Bitterroot Lake

The show had been in early April. Jeremy had been too ill; Sarah hadn’t dared risk leaving him to fly over, even for a couple of days, but Peggy had sent pictures and a video clip from the opening. Landscapes and portraits, like the ones that hung in the house in Seattle.

Neither she nor Janine had mentioned running into each other.

“But what are you doing in Deer Park?” Peggy asked Janine, releasing her from the one-armed embrace.

“Let’s get the groceries unloaded,” Sarah said. “Then we can talk.”

“I hope you bought cat food,” Peggy said. “He’s been jabbering at me since I got here, and I may not know cats, but I know what that means. Where did he come from, anyway?” She didn’t wait for an answer, and Janine followed her inside.

Sarah bent to pick up the white cotton dish towel her mother had dropped. Tuesday, it read in neat black stitches beneath the outline of a little Dutch girl in a pink and blue skirt, yellow braids flying as she leapt across the corner of the towel, the arms of a windmill behind her. Mary Mac had embroidered set after set of these towels. If her grandmother wasn’t in her sewing room working on a quilt, she’d been sitting in the oak rocker facing the lake, or on the deck under the deep overhang, handwork in her lap. Most of it she’d given away. Trust her mother to dig out the right day of the week.

“No point putting anything in the cupboards until we’ve wiped them out,” Peggy said a few minutes later as Sarah set the last bag of groceries on the kitchen counter. “This whole place is full of dust and cobwebs. I didn’t realize until …”

“Until what, Mom?” It wasn’t like her mother to leave a job unfinished.

Peggy sank against the counter, the rag in her hand dripping on to the floor. “Sometimes, it’s just too much.”

The size of the place? The grime? The memories? Sarah took the wet rag and wrung it into the sink.

Abby would be home for the summer in a few weeks, Noah a week or two later. She’d told them, before they went back to school, that she wanted them to come to the lake with her to spread some of Jeremy’s ashes, but they hadn’t made firm plans. So much up in the air.

A spasm of anger tore through her chest. At Jeremy, at the cancer. It wasn’t right to blame him; she knew that. But sometimes she did.

The kettle whistled, bringing Sarah back to the present. She rummaged in a grocery bag for the tea they’d bought—Earl Grey, permanently linked to the lodge in her memory—then plopped bags in the white ironstone mugs and Janine filled them.

“I can’t believe all this dust.” Sarah dug for a box of tissues before taking her seat.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were coming,” Peggy said as Sarah blew her nose. “I’d have picked you up at the train and taken you home. To a clean house and a clean bed.”

This, this is why I didn’t tell you. “You don’t drive at night, Mom.”

“I’d have asked your brother to take me.”

“Connor’s busy, Mom. He already took time away from the business to come to the funeral.” McCaskill Land and Lumber, the family business for more than a hundred years. “He didn’t need to be traipsing all the way into Whitefish last night to pick me up.”

“Of course he came to your husband’s funeral, and he would have driven me to the station.”

“Besides,” Janine said, “if she hadn’t come to the lodge, I don’t know what I’d have done.”

Peggy turned to her. “And what are you doing here, dear?”

Janine flicked her dark eyes toward Sarah, who set down her tea and cleared her throat.

“Mom, you heard about Lucas Erickson, right? That he was killed, sometime yesterday afternoon.”

“Yes, it’s tragic. But what …”

Sarah poked her tongue over her bottom lip and exhaled. “Janine found him.”

For a long moment, the only sound was the cat, scrabbling in the bowl of dry food they’d set in the corner.

“I didn’t kill him, Peggy,” Janine said. “I swear. After I found him, I came out here. To think. Make a plan. Then Sarah showed up.”

“That’s why you called Leo,” Peggy said to her daughter, “and why you were in town this morning. Becca Smalley told her mother she saw you at the Blue Spruce, and her mother mentioned it to me when she stopped by to return a book. That’s when I dropped everything and came out here.”

What had her father always said about small towns? Everyone knows everything about you, whether it’s true or not. People you don’t know, know you. And his warning when they were teenagers, testing their wings: someone will see everything you do.

“We went in to give statements,” Sarah said. “And pick up a few things. We stopped by the house, but you’d already left.”