Bitterroot Lake, Alicia Beckman [good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT] 📗

 3

Where was she?

Sarah opened her eyes to light streaming in through the windows. The dirty windows, her first clue that she wasn’t in the house in Seattle. Besides, the sun was streaming in the wrong way, the windows facing south.

And this was definitely not her bed, the cat curled up on her feet.

The cat. She hadn’t had a cat in years.

It came back to her then, how she’d reached the lodge last night and found Janine, and the cat. Janine’s gruesome discovery, her attempt to call her cousin the sheriff. The cups of stale tea they sipped as they tried to piece it all together.

And a night wrapped in a musty wool blanket on the bumpy old leather couch. No wonder her dreams had been unsettled, vague images slipping away with the morning light.

She slid one foot up, then wriggled the other free, not wanting to disturb the cat. Too late. It turned its head and gave her the stink eye.

“Figures.” She sat up, pulling the small, warm body closer. “You a he or a she?”

“It’s a she,” Janine said as she approached, two heavy white mugs in hand. “I checked.”

“Oh, coffee. Bless you.” Sarah pushed the blanket aside with one hand, put her feet on the floor, and set the cat next to her. As if unsure how to respond to the indignity of forced relocation, the cat stood, circled, and settled back down, tucking her tail beneath her.

“My grandmother’s ironstone, what she always called her railroad dishes.” She took the mug Janine held out, its shape familiar and comforting, and let the first sip linger in her mouth. Hot, bitter, perfect. “You know, I don’t think anyone’s made me coffee, at home, since Jeremy got sick. He’d start the pot before he went out on his run and it would always be a toss-up whether he’d get back before I got up.”

“Bakers and runners,” Janine said. She still wore Sarah’s T-shirt and black leggings, both long on her. “We get up early and spend the best part of the day on our feet.”

The world beyond the windows shimmered despite the grime. Bitterroot Lake was shaped like an uneven piece of elbow macaroni, the lodge at the outer edge of the bend, town to the southeast, hidden by the curve.

What time was it? Sarah had no idea. Where had she left her phone? Odds were the signal wasn’t coming through anyway, not in the daytime, despite the clear skies, making the phone a pricey clock. If she stayed more than a few days, they might need to reconnect the landline.

If. The controlling word in her world right now.

She took another sip of the Italian roast she’d brought with her from Seattle. Even a thirty-year-old Mr. Coffee knew what to do with good beans.

But coming back to Montana hadn’t changed the key fact. Each day brought so many questions. Why, just as they were getting used to being empty nesters, getting to know each other again as people, not just parents, had the cancer come back and killed him? Quickly, too—less than six months from that first sharp pain in his low back to the end. To the ashes she’d brought with her. She and the kids had spread a handful on Lake Washington, not far from their house in Seattle, but she’d saved some for Bitterroot Lake, where it had all truly begun.

Now Lucas Erickson was dead, too. Had the three young men been cursed? Michael and Lucas had been roommates in the dorm, Jeremy a friend, jumping at the chance to visit the girls at an old lodge on a mountain lake. What young men wouldn’t have?

Something soft swished against her bare arm. The cat. “You hungry? Me, too.”

She took another sip and glanced at Janine, sitting on the other couch staring at a phone, her striped Pendleton blanket neatly folded. The letter lay open on the coffee table. “I thought your phone broke.”

“I borrowed yours while you were asleep. Walked up toward the highway until I got a signal.” She set the phone next to the letter. “Still no reception down here.”

“Did you call Leo?”

“I called Nic.”

Nicole. “Why? What can she do from four hundred miles away? Oh. You think—”

The sound of a car outside interrupted her and she stood. Strode to the nearest window and pushed the lace curtain aside.

“Better wash another cup,” she said. “We’re going to need it.”

“I have to confess,” Sheriff Leo McCaskill said after Janine had told her story, “I don’t get why you didn’t call us. Smart to leave the building—the killer could have been hiding anywhere. But you should have called us the moment you got to safety. Or driven over, if you were too scared to stay, or your phone wasn’t working. The courthouse is only two blocks away.”

“Leo,” Sarah said, resting a hand on the kitchen table and leaning toward her cousin. “You have to understand. There’s history here.”

“So you say. But without a report …” Though Leo had the McCaskill height, he didn’t have the classic Irish coloring of Sarah and her siblings. His nearly black hair was shot with gray and his eyes were the same dark brown as his uniform shirt and the matching stripe on the outer seam of his tan pants. “Look, it’s not that I don’t believe you about the assault—what, twenty-five years ago? But history is no defense to failure to report a crime. That’s a crime itself, you know.”

At least he hadn’t said history was no defense to murder. Fingers crossed that meant he didn’t consider Janine a suspect.

“I didn’t know that,” Janine said. “And Sarah did try. How did you know we were out here?”

“You, I had no idea. When I got Sarah’s message, I tried to reply, but no luck. So I called your mother,” he said to his cousin. “She knew you were coming home, but not when. And hearing you’d already arrived from me did not make her happy. You have to call her.”

“I have