Chapter 2 - The Name on the Box
I drove three miles before I realized I'd left my purse inside the house.
My phone was in my jacket, but my driver's license, bank cards, and the tiny brass key Mom had given me were still on the kitchen counter. I pulled into the gravel lot of a bait shop and stared at my empty passenger seat.
"You look like somebody hit you," said Leona Fitch through my open window.
Leona lived next door to the summer house. She was sixty-eight, carried a walking stick carved with trout, and had never treated me like a child. She'd seen my car pass and followed in her old station wagon.
"My father did," I said.
Her face hardened. "I saw him throw you. I was putting the hose away."
I showed her the red crescents on my wrist. "Clara says I pushed her."
"That woman has been practicing being helpless since the day you were born."
I wanted to laugh. Instead I started crying, the ugly breathless kind that comes when you've been holding it in for years. Leona passed me a clean handkerchief and let me finish.
"Mom's jewelry is missing," I said. "Clara practically admitted it."
"The green velvet box?"
I stared. "How do you know about that?"
"Because your mother once asked me to help hide it from Clara. This was before Nina got sick." Leona glanced toward the road. "There's something else. Nina kept a little camera in the sunroom when you were small. She used to joke it was the only one in the family that believed what it saw."
I remembered a white ceramic owl on the shelf above the sewing desk. Mom said it was a gift from her aunt. One glass eye always seemed shinier than the other.
"That camera's been there for years," I said.
"Maybe. Your father had the wiring repaired last spring. He told me the security system still worked."
A pickup slowed at the entrance to the lot. It belonged to Dad's business, Hart Marine Supply. The driver stared at us and kept going.
Leona lowered her voice. "Before your mother died, she gave me a sealed box. Told me to pass it to you if anyone ever tried to make you leave the lake house."
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"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because the box had a name on it. And it wasn't yours."
