Carla Neggers - Echo Lake

“I can set a table, too. I even know my wineglasses.”

“Vic makes it easy. He only has one kind.”

“You’ll be correcting that?”

She laughed. “Absolutely.” She hunched her shoulders. “I’ll say good-night. I’m freezing.”

Brody waited as she dashed up the back steps and went inside. It was damn cold, but it felt good to him. He didn’t have a good sense of Adrienne Portale and her reasons for house-sitting in Knights Bridge, but he hadn’t found anything suspicious, never mind alarming, in their conversation about Vic, wine and dinner.

He took the shoveled walk to the guesthouse but didn’t go inside, instead heading through the snow down to the lake. The stars were out in full force now, penetrating the darkness and creating shadows in the woods and on the lake. He could see Heather’s footprints from her Rohan rescue. He pictured her climbing up from the brook with the puppy in her arms, her pant leg soaked, her scarf dangling, one glove. She’d been focused and determined, and she hadn’t needed his help.

He ducked past white pines to the lakeshore. A breeze whistled in the clear night air. He remembered standing in this spot as a boy, waiting for the stars to come out, imagining being on a different planet—in a different place. He hadn’t hated Knights Bridge then. He’d wanted to go places, see things, do things, get out in the world.

He’d done that in spades, and now here he was again, on the shore of Echo Lake. He hadn’t lied. He had dreamed about Echo Lake in the days before Vic’s call. He’d just returned to the US to begin an extended home leave, and it had struck him that he had no real home, except for his land in Knights Bridge—and it wasn’t home. He’d picked up his car and considered dividing his time between visits with his mother in Orlando and his father in Key West.

He felt the cold sting his face and ears. He gritted his teeth. Damn. He was a tough federal agent. He’d endured all sorts of extreme conditions. He could handle a southern New England January evening.

He turned away from the lake and walked up to the guesthouse. He’d had a rough few months on the job, and being back in Knights Bridge—running into Heather, even if she wasn’t one of the Sloan brothers—was messing with his head. He didn’t like digging into his emotions. Didn’t want to go there. Thinking about the past wouldn’t help him size up what was going on with Vic. So far, it seemed as though he was in the throes of adjusting to retirement and making mountains out of molehills. Brody wasn’t even sure there were any molehills, never mind mountains.

He went into the guesthouse through the side door. The two-bedroom cottage was solid and only about forty years old, a late addition to the original 1912 estate. It needed work, but not as desperately as the main house. He didn’t care one way or the other. It suited his purposes. He liked keeping some distance between him and Vic, and time alone, even here, with the past so near, worked for him right now. He hadn’t been back in the US in months, and his mind was still thousands of miles away in North Africa and his unfinished business there.

He filled the wood box and started a fire in the woodstove. Its crackling was the only sound in the place. He stood at the windows and looked out at the night sky. His mother loved stars and had pointed out various constellations to him when he was a kid. It wasn’t until he was in middle school that he’d realized her names were all of her own creation and not the actual names. Eric Sloan had told him. “Dude, that’s not Camel Head. That’s Orion. There is no Camel Head constellation.”

Brody had felt like a dumbass. At first he’d blamed his mother for lying to him, but she hadn’t lied. She’d made up her own names because she didn’t know the real ones—couldn’t sort herself out enough to go to the library and find out—and needed something to grab on to for herself, and maybe for her only son, too. She’d been restless and depressed, hating her life, hating Knights Bridge, and by his fourteenth birthday, Mary Hancock had left him and his father.

Brody hadn’t told Eric he’d gotten Camel Head from his mother. He’d covered for her.

That was what he was good at—watching people’s backs.

She’d loved Echo Lake itself, though. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived, Brody. I can’t imagine any place prettier than right here, even if it’s not for me.”

She was happy as a clam these days in Orlando, where she’d moved his senior year in high school. His father had been right behind her, beelining to South Florida twenty-four hours after Brody had turned eighteen, two weeks after his graduation.

He smiled, thinking of his parents. A couple of flakes. He wondered if they’d have stayed together if they’d moved to Florida instead of to Knights Bridge. He needed to go see them while he was on home leave.

He felt the heat of the woodstove. He was surprised at how tight his throat was, but he knew it wasn’t just being here. Being back “home.” That was an aggravating factor, but it was also the weight of the past few months, the tension and the uncertainties of what came next for him.

The fire popped and hissed, the sounds launching him back to a mission in November to secure a small consulate that had been shut down the year before. He remembered the heat, the dust, the eerie stillness. He and Greg Rawlings had looked at each other, sensing—knowing—something was off. They hadn’t exchanged a word. They’d had a split second to react before gunfire erupted, but it was that split second that had saved their lives.

Brody had emerged uninjured. Greg hadn’t been so lucky. He had taken a bullet to his shoulder that he and Brody both had believed would end Greg’s seventeen-year career as a DSS agent. Blood seeping through his fingers as he applied pressure to his own wound, Greg had looked at Brody with pain-racked eyes. “Now what, Brody? Hell. I don’t have a life to go back to.”

“You do, Greg,” Brody had said. “Think of those kids of yours.”

“I’ve never been there for them. What, start now?”

Before Brody could respond, Greg had drifted into semiconsciousness. Two months later, he was making a full recovery. He could go back to work if he wanted to. His call. He didn’t have to take on another dangerous assignment. He had married young and had a couple of teenagers, if also a wife who didn’t want to “indulge” him anymore. Laura Rawlings didn’t care if he was good at his job, if it made him happy—she was done. Even before he was shot, Greg had expressed his doubts that a nonhazardous post where she could join him wouldn’t make any difference.

But as in need of TLC as Greg’s home life was, at least he had one to come back to. Brody didn’t. He didn’t have a family, a pet or even an apartment.

The wind howled out in the dark January night then settled down again. It had been a long time since he’d experienced such quiet. He turned from the stove and sat on the sectional sofa. He’d slept here last night. He’d grabbed a pillow and a blanket from one of the bedrooms. The front room was warmer with the woodstove, and it had a view of the lake. He’d wanted to wake up to the sunrise over Echo Lake. He didn’t know why.

Maybe he didn’t want to know why.

He leaned back and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the crackle of the fire and trying not to think, not to remember and especially not to feel now that he was back in Knights Bridge.

Four

Heather woke up to no truck and no food in the house—not so much as a slice of bread for toast or a drop of milk for coffee. Fortunately, Smith’s, the only restaurant in the village center, was open and within easy walking distance, one of the perks of living on Thistle Lane. Smith’s was popular with loads of people she knew, including her brothers. Someone would be willing to loan her a set of jumper cables and give her a ride up to Vic’s.