Which color do you like better?” Holly stood before Leah’s chair and held up two jars of nail polish—one cobalt blue, one mint green—for Leah’s inspection.
“Ummm, tough choice.” Leah appeared to consider them equally. “Maybe the blue. It matches your eyes.”
“Would you let me paint your nails sometime?” Holly asked tentatively.
“Oh, sure.” Leah offered her hands for Holly’s inspection. “Though I’m afraid they’re a bit stubby right now. I haven’t had much time for manicures lately.”
“I’ve never had one. Not a real one, anyway. Sometimes when I’m at Chrissie’s and some of her friends from school come over, we all do each other’s nails.”
“I think that’s how I learned to paint nails,” Leah told her.
“Do you know how to French-braid hair?”
“Yes. I am quite good at it, actually. Or at least, I used to be.”
“Would you do mine?” Holly asked nonchalantly, as if it didn’t matter much to her if Leah did, or didn’t, braid her hair.
“Holly, don’t bother Leah. She’s working on her notes.” Tom looked up from his book.
“Oh, I don’t mind. And besides, I’ve done all I’m going to do tonight, anyway. Bring that stool over here, Holly, and sit in front of me.”
“I’ll get my hair brush,” Holly leaped from the sofa and bounded toward the front hall, “and I’ll be right back.”
Leah smiled and craned her neck to watch Holly take the steps two at a time.
“You don’t have to, you know,” Tom told Leah. “I don’t want you to feel that she’s being a pest.”
“Not at all.” Leah shook her head. “Holly’s delightful. Besides, it isn’t often I have the company of teenage girls. It’s fun to know they still do the things my friends and I did when we were her age.”
“Well, she doesn’t have much female companionship, you know. Bein’ here all the time with just her dad and me. That bein’ said, I still wouldn’t want you to feel she’s takin’ advantage.”
“I don’t. I’m enjoying her company, too.”
“It’s been hard on Holly, you know, growin’ up without her mother.” Tom folded his book over, using the fingers of one hand to mark his place, the other hand dropping down to pet Dieter. “Libby’s death changed all our lives.”
“A death in the family always does,” Leah said softly.
“Here’s my brush. And a few hairpins.” Holly appeared in a blur, entering the room, pulling the stool over in front of Leah’s chair, and sitting, seemingly all in one motion.
“Well, then, let’s see if I’m still as good at this as I used to be.”
They sat in silence for a few long, comfortable moments, Leah brushing and braiding long strands of Holly’s honey-blond hair, Tom occasionally glancing up from his page to watch. Holly was clearly content with Leah’s attention. It had been so long since his granddaughter had been the recipient of such special treatment, Tom thought sadly. He hoped she wouldn’t suffer for lack of it, once Leah left.
Though Leah did need more information for her article, Tom reasoned. And Lord knows he could tell her everything she needed to know. It could take a while.
Tom liked the young woman. Leah brought something to the lodge and to their lives, something vital and colorful that had been sadly lacking over the last few years. This afternoon he had heard Leah and Holly laughing together in the kitchen. The sound of their shared feminine laughter had touched Tom in a way he could not explain.
“Grampa, I said, the phone’s ringing. Could you please answer it?” Holly was waving a hand to get his attention.
“What? Oh, yes. Right.”
Holly giggled and whispered, “I think Grampa’s having a senior moment.”
Leah laughed. “I think he was just daydreaming. Maybe thinking about the book he’s reading.”
“Do you do that when you read?” Holly asked.
“Sometimes.”
“What do you daydream about?”
“Oh, sometimes I’ll stop and think about the scene I’ve just read. Sometimes things that I read spark a memory of a place I’ve been, or make me think about places I’m planning to go to … hold still, Holly, I need to secure this section—”
“Do you French-braid your own hair?”
“Not usually.”
“Where’d you learn to do it so well?”
“I used to braid my little sister’s hair. Just like this.”
“How old is your sister?”
Leah was silent for a long minute, then said, “She died several years ago.”
Holly turned quickly in her seat. “I’m so sorry, Leah.”
“So was I.”
“I’ll bet you still miss her.”
“I do. Every day.”
Holly appeared to be about to ask yet another question when Tom appeared in the doorway.
“That was your father, Holly. He’ll be home tomorrow, probably in the morning.”
“Oh, great! Did you tell him about Leah?”
Tom paused slightly, then said, “No. I didn’t.”
“Why not?” Holly asked quizzically.
“It just slipped my mind. We didn’t speak for very long,” Tom told her, knowing that wasn’t the whole truth.
Actually, Tom had been about to tell Ethan about their visitor, but for some reason, he’d hesitated, not knowing quite why but feeling a definite compulsion to omit that little bit of information. And so he simply hadn’t mentioned it.
Oh, well, no harm, no foul, Tom told himself as he opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch to grab another log or two for the fire. Ethan would be home tomorrow. He’d meet Leah soon enough.
Tom couldn’t help but smile somewhat hopefully as he leaned down to pick a piece of cut wood from the pile. Ethan had been alone for long enough. Tom couldn’t wait to see what his son would think of their pretty guest.
* * *
“Her name is what?” Ethan turned slowly to his father as he plopped a large pile of mail, picked up that morning at the post office in Arlenville, in the middle of the kitchen table.
The name had struck an irritating chord.
“Leah. Leah McDevitt,” Tom repeated.
“How long has she been here?” Ethan said through clenched jaws.
Tom watched his son’s face as Ethan stared out the window, searching the landscape, no doubt, for his daughter and the woman who, his father told him, had gone down toward the lake over an hour ago.
“She arrived three days ago. She’s—”
“Why didn’t you tell me she was here?” Ethan asked.
“I didn’t think to,” Tom replied somewhat archly. “Last night was the first time you called home all week, and we didn’t stay on the phone very long.”
“Long enough for you to tell me you had a visitor.”
“What difference does it make? Leah is a writer. We’ve had writers here before. She’s doing a magazine article on Maine sporting camps, and she chose White Bear Springs for the article,” Tom told Ethan proudly.
“Well, that’s original, I’ll have to give her that,” Ethan muttered.
“What?”
“I said, that’s a clever cover.” Ethan turned away from the window.
“Cover?” Tom’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“Miss Leah may be a writer, but she’s not writing any article about White Bear Springs,” Ethan said dryly. “My guess is that she’s working on a book about Raymond Lambert.”
“Raymond …” Tom appeared stunned. “Why would you think—?”
“Because she called me the night before I left and asked me if she could look at any notes I might have taken while I was working on The Vagabond Killer. It was within days of Lambert being killed.”
“Now, what would Leah want with—”
“My guess is that now that Lambert’s gone, she’s planning on rehashing the story and making a few bucks on it.” Ethan walked to the counter and peered into the coffeepot. It was empty, further darkening his mood. “Why else would anyone be interested in Lambert, all these years later?”
“I don’t understand why she would lie.” Tom shook his head slowly, stunned by the news. “Why she wouldn’t have just told me the truth when she got here.”
“Probably because I told her that I don’t have anything to say about Lambert, and that I wouldn’t discuss him with her or with anyone else.” Ethan rinsed out the coffeepot, then turned to look at his father. “You look upset.”
“I am upset. I like Leah. A lot. So does Holly. They’ve spent a lot of time together this week, and Holly will be—”
“She hasn’t been asking Holly about Libby, has she?” Ethan’s fingers gripped the handle of the coffeepot as the thought occurred to him that perhaps, not getting any information from him, Leah had spent the last three days pumping his daughter for information of the most personal kind. “If she’s upset Holly, I’ll—”
“Ethan, calm down. As far as I know, Libby’s name only came up once since Leah got here, and I was the one who brought it up.” Tom paused, still confused at having learned the young woman he’d grown so fond of in so short a time might not be who she claimed to be.
“What did you say? What did you tell her?”
“Only that things haven’t been the same for any of us since Holly’s mother died.”
“And she said—?” Ethan waited for Tom to continue.
“That death had a way of doing that. Of changing the lives of those left behind. Or something to that effect.”
Ethan stared at his father, then turned at the sound of footsteps on the back steps. Footsteps and laughter.
The back door swung open and a giggling Holly was followed by a giggling woman and Dieter, whose tongue was lolling half out of his mouth.
The first thing Ethan noticed about their visitor was that her eyes were the color of melted chocolate. The second was that her face, flushed with the last cold breath of winter, had a natural beauty.
The third was that she was wearing his favorite scarf.
“Daddy!” Holly exclaimed. “You’re back!”
Holly kicked off her snowy boots in record speed and jumped into her father’s arms.
“Hello, pumpkin.” Ethan kissed Holly’s cheek, and looked beyond her to the woman who stood in the doorway.
“Daddy, this is Leah. She’s writing an article about our camp for a magazine called Trends. She’s taken tons of pictures this week, and I’m in some of them, so my picture could be in this famous magazine. Is that the coolest thing you ever heard?”
“It’s right up there.” Ethan’s gaze never wavered. Neither did Leah’s.
“Hello, Ethan Sanger.” Leah extended a deliberate right hand in his direction.
Just as deliberately, he chose to pretend not to see it.
Instead, Ethan swung his daughter around, effectively averting Leah’s gaze, which he had found to be unexpectedly direct and wholly unapologetic. For reasons he could not name, it unnerved him, and he chose to distract himself since he was having a hard time ignoring it altogether.
“Dad, Leah said hello.” Holly would not permit her father to slip off the hook.
“Hello, Leah,” Ethan said without looking at the unwanted visitor.
Holly stared at her father. While not the world’s most outgoing guy, she’d never, ever known him to be rude.
Under his daughter’s scrutiny, Ethan bristled. That Holly and Leah had forged some sort of bond was apparent. That Holly would be devastated to learn that Leah had no more interest in her than the man in the moon was even more obvious. Holly had been beaming when she’d all but fallen through the back door, weak from laughter, her eyes shining. It was a look Ethan had seen Holly share mostly with her girlfriends these days, though on occasion, she still reserved a little of that happy exuberance for her father. To see Holly so happy in the company of someone who would only bring her sadness once her true purpose was revealed, so trusting of someone who could not be trusted, made Ethan’s blood boil. Holly was an open, loving child. It appeared to Ethan that Leah had taken advantage of Holly’s sweet nature to get to him. It was all he could do not to lift Leah bodily and toss her out the back door into the snow.
Such action on his part, Ethan knew, would only upset Holly, who’d be upset enough when she realized that Leah had come to the lodge under false pretenses. Rather than confront Leah in front of Holly, Ethan touched his daughter’s cheek with the tips of his fingers and said, “I think Leah and I should take a few minutes to get acquainted, Holly. Would you make some coffee for us and bring it into the den?”
“Leah likes tea in the afternoon,” Holly told him.
“Well, then, Leah can have tea, and I’ll have my usual coffee.”
With his right hand, Ethan reached out and gripped Leah’s left elbow with enough pressure to let her know that he remembered her name, and knew why she was there, and that he wasn’t going to let her get away with trying to charm information out of his family behind his back.
“I think that’s a fine idea, Ethan. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” Leah told him, refusing to flinch from his touch or his gaze, neither of which held a trace of welcome.
Tom took a step forward, about to speak, his face lined with concern.
“Dad, why don’t you tend to the fire in the front room for a few minutes?” Ethan said firmly.
Without waiting for his father’s response, Ethan steered Leah through the door and down the hall, not speaking until he’d reached the den and closed the door behind them.
“I will give you forty-five seconds to tell me why I should not drop-kick your ass from here back to wherever it was you came from,” Ethan said, his anger just beginning to surface.
“Ethan, I understand how you must feel—”
“You couldn’t possibly,” he said coldly.
“But if you’d let me explain—”
“I can’t think of one good reason why I should.”
“You know, it’s really hard for me to understand how such a rude, closed-minded man could have such a charming father and such a wonderful, totally delightful child.”
“Don’t bring Holly into this.” He turned on her, his eyes flashing with parental concern. “Although I suppose you already have by pretending to be her friend.”
“Pretending?” Leah’s own ire began to rise. “That remark insults Holly as much as it insults me. No one would have to pretend to like her. Why, she’s smart, she’s responsible, she’s fun, she’s—”
“Thank you,” he said dryly. “We both agree she’s exceptional. That’s not going to win you a second more of my time. I really resent what you’ve done. Your deception aside, I told you I would not discuss Raymond Lambert and I meant it. For you to sneak into my home behind my back, weasel your way into my family’s good graces—”
“Wait a minute. I never set out to deceive anyone,” Leah’s voice edged up defensively. “When I decided to come here to see you in person, I had no idea you wouldn’t be here. How would I have known that? But after I arrived and your father asked me what I did and I told him, he just sort of assumed I was here to do an article about the camp. And it took me less than twenty-four hours to realize that it was actually a great idea. This area is a natural for the type of article I do. It’s unspoiled, it’s beautiful—”
“How long have you been rehearsing this?”
“I’m going to pretend that you didn’t say that. Because regardless of what you think, this article will be a great one, and it will run in my magazine. The only way to prove that I’m telling the truth about that is to send you a copy when the issue comes out … I’m targeting the July issue, by the way.”
“Well, I hope you got all the pictures you need, because you won’t have time to take any more. I’d like you to leave within the hour.”
“I don’t think you’re being fair.”
“You coming here under false pretenses wasn’t fair.”
“I did not come here under false pretenses. I came to see you, to talk to you. I believe that you might have information that I desperately need.”
“Oh, so you can write the definitive book on Raymond Lambert? Now that he’s been offed, you think someone should cash in and it might as well be you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Leah’s hands flew to her hips.
“I’m talking about the book I suspect you’re planning on writing about Raymond Lambert and his victims.”
“And what makes you think that I’m writing a book?”
“Why else would you want access to my notes? And for the record, there are no notes of any conversations that I ever had with him.”
“No notes?” Leah seemed to blanch. “None?”
“No.”
“But … how did you write the book if you took no notes?”
“I tape recorded our conversations and turned the tapes over to the publisher.”
“The tapes, then. If I could just listen—”
“No.”
“Ethan, please. You’re my last hope.”
“No.”
“But … you don’t understand.” Leah’s eyes teared and her bottom lip began to shake.
“Nice touch, the quivering lip. But the answer is still no. I’m afraid you’ll have to rely on newspapers and the information in my book as reference for your own. But I warn you, don’t plagiarize from me. Plagiarism is still a crime, you know. Nothing would please me more than to bring charges against you.”
“The newspapers didn’t tell me what I needed. And I read your book twice. It didn’t help, either.” Leah’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “I was hoping your notes could tell me—”
“Tell you what?” Ethan’s eyes narrowed.
“Where he left my sister’s body.” Large tears rolled openly down Leah’s cheeks and she made no effort to hide them, as if she was unaware of them.
The silence in the room was overwhelming.
“What was your sister’s name?” Ethan asked, a note of caution in his voice.
“Melissa McDevitt.”
“I sat with Lambert for weeks on end. He told me about every killing in great detail. He never mentioned your sister’s name. And trust me, I remember every single one of them. I’d have remembered hers as well. I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that, though I admit it’s a very clever ruse.”
“It’s not a ruse.”
“Tell me, then, why you think Lambert killed your sister. And why you waited until after he’d been killed to start looking for her.”
“I didn’t know—”
“Where did this killing take place?”
“In upstate western Pennsylvania.”
“You should have done your homework a little better, Leah. Lambert’s kills were strictly through the south and the southwest.”
Leah sighed heavily. “Would you please listen to me for one minute? And if at the end of that minute you still don’t believe me, I’ll leave.”
Ethan glanced at his watch.
“Talk fast.”
“Seven years ago, my sister was on her way home from college for the summer. She’d just finished her freshman year at Ohio State.”
“When was this?”
“May twenty-fifth, nineteen ninety-three. She was dropping her roommate off in a small town outside of Erie, not far from the New York border.”
Ethan shook his head.
“By his own admission, on the twelfth of May, nineteen ninety-three, Lambert was in Texas—outside of San Antonio—where he killed a young woman named Marlene Baker.”
“He had plenty of time to travel from Texas to Pennsylvania. His next documented killing was on June first. He’d have had time enough,” Leah insisted.
“What makes you so sure that it was Lambert?”
“Because he told me he did.”
“Lambert told you he killed your sister in Pennsylvania on May twenty-fifth, nineteen ninety-three?”
“He didn’t exactly come out and say that he did it, but he certainly led me to believe that he did.”
“Why didn’t he tell me about her? He took such great pleasure in telling me everything about every murder he committed. Why would he omit only her?”
“I don’t know. And you don’t know that he did tell you about all of his victims. You only know what he chose to tell you. Maybe you just don’t remember.”
“I remember everything. And your minute is up.”
“You used up half of it with your questions. Please just hear my story.”
Ethan sighed heavily and leaned back against the edge of the desk, his arms crossed over his chest. He might as well let her get it over with. The sooner she told her story, the sooner she would leave. He motioned for her to start.
“A few weeks before he was killed, Lambert sent a letter to me at my office. At the magazine.”
“What did the letter say? How did he know where you worked?”
“If you’d stop interrupting me, I’d tell you.”
“Daddy?” Holly called from outside the door. “Could you let me in? I have your coffee.”
Still eyeing Leah suspiciously as he crossed the carpet and opened the door, Ethan took the tray from Holly’s hands.
“Thank you, Holly. But if you wouldn’t mind, Leah and I are having a discussion right now.”
Holly peeked into the room and glanced uncertainly from Ethan to Leah. The tension was as dense as the fog that was beginning to settle over the lake.
“I promise, we’re almost done,” Ethan told her.
“But …” Holly looked at Leah curiously.
Holly had wanted her father to like Leah, but she hadn’t expected him to lock himself away with her like this. And there was something in their faces. Both of them were tense and uneasy, not exactly the reaction Holly had secretly hoped her father and her new friend would have to each other.
“Five more minutes, Holly,” Leah said softly. There was a sadness in her eyes Holly had not seen before.
Holly nodded uncertainly and backed out into the hall and closed the door behind her, not at all liking whatever was going on in there.
“Thank you,” Leah told him.
“Finish your story.” Ethan sat the tray between them and motioned for Leah to help herself.
“Where was I?” she asked.
“Lambert sent you a letter.”
“Right. I found it when I came back to the office after being out of the States on assignment for a few weeks. It was in a stack of mail that my assistant left on my desk. At first I thought it was a hoax.”
“What did it say?”
“It said, ‘I know where your sister is. Does this mean I get the reward?’ ”
“Reward?”
“When Missy disappeared, we—my cousin and I—posted a fifty thousand dollar reward for information about her disappearance. There were a lot of false trails over the years, but the reward money has remained in escrow.”
“You never gave up?”
“No. I never did. I always believed …” Leah bit her bottom lip. “Well, it doesn’t matter what I believed. Suffice it to say that I always believed the reward would be paid out.”
“How did Lambert know about the reward?”
“Shortly before I left on my trip, I was on a television show with the siblings of others who had disappeared and never been found. I was asked if the reward still stood and I said it would until Missy was found, one way or another. That anyone having information should contact me in care of Trends. I gave the address.”
“And shortly after that, you got a letter from Lambert.”
“Two. Two letters. I was out of the country when the first one came, and I guess he was annoyed that I didn’t answer him, so he sent a second.”
Ethan appeared to digest this for a long moment, then asked, “What did you do with the letters?”
“I gave them to the FBI.”
“Who did you speak with?”
“Genna Snow. She put me in touch with John Mancini, the agent who had interviewed Lambert after his arrest.”
“I remember him well.” Ethan nodded. “But what happened to the letters?”
“She kept them to compare the handwriting to Lambert’s and to check for his fingerprints. She was going to look into reopening his case if the prints matched, but of course, Lambert was killed and that was the end of that.”
“So that was it? You turned over the notes and waited to hear from the FBI?”
“Not exactly. I went to see Lambert in prison. Genna—Agent Snow helped me to get in to see him.”
“What did he say? He must have wanted something from you.”
“He wanted the reward money.”
“And in return, he’d tell you where your sister’s body was?” Ethan’s jaw tightened.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“A good guess,” Ethan said without emotion. “And you paid him?”
“Half. I was in the process of wiring half to his attorney as we had agreed when he was killed. I canceled the transfer. He had, however, already given me a general idea of where Missy was. Not exactly where, but what part of the state, what it was near.”
“But not enough information for you to find her?”
“No. He was killed the day after I was there.”
“Is this the truth? All of it?” Ethan looked suddenly very weary, and very sad.
“Yes. It’s the truth. And frankly, I couldn’t make up something like this. It would hurt too much. I’ve missed my sister every day she’s been gone. I’ve never stopped missing her for a minute. I’d have done anything to find her—”
“This must be very hard on your parents.”
“We lost them both in a car accident a few years before Missy died. She was all I had left of my immediate family. There is no way you could ever understand what I have gone through, all these years.”
“Oh, I think I could,” Ethan said grimly.
Leah looked at the man who slumped back against the big wooden desk halfway across the room.
“Raymond Lambert killed my wife. The price for her body was the book.”
Leah’s throat constricted so tightly that for a moment she could not even breathe.
“He made you sit and listen … before he …” A wave of nausea hit Leah strongly and unexpectedly.
“Yes,” Ethan whispered.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.” A shaking Leah pointed to a partially opened door on the right. “Is that a bathroom?”
Ethan nodded.
“Excuse me,” she told him, “but I think I’m going to be very sick.”