Chapter 7
The Lantern House was shrouded in gray morning.
Grace sat hunched at her kitchen table, head cradled on folded arms, listening to the tick and hum of the ancient fridge as if it could lull her back to sleep.
Her eyes burned with the grit of a bad night: not of drinking, but the kind of overtime you can only pull with a psychic hangover.
She’d spent the hours after Bryant left crawling internet archives, town records, and her own snaking scrolls of notes, determined to divine some meaning from the splinters of memory and prophecy that now lived in her head.
Instead, her mind had only multiplied suspects and possibilities until she felt less like a detective than a sieve.
The printouts she’d spread over the table looked like the scattered paperwork of a failing case.
At some point she’d circled names with a red gel pen, Rick Dalton, Martha Lane, Mayor Harold Whitaker, Tessa Monroe, then drawn a heavy line under the word Motive, which remained, as ever, a total blank.
People were complicated, especially in a place where everyone wore a mask, sometimes literally.
The electric kettle whistled. She poured hot water over the last sachet of Earl Grey in the box and debated whether it was worth putting a bra on.
The day outside had not decided whether it wanted to be overcast or merely indifferent; all she could see from the kitchen window was the haze of the neighbor’s Christmas lights, blinking weakly through the late-December mist.
Grace had not planned to do anything today, not after last night, but fate had its own plans, starting with a knock at her back door.
She startled, sloshing tea onto the counter, and then closed her eyes and breathed in slowly.
It would be Bryant, probably, or Caroline, maybe back for more late-night theorizing.
Or, she thought, the person who’d planted a bullet-holed necklace in her living room, come to finish what they started.
Grace shook her head and snorted, annoyed at her own jumpiness.
She opened the door and was hit with a blast of cold and, behind it, Anna, dressed in a navy coat and some sort of enormous cable-knit scarf that looked like it could double as a hammock.
“Hey! You alive in there, or should I call the coroner?” Anna grinned, shifting a canvas tote bag from one arm to the other.
“I’m definitely not awake,” Grace said. “Come in before my pipes freeze.”
Anna stepped inside, stamping crystalline snow from her boots.
She carried the smell of distant sea salt with her, though the nearest beach was over two hundred miles away.
“You look like you lost a fight with a Christmas tree,” Anna said.
“And lost.” She let herself into the kitchen, dropping the bag next to the table with a heavy clunk.
Grace motioned vaguely at the pile of research. “That’s about right. Did you know there are over a hundred pages of legal filings for the town’s tree-lighting permits since 1979?”
Anna made a sympathetic face. “Wow, you really committed. I told Robert you’d go full PI on this. You need a vacation.”
“Or a coma,” Grace muttered.
Anna rolled her eyes and reached into the tote, extracting a gleaming pair of ice skates. “Well, lucky for you, today you get both: a break from murder and some enforced cardio. You didn’t forget, did you?”
Grace stared at the skates, at first not comprehending, then remembering the group text from two days ago. “Oh no. Was that today?”
Anna gave a little shoulder waggle. “I said Saturday, and it’s Saturday.
I even brought your skates.” She produced another pair—white leather, laces in a tidy bow, as if expecting them to walk themselves to the rink.
“I know you’re probably on zero hours’ sleep, but I need this.
You know what it’s like to be a mermaid in a mountain town in December? ”
“I assume… dry?” Grace guessed, rubbing her temples.
Anna gave a theatrical sigh. “So, so dry. I’m flaking like a croissant. I haven’t been in open water since Halloween. If I don’t get to the lake, to just be close to water, I might actually combust.”
Grace smiled despite herself. She took the skates, wincing at the muscle memory of falling repeatedly on her tailbone last time she went. “Are we doing this now?”
“Unless you have an appointment with the spirit world,” Anna said, dropping into the chair across from Grace and scanning the table. She tapped the top file, brow furrowed. “Wow, you really did your homework.”
Grace shrugged, suddenly embarrassed at the mess. “Just… trying to be useful. There’s more suspects than time in the year.”
“Yeah, but look at it this way,” Anna said, propping her chin on a fist. “If someone wanted to kill the mayor, I could list ten people before I finished my bagel. Martha Lane? At least five. Rick Dalton? He’s more popular, but I guarantee he’s ticked off some folks with those fire code citations. Tessa Monroe? Don’t get me started.”
“She did win 'Least Trusted Local Media' three years in a row,” Grace said, sipping her now-tepid tea.
“Exactly! My point: You’re not looking for a needle in a haystack, you’re looking for a hay-colored needle in a stack of identical needles.
Try not to go cross-eyed.” Anna reached over and grabbed a note, reading it upside down.
“Besides, you’re supposed to be the town’s holiday psychic, not its personal Google. ”
Grace laughed, the sound catching her off guard. “Is that my job title now?”
Anna’s face softened. “Only if you want it. Seriously, Grace. I know you think you have to solve everything by yourself, but you don’t. I mean, look at me: I barely manage to keep my own life afloat and I still ask for help all the time.”
Grace nodded, then squinted at Anna. “You’re actually good at that, you know. The asking for help thing.”
Anna shrugged, clearly pleased by the compliment. “Perks of being half-fish. We do everything in schools.”
They both snorted at the dumb joke. Anna reached into her scarf and pulled out a little sandwich baggie of Christmas cookies. “Bribery. For the road,” she said, pushing it across the table.
“I haven’t even changed,” Grace said, eyeing the clock. “Give me ten minutes?”
“Take twenty,” Anna said. “Or thirty. I can answer emails from here.”
Grace slipped out and left Anna humming to herself and clicking through her phone at the table, reading some legal memo about land use or, knowing Anna, trashy local gossip on Nextdoor.
She changed into jeans and a heavy sweater, feeling a pang of nervousness about the skates and the open lake.
But Anna was right: she was owed a day off, and if she tried to research any more, her brain would start leaking out her ears.
When she returned, Anna was admiring the fireplace. “Your house is the best,” she said, sounding a little wistful. “If you ever want to swap for a weekend, let me know. I’ll even water your plants.”
“Ha. The plants water themselves, you know that, right?” Grace pulled on her coat and gloves, checked her pockets for keys, and then paused, unsure why she suddenly felt like she was forgetting something vital.
“Just us, or are we meeting the others?” Grace asked, half-hoping Caroline would show up in some sequined skating outfit and distract everyone from Grace’s predictable flailing.
“Caroline’s probably still asleep, and Olivia hates the cold. So, just you and me. We can’t both fall on our asses, one of us has to document it for posterity,” Anna replied.
They collected their things. Anna insisted on carrying the skates, despite Grace’s attempts to take her own pair. “You need both hands to hold onto the railing,” Anna said, eyes glinting with mischief.
As they left the Lantern House, Grace caught a last glance at the beautiful house she now owned.
For the first time in days, she felt something close to peace, or at least the possibility of it, carried in the promise of sharp air and dull blades and a friend who believed in her even when she didn’t believe in herself.
The sky was still smudged with morning, and Grace shivered as she stepped down the path to Anna’s car. Anna popped the trunk and stashed the skates, then motioned for Grace to get in.
“I call playlist,” Anna said as she started the engine.
“Just nothing with the word 'ice' in the title, please,” Grace pleaded, pulling her seatbelt.
“Too late!” Anna chirped, and cranked the dial.
They drove off, leaving the gray haze and the questions and the unseen ravens behind them, at least for a little while.
The drive up to Holiday Hollow’s lake was always beautiful, but in deep winter it was something out of a snow-globe fever dream.
The frost-rimed woods boxed them in, the narrow road twisting past white-dusted pines whose boughs bowed under the weight of last night’s squall.
Even Anna, who’d lived her whole life surrounded by water, slowed to take it in.
“This is the only time of year I don’t miss the ocean,” she said, then corrected herself: “Okay, I miss it, but I’m not actively pining for it. ”
Grace sipped her thermos of now-lukewarm tea and watched as the lake came into view just beyond the parking lot, the water was a blue coin under the morning’s pale sun, the surface glassy and already scribbled with the lines and arcs of early-bird skaters.
Holiday Hollow had gone all-out as usual: garlands and wreaths looped every lamp post, a trio of local teenagers ran a cocoa cart beside a bonfire ring, and a flock of toddlers in matching puffer coats penguin-waddled around the kiddie rink.
There were enough twinkle lights to make the shoreline visible from orbit.
Anna found a spot near the edge and parked. “Brace yourself,” she said, “I heard the ice is so good today you could do a double axel and not die.”