For three days she searched the empty lake, carrying a torch before her where she could stand, or pushing it before her when she must crouch. The fish lined the lake bottom like Dutch tiles, the scales catching the firelight in flashing colors. She found rusted blades and fishing spears, the hull of a canoe and, inside of it, a cage of ribs. The bottom of the lake was littered with bones enough to build a city of the dead.

On the third day, when the sun was hot overhead and the ice roof groaned like a woman in travail, Walking-Woman dropped down into the lake and saw that the crows had followed her. There were a dozen of them, prying fish from the icy mud, and they paid her no attention. Enough for them all.

Late that day Walking-Woman found a snowshoe, a bow, a scattering of arrows. And then the boy. Curled like an infant on the floor of the lake, he looked like a child carved out of wax. She took him in her arms and cradled him, and thanked the spirit of the lake for returning her son to her.

When she woke the next morning the rain had come again and the lake was already filling. She had nothing with which to dig a grave in the frozen ground and so she climbed the tallest pine tree she could find and wedged the boy there among the branches.

The same day she started out for Lake in the Clouds.

Chapter 15

Dear Cousin Lily,

Your mother and father bid me write down for you the events of the last weeks. It is a task I take on out of concern for them and you, but it is neither an easy nor a pleasant one. Nor am I your mother's equal in matters of the pen, but I hope my poor efforts will serve.

On Christmas Eve, while Blacksmith Hench was busy lighting firecrackers, Cookie Fiddler's remains were discovered floating beneath the ice on the lake. And more shocking still, it was Callie Wilde and Martha Kuick who first came upon this gruesome sight.

You will remember that Mrs. Fiddler has been missing since the day late in November when Dolly Wilde was found near death on this mountain. Foul play was feared, and indeed it seems as if foul play has been done. Our first worry was for Callie, as you can well imagine. It is a very hard burden indeed for such a young lass, to lose the two women she loved best in the world in such a violent way. Martha was just as distraught as Callie herself, and the two of them clung together and wept so pitifully that it took all of Curiosity's and your mother's efforts to see them to an uneasy sleep in Curiosity's own bed, where she could watch over them in the night.

While we were busy with the lasses, Constable McGarrity and Mrs. Fiddler's sons and some of the other men had managed to retrieve her remains from the lake. I did no see her myself but Mrs. McGarrity tells me, and I have no cause to doubt her, that there was a great gash to the back of her head, it is believed made by a blunt object such as a piece of firewood.

It was midnight before the constable made his announcement. It was only by accident that I was in the trading post to hear him, where I had been sent by your mother in the hope that I might find your father. (Which I did no, for he was at that time already back at Lake in the Clouds with your sister who was, I think it is fair to say, in a state of shock. But that is another story that is best told by your mother.)

Never have I seen the trading post so crowded. The constable stood on a box with Mrs. Fiddler's two sons standing to either side of him, and all of them looking like the wrath of God. Constable McGarrity announced that he would rule Mrs. Fiddler's death (these were his words, most exactly) as “murder, by person or persons yet unknown.”

Just as he was saying this, Charlie LeBlanc came in, who had been sent to fetch Nicholas Wilde but came back instead with another story, this one as aye strange and disturbing as the rest of what had passed that night: Nicholas Wilde was nowhere to be found. There was no sign of him at hame nor in the barn nor anywhere in the orchards, and his horses and sleigh were gone, and some other things from the house that made Charlie think he had left Paradise.

You who grew up in this wee village can well imagine what kind of talk began then, some arguing that Nicholas must have killed his poor guidwife and housekeeper both, and now had run rather than wait to be hanged, leaving poor Callie behind to make her own orphaned way in the world. Others thought there must be a murderer among us who had struck again, making Mr. Wilde the newest victim. Still others claimed that it was Dolly herself had attacked Mrs. Fiddler in a fit and then wandered off to die on the mountain. Mrs. McGarrity put a stop to the worst of the talk by promising to thrash the next man wha spoke of hanging in her hearing—and no doubt she would have, too, for she waved a stout stick about her head as she said as much.

Then Mr. Hench took off his wooden leg and pounded with it on the wall to get everyone's attention and asked had anyone thought to go to the millhouse? For it turns out, or so he claims, that Claes Wilde had been courting Jemima Kuick for some weeks at least. A wild and, aye, almost violent argument followed, most of the women saying that if there was any courting being done, it was Jemima who was behind it for hadn't she been husband hunting since the day she buried her first and lost all his fortune? At that some of the men blushed and hung their heads and studied their shoes, for it turns out that Mrs. Kuick had indeed been looking for a new husband and had cast a wide and well-baited net, all without return.

And in the end the whole party marched together from the trading post to the millhouse, waving torches overhead. Their aim, they said, was to call Jemima Kuick to an accounting and perhaps more, though those words were not spoke aloud. I must admit that I went along out of naught but morbid curiosity for I would never sleep without knowing what was to happen next.