Sisters of the Lake by Linda Hughes

 

Release date: May 9, 2022
Subgenre: Suspense, Family Life

About Sisters of the Lake:

Three estranged sisters.

One mysteriously disappears.
Two must join forces to find her.

Sixty-five-year-old recluse Charlotte Westerly is horrified to awaken to find herself chained up in a strange place with a teen who is about to give birth. Accustomed to living at the bottom of a bottle of Scotch, she soon realizes it’s up to her to save them from their murderous captor.

Her sisters strike out in search of Charlotte. With one determined to keep dark family secrets buried and the other digging them up, deep-rooted disagreements must be resolved in order to find their sibling.

A gripping mystery that is part thriller and part family saga, with unexpectedly charming and disarming characters, SISTERS OF THE LAKE will sweep you along in suspense.

Excerpt:

Chapter One

Day One

Afternoon

Charlotte pressed a palm to her forehead in an attempt to come up with a single cogent thought. It felt like she’d had a lobotomy, her brain pithed to mush in a biology experiment. Struggling to sit up on the rigid cot she’d been lying on, she tried to get a fix on what had happened to her. Nothing made any sense. She’d been knocked out or something, coming to in this weird place. Her eyes burned, but she could see that the room she sat in was small and dark without a light or window. Dank, it smelled like decay. Her foot scraped across the floor. Dirt.

“What in hell happened to me and where in hell am I?” She barely recognized her own raw whisper.

A sharp sting pierced her skull. She fell back onto the cot, moaning not only in pain but in confusion, as well.

Then it hit her, the most alarming and most likely meaning behind all of this. Her sisters had confined her to this dingy place. No. Wait. Not sisters. Sister. Emily would never put her into a shoddy rehab facility like this. It was Anne. The bully of the trio, she’d always considered herself to be the boss of the three of them, all because she’d been the first of the triplets to be born.

“That bitch!”

*****

Emily looked over at Anne, who sat rod straight, all prim and proper, completely under control like always. Her immaculate white leggings and red silk blouse looked brand new. Her blood red lipstick and nail polish matched her blouse perfectly.

Emily, on the other hand, was a bundle of nerves, and her yellow polka dot sundress had certainly seen better days. The lipstick she’d swiped on that morning had been chewed off hours earlier and her last manicure bit the dust a week ago. Biologically she and Anne might be identical siblings but the way they dressed and behaved, not to mention the ways their minds worked, had become as different as if they were a saint and a sinner.

Charlotte, the third and missing member of the triad, had changed so much over the years that people seldom recognized her anymore as one of the triplets. There had once been a time when no one could tell them apart.

“I don’t know where Charlotte could be,” Emily fussed, fingering the small gold cross dangling from her necklace. “She promised to be here. I’ve called and called, but she doesn’t answer.”

“Oh, get over it, Emily. You know she’s sitting on her favorite stool, belly-up to her favorite bar, two fingers of her favorite Johnny Walker Red in a glass in front of her, schnockered out of her mind. The twit has no concern whatsoever for family matters. We need to proceed without her.”

Mr. Hanks, their father’s lifelong lawyer, a stodgy man of about seventy, cleared his throat in discomfort. Emily decided to shut up for the time being, which was always the best tack to take when Anne started calling the shots. There was no use arguing with her. She always won.

The women sat on a tufted leather divan in their father’s opulent study. This Victorian-era mansion had been their childhood home and that of their father until his death four days earlier. Their mother had died twelve years before, so their father had lived alone except for a cook and house manager, two housekeepers, a driver, a handyman, yard workers, and a nurse constantly coming and going. And a mistress or two, Emily suspected, even at his advanced age, if he’d maintained the same licentious habits he had when married.

For many years now there had also been Charlotte living in the carriage house on the property. It was a concession their father made only after much pleading from Emily, who feared that her sister would otherwise end up homeless.

At age sixty-five, it had been forty-seven years since Emily and Anne had left Traverse City, Michigan, and gone their separate ways. Emily loved their historic hometown, nestled as it was on Grand Traverse Bay that flowed into Lake Michigan at the little finger of the mitten in the lower peninsula of Michigan. With white sand dunes, lush forests, rolling farmlands, and pristine beaches all around, she would have stayed there forever had she not fallen head-over-heels in love on another beach far away.  

Emily met a Cuban immigrant on a Florida beach while on spring break from Central Michigan University. Carlos spoke no English at the time, but the language barrier didn’t stand in the way of an immediate pregnancy. Against the vehement objections of her father, Emily married Carlos and remained in Florida.

Anne loathed their hometown and escaped to the University of Texas three days after graduating from high school. She’d been employed at a Texas airline ever since, starting out as a ticket agent and working her way up, stomping on her stilettos to smash through the glass ceiling to become a vice president. She was on her third husband, George.  

Charlotte, on the other hand, the youngest of the triplets by a few minutes, had never married and never made it past that carriage house right there on the family estate in Traverse City.

*****

This wasn’t right. Even Bitch Anne wouldn’t do this.

Charlotte fingered the metal clamp that encircled her left ankle, gasping as her eyes and mouth widened into large “O’s” of disbelief. She’d finally come to her senses enough to scan her surroundings, only to discover she was locked into the clamp, which was welded to a chain that meandered toward an unknown source. Heavy, it hurt, even though it was lined with cheap faux fur. 

She hadn’t been locked into rehab again. Of that she felt certain. This was something else, something far more sinister.

Shaking in fear, an all-too-familiar anxiety attack curdled up to choke her. Using the tactic taught to her during one of her reluctant stints in rehab, she took long deep breaths, working through it. A neat Johnny Walker Red scotch whiskey would solve the problem much more readily.

“What the hell has happened to me and where in hell am I?” It was the second time she’d asked herself that question and, like before, she couldn’t come up with an answer.

Shivering in spite of the unusually hot day, she knew that her spate of chill had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with needing a drink. She looked down at herself and realized she wore the same sleeveless black dress and flat black shoes she’d had on at her father’s funeral earlier. When? How long ago had that been? She didn’t know. It felt like she’d been passed out for days.

Driven by macabre curiosity, she stood up unsteadily, like a drunk she thought, the irony not lost on her seeing that at the moment she was sober. Squinting in the dim light, she could see that her chain meandered out the door and into another room. As quietly as possible, she dragged her clunky tether the few steps it took to reach that door. It occurred to her that this was as stupid as walking into a dark room the way doomed characters always did in horror stories. But the idiots always went anyway.  

Charlotte opened the door half-way and peered into the next room. It was an old log cabin, its musty smell assaulting her. Reluctantly, afraid of what she’d find, she let her eyes follow the trail of her chain. A cement stump sticking up a foot from where it was buried in the middle of the floor held a spike. The end of her chain was welded to that spike, never to be undone.

Her breathing failed her again. How could this be? Gulping in air as fear overpowered her, she struggled to force her muddled brain to focus.

“Think, damn it, think!” Swiping at the beads of sweat sprouting up on her forehead, she forced herself to look around to try to make some semblance of sense out of this unimaginable nightmare.

Bare windows with mottled glass on the far wall allowed sunlight to filter in through the forest of trees outside, leaving dappled bits of light dancing across the room. She could see a primitive kitchen area with a stained porcelain sink and old-fashioned water pump. An obsolete black metal cookstove, the kind that used wood for fire, sat next to an antiquated white icebox. A card table with two metal folding chairs sat by a window. On the other side of the room sat a sunken couch and two well-worn Adirondack chairs. The place obviously had no electricity. The phrase “old as dirt” applied, considering that the entire floor was pure dirt.

She turned around, recoiled, and yelped. "Holy shit!"

Dead black eyes leered at her from the unfortunate stuffed head of a deer that hung over the mantle of a stone fireplace, the buck's antlers reaching out, inviting her into their desolate embrace. Repulsed, she quickly averted her stare.

This place had once been, she guessed, a hunting cabin. Michigan forests were full of them, used mostly by men during hunting season in the fall.

A sound at the front door startled her.

Stricken with shattering fear, she jumped when the door opened.

*****

“All right then, we’ll begin without Charlotte.” Mr. Hanks opened his briefcase and pulled out a thick document. “The upstart of it is that…” the lawyer continued, leafing through the pages “…you two get the bulk of his investments, cash, and life insurance. That will amount to about six and a half million apiece.”

Anne huffed. “Is that all? I thought he had more than that.”

“No, I assure you, that’s ‘all.’ His ledgers and account records are all over there on his desk and in the file cabinets.” He pointed at the magnificent antique oak desk in the center of the large room. “You can peruse them all you want.”

Emily’s breath caught in her throat. “I can’t believe it. He hated my husband so much – he always called him a ‘balsero’, a boat person – I always assumed he wouldn’t leave me anything.” Her mind raced back through the years that she and Carlos had struggled financially, especially with six children to raise. Refusing to ask the help of her father, they always managed to get by. “What about Charlotte?” she asked, concerned about her other sister.

“She gets the carriage house with her apartment, the property it’s on, and two million in investments.” Mr. Hanks took off his glasses, pressed his fingers between his eyes as if trying to fend off a headache, and replaced his glasses. “I confess, I had to coerce your father into leaving money for Charlotte. He insisted she would drink it away. But I reminded him that if he left her nothing, she could contest the will and hold up any payments to you.”

“He’s right, you know. She’ll booze it up and piss it away.” Anne tucked at the French twist in her dyed blond hair, making certain nary a hair escaped to freedom.

“We don’t know that,” Emily insisted, shaking her head, which caused her own thick hair, naturally white and long, to swish about her shoulders. “This isn’t fair. She should get what we get. She’s our sister. We’re triplets, for goodness sake.”

Anne rolled her eyes and then glared suspiciously at the lawyer. “Did Father leave anything to anyone else? A damned charity or anything?”

“He left half a million dollars to his church.”

“Oh, Christ,” she groused.

“Well, we haven’t discussed the house yet. Your father did leave it to the three of you, to sell or live in or turn into a B&B or do with whatever you want. Any money is to be split equally amongst the three of you. It should be worth about three million dollars in today’s market if you do sell.”

“Goddamned tomb. We’ll sell.” It wasn’t a suggestion. As usual, Anne commanded.

Emily thought of Carlos telling her to “grow some cojones” when dealing with her three-minutes-older sister. “We need to wait to discuss this with Charlotte,” she asserted, proud of the sudden appearance of those figurative man parts. In fact, it felt as if she’d had a shot of testosterone. In a voice even more strident, she added, “We won’t decide about the house until we do.” She couldn’t wait to tell Carlos she’d almost had an urge to grab her crotch in a display of masculine power. He was going to get a good laugh out of that.

Anne humphed and stood up. The meeting had ended. She trounced out of the room on her wedge sandals like a runway model trailing haughtiness in her wake. 

*****

A young girl stepped over the threshold and took a tentative step into the cabin. The two females stared at one another.

The girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, held an armload of chopped wood. Her gaze fell shyly to the floor as she came further into the room to set the logs on the floor by the fireplace. Grime streaked her tattered tent of an Amish-style dress. She wore dirty sneakers. And her ankle was shackled with a metal ankle bracelet attached to a long chain like Charlotte’s. Hers, too, culminated at the block of cement buried in the floor.

Her red hair, which fell in one long braid in back, looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks, if that. Unhealthily pale skin indicated a lack of time outdoors. 

When her denim blue eyes met Charlotte’s again, the woman recognized the child.

“Oh my God.” Charlotte kept her voice low, so as not to frighten the girl. “You’re Jenny FitzHugh.”

Tears sprung to the girl’s eyes. “You know me?” A tinge of hope crept into her soft voice.

“Oh, yes, Jenny. Everybody looked for you for months. It was all over the news. Your parents and friends and family have never given up. They’re still looking.”

“Really? I thought maybe they forgot me. He said they did. He said they never wanted me in the first place.”

Charlotte couldn’t believe what she was hearing. He? She’d ask about that later. Her mind raced, lost. This was the stuff of fiction or sensational news, not something that happened to her and a mere girl she now found herself imprisoned with.

She’d seen the news and read the memoirs. There had been Jaycee Dugard, held for eighteen years in California by a monster and his wife, and baring two children by the man who insisted he had a religious right to ravage her. She remembered a young woman named Amanda, entrapped along with two others for years by a psychopath in his house in Cleveland, with more children born in captivity. And Elizabeth Smart, taken from her own bedroom in California and kept for nine months by another crazy bastard and his wife, he proclaiming to be a prophet.

This happened to other people in other places.

And yet here she was.

And here was this girl.

“Jenny, your parents would never forget you. Never! They looked and looked for you. They’re still looking. They’re so distraught. They love you. They went on TV over and over and begged whoever took you to bring you back. They cried and cried. Hundreds of people searched for you for weeks. The police used K-9 dogs. The FBI came and helped. It’s still an open case, even after all these months. The chief of police vowed never to give up until you are found. They’ll all be so happy to know you’re alive.”

A deep frown overtook the girl’s delicate features as she pondered what Charlotte said. “But they’ll never know I’m here. You, either. They’ll never find us.”

Charlotte inhaled deeply. She wasn’t good at being positive, or at being supportive, or at anything, actually. Yet she knew that somehow, she had to bolster this child’s faith that, whatever in God’s name had befallen them and whoever in hell “he” was, they could prevail and escape.

Especially since the fragile girl’s belly looked ready to burst with child.

Amazon | LindaHughes.com 

About Linda Hughes:

When Linda Hughes was twelve she wrote in her diary that she would be a "writter" when she grew up. Her inner child is very pleased to be a full-time writer today.

She has published twenty novels - women's romantic fiction, family saga, suspense, and mystery - and some non-fiction books, two that have been Amazon bestsellers. Her books have won awards and honors from National Writer's Association, Writer's Digest, American Screenwriter's Association, eLit, Indie Book of the Day, finalist for the Silver Falchion, finalist for Georgia Romance Writer's Murder & Mayhem, and others. 

Sisters of the Lake, a suspenseful mystery about three sisters, evolved as Linda considered how different her life would be had she made different choices when she was a young woman. She could have remained in the corporate world; she could have stayed on a Florida beach and become a bohemian dance instructor; she could have stayed in her small hometown and become a sot. She loved writing these characters with the nuances of family dynamics entwined in the mystery of the disappearance of one of the sisters.