CHAPTER ONE
TWO STRANGE CHILDREN were playing on her dock.
Frowning with concern, Samantha Fremont looked out the window of the house she had lived in all of her twenty-eight years, on the shore of Lake Haven in the small, picturesque town of Haven Point, Idaho.
She didn’t recognize them. Who were they and what were they doing on her property? From here, she could see the trespassers looked to be a girl of about eight and a boy a few years younger. They were dressed in summer wear that even from here Sam could tell was costly, even designer quality. A sundress for the girl of a pale peach cotton dotted with white flowers, and khaki shorts and a blue striped shirt for the boy.
She looked out at the water and then back at the dock. The children were still there. Not a mirage, then, induced by a combination of too much work and too much time spent hunched over her sewing machine or looking at fashion magazines.
Most likely, they were renting the house next door and didn’t realize the dock stretching twenty feet out into Lake Haven belonged to her house, not theirs.
Her mother would have had a fit. Linda had hated that the house next door had been turned into a vacation rental after the previous owner, a kindly older woman, passed away. She had complained to anyone who would listen about the noise level, strange people coming and going at all hours of the day and night, the lack of respect she claimed the short-term tenants showed for the established neighborhood.
If she had been here to see those two children out on the dock without any sign of supervision, Linda would have marched out there, grabbed them both firmly by the hand and trotted off in search of their absentee parents. Once she found them, she probably would have spent the next half hour haranguing said parents about the importance of teaching children to respect the property of others and the dangers inherent in allowing children to play next to a large body of water without adequate supervision.
But her mother wasn’t here anymore.
The little spasm of hurt in her chest was as familiar to her now as her favorite pair of scissors. For all her mother’s crankiness, the house didn’t feel the same without her. Five months had passed since Linda Fremont died of a massive heart attack in her sleep. Five months without her tart tongue or her pessimism or her dire prognostications.
Sam wouldn’t have believed it possible but she still missed her mother.
Betsey whined and she looked at the large pen where three puppies were crawling all over the little Yorkie/shih tzu cross lying on her side.
Her mother would have had a fit about the dog, too. Despite pleading, cajoling and, okay, even a few outright tantrums, Sam had never been allowed to have a dog. Or a pet of any sort, really. Linda would never budge.
Dogs were too much of a bother, her mother had always said, and cats were too sneaky. As Sam wasn’t a fan of reptiles or rodents, she had contented herself as a child with pretending her stuffed animals were real or that her friends’ dogs were really hers.
Months after her mother’s death she had still been lost and grieving in that weird irrational place where the world didn’t seem quite right when she had made an after-work visit to the grocery store for more TV dinners. Outside, she encountered a young couple who looked like ski bums holding up a sign claiming they had a dog for sale.
“Betsey is the sweetest thing,” the woman, little older than a teenager, had assured her. “We love her and it will break our hearts to lose her. It’s just that now the ski season is over, we have new jobs on the Big Island and it’s a real pain to take a dog over there.”
“Plus, you know, we’re really not pet people,” the young man had said in an apologetic voice, his eyes sorrowful beneath his dreadlocks.
Sam had fought the overpowering urge to tell him that since they had taken on the responsibility for a dog that made them pet people.
Before she could find herself channeling her mother, Sam had taken one look at that cute little furry face, with its big brown eyes and floppy ears, and had felt a sharp tug in the vicinity of her heart.
You could take her, a seductive voice had whispered. What’s stopping you?
Her mother was gone. She was alone in the house. She was an adult running her own boutique. Surely she could have a dog now. What was the harm?
“Betsey is totally house-trained and hardly ever barks,” the woman had pushed, obviously sensing blood in the water. “We’ll throw in her crate, her toys, a bag of her favorite treats and a whole container of food. All we’re asking is two hundred dollars to help us out with gas money.”
Sam had been such a sucker. Looking back, she could see exactly how stupid she had been. She might as well have had Soft Touch tattooed on her forehead. For one thing, how would gas money help them get to the Big Island? For another, they had been entirely too eager to get rid of the dog, especially if she was as perfect as they claimed. Sam had been blinded by her own long-buried childhood desire for a pet and hadn’t for a moment pondered why they were selling this cute pup outside the supermarket.
She wasn’t sure if she had been lured more by their words, by the dog’s extraordinary cuteness or her dread at returning to this empty house night after night. Whatever the reason, she had handed over all the cash in her wallet down to her last dollar, scooped up the little dog and her small assortment of supplies and headed home with a feeling of deep exhilaration.
Samantha didn’t have to try hard to imagine how her mother would have rolled her eyes with a chorus of I told you so’s the next day, after she took the dog to her friend, veterinarian Dr. Dani Morales, to have her checked out and learned the little dog wasn’t simply chubby, she was expecting puppies.
That was six weeks ago. Now, instead of living out her grandiose image of having one sweet-natured, quiet little lapdog who would sit at her feet while she sewed, she had one exhausted, stressed-out mama dog and three very active, very demanding, month-old puppies.
She sighed, turning her attention away from the puppies and back to the children on her dock. Where were the parents? She couldn’t see a single adult in sight.
She was scanning the area when she suddenly heard a splash and then a scream. When she jerked her gaze back to the dock, she saw the boy in the water and the older girl, likely his sister, belly down on the dock, frantically trying to pull him back up.
It wasn’t deep there, only about four feet or so, but would still be over a little boy’s head. Sam yanked open the door of her sunroom and raced to the dock. At her arrival, the girl looked at her with mingled terror and relief.
“My brother’s fallen in,” she exclaimed in what Sam noticed was a British accent. “Please. Can you help him? Don’t let him drown!”
Sam was already shucking her shoes and taking off her baggy sweater. She wore yoga pants and a workout tank underneath, her favorite sewing clothes.
The boy hadn’t resurfaced, she realized as panic now washed over her, thick and greasy. Where were his blasted parents?