Murder at Sunrise Lake

Stella let her breath out. As declarations went, it was a good one, a Sam one, and she’d take it because he always meant every word he said. He could melt her heart when he did unexpected things like grill salmon for her at the end of a long day when she was so tired she just wanted to curl up in her egg chair and forget everything. When he brought her an ice-cold beer, or watched her favorite movie for the tenth time without complaint, those were Sam things. He bought books she liked, treats for Bailey, he remembered to get the particular kind of chocolate she loved. He was quiet about it. The books would show up occasionally, the chocolate would be in the kitchen and Bailey always had treats. Sam was thoughtful and he kept them uppermost in his mind.

Stella switched on her lamp and pulled the drawing pad and journal out of the drawer of her nightstand. The moment she illuminated the bedroom, she had that eerie feeling she didn’t like, the one that told her someone could see in. She wished she’d gotten black-out screens for the windows instead of the shades that allowed her to see through them to the lake. She loved her views and hadn’t wanted to compromise them.

She glanced at the window. She was being silly, wasn’t she, letting her imagination get the better of her? The aftereffects of the nightmare. She put one hand in the air and it was still trembling. It wasn’t as if she could say she wasn’t still freaked out by her dreams just because she was being proactive and Sam and Zahra were helping her.

She forced her mind to be meticulous about remembering every component she could, writing it all down, and then she began to sketch. She was better at drawing. The details emerged when she fleshed out her illustration. She got lost in the picture, no longer thinking in terms of it being a serial killer’s view, or a witness’s view, but simply an artist’s rendition of two backpackers on a trail in the very early morning hours as they started on their journey.

It was dark and she filled in that darkness with charcoal, adding the woman’s brief spotlighting of the floor of the trail, various rocks and the walls by putting each separate image in its own square, much like a graphic novelist might do. By treating each of the pictures as an individual drawing, rather than one as a whole, she could concentrate on details of what the light revealed to her. Veins in the rock. Crevices in the wall. Leaves from the types of trees or bushes. Stella always found that when she drew what she’d seen in her nightmares, she recalled quite a lot more detail. Her subconscious mind picked up far more than she realized.

She turned to a new blank page and began to sketch the lens she had peered through, adding in the features she had noticed on the sides. What might have been a partial round knob that didn’t mean anything at all to her but hopefully meant something to someone else. This wasn’t a cell phone she was looking through. She put as much detail into that fractional view of the button as she had the other pictures, right down to the strange little vee-shaped mark in gold that ran through the black rounded-looking thing she thought might be a knob one could turn.

When she looked up, Sam was standing well to the back of the room, out of the light spilling from the lamp beside her bed. Just the fact that he hadn’t come close to put her chocolate on the nightstand or see what she’d drawn sent more chills walking like fingers of doom down her spine.

She glanced toward the bank of windows that overlooked the lake. With a little sigh she turned off the light, once more plunging the room into semidarkness. Even with clouds drifting across the moon, the lake reflected enough light to allow her to see well enough in the bedroom.

“You feel it too, don’t you, Sam? Someone watching again.”

Instead of answering, he set the mug on the table between the two armchairs. “Come get the chocolate. Keep Bailey with you. I’ll arm the security system when I go outside. You have a gun in the bedroom with you, don’t you? I know you keep one in the car.”

She nodded, keeping her face turned away from the window. “I have a small compartment built into the wall just to the right of the bed. It’s difficult for anyone to notice. I keep several weapons there so I have them close.”

“Get your gun out. Have it loaded, one in the chamber, but don’t shoot me when I come back inside.” There was a trace of amusement in his voice. “Bailey acts up, you know it isn’t me.”