Page 42 of The Woman By the Lake

But necessarily.

And then I was going to go have a chat with Doc Riggs.

NINE

Bermuda Triangle

Nadia

I braked beside Riggs’s big, shiny, fancy truck in his driveway on a dramatic skid of gravel.

I did this because I’d just finished buying a Santa beanie, an American Flag, and the apparatus to fly it from a post on my front porch.

And I’d also spent the last hour and a half reading about Ray Andrews, Richard Sandusky, Ezra Corbin, Carrie Molnar, the Misted Pines “Coven” and their reason for forming.

Not to mention not one, not two, but three articles in the local paper that told tales of the Haunting of Whitaker Lake, which shared the heretofore unknown knowledge that it hadn’t been only three years since someone lived in my cabin.

It had been fifteen.

In fact, the judge-appointed, but bitterly disputed trust that was managing the Whitaker brothers’ estates had made the decision to sell off the lake and its properties because they’d been sitting mostly derelict. This was because no one would stay in either of them, including Riggs’s house, for more than a few weeks. This due to the unexplained, but highly creepy stuff that happened there.

As such, I jumped out of my car, raring for another go-round with Riggs, because, yes, perhaps I should have looked into things more before I leaped.

But first, who knew you had to research a small town for their serial killer history, and second, research the cabin you were considering renting for news of recent hauntings.

He also should have told me.

I was marching toward his house when Riggs all but burst out of the front door in a full-on jog, coming at me.

This surprising circumstance, of course, made me halt.

“Jesus, Nadia,” he said when he got to me and grabbed my upper arms. “You okay?”

He knew my state of mind, for sure, considering his history, and his knowledge of mine. And it was sweet, his obvious concern at me skidding to a dramatic stop in his driveway.

He also knew my cabin was possibly haunted.

So there was that.

“No, Riggs, I’m not okay!” I yelled. “I just got back from lunch at the local diner where I got an earful from a shopkeeper who told me my cabin was haunted! Why didn’t you?—?”

I wasn’t able to finish that because Riggs looked over my head, gritted out, “Kimmy,” let my arms go but grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the front door, doing this yanking his phone out of his back pocket.

I was so astonished by this reaction, I didn’t think to say anything until we were inside. And then I couldn’t say anything because he was hauling me down into his living room, then up, up and up into his kitchen.

Jeez. If this place was wild from the outside, it was wilder inside.

One could say it wasn’t too much of a shocker Lincoln Whitaker blew his brother and wife away, if the chaotic design of his house reflected his mental state.

And then I couldn’t say anything because I was confronted with an eight or nine-year-old mini-Riggs sitting at the counter in the kitchen eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

His mouth full of sandwich, his silvery-blue eyes looked to me, his dad’s hand in mine, then back to me.

I stopped still.

Riggs let my hand go.

“Ledger, this is our new neighbor, Nadia. Nadia, this is my boy, Ledger,” Riggs introduced, then said, “Yeah, it’s me, Kimmy. What the fuck?”

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