Bitterroot Lake by Alicia Beckman (best books for 20 year olds txt) 📗

had taken Jeremy’s car—why had he left the keys in it, anyway? It was all that, and the dream.

Did she really think he’d have dismissed the dream, called her crazy? Yes. Jeremy Carter considered himself a rational, practical man. And she was young and in love, and while she wanted to share everything—everything—with him, she had not risked telling him anything that might tarnish his opinion of her.

She reached the top of the hill, the same spot where she’d stopped a day or two before. Found a stick and sat on the bench, scraping the mud off the soles of her feet. Mud, feet, mud, feet, blood, tears, mud, feet.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. None of it. Losing Jeremy meant losing her own future.

She flung the stick away and slid her hands up her sleeves, warming them on her arms.

What had Connor meant when he said Jeremy had let the past go, but she hadn’t? How would he know what Jeremy thought about the crash?

And why was Leo targeting Janine? He couldn’t seriously think she’d cooked up this whole letter business as an excuse to kill Lucas Erickson and terrify the rest of them.

No. It was because Janine had run. She’d seen the body and she’d fled to the lodge and hidden. What would she have done if Sarah hadn’t found her there?

Would she be dead, too?

Sarah closed her eyes, remembering the terror radiating from her old friend.

Janine was convinced that someone had been in the law office with her. Watching her. Someone who’d slipped in after the secretary left, leaving Lucas there alone, and slipped out before she returned. Someone who didn’t expect another visitor to come in the front.

A slow heat rose up Sarah’s spine. As if she was being watched right now. The heat became a chill and she froze. Felt her breath go shallow, her jaw tighten. Was it better to act casual, turn slowly, try to fool whoever was watching you into thinking you had no idea, or to whip around and catch them in the act? She and Noah had debated that one time, over biscotti and kombucha at the co-op when he’d felt himself being watched. The eyes, his biology teacher had said, sense information beyond the visual. If you can sense when someone is looking at you, Noah had countered, can the person doing the staring sense when you know?

But there was no one there. No one in the woods, not even a sparrow.

This whole stupid thing had turned her into a blubbering idiot, scaring herself for no reason.

This was why she hadn’t told Jeremy about the dream. Why she regretted telling Holly, the day of the attack.

The wind was whipping up again. As she headed for the lodge, the question clung to her brain: had whoever saw Janine leaning over Lucas’s body known she’d sensed their presence?

And what would they do next?

But short of a hypnotic trance, Sarah didn’t have a clue how to help Janine identify who might have seen her. And after this dream nonsense, she wanted nothing more to do with the unseen world. This one was trouble enough.

Outside the mudroom door, she stopped to wipe her feet on the mat. Glanced at the phone box. Remembered the penny in her pocket.

“Okay, okay.” She rolled her eyes, tossing the words into the ether. To the ghost of her dead husband, or whoever was listening.

When had she last eaten?

Where were Holly and Janine?

And where had Caro’s journal gone?

“I know I left it right here,” she said out loud. On the kitchen counter, next to the plate that had held this morning’s coffee cake. Too bad Janine couldn’t afford to open a café; that coffee cake alone would guarantee success.

Sarah grabbed an apple. In the main room, Holly and Janine sat on the couch, speaking intently, voices low.

They broke off when they saw her, Holly following Sarah’s gaze to the journal, which lay on the coffee table next to the box of letters and a stack of albums and scrapbooks.

“Amazing,” Janine said, “that your family saved all this stuff. I’ve never even seen a picture of my grandmother.”

“I’d never seen anything in that trunk,” Sarah said. “Con and Caro must have brought it with them when they gave the house in town to our grandparents and moved out here.”

To the lodge. Everything came back to the lodge.

“And then”—she was guessing now—“it got stashed in the carriage house apartment and forgotten.”

“Amazing. Back to work for me,” Janine said, pushing herself off the couch. “Earning my keep.”

When the door closed behind her, Sarah said the words she’d wanted to say for so long, but hadn’t, wanting to hear them first. She didn’t have that luxury anymore, if she ever had.

“I’m sorry, Holly. For everything I’ve done to keep us apart.”

Silence. Then, quietly, “Me too.”

Sarah sat beside her sister, the couch still warm from Janine. “What are you going to do?”

“Read those letters. Flip through the albums and scrapbooks.”

“I meant back home, after this. Why didn’t you tell me you lost your job?”

“You had enough on your plate. I’ll figure out something. Does Mom seriously want to sell?”

“I don’t think she knows what she wants. She practically begged me to come help her with this place, and where is she?”

“Either she’s burning to paint—”

“She would not let me in her studio. No way.”

“Or she thinks if she leaves us out here by ourselves, we’ll work through our differences.”

Like she’d done when they were kids. “Hol, do you know—has she said—is she sick?”

“No. Good God, no. What did she say? Why do you think that?”

“She didn’t say a thing. It’s just—and you may not want to hear this. But what if the girl in the dream, whoever she is … She came to me twenty-five years ago, to warn me. What if she’s telling me now that someone else is in trouble? At first I thought it was Abby, because of the light hair, but she’s fine. I mean …”

“Except for