Bitterroot Lake

“That’s when I saw her,” Peggy continued. “Anja, though I didn’t know her name until today. But it was her face. And those blond braids—so distinctive.” She paused for a sip. “The first night, I got a vague sense of someone. It didn’t mean anything. The second night, it was more unsettling, but still unclear. I didn’t get the real sense that she was coming to me for a reason until the third night.”

“Three nights?” Sarah’s voice cracked. Her mother had just described the same sequence she’d experienced earlier this week, from a vague image to a tug to a compulsion. From an unsettled sensation to a full-blown nightmare. Way back when, she’d only seen Anja once. Had she been too oblivious? Was the danger closer now? Why was Anja, if it was her, getting more insistent?

“What aren’t you telling me, Sarah?”

She told her mother about her own dreams. “At the time, twenty-five years ago, I was certain the girl in the nightmare was Janine, because Lucas had been pestering her all weekend, and he was clearly bent on trouble. Now I’m convinced that the girl I saw then is the same girl I saw this week. And the same girl you saw.”

Peggy reached for her hand, fingers cool from the iced tea. “When I went back to town, the dreams stopped. The only person I told was Pam Holtz. She’s so sensible. She assured me I was just overwrought, worn out by those last few weeks with your father.”

What Sarah had thought, too, at first. But it was more than that. Both the nightmare this week and the nightmare twenty-five years ago were demanding something. She’d ignored the message back then. She couldn’t ignore it now. But first, she had to figure out what she was being asked to do.

“Makes sense,” Janine said from the chair next to Sarah’s. “Anja worked for the Laceys, and we think this is where she died. She had no connection to the house in town.”

“When I got back from Seattle,” Peggy said, “after Jeremy’s funeral, I came out for a couple of days, intending to start cleaning so we could use the lodge this summer. You and the kids.”

Peggy’s eyes drifted shut and Sarah had almost decided she’d fallen asleep when she opened them.

“She came to me again.” Peggy’s voice was soft and distant. “Different this time. Not the nightmare you had, though I knew it was the same girl I saw after your father died. This time, she let me see her face. She wanted me to see her face.” She tightened her grip on Sarah’s fingers. “I never imagined she would terrify you like that. If I’d had any idea, darling, I never would have suggested you come to the lodge.”

“You couldn’t have known. You knew about the attack, but not the dream. You had no reason to think she—Anja—had appeared to anyone besides you.”

“All this is why I haven’t let you girls into my studio. I’ve been trying to paint what I saw. That’s why I went back to town after only one night, so I could paint her. Why I’ve spent every minute I can working. These pieces”—Peggy hesitated—“aren’t like anything else I’ve done. You’ll think I’m nuts. Or nuttier than ever.”

“Mom, you know I think your work is terrific.” Over the years, she’d booked several shows for her mother in an upscale gallery on Seattle’s Eastside and sold pieces to friends.

“Your show in Missoula practically sold out opening night,” Janine said.

“The point of a landscape, for me, is to capture the light and movement in a way that gives people an emotional connection to the place. Similarly, in portraiture, I want the viewer to see something essential about the subject and connect to it emotionally. But these paintings …” Peggy paused. “They go a step beyond. It’s not me providing emotional content for the viewer. It’s my emotional connection to what no one else can see. Does that make any sense?”

“Yes,” Janine said.

Not one bit, Sarah thought. Not one bit.

But then, neither had anything else in the last twenty-one days.

27

“So, we were right,” Holly said. “Not that we can prove it.”

The four friends and Peggy gathered in the kitchen after Holly and Nic returned from town, so Janine could hear what they had to say while she cooked. Once again, she’d refused help. Easier, Sarah suspected, to do it all herself than direct the rest of them, especially in an outdated space nothing like the commercial kitchens she was used to.

“Turns out records clerks love a good mystery,” Holly continued. “And the county was small enough back then to make searching a breeze.” She laid a photocopy of a State of Montana Standard Certificate of Death on the table.

Sarah summarized what the form called the “personal and statistical particulars.” “Anja Sundstrom, age twenty-one, born in Sweden, drowned in Bitterroot Lake on Sunday, January 1, 1922. Single, a resident of Whitetail Lodge, Deer Park. Informant, Frank Lacey, Whitetail Lodge. It asks for parents’ names and birthplaces. Mother is blank. Father, Carl Sundstrom.”

“I always forget,” Nic said. “This lake doesn’t freeze over, does it?”

Sarah shook her head. “Some of the shallow bays freeze, but not up here. Too deep.”

“Does it say what happened to the body?” Janine asked.

“Buried in Valley View Cemetery, Deer Park,” Holly replied. “We interpreted Caro’s journal entry to mean that she threw herself in the lake because of whatever happened at the house party. But in this column”—she ran her finger down the right side of the form, filled out with a finer-nibbed pen, in a compact backhand—“the medical doctor says cause of death was drowning, and where it asks ‘accident, suicide, or homicide?’ he wrote ‘accident.’”

Sarah frowned. “You saying he didn’t want to call it suicide? Why—stigma?”

“Maybe. Look

at the time of death. One thirty AM. Or maybe it was an accident,” Holly speculated. “She was just running. Trying to get away, not noticing where she went.”