Elizabeth watched a tall, thin shadow dive into the lake. She sank down beside Shepherd. “Oh, shit,” she murmured. “It’s Bill.”
The man who had emerged from the thicket with Bill was wearing a sheriff’s department uniform, but it was not Rountree or his deputy; he was big enough to be both of them put together, she thought. He hurried to Shepherd and began to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The Wagner imposter took her arm and led her away.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Elizabeth stared at him. He looked about Bill’s age, with clever brown eyes and good cheekbones. “Are you Milo?” she said finally.
“Of course.” He glanced back at the lake. “If you’re okay, I think I’ll go back and help Bill.”
She heard him hit the water as the sheriff and Clay burst into the clearing. Rountree took in the scene, and walked toward her. “Are you all right?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“Then you want to tell me what’s going on down here?”
Elizabeth stared out at the lake. She could just make out two swimmers circling in midlake. Two swimmers; not three.
“Alban did it,” she said softly.
“Well, I knew that,” drawled Rountree. “I just want to know what this stunt was all about. And what is Hill- Bear doing here? Will somebody tell me that?”
Elizabeth shook her head. She felt dizzy.
Rountree steadied her arm. “Easy, now. Clay, get her back up to the house and call for an ambulance. I’ll stay here and give these fellas a hand.”
Elizabeth saw Dr. Shepherd’s legs move a little, and the uniformed man bent down to say something to him; then she turned and followed Clay back to the house.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ELIZABETH DID NOT SEE them again until much later, after the ambulance had come and gone, and Taylor in diving gear had retrieved the body of Alban and a sackful of bones from the lake. Bill and Milo had stayed in the library for over an hour talking to Rountree, Dr. Chandler, and Captain Grandfather, while Elizabeth and Mildred had done what they could to comfort the rest of the family.
It was nearly midnight before the meeting ended. Dr. Chandler announced that he was going to the hospital to look in on Shepherd, and left by the front door as Elizabeth was coming back downstairs. She saw Bill in the hall saying good night to Wesley Rountree, and she slipped into the kitchen to get coffee and sandwiches to offer in exchange for an explanation of the night’s events.
A few minutes later, she brought the silver tray into the library, where Milo was sitting at the desk making sketches on a sheet of typing paper and Bill was looking out the window at Alban’s castle, just visible in the light of a quarter moon.
Elizabeth set down the tray on the coffee table and settled on the couch beside him. “I brought you some coffee and sandwiches,” she said, talking to Milo. “Come and eat.”
Milo made a few more notes before coming over to join them. Bill said nothing. His forehead, under a thatch of blond hair, was wrinkled, the way it was when he was tense or deep in concentration.
Elizabeth tried again. “I called the hospital,” she announced. “Carlsen is all right, but they’re keeping him overnight. I’m going to see him tomorrow. What-what did the sheriff say?”
“That we were damn fools,” said Milo, smiling.
“It’s over,” snapped Bill. “Case closed.”
“But what made you come here? How did you know?”
Bill poured himself a cup of coffee. “It was all there in your letters, Elizabeth.”
“How could it have been in my letters when I didn’t know?” Elizabeth demanded.
“I mean all the information was there; that, plus what you told me on the phone the morning after Eileen was killed. I had to put it together, though.”
Elizabeth stared at him in disbelief. She turned to Milo, expecting to see the knowing grin of a fellow practical joker, but he merely nodded in agreement.
“Look,” said Bill impatiently. “You told me that Eileen’s painting was missing, and that she had been painting by the lake, and I wondered if the lake had any significance. With Eileen dead, the only person likely to know if the lake meant anything special to her was the psychiatrist you mentioned: Nancy Kimble. So I asked her.”
“But she’s in Vienna!”
“Yeah. I got her address from the med school and sent her a telegram.” He fished a crumpled yellow envelope out of the pocket of his jeans and handed it to Elizabeth.
She unfolded it and read aloud. “Early in treatment, patient occasionally mentioned woman’s face in lake. Please explain query. Nancy Kimble.” Elizabeth looked up. “How did you get her to tell you this?”
Milo coughed. “I believe she got the impression that we were colleagues of hers.”
“You said you were doctors?” Another thought occurred to her. “But, Bill, Eileen was seeing everything in those days! Demons, visions, who knows what? How did you know this wasn’t another hallucination?”
“Because Eileen was dead.”
“If somebody stole the painting of the lake, and Eileen had been seeing a face in the lake, then we figured there had to have been a face in the lake for her to see,” Milo explained.
“But whose?”
“Alban’s fiancee, Merrileigh Williams. The one you told us had disappeared shortly before their wedding was to have taken place. I wondered if that had been arranged. Maybe she was out to marry the boss’s son, and Alban changed his mind, or maybe she had been fooling around with some other man. I don’t know. We found her bones, but they won’t tell us why she was killed.”
“A skeleton also won’t tell you who it was!” snapped Elizabeth.
“Oh, yes, it will,” said Milo, leaning forward eagerly. “I study that kind of thing, you know. Forensic anthropology. Mostly burial mounds and things like that, but the principle’s the same. We were lucky to have recovered the entire skeleton. He wrapped her in a sack when he dumped her, which prevented the bones from scattering. That would have been tough! Anyway, the sagittal sutures indicated that we were dealing with a person approximately twenty-two years of age. Definitely female; we found the pelvic bone; and the dentition indicated-”
“Okay, okay, I believe you. You identified her from the bones.”
“Well, we didn’t, actually,” Milo admitted. “You said a skeleton couldn’t tell you who it was, so I thought I’d explain it to you. We could have done it that way, but the fact is, Dr. Chandler identified her from Eileen’s painting.”
“You found that, too?” gasped Elizabeth.
“Oh, sure. In the lake. In a sack with some bricks. The deputy found it close to the other sack. Apparently, Alban threw it in some time after he’d killed Eileen.”
He nodded toward an object covered with a cloth on the table by the window. Elizabeth went to look at the painting. It was still damp to the touch, but because it was done in oils the colors had not run.
Eileen had painted the lake at twilight-drab green water shadowed by the gray trees surrounding the lake. In the foreground, the shallows, a woman’s face floated just below the surface of the water. Her eyes were closed, and her hair streamed out in the water like weeds.
“She must have pictured it over and over in her mind to get so good a likeness,” said Bill softly.
Elizabeth shivered.
“We think she must have actually seen the face in the water six years ago, when Alban first dumped the body there. He had probably gone back for the sack and something to weight it down. It’s a miracle he didn’t catch her then.”
“But why didn’t she say anything about it?”
