Bitterroot Lake

“Not the specifics, no. Routine stuff, I guess.” But her mind wasn’t on lumber. It was on the lodge, and murder.

* * *

“I’ve asked too much of you,” Peggy said as Sarah pointed the car up McCaskill Lane late that afternoon. “The lodge is too much.”

Yesterday, she would have agreed. Today, though, a sense of mission had come over her. It wasn’t just that the house was asking her to protect someone.

The thought struck her with the force of certainty, despite its oddity. The house itself, Whitetail Lodge, wanted her protection.

Breathe. Breathe. She slipped a hand off the wheel and squeezed her mother’s.

“Both hands, Sarah,” her mother said, but not before squeezing back.

She drove slowly, avoiding the ruts. What would regrading the road cost?

She grunted, remembering that the phone company service tech still had not shown up.

If Peggy was nutty, painting her dreams, was she nutty, too, thinking the house was asking her to save it? Blame the shock and grief. Her therapist would respond with soothing comments, suggesting that labels weren’t helpful and that perhaps the dreams were messages from her subconscious, pointing her in a healing direction.

Oh, God. She was nuts, putting words in the mouth of a woman who wasn’t even here.

Though if she were, that’s what she would say.

She might also say that Sarah herself needed Whitetail Lodge. The way Caro had needed it, after the deaths of the Swedish housemaid and her own young daughter.

Sarah had let her ties to the lodge fray. The source of so much childhood happiness, the place where she and Jeremy had fallen in love. The place where she and her friends had broken their promises to each other.

Could she mend all that?

“No idea yet who’s decorating the cross?” Peggy asked as Sarah drove past the roadside memorial. Sarah recapped their theories, but her mother had no good explanation.

On Lake Street, she passed the brick hotel, the FOR RENT sign in the first floor window. “Oh, darn it. I meant to ask Becca about that space.”

“You thinking of opening a restaurant?”

“Not me. Janine.” At the lift of her mother’s brows, she explained. “She’s making noises about moving back here. Holly thinks I could help, but she won’t take money from me.”

“Proud,” Peggy said. “Like her mother. I wish I’d been a better friend to Sue. You can find a way.”

Now there was a challenge if she’d ever heard one.

* * *

Sarah parked in front of the Victorian, wondering how to ask her mother to show her what she was working on.

“I suppose you want to see the paintings,” Peggy said.

“If you’ll let me.”

“Why not? Since the dreams are coming to you, too. Maybe you can tell me what they mean.”

Sarah followed her mother through the house. Peggy’s style had evolved over the years, always relying on a strong sense of line and movement. Her ten thousand hours pain

ting water had paid off, and when galleries hung work showing reflections, whether of mountains, grasses, or trees, they sold quickly.

What to expect now, though? The refrain of the day: no idea.

In the upstairs hallway, her mother opened the studio door and stood aside. Three feet into her old bedroom, Sarah stopped abruptly. This painting was unlike anything she’d ever seen.