The Breakfast Order At My Lake House

Thursday, Jill found me alone in the garden and sat down on the grass beside the marigolds the way she used to when she was small, knees pulled up, and for a few minutes it was almost like getting my actual daughter back. “He’s just trying to help, Mom,” she said, out of nowhere, like she had been building up to it all morning. “He really does know this stuff. His last company in Phoenix managed almost thirty properties.”

“Which company was that,” I asked, as lightly as I could manage.

“I don’t remember the name,” she said. “It folded before I met him. The market, he said.”

I did not push further that day. I only filed it away, the way you file away a loose thread on a sweater you intend to pull on later, once you are somewhere private enough to do it properly.

I want to be honest about what I did next, because it was not clever and it was not dramatic. I made phone calls. I am sixty one years old, I taught fourth grade for thirty one years, and the two tools I have always trusted most in a crisis are patience and the phone book, so to speak. The first person I called was Stan Pruitt, who has run the marina on the east side of Tamarack Lake since before Gordon and I bought our lot, who knows every family and every cottage and most of the gossip for fifteen miles of shoreline, because people talk when they are filling up a gas can or buying a box of worms.

“Stan,” I said, “I need you to think hard. Does the name Blake Donnelly mean anything to you? Younger fellow, dark hair, calls himself an investment strategist, talks a lot about unlocking value in property.”

There was a long pause on the line, long enough that I thought we had lost the connection.

“Patty,” Stan finally said, “that name does not mean anything to me. But you should talk to Judy Jensen. She runs the general store up on County Road 9 now. Used to have a cottage on Birch Lake, over near Pelican. Lost it a couple years back under circumstances I never understood, and never pried into, but something about the way you just described that fellow put a chill right up my arm.”

I drove to Judy’s store the next afternoon while Jill and Blake were out on the pontoon, a trip Blake had organized so he could, in his words, “get a feel for the shoreline’s potential.” Judy Jensen was a stout, sun weathered woman somewhere in her late sixties with silver hair cropped short and a laugh that filled the whole little store when something struck her funny, though nothing struck her funny the afternoon I came in and asked her, as gently as I knew how, about the cottage she used to own on Birch Lake.

She did not laugh then. She set down the box of fishing bobbers she was stocking and looked at me for a long moment, like she was deciding something.

“Why do you ask,” she said.