Dark water disappearance, p.1
Dark Water Disappearance, page 1
“Okay. Then we—” she emphasized the word by wagging her finger between the two of them “—will look into things together.”
He shook his head. “No way. I have no idea what’s going on. It could be dangerous.”
She smiled what she knew was a cold smile. “It’s cute how you think I was asking your permission.” Arrogant was more accurate. A pity he hadn’t grown out of that unattractive character trait. “I wasn’t. I’m in this whether you like it or not.”
“You’re as stubborn as ever even though you have no training to deal with whatever this might turn out to be.”
“That’s why working together is the perfect solution. Your police training may come in handy, but you have absolutely no diplomatic skills whatsoever if your tête-à-tête with the sheriff earlier was any indication. Together we’re perfect.”
Heat flamed in her cheeks. “I mean we make the perfect team for getting to the bottom of whatever is going on here at Lakewood House.”
DARK WATER DISAPPEARANCE
K.D. Richards
K.D. Richards is a native of the Washington, DC, area, who now lives outside Toronto with her husband and two sons. You can find her at kdrichardsbooks.com.
Books by K.D. Richards
Harlequin Intrigue
West Investigations
Pursuit of the Truth
Missing at Christmas
Christmas Data Breach
Shielding Her Son
Dark Water Disappearance
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Detective Terrence Sutton—Homicide detective raised in Carling Lake, New York.
Nikki King—Former political aide and owner of Lakewood House.
Sheriff Lance Webb—Carling Lake sheriff.
James West—Owner of West Gallery in Carling Lake and brother to Ryan and Sean West.
Rose Whitmer—Owner of Lakeside Diner.
Jill Sutton—Terrence’s missing sister.
Charity Jackson—Terrence’s aunt who raised him and Jill.
Peter Bonny—Caretaker of Lakewood House.
For Shara and Kendra
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
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Excerpt from What Is Hidden by Janice Kay Johnson
Chapter One
Dominique “Nikki” King turned her Camry onto the familiar road leading to the house that had been her refuge for as long as she could remember. The limbs of the decades-old trees lining either side of the street swayed gently as if waving hello to an old friend. She made a right turn into the horseshoe driveway and got her first look at the modest farmhouse she hadn’t seen in years.
Lakewood House. The house had been christened at some point years before her grandfather bought it. The name had stuck.
Her chest tightened. She pulled to a stop and let the car idle.
It was the first time she’d been back to her grandfather’s house since he’d passed away a year earlier. It was her house now. Her grandfather had employed the services of a local handyman as a caretaker, and she had kept the man on retainer after she’d inherited the home. But it looked as if the monthly stipend had only extended to the basics. There’d never been much of a lawn. There was too much tree cover for any kind of grass to flourish, and since the house sat on nine acres of land, there weren’t any neighbors within sight to complain about the curb appeal. The once bright white wooden siding was dirty, dingy, and several shingles were missing. The black shutters were faded and chipped. The windows themselves desperately needed a good scrubbing, and the pronounced dip in the two stairs leading up to the wraparound porch served as a warning to take care to anyone approaching the front door.
Tread carefully.
A warning she should have heeded more generally in life. Then she might not have found herself back in Carling Lake, New York, unemployed and a pariah among the political world she’d worked so hard to enter.
Just a temporary blip, she told herself for the thousandth time. It had almost become a mantra. She’d been putting off coming back to the house for too long, anyway. There were decisions that needed to be made. Whether to sell the house or keep it and rent it out. Carling Lake was a tourist town, so it wouldn’t be too difficult to find renters on a regular basis. But the idea of strangers tromping through the house didn’t sit well. Sleeping in her old bedroom. Making a mess of her grandfather’s spotless kitchen. She wasn’t sure she could stand it.
Well, there was plenty of time to figure all that out. Right now, she just wanted to get unpacked and settled in.
Without a job, she had no way to pay for her Washington, DC, apartment, so she’d broken the lease and put all of her furniture in storage. Two extra large suitcases of clothes, three boxes of knickknacks and miscellaneous items, and her laptop were pretty much all she had to her name at the moment. It was a precipitous fall for the girl voted most likely to become the first Black female president in her senior year of high school. For as long as she could remember, she’d been interested in politics, an interest she’d inherited from her grandfather, who had served on the Carling Lake town council for nearly twenty years.
After years of internships that didn’t pay well, if at all, and various entry-level jobs, she’d climbed the ladder and finally landed a position as a policy aide to Thomas Manco, a member of New York’s delegation to the House of Representatives. Her dream job working for a man she’d thought was an honest public servant with the sincere desire to help the people he represented.
Oh, how wrong she’d been on that one.
“Hey, you left DC to get away from all that,” she said out loud, shaking thoughts of her ruined career from her head just as her phone chirped the receipt of a text message.
You there yet?
Carolyn Montgomery, Nikki’s only work friend who hadn’t stopped returning her calls and texts. Carolyn was the only person she’d told she was leaving DC for Carling Lake.
Just got here. Will call you tomorrow if I make it through the night. JK.
Nikki tossed the phone back into her purse, shut off the engine and exited the car.
She wheeled her suitcases to the porch stairs and tested that the tread would hold before hauling them, one at a time, to the front door. Last week, when she’d decided to temporarily relocate to Carling Lake, she’d contacted Pete Bonny, the man her grandfather had hired to act as caretaker of Lakewood House when he’d moved to Florida two years earlier. Pete had assured her the property, though a little worse for wear over the years, was perfectly habitable. She hoped he was right. Living in DC wasn’t cheap, and what little money she’d managed to save would go quickly, even in Carling Lake, if she had to rent a place.
Luckily, her key turned easily in the lock, and the front door swung open into a living area that looked into the kitchen. The home’s layout was unusual, but her grandfather had opened up as many walls as he could to make the home feel as spacious as possible. A small dining room sat adjacent to the kitchen, and tucked into the rear corner of the main floor was her grandfather’s study, which was about the same size as the walk-in closet in her apartment back in DC.
The second floor was apportioned into three bedrooms—a tiny guest room and two larger rooms that shared a Jack-and-Jill bath, the only bathroom in the house. A cozy, if oddly configured, space by anyone’s standards, but it had been perfect for her and her grandfather.
She got busy pulling the dirty covers off the furniture and bringing in her belongings from the car. She’d just set the last box from her car on the living room sofa when the sound of an engine bloomed outside. She stepped to the open front door and watched as a metallic blue pickup bounced its way toward the house. Hitched to its rear was a boat Nikki recognized even without seeing the lettering on its side.
Annalise. Her grandfather had named the boat after his beloved late wife, Nikki’s grandmother, who had died the year before she’d been born.
The truck pulled to a stop behind her red Camry, and Pete Bonny hopped out of the driver’s side.
Pete was only ten years older than her thirty-two years, but hard living had aged him. At just after three in the afternoon, his eyes were already bloodshot, and his thinning brown hair stood up in tufts over his head. His orange-beige skin looked rubbery, as if he’d spent too much time under a tanning light or, more likely, out on Carling Lake without using sunscreen. A sizable beer gut hung over the waistband of his jeans. Still, when he smiled, she could see a hint of the heartthrob the teenage girls in town had swooned over many years ago.
Pete climbed out of the truck. “Well, aren’t you a sigh
Nikki grinned and bounded off the porch. “Hi, Pete.”
He pulled her in for a quick hug before stepping back. “Your granddad always bragged about how smart and pretty you were, but I don’t think he did you justice.” Pete winked.
Her grandfather had been openly affectionate. He’d made sure she knew how proud he was of her. Still, her heart clenched at Pete’s words—words she’d never hear directly from her grandfather again.
It had been more than a year since Bernard King had passed on peacefully in the Florida retirement home he’d moved to when the New York winters and the upkeep on his beloved Lakewood House had gotten to be too much for him. But she was still struggling to deal with the loss of the only real parent she’d ever had. Her mother and father had been more interested in calling themselves parents than in actually parenting once they were. High-powered careers as US diplomats had taken them all over the world, and caring for their only daughter hadn’t been a priority. They’d stuck her in a boarding school when she’d turned six. It had been a point of contention between Grandpa Bernie and his son, her father, for years, but thankfully, she had still been allowed to visit her grandfather on breaks and during the summer. Then, not long after her tenth birthday, her parents had been killed in a car accident. Grandpa Bernie was granted guardianship, and he’d immediately taken her out of the boarding school and brought her to live with him in Carling Lake.
It had been a transition for both of them. Bernard King had spent his lifetime building up his trucking-and-shipping company, King’s Trucking. As was tradition at the time, Grandma Annalise had raised their only son. But they were now all the family either of them had, and Grandpa Bernie had been determined to do things differently this time around. And he had, attending every dance recital, basketball game and piano concert that she’d been in. He’d bandaged scraped knees, set curfews and imposed punishments when called for. He’d been the father he hadn’t been to his son. The father his son hadn’t been in the ten years she’d known him.
She wasn’t sure if she’d ever come to terms with never hearing his voice again or simply lounging beside him on the Annalise in the middle of Carling Lake again.
She pushed away the tears that threatened to come and focused on Pete.
“...so I figured you might like to have the boat.”
“Thank you.” She forced a smile. “You didn’t have to go through all that trouble.”
Pete waved away her words. “No trouble at all. It is your boat after all. Your grandfather allowed me to use it whenever I wanted, part of my compensation for looking after the house, so I primarily kept it at my place. But since you’re back now, you should have it.”
Pete didn’t exactly sound thrilled about having to give up the boat, but he was right that it, as well as everything else her grandfather had owned, was now hers. Maybe she should have told Pete he could keep it, but what was the point of living lakeside if she didn’t have a boat to take advantage of the lake.
Pete ducked his head and stepped back toward the truck. “Well, I’ll get her docked for you.”
Nikki took a step back toward the house. “Let me just put on my boots and I’ll come help you.”
Pete flashed a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “No, no need. I can handle this alone. You get yourself settled in.”
Truth be told, as much as she was happy to have the boat, launching and docking it was the last thing she wanted to deal with at the moment. She was exhausted from the drive from DC, and she wanted to unpack and make a trip to the grocery store before it got dark.
She waved to Pete as he hopped back in the truck and started toward the lake at the back of the house.
Nikki walked through the space, memories rushing her as she did. In the kitchen, she ran a hand over the wooden countertops. A slip of paper on the floor caught her eye. A business card, homemade by the looks of it. There were no words or lettering on the card, only a symbol: a yellow fleur-de-lis. The only person who should have been in the house in the last year was Pete. It must belong to him.
She pocketed the card to ask Pete about it when he returned from launching the boat and focused on the more pressing task at hand.
By the time she’d lugged her two suitcases up to the second floor, she was breathing hard and wondering whether unpacking couldn’t wait a little longer.
The first door to the right of the stairs opened into the tiny bedroom she’d occupied when she was home from college for holidays.
Nikki rolled the suitcases past the room and toward her grandfather’s bedroom. Her grandfather had taken anything of value with him when he’d moved to Florida, leaving his room a blank canvas. But that wasn’t why she’d chosen this room. It was the bigger of the two rooms that opened into the bathroom, and unlike her tiny room, it had an unobstructed view of Carling Lake.
She might not have remembered the roads in Carling Lake, but she remembered how gorgeous the sun was rising over the water in the mornings.
It was too late to catch the sunrise, but Nikki glanced out of the window anyway. The lake was beautiful at any time of the day.
But it wasn’t the lake that caught her attention now.
Pete jogged back toward the house. She was too far away to see the expression on his face, but from his body language, she could tell something was very, very wrong.
Nikki turned and dashed back down the stairs, throwing open the back door of the house as Pete bounded onto the back porch.
“What is it? Are you okay?” she asked, leading Pete to one of the old rocking chairs that lived out there.
“There’s...a...body,” Pete said between labored breaths.
Nikki turned and squinted toward the water. Her eyes scanned the lakeshore until they landed on something, she wasn’t sure what. Red plaid maybe? Whatever it was, it was lying partially submerged in the lake.
She pulled her phone from her back pocket and dialed 911 before handing it to Pete. “When the dispatcher picks up, tell them what’s going on. I’m going to take a look.”
She ignored Pete’s protests and stepped off the porch, walking fast toward the thing she’d seen.
As she got closer, it became clear that the object was a person. A female. And she looked young, late teens or early twenties, but it was hard to tell.
Nikki slowed. She was sure the police wouldn’t want her to disturb the scene, but if the woman needed help, she didn’t want to wait.
She lay in a prone position, her legs still in the water, dirty reddish-brown hair obscuring her face. Her body, the air around her even, was so motionless, it wasn’t really necessary for Nikki to feel for a pulse. She did anyway, reaching for the woman’s ashen wrist and pulling away, unsurprised when she didn’t find any sign of life. Whoever the poor soul was, she’d been dead for quite some time.
Nikki stepped back, careful to plant her feet in the same soft ground she’d trodden moving forward, in an attempt to disturb the scene as little as possible. Now that the initial shock had worn off, she could see that the stranger was soaked from head to toe.
Maybe she’d fallen overboard and drowned, the currents of the lake washing her up on the property. Nikki said a quick prayer, then hurried back to the house to wait for the police with Pete.
It had been a long, trying day for her, but not nearly as bad a day as it had been for the poor woman lying lakeside.
Chapter Two
Terrence Sutton weaved his way through the streets of Carling Lake. He passed the turn leading to his aunt Charity’s house, keeping his car pointed toward the sheriff’s department. Good manners dictated his first stop in Carling Lake should be family, but this time, social niceties would have to take a back seat. He wasn’t in town for a social visit.
He hadn’t heard from his sister, Jill, in a week. While it wasn’t unusual for his sister to let his calls and texts languish for a little while if she was caught up in a story, she had never been out of contact for so long. She knew he worried about the chances she took as an investigative reporter, digging up information many people would rather keep hidden. Over the years, they’d worked out a routine of sorts. When he called, she’d get back to him within twenty-four hours even if that response was only a quick text saying she was too busy to talk. And the same went when Jill called and left a message for him. His job as a detective with the Trenton, New Jersey, Police Department had its own set of dangers.
