had stood by and watched her own father be convicted of a crime he did not commit.