“Do you think that’s the case?”
She stared straight ahead at the interstate, flanked by wooded hills. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
Chapter 4
Maggie Galway unlocked the front door to the small two-bedroom cabin. She used the key the owners had given to her, and she was already in love with the place. If not for her guilt at cutting out on her sister and Luke Jackson, she would have squealed with pleasure at the cabin’s sheer perfection. Its location, its size, its homey décor, its stunning setting on a crystal-clear Adirondack lake. Even the choice of the locally made soap and shampoo in the bathroom was perfect.
This would work, Maggie thought as she set her suitcase on the floor by the kitchen table. She would finish the rewrite on the introduction to her dissertation, and she would put her demons to rest.
She couldn’t tell Ellen.
Good-hearted, can-do Ellen would want to come up here and fix things, and that was part of the problem. Soft-spoken and more introverted than anyone else in her family, Maggie had been letting her sister and parents and even her aunt and uncle do the hard work of fighting her demons for her. She needed to deal with them herself.
What she regretted most right now was having let a strange man get to her—to the point that she’d gone straight to Luke. Finding herself standing in front of him, saying too much, she’d realized her mistake and made a few lame excuses and left. She was sure that encounter had contributed to Luke’s presence now.
The man had done nothing. He’d shown up after one of her classes, told her that he found Jane Austen fascinating and wished her well in Saratoga. She didn’t recognize him as a student or faculty, but so what?
She put him out of her mind. She’d overreacted. All there was to it. Her parents had encouraged her and Ellen to trust their instincts, but sometimes they were wrong. In this case, hers had been corrupted by her nervousness over her talk and her obsession with her and Ellen’s kidnapping and near-death eight years ago.
By now, Ellen had received the note and knew the score—knew why, in fact, Maggie had opted out of their celebratory champagne dinner that evening. With Luke in Saratoga, Ellen had her hands full. She would understand Maggie’s thinking, or at least forgive her. They’d been through hell together eight years ago. Maggie didn’t know why her experience had bubbled up all of a sudden, but it had.
And it was up to her to deal with it.
This retreat would make a positive difference in her life, she thought as she crossed the worn wood floor to a large window overlooking the lake and surrounding hills. Returning to the Adirondacks was like climbing back on a horse after being thrown—even if it had taken her eight years.
There were other cabins on the lake, and a few year-round houses. The location wasn’t as remote as it felt. Not like the cabin where she and Ellen had run with their mother—only to be discovered by a killer. That one was deeper in the Adirondack Park, a vast tract of protected land encompassing six million acres in northeast New York.
Breathe.
A snowstorm. Two teenagers dragged out of their warm cabin, tied to a boulder…
“Finish the story,” Maggie whispered. “It didn’t end there. Finish it.”
She could feel the cold as if she were back in that frigid Adirondack winter, dressed in vintage clothes. She remembered she’d lost a sequined shoe from the ’70s.
Their mother had found her daughters, putting herself at greater risk.
Maggie smiled, ignoring tears rising in her eyes. Her intrepid mom who’d made millions in a series of clever investments that had worked out better than she’d ever imagined. The money hadn’t thrown off her parents’ marriage as much as the doubts and challenges her mother faced being married to a dedicated Texas Ranger. Maggie had assumed divorce was a certainty, but the killer who’d nearly dispatched his family had prompted Jack and Susanna Galway to make a real effort to prove how much they mattered to each other.
Maggie wasn’t sure what all had been involved in their reconciliation, but she was glad her parents had worked through their problems, in spite of the hurdles and the long odds. They’d agreed from the start their daughters weren’t to be asked to take sides. Who was the bad guy, Susanna Galway or Jack Galway? There was no bad guy.