The night is darkest, p.1
The Night Is Darkest, page 1
the night is darkest
Welcome to Lake Pines.
A fictional small town in Northwestern Ontario that is home to both year-round residents and summer cottagers. Hidden secrets, private lives, and tension lay the groundwork for treacherous crimes. But there are more than secrets buried in this small town.
Order of Books in this series:
LAKE PINES MURDER MYSTERY SERIES
Murder At First Light
Death At Deception Bay
Murder Of Crows
The Dead Of Winter
The Night Is Darkest
Conspiracy of Blood
Deadly Past
Echoes of Guilt
THE NIGHT IS DARKEST
The Night Is Darkest Copyright © 2021 by LLAbbott.
All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Cover designed by Warren Design
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Author Name
Visit my website at www.LLAbbott.com
Paperback ISBN- 978-1-989325-50-6
eBook ISBN- 978-1-989325-49-0
Large Print ISBN- 978-1-989325-51-3
For Kate, my dearest friend, who’s not afraid to stay alone on an island, in the dark, in the middle of a storm,
. . . .with no phone.
~ thanks for always being there.
And for Karla, a champion, a fighter
and selfless support of those less fortunate.
~ keep fighting.
And especially for Drew, Aidan & Eric
Everything is for you.
~ I love you.
The night is darkest
A gripping Lake Pines Mystery
the night is darkest
The night is darkest
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
May the night come upon us,
tormented soul.
Our past is stolen,
taken its toll.
Put to rest,
your pain and fear.
As darkness descends,
this will be the last you hear.
For when the time comes,
say goodbye, and mourn.
The Night Is Darkest,
before the storm.
~ LLA
The knock on the door came with no preamble or preparedness that it should have. Two police officers stood on the front steps, viewed in a warped distorted form through the fisheye peephole in the front door. A blurry image of a third person, a woman, was standing on the lower step behind them.
She twisted her face sideways to see if there were any other people with them.
This is exactly the kind of joke that Wilson would play on her, but come to think of it, he was away on one of his mom’s family retreats that she forced him to go on every Easter weekend.
It was the middle of the day and the temperature had been rising steadily since seven that morning, it was unusually warm for that time of year on Vancouver Island. She was standing in a pair of faded denim shorts and a bright orange t-shirt with the words ‘try and underestimate me’ scrawled across the front. It was an attitude she always found amusing and one that Wilson and Janine said suited her personality perfectly when they gave the shirt to her for her birthday last November. However, as she stood at the front door and faced with the prospect of the three strangers reading it, she immediately became self-conscious.
She grabbed the bright blue hoodie that was draped over the banister and pulled it over her head. The heat became instantly unbearable and she contemplated running upstairs to get another shirt when the second set of knocks came.
“Mr. Fowler?” the voice asked with a shout from the other side. “It’s Officer Miller.”
Chandler froze.
She leaned in closer to the door, “My dad isn’t here right now.” She spoke into the crack near the frame. “Can I let him know what you want?”
Chandler’s father kept to himself most of the time. When he wasn’t working on his fishing boat in the Strait of Georgia, he was reading history novels that he downloaded from the library on his iPad. Even in her wildest imagination, Chandler couldn’t imagine why the police would need to speak with him.
Chandler watched as best she could through the glass peephole in the door as the officers looked behind them to the woman standing on the step for their next set of instructions.
The woman said something to them, too low for Chandler to hear from the other side of the door. They nodded as the woman spoke and then turned around and said, “Can we come inside and speak with you, Miss Fowler?”
She didn’t feel like speaking with them, not because she had done anything wrong, but because of the unsettling feeling the officer’s tone gave her. The same feeling that she’d been having in the pit of her stomach for the last few years when the nightmares came.
They were flashes that came in her dreams and not enough to hold any meaning to. She tried to push the images from her mind and the feelings from rising in her stomach.
“What’s this about?” Chandler said through the door.
“It’s something we’d rather not speak about through the door,” this time it was the woman who answered.
Chandler stepped back.
She turned the lock on the deadbolt and twisted the handle, opening the door just as far as the brass chain would allow.
She pressed her cheek against the door, only revealing one eye and the side of her face, “Do you have any I.D.?”
It was a question she knew she should ask, but like most people, she wouldn’t have a clue if any of the badges or cards that were held up for her to read were legit or not.
The three strangers on the front step held out their identification, and Chandler scanned each of them focussing more on the card that the woman in the gray suit was holding up.
Chandler squeezed her brows together confused, “Are you sure you have the right house?” But she remembered they asked specifically for her father.
“We are,” the woman said, pointedly. “If we can come in, we’ll explain why we’re here.”
Chandler closed the door and pulled the chain lock to the left until the knob lifted from the hole. She stood behind the door as she pulled it open and each of the three strangers walked inside.
Chandler’s face began to flush due to a combination of the heat that was building under the thick sweatshirt and the nervousness rising inside her.
“Can we sit down Miss Fowler?” The woman asked.
Chandler extended her hand to the room off the front hall where an assortment of mismatched furniture cluttered the space, indicating where they should go. However, her gut was telling her to push them back out the door and run.
She wouldn’t exactly call it a living room, but it was where she and her father spent most of their time. It was where she would kneel in front of the low riding coffee table to complete her homework, where her father would fall asleep in his oversized chair next to the fire while reading a book.
It was also where they placed their Christmas tree every year in the corner of the room between the window and the fireplace, and where Chandler would sit for hours listening to her father play his guitar.
She waited for the three intruders to take a seat before crawling into the center of the blue and white striped armchair, tucking her feet under her body.
Her half-eaten bowl of cereal sat in the center of the coffee table. The milk - now warm and turning a golden yellow from the sugar on the flakes.
The single-pane front windows of the seventy-five-year-old house were painted shut and the fan that was sitting on the floor failed to summon
“What’s this about?” Chandler asked.
“Your name is Chandler, right?” The woman asked.
Chandler nodded.
The two cops sat next to each other on the faded yellow sofa, which had lost most of its support and stuffing over the years. The corners of the seat cushions had begun to fray and the sponge filling was bursting through, and for the first time, Chandler felt a sting of embarrassment at their home. Their knees rested much higher than their hips making it look like they were sitting on child-sized furniture.
The cop that called himself Constable Burgess, fidgeted with his hat as it dangled between his knees and had a different uniform on than the cop sitting next to him. Miller, the second officer rested more comfortably and smiled as Miranda Kroft, the woman in the gray suit, spoke, and Chandler thought she recognized him. But then again, they lived in a small community so that wouldn’t have been a surprise.
“We were hoping your father would be here,” she said.
“I don’t know why,” Chandler snapped. “He does work you know.”
“Do you know when he’ll be home?” Ms. Kroft asked, ignoring Chandler’s sardonic tone.
Chandler folded her arms across her chest and felt a wave of heat and defensiveness overtake her, “What’s this about anyway?”
“It’s about your mother Chandler,” Ms. Kroft said.
“What about her?” Chandler looked from the faces of the two cops sitting on her sofa to Miranda Kroft who seemed to be the only one in the room unfazed by the stifling heat.
Chandler’s mom died when she was small. There were glimpses of her that Chandler could remember, but she wasn’t sure if they were genuine memories or images that she conjured up from stories that her father told her since there were no photos. It wasn’t something that her father liked to talk about, she could see the pain rise in his face each time he spoke about it. And he only spoke about it vaguely and when Chandler would specifically ask about her. Pressing the issue to the point where he couldn’t refuse.
It happened when Chandler was just a baby. Before she could speak and before memories could be formed. There was a huge fire and it was all her father could do to get her out alive. It was a story that was seared into her memory but only because of her father’s words, not her own recollection. He ran back in and dragged her mother out, but it was too late. The smoke was too thick, and she wasn’t able to breathe even after the paramedics arrived with their gear. Her father said he was barely able to get Chandler out before flames completely engulfed their house. She bore the scars of heat burns on the palm of her left hand, and the skin on her father’s back was twisted and marked by the intense heat and flames that licked at his skin when he carried Chandler to safety.
“You submitted one of those Genealogy DNA tests a few months back,” Miss Kroft pulled a sheet of paper from her file and handed it to Chandler.
Chandler held her hands tight inside the crooks of her elbows, “I thought that stuff was private?”
“It was done through your school for a history class project,” Ms. Kroft began to explain. “Because the group was underage, your parents had to sign a permission form before they were submitted for testing. Part of the authorization was for the information on the tests to be collected into a database.”
Chandler recalled forging her father’s signature on the bottom of the form. He always left too early in the morning to get to his boat on time, and she always forgot to ask him to sign it in the evening. When she arrived at school on the final day that the signed form was due, she took it into the bathroom and crouched down against the wall, and balanced it on the tip of her knee. She scribbled her father’s name on the line with the words ‘GUARDIAN’ typed underneath and then folded it into her bag.
She didn’t think to read it, she was more interested in seeing if she had a Viking ancestor that would possibly explain her translucent reddish-blond hair and her antagonistic approach to authority. Chandler nodded but didn’t take the sheet Ms. Kroft held out, she remembered what it said.
“So, what about it?” Chandler wanted to shout that it was an invasion of her privacy and that it wasn’t illegal to do those stupid DNA tests anyway. But then she remembered forging her father’s signature and figured that was probably illegal.
“My office was alerted when your results were submitted into the database,” Ms. Kroft explained. “That’s why we’re here, and why we need to speak with you and your father.”
Chandler’s stomach twisted and bile rose to the back of her throat. She was going to be sick.
“Your DNA results matched a case of interest,” Ms. Kroft said. “It has to do with the day your mother died.”
There was only one reason why Ms. Miranda Kroft, an RCMP officer with the National Missing Persons DNA Program would be here with the two officers and why her office would have been alerted.
“Did you hear me, Chandler?” Ms. Kroft asked.
Chandler nodded but not because she understood what was going on, but because she wanted Ms. Kroft to stop talking.
The blood pounded hard through Chandler’s veins and echoed in her ears, muffling the words being spoken by the smaller cop. Chandler covered her face with her hands and shook her head.
“No! There’s been a mistake!” Chandler jumped up from the chair. “You need to go,” she shouted.
She pounded her steps around the end table and knocked the corner with her hip. The lamp teetered a few times before it eventually crashed to the floor. Thin shards of glass from the bulb scattered across the wood plank floor, some landing deep in the thick pile of the area rug in the room, while the remaining pieces refracted the rays streaming in through the front window.
“Chandler,” Ms. Kroft stood as she spoke, but didn’t walk toward her. “I know how upsetting this must be, but you have to understand that we’re here for your well-being, not to hurt you.”
Chandler bit her bottom lip and began to walk around in small circles, a nervous habit she had when she was a small child and had begun to surface again once her nightmares returned.
“You’re wrong,” Chandler stuttered through tears.
Ms. Kroft was relaxed when she spoke, obviously having dealt with similar situations before. However, the two police officers displayed uneasiness with the situation, almost looking as shocked as Chandler was.
Almost. But not quite.
“What do you remember about your youth?” Ms. Kroft asked.
Chandler shook her head. Why should she say anything to her? Why did she owe any of them an explanation? She and her father never bothered anyone nor did they ask for any help. Even when the months of loneliness stretched over her youth.
Other kids in her class would complain about their impatient grandparents that would fight over who would get the front row seat at one of their pathetic school plays, or would grumble because they had to go to ‘another boring family dinner’. Chandler would just laugh and joke that she didn’t have to deal with any of that. However, in reality, she would’ve done anything to have just one of those overzealous grandparents or one of those boring family dinners, but she refused to say anything to her father.
The only memories she had, were of her and her father. But she never complained because they were good memories, and the three new strangers sitting in their living room were threatening to take it all away.
“You’ve made a mistake.”
Ms. Kroft folded her hands in front of her body, “Then why don’t we wait until your father gets home and I’m sure he’ll straighten everything out for us.”
“Fine,” Chandler snapped. “But I’m not saying anything else until he gets here.”
Ms. Kroft nodded, accepting Chandler’s terms of protest, and sat down again.
They waited for the rest of the day, and well into the evening, when it was dark, it was finally clear that Chandler’s father wasn’t coming home. Calls to his cell phone went unanswered and texts pleading for him to come home were ignored.
Could these three strangers be right? Could she have a past that she wasn’t aware of?
Scenarios flooded through her mind, playing out everything from a huge misunderstanding to a massive kidnapping plot.
