Loe raamatut: «On Thin Ice»

It was the wedding invitation.

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.”

LINDA HALL

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.

On Thin Ice
Linda Hall

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

CONTENTS

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

ONE

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.”

“You came…”

She nodded.

“After all this time…”

“Yes.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“A woman in your office said you like to ice fish on your day off. She told me where.”

He ran a hand across his chin, still looking at her. “No, I mean Whisper Lake Crossing. How did you know I was here?”

“I looked you up online.” Megan, who worked as a self-employed Web designer, had kept track of Alec over the years. She knew that he’d been the sheriff here for six years. She knew that he’d never married.

She continued, “I needed to come and see you because of Sophia Wilcox and Jennifer Moore. Do you remember them? From the wedding party?” She clamped her mouth shut. Had she really said the words wedding party? She had vowed she would not bring that up.

She shifted her position in the snow. Her toes were beginning to feel cold through her thin leather boots. “They died in separate car accidents last month. First, Sophia in California. Her brakes failed and she went down over a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. Then exactly a week later Jennifer died in Augusta. Here in Maine. Her brakes failed in precisely the same manner as Sophia’s brakes and she went off an embankment to her death. I don’t believe they were accidents….” She stopped, aware that she was now giving voice to her fears.

“Meggie.” His voice seemed to have broken, or maybe it was the sudden gust of wind that had carried it from her. Seeing him in person was reawakening things in herself which had lain dormant for twenty years—things she had not allowed herself to feel. Why had she thought coming here would be a good idea? What could he do?

“I know all about those so-called accidents,” he said. “You’re right. I’ve been wondering about that very thing.”

“I think I’m next,” she said.

“You might be.”

This startled her. She drew a breath and looked up at him. What did he know?

What happened next was so sudden it barely had time to register. His head jerked up. His eyebrows scrunched together as he looked at something beyond and behind her. Suddenly he reached forward, grabbed her shoulders with one arm and, with the other, he held her around the waist, brought her to him and dropped them both to the cold, snow-covered surface of the lake.

“Stay down,” he said into her ear.

“Wha…?” she managed.

“Someone. With a gun. On the shore,” he breathed. His mouth was close to her ear. He held her firmly.

It was then that she heard the sound of shots.

Minutes passed. Alec flattened himself against her and held his arm across her back. She felt the keen alertness in him. It was unbearable being this close to him.

More shots. Someone was after her! Someone knew she had come here! Long minutes passed, until finally, he crouched up beside her, his gun in his hand. “Stay down!” he hissed.

“Okay,” she whispered. He didn’t have to worry. She had no intention of getting up.

In the next minutes she felt or heard something that was like a thunder underneath them. In one horrific instant she thought the lake was cracking. She had visions of them escaping the shooter only to be plunged into the icy depths of Whisper Lake.

“The ice,” she said. “It’s breaking up!”

Alec brought his face close to hers and put a finger to her lips. “Shh. The ice is fine,” he said. “It’s just settling. It does that. It means nothing.”

After several minutes of quiet, he got up but kept low. When she attempted to do the same, he cautioned her with his hand to stay down. She placed her gloved palms together and lay her face against the ice and watched him crouch toward the shore.

The cold and wet ice was seeping up her pant legs and inside her jacket and soon she was shivering, whether from cold or fear she didn’t know. Probably fear. Someone had killed her friends and that same someone had followed her here! And she had no idea why.

It all had something to do with the card. As soon as she was handed that card when she had walked into the coffee shop this morning, she should have turned around and driven right back to her Baltimore home.

The shooting seemed to have stopped. She looked up. Alec was scanning the shoreline, frowning. Megan rose to her knees. “Are you sure you saw someone?” she asked. “Maybe it was a car backfiring,” she said.

He shook his head. “I saw someone. With a gun.”

She shuddered.

His gaze seemed to settle on her for a long time. He pulled off his toque and gave it to her. “You need a hat. You’re so cold, Meggie.”

“I’m Megan,” she whispered. “I go by Megan now.” She pronounced it Mee-gan. She pulled Alec’s toque firmly down around her ears. It was still warm from his head and it smelled like him.

There was a hint of a smile on his face. “Okay then, Megan…” He emphasized the name, elongating the e. “We have to get off this lake. Where’s your car?”

“I parked it up by the town dock.”

He said, “My stool and fishing gear are over there. I’m going to grab them and then we’re going to make tracks toward your car.”

“What about your car?”

“I live in town. I walked here.”

The light snow had stopped and ice crystals gave the air a sheen. As she walked in step with Alec, the events of the past two weeks came to her in sharp clarity.

Even though it had been a long time since the two had corresponded, it had been shock to learn that her school friend Sophia had died. She managed to find the e-mail address for Sophia’s sister, Pam, and conveyed her sympathy. Pam was pleased to hear from Megan after all these years, but wrote back that the entire thing was “fishy.” When the family was finally able to retrieve her car from the Pacific Ocean, they determined that the brake cables had been worn to the point of being nonexistent. This was so unlike Sophia, Pam wrote. Sophia always kept her things in pristine condition.

The police were looking into it, Pam had said. But they had no leads. Sophia left behind a husband and two children. Sophia was to have been maid of honor at Megan’s wedding to Alec.

Seven days later when her other friend Jennifer had died in the same kind of accident in Augusta, Maine, Megan began to be afraid. Jennifer was to have been her bridesmaid.

“They’ve gone,” he said. “Whoever it was.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“I saw someone get into a truck. We need to hurry, though.” She kept in step with him. “Megan, do you have your keys?”

She pushed shaky, cold fingers into her pocket and handed him the keys to her Toyota. He could drive. She didn’t think she would be quite capable.

“We’ve got to move,” he said. “We’re okay now. He’s gone. But we’ve got to move fast. We have to get off the lake. We’re sitting ducks out here.”

She found it hard to keep up with his long strides. About a dozen feet from the shoreline she felt her feet slip out from under her. Before she fell, Alec reached one strong arm over and caught her. When they reached the shoreline, he was still holding on to her tightly.

All of this closeness to a man who had hurt her so profoundly was sending her very being into confusion. His touch was melting feelings long dead and cold within her.

“Alec, I have to ask you something. Why did you leave?” she said as they reached the car.

He didn’t turn to her and she wondered if he hadn’t heard her. Perhaps not. Perhaps she only whispered it. She didn’t repeat the question. But would she finally learn why he had walked away from her twenty years before?

TWO

Alec put the keys in the ignition of Meggie’s silver Toyota and the engine came to life. He aimed it up toward the parking lot entrance. They needed to get out of there and he needed to figure out what was going on.

When they reached the street he pulled out his cell phone and made two calls in quick succession. The first was to his new deputy, Stu. “Someone is shooting out at the lake,” he said. “About half a mile north of the fishing shacks. Could be kids.” He knew it wasn’t kids, but he was conscious of keeping his demeanor calm. He didn’t want to show Meggie the rising panic he was beginning to feel. Megan, he corrected himself. “We need to check it out. Pick up any shell casings you can find. I’ll be there as soon as I can…” He described the precise location and urged Stu to hurry. As best as he could remember he described the truck he’d seen leaving. “Dark in color. Late model, small. I wasn’t close enough to get a make on it,” he said.

He glanced over at Megan, and everything in him wanted to protect her this time, not leave her. Not like last time.

His next call was to his trusted friend, retired Special Forces Major Steve Baylor. Steve and his wife Nori owned and managed Trail’s End Resort and Cabins. Alec often called upon Steve’s expertise and Alec could sure use his friend’s levelheaded help right about now. Steve had worked more cases with snipers and ballistics and trajectories in a month than Alec had in his whole career.

“Steve,” he said. “Someone’s shooting out on the lake. I have a woman with me. We both were caught in the cross fire.” For this call, Megan was just “a woman with him.” He couldn’t go into specific details on the phone. Even his closest friend, Steve, didn’t know about Megan, about that part of his life.

Calls complete, he closed his cell phone and put it back in his pocket. He was glad he had insisted on driving. The woman beside him, who hugged her arms around herself, was in no shape to drive. Of course she was more than “just a woman,” she was his Meggie. Even after all these years. He looked back at the road lest he let his gaze rest on her too long or spend too much time remembering and regretting.

Long-ago memories entered unbidden into his thinking as he drove. The girl he had fallen in love with had blond hair, which she wore straight and halfway down her back. Round glasses used to cover half her face. This Megan was thinner, more studious looking than his high school Meggie. His Meggie was pretty. This Megan, who folded her gloved hands on her lap to keep them from shaking, was stunningly beautiful. She still wore his hat. He liked the way it looked on her.

Alec already knew Sophia and Jennifer had died in car accidents. His brother Bryan, even from his home in New Mexico, kept track of everyone from those days. He’d called Alec with the news.

“They look to be too coincidental to me,” Bryan had said. “Don’t they to you?”

They did, indeed.

Megan shifted in her seat. He still couldn’t believe that she was here in Whisper Lake Crossing. This time he would believe what she told him. This time he would listen to his own heart rather than the arguments and reasonings of his family.

He hadn’t hung in there when Megan’s grandmother had died and his own brother was arrested for the murder. But, more importantly, he hadn’t believed Megan.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“My office.”

“Good. That’s good.” She looked down at her hands. “We need to figure this out.” She paused. “I just want you to know that I never would have come if there was any other way. Just so you know.”

She never would have come. Her words cut him to the quick. After his brother was arrested, he had tried to talk to her. He had called but she never answered. She hadn’t even attended the trial. She had disappeared, and he was the only person who knew why she had left town in such a hurry. She had been pregnant, carrying his baby. It was a secret they had kept from everyone.

Their child would be almost twenty years old now. A grown-up person in his or her own right. Through the years he had thought of hiring a private investigator to find his child. He never did. He knew he didn’t deserve to be the child’s father. This was his penance for betraying Megan. He had done the only thing he could do in the ensuing years—he prayed daily for his child. He knew he had no right to ask, but another part of him reminded him that the baby had been his, too.

Megan pulled off his hat and laid it on her lap and sighed. She fingered a few loose threads and looked out the window. He drove past a few businesses, mostly closed up for the winter now. With temperatures hovering at twenty degrees below, few people were about.

Megan looked up, seemed to remember something, leaned forward and opened the glove compartment. She said, “This morning someone gave me this.” She pulled a square white card out of a manila envelope.

He blinked at the large white rectangular card that Meggie held in her hands. The front of it was embossed in cherry blossoms and hearts. He recognized it immediately. It was one of their wedding invitations. She turned it over to show him the back. Written in large block letters were the words, HAPPY ANNIVERSARY NUMBER TWENTY. Their twentieth anniversary would have been on Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day was next week.

He skidded slightly on the slick road. “Who gave you that?” he asked, quickly regaining control of the wheel.

“This morning I went into a coffee shop and someone handed it to me. It had my name on it. Meg Brooks.”

“What coffee shop?”

“The one with the big boat painted along the side.”

He nodded. “The Schooner Café. Who gave that to you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I walked into the coffee shop and a waitress came over and asked me if I was Meg Brooks. When I said yes, she handed me this envelope. She said that someone had come in a few days ago with an envelope to give me when I showed up. When I looked at her in surprise, she said that everyone who comes to Whisper Lake Crossing eventually stops in there for coffee.”

“Who knew you were coming here?” he asked.

“Nobody knew I was coming here.” She placed the invitation on her lap.

Alec shook his head slowly. What was happening here? “Describe the waitress who gave that to you.”

“She was blonde, big hair, sort of heavy, seemed talkative.”

“That would be Marlene. She owns the Schooner Café.”

He did a quick U-turn on the mostly deserted street.

“Where are we going?” she asked him.

“The Schooner,” he said. “We need to talk to Marlene. We need to figure this out.”

Megan nodded. “That’s a good idea. Something weird is happening. I want to find out what.”

They stopped at a red light. He looked long and hard at her. He wanted to protect her. This time he didn’t want to walk away from her. But this time would he be strong enough to stay?