she’d been at the time, utterly sad to the adult she was now. The soul of Sean Windom had died that night, although his body hadn’t gone until five years later, when he’d had an automobile accident.
Drunk again, people had whispered. Driving too fast.
A sixteen-year-old at the time, she had vehemently denied he’d wanted to die. Now…now she wasn’t so sure.
The thought seemed a betrayal of her father’s memory. Pushing it out of her consciousness, she wondered why the past weighed so heavily of late. Since her grandfather’s death in March, it had preyed on her mind and emotions.
The specter of cleaning out drawers and closets loomed over her. It was something she should do, but she dreaded it. Kate and Shannon would help, but she wasn’t ready to face that task just yet.
Another shiver chased down her spine. Glancing once more around the patio, she slowly entered the house and felt its haunting emptiness. She walked upstairs, but instead of going to her bedroom, she went to the suite that had belonged to her parents.
She hadn’t been back in here since she and her cousins had gone through and disposed of the clothing and personal items. Jess had searched the room last summer, sure he would find a clue to his sister’s death. They had found only the usual things—photo albums, mementos from anniversary dinners, birthdays and the few vacations they’d had.
Gazing at the portrait of her mother, Megan was overwhelmed with love and despair and questions.
“Why?” she whispered, staring into green eyes that were so like her own. “Why were you out on that lake? Why were you with a man hated by our family? Why?”
The woman in the portrait returned her stare, the rose-petal lips caught forever in a soft, dreamy smile of perfect happiness, her belly flagrantly rounded with child.
The painting had been commissioned by her father for the couple’s first anniversary. The unborn child was a girl. Herself. Megan Rose Windom, her parents’ only child.
Closing her eyes, she tried to recall those early years. The happy times, she termed them. She had dozens of pictures of picnics, horseback rides and birthday parties to prove it. Her mother had been radiant in each of the early snapshots. When had their lives changed?
The past haunted her like a ghost at a banquet, demanding attention but refusing to show itself fully. Sometimes she got flickers of memories, but not enough…never enough to put the pieces together….
Turning abruptly, she fled down the hall to her room.
Dressed for bed, instead of climbing in the four-poster, she lingered with one knee on the window seat as she observed the moonstruck landscape sweeping down the pasture to the lake. Its surface was unnaturally still, splashed with pewter by the brilliant moon, reflecting the scattered clouds that drifted over the peaks to the west of the ranch.
The lake.
It looked beautiful, lying in a glacier-carved bowl, mysterious…treacherous.
The lake.
The place where a sailing yacht had crashed upon the rocks, and her mother, unconscious from a blow on the head, had drowned. An accident? The police report said so.
The lake.
It pulled at her as if the deep, cool water was a magnet of liquid metal, calling to her in nightmares that made her wake with cries of despair, fear eating her soul.
She blinked the sting of unwelcome tears from her eyes, her body tensed as if to run for her life.
The silvery surface of the water winked back at her, ruffled by a sudden wind blowing down from the mountain. From the cottonwoods by the creek, she heard the harsh caw of the ravens.
The ravens. Once they’d frightened her, too. The birds had cawed the night before her mother’s death, or so it was rumored. She didn’t remember.
What would it take, she wondered, to gather all the pieces of the past and put them in order?
Fear shuddered through her, but she ignored it. She wouldn’t give in to terror like a child locked in a dark closet. The light of truth was what she needed to dispel the horror of her nightmares.
She would start in her grandfather’s quarters. Soon. Next week. She would start next week.
It was a promise to the child who lived in the dreams that troubled her.
Chapter Two
K yle Herriot held the door for his mother, closed and locked it, then set the alarm to go off if the door was opened again during the night. His mother’d had the security system installed fifteen years ago…shortly after his father’s death.
“I’m glad that’s over,” she said, setting her purse on the marble-topped foyer table. “There’s only the Windom girl left. When she marries, the name will be gone.”
“Unless she chooses to stick with her maiden name.” He followed his mother into the study. After pouring her a cordial of Riesling late harvest, he splashed an inch of brandy into a snifter and gazed out the windows that lined the western wall of the house.
The French doors opened onto a covered patio that looked out upon the mirror-smooth lake. One by one, the lights clicked off in the Windom mansion. He watched as headlights came on and the last vehicle in the circular drive sped away into the night.
Through the reflection in the glass, he saw his mother sit in her favorite chair, her eyes also drawn to the night scene beyond the windows.
“I’ve hated looking at that house,” she said in musing tones. “For fifteen years. Since your father died.”
He remembered the day as if it were yesterday. He’d been eleven, determined to go sailing with his dad, although he was on restriction due to some infraction of the rules. However, someone else had been with his father when he’d arrived at the boathouse on the lake.
Hearing an odd sound, he’d sneaked around the corner of the building and heard a woman crying. Sensing it would be unwise to butt in, he’d returned home, resentful that his plans had been interrupted due to adult problems.
“I wish I knew what happened that day,” Joan Herriot continued, a thread of bitterness in her tone as always when discussing her husband’s death.
“It was a long time ago.”
She sighed. “I know.”
They sat in silence for a while. Kyle saw the last light in the Windom house go off. Megan’s bedroom, he assumed, from which she’d watched her father weep over the loss of the wife who had died with another man.
He resisted a stirring of pity for her, shaking his head slightly, denying the emotion. Like his mother, he had no sympathy for the Windoms.
His grandfather had hated them. He’d called Megan’s grandfather an autocratic tyrant with an uncontrollable temper, a man who’d ruled the 5000-acre Windraven Ranch with an iron hand and little patience.
All that had changed after the old man’s stroke, of course. It turned out the ranch had been
