Chapter 2
Her hard-won sleep didn’t last long.
Nightmares of a man in an oil-stained olive-green jumpsuit showing up at the lake house and attaching a hook to the deck to tow the whole structure out into the water of Mirror Lake jolted her awake before the sun rose. It was useless trying to go back to sleep with the rush of adrenaline surging through her limbs, so she lay on the bed, staring out the balcony window toward the water, her mind whirring.
She wasn’t sure how many hours she’d spent trying to find a solution to her current predicament. Her mind spun through them all from the landlord to the bank to the repossessed car to the property manager here at the lake house and back again. It was a dizzying merry-go-round of problems, with zero solutions in sight. By the time the first pink rays of dawn poked through the window panes, there was only one thing Bonnie was sure of: she needed to figure out how to survive, STAT.
It wasn’t just business debts, after all. Closing down all of Peter’s enterprises wouldn’t make this go away. Bonnie needed to find a way to get money, fast, before she lost every last asset and wound up on the street. Well, she probably wouldn’t end up on the street. The children would never let that happen. She’d have to go to Atlanta or Chicago to impose on one of them. They’d tell her it wasn’t an inconvenience, and they were happy to have her, but Bonnie would know better.
James and Jackie had busy, full lives. Bringing their mother into those lives was hardly their top priority. Bonnie knew enough about them to know they had social calendars as active as their work schedules, and that her presence would put a significant damper on their adventures. Plus, she wouldn’t even begin to know how to choose between them without someone’s feelings getting hurt, either because they were chosen or they weren’t. It was a minefield.
Add onto that the humiliation of admitting to her children that their father had left her in a financial shipwreck, and Bonnie couldn’t do it. She didn’t care if her pride made her life more difficult; she couldn’t bring herself to admit to her children that she was in over her head and it was all Peter’s fault. That wasn’t how life was supposed to go. She was their mother, even though they were in their mid-twenties with lives of their own. Bonnie was supposed to be their safe haven, their pilot light—not the other way around.
Halfway through sunrise, Bonnie stumbled out of bed to make herself a pot of coffee and eat some breakfast. She’d cried herself out last night and needed to replenish herself before she spun further out of control. The despair that swamped her the night before was more tamable in the early morning light, and so while she wasn’t exactly happy, Bonnie wasn’t trapped in her sorrow as deeply anymore.
Caffeine and toast helped her a little, but she knew she needed a bigger boost if she was going to turn this ship around. She literally couldn’t afford to waste time wallowing. The sunlight dancing on the kitchen floor inspired her. One of the things she’d always longed to do at the lake house but rarely could, was hike the trail around the water by herself.
It was rare for Peter to be at the lake house to watch the kids in the mornings. Even when they were old enough to be at the house alone by themselves for a few hours, it was unusual for them to sleep in long enough to give Bonnie a few hours of solitude. They were always up earlier at the lake house, expecting a full day of activities and entertainment.
Bonnie had walked the trail part of the way with the kids a few times, but they always got bored quickly. Today, there was no reason why Bonnie couldn’t walk the trail until she got bored. All of her pressing financial problems would still be there in the afternoon, and they certainly weren’t problems she could solve with a snap of her fingers. She really wasn’t sure how they could get any worse, either, so she might as well take advantage of the tranquility of the lake. It was why she was here, and why she and Peter had bought the property all those years ago.
She dug out a pair of tennis shoes and some athletic leggings from her suitcase and got dressed. The morning air was still chilly this time of year, so she pulled a light jacket on over her T-shirt and headed to the kitchen for supplies. There wasn’t much in the pantry, but she always ensured there was a stash of canned and dry goods and some bottled water on hand in case of an emergency. Of course, the emergencies she’d pictured had always been hurricanes or snowstorms—not car accidents, widowhood, and financial ruin.
She gathered up a few things—her headphones, a small water bottle, and a granola bar—and put them in a fanny pack. Then, at the last second, she grabbed a can of tuna off the pantry shelf. Maybe that cat from last night would come back. There was a chance it found shelter somewhere else, or even that it belonged to someone else in the neighborhood. But Bonnie couldn’t help thinking about the poor thing all alone and hungry in the woods. It was hard to tell in the rain, but the cat had seemed too clean and too fat to be feral, so she wasn’t confident in its hunting skills.
Out on the deck, she opened the can and considered calling out for it. But then she thought about Jack Barlow looking out his kitchen window to see her waving a can of tuna around and shouting for an imaginary animal. She’d embarrassed herself in front of her neighbors enough recently, so instead she walked down the steps and placed the open tuna can on the last step. Hopefully, if the cat was hungry, it would find the snack.
Bonnie put her headphones in, turned on a podcast about women entrepreneurs, and headed toward the lake. The host of the podcast had a friendly voice, and her first guest was bubbly and enthusiastic. It was such a contrast to the way Bonnie had been feeling lately that it was mildly disorienting for the first few minutes. Then her feet found a rhythm against the dirt path, the sun melted through the clouds to warm her face, and the podcast started sounding more and more like old friends having a conversation.
Mirror Lake was gorgeous this time of morning. The water glittered, and birds flitted in the trees overhead. A refreshing breeze, scented with pine and sun-warmed earth, floated across her face. The voices in her ears encouraged her to keep moving forward, not just on the trail but in her life, as well. She heard story after story about women like her who had nothing to their name but a pile of debt, yet climbed their way out of the hole and made something of their lives.
As Bonnie sipped from her water bottle and snacked on her granola bar, she realized that many of the guests had less than her. Most of the women interviewed on the podcast didn’t have a second house to run away to when things got bad at home. There was no house in the city they could sell to cover debts. Over and over, she listened to dire tales that made her more and more grateful for what she hadn’t lost—yet.
The trail helped, too. It was more strenuous than she remembered, but it was exhilarating to push her body. Her legs felt strong, and every breath of fresh air helped clear out more of her despair to make room for hope and ambition. Being out in nature like this was the purest antidote for the bleakness left behind by grief. She was confident that by the time she made it to the end of the hike, she’d be ready to sit down and make a real plan for how to fix things.
She was a smart woman. The college degree gathering dust in the attic of the city house was something she’d earned, course by course. Peter had built his business up from basically nothing; Bonnie could build something, too. She could do difficult things, and she could do them on her own. The confusing list Peter had left for her wouldn’t hold her back. Sure, she could try to follow Peter’s footsteps, scavenging for some breadcrumb trail he’d left behind. But Peter was gone. Bonnie was still here. She had to learn how to rely on herself now.
When the episode of her podcast ended, she realized she’d been hiking for nearly two hours. Thirsty, she pulled her water bottle out of her fanny pack, only to discover it was empty. It was a minor setback, but not something that would derail her pleasant morning.
She was close to home. Soon enough, she’d be back in her lake house with unlimited clean drinking water. Bonnie looked to the lake to get her bearings and to try and figure out how long it would take to get back to the house. The trail curved around the lakeshore quite a lot to leave room for kayak launches, small beaches, and the natural shape of the shoreline as it changed with the tides, so Bonnie wasn’t entirely certain how far she’d wandered. As varied as the lakeshore was, though, she couldn’t tell where she was. The longer she stared, the less sure she was of where her house was—or where she was.
The sun was a lot closer to the center of the sky now than when she had set out. It wasn’t quite noon, but it was too close for her to figure out which way was north and which was south. Not that it would have been entirely helpful, since she wasn’t totally sure which direction her house was. She pulled her phone out to see if she could navigate with its map, but the signal wasn’t strong enough to load her location, let alone tell her if she was anywhere near the neighborhood she’d walked out of so blithely this morning.
Trying not to panic, Bonnie decided to make a guess. She turned around and walked down the path in the direction that felt most like the right one. It was hard to tell whether she’d already walked this part, though. All the trees looked remarkably similar, and she hadn’t thought of making note of landmarks as she hiked. She’d been so focused on her podcast that it hadn’t occurred to her.
A few minutes passed, and with every step, her certainty about the direction she was headed faded. She didn’t recognize anything around her, and she didn’t seem to be getting closer to the lakeshore. If anything, the path had veered more deeply into the woods around the lake. That was definitely wrong.
Bonnie paused, her heartbeat rising steadily.
No direction seemed right. But one of them had to be. If she could just focus and not panic, she could figure it out. She’d been on this lakeshore hundreds of times before. There was no reason to be frightened now. Just because no one knew where she was—and no one was expecting her any time soon—didn’t mean she was in trouble. She couldn’t really be lost. Lake Placid was surrounded by wilderness, sure, but it was still a town. There were houses and vacation cabins everywhere. Roads cut through so much of the forest--she would end up on one sooner or later. Bonnie wasn’t in trouble.
Unfortunately, her nervous system didn’t get the memo. She pulled her phone out again, desperate to find a signal. There weren’t any bars—nothing but a few white dots and three tiny letters, spelling out SOS. She wasn’t sure what that even meant, but when she tapped on the map app and nothing happened, she figured it didn’t mean anything particularly useful.
The sound of twigs snapping beneath boots behind her sent her already-rapid pulse thundering. She whirled around, searching for the source. Suddenly she was acutely aware that she was a woman alone in the woods, with nothing to defend herself and no one to wonder where she was. It was a situation out of one of those horrible true crime podcasts Jackie always recommended. Bonnie hated those—and now she was trapped in one.
Another stick snapped, and she yanked her headphones out. Bushes rustled, and then she saw a shape emerge from the trees. A man in a baseball cap was running right toward her.
Bonnie gave up on trying not to panic. This was a situation that called for—no, demanded —a full-on panic. She scanned the ground around her for something to use to defend herself—a stick, a large rock, anything. The man was closing in on her too fast. She couldn’t hide, and she definitely couldn’t run. She would have to take her chances in a fight.
All she could hope for was that he was unarmed…and weaker than he appeared.