“I got it.” She strode away toward the other building. “More stuff from your boyfriend?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, I guess ex-boyfriend. My condolences.”
Dumbfounded, I blurted out, “I’m not gay.”
“Oh.”
I frowned. “Because I’m from San Francisco?”
She laughed. “No, from the ribbons of sports stuff I found in the box in the hall. Seemed like two different guy sizes.”
Christopher was definitely shorter and slighter than I was. I darted ahead to open the door for her.Mouse shot in first going right to a water dish. “Nosy, much?”
Unrepentant, she breezed through the doorway with a laugh. “Guilty. Though I guess it could have been for a woman or nonbinary. Sorry about that. I have a very active imagination.”
“Evidently.”
I followed her into the building and froze in the doorway. The massive room was nearly all windows showing off brilliant natural light. It was part atrium, part studio with two massive tables in the center of the room. One was littered with art supplies and papers, the other was a drafting desk tilted up with a large piece of paper taped to the surface.
Watercolor and pastels slashed over the cream paper, and puddles of water were drawn on top as if someone was looking through a window at the view. It was of the lake with snow coming down. Neither of our houses were in the picture. Instead, trees dominated the landscape. Tendrils of smoke came off the water possibly from the difference in temperature or early morning mist.
The lake was a mix of ice and rushing water as it flowed over the rocks.
The whole thing reminded me of the sounds from my previous night’s dreams.
Uncannily so.
When I got closer, I noticed something in the water.
“What’s that?”
She set the box down and met me at the table. “Oh, I didn’t even realize I did that. The car shows up in my drawings sometimes.” Her shoulder brushed my arm. “There’s an old car at the bottom of the lake. A few people have tried to bring it upover the years, but something always happens to prevent it from making it to the surface.”
The information tickled at something at the back of my brain.
Being a horror writer, I saw the worst case scenarios as fodder for the monsters in my book. Sometimes they were supernatural monsters, but more often than not people were the real evil.
I knew that all too well.
My fingers fisted at my side. A wet nose nudged my hand. I unclenched and absently pet Mouse. “Does the car have to do with the missing kids?”
She wandered over to the coffee maker in the kitchenette of the wide open space. “That’s a good question. I’m not exactly sure, nor am I the scuba kind of girl to go looking. Every time someone tries to take underwater photos they don’t come out. The stories vary from an old Chevy to a Honda Civic.”
My system fairly vibrated at the new information.
“Since the podcast came out, a lot more people have snooped around. Everyone loves an unsolved mystery. Now it’s just another part of Haven’s lore.”
“Lore?”
She laughed as she turned on the kettle and poured beans into a grinder. “There’re a few stories about the history of Haven,” she said over the noise. “Some more benign ones about the town being a safe place for people who want to start over.” She glanced over her shoulder at me. “Kind of like you, California boy.”
I didn’t say anything.
She turned off the grinder then set a filter into a Chemex glass pour-over coffee maker. The sharp scent of coffee and brown sugar filled the air a few moments later. “A lot of people settled here for farming until that started to dry up when I wasa teenager. We won’t talk about the government overreach there and why farms fail, I have an appointment.”
My eyebrows shot up.
