Linda Hall - On Thin Ice

Megan picked it up, turned it over and read again. “Happy anniversary number twenty.” Why was Alec showing her the card she had received at the café?

“This card was in the box that came to me,” he said.

“Two cards?” Megan asked.

“Yes, two cards. The writing on the back of both of them appears to have been photocopied. They’re identical.”

“And you think there’s a connection between these cards and the person who was shooting at us on the lake, plus the deaths of Sophia and Jennifer?”

He nodded. “There is no doubt in my mind. We’re looking at someone from before…”

“From before what?” she asked.

“From before our lives now. It may be painful, but I think we’re going to have to go back to the early days, when we were…together. Whoever is doing this is obviously from…then.”

When people ask award-winning author Linda Hall when it was that she got the “bug” for writing, she answers that she was probably born with a pencil in her hand. Linda has always loved reading and would read far into the night, way past when she was supposed to turn her lights out. She still enjoys reading and probably reads a novel a week.

She also loved to write, and drove her childhood friends crazy wanting to spend summer afternoons making up group stories. She’s carried that love into adulthood with twelve novels.

Linda has been married for thirty-five years to a wonderful and supportive husband who reads everything she writes and who is always her first editor. The Halls have two children and four grandchildren.

Growing up in New Jersey, her love of the ocean was nurtured during many trips to the shore. When she’s not writing, she and her husband enjoy sailing the St. John River system and the coast of Maine in their thirty-four-foot sailboat, Mystery.

Linda loves to hear from her readers and can be contacted at Linda@writerhall.com. She invites her readers to her Web site, which includes her blog and pictures of her sailboat, http://writerhall.com.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Grace and peace to you from God our Father

and the Lord Jesus Christ.

—1 Corinthians 1:3

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EPILOGUE

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Her friends were dying and Megan Brooks knew she was next. She needed answers. And Alec Black, the sheriff of Whisper Lake Crossing, Maine, the man who had broken her heart twenty years ago, was the only person in the world who could give them to her. Yet she never imagined their meeting would be like this—the two of them standing face-to-face in the middle of a frozen Maine lake, ankle deep in snow.

People changed in twenty years. Certainly this man had. He was only nineteen when she had last seen him, and she a year younger. They had met when she was a camp counselor and he was a lifeguard at a summer Christian camp for kids. She had just graduated from high school and he had completed one year of college. Alec’s brother had been in her high school class—and it was Bryan who had suggested that Megan and Alec meet in the first place. Even though Megan had dated Alec’s brother briefly, he had seemed ecstatic when Alec and Megan fell in love.

All during the fall they saw each other. He was in his second year of college and she was in her first. They became inseparable.

By Christmas she was pregnant.

They decided to keep it a secret. They would get married immediately. Although the pregnancy was a mistake, they loved each other desperately. They were in love enough to make it work. Even though Alec’s parents and the grandmother who raised Megan had wanted them to wait, they wouldn’t listen. They planned their wedding for Valentine’s Day. Megan’s baby was due in July.

It was to be a small but lovely church wedding with only four friends in their wedding party. It was going to be perfect.

But the wedding never happened. All of that was twenty years ago.

Alec’s eyes were the same—large and brown and expressive. However he now wore rimless glasses. The ends of his hair, which stuck out from under his knitted watch cap, were darker than she remembered. And his hair was now shorter. His hair was the first thing she had noticed about him when they’d met. In those days his hair hung long and sun-bleached in his eyes. She remembered the way he would brush it off his face with both hands.

From the first moment she saw him, she was aware of everything—the way her hair was, the way she looked in her one-piece swimsuit, self-conscious, knowing his eyes were on her from atop his lifeguard perch. And they were.

She wondered now if his hair would be as soft in her fingers as she remembered.

“Hello,” he said uncertainly. “Pretty cold weather. You just out for a walk on the lake?”

He didn’t know who she was. This was the sort of thing you would say to a stranger. She knew she had changed. In twenty years she had lost weight. “Pleasingly plump” was how her grandmother had described her back then. She had also exchanged the big, round, plastic glasses she wore for violet-tinted contact lenses. Plus she had cut her long “dirty-blond hair”—also a label from her grandmother—and now it was auburn in color and cheek length.

An attempt to remake herself? Possibly.

Flecks of snow landed on the shoulders of his bulky blue jacket. Up around his collar peeked a layer of red fleece. She fought the urge to reach up and straighten his collar.

“Hello.” She looked directly into his eyes. Her voice was hoarse, a whisper. She needed to remember why she was here. This wasn’t about them. This was about her friends. People had died. She could be next. So could he, for that matter. Unless he was the one responsible for the murders?

He peered at her, took off his glasses, folded them and put them in his pocket. He ran his hand over his face and squinted at her, then turned away. Then back at her. “Sorry,” he said. “I just…You…For a moment…you looked like someone I used to know.”

“I am someone you used to know.”

She could see recognition dawn slowly. His eyes went wide and he took a step back, staring, not letting his eyes leave her. “Meggie?”

She nodded, winced slightly at his old pet name for her.

He came close to her, and she felt all the power of him again, a strength that had kept her rapt and spellbound twenty years before. Control. She needed to remain in control. It was twenty years later and she wouldn’t be hurt again.

She said, “I came to see you. I need to talk with you.”

“Meggie. You look so…”

“Different? I am different, Alec.” She took a breath before she could continue. “I drove up yesterday. I got here last night. Someone at the sheriff’s office told me it was your day off.”